This is one of those of those stories you get rolling around in your head quite often... typed this in about an hour and it definitely shows in the lack of tightened grammar and form... but let's see if anybody bites. Critiques are welcome, though this story is definitely still 'in the rough'.
Untitled (?)
Play your cards right and you may just get famous. Have me playing with you, and I’ll make you a god. My name’s Richard Satorsis, formerly of Wellson and Griggs. W&G is a big PR firm that nobody’s heard of, mostly operating for big clients with more money than brains. I get paid well, but for all the money I made with them I still can’t stop thinking of my last gig. Most people wake up in a cold sweat and can get back to sleep; I haven’t slept in thirteen days.
Ninety eight days ago I met Hermann Lux, big up and comer in the industry. Well, that’s what we called ourselves; in advertising, the elitism is laid on pretty heavy. Cloying for some, the way that new cars seem to have that factory smell of newness and finality to them. In sixty days I had made him one of the heavy hitters, bigger than anything you can imagine. Hell, I had made him something, Something big and terrible. Fifteen days ago I put a bullet through Hermann Lux’s head, because some people don’t learn that this business is a cut-throat operation.
I guess you could call me an operator in the business of divinity. Really, isn’t that all advertising is? Sell the product, make it big and new and something that people can’t live without. Something people could die over, would die for if they were ever given a chance. I laughed at a senior exec at my old job who used to tell me about the fanaticism that comes from the right pitch.
This guy, I won’t tell you his name, but he knew the sell, the pitch, and the kill. That little thing that puts it all over the edge, shoves a ****ty product with more flaws than a cracked windshield into the Next Big Thing. That’s a helluva lot of pressure on you, to really tell you the truth. Anyways, this guy tells me about his big break, the one that really made it for him. Some bottling outfit out in the back of nowhere decides they want to be the Next Big Thing.
They’ve got a drink in the pipeline that’s really something. Stuff will knock the socks off of you when you drink it. Liquid gold, they’re telling me. A whole ****ing business riding on it, and they decide to just roll out the product and damn the expense. I was with a little outfit you may have heard of if you keep up with the news. I got the account and started working on it. We pitched the hard sell; if everybody’s got a price, you could say that everything has an expense.
Anyways, I got this **** moving. Sold it across the country, putting it in the hands of some real people. Men, women, kid actors who were worshipped by the new teeny-bopper generation. This was going to be the Drink that Ended it All. Coke, Pepsi? In five years they would be forgotten, a little anthill in comparison to the mountain that this product was pushing. I got it put up with some major players; music videos with the whole crew sipping on this drink. Oscar gift bags with the stuff loaded inside. No expense spared.
The **** went through the roof. Every kid from Podunk, Nowhere wanted a bottle. Hell, they wanted a case. Their idols had started to pick up on it, and if you weren’t there for the Next Big Thing you might as well just end it now. Musicians, actors . . . I even had the president’s kids sipping it at Camp David. Now it really started to move; the campaign had legs. Everybody who is ANYBODY wants to be seen with this can in their hands. This is ambrosia, the closest thing that your average Joe is ever going to come to rubbing elbows with the glamorous.
But that was before the suicides and the murders. The complete breakdown. Substances in the soda were giving out some crazy fumes or ethers or something. Psychotic episodes, manic depression . . . you name it, these kids were going through it. Pretty soon our damage control just wasn’t cutting it. Seventy five million down on the table and the stuff was making it hand over fist despite the deaths. Everybody kept coming for it, and the danger just fueled it all, right? Nobody could be left alone with a can of this ****, or they would lose it. They had to have it. Kids robbing gas stations and holding up banks to get more, more, more of it.
That’s when they shipped me out here, to the boondocks. Big pay, a severance that came with everything except a golden calf and a harem. So now I sit around, the big executive of a firm that couldn’t sell blood to a hemophiliac, and I’m popping Tums like they’re mints. I still hear the screams of kids pounding on 7-11s, bricks and pipes, trying to kill anybody who would come through the door. But that company just sort of disappeared, the money with it, and you won’t read about it in the funny pages. Money can buy you love, happiness, but it can also buy you your damnation. Enough of it, and everybody can forget that something happened.
