Humor

316

Volume two of this epic and insane comic adventure. Kind of like "Mark Twain meets Mad Magazine." Illustrated with 80 pen-and-ink outrageously funny drawings by Dan Florentino.

They would save the wicked from the pious, the rich from the poor, scar the tundra, torch the rain forests, confront sleazeballs and die a thousand times over if necessary. Yes, blowhard Dave ad his loyal companion Dennis are off on the nuttiest and wildest adventure ever in the history of ever: a cross-country motorcycle trip begun from frozen Chicago on the first day of winter.

Excerpt
CHAPTER 8

Past Life Regressions

It’s difficult to lapse into a coma while standing, but I nearly did after my anger subsided and the consequences of our being dumped hit me.

“It’s not that bad,” Dave offered as we stood outside the skating rink. “You’re pale. You’re trembling violently. You’re sobbing and are staring blankly into space. You’re cold to the touch. You look like your life has just ended. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“I want to die.”

“Knock off the self-pitying crap. No woman is worth destroying yourself over. The stupidest thing humans do is mope over lost loves. It’s pathetic to depend on others for your happiness. Depend on yourself.”

“It’s not that. It’s what this means.”

“And that is?”

“That I’m a homo. You said so yourself.”

“No. All I said is that you might have to start worrying about it. Now calm down and just worry about it.”

I did, and soon my color was back and we were trying again—since it was a Friday night and still relatively early—to find women who would go out with us.

Unfortunately for us, the campus weight-loss and mental health clinics were closed, and so we resigned ourselves to a dateless night.

But we soon found entertainment. An advertisement plastered on a campus kiosk told us to “Dare To Discover Your Link To The Past! Learn About Your Previous Life! Experience The Awesome Power Of Hypnosis In A Fascinating Evening Of Past Life Regressions With The Nation’s Foremost Hypnotist, The Great Doctor Erno Bernard!”

“Past life regressions,” Dave explained as we walked to the campus auditorium where the show was to be held, “are where people get hypnotized and revert to their previous lives, back into the people they were before they were themselves, and sometimes that could mean going back centuries.”

“People have lived previous lives? Is this stuff real?”

“It’s a theory. Some people believe in it, and some say it’s nonsense and all a big hoax.”

“What do you think?”

“Don’t know. But I do think that I’ve lived before.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I’m so smart and so bold. No one, not even me, can accumulate this much knowledge and boldness in just one lifetime. So I had to have lived before. And there’s another reason I know it’s true. I used to have a rock collection, meaning I used to like rocks. How would I have come to like rocks if I hadn’t lived before as a caveman?”

We entered the large auditorium and had to stand in an aisle against a wall up near the stage because every seat had been taken. Dr. Bernard was obviously popular, for hundreds—young college students and older townspeople—had turned out for the show.

It was easy to see why he was popular. The head of silvery gray hair combed straight back lent an authoritative and distinguished look to his stocky frame. His white shirt seemed to glow, and even though he worked coatless with his shirt sleeves rolled up and wore red suspenders, he radiated an air of professionalism and a thorough, but relaxed, competence. For twenty minutes he gracefully walked the stage, microphone in hand, and lectured us about the wonder and safety of hypnosis and the marvels of past life regressions. He told astonishing stories of how ordinary people had “regressed” into famous figures, and assured us that there were probably many in the audience who had lived before and who had lived interesting lives. He cautioned that not everyone could be hypnotized, and that not everyone had lived previously, but urged us all to find out whether we had had past lives.

“Don’t be afraid of the past!” he shouted. “What fear is there in knowing that you might have been Abe Lincoln or King Arthur or Cleopatra or Mary, Mother of Jesus? I need volunteers!”

More than a dozen people rushed to the stage. Dr. Bernard advised patience and asked them to wait in line because he worked best hypnotizing one person at a time.

