The first time I spoke to Jesus was in the men’s room at a wedding reception.
I had seen him around school but had never talked to him. We were both freshman at this all-boys school in the Midwest, and in the beginning, people thought he was kind of a weirdo. It wasn’t just the long hair. Everyone had long hair back then. It was the robe and sandals. That’s all he ever wore. I guessed he was a scholarship kid and that’s all he could afford, but still it was an odd choice, especially since the winters get pretty cold around here. I didn’t have much social capital to begin with and could ill-afford to be seen fraternizing with someone else on the fringes of acceptability.
My mom’s cousin’s niece was getting married. She’d gotten knocked up by her boyfriend in the middle of her senior year. They’d kicked her out of school two months before graduation, which was too bad, because I heard she was a pretty good student. Straight A’s and all. Both sets of parents got together and decided the only thing left to do was have them get married. They were in a big rush to do it before the kid was born, so they could pretend it was all above board. Doesn’t make much sense to me now, especially since the marriage only lasted a couple of years. The guy turned out to be a major asshole.
“Real immature,” my mom said, as if she were surprised.
Anyway, my parents dragged me to this wedding, and at the reception I spotted Jesus on the other side of the banquet hall. He was at a table in the back corner sitting between his mom and dad. They were a dark complected, Middle Eastern looking family, a bit anomalous in our generally milky white town. At that age, Jesus already was sporting a bit of a peach fuzz moustache that the headmaster of the school soon made him shave. His mom, engaged in a lively conversation with the woman sitting next to her, was darkly attractive in a blue sarong-type outfit. His dad, in a brown suit with black shoes, looked to be a roughhewn working-class guy with big hands, considerably older than his wife. Sipping his wine and checking his watch, he didn’t seem any happier to be there than I was.
I tried not to make eye contact, but Jesus caught my gaze and gave me a slight wave. I volleyed back with an up nod and hoped that would be the end of it. And it was for most of the evening. That was until much later when we found ourselves standing next to each other at the urinal in the men’s room. He turned to me and said, “Hi, I’m Jesus.” He told me his family were neighbors with my mom’s cousin. They had just moved in, and this was the first social event they’d been invited to. I made some lame joke about how bad the band was. They called themselves “The Music Company.”
I said “Music Company, eh? They play like the accounting department.”
Jesus laughed. And it wasn’t a polite laugh. I got the sense he really meant it. It was authentic. Made me feel good. He seemed like a pretty nice guy. Although, I wouldn’t have thought there was anything special about him standing there at the urinal. He peed like anyone else. Washed his hands. No way would I have ever suspected what he later became.
As we walked out of the bathroom, his mom was waiting for him in the hallway, looking a bit agitated. Jesus said, “Hey Ma, this is my friend, John, from school.” It was a little presumptuous to call me “friend” at that point, since we’d just met, but it didn’t really bother me as much as I thought it would. She smiled and said, “Hi, John,” then quickly told Jesus she needed to speak to him. It was important. She took him aside, and I took that as my cue to make myself scarce. I started away but noticed my shoelace was untied. I wasn’t used to tying hard shoes, and these laces were shiny and came loose all the time. So, I took a knee to re-tie my shoe and overheard part of the conversation.
It was something about how they had run out of wine. The bride’s father was “kind of a cheapo” was the term she used, and her friend, the bride’s mother, was really pissed at him. Those are my words. Jesus’s mother put it another way but that was the gist. It sounded like she was asking Jesus to do something about it.
He said something like, “What does this have to do with me?”
She said, “You know what I’m talking about.”
He said, “But my hour has not yet come.”
And I was thinking, “What the hell? ‘His hour?’ What is that about, ‘his hour?’” I wanted to hear more, so I pretended my other shoe was untied, too. It was obvious Jesus’s mom was not going to take “no” for an answer. She told him how her new friend would feel humiliated and there was already enough embarrassment about the bride looking so preggers. No one was buying that she was “just retaining water.”
I heard Jesus sigh and say, “Okay, okay, but just this one time.”
I had already overstayed my eavesdrop, so I stood up, but before I could take more than a step or two, Jesus’s mom called, “John!” I froze, feeling caught fully expecting her to ream me out for listening in on their private conversation. But instead, she said, “Come here. We need you.”
I turned and slowly shuffled toward them having no idea what they could possibly need from me. She got impatient, “Come on, John. Chop-chop.” I’m not so sure that phrase is politically correct these days, but that’s what she said, so I hurried over.
She pointed to Jesus, “Do whatever he says.”
Jesus started giving orders, “Collect every empty wine bottle you can find and bring them to me in the lavatory. Got that?” All I could do was nod. He was so authoritative. If he’d have said, “Collect every empty wine bottle you can find and shove them up your ass,” I might have done it. He was that confident. He was that commanding.
Then he said to his mother, “Do you think we can get Joseph to help?”
She said, “He’ll do it if I tell him to do it.”
I always found it strange that he referred to his father by his first name. It must have been some stepfather situation, although Jesus never talked about him much. And come to think of it, Jesus didn’t look anything like Joseph, so that makes the most sense.