I moved up in the world because this guy knew that I was ready. I was a mover and a shaker (his words, not mine) and I was the kind of guy who could get things done. So I got the position at W&G without too much effort, and I moved up the ranks. A couple of movie promotions, manage a star’s rise to fame or make sure they don’t crack their skull falling into infamy, and then I got the Lux account.
Hermann Lux was the kind of guy who didn’t know what money could get him. Yeah, he sure as hell had a lot of it; his grandfather was a rich man, and his family just kept building it up. An investment here, a shady deal there, and the Lux name was on everything. I shouldn’t have to tell you; you’re reading this in a Lux family publication, and when you put this down you’ll be watching the tube and maybe half the shows you pass by will be a Lux family production. The name’s a fake just as much as any I’ve been giving for the last few weeks; but if you can trace it back you’ll know who I’m talking about. Good money can buy anonymity in 7 days.
Hermann Lux stood about five seven, and had the look of a rat about to drown in a bottle of booze. Slicked back hair, teeth that seemed to stick out from his mouth even away from his closed lipped grimace. Pudgy but he carried himself well, the way that money carries a person. Standing straight and then finally sitting down with perfect posture in front of me, Hermann Lux seemed bigger than he had any right to be as a human being. So we started talking business.
You see, Mr. _____, I want to be somebody. Something more than what my mother and father have planned out for me. I’ve always been a reader; I love stories about rags and riches, but I find them hollow. Guess it comes from living the way I have. I have a bodyguard and an executive chef; three maids and two women who I can take whenever I want. Champagne and caviar all the way, but it’s got tiresome. The life isn’t what it used to be, and once you run out of fun . . . well, I guess I need something else. I know it is an odd thing to come to an advertising agency to find a new calling, and no I don’t want a job. I want something bigger than what I got, something that has oomph and praise behind it.
I want to be a god. A real and true god.
If I told you right now that I laughed would you hold it against me? The rich kid fantasy, I thought. You come across people who want so much out of life, but they always want something new and fine. For a couple years there was backpacking through Europe; but then the lower classes got in on it. Then it was the jetsetting life, and that just didn’t wash. Coke and whores and the occasional dalliance in the AC/DC vein kept a generation going, but then riches went to rags. Kids wanting to ‘rough it’, slumming in dirty clothes and grungy beater cars. Sleeping in subway tunnels and eating rotten food. Dumpster diving, but it never came to anything I guess.
I guess Lux’s idea was the obvious conclusion. Once you got enough money you had worshippers anyways. Lux had his maids and his bodyguard but that wasn’t good enough. He wanted honest to G-d worshippers; he wanted to be Something bigger than anyone since the Roman Emperors. Lennon thought he was bigger than Jesus, and Lux wanted to be Jesus. Well, I guess you can give a whirl. I’ve sold weirder products before.
Man came in, worked for a toy company. He had come up with the next big thing, and he was excited. And I guess I was willing to push it. Lady Baby-lon, a doll that doubled as a sex aid. He knew that he couldn’t market it with his company, but if you hide everything well enough you can get away with it. The doll was the size of a little girl, built anatomically correct and dressed in these adorable princess dresses. Pedophile’s fantasy, and I pushed it. I never said I was proud of the work I did.
Explosive candy that actually killed somebody. The occasional inappropriate gift that everyone would need this Christmas. Children’s music that was made by a guy who looked like Charles Manson who sang like a soprano and was accused of murdering his own children. But you have to sell what you got because there are only so many contracts that come your way.
Well, a crazy man with a lot of money is going to be a fabulous contract. Make a man a god? Not a problem. Hell, I’ve made coked-up skanks into the Best Selling New Artist for whatever. The contract was going to be bad to pull off and get an honest buck for it, but I was going to work on it. Maybe it was just a bull**** gig but if it was I was going to work my ass off to show that I could take anything.
Sixty days? Two months is the kind of time you dream of on some contracts just to bleed the company. I bill for the hour and the commission, and I do damn good work. Expenses? Well, I’m not paying them so I get results by putting the contract in the tank. I sat up the first three days having no idea what the hell I was going to do. Then it hit me all at once, the whole trick of the thing is pretty damn simple. I started thinking like a prophet, the hype man, the original advertisers.
