CHARLIE HEART

CHAPTER EIGHT: REALIZATION

THE REALIZATION SEMINAR

         The sun is setting and I’m sitting outside St. Mary’s Catholic Church waiting for Ginger to show up. I guess I am a little early. This is where the flyer said to be, I hope it’s the right place.
         The strangest people start walking into the building. They give me looks and I simply smile and wave. I am trying to figure out exactly what this thing is, and what kind of a person goes to it.
         I watch this couple walk inside, the man must have been in his seventies and the woman looks barley legal. I look around to see if anyone else looks like they are wondering what he does for a living.
         Then Ginger comes up behind me.
         “Hi.”
         She startles me, I almost jump off the wooden bench.
         “Oh, hi!”
         I stand up and pull out a beautifully arranged bouquet of flowers.
         “Thanks Charlie, how are you?”
         We squeeze an awkward hug, I answer with the cliché.
         “Great Thanks for asking, how are you?” I say this like I’m a gentleman. I’ve only spent a few hours with this strange woman and look what she’s already done with me.
         I smile.
         “I’m good, well, are you ready?”
         I stick my arms out. “Lead the way.”
         I feel like we had just been script reading for amateur movie or commercial. What a dry way to start the night. I couldn’t even think of a cute joke or anything.
         As we walk into the noisy building she drops my bouquet into a trash can outside the main entrance. I want to ask her if that was an accident, but I decide not to. Im not sure how to take that so I just ignore it.
         There are metal chairs pointed to one general direction but no one is sitting down. Everyone is talking amongst themselves, shaking hands, laughing, pouring hot cocoa and cider. A fat black woman was crying on someone’s shoulder, and there is a pair of midgets everyone keeps tripping over.
         Some pale red headed man who can’t stop twitching and blinking, walks up to us. I grab my phone in case I need to fake a phone call. He whispers something to her, then he looks at me. He looks like he hates me, or maybe thats just his face I can’t tell.
         He starts talking to Ginger about his cancerous mole that his twin sister chopped off with a shark tooth from her necklace. He say he’s safe now. He says his life has new meaning. He pulls out a book and asks for an autograph. I fight the urge to blink as I watch him. He must have done it at least two hundred times while they talked.
         She gets a stone cold look on her face and tells him to put that book back in his bag and don’t let anyone see it. She whispers something else in his ear and he smiles, looks at me and walks away.
         This shocks me. I ask, “What was that book?”
         “Nothing,” She looks a little shaky and cold.
         Some old guy at the front of the room grabs a micro phone. A loud high pitch blast of feedback comes spearing into everyones ear drums. There is a group wide gasp and moan that follows it.
         “Sorry, everyone, sorry.” The man clears his voice and taps on the microphone. “Good evening everyone and welcome to the Realization Seminar. If you could start to fill up the front rows here first, that would be spectacular. Lets get cozy. C’mon! We all love each other.”
         He talks to us like we are his second grade students.
         I instantly don’t like the man. I can’t help it.
         I wish I could just be with her the whole time, talk to her, watch her talk, touch her. But instead I get Blinky and a whole crowd of weirdos.
         Eventually, we take our seats somewhere mid row and the lights dim. An acne infested kid with braces and a box of chew sticking out of his pocket pops a spotlight on the man that thinks we all love each other.
         He is wearing a green polo shirt and socks up to his knees. He is balding and has glasses so thick that you feel bad for the eye doctors who had to build those things.
         “Well, we are excited to see all of you here. Now, to start off, let us have everyone take in a deep breath and let it out slowly.”
         There is a sound of breathing that reminds me of an ocean wave. The kind that crushes, the kind you brace for and you think it’s going to be funny and cute when it hits, but it actually hurts and you get salt water and sunscreen in your eyes and it ruins an hour of your day.
         “Now lets all start with some exercises before the speakers take the floor shall we?”
         He grabs a piece of paper from his pocket and begins to read.
         “You are now aware of the fact that your clothes are touching your skin. You can feel every article of clothing. The threads in your shirts, the grip of your shoes, squeezing your toes, the touch of your underwear around your private parts.”
         I snort a laugh that I instantly try to turn into a cough.
         Ginger glances over and I quickly take a sip of cider.
         There is a lady siting next to me with one breast. There is a sticker that says ‘fix cancer’ stuck on the spot where her other breast should have been. She catches on to my fake laugh, smiles, and whispers: “I know, I’m not wearing any either.”
         I look at her for just a second. I don’t respond.
         The man continues.
         “You are now aware that every time you swallow, you hear a little crackle in your jaw.”
         It was like clock work. The whole room must have swallowed at the same time. I try my hardest not to.
         “You are now aware that your nose is in your peripheral vision.”
         What is this, the uncomfortable seminar? The brain washing seminar? I don’t know if I can take much more of this.
         “You are now aware that your tongue is un able to find a comfortable place in your mouth.”
         Now is when the itch kicks in, and I want to laugh.