The first subject was a young man named Bob, a stoop-shouldered dental student who, under questioning from Dr. Bernard, told the audience that he earned average grades, had no job, few friends, no social life, no dates and was attending school courtesy of his parents’ money.

“Sometimes I just don’t know why I’m here,” Bob said with an overpowering depression. “Sometimes I just want to die. I’ve got nothing going for me.”

“Ah, but you have everything going for you, my young friend,” chirped Dr. Bernard in his hearty, optimistic voice. “All problems are surmountable. You have everything going for you because ahead of you is life. My friend, life is the greatest gift of all. But you might also have life in back of you. Who and what you were before may provide you answers for the future and bring you happiness. Let us start you on your journey!”

The student sat on a brown couch in the middle of the stage. Dr. Bernard swung a watch in front of his face, told him he was getting weary, then sleepy, and then, in less than two minutes, Bob was snoring. Dr. Bernard spoke softly, but deliberately, and commanded Bob to take himself back into time.

Bob slowly curled into fetal position on the couch while telling us he was a baby in a womb. Then suddenly he straightened out, screamed, and as far as I was concerned, began babbling.

“You’re speaking Italian!” Dr. Bernard shouted with a pleased look on his face. “Where are you?”

Bob babbled some more and the doctor interpreted:

“Ah, so you say you are in Venice! What year is it? Seventeen-fifty-eight, you say! Splendid! You say you are entangled in affairs with several women? You will have to leave town on the threat of death from jealous rivals? Amazing! You have a marriage proposal, no several, on the table! Oh my! All the men of Venice are envious of you? Who are you? What is your name? No! Unbelievable! Just plain astonishing! Welcome my friend, Giovanni Casanova, the greatest of romantic lovers!”

All in the audience, with the exception of Dave, burst into wild applause and approving cheers. Bob—I mean Giovanni Casanova—sat on stage and rambled on in alleged Italian. Dr. Bernard translated and told us of Giovanni’s many romantic entanglements with women and of his romantic exploits.

Dave was angry. “This is a fraud,” he said. “I can see right through it. This ain’t real.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, too,” I said. “I mean, the doctor is doing the translating? How do we know that he even knows Italian? And if he does, how can we trust his translation? Is that why you think this is a fraud?”

“No. That’s got nothing to do with it. I know that that mope could not have been Casanova.”

“Why not?”

“Because if anyone was Casanova, it’s me, not some hunchbacked geek.”

Dr. Bernard snapped Bob out of the hypnotic spell, and all cheered wildly again. Bob excitedly asked what had happened and if he had been someone in a past life. When told by the doctor that he had once been Giovanni Casanova, the world’s greatest lover, Bob leaped into the air, punched a fist at the air and shouted, “All right!”

The crowd screamed approvingly again, and Dr. Bernard exclaimed: “I knew it just by looking at you son!”

Bob walked off the stage in a cocky, confident strut. Several women in the audience chased him to his seat and tried to sit on his lap.

Next on stage was Betty, a fat, unmarried, forty-three-year-old woman who worked as a waitress in town and whose face looked as if it had been splattered with mud because of all of the moles on it. She had been divorced twice, had served three years in prison on a robbery charge, had three children who had been taken from her by the state and placed in foster homes because she was a bad mother, and was now trying to live a good life. But that effort was faltering because two weeks earlier she had been evicted from her apartment for failing to pay the rent.

“I knows I ain’t never been this bad or so low,” Betty said while on the verge of tears. “I feel that somewhere before things was better for me and that I was a good person, maybe even pretty.”

“You are as pretty as a rose and as desirable as every new day!” snapped Dr. Bernard.

“Do you really think so?” Betty sniffled as she wiped tears from her eyes with her ham-like fists.

“I know so my dear. Now let us begin your journey!”

Betty awoke from her trance speaking what sounded like English, but not the English we spoke. She seemed to be carrying on a conversation with somebody:

“Ah, my lady, thou art more precious than yonder knights who ride passingly poorer than wouldst she whose beauty far exceeds the nourishment thy receiveth from a pig and the merriment thy gaineth from ever so generous partakings of the bladder of wine.”