When you think about it, religion is one big gig. You’ve got a whole group of executives sitting up at the top waiting on it, dropping the crumbs down to the soldiers, the footmen who move the gig. You get a king to sign on to your faith and you get a country. You get the right people in the right place? You change history.
My notes are funny to me now. But here’s how it went:
How to make a god in some easy steps 1.)Get the Worshippers. 2.)Get some disciples 3.)Get the mill going 4.)Get him involved in the whole thing 5.)The end
Yeah, it’s not too clear. Hell, it’s barely cogent. But I think that I was already starting to go around the bend. There’s a point when you have to cope with any insane idea and this was it for me. Does anyone ever think about the consequences of their actions when the goal is mad? I would have told you that it has to happen, that no man could ignore the things that lie in wait. Now, I’m just not so sure.
In this business you need to be limber. As soon as you lose that quickness, the mercurial favor of whatever forces make an idea go from idiocy to the Next Big Thing you’ve lost your edge. Can I say now how I got this project running? Yeah, but you would probably laugh at the idea.
I used the homeless. Not the most attractive lot, but for the right money you can get almost any reaction out of a homeless man. Does that sound callous? Well, as I said this is cutthroat, and if you’re not willing to use your resources . . . My first major pickup began in the soup kitchens, the faulty tenements and back alleys of Major City. I hired a small firm that gathered up talent, and they must have thought I was insane. Hell, even now I sometimes think they wouldn’t have been that far off.
Worship doesn’t come cheap, but with the right twists you can get it going. I set up a warehouse for the first step. Heavy oak pews and votive candles, a tabernacle and a large altar in the front. A collection box here, a small place for relics there, and we started it all out. Those days were bending and scraping, by me and my ‘workers’. Ten dollars a day and they would come to the ‘church’ and pray to their newfound fortune; I hired a guy I knew from the exploding candy campaign for a jingle.
Hymns don’t exactly come pouring in. I started to know what Peter must have felt like; all dressed up, and no place below.
The first were off-tune, bad pieces which served the purpose well enough. Exaltation of the great Lux, praise of his good works and deeds. But then we figured out our problem; making a god is like making a candidate, and I had to start asking the hard questions.
What would Hermann Lux do?
Well, we began to scrape about for anything. The right calls to an art director and a twist of an arm about some not so flattering moments spent in a seedy motel off the interstate and I had the first portraits. Clumsy triptychs for the most part; Lux reigning in a halo of light, Lux feeding the poor and sick, and Lux casting down judgment.
Too Christian, lose the whole spiel. I was looking more for an Old Testament feel. Think historical; think Greek or Roman.
We sent it up to the art department and it came back. Lux fending off the Lion of Injustice, his features altered to appear Herculean in comparison to his meager self. Lux casting fire and brimstone down on the ivory towers of the rich. And the mobs ate it up. How fast did we grow those days? I would guess we made leaps and bounds. More and more people began to fill the warehouse, and not all of those people were the bums we were paying in politeness and crisp Hamiltons.
Punks and skater types came in, college kids and dirty-looking New Agers. The smell of pot mingled with the smell of sickness and dirt, the unwashed masses began to fill out quite nicely. Our little congregation was up to two hundred by the end of the month, with more coming day in and day out. A thousand in just five weeks. Join the Next Big Thing; Openings Available to Those Who Qualify.
A thousand became two and we started to hear about it. Advertising is viral; one guy gets it into his head that the product is going to be huge and moves to the next town. Then that town falls all over themselves to get in on the ground floor. Prayer circles were reported across the state, and seven weeks in we had spots in all of the trendiest areas. Proselytizers began to fill the neighborhoods in LA and NY, and an actual new church spontaneously arose in Orlando. We were really cooking then, and we were getting dividends.
I really liked this business. No muss, no fuss. Let the lower men do the work and I only had to watch as it spread. The Lucians, as they began to call themselves, were ten thousand strong at the end of the next month, and Lux seemed to be happy with the results. I really like what you’ve done with the place, and keep up the good work.
