Say A Little Prayer For Me

I’ve been to pray at synagogues, and things only got worse. I prayed for my mother to live and she died. I prayed for my career to get back on track, and it collapsed.

I’m not saying that the spirits of my ancestors and the Jewish people don’t like me, but it’s a possibility. I never have had very much luck in life, despite all my effort.

I’ve never been observant. Most religious people that I have known have been thieves seeking to mitigate their guilty consciences.

Frankly, I’ve had more luck with what I call Off Track Praying, or non-traditional religion. I sort have chosen my own gods to pray to out of desperation, like Tom Hanks in that movie where he was marooned. My choices have not been as inspired as praying to a volleyball with a face painted on it, but they work for me.

Organized religion is a bait-and-switch situation that lures in with one thing and you end up buying something inferior. Better just to settle on your own gods and pray to them. If you choose to pray to a god and you don’t get any satisfaction, you can always change gods around until you find a combination that gets results.

Praying to the big religions is like having to choose between Wal Mart and Target to do your shopping. The choices are too big and generic to have any impact. They’re not tailored to the individual, but are so generalized as to appeal only to the most desperate believer. What you end up with is a bunch of irrelevant ceremonies and restrictive rules of behavior that don’t get results.

And results are what count. I never got anything I ever wanted by praying to Judaism, and I never achieved any emotional satisfaction listening to endless moralistic sermons preached by rabbis who have never had any life experiences to draw on except for some theological institute stuck somewhere in the suburbs of Ohio. These guys are just paid agents of the status quo (female rabbis, I’m not even going to go into here).

My system is based on Buddhism, which says that the spirits of your ancestors are present and listening when you pray to them. The difference is, what the fuck do I care about my ancestors, who were a bunch of pricks that never did anything for me? My mother’s family were antediluvian suburban slugs and my father’s family, bless ‘em, are the next thing to the swine who murdered other Jews for Hitler so they could stay alive. Only instead of being a case of life or death, they left me to rot just to economize a few bucks. I hope they’re reading this, the pricks. They never did shit for me and I’m hoping to return the favor going forward.

Anyway, if you accept the theory that spirits of the departed are still with us in one form or another, and that you can reach them through the power of prayer, then the trick is to find spirits that work for you. I can envision a situation where crowds of people in baseball caps ride the train to Yankee Stadium to bow and pray to the spirits of Babe Ruth and Whitey Ford! When you think about it in that context, the idea has dynamic possibilities.

It works for me. The last time I was in Paris, I visited the grave of Jim Morrison in Père Lachaise Cemetary. The place was thick with kids, and there were plenty of cops too. I was loaded, naturally, and while I was standing in front of Morrison’s grave I had the inspiration to try to profit from the opportunity by praying for good luck.

“Jim,” I said, “I’m an artist too. I need a break. Please help me break out with my art.”

The kids standing around me looked at me with their eyes bugged out like I was a lunatic. Fortunately, I have never been susceptible to public opinion.

The result was almost immediate. The next day the plumbing crashed in the studio apartment I had rented on Ile St. Louis and the rental agent moved me into a two bedroom luxury apartment in the same historic building on Rue de l’ancienne comédie that houses the world famous Comédie Française theater group that was founded by Molière, right across from the Café Procope, where Molière and Beaumarchais hung out dating from the seventeenth century.

Coincidence? All I know is that the day after I said a prayer at the grave of Jim Morrison I ended up living like royalty in a huge luxury apartment in an historic building in the heart of French artistic expression. Some people go to church and pray all their lives to Jesus, and for their trouble they end up living in Cambria Heights.

I wish some of Jim Morrison’s luck would have followed me back here!

Here’s another example of praying for luck to “non-traditional” sources. When I take vacations on the Mayan Riviera of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, I always make a point to stop by one of the ubiquitous archeological sites throughout the area to offer a prayer to the Mayan spirits. I always pray to them in Spanish, and I am not shy about asking for favors. The good luck I get from the Mayan spirits follows me back to New York, unlike Jim Morrison’s spell,and I always end up getting new jobs and enjoying robust health. But the last time I came back from Mexico, I promptly got my arm broken in a bus accident, and now I got a fat lawsuit against the MTA, which my attorney is very happy with. Ordinarily it’s a catastrophe to break your arm, believe me, but when the MTA does it for you in front of an unimpeachable witness (a law librarian, yet) – I call that good luck.

The Mayans weren’t such good luck for that cocksucking prick Mel Gibson, who made a movie characterizing them as bloodthirsty savages. Instead of appreciating the finer points of their civilization, Gibson preferred to dwell on some of the less appetizing aspects of their history (who is he to judge?), so the Mayans weren’t good luck for him. Ol’ Mel hasn’t been having good luck lately, and he didn’t appear at the Oscars.

My acquaintance with the spirit world goes back a lot longer than the two brief instances I am relating here. When I was a young person I traveled and took a lot of chances in life, which doesn’t exactly fill me with admiration for the young people I come into contact with now, living at home with their parents and being supported by them, all the time acting like big players. No matter. I ended up in Montreal, where I operated a leather boutique on that city’s “Boulevard du crime,” Ste. Catherine Street, for many years. That boutique was a very wild place which certainly would have been closed by the police anywhere except Montreal, a city that has a very elastic concept of morality. It was a version of “Friends” featuring a cast of frenchified, dope smoking, fornicating subversive radicals. I even had the cops on my side.