“My Lord, weary thy no more with compliments and praise so noble. Thou words about thy beauty are spoketh with an eloquence fat with truth that all of history shall knoweth: That thy’s beauty and grace exceedeth that of all others. Words pregnant with such truth cannot beeth made more truthful by repetition. Sayeth once only what thou believeth.

“Nay, for a crime against the gods would beest a single recitation of thou’s beauty. For here rideth the fairest lady of all creation.”

Dr. Bernard broke in: “My lady. Where art thou?”

“In forest madeth dark in day byeth trees that grow rich.”

“Does thou walk?”

“Nay. It beeth on the back of the beast by which thy passeth ground.”
“Who beeth with thou?”

“Thou’s head must beeth small. For thy rideth with Arthur and Launcelot.”

“No! You must be—”

“Guinevere.”

“Queen Guinevere! Queen Guinevere of King Arthur’s time and the Knights of the Round Table!”

“It beeth so and spoketh now thrice.”

The audience went wilder than before. People stood on their seats and cheered and clapped and howled and whistled. Dr. Bernard beamed.

The cheers continued as Dr. Bernard snapped Betty out of her trance. She seemed scared, but pleased by the ovation, and eager to know who she had been. And when Dr. Bernard, with a great flourish, shouted, “Queen Guinevere of King Arthur’s Court! The fairest lady of all creation!” Betty slumped to the floor and began sobbing. Through her tears she mumbled, “I knew it! I knew it!”

“We all know it!” Dr. Bernard shouted with a great smile. “It beeth so!”

The cheering intensified, and Betty walked off the stage crying, smiling and waving to men in the audience.

Next up was Sharon, a woman in her early thirties who worked as a clerk in a curio shop and studied healing with crystals by night.

“Crystals can heal every ill,” she said with a rigid smile that bore none of the elasticity and suppleness of true enthusiasm. “They can wipe out cancer, heart disease, gout, depression, warts, athletes foot, negative thoughts and even acne. I am working to become the world’s greatest crystal healer.”

When Dr. Bernard put her under, we discovered that Sharon had lived as Marie Curie, the great French physicist who won two Nobel Prizes and who was famed for her research on radioactivity. The audience again erupted into applause. The cheering intensified when Curie told us that she intended to live her second, third and fourth lives as a crystal healer.

A plumber named Bill followed Sharon. He, it turned out, had lived as King Henry VIII. Others followed. Stan, an architecture student with failing grades, had lived before as one who designed the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Buddy, who had been dishonorably discharged from the army, had been the great Napoleon. Anne, a frumpy social worker, had been the great woman’s suffrage advocate, Susan B. Anthony.

Dr. Bernard was now being mobbed by audience members who demanded to be hypnotized. He began hypnotizing groups of twenty and thirty people at a time. Everyone had lived as someone else, and always as some great figure in history. Dave was not impressed.

“This is crap,” he said. “You see what’s going on? All these people who are misfits and worthless nobodies in their real lives suddenly have lived before as great and famous people. It’s pathetic. They’re trying to deny the fact that they’re nothings. And they’re trying to become important, not by hard work, study, ambition and intelligence, but by fraud. If a leech attaches itself to a whale, that doesn’t make the leech a whale. But these bums think it’s so. They’re worthless, nothing leeches who are attaching themselves to famous people in the hopes that they too will become important and influential. This is a sham. If anybody has lived before, you can bet it’s been me, a bold man. I’ll show these idiots.”

By the time that Dave strode with an angry confidence onto the stage, all in the audience had been hypnotized but us. The crowd, though abuzz, was nearly spent from the emotional journey it had been on, and seemed to have exhausted its ability to cheer.