Now is when we started to get into the trickier parts. Sixty days in and I knew we had something on our hands, but it was starting to fall. I had no control over the operation but the executives at W&G didn’t mind; hell, they were ecstatic at the hours I was billing to the schmuck. I had made a cool million at that time using no real company resources; I was on the clock 24/7, making plays for the hearts and minds of a nation. No buildup, no slow creeping for the project. Just good ol’ fashioned virulent capitalism.
But there was the case of the splinter cells. One bum started the Faith of St. Charlie, and we had to get rid of him. Fifteen thousand to the right man and they never found the body. Two hundred worshippers burned out a tenement of ‘heretics’ but we quieted the papers, calling it a ‘freak accident’. A public stoning was held at the Watts Towers for another heretic leader, but we just grinned and bore it. This was getting to be too much fun.
And I didn’t mind. The trend seemed to defy description, and those who crawled out of the woodwork really amazed me. A few big named celebrities seemed to embrace the faith and the donations came in. I skimmed off the top I’ll admit, but the rest came into stabilization. Lux was moving at light speed, and on day seventy of our little adventure I found that there were benefits to being the prophet who sets up the god.
I went on a bender, and I had my fill of everything. This was the high life, I have to tell ya. I helped get people moved into a few new meeting spaces on the West Coast and was high as a kite for three days straight. Uppers, downers, and pot that made me feel like I was a kid was coursing through my veins. Yeah, it was definitely the high life until I saw the lead story. Seventy five days in and the campaign had gone too far.
New Radical Organization Foiled in Assassination Plot. “The world will know of us, and tremble in our wake” says leader.
Then came a bombing. Arson in a government building. And outrage was on us. We were going to take a dive and this one may not be stopped. I kept my name and Lux out of the papers but the writing, as they say, was on the walls. The words of this prophet were stuck in my throat.
It was three days later when I decided to kill Lux. And it happened one week later.
Fourteen hours to drive, and then a plane ride. Lux seemed to enjoy the accommodations I had set up for him, and I think they were apt. A bunch of his followers were on the plane with us, dressed in a style which was the haute couture of the jet-setting Lucian on the go. We flew to Europe where we were to set up the new operation. I had set up the whole thing; we were ready and willing to settle on the particulars, and so we were in the Aegean on Legacy, Lux’s former toy.
I feel lighter than air, Satorsis. I feel like a new man . . . or should I say a higher one. I like the way you have run the campaign, but I think we need to move forward. The whole thing with heresy and the radicals I like, but we should do it on a bigger scale. I’m thinking we have the power; let’s really start raising hell. Vengeful deity like myself needs to have his hobbies.
Then I started to hear his plans. Genocide in Africa, a bit of plague through South America, and of course a continuation of the witch hunts in the United States. Expansion into Europe with a new branch in Australia by year’s end. Millions dead, his sacrifices. His ascension was eminent.
How do you kill a god? Well, you can’t just kill a god. The ideas, the process that makes one is just too tied to life. People who believe in a religion live and die by it, and the air they breathe is so much sweeter for the experience. I may not have gotten rid of the god, but it took four .38 caliber slugs to the head and back to take down the godhead. The shots were muffled, and we were in a soundproof room. I snuck the body off the boat and into a dinghy, and it was ten miles out into the Aegean when I dumped the corpse of Hermann Lux, the god that failed, into the rising waves. A storm was coming, but I was glad that I wasn’t calling down the thunder.
It’s been sixteen days now; the clock just struck midnight here. I’m sitting in a filthy room in Damascus with thirty thousand dollars in unmarked bills and the same in precious metals and gems in a lock box beside me. I kept two shells from the revolver I picked up off of a fence in Paris; one for the man who is probably coming, and one for myself.
Gods get out of the hands of their people a lot quicker than you would believe. The Lucians are still going strong; they have a new name for themselves, and they’re still preaching the same rhetoric, but all the posters and murals and scrawling diatribes in the warehouse temples have been painted over. I guess Lux gave a lot of people hope, but I don’t think there’s much left for me. I’ve already damned my soul, and all I ask is for your forgiveness. I know I can’t trust a just and loving god; I don’t think we could make one even if we tried. My love, and sincerest hopes for the best, and may Lux have mercy on me.
