"Roll Away the Stone"

"Yo! Idiot! Wake the fuck up!"

Smiling Jack awakened to that little fellow they called "Bowery Bert" slapping his cheeks.

"Oh, hello, Bert," said Jack.

"What the fuck are you doing, freezing yourself to death in the freezing snow leaned up against a light pole? What're you, a fucking moron?"

The shabby little man in the ancient cloth cap looked up at him through the thick swirling snow, the stub of a cigar smoking in his lips.

"I must have fallen asleep," said Smiling Jack.

"Bullshit," said Bowery Bert.

"Heh heh, no, really," said Jack. "I was just standing here, looking for lost souls to give my book to –" he glanced down at the little book in his right hand, his frozen right hand –"and I guess I just, uh, got sleepy, and –"

"Listen, jackass," said Bert, and he pointed his bare finger sticking out of his ragged canvas glove, "don't give me that malarkey. You deliberately stood out here in this blizzard in a concerted and conscious effort to top yourself."

"Um, uh –"

"Did you think for one little moment that, in the words of my good friend Will Shakespeare, alias the Bawdy Bard,'the Everlasting had not fix'd/His canon 'gainst self-slaughter'?" 

"Did you say Shakespeare?"

"Yeah, you ever hear of him?"

"Well, of course I've heard of him, heh heh –"

"Author of Hamlet? You know that play?"

"Um, uh –"

"What about King Lear? Macbeth? Othello? Romeo and Juliet?"

"I've heard of Romeo and Juliet –"

"Oh, you've heard of it."

"Yes, I think so –"

"So what you're telling me in other words is you've never read a word of Shakespeare or seen a single performance of one of his immortal plays."

"Well, um, heh heh, you see, I'm more of a movie fan myself. You know, Laurel & Hardy, Wheeler & Woolsey, Joe E. Brown, I used to like W.C. Fields, but then when I got sober, I, uh –"

"In other words you're an idiot. And yet you want people to read your stupid book."

"Well, my book is meant to help people, Bert. To help them realize that they have a drinking problem, but that by accepting their powerlessness over alcohol –"

"Bollocks. It's books like yours that make people want to get drunk, and who can blame them? Gimme that."

Bert grabbed the little book out of Jack's snow-covered hand. He slapped the book to get the snow off of it, then opened it up.

"Right, now I'm just gonna read the first words I see at random. Okay, I quote:

…because there is indeed a Higher Power, my friend! Some call him God, or Jehovah, some call him the Buddha. But me, I call him the Big Guy. And this Big Guy wants to be your pal. So all's you got to do is get down on your knees, and fold your trembling sweaty hands together, and say, "Hey, Big Guy, Big Fella, help me out here, pal, 'cause I'm tired of waking up every morning like I been run over by a dump truck, with a taste in my mouth like a mouse crawled in there and died, tired of hating myself, tired of hating life, tired of everybody I know avoiding me like the Black Plague, sick and tired of being sick and tired every second of every rotten day and nightmarish night…"

"Jesus Christ, man," said Bowery Bert.

"I thought that passage was pretty good," said Smiling Jack.

"Oh my fucking God," said Bert.

"You didn't like it?"

"Here," said Bert. "Take it back."

"Oh, please keep it, friend," said Smiling Jack. "Perhaps someday you will find it helpful –"

"You implying I got a drinking problem?"

"Well, no –

"Then what the hell are you implying?"

"Well, I suppose I just assumed –"

"Assumed I was an alcy because I'm out on the Bowery at midnight in a raging blizzard, and because I ain't dressed in a Brooks Brothers tweed suit and camel's hair polo coat with a Bollman's fedora on my noggin?"

"Oh, no, heh heh –"

"On accounta my fingers stick outa my gloves, and because my old cap looks like it's a hunnert years old, which it is?"

"No, not at all –"

"Well, let me tell ya, pal, I may look like a Bowery bum but I ain't a Bowery bum."

"You ain't? I mean, you aren't?"

"No, I ain't. I am an angel."

"A what?"

"You heard me. I'm an angel."

"No kidding? Because it's a strange thing, but I always thought you had an unusual quality about you."

"Yeah, that's on accounta I'm an angel, more specifically, a guardian angel, but in the guise of a Bowery bum."

"So you're my guardian angel?"

"Well, that ain't the way it works, pal. You see, there's only so many of us guardian angels around – to be exact, twelve thousand nine hunnert and twenty-two of us. And between us we got to cover the whole goddam world. So what we do is we each get a district. Me, for my sins, which I won't go into right now, I got this neighborhood."

