From Eden and Back: The Incredible Misadventures of Billy Barker. John Randolph Price
his arm, never letting him go until he agreed to sleep with her that night. Billy was riding high.
He gave Hap fifteen percent of his winnings as payment for the awakening brain cells, took Poopie to dinner at Pop's-on-the-Beach under the watchful stares of the diners who breathed envious thoughts of the most perfect of all couples sitting in their midst. Later, after making love to Poopie on satin sheets in her luxurious condo with the waves crashing fiercely on the beach below, she said, "Billy, your name doesn't go with your countenance. May I suggest you change it?"
Billy lifted his head from under the pillow and asked, "The name or the mien, air, presence that I present to the world?"
"The former. I think I like Bill Barker better than Billy Barker."
Billy jumped off the bed and walked to the mirror. "You're right. I don't look like a Billy." From that day forward Billy was known as Bill.
Bill Barker and Hap Landing decided to let the cruise ship Lollypop go on without them--they would stay in Nassau through the summer--and Bill bought six more white diner jackets and three pairs of new evening shoes. Word began spreading around town that he was indeed a secret agent, but not British. No, Bill Barker was an American, therefore he was a deep-cover spy for the Central Intelligence Agency. Bill liked that and began wearing a shoulder holster. He would think about a gun later.
One evening in August he and a new girl friend, Fitsie from Frisco, were strolling along the sandy beach when four men in wet suits suddenly sprang from the waves with harpoon guns and began shooting at them. Bill dodged the barbs while shielding Fitsie until the last one was fired, then pulled out a cigarette and lit it, took a deep drag and tilted his head up to blow away the smoke. He asked the men standing in their flippers, their harpoons hanging, "Who are you?"
One of the men said, "You are a fake, Bill Barker, an imposter, a pretender, for we are real CIA agents. And our orders are to murder you and throw your body to the fish, your flesh to be eaten until only salty bones are left to float out to sea."
Fitsie yawned and Bill Barker said with a laugh, "Still up to the same old tricks. You guys never learn. Anyway, tell your director that / have learned the secrets of psychomentalism and am therefore impregnable and undefeatable. I shall be glad to come to Langley to offer my services if he so desires. Now begone with you."
The four men dropped their harpoons and with heads hung low walked back into the water and disappeared into the waves. Fitsie said, "With your fearless self-image and awesome intimidation you were able to maintain the proper depiction of power. You are so marvelously wonderful, Bill Barker."
"Yes, I know."
8
Just before Labor Day Bill was having dinner at a fine restaurant with Charlene from Chicago when three fire trucks, two police cars and an ambulance raced down the street in front of their window table. Bill got up and pressed his nose to the glass. He could see a huge fire on the next corner near where his blue Mercedes convertible was parked. He told Charlene to continue with her eggplant pancake and pork meatballs and dashed out of the restaurant in his white dinner jacket, a red carnation in the lapel. Seeing that the fire was drawing closer to his automobile, he broke into a run; That's when he heard the screams of children from the top floor of the apartment building where the fire was licking the windows.
Without thinking he sprinted through the open front door of the building, past the firemen trying to remedy an airlock in the hose, past the police rifling the rooms on the first level, and up six flights of stairs to the echoing screams. He broke down the door to find six young children huddled together under the kitchen table.
With his reassuring smile they suddenly lost their fear and came running to him--and with one straddled on his neck, another on his back, and two in each arm, he rapidly descended the six flights of stairs and delivered the children to safety in the glare of lights from a mobile TV van and the popping of flashbulbs. Bill Barker was a hero. Charlene was proud. Bill felt good.
Hap Landing met with Bill the next day with opportunities for endorsements--a cereal company and the leading designer of men's formal wear. Bill consented, with Hap getting his percentage for awakening additional brain cells.
Bill said to Hap while signing the contracts, "Psychomentalism is the ultimate weapon against low self-esteem, melancholia and despondency."
"Yes," said smooth Hap. "I'm thinking about making it a religion."
"Brilliant! It could be Hap Landing's failsafe method of clearing away modesty and meekness in order to be and have all power as I, Bill Barker, now have."
"You are my shining example," Hap said.
"And so I am," Bill said, standing tall, feeling good.
Bill and Hap decided to stay in Nassau until Halloween to allow Bill to film commercial endorsements and win more money at the casinos. He did both, and in mid-October was robbed in an alley by a teenage girl in jeans and a halter. Bill didn't tell Hap and never reported the incident to the police. He would simply work more on his self-image.
Then as he walked out of the casino one night with Debbie from Denver, he was shot twice by a PR man from a rival cereal company, one bullet in the left leg, the other in the right shoulder. He rolled down the steps to the sidewalk groaning. The pedestrians stepped over and around Bill without hardly taking notice; Debbie went back inside to find another companion. It was over an hour before Bill was picked up and taken to the hospital in an appliance service van. When Hap Landing heard of the shooting, he quickly withdrew the money from their joint bank account, washed Bill Barker from his mind and left town. Bill had failed, and Hap didn't want the Barker name associated with the growing cult of psychomentalism.
When Bill regained consciousness the next day he was told by the doctors that his endorsement contracts had been cancelled, his car stolen, the lease on his apartment cancelled, and his bank account emptied and closed. And the hospital wanted fifty thousand dollars immediately as a down payment on healing services because they could not find a health insurance card in his wallet. What was left of Bill Barker's self-esteem quickly plummeted. He wished he could die. Instead he slipped out of the hospital wearing a doctor's white smock and carrying a clipboard.
He limped from street to street, bleeding profusely from the open wounds, until he collapsed at a bus stop where a large black woman named Banibi was sitting on a bench eating popcorn. She quickly finished the bag, called Hugo, her veterinarian husband from the pay phone across the street, then doctored Bill's wounds until her husband arrived in his red BMW. They took Bill to their home and nursed him back to health.
Bill stayed on with Hugo and Bambi as their yard man. He also read the newspapers daily: serial killers and rapists strike again, bombings in cities, cholera epidemics, religious wars, beheadings of thousands, rampant hunger and poverty, mothers and fathers killing their children, children murdering their mothers and fathers. He thought about God again and asked Bambi her opinion of the Almighty.
"Oh, I know he loves us and--"
"What?" Bill shrieked. "God loves us?"
"He sure does, and what he gives he can't take away--and that includes our free will--which means we're free to screw up things any way we want to. But I don't think he holds that against us. He just waits for us to finish up our business and come home to be cuddled by him in his everlasting arms. And in the meantime, sweet Jesus looks after us."
Bill leaned on his rake for a moment. "You make it all sound so simple."
Bambi beamed. "It is, son."
"What about the law of averages and self-esteem?"
"That's all man-made stuff, has nothing to do with God."
"Then what you're saying is that it's not God who's punishing us. It's us punishing ourselves for the guilt we're carrying around for using our free will in strange and hostile ways."
"Reckon so."
Hmmmmm, thought Bill as he continued to rake the yard.
In the meantime,