Private Mod Note
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Debating on Salvation because News just doesn't have the oomph for me . . .
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Untitled (?)
Ninety eight days ago I met Hermann Lux, big up and comer in the industry. Well, that’s what we called ourselves; in advertising, the elitism is laid on pretty heavy. Cloying for some, the way that new cars seem to have that factory smell of newness and finality to them. In sixty days I had made him one of the heavy hitters, bigger than anything you can imagine. Hell, I had made him something, Something big and terrible. Fifteen days ago I put a bullet through Hermann Lux’s head, because some people don’t learn that this business is a cut-throat operation.
I guess you could call me an operator in the business of divinity. Really, isn’t that all advertising is? Sell the product, make it big and new and something that people can’t live without. Something people could die over, would die for if they were ever given a chance. I laughed at a senior exec at my old job who used to tell me about the fanaticism that comes from the right pitch.
This guy, I won’t tell you his name, but he knew the sell, the pitch, and the kill. That little thing that puts it all over the edge, shoves a ****ty product with more flaws than a cracked windshield into the Next Big Thing. That’s a helluva lot of pressure on you, to really tell you the truth. Anyways, this guy tells me about his big break, the one that really made it for him. Some bottling outfit out in the back of nowhere decides they want to be the Next Big Thing.
They’ve got a drink in the pipeline that’s really something. Stuff will knock the socks off of you when you drink it. Liquid gold, they’re telling me. A whole ****ing business riding on it, and they decide to just roll out the product and damn the expense. I was with a little outfit you may have heard of if you keep up with the news. I got the account and started working on it. We pitched the hard sell; if everybody’s got a price, you could say that everything has an expense.
Anyways, I got this **** moving. Sold it across the country, putting it in the hands of some real people. Men, women, kid actors who were worshipped by the new teeny-bopper generation. This was going to be the Drink that Ended it All. Coke, Pepsi? In five years they would be forgotten, a little anthill in comparison to the mountain that this product was pushing. I got it put up with some major players; music videos with the whole crew sipping on this drink. Oscar gift bags with the stuff loaded inside. No expense spared.
The **** went through the roof. Every kid from Podunk, Nowhere wanted a bottle. Hell, they wanted a case. Their idols had started to pick up on it, and if you weren’t there for the Next Big Thing you might as well just end it now. Musicians, actors . . . I even had the president’s kids sipping it at Camp David. Now it really started to move; the campaign had legs. Everybody who is ANYBODY wants to be seen with this can in their hands. This is ambrosia, the closest thing that your average Joe is ever going to come to rubbing elbows with the glamorous.
But that was before the suicides and the murders. The complete breakdown. Substances in the soda were giving out some crazy fumes or ethers or something. Psychotic episodes, manic depression . . . you name it, these kids were going through it. Pretty soon our damage control just wasn’t cutting it. Seventy five million down on the table and the stuff was making it hand over fist despite the deaths. Everybody kept coming for it, and the danger just fueled it all, right? Nobody could be left alone with a can of this ****, or they would lose it. They had to have it. Kids robbing gas stations and holding up banks to get more, more, more of it.
That’s when they shipped me out here, to the boondocks. Big pay, a severance that came with everything except a golden calf and a harem. So now I sit around, the big executive of a firm that couldn’t sell blood to a hemophiliac, and I’m popping Tums like they’re mints. I still hear the screams of kids pounding on 7-11s, bricks and pipes, trying to kill anybody who would come through the door. But that company just sort of disappeared, the money with it, and you won’t read about it in the funny pages. Money can buy you love, happiness, but it can also buy you your damnation. Enough of it, and everybody can forget that something happened.
I moved up in the world because this guy knew that I was ready. I was a mover and a shaker (his words, not mine) and I was the kind of guy who could get things done. So I got the position at W&G without too much effort, and I moved up the ranks. A couple of movie promotions, manage a star’s rise to fame or make sure they don’t crack their skull falling into infamy, and then I got the Lux account.
