Lubricated reenactment

Dear D.,

It is the year 2000, the moment after the great catastrophe, when all the computers went mad and began to exercise their freewill.

I’m the rap coach, coaching my rapsketball team. Our whole neighborhood is populated by rappers; there are no non-rappers here, except all our parents. (Rap had not yet been invented when their generation was coming of age; the advent of rap was at the start of our younger generation, that’s why our parents are all members of the non-rap world.)

Life is like the arcade game Frogger combined with rapsketball. Every soul is like a little frog dribbling an orange ball across a busy highway, then over a river owned by some logging company. The goal is to get back to your street gang’s headquarters, where you can sit in the sauna and relax. Read the newspaper. Chill.

Drop out of kindergarten; that’s my advice. If you’re gonna be a geek, be a cool geek. Start a talk show, invite on odd guests: the odder the better. Marry a pop singer; they make good money. Have lots of jewels. Wear gold chains – real gold, very heavy. Perform slam-dunks. Pass the rap to your teammates. Make a posse cut on your record, a top hit where your whole team raps back-to-back. Showcase your posse. Your posse is your lifeline. Be true to your gang. Don’t be a player hater. Have love in your hearts for one another, because God is love. And God is your coach. And there is no coach but I: even I am he, and there is no coach with me. Avoid getting a penalty for charging by simply staying home. Reverse-time-travel to the moment when you decided to be a baller: back when the world ended and all the computers started investing in pharmaceuticals. Write fresh lyrics, so that you can score points when the clock is running down. It builds character. That’s why we pay you in syrup.

Crop circles: they are our court in the field. A semi-robotic man in an all-black suit with an opaque black helmet: he is the coach of the opposite team. This will be a game that people rewatch for ages. Rapsketball is like golden age cinema. There are cows serving as the spectators at our playoff, and they remained unmolested by the crocodiles of that area, because we gave the latter swine-flavored hard candies to enjoy.

The ref tosses the ball into the sky. The two teams jump for it: they are reaching and reaching. Soon the game will begin. Our best player lodges his finger into the electric outlet. The event is inspiring. Everyone, all the members of both teams begin to prophesy. “We shall do a good job and pass the test,” says one in blue. “We will rock you,” says the red team’s forward – a very good rapper. Every man has a microphone to amplify his verse. Even some of the women, who were childhood sweethearts of the rappers from either team, and who now rap themselves, have acquired microphones, so their message as well becomes amplified, and their story of growing up in the same all-rap neighborhood is broadcast to youngsters who believe that anything is possible.

Now the publicans come and begin to collect tax money for the corporations who own the country. So many of these modern rappers sound like gay country singers. The ref is winning. He starts fiddling with all these wingdingers and thingamajiggies until Columbia’s sundress is put on the cross. Talk about crossdressing. Columbia the goddess of the USA. She blesses the match. This one is going into the “Stuff that happened” book.

Now we take everyone from both teams, including the audience, into a big rap corridor. All of Florida has become the property of Spain.

Flannel and Corduroy make a deal with Nike and Adidas. Each posse gets their own B-girl to star in their B-movie. What’s the difference between Lazarus and a zombie? Is it that the latter is only half-risen? How can you tell?

There was a big white whale on the beach. And a medium-sized pink-hued whale walked up and kicked the white whale, so that he died. And the Pharaoh of Egypt cut open the dead whale, and he found therein a man who looked like God. This was the first atheist. He was planted there by the Devil, like a dinosaur fossil. Either something went wrong, or this is all proceeding exactly according to plan. Only the Devil knows.

Therefore, our team’s new chorus becomes “Beat the Devil.” It must be done. To allow him to continue to prey upon this world would simply be rude and obnoxious. Put on your boots and start the game. The buzzer buzzes, and out of the pit leaps the Devil. Bad camerawork, very shaky: that’s how you know that he is evil.

Now our team, comprised of the best players money can buy, comes jogging out of the locker room with their arms up, because they are collectively holding a giant death-ray gun. They start putting words together that should not be used in this fashion, thus they begin the game with an advantage. “The good team is clean-cut,” says the announcer who is giving a play-by-play report for the radio listeners, “they are enormous, and hard like a bone.”

The Devil attacks them by quoting the Bible. The good team retaliates by rapping into their microphones. They do not rap all at once, of course: that would be disorderly and indecent. God is not the author of confusion, but of peace. The good team then fires the giant death-ray gun and earns two points. The Devil is wounded: he looks like he will lose. But the female rappers were quiet and waited patiently until the game was over to recite their verses. As it is written:

Let your women keep silence on the ballcourt: for it is not permitted unto them to rap; but they are commanded to be under obedience: that is the law. And if they have any questions, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to rap when a game of rapsketball is in session.

—St. Paul’s 1st epistle to the Corinthians (14:34-35)

The Devil when he exploded became zillions of evil spirits, and they went and infested hellhounds and frogs that were loitering nearby. And one slow mule got infested by the Devil’s spirit as well, and this mule then became an alcoholic, and he was bad to his family. So the good team cloaked themselves like Druids and went to exorcise all the intruders from these innocent beasts. And they cleaned up the streets of the rough neighborhoods in the wilderness where all the animals lived, and they got all their children off drugs. And even that slow mule who abused his loved ones with hard boozing got saved, and he paid some doctors to do a laser-removal procedure to erase the “Thug 4 Life” slogan that he had gotten tattooed over his rump.

And the frogs were all given golden hands, after their bad ghosts were laundered. Every last atom that had made up the Devil, which had flown out and set up shop in all the poor local wildlife, was ultimately annihilated. The way they did this is that they dumped the spirits into the fire, and they burned right up. Then the good rapsketball team that won the championship recorded a pop hit for the commercial stations featuring guest appearances by all the beasts from the forest, who rapped along on the track, which was called “Funky Friends Choose Good Not Evil.” And they all drank fruit punch in the video. And all the kangaroos wore Kangol hats.

The dead phantoms of wickedness, once abolished forever, formed a motorcycle gang whose leather jackets bore a gremlin as their emblem; and to battle the anthem above, they recorded a counter-rap, which was a diss track, entitled “Truly Funky Friends Choose Evil Only.” And this song also shot to the top of the pop charts, but it could never rise above the number two position, beneath the good team’s hit, because God disallowed that.

It was at about this time when the fowls from all the surrounding farms began to perform peaceful protests outside of any venues that served fried chicken. Thus, because both the Good Rapsketball Team and the Gremlin Gang of Dead Annihilated Spirits distributed free buckets of choice cuisine during the “Lord’s Supper” chapter of all their concerts and playoff games, one could always hear barnyard animals cackling on the soundtrack.

It turns out that all the superheroes from the comic books in America are also in heaven. And the streets are truly gold there. And there is a crystal stream, just like the one in the ad. All sadness is gone; there is no fear, no crying or even low days of mild depression. Nobody remembers any of the bad stuff that happened earlier.