"So that's why they call you –"

"Bowery Bert. Yes. This whole slum around here is my territory, and let me tell ya, it ain't easy, pal."

"I can imagine."

"Worst district in the world, but I got stuck with it, so what're you gonna do? Nobody wants to hear a guardian angel complain. Oh, no. We get to hear everybody else's problems, but nobody wants to hear our problems."

"Well, Bert, if you ever need an ear to be lent –"

"This ain't about me. This is about you, my friend, deliberately freezing yourself to death."

"But I'm not dead."

"Oh, ain't you? Try to move."

Smiling Jack tried to raise his arm, the arm from which extended the hand that had held his book, but he was unable to budge it. And he realized with horror that he was indeed frozen stiff.

"I'm frozen," he said.

"So you finally got the newsflash."

"But how can I talk if I'm frozen?"

"You ain't talking. You're communicating what they call telepathically."

"Oh my God. You mean I'm really dead?"

"That's what you wanted, wasn't it?"

"Well, I, I suppose I did succumb to a kind of feeling of despair, but I didn't know I would really go through with it –"

"That's no excuse."

"So I'm going to hell?"

"What do you mean, going to?"

"You mean I am in hell?"

"I mean you been in hell your whole goddam life, except for maybe when you were a kid on your birthday or Christmas or Easter, chowing down on all them chocolate eggs and bunnies. But, lookit, every once in a while we guardian angels get to help somebody out. Not often, but sometimes, and only oncet in any human's lifetime. So, if you want, I can maybe give you a break. All's you got to do is choose life over death."

"Gee."

"What's your choice?"

"So I can choose either to be dead or be alive?"

"Like I said, your choice, but I ain't got all night, and you ain't got all night. About fifteen more seconds and it's gonna be too late, and it's off to the next world for ya."

"And what is the next world like?"

"That I am not at liberty to tell ya, pal. House rules. Ten seconds you got."

"Ten seconds?"

"Now it's nine. What's your choice? Life, or what my other good friend Søren Kierkegaard called 'the great unknown'?"

"Um, gee –"

"Four seconds."

"Four?"

"Now it's three."

"Um, uh –"

"Two seconds. One –"

"Okay! Yes, I choose life!"

"Solid, Ted, 'nuff said."

And suddenly and all at once Smiling Jack felt life coursing through his body and his sluggish blood flowing through his veins.

He was cold, and shivering, but alive.

"How's it feel, buddy?" said Bowery Bert.

"It feels, uh –"

"Better than bein' croaked?"

"Yes," said Smiling Jack.

"'Cause let me tell ya something. You got all of eternity to be dead, but only just this one lifetime to be alive."

"Yes, I, um –"

"What you should do, you want my advice, what you should do now is you should go over to Ma's Diner and warm up with a good cup of joe. Maybe get some corned beef hash and eggs. Maybe a couple of them hot cross buns Ma makes, with plenty of butter on them."

"Yes. I guess you're right. A nice hot cup of coffee does sound good –"

"And then after you eat I want you to light up a smoke and look out that plate glass winda there at the falling snow, and just kind of appreciate being warm and alive."

"Yes, I should do that."

"'Cause, remember, life is short, but death is forever."

"Thank you, yes, I'll remember that, Bert, thank you."

And then Bowery Bert was gone, and where he had stood was only the heavy falling blustering snow.

Jack noticed that Bert had kept the book, his book, the book in which he had collected all of his hard-earned wisdom. He hoped Bert wouldn't just throw it away.

Smiling Jack trudged through the falling snow and the snow that covered the ground a foot high across the street to Ma's Diner. After he had sat at the counter and placed his order with Ma, a mysterious moment of panic urged him to check his pockets, and he quickly realized that his wallet was empty of money, and his pockets were empty of coins. He had also somehow lost his cigarettes, and his Zippo lighter. He called Ma over to cancel his order, explaining that he was unexplainably broke, and had even somehow lost his cigarettes and lighter, but Ma took pity on him, and told him he could have his coffee and a meal on the cuff, and she also let him have a quarter for the cigarette machine. 

Little did Smiling Jack know that Ma was also a guardian angel, just not officially so, and her place was assured in the hereafter, among all the other saints and angels for all eternity.

{Please go here to read the unexpurgated "adult comix" version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious Rhoda Penmarq…}