Hermann Lux was the kind of guy who didn’t know what money could get him. Yeah, he sure as hell had a lot of it; his grandfather was a rich man, and his family just kept building it up. An investment here, a shady deal there, and the Lux name was on everything. I shouldn’t have to tell you; you’re reading this in a Lux family publication, and when you put this down you’ll be watching the tube and maybe half the shows you pass by will be a Lux family production. The name’s a fake just as much as any I’ve been giving for the last few weeks; but if you can trace it back you’ll know who I’m talking about. Good money can buy anonymity in 7 days.
Hermann Lux stood about five seven, and had the look of a rat about to drown in a bottle of booze. Slicked back hair, teeth that seemed to stick out from his mouth even away from his closed lipped grimace. Pudgy but he carried himself well, the way that money carries a person. Standing straight and then finally sitting down with perfect posture in front of me, Hermann Lux seemed bigger than he had any right to be as a human being. So we started talking business.
You see, Mr. _____, I want to be somebody. Something more than what my mother and father have planned out for me. I’ve always been a reader; I love stories about rags and riches, but I find them hollow. Guess it comes from living the way I have. I have a bodyguard and an executive chef; three maids and two women who I can take whenever I want. Champagne and caviar all the way, but it’s got tiresome. The life isn’t what it used to be, and once you run out of fun . . . well, I guess I need something else. I know it is an odd thing to come to an advertising agency to find a new calling, and no I don’t want a job. I want something bigger than what I got, something that has oomph and praise behind it.
I want to be a god. A real and true god.
If I told you right now that I laughed would you hold it against me? The rich kid fantasy, I thought. You come across people who want so much out of life, but they always want something new and fine. For a couple years there was backpacking through Europe; but then the lower classes got in on it. Then it was the jetsetting life, and that just didn’t wash. Coke and whores and the occasional dalliance in the AC/DC vein kept a generation going, but then riches went to rags. Kids wanting to ‘rough it’, slumming in dirty clothes and grungy beater cars. Sleeping in subway tunnels and eating rotten food. Dumpster diving, but it never came to anything I guess.
I guess Lux’s idea was the obvious conclusion. Once you got enough money you had worshippers anyways. Lux had his maids and his bodyguard but that wasn’t good enough. He wanted honest to G-d worshippers; he wanted to be Something bigger than anyone since the Roman Emperors. Lennon thought he was bigger than Jesus, and Lux wanted to be Jesus. Well, I guess you can give a whirl. I’ve sold weirder products before.
Man came in, worked for a toy company. He had come up with the next big thing, and he was excited. And I guess I was willing to push it. Lady Baby-lon, a doll that doubled as a sex aid. He knew that he couldn’t market it with his company, but if you hide everything well enough you can get away with it. The doll was the size of a little girl, built anatomically correct and dressed in these adorable princess dresses. Pedophile’s fantasy, and I pushed it. I never said I was proud of the work I did.
Explosive candy that actually killed somebody. The occasional inappropriate gift that everyone would need this Christmas. Children’s music that was made by a guy who looked like Charles Manson who sang like a soprano and was accused of murdering his own children. But you have to sell what you got because there are only so many contracts that come your way.
Well, a crazy man with a lot of money is going to be a fabulous contract. Make a man a god? Not a problem. Hell, I’ve made coked-up skanks into the Best Selling New Artist for whatever. The contract was going to be bad to pull off and get an honest buck for it, but I was going to work on it. Maybe it was just a bull**** gig but if it was I was going to work my ass off to show that I could take anything.
Sixty days? Two months is the kind of time you dream of on some contracts just to bleed the company. I bill for the hour and the commission, and I do damn good work. Expenses? Well, I’m not paying them so I get results by putting the contract in the tank. I sat up the first three days having no idea what the hell I was going to do. Then it hit me all at once, the whole trick of the thing is pretty damn simple. I started thinking like a prophet, the hype man, the original advertisers.
When you think about it, religion is one big gig. You’ve got a whole group of executives sitting up at the top waiting on it, dropping the crumbs down to the soldiers, the footmen who move the gig. You get a king to sign on to your faith and you get a country. You get the right people in the right place? You change history.
