Magic, Jesus and Backstage Stage Passes to the Apocalypse

It's a holiday here in the states, so we are taking the day off and republishing an old favorite here on the front page (originally published 04/14/2008).

Back in the days when my husband Al and I were newlyweds, we rented the second floor of our house to three guys. Al was the only one with a regular job, and he only worked school hours. The rest of us were often "between jobs" and when we were working, it typically wasn't normal hours. So at our house you could pretty much find someone to play with at any time of the day or night.

We had almost no furniture, but we did have multiple TVs, game consoles, and computers. One of the guys was a hardware geek and another was a programmer, so they wired us up a home network, back in the days when home networks were unheard of. We had to punch some holes in the ceilings and the floors to do it, but it was worth it to play multiplayer computer games against each other.

We also played a lot of Merchant of Venus, Talisman, History of the World and Magic: the Gathering. A couple of the guys had binders, upon binders, upon boxes of Magic cards. They would hand you a deck and you could play.

I would later learn that these many boxes of Magic cards was the reason one of the guys was renting a room from us, rather than having his own place. He had charged up thousands of dollars on his credit card buying Magic cards. He finally was in so deep that he had to declare bankruptcy. This made passing a credit check to rent an apartment or a security check to get an IT job pretty much impossible. This, however, is not the craziest part of this story.

Here's the crazy part. About 9 months after we all move in together, everything is good, well except now we also have a 17 year old girl who's parents kicked her out of the house when they caught her kissing another girl, living with us. One of the guys had found her sleeping the the storage room of the store he managed, and brought her home with him. And another guy's cousin came to visit for two weeks, and two months later he was still here. But as I said, it's all good until we discover that one of our housemates is Jesus.

At first, living with Jesus wasn't so bad. As you can imagine, Jesus is a pretty nice guy - quite, gentle, tidy. He cleaned up after himself. Even washed the bathrooms - with shaving cream.

Jesus liked to wander around barefoot, wearing nothing but his pajama bottoms, outside in the snow in the middle of the night, collecting garbage, which he would arrange "artistically" in the living room while we slept. He could stop cars with his mind, which he demonstrated to us - while standing next to the stop sign at the end of our road. He could fly. We assured him that we believed him and he didn't have to demonstrate. God, who was the two Al's at the beginning and end of the universe - one Al being my husband, the other Al being a large black man who smoked Cool cigarettes - started communicating to his son via Daffy Duck on TV, and through the license plates on red cars.

One day Jesus got into the files of the Doom game everyone had been playing on our little network, and hacked the files so that all the walls and floors were invisible. Then he set the files to hidden so we couldn't find them on the hard drive. This really t-ed everyone off. It was time to do something.

While I tried to find the hidden files, Al was elected to take Jesus on a little trip to the Emergency Room. There Al tried to convince them that Jesus really needed a long vacation in the hospital. Turns out that being Jesus isn't enough to get you a bed in the psyche ward. First you need to fail the psyche evaluation.

Psychiatrist: So what seems to be the problem?

Al: He's Jesus and wanders around the neighborhood in the middle night collecting garbage.

Psychiatrist: So he likes to to take walks and clean up the neighborhood. There's nothing wrong with that.

Al: He does it barefoot.

Psychiatrist: I'm sorry but...

Al: He brings the garbage into the house and arranges it.

Psychiatrist to Jesus: So you arrange things. Can you show me.

Jesus takes a framed photo from the psychiatrist's desk and artfully arranges some small object and colored paper in the frame.

Psychiatrist: So you're an artist. He is just creating art. I'm sorry but...

Al: Please, just talk to him you'll see.

Psychiatrist (sigh): So is there anything going on in your life that you would like to talk about.

Jesus: I'm selling my Magic cards.

Psychiatrist (suddenly interested, starts scribbling madly in his notebook): Your magic cards?

Al: Yes, he has magic cards! Tell him about your Magic cards.

Jesus then launches into an explanation of how he can tap his cards and use them to cast spells. Al tells me it was actually a fairly coherent rules summary. It was also enough to score some meds, and hook Jesus up with an out patient service.

When Jesus set the sofa on fire, the out patient psychiatrist finally sent the Twinkie Wagon around to pick him up. Jesus went willingly, dressed in both his suits, convinced that the ambulance was the limo to his final big gig. As he approached the ambulance, he suddenly stopped and pressed a half dozen Magic cards into my hand. "Backstage passes to the Apocalypse," he explained. Then grinning and waving to his fans, he and his escorts stepped into his limo and drove away.