Perpetual Permanence

 

 

by Kevin Bliss

 

 

            I called my friend, Tony Lempwicke.  Tony Lempwicke and I used to do everything together, but not so much lately.  So I gave him a call.

            “What’d you have in mind?” Tony asked when I wanted to know if he had plans for the weekend.

            “I don’t know,” I replied, “I’d kind of like to start a new religion.  What d'ya think?”

            “Yeah.  Might be worth doing.  When?”

            “Saturday.  I figure it’ll take the entire day.”

            “Can’t on Saturday.  Wife and I have plans.  How ‘bout the Saturday after?”

            I checked my calendar.  A cousin’s wedding was scheduled for that day.  I decided to blow it off.  A new religion’d be more fun.  I'd first gotten the idea from an article I'd read in a magazine.  Something about fifty things to do before you die.  Actually, it might have said start a new charity, but I'm not a big fan of charity.

            I told Tony that we really needed our religion to have more than one god.  Maybe three.  Or four.

            “Why?”  He was not convinced.

            “Mass appeal,” I explained, “The more gods we have, the better chance somebody’ll like at least one of them.”

 

            We settled on three:   Graham-the-Bitter, Alfa and Delapidatio. 

            I  booked a hall.  A place co-owned by somebody I went to high school with.  Although located in an older part of town, between a bowling alley and a thrift store, I thought it'd work just fine.

            Tony had called an old friend – Paul Scow – who used to DJ weddings and bar mitzvahs back in the days of vinyl.  Since we didn't have a congregation to sing yet, and didn’t know anybody to serve as choirmaster, Tony’s pal would provide the music.

            We were ready for worshippers at nine thirty.  Tony and I stepped out front while Paul Scow spun some disco hits.  While we’d been setting up tables and chairs, I decided on a name for our religion:  Perpetual  Permanence.

            Our first member was a woman in her mid-forties named Alicia.  She'd missed her bus and complained how hot it was.  We invited her inside.  With Paul Scow spinning those disco numbers and cool air conditioning blowing through the entire hall, it would've been hard for her to refuse.  She asked if we were a dance club as she took a seat and I told her that all questions would be answered in good time. 

            For some reason, this caused her to want to leave.

            As she slid her shoes back on and stood up, Tony took my cue and pointed a nine millimeter pistol at her (which also came with Paul Scow).  The gun wasn't loaded, but she didn’t know that and sat down again.

            I headed back outside and searched for more souls to convert.  Right there was a tall, fair-skinned guy in a nice suit.  Using strong arm tactics I learned at a "weekend warriors" Coast Guard defense class, I brought the suit along -- albeit unwillingly.

            By noon, we had a total of eleven congregants.  Tony had the gun trained on them, careful to retain a menacing look.  I explained to our congregation that they’d come to love me in time, so they shouldn’t fight it. Alicia said that she needed to use the bathroom. 

            Tony was dead set against escorting her.  I didn’t feel that I could be seen to bow to the wishes of a member of the congregation.  That left Paul.  He began a new record (the Bee Gees’ “How Deep is Your Love”) and led Alicia to the bathrooms.

            After Alicia’s return, I decided to tell my followers a parable.  I had no real experience with parables, so I decided to wing it.

            “A true believer in the ways of Perpetual Permanence once found himself walking down the street in a contemplative mood.  When he came upon another man who appeared to be lost, the true believer asked the man what he was trying to find.  The man, seeming grateful that at least one person in the strange city was kind enough to take an interest in his troubles, smiled and said, “I need to locate the offices of the accounting firm of Brownlow, Schuyler and Crabbe.  I have a very important appointment, and I’m already twenty minutes late.”  The true believer smiled back, nodded knowingly and said, “Well, it seems as though you’re completely fucked,” and continued on his way.”

            The congregation didn’t respond favorably.  I then offered the three cornerstones of Perpetual Permanence:

-Never tell the truth to anyone you dislike.   

-Always be yourself unless you have no charm.

-Concentrate forty minutes of your time helping somebody else each and every year.

            No discernible response.  Then, one of the eleven --a middle-aged man with a beard, wearing a 'Rush' t-shirt who identified himself as Scotty -- raised his hand.

            "You know what I hate?"  he began, "I hate the local TV news people.  It's like all the cool kids from high school went to work at the TV station and they're trying to tell us how we ought to think and feel about every damn thing.  Act like they're some kind of moral compass or something for everybody.  What kind of rule can we make about them?"

            I didn't want to tell Scotty that I frequently fantasized about one of the female anchors at channel nine.  I liked his enthusiasm.  I announced that Perpetual Permanence would sanction non-lethal attacks against local television news personnel.