I started collecting the empties, pretending we were just trying to clean up. Joseph wasn’t going as fast as I was because he was taking the time to raise every bottle to his lips, claiming he was just making sure they were really empty. Jesus’s mom looked a little annoyed at that.
We carried a lot of bottles to the men’s room. I don’t know how many exactly, so let’s just call it a shitload. Joseph and I would hand them to Jesus while his mom stood guard outside directing people away from the bathroom with the excuse that her son was in their dealing with a pretty serious case of explosive diarrhea. Jesus would fill each bottle with water and hand it back to us. Sometimes he’d use the hot tap, sometimes the cold. We’d run out and place the bottle, now full of liquid, back onto the serving table. I didn’t know who we thought we were fooling pouring tap water from the bathroom into wine bottles, but I got so caught up in the intrigue of it, I didn’t care. It was the most fun I’d had all night.
Finally, he filled the last bottle and said, “That oughta hold ‘em.”
We strolled back into the reception, and I gotta tell ya, that joint was jumpin’! When I first started collecting bottles, the place was dead. Some people were starting to leave. Now, people were dancing, laughing, talking really loud. I was standing next to the bride’s father when someone rushed up to him and said, “This wine is fantastic! You saved the best for last, my friend!” Someone else came up and said, “Where have you been hiding this? So full-bodied but not at all pretentious.” Even the Music Company started profiting from the new-found energy in the room and blew the roof off the place with a kick-ass version of “Suffragette City.”
I couldn’t believe it, so I slipped a bottle of wine off the table, made sure my parents weren’t looking, and took a sip. At that age, I didn’t know anything about how wines are supposed to taste, but I could tell that this definitely had alcoholic content. Sure as shit Jesus had somehow turned that bathroom tap water into wine. I took a couple more sips and for the very first time in my life - but certainly not the last - experienced the sensation of getting buzzed.
Jesus and his parents were back sitting at their table in the corner taking it all in. His mom had a big smile on her face. His dad looked slightly cross-eyed. He seemed if not a full three sheets, at least a couple of sheets to the wind. I started to think maybe Joseph was the reason they had run out of wine so quickly. Jesus did not look all that happy, which I found surprising considering he had just pulled off one of the greatest magic tricks I had seen since my parents had taken me and my sister to see Siegfried and Roy in Vegas.
I went over to their table and gave them the “thumbs up” sign. Jesus’s mom gave me a high five to which Jesus rolled his eyes, irritated. I soon found out why when an older couple approached the table. The woman asked Jesus if he was feeling better.
“Diarrhea is the worst. Was it the shrimp puffs? I react badly to shellfish myself?” she said with a sympathetic smile.
“Yeah, we heard you really hosed down the place. It’s now a restricted area until they can call the Hazmat unit,” the man said, heartily laughing at his own joke and clapping Joseph on the shoulder, who just shrugged, declining to fully endorse the “witty remark” made at his son’s expense.
When they left, Jesus turned on his mom, “Diarrhea!? You had to tell them I had diarrhea!?”
“I’m sorry, honey” she said. “It was the first thing that popped into my head.”
“Now, everybody here thinks I have diarrhea!”
Now, it was her turn to be firm. “What do you care what people think?” she said.
Jesus took this in and that seemed to be the end of it.
The next day, I rushed up to Jesus in the school hallway, “Dude, that was amazing what you did last night.”
He shoved a pair of sports sandals into his locker, shut the door, spun the lock and said, “Yeah, please don’t tell anyone about that. Okay?”
“No, no. Sure if you say so, I won’t,” I said as I tried to keep up with his brisk pace down the hall. “But man, we gotta do something with this power of yours. We could team up. You’re the creative guy. I’m the business guy. We could make a fortune. We could call it ‘Jesus/John Wines.’ You get first billing of course. Or maybe ‘JeJohn.’ Sounds kind of French. Or maybe just ‘J & J Wines.’ Hey, can you do hard liquor, too? We could be full service.”
But Jesus was having none of that. He was not interested in opening a liquor distillery and distribution hub, even when I offered to drop my name completely and call it simply “The Spirits of Jesus.”
Finally, I said, “Okay, I get it. You’re modest. You’re not interested in making money, but let me ask you; what did you mean when you told your mom, “My hour has not yet come?”
Jesus stopped, “You heard that, eh?”
“Yeah, sorry. I didn’t mean to. I was tying my shoe.”
“I can’t say anything right now, John,” he said and put his hand on my shoulder. “But I promise one day… all will be revealed.”
I don’t know why, maybe putting his hand on my shoulder was some sort of Star Trek mind meld thing, but all I could do was gulp and nod. For some reason far beyond the incredible magic trick the night before, I wanted this guy to be my friend. And I didn’t want to blow it by spouting off his secrets. In that moment, we both knew I would keep his confidence.
He continued down the hall, leaving me standing there in his thrall.
“Just answer me one thing,” I finally called out. “Why did you sometimes fill a bottle with hot water and another with cold?”
Jesus chuckled and said, “That’s easy. Cold is for white. Hot is for red.”
End of Chapter One
Tomorrow, Chapter Two of Jesus: The High School Years
Love this! Especially since I'm in seminary and this is right along the lines of what I've been learning in my Unitarian Universalist school.
Hilarious!!!