         “You can feel you heart pumping gallons of hot blood through your muscles and into your brain and limbs. You are now noticing that your chest expanse with every breath. You can now feel every hair follicle on your body slowly growing a stem of hair. You can feel the acid in your stomach, bubbling, slurping into your intestines. You can feel the electric pulses in the thick of your brain, producing thought.”
         I’m about to have a seizure, then the man changes things up.
         “You are now as light as a feather. Every breath you take makes you lighter. You now realize that if you want to, you could lift off the ground and fly away. You are helium. You are oxygen. You are baby birds.”
         I look at Ginger.
         “What is this, some sort of meditation?” I ask this without trying to sound like I want to leave.
         “You will see,” she says.
         “You are fishes swimming in the ocean at the speed of light. You are dust blowing freely in the wind. You are rays of sunshine bouncing of the trees.”
         He stops and looks around, some people are staring blankly. Others have their eyes closed, totally tranced by his words.
         “Awe, Now that everyone is ready, we would now like to welcome Dr. Dippenhammer to the stage.”
         “...You’ve got to be kidding me!”
         I realize I had just said that out loud. I cover my mouth and look at Ginger who motions a confused look.
         “Well, it looks like we got us a sour gummy bear in the back there.” She points at me and cackles a laugh from her throat. I can’t help but think of a hyena.
         “We are here, ladies and gentleman, to learn how to gather enough pieces to have an amazing life defining experience. One that sets our paths and gives us purpose. An epiphany, if you will, that opens our minds so widely that everything around us makes sense and screams freedom.”
         The fat lady who was crying earlier shouts “Amen sista!”
         The boob-less, underwear-less lady next to me leans over again and says “I had an epiphany once, it’s apple pie, but for your mind.”
         “It is all about acceptance,” says Dippenhammer. “It’s letting the bad things come as messages, and the good things come as clues. We can’t control the world, but we can control our world!”
         She rants for about ten minutes about things that sound profound but really aren't. Like how everything is interconnected. How one little change of one little person’s life can have a huge tidal wave effect on someone else's across the world.
         Great, I get it, seen the movie.
         “All right everyone, now it’s your turn. Your turn to share your experiences.”
         She plants the mic in its stand and sits down. For a moment no one does anything, then one of the midgets get up and walks to the front.
         It’s a little awkward when the balding man with the green polo tries to help him but he refuses the help. The midget tips the mic stand over and rips it off.
         “Hi, my name is Bob, and I had an epiphany once.”
         The crowd responds, “Hi Bob.”
         The fat black lady hollers something I can’t understand, But it sounds like ‘you tell ’em little brotha.”
         The midget takes in a deep, long, cleaning you out kind of breath.
         “I realized I was short!”
         I can’t help myself this time, I burst out laughing. I usually don’t get embarrassed but I was red for a while after that. Ginger actually gives me a look that scares me. Whether or not anyone else heard me they all pretend they didn’t.
         He continues.
         “I realized I couldn’t reach the top shelf, or push the button for the top floor on the elevator, and I became discouraged. I wondered if my life was worth living if I couldn’t be like everyone else.”
         He smiles.
         “Then I found my purpose. I realized that I could squeeze through little tunnels, and I could reach under things that you people can’t. I realized that I could do a lot of things you giants can’t. Now, I’m a cop, and who do you think is the first person they send in to a pitch black meth house at three a.m.?”
         Silence.
         “Me! Why? Because when the guns go off, no one is going to be shootin’ at anyones toes now are they? Once, I took out nine of them on my own! ‘Bet they thought I was a friggin’ ghost!”
         He sticks his little pudgy fingers out like they are guns and pretends to shoot the front row.
         I imagine Bruce running around with Bob under his arm, throwing him into gang fights like a football. Bob flipping around on trash cans and brick walls, like Yoda from Star Wars.
         The twitchy red head gets up next; he tells his whole story about his mole and his sister again. Then he starts raving about Ginger and her book. He wants her to come up and talk about it. Soon the whole place is chanting her name.
         Suddenly, I’m excited. I think I was chanting the loudest.
         She waves her arms in defeat and walks to the front. Someone whistles at her.
         “Well, thank you all.”
         She blushes, so cute.
         As some of you may know I just published my book called Project Punchline.
         I catch her eye and wink at her.
         “It’s not published publicly because of the personal graphic and violent nature of it. It’s only for members of my truth group that I started. For people who are interested in taking control her their lives.”
         I am a little stunned and suddenly interested in the book.
         Her persona changes a little bit, she gets darker and quiet.
         “It’s about realizing that your life is a build up of events that lead to a singular, most important moment. In that moment, is when you find purpose,” she says. “That’s when it all makes sense, and nothing else matters.”
         “I used to be so lost, I used to have no direction,”she says. “Getting your life destroyed by a few individuals will do that to you. She looks down,“I will one day make everything right again. Call it justice, call it revenge, what ever it is, it’s my destiny.”
         She says this like it’s a nonchalant thing, like it’s nothing. At first I thought she was joking.
         She smiles, catches my eye, and winks back.