The World's Most Pink-Skinned Saint

An excerpt from my novel, Diary of a Heretic: Click here to read the previous episode, and here to start from the beginning.

Yesterday at about six o’clock, when I got back from Louie’s (my flour supplier), I saw this sign flapping across the plate-glass window, announcing the first meeting of the “New College of Complexes.”  And beneath that, my topic, spelled out!

How Can We Know Anything If We Only Believe What We Want to Believe?

Apparently while drinking the New Year’s champagne, I had divulged my opening topic to Carlos. I remember drinking and talking. About the topic, I remember him frowning.  But he must have decided he liked it, despite himself.  For Carlos has seen and done everything six times over, something he never lets me forget.  In the seventies, he worked in every ashram and monastery between LA and San Francisco.  He’s studied religion his entire life and considers himself an authority on cults. 

Nonetheless, the set-up astounded me. The sign! The banner! It was terrifying. About the topic, I pretended nonchalance, in my too-intense way. But Carlos was motioning me toward the swinging door to the kitchen.

“Our timing’s dead on. See how the shop’s filling up?”

I saw old Mr. Downey and old Mr. Hedlund, who, true, usually leave by five.  They come every day at three-thirty, drink espresso, eat biscotti and pay twenty percent of their bill—their reading of the seniors’ twenty-percent discount I offer.  Unfailingly, I explain the math on their receipts, but the old men—eyes, I swear, twinkling—turn off their hearing aids until I give in and shout, “After you drive me out of business, then what are you going to do?”

It was out of the norm that the old guys were still sitting there, but downright surreal that a group from the university, probably graduate students, were in my shop, sitting around and whispering as if waiting for a performance. Two young women, one with curly red hair, the other’s dark and cropped, sauntered out of the rest room.  Carlos grinned at me and turned so that his nice little butt kept shifting oh-so-close to me. Meanwhile—how else to put it?—an influx of academic-types.

“Ready, Malcolm?”  Peeling off his hair net, Carlos crossed the kitchen, his braid swinging from side to side. From my office, he dragged out a microphone.

“Are you crazy?”  I waved my arms.  “The room’s way too small for that.”

Laying his hands on my shoulders, he put his mouth near my ear, “Don’t worry.” 

Once he set up the mike, I figured:  It’s my shop, my dream, I’m doing the sound check! “Testing, testing. . . ” And, sure enough, my voice was so loud, everybody winced.

Bounding back over, Carlos readjusted the apparatus, and embarrassingly off key sang a few phrases from the John Lennon song, “Beautiful Boy.” Marking a line on the floor with a strip of electrical tape, he said, “Stand here.”

“You’re making too much of this,” I bent over to suppress a choking impulse.

Stephanie, my irritable but highly competent waitress, glared at me as I pressed a fist into my diaphragm, trying to breathe.  “Shit, Malcolm, if you’re not going to get the cocoas for table three, keep your fat ass out of my way.”

Whereupon Carlos my horrible, totally creepy but brilliant baker who’s categorically above serving people said, “Allow me.”  He got cocoas and teaspoons, little plates of butter, ice water, and hazelnut cappuccinos. 

“Why are you doing this?”

“Not me,” Carlos said. “You. You’re doing this. I’ve seen these things happen before. But never with so much potential.”

I groaned and Carlos said, “You should decide what you want to be called. How about, The World’s Most Pink-Skinned Saint?”

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