Once on stage, Dave turned to the audience and announced: “I will show you what true greatness is. For before you stands a bold man. Doctor Bernard, take me to my past.”

The doctor obliged, and soon Dave was reciting the Gettysburg Address.

“I,” he told the crowd, “am Abe Lincoln, the freer of slaves and the conqueror of hillbillies; the great man who called this great nation the last best hope for the human race. And yes, I have a terrible headache. Getting shot in the head really hurts.”

The crowd, summoning its last bits of emotion, let out the wildest and most prolonged cheer of the evening. When it had subsided, Dr. Bernard tried to bring Dave out of the trance.

“No,” Dave—I mean Abe—said.

“Why? Have you more to say?” asked Dr. Bernard, who by now was sweating, and whose once crisp white shirt was wrinkled, damp and rising out of his pant waist.

“No,” Abe replied. “I have lived other lives, all of which must be explored.”

The crowd and Dr. Bernard gasped. “Other lives!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never experienced this. It is unprecedented.”

“Unprecedented indeed,” said Abe.

“Who else have you lived as?”

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.”

“You are?” asked Dr. Bernard.

“Thomas Jefferson!”

The cheering grew wilder.

“Excellent,” said Dr. Bernard. “Now let’s go.”

“No. There are other lives I have lived.”

“It can’t be so!”

“It is! I am also George Washington, Patrick Henry and Benjamin Franklin.” The crowd went crazier.

“It can’t be so!” shouted Dr. Bernard. “They lived at the same time. You can’t be three people at once.”

“I was and am! And there are others.”

“Who?”

“Squanto the Indian, Peter the Great, Genghis Khan, General George Patton, Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King Junior, Count Casmier Pulaski, Thaddeus Kosciusko, General Zhukov, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnigee, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.”

“It can’t be! You can’t be Pole and Russian and white and black!”

“Yes I can. And there are others.”

“Come now. Who else have you lived as?”

“Moses!”

The crowd dissolved into delirium. Hundreds rushed the stage and tried to touch Dave, treating him with a reverence that said he was the world’s one true deity. Others, overcome with emotion, slammed themselves into walls. Dozens wept. Some screamed, “Bless him! Bless him!” Others were paralyzed with awe.

Dave had lived other lives as well—the Three Wise Men, Mark Anthony, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Lewis and Clark and Plato. He spent twenty minutes naming his different lives, and when he had finished, a single, adoring, deafening chant of “Hero! Hero!” rose up from the exhausted, delirious crowd. As he glided off the stage with a look of supreme satisfaction, Dave bent over, and like a miracle-performing god placing hands on the infirm, gently patted the heads of those who had mobbed the edges of the stage.

Not to be ignored or overshadowed by Dave’s heroics, I stepped on stage, determined to show that I too had seen previous greatness. Dr. Bernard, now barely able to stand, began swinging his watch.

I remember only waking up to resounding jeers and derisive shouts from the audience. People were throwing shoes, vegetables, wads of paper, seat cushions and other junk at me. I was stunned. I had expected the same wild ovations that Dave had received. Before the hypnosis, I had thought—hoped—that I might have been Mark Twain or Edgar Allan Poe or some other great author. But instead, I left the stage wondering who I had been to so offend the crowd.

“Was I Hitler or Stalin or some evil menace?” I demanded of Dave as I met him in the aisle. “Or General Custer or some other pathetic figure in history?”

“No,” he said in an embarrassed voice. “You weren’t a person.”

“Good God!” I screamed in terror as I clutched his arms and shook him. “Was I the devil or—”

“No. You were an animal.”

“A mighty, majestic buffalo perhaps? A soaring bald eagle? Or a fierce and fearless grizzly bear?”

“No!”

“What was I then? Why are these people laughing at me?”

“Because in your past life you lived as an earthworm—a slimy, stinking worm.”

Even I saw the ignominy in that, and as we left the auditorium, I picked up a rotten tomato from the floor and smashed it on top of my head.