Chapter 24

Before this plane goes down, before the flight recorder tape runs out, one of the things I want to apologize for is the Book of Very Common Prayer.
People need to know the Book of Very Common Prayer was not my idea. Yes, it sold two hundred million copies, worldwide. It did. Yes, I let them put my name on it, but the book was the agent’s brainchild. Before that the book was the idea of some nobody on the writing team. Some copywriter trying to break into the big time, I forget.

What’s important is the book was not my idea.
What happened is one day, the agent comes up to me with that dancing light in his brown eyes that means a deal. According to my publicist, I’m booked solid. This is after we did that line of Bibles I was autographing in bookstores. We had a million plus feet of guaranteed shelf space in bookstores, and I was on tour.
“Don’t expect a book tour to be something fun,” the agent tells me.
The thing about book signings, the agent says, is they’re exactly the same as the last day of high school when everyone wants you to write in their high school annual, only a book tour can go on for the rest of your life.
According to my itinerary, I’m in a Denver warehouse signing stock when the agent pitches me on his idea for a weeny book of meditations people can use in their everyday lives. He sees this as a paperback of little prose poems. Fifty pages, tops. Little tributes to the environment, children, safe stuff. Mothers. Pandas. Topics that step on nobody’s toes. Common problems. We put my name on the spine, say I wrote it, run the product up a flagpole.
What else people need to know is I never saw the finished book until after the second press run, after it had sold more than fifty thousand copies. Already people weren’t not just a little pissed off, but all the fuss only upped sales.
What happened is one day I’m in the green room waiting to co-host some daytime television project. This is way fast forward, after the autographed Bible book tour. The idea here is if I co-host and enough people tune in, I’ll spin off with a vehicle of my own. So I’m in the green room trading toenail secrets with somebody, the actress Wendi Daniels or somebody, and she asks me to sign her copy of the book. The Book of Very Common Prayer. This is the first time I ever see a copy, I swear. On a stack of my own autographed Bibles, I swear.
According to Wendi Daniels, I can smooth out the swelling under my eyes by rubbing in a dab of hemorrhoid cream.
Then she hands it to me, the Book of Very Common Prayer, and my name is just so right there on the spine. Me, me, me. There I am.
There inside are the prayers people think I wrote:
The Prayer to Delay Orgasm
The Prayer to Lose Weight
The feeling, the way it feels when laboratory product-testing animals are ground up to make hot dogs, that’s how hurt I felt.
The Prayer to Stop Smoking
Our most Holy Father,
Take from me the choice You have given.
Assume control of my will and habits.
Wrest from me power over my own behavior.
May it be Your decision how I act.
May it be by Your hands, my every failing.
Then if I still smoke, may I accept that my smoking is
Your will.
Amen.
The Prayer to Remove Mildew Stains The Prayer to Prevent Hair Loss
God of ultimate stewardship,
Shepherd of thine flock,
As You would succor the least of Your charges,
As You would rescue the most lost of Your lambs,
Restore to me the full measure of my glory.
Preserve in me the remainder of my youth.
All of Creation is Yours to provide.
All of Creation is Yours to withhold.
God of limitless bounty,
Consider my suffering.
Amen.
The Prayer to Induce Erection
The Prayer to Maintain an Erection
The Prayer to Silence Barking Dogs
The Prayer to Silence Car Alarms
The way all this felt, I looked terrible on television. My spin-off television show, well, I had to kiss that goodbye. One minute after we were off the air, I was being all over the telephone long-distance to the agent in New York. Everything on my end of the conversation was furious.
All he cared about was the money.
“What’s a prayer?” he says. “It’s an incantation,” he says, and he’s yelling back at me over the phone. “It’s a way for people to focus their energy around a specific need. People need to get clear on a single intention and accomplish it.”
The Prayer to Prevent Parking Tickets
The Prayer to Stop Plumbing Leaks
“People pray to solve problems, and these are the honest-to-God problems that people worry about,” the agent’s still yelling at me.
The Prayer for Increased Vaginal Sensitivity
“A prayer is how the squeaky wheel gets greased,” he says. That’s how made out of cheese his heart is. “You pray to make your needs known.”
The Prayer Against Drivetrain Noise
The Prayer for a Parking Space
Oh, divine and merciful God,
History is without equal for how much I will adore
You, when You give me today, a place to park.
For You are the provider.
And You are the source.
From You all good is delivered.
Within You all is found.
In Your care will I find respite. With Your
guidance, will I find peace.
To stop, to rest, to idle, to park.
These are Yours to give me. This is what I ask.
Amen.
Seeing how I’m just about to die here, people need to know that my personal intention all along has been to serve the glory of God. Pretty much. Not that you can find this in our mission statement, but that’s my general overall plan. I want to at least make an effort. This new book just looked so not at all pious. So not even a little devout.
The Prayer Against Excessive Underarm Wetness
The Prayer for a Second Interview
The Prayer to Locate a Lost Contact Lens
Still, even Fertility says I’m way off base about the book. Fertility wanted a second volume.
It’s Fertility who says, some stadiums when I’m up front praising God, I’m the same as people wearing clothes printed with Mickey Mouse or Coca-Cola. I mean, it’s so easy. It’s not even a real choice. You can’t go wrong. Fertility says, praising God is just such a safe thing to do. You don’t even have to give it any thought.
“Be fruitful and multiply,” Fertility says to me. “Praise God. There’s no real risk. This is just our default setting.”
What saved the Book of Very Common Prayer was, people were using every prayer. Some people were pissed off, mostly religious people who resented the competition, but by this point our cash now was down. Our total revenues were leveling off. It was market saturation. People had the prayers committed to memory. People were stuck in traffic reciting the Prayer to Make Traffic Move. Men were reciting the Prayer to Delay Orgasm, and it worked at least as well as multiplication tables. My best option seemed to be to just keep my mouth shut and smile.
Besides, the attendance figures were down at my personal appearances, this looked to be the beginning of the end. My People magazine cover was already three months behind me.
And there’s no such thing as Celebrity Outplacement.
You don’t see faded movie stars or whoever going back to community college for retraining. The only field left to me was doing the game show circuit, and I’m not that smart.
I’d peaked, and timing-wise, this looked like another good window to do my suicide, and I almost did. The pills were in my hand. That’s how close I came. I was planning to overdose on meta-testos-terone.
Then the agent calls on the telephone, loud, real loud, the way it sounds when a million screaming Christians are screaming your name in Kansas City, that’s the kind of excitement that’s in his voice.
Over the phone in my hotel room the agent tells me about the best booking of my career. It’s next week. It’s a thirty-second slot between a tennis shoe commercial and a national taco restaurant spot, prime time during sweeps week.
It amazes me to think those pills were almost in my mouth.
This is just so not boring anymore.
Network television, a million billion people watching, this would be the prime moment, my last chance to pull a gun and shoot myself with a decent audience share.
This would be such a totally not-ignored martyrdom.
“One catch,” the agent tells me over the phone. He’s shouting, “The catch is I told them you’d do a miracle.”
A miracle.
“Nothing too big. You don’t have to part the Red Sea or anything,” he says. “Turning water into wine would be enough, but remember, no miracle and they won’t run the spot.”