LUDIC LOG

The first time where I got in trouble was right off. They come by the mall food court, 'cause they like to pick out people eatin' alone, which is what I was doin' at the time. I was actually there with my friend Jimmy but he was in the toilet and I didn't even really like him that much. I was eating his onion rings in fact when they approached me. In the van on the way back to the compound I asked them if they ever thought about changing the name.

"What's wrong with Christ's Happy Wanderers?", Alex asked me.

"Ain't nothin' wrong with it, by itself," I says, "but if you say it certain ways it sounds like you're sayin' Christ-Happy Wanderers. Which is a whole different species of wanderers all together."

He told me not to worry about that. It was the first of many times when I would hear not to worry about it.

Basically the job of us in the Happy Wanderers was to go from town to town soliciting for Jesus. Money, donations of clothes and old TVs, anything what could be sold or was good for around your house. Of course it didn't really go to Jesus but to Marty, who was the man running the show. Well you might ask, as I did a few times, what Jesus would want with a DVD player. The answer was, that's how come we're giving it to Marty. He's acting as God's representative on Earth. In so far as the aspect of God's ability to watch The Jeffersons I have to admit he did a fine job of it at that. Sometimes one of the younger fellas would say that it weren't right to misrepresent ourselves by saying we was getting the money for Jesus when after all we was giving it to Marty, but Marty made a promise that as soon as Jesus came back he would give him all the money less expenses. I had no reason to doubt this.

Life on the road was hard but I guess it was part of being a Wanderer. We couldn't rightly call ourselves Christ's Happy Wanderers if we was a handful of angry Hindoos who stayed in one place all the time. So wander we did and Christ's we were, or Marty's, which he assured us was the next best thing. As to whether we was happy, well, we tried to keep good spirits. Some of us where not so fond of Stryper and White Lion as Marty was, and there were always a lot of complaints about the food. Marty insisted on us eating only at Taco Bell, or KFC, on account of they were owned by Pepsi and heavily invested in by the Mormon Church. So if there wasn't one of them in a town he would just send Sherri or one of the girls to the supermarket to buy things to make our own KFC, and Sherri wasn't the best cook in the world.

One time I asked Marty how come it was so important that we eat at places owned by the Mormons.

"Then we can make sure the money's goin' to God," he telled me.

"But we ain't Mormons, are we, Marty?" I asked.

"It's close enough for government work, Finn," he says. "And call me Lord, not Marty. I think the government is listening in on us and I want them to know the chain of command around here."

It was about that time, in fact, that he started preachin' that the government under the spell of Satan was going to rain fire down on us. I was pretty excited about that because to be honest about it, I was tired of the whole Christ's Happy Wanderers way of doing, and I figured one end to it was as good as another. Anyway, he commenced to givin' us hell and brimstone about the coming Apocalypse, which was all well and good because if nothing else it meant an end to all the sermons about how wearing shoes were a mark of disrespect for Jesus. But that's also about the time that he started goin' after the women -- not just Sherri, but even them that could legally see and didn't walk with no limp -- saying it was time to start producing sons and daughters for the future of Christ's Happy Wanderers.

"I don't quite savvy why we need no more kids for the future, Lord Marty," I says to him one day, this being about a week ago.

"How do you mean, Finn?" he asks, all gone suspicious in his voice. Like it mattered to me; I ain't got no girl for him to go after.

"Well, it occurs to me, is all," defending myself all logical-like, "that if the Feds are gonna rurn us all with Satan's fiery rain, there ain't much point in preparing for no future. What's the point of givin' these kids naught but a year or so around before the Devil smites them all down via the FBI?"

I thought it was a pretty good question myself, but Marty just told me that if I wanted garbage duty that I should just keep on talking. I didn't want garbage duty because it consisted of pickin' out old KFC boxes and helping Sherri make them into a suit which Marty seemed to believe would give him power and dominion over the animals.

That was about the time I took my leave of Christ's Happy Wanderers. I stole a pair of shoes someone had left out by the roadside and hitch-hiked here to Lexington. I don't think they'll find me here, because there's no KFC or Taco Bell in this shopping mall. So it's a good place to make my home. I'm still hoping for good luck with an apocalyptic cult, and if there's one thing I know for a fact, it's that the food court is the place to be discovered.

My only fear is that old Jimmy is probably worried sick by now, not to mention the fact that he's surely done bought a new thing of onion rings.