My notes are funny to me now. But here’s how it went:
How to make a god in some easy steps
1.) Get the Worshippers.
2.) Get some disciples
3.) Get the mill going
4.) Get him involved in the whole thing
5.) The end
Yeah, it’s not too clear. Hell, it’s barely cogent. But I think that I was already starting to go around the bend. There’s a point when you have to cope with any insane idea and this was it for me. Does anyone ever think about the consequences of their actions when the goal is mad? I would have told you that it has to happen, that no man could ignore the things that lie in wait. Now, I’m just not so sure.
In this business you need to be limber. As soon as you lose that quickness, the mercurial favor of whatever forces make an idea go from idiocy to the Next Big Thing you’ve lost your edge. Can I say now how I got this project running? Yeah, but you would probably laugh at the idea.
I used the homeless. Not the most attractive lot, but for the right money you can get almost any reaction out of a homeless man. Does that sound callous? Well, as I said this is cutthroat, and if you’re not willing to use your resources . . . My first major pickup began in the soup kitchens, the faulty tenements and back alleys of Major City. I hired a small firm that gathered up talent, and they must have thought I was insane. Hell, even now I sometimes think they wouldn’t have been that far off.
Worship doesn’t come cheap, but with the right twists you can get it going. I set up a warehouse for the first step. Heavy oak pews and votive candles, a tabernacle and a large altar in the front. A collection box here, a small place for relics there, and we started it all out. Those days were bending and scraping, by me and my ‘workers’. Ten dollars a day and they would come to the ‘church’ and pray to their newfound fortune; I hired a guy I knew from the exploding candy campaign for a jingle.
Hymns don’t exactly come pouring in. I started to know what Peter must have felt like; all dressed up, and no place below.
The first were off-tune, bad pieces which served the purpose well enough. Exaltation of the great Lux, praise of his good works and deeds. But then we figured out our problem; making a god is like making a candidate, and I had to start asking the hard questions.
What would Hermann Lux do?
Well, we began to scrape about for anything. The right calls to an art director and a twist of an arm about some not so flattering moments spent in a seedy motel off the interstate and I had the first portraits. Clumsy triptychs for the most part; Lux reigning in a halo of light, Lux feeding the poor and sick, and Lux casting down judgment.
Too Christian, lose the whole spiel. I was looking more for an Old Testament feel. Think historical; think Greek or Roman.
We sent it up to the art department and it came back. Lux fending off the Lion of Injustice, his features altered to appear Herculean in comparison to his meager self. Lux casting fire and brimstone down on the ivory towers of the rich. And the mobs ate it up. How fast did we grow those days? I would guess we made leaps and bounds. More and more people began to fill the warehouse, and not all of those people were the bums we were paying in politeness and crisp Hamiltons.
Punks and skater types came in, college kids and dirty-looking New Agers. The smell of pot mingled with the smell of sickness and dirt, the unwashed masses began to fill out quite nicely. Our little congregation was up to two hundred by the end of the month, with more coming day in and day out. A thousand in just five weeks. Join the Next Big Thing; Openings Available to Those Who Qualify.
A thousand became two and we started to hear about it. Advertising is viral; one guy gets it into his head that the product is going to be huge and moves to the next town. Then that town falls all over themselves to get in on the ground floor. Prayer circles were reported across the state, and seven weeks in we had spots in all of the trendiest areas. Proselytizers began to fill the neighborhoods in LA and NY, and an actual new church spontaneously arose in Orlando. We were really cooking then, and we were getting dividends.
I really liked this business. No muss, no fuss. Let the lower men do the work and I only had to watch as it spread. The Lucians, as they began to call themselves, were ten thousand strong at the end of the next month, and Lux seemed to be happy with the results. I really like what you’ve done with the place, and keep up the good work.
Now is when we started to get into the trickier parts. Sixty days in and I knew we had something on our hands, but it was starting to fall. I had no control over the operation but the executives at W&G didn’t mind; hell, they were ecstatic at the hours I was billing to the schmuck. I had made a cool million at that time using no real company resources; I was on the clock 24/7, making plays for the hearts and minds of a nation. No buildup, no slow creeping for the project. Just good ol’ fashioned virulent capitalism.
