Poe Ballantine - 501 Minutes to Christ: Personal Essays

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Book:
501 Minutes to Christ: Personal Essays
Author:
Poe Ballantine
Publisher:
Hawthorne Books
Genre:
Books / Detective and thriller
Year:
2011
Rating:
4 / 5
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501 Minutes to Christ: Personal Essays: summary, description and annotation

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DUE OUT SEPTEMBER 2007, POE BALLANTINES second collection of personal essays follows in the tradition of Things I Like About America. Stories range from The Irving, which details Mr. Ballantines diabolical plan to punch John Irving in the nose after opening for him before an audience of 2,000 people that launched the literary festival, Wordstock; to Wide-Eyed in the Gaudy Shop, which tells how, in Mexico, the narrator met and later married his wife, Cristina; to Blessed Meadows for Minor Poets, the devastating tale of how after years of sacrifice and persistence, Mr. Ballantine finally secured a contract with a major publisher for a short story collection that never came to fruition. Ever present in this collection of essays are the odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer that populate Mr. Ballantines landscape and make his stories uniquely his own. The title story, 501 Minutes to Christ, was included in the Houghton Mifflin anthology, Best American Essays 2006.

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Table of Contents

HEAVY SPIRITUAL PLAYERSand others who have slipped in uninvited weigh in on Poe Ballantines enormously entertaining collection of reputedly factual tales:

This book appears to be more about beer and striking out with women than theological issues. However, Im convinced that this honest quest, this clear-eyed and blasted view from the gutter, might very well be a crumb in the vast crystalline matrix of the New World Order.

DR. EDWARD VARGA SAGE
Professor of Divinity
Holy Mother of God University

Ravishing work, my son. Voluptuously heartbreaking.

THOMAS AQUINAS

By grace, through faith, they offed my head in 65, but Im still here as you see, a Pharisee, a tortured wanderer, like this man Ballantine, by grace through faith, as to all those who wait, and shirk not the light of truth.

ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE

My soul yearns to know this most entangled enigma. I confess to Thee, O Lord, that I really have no idea what Poe Ballantine is talking about.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Anyplace around here I might wash my hands?

PONTIUS PILATE

How about 501 Minutes to Lunch?

BARABBAS

More, of course

OK, so I edited the Bible as you know it, and I was a pagan emperor and all that, but when my Franks and I marched out- numbered under the Christian standard and whipped those Goth mercenaries all the way to the Hellespont, Rome saw another glorious millennium. In hoc signo vinces. Remember also: Istanbul was Constantinople. Now its Istanbul, not Constantinople. Been a long time gone, Constantinople. Now its Turkish delight on a moonlit night.

CONSTANTINE THE GREAT

We recommend brazen manipulation of Christian iconography. Look what it did for Madonna, and shes not even a real blonde!

SHAMELESS AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT MACHINE

I resent that remark. The concept of Christianity, much less its iconography, did not exist in my time. And I was never once in my life a blonde, though I do admit to one experiment with henna.

THE MADONNA

We werent talking to you. Come back and see us when you 1ve got a single on the charts.

SHAMELESS AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT MACHINE

Oh, you bore me, youre all so boring.

SATAN

These authors have no idea what a pain in the ass it is filing titles that begin with numbers.

MATT PLIES

Annie Blooms Books

501 Minutes to Christ Personal Essays - image 4

To Rhonda Berry Wine and A.W. Snee

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS to Machete Woman, Kato the Cha Cha Champion, and One Adam Twelve McIsaac, the man who makes even strangers want to read me. And Whirly the One-Eyed Squirrel.

ALSO BY POE BALLANTINE:

Things I Like About America
God Clobbers Us All
Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire

World of Trouble

THE PLACE WHERE YOU GAVE PLASMA LOOKED LIKE IT had recently been a small grocery store. I had never given blood or plasma before and had no appreciation for the difference. All I knew was that you got eight bucks, which was also the going rate for a full days labor through Manpower.

A woman with a white smock and immaculately sculpted hair stood behind a glass case full of baloney sandwiches and candy bars. I imagined she was happy to see me and my young blood, not old wino blood. She seemed to have a slight vampire curl in her smile. I answered her questions: I was eighteen. I was not a heroin addict. I was presently unemployed. I had no current address. Id bought these useless boots at an army-surplus store. The jacket too. I signed a form, and she led me to an examining table and told me everything would be all right. The tissue paper crackled as I climbed aboard. There were two other men reclining on tables, bundles of gauze taped to their arms, tubes running into dark bottles.

Were going to draw a pint of blood, the woman explained, as if I were a keg of Irish stout. Spin it on a centrifuge, remove the plasma, return the blood solids to your body, then well repeat the process. It wont take more than an hour.

She smiled and made a vein stand out by cutting off the circulation in my left arm with a rubber tourniquet. A vein swelled. She produced not a needle but a pipe, razor sharp, big around as a pencil and chamfered at the end like the mouthpiece of a clarinet or the stake youd drive into Draculas heart. I didnt believe she would stick anything that big into me. Ill bleed to death, I thought. The blood in my swollen vein will splash the ceiling.

Ball your fist, she ordered. Then she punched the needle in: pain-meat-slice-burn, followed quickly by a deep dull ache that spread to my hand. The blood sped up the tube, my dark life spinning away.

Youve got good-looking blood, she said.

Who but a ghoul would say a thing like that? And were going to do this twice? How much can I spare? I thought, skinny boy who never ate.

The woman flicked her nail at the filling bottle and asked me where I was from. She had a motherly air despite the vampire curl and film actress hair. I explained that I had recently set out from San Diego, California, to make my fortune. I was going to New York City, where I planned to earn passage on a steamer to France, but I had gotten sidetracked: robbed in Houston and kicked off the trains in San Antonio, a city that also treated me to a pair of tickets for hitchhiking and sleeping on the freeway. A few days earlier my backpack and sleeping bag had been stolen, so I was stuck in New Orleans for a while.

She wanted to know why I was clear down here if I was headed to New York, and I told her I had thought it would be warmer along the southern route, and that I had heard people talking about this thing called Mardi Gras all along the way and thought I might have a look at it, though it had turned out to be just parades and drinking, and I had quickly lost interest.

She looked sympathetic, but her expression said she had heard this story many times before, and soon she had to flit off and check on one of the donors across the way.

I watched my vessel fill. If they removed all my blood, I wondered, replaced it with someone elses, would I still be me? Seven years before, Christiaan Bernard, a South African surgeon, had given a dying patient another mans heart without any apparent personality change. The me in me was pretty deep then, deeper than the blood, the marrow, the heart. If you took out my brain, however, then I wouldnt have these thoughts. And Id probably have the sense not to be lying on this table with a steel pipe in my arm. I began thinking about sex. Then my fantasies switched to potato chips. I hankered for salt. I was losing salt. I would die not of blood loss but of salt loss. Ill buy salted peanuts when Im done here, I declared to myself, and red wine, good Concord grape wine blessed by a rabbi, to restore my cells. I dreamed of peanuts and Concord wine. The room began to turn. My head felt the size of an orange.

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