Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet: Chapters 10–17

I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the basement still looking like an advertisement for a couple dozen of the carnal sins.

We both ended up acing the test, but that episode kind of took the excitement out of climbing and pilfering tests and pretty much everything else.

At that moment Fang looked like he could barely slide off the couch let alone come up with some convoluted lie to amuse a friend.

We guffawed over that for a while, although the idea of Fang's mom trading his Christmas gift for booze wasn’t much of a stretch.

He paused, beaming, and I could just tell he was getting ready to lay some impotent elfin wisdom upon me.

The cab must have been well insulated, because I couldn’t hear the wind outside at all.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” It was light and earnest, the way he said it, like he just knew there was more to come.

I rolled my head to the side and looked at him. “You think so?”
“I do.” He nodded solemnly. “Now, go on. Get outta here.”

The warm-up band, Queens of the Stone Age, already had the crowd jumping by the time Fang and I shoved our way to the periphery of the mosh pit.

Four huge screens hung above the stage, rotating flashing psychedelic images, but about halfway through the song I just closed my eyes and leaned back, pounding the killer rhythms on my gut.

After one particularly labored pull, he lifted his head and looked me in the eye and said really clearly, “I can’t breathe.”

And I know it was completely insane, but when I cleared the windshield on the driver's side and saw Faith watching me through the glass, I felt like a kid who’d just pulled the wrapping off some coveted Christmas gift.

It looked like the handyman had been on vacation for the past couple centuries, and the threadbare, watery pink carpet leading to the office was barely hanging on.

We were thirteen when we made the list, and we were pretty positive the retreating glacier rhetoric was bogus.

The fat guy grabbed hold of the counter, arms warbling, spread his meaty fingers across its cracked surface and gave Faith a long, leering look.

The honeymoon suite was dank and cold and dirty brown.

He stifled a gasp as his injured mitt hit the hot water, then he relaxed into the bath and began splashing water onto his chest and arms.

I imagined a mother lode of drug paraphernalia...but except for an empty Ziploc, which I worked around, the only things I found were a pack of gum and two five-dollar bills.

I relinquished the remote and snuck a peek at Faith, stretched out on the other bed.

“Yeah. His last album is sooo mournful. It lets me release my grief in small, beautiful doses.” She undulated her hand through the air in front of her. “In sad, perfect waves.”

And I didn’t mention the angry, icy interlude outside Delaney’s door earlier in the evening.

Out the window, a puff of blue, transparent exhaust wavered behind the Sunbird.

Mr. Miller had listened to their interpretations of the reading with this condescending smile on his face before explaining the real, approved-by-Christ lesson meant to be taken from the passage.

"...Anyway, after pointing out what a heathen I was, he started ridiculing my name, saying how ironic it is that someone like me, someone with no faith in Christ’”—she lowered her voice to mimic Stan’s dad—“should have been bestowed with such a name.’"

Probably the closest I ever got to a spiritual sort of experience was during my mom’s O Brother period, which coincided with me being about eight or nine years old.

And she’d sing along with the soulful a cappella choir about going down to the river to pray and wearing the golden crown and the good Lord showing us the way and whatnot.

I don’t even know if he believed in the afterlife or a literal Jesus or what.

After the drive along the sloppy highway, the snowy park looked especially clean and serene, and all conversation stopped.

I imagined all the frogs Stan and I had paid for, beneath the ice, motionless bumps on a muddy bottom, more dead than alive, hanging in a cold, dark limbo until next spring.

Turns out I was wrong, of course, because Faith still had lots to say about the old beau.

Stan had this intrinsic ability to see the worthiest part of a person and deal with them there...

And it’s not like he was disillusioned or blind to the dark side of humanity or anything like that, either.

You knew all the darkness was there, in you, in him, in the world, but it was completely latent.

I wasn’t sure if the old Kalbro supply chain was taut, but I’ll tell you this, my mother certainly was. She and my dad had a fairly major blowout when he finally arrived home at nine-thirty.

Even though it wasn’t that cold, Mrs. Bernoffski was completely swaddled—long black coat, hat, scarf, the whole bit.

It took her forever to get down the stairs, turned sideways, gloved hands gripping the flimsy railing, booted feet groping for every snowy step.

No intellectual bravado, no suave charm, no superhero powers, nothing.

No intellectual bravado, no suave charm, no superhero powers, nothing.

The two gallons of pop had me squirming in my seat for the last sixty minutes of redundant nonsense, and I practically sprinted to the can when the film finally collapsed.

I...got into philosophy, which eventually led me to metaphysics and creative immortality and New Age crap, and all of a sudden I was right back to Oprah and my brain was completely fried.