But there was the case of the splinter cells. One bum started the Faith of St. Charlie, and we had to get rid of him. Fifteen thousand to the right man and they never found the body. Two hundred worshippers burned out a tenement of ‘heretics’ but we quieted the papers, calling it a ‘freak accident’. A public stoning was held at the Watts Towers for another heretic leader, but we just grinned and bore it. This was getting to be too much fun.
And I didn’t mind. The trend seemed to defy description, and those who crawled out of the woodwork really amazed me. A few big named celebrities seemed to embrace the faith and the donations came in. I skimmed off the top I’ll admit, but the rest came into stabilization. Lux was moving at light speed, and on day seventy of our little adventure I found that there were benefits to being the prophet who sets up the god.
I went on a bender, and I had my fill of everything. This was the high life, I have to tell ya. I helped get people moved into a few new meeting spaces on the West Coast and was high as a kite for three days straight. Uppers, downers, and pot that made me feel like I was a kid was coursing through my veins. Yeah, it was definitely the high life until I saw the lead story. Seventy five days in and the campaign had gone too far.
New Radical Organization Foiled in Assassination Plot.
“The world will know of us, and tremble in our wake” says leader.
Then came a bombing. Arson in a government building. And outrage was on us. We were going to take a dive and this one may not be stopped. I kept my name and Lux out of the papers but the writing, as they say, was on the walls. The words of this prophet were stuck in my throat.
It was three days later when I decided to kill Lux. And it happened one week later.
Fourteen hours to drive, and then a plane ride. Lux seemed to enjoy the accommodations I had set up for him, and I think they were apt. A bunch of his followers were on the plane with us, dressed in a style which was the haute couture of the jet-setting Lucian on the go. We flew to Europe where we were to set up the new operation. I had set up the whole thing; we were ready and willing to settle on the particulars, and so we were in the Aegean on Legacy, Lux’s former toy.
I feel lighter than air, Satorsis. I feel like a new man . . . or should I say a higher one. I like the way you have run the campaign, but I think we need to move forward. The whole thing with heresy and the radicals I like, but we should do it on a bigger scale. I’m thinking we have the power; let’s really start raising hell. Vengeful deity like myself needs to have his hobbies.
Then I started to hear his plans. Genocide in Africa, a bit of plague through South America, and of course a continuation of the witch hunts in the United States. Expansion into Europe with a new branch in Australia by year’s end. Millions dead, his sacrifices. His ascension was eminent.
How do you kill a god? Well, you can’t just kill a god. The ideas, the process that makes one is just too tied to life. People who believe in a religion live and die by it, and the air they breathe is so much sweeter for the experience. I may not have gotten rid of the god, but it took four .38 caliber slugs to the head and back to take down the godhead. The shots were muffled, and we were in a soundproof room. I snuck the body off the boat and into a dinghy, and it was ten miles out into the Aegean when I dumped the corpse of Hermann Lux, the god that failed, into the rising waves. A storm was coming, but I was glad that I wasn’t calling down the thunder.
It’s been sixteen days now; the clock just struck midnight here. I’m sitting in a filthy room in Damascus with thirty thousand dollars in unmarked bills and the same in precious metals and gems in a lock box beside me. I kept two shells from the revolver I picked up off of a fence in Paris; one for the man who is probably coming, and one for myself.
Gods get out of the hands of their people a lot quicker than you would believe. The Lucians are still going strong; they have a new name for themselves, and they’re still preaching the same rhetoric, but all the posters and murals and scrawling diatribes in the warehouse temples have been painted over. I guess Lux gave a lot of people hope, but I don’t think there’s much left for me. I’ve already damned my soul, and all I ask is for your forgiveness. I know I can’t trust a just and loving god; I don’t think we could make one even if we tried. My love, and sincerest hopes for the best, and may Lux have mercy on me.
Debating on Salvation because News just doesn't have the oomph for me . . .
Check me out on News if you feel I'm a 'newbie' when it comes to debate
... And yes, Loonook>Jesus ...