Book excerpt

When I was demoted to minister of the Cigarette Depot Acts of God Bible Ministry Church, I cried.
"I want to do," I argued with the circle of whiskered and rouged faces clustered on a street corner, "not be."
"You're the best listener."
"You smile like you're sad and you never yell."
"You laugh when you talk with children, even when you're soused."
"You're getting too old to roll drunks."
"I don't care." That's what I said. What I wanted to say was, 'I want to be alive.'
Their heads shook slowly, their eyeballs rolled white under the streetlight. "No, man. You're the best we've got to offer."
"I can trust you with my girls."
"I've never seen you do a bad thing."
"That's because you haven't looked, man." I didn't want to be good. I didn't want impotence and white senility. I wanted electricity crackling from my fingertips. I wanted to be bright lightning. I wanted to be the actor, not the audience. Have you ever seen a minister man who was whole?
"You're the one we need, man."
Then Emmaline’s predictable, “You gots to be minister. A minister gots to be a man, and you is a man who knows how it goes to talk to people.”
"I don't care."
Maybe I didn’t, but they didn’t listen, either.
Puking up rotgut booze behind the dumpster is better than sitting on Emmaline's cracked steps and feeling its dampness seep into the worn seat of my trousers while Emmaline tells me how her second man beat her when she reminded him he had told her they would get married. "Maybe he forgot," I reached past myself to scratch a fingernail across the chalky paint, feeling vibrations shiver along my fingerbone.
"Maybe he got drunk," Emmaline answered, leaning on the fat roll above her hip. "I tell you, maybe he didn't never want to get married. And here I was, living with him. What's my mama going to say?" She waved her arms, then stood motionless except for the loose flesh at the backs of her arms jiggling in echoes. She frowned. Then she laughed. "So I kicked him out. What's my mama going to say about that?"
"Maybe he changed his mind."
"What do you mean by that?" Her head bent forward above her double chin like a turkey gobbler hunting for his beak.
What did I care what I meant by that? I meant nothing except anything: lifting a shot glass of amber oblivion, filching the last packet of peach jam from a table at Nellie Slimey's Restaurant, leaning back against a winter doorway in an overcoat stiff with dirt, even beating Emmaline myself: anything was better than sitting on the cement stoop listening to her go on. I'd rather be a wife beater than a woman's listening post.