Sainthood is hard

If you were a saint, you’d have to stop on your way to work and give all your money to a panhandler. You’d probably have to kiss him, too. Then, you’d have to give all your clothes to people whose clothes were old and ragged. You’d show up at work naked, and you’d get fired. Even strippers are supposed to have clothes on when they GET to the job. This is why sainthood is a job that’s always hiring, because saints have to care about everyone and everything, all the time.

I get up Wednesday morning in America, and I drink a cup of warm furniture polish, and I find out Kathy Griffin, a woman who was once slightly famous, is in trouble for taking a picture with what looked like the severed head of President Donald Trump. Trump said the picture upset his 11-year-old son. The kid’s name is “Barron.” His mother goes outside, yells, “Barron!” and three German shepherds show up in the yard.

“What the hell?” I say to myself, eating a tin can for breakfast. “Barron Trump’s already seen naked pictures of his mom. Kid’s gonna be fine.”

And just like that, I duck sainthood.

I get to work, sit down on the broken glass I always leave on my desk chair and, bang, the news wire says there are only 62 Javan rhinos in the world.

Sixty-two? That’s not a hell of a lot of rhinos. You gotta figure they’ll be gone in five years, three if American billionaires decide rhino heads look good on the walls of a penthouse, one year if any flabby old guy anywhere hears that rhino horn makes the stock market rise. Why waste the empathy?

Sainthood dodged the way you’d dodge a ball if you were playing dodgeball, I eat a box of bullets for lunch, wrap a brick in the American flag, and throw it at a Kia sedan full of guys in turbans. Mighta been Muslims. Who cares?

At 2 p.m., I bite off one of my thumbs, the left one, I think.

I read that there are 8,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, eating dust, and hoping they get on the police force when they get home. One of the last remaining American paths from working class to middle class is military to police force.

Screw ‘em, I think. They’re volunteers. All gave some. Some gave all. Little Barron ain’t gonna end up in Afghanistan, not even in a K-9 unit. There’s no draft, so he won’t even have to fake the genetic bone spurs that kept his daddy out of the Mekong Delta and in the discos.

“All the saints are dead,” my old man used to say, “but not all the dead are saints.”

By the end of the day, I’m in a junkyard, bedding down under the orange and rust carcass of an old Ford Fairlane with no bumpers and a blood-etched spiderweb crack in the windshield. Another prom night gone bad.

I decide I’ll feel bad for little Barron. I’ve never seen naked pictures of my mother. My father was a World War II vet. When I was 11, there probably weren’t more than 100 people who knew I was alive, and maybe 15 of them were nuns.

I get a good night’s sleep. I care. I’m on the road to sainthood.