The carryings-on in that place were so wild, and went on for so long that even I was amazed at my enduring good luck. It was only later in life – after I had finally been run out of town by an enraged establishment following a particularly provocative episode involving a Halloween fashion show at a comedy club, that I realized that my good luck must have come from the fact that my boutique was located next to The First Spiritualist Church of Montreal, a group of mediums and crystal ball gazers, and that the spirits attracted to the place must have found my little three ring circus of freaks, schizophrenics and nut jobs vastly more entertaining than the sanctimonious psalm-singing and strenuously arch attempts at ouija board trans-meditation techniques engaged by the people next door. There’s no question that some kind of higher power must have been protecting me, or I would have been sentenced to jail ten times over, so oblivious was I regarding any concept of civilized behavior.

This could all be in my mind. Maybe I should check myself into Bellevue for a nice, restful repose in the Lunatic Suite. I’m not discounting the possibility. If my track record in life is any indication of the state of my mental stability, then I have to admit that my mind is a fucking mess.

Anyway, what do you care? The purpose of this blog is entertainment, not theological rectitude, so if you’re looking for the Voice of Authority, you better leave right now, because this show will bring you down so much…

The purpose of this blog is that I’ve been praying to Jim Morrison in France and Indians in the jungle, and meantime I’ve been ignoring my main god, the one guy who has shone through to me like a beacon in a tempest. I love this guy better than any woman I’ve ever known. Everything he ever put his hand to has been an inspiration to me. I named myself after his discordant, dysfunctional symphonic masterpiece, “200 Motels.” He told both Al Gore and Ronald Reagan to go fuck themselves. He’s a hero in Europe and a non-person whose identity has been virtually erased by the American establishment. I’m talking about the incomparable, inimitable American master of composing, guitar playing and comedy, The One And Only (drumroll)… FRANK ZAPPA!

Frank Zappa! A greater guitar player than Jimi Hendrix, incomparable comedy writer, composer, poet and sound engineer; a prescient social critic and commentator, an example of American genius abroad in a time of stinking, rancid leadership in this country, Frank Zappa was the last half of the twentieth century rolled onto one scintillating package of talent. I would need to write a book to express everything that he means to me.

Though I saw his act many, many times, I have never prayed to his spirit because in my system you need a place where his spirit might be present. I don’t know where he is buried, or even if he would hang around a cemetery which, let’s face it, is not likely to be the kind of floating crap game that Jim Morrison’s is (also, the cemetery where Morrison is buried, Père Lachaise, is the greatest cemetery in the world, where the tombs are like mansions).

Maybe Zappa’s spirit can be found hanging around some tacky drive-in restaurant parking lot, cigarette hanging from his mouth and his guitar around his neck, jamming the shit out of his wah-wah bar while waitresses on roller skates go zooming right through his transparent body, like in one of his songs. Who can know?

So in the case of Frank Zappa’s spirit I’m going to take a different approach which is freakin’ peculiar even for somebody like me. I’m going to pray to Frank Zappa over the internet, in the hope that the words of my prayer, converted to digital impulses propelled through fiberglass cable and bounced off satellites orbiting the earth, find their way to his spirit, who will be moved by them and use his astro-intestinal powers to affect an oh-my-papa in the earth’s crust and shuffle around the deck of possibilities so that the cards of fate deal me a hand of aces.

Hey, what have I got to lose? Probably anybody who started reading this swill has already given up, so the chances of this stupidity gaining wide circulation are virtually nil. If this prayer reaches the ear of Frank Zappa, then he will surely respond because he knows I love him, and in a year’s time I will be a huge comedy star.

So, bend over and spread ‘em, ‘cause here come my bullet!

A PRAYER TO FRANK ZAPPA

Oh, Frank, Grand Wazoo, Sheik Yabouti, Great Master of Comedy and Rock ‘n Roll, hear my plea and help me to become a huge comedy star. I got everything it takes to succeed as a fuckin’ moron in this world except for luck.

Everything I ever wrote has been dedicated to your greatness, like when I had those strippers whipping that guy during my fashion show, or when I did my ventriloquist act by strapping a dildo to a teddy bear.

I fucked Mel Gibson in the ass dressed as a rabbi onstage at the Comic Strip, shot whipped cream up my nose in a salute to Paris Hilton and was the only person to display Rudolph Giuliani’s panties before it became common knowledge that he was a drag queen, yet nothing seems to work. I can’t get no traction for my act!

Frank, I’m sick of working lame fucking day jobs for a bunch of stiffs. I want to be headlining in Vegas, smoking reefer with Joe Frazier and Vinnie Pazienza backstage at HBO Boxing Night, fucking around with showgirls and pole dancers. I want a female personal trainer and a whole gang of naked women in the hot tub of my mansion in Miami.

I want to do naked mud wrestling with a pair of twin lesbians on Howard Stern and get a million-dollar book advance. I want to have a band and cause riots and pandemonium in nightclubs. All this and more, O Grand Wazoo. Please hear my plea and get me out of my girlfriend’s apartment, where she dogs me night and day like a jailkeeper and drinks up all my money.

If you hear this prayer, send me a sign, like a huge, smoking blunt in the sky that I can inhale the smoke and catch the first jet for Miami. All this and more, O Grand Master of the Endless Universal Guitar Solo. Amen.

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Posted on 3/4/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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