On HOT COCOA

January 8th

On HOT COCOA
Memoirs – Part II
It turned out I was the only passenger on the train to Salem. The Baton Rouge-Salem line was only created as an economy-stimulating make-work project in the 1930s, and train service continued because a corrupt politician had a mistress that he would train in from Oregon. She wasn’t on the train that day.
Somewhere in the mountains between Utah and Colorado, on the ninth day of my trip, and unbeknownst to either the train engineer or me, the train derailed. It was late January and a heavy snowfall had reduced visibility to zero. The train travelled for another half hour on ice formations that, by odd chance, had naturally taken the form of rails, until finally the train tumbled into a small gully. The train engineer died instantly, but I was thrown from a window and then into a twenty foot snowdrift. I made a makeshift sling out of snow and pine needles for my broken arm, and walked for 78 miles until I came upon a small cabin on top of a ledge.
An old man in a top hat answered the door. His eyes were red and watery, and he was quite stout. He took pity on me and gave me warm clothes, which were large in the torso and short in the leg, and a blanket. He made us both a mug of Hot Cocoa. On my mug was the official logo of the 1904 World’s Fair/Olympics in St. Louis, and on his was the face of a sad clown.
“What is your name, son?” asked the gentleman.
“Jack Rabbit,” I answered.
“Jackrabbit?” He asked.
“No, Jack,” and I paused to indicate the space, “Rabbit.”
“Like John Updike?” he said, confused.
“No, that was just ‘Rabbit’.” I would have said, if I had known who John Updike was. In reality I said, “What?”
We had gotten off to a bad start, and it got worse when he offered to adopt me. One thing led to another and by the time the cocoa was finished, a fire had started that would consume the entire house. For the next three days I wandered through the mountains while the old man followed me with a gun. To disguise myself, I rolled in bird dung on some bare rocks, making my black cloak white. Finally we were both caught in an avalanche, and I watched a large falling tree decapitate the old man and I was trapped in a small cave. I slept for four hours, exhausted.
When I opened my eyes Jesus was before me, a two-dimensional Jesus that looked like it had been literally ripped from an illuminated manuscript, with edges of torn paper. When Jesus spoke to me, his mouth moved up and down like a Steinbach nutcracker, and sunbeams emerged from the square void between his teeth. He blurted out a series of nonsense words which at the time I thought were Aramaic and I wrote them down on a piece of parchment I had kept in my cloak for emergencies. Later, when I researched the meaning of these words, I found they corresponded to no known language. After about five hours, He started to sing the Alphabet over and over. That lasted for another seven hours, and then he disappeared and I was lying in a gutter in New York City, completely naked.