            Scotty nodded, gave me the thumbs up and smiled the smile of a man who had bent the world to his will.  Things were falling into place.

            Within minutes of my conversion of Scotty, however, the police arrived.  It seems that when Paul Scow took Alicia to the bathroom, she talked him into letting her use a cell phone to call her sister.  Problem is, Alicia didn't call her sister.  She called 9-1-1.  News vans weren't far behind the police and we could see them parked a little way down the street.

            I got a lawyer on the phone, asked him to come down.  The guy had represented my sister in some accident injury thing and one of his business cards ended up in my wallet.  Too bad I didn't keep better track of my sister's life.  Soon as I got off the phone with the guy, I realized that I'd never heard if she'd won or lost the case in question.

            The news people wanted an interview.  The police wanted to talk.  I wasn't ready.

            Scotty suggested we invite as many of the local TV people in as we could get and then savage them.  To get him out of my hair, I put him in charge of continuing indoctrination of the others.

            I let Paul Scow go outside and tell everyone that we were the Church of Perpetual Permanence, that we insisted on our first amendment rights and that we needed seventeen sandwiches, fifteen bags of chips, a dozen or so pudding treats and all the bottled water they could lay their hands on.  Paul had grown tired of spinning the disco hits and wanted to get out before things got brutally serious.  Fair enough.  Once he passed along our message, he was free to go.  Unfortunately, the police didn't feel the same way and placed him under arrest.

            Less than ten minutes after Paul headed out the front doors and made the announcement, it was all over the internet (including our lunch order).  That's what I love about the information age -- no wasted time.

            Tony took advantage of the news coverage and texted copies of our three cornerstones for good living to reporters.  He left out Scotty's thing about local TV people to keep the media on our side a little longer.

            About that time, the lawyer arrived:  Peter Brick, Esq.  Near as I could tell from my vantage point, he drove a Mazda.  Must have been about six or seven years old.  That was disappointing and my estimation of him took a big nosedive.

            The police wouldn't let him in.  I retaliated by having Tony text the media about it.

            This went on for the better part of an hour.  As much as the police wanted to cut off our constant news releases, they couldn't.  Finally, they gave in and sent Peter Brick, Esq. through the doors of the hall.  I asked what our prospects were.

            "Not good," he said, "they're pretty serious about the kidnapping charges."

            "But if they'd only give us another three or four days, I'm sure that I can win these people over and convince them that they weren't kidnapped.  Then everybody can go home happily.  They won't need to fill out any reports or testify to things in court or any of that," I said.

            "Most of those guys live to fill out reports."

            I turned to our congregants, told them I really needed them to come through for me.  The guy in the suit gave me the bird.  Scotty smacked him in the face.

            So that appeared to be it.  The end of our plan.  That's when Brick's cell phone rang.  It was a consortium of media and social networking entrepreneurs.  They wanted to know if Perpetual Permanence was for sale.  We had five minutes to make a decision.

            Looking back on it all now, I realize I should have asked for more.  Perpetual Permanence ended up being a social networking platform that fed into a larger social network which was a part of wider internet platform built to rival Google and Yahoo!  Within twenty-four hours of the sale, Perpetual Permanence had over seven hundred thousand online members with a deal in the works for a reality show and major Hollywood motion picture.  Tony and I were forgotten in the flurry.  Our names don't even show up in the Wikipedia entry for Perpetual Permanence.

            The money we made barely covered our legal bills (we hired a much better lawyer who managed to get us off with five years probation and two years counseling).  Peter Brick took his cut for setting up the deal and Paul Scow sued us (with the out of court settlement taking away the rest of the money we'd made from the sale).

            Tony went back to his wife and they lasted for another eight months before she walked out.  He tells me that the decision to exclude her from our religion had no bearing on her departure, but I have my doubts.

            Peter Brick was disbarred soon after he made our deal.  My sister told me that she heard he was selling timeshare condos for a company in Long Beach.

            Alicia, the woman who ratted us out, did a lot of interviews following her involvement with Perpetual Permanence.  She got some money for the interviews and used it to launch an online advice column that nobody read.  It was taken down within four months of its inception.

            Scotty was arrested some time later for attacking a woman he had mistaken for local news anchor Sharon Sparrow.  The woman forgave him, visited him in prison and married him the very day he emerged.

            I went back to my old life, never missed any cousins' weddings and resisted taking advice from magazine articles.  I spend my time watching the world through my television screen and avoiding, at all costs, another losing proposition.