LITTLE JESUS

Little Jesus counts exactly seven steps back from the microphone as he pulls a small beige cloth from his waistband. The usual suspects are out in full force tonight; assorted bar girls clandestinely awaiting their personal salvation, drunken sailors still wobbly from long weeks at sea, and semper-fried marines hell-bent on proving that they are indeed as tough as their reputation.

This wonderfully strange conglomeration of humanity erupts as Little Jesus waves this cloth in a salute of genuine gratitude before draping it over his face. He tips his head back and stares into the vague glow sneaking through from the overhead spotlights, then slowly raises his arms until his diminutive body forms a cross. And as he stands so blissfully crucified, he remembers reading a National Geographic article about the Shroud of Turin. The thin fabric swaddling his own face pulsates with each exhale, and he believes.

All that remains to be done here in these wee hours is the finale, his signature song. The stage lights shift to a soft red glow as the bass player, who also doubles as his older half-brother Carlito, reignites the crowd with the first deep throngs of Running With The Devil, by Van Halen. In sheer defiance of the odds, Little Jesus leaves his trance and runs atop five-inch platform shoes across the stage, this miracle culminating with a flying front snap-kick that lands him squarely in front of his pulpit. He rips the microphone from its perch and throws a moist, beige cloth into the swirl of alcohol, shrieks, and hormones. Shroud of Olongapo, he thinks.

It’s just past two a.m. when Little Jesus finishes this night’s sermon, and as he always does after the last set, he descends into his ever-changing congregation for the laying on of hands and random offers of free beer. The Americans tower over this pocket-sized messiah as they reach out to him, and one brazen marine momentarily lifts Little Jesus from his feet with a bear hug of drunken adulation. The marine screams in his ear,

“You’re fuckin’ righteous little dude, WHOAAA! You fuckin’ rock!”

Little Jesus doesn’t mind. In fact, it’s the very reason he comes back night after night and week after week, month after month and year after year. It’s a pure and divine addiction, he thinks, and one he gave up trying to escape years ago.

In 1970, at the too-late age of fourteen, his mother sent him to live with his father in California, a merchant mariner whom everyone called “Popeye.” Though only five feet tall himself, “Popeye” was the biggest asshole he’d ever met, and Little Jesus soon found himself back in the Philippines running the streets of Olongapo City, just another miniature denizen caught up in the collision between third-world survival and American foreign policy. Little Jesus thought it was a magical place. He also knew that it couldn’t last forever.

After several beers, Little Jesus offers his goodbyes and leaves the club, all alone, but certainly not lonesome. He concentrates mightily through his fatigue as he navigates the same seventeen steps he must manage every night on his way from one reality to another, and he waits for it to happen. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen…he feels it welling up inside him…sixteen, seventeen…he reaches street level…ahhh, there it is! Tonight “Little Jesus” is letting him go without a struggle. And quite thankfully he mutters,

“Goodnight little brother, sweet dreams.”

Out on Magsaysay boulevard, the not-so-mythical street of a sailor’s best tales, the street of a thousand bars and ten-thousand hookers, the same street whose gutters run thick with puke and bacteria and venereal disease, the very epicenter in fact of sin in all its glory, he finds himself engulfed by delicious solitude and the purplish hues of early morning. The relative cool tames a plethora of pungent fragrances, and street vendors somehow slumber fitfully at their stations while a solitary trike rumbles its one-hundred cc’s of power in the near-distance. The few remaining perpetrators of this evening’s shenanigans stumble along like dutiful children toward their secret and separate destinations.

As Augusto DeLeon turns and walks toward the corner, he passes two old women huddled beside a greasy barrel spilling its trash into his path. One smokes a thin brown cigarette while the other offers up a toothless grin from the creased brown-leather of her face. And it occurs to him that they might be angels, sent here for just this moment, their sole purpose to greet him on his way home. He reaches into his pocket and retrieves a twenty-peso note, lays it at their feet, and with his own warm smile leading the way, continues on his journey. He feels refreshed, as if he’s suddenly in the midst of something all at once intangible and eternal.

He turns the corner, and rather than hop into a trike, decides to walk the four blocks home. His mother will already be awake, drinking instant coffee overly sweetened with condensed milk. He’ll kiss her forehead on his way to bed, and hopefully he’ll sleep until the tropical sun becomes so unrelentingly torrid that even the righteous must arise and greet yet another sweltering day.

As a rooster announces the near-dawn, Augusto slows his pace, barely moving now as he tries to take it all in, this wonderful cacophony of poverty and affluence, of all the saints and sinners constantly changing roles, every one of them equally tasked with creating the coming epilogue. It makes no sense, this crazy, crazy life makes no sense at all. Augusto catches himself laughing out loud as he ponders his thoughts and breaks into a trot, still encumbered by his five-inch platform shoes, but it feels like he’s floating. Running with the devil, or running with the angels… Augusto can never tell which path he’s on, and for tonight at least, it just doesn’t seem to matter.