The Messiah of Morris Avenue - First Chapter

My favorite Nut Log nut was a former professor of archaeology at Rutgers. An obliging angel of the Lord had informed him that he was the reincarnation of Simon Stylites, a saint who'd spent the best years of his life atop a fifty-foot pole, sustained by bread and water.

St. Simon the Sequel had constructed a similar perch in his yard in Asbury Park and had been living up it in a loincloth for a while when the Nut Log crew caught up with him. His wife would shin up a ladder every morning to bring the Saint his bread and water.

We shot this ritual from a neighboring tree; the very first time, St. Simon snarled, "Damn you, woman, I said stale bread! And this water is clean!"

That did it for me. But what sold him to the Nut Log was an hour later, when the time came for his self-mortification. The appearance of his helpmeet had given him a fine erection, which he proceeded to pound with a mallet against the floor of the platform for a good half hour.

Then there were the messiahs. In theory, messiahs were a gold mine. Problem was, they were largely indistinguishable. The Manson eyes, the unkempt hair, the beard with bits of food in it, the occasional robe -- they'd all been watching the same movie. When you get right down to it, fanatics aren't that funny. Except for the King James garble coming at you nonstop, most Christs could just as easily be animal activists, Roswell geeks, classical bassoonists, or wine writers.

So when I first got a report from my stringer in south Jersey about some guy wandering around with a bunch of disciples, performing miracles, I didn't pay much attention. Messiahs were a dry hole. But other stringers in other parts of the state began to hear things on their grapevines: a man cured of TB in a supermarket parking lot in Phillipsburg, a kid with MS made to walk in a schoolyard in Mount Laurel; more than one report of young women cured of full-blown AIDS, no location given.

I began to wonder a little, but not whether miracles were happening; quite the opposite. These "miracles" had a familiar ring. They sounded like retooled versions of old tent-revival laying-on-of-hands scams: autosuggestion temporarily alleviating symptoms of serious disease. You had to know your way around not to be fooled by them, but desperately sick people often were. Then they'd find out there'd been no cure and fall apart.

Hardly what Nut Log fans wanted to see on their carputers in morning traffic.

Messiahs fell into two categories: nuts or hustlers. This guy sounded like the second, and I wasn't about to give him any publicity. He was probably doing enough harm as it was. On the other hand, he didn't seem to want publicity, which was puzzling. Nuts or hustlers, messiahs were always ravenous for attention; even the most severely unhinged sought us out day and night.

One of my stringers, a funny energetic Asian kid named Kuni, was intrigued enough to start keeping a record of the "miracle" messiah. There weren't that many sightings, perhaps five in as many months. All were after the fact. There was no way to predict where he was going to pop up. He seemed to be operating in the tristate area, but he was hard to track because he moved in the underground of the truly poor: the toughest neighborhoods of hard-hit cities like Elizabeth, Trenton, Bridgeport. Once or twice a stringer got wind that he'd materialized somewhere, but the neighborhoods where he appeared weren't easy or safe to navigate, and by the time someone got there he was on his way again, leaving behind talk of cures and second sight and people changed by his words. The inaccessibility of these places then made it hard for stringers to find and check for people who'd been "cured" or "changed by his words."

Kuni kept at it. One source said the miracle worker's people called him Jay and they all traveled together in a beat-up van. He sometimes preached in Spanish. He never took up collections, as other messiahs invariably did. One source said he had a real slow way of talking that "made you feel peaceful-like." Kuni said someone told him she thought he'd got his start in Camden. That'd be news, I said: getting your start in Camden.

I remember this conversation because it was the first time Kuni called him the Mysterious Stranger. I liked that. It was a very cool putdown. From then on, in the way that happens when someone anonymous acquires a handle, he became more real. I asked Kuni about him regularly, not because I planned to run a story but just so I could say, What's new with the Mysterious Stranger? It always made me smile.