In Which I Chase A Jesus-Guy Across a Subway Parking Lot (But I Wasn't Mad)

Every Tuesday at five o’clock in the town where I live there’s a protest against Donald Trump and whatever he’s doing that week. It’s right in the center of town, where our two main-ish streets intersect at a stoplight. It’s called the Four Corners, though because Swifty’s Pub has a parking lot that’s also a small road, and lets out directly into the intersection, the geometrical reality is that the Four Corners has five corners. We’ve never talked directly about this, as a community. After covid a gift shop that looked like an Instagram feed, The Fifth Corner, opened up there. The day after it opened a pickup truck drove through its front window. No one was hurt. It was an accident and not the work of a Four Corner fundamentalist. And the shop has thrived since. Delmar is pretty gentrifriendly, but the market for locally woven $39 potholders is stronger than even I imagined.

The point is I try to make it to the protest as often as I can. It feels good.

You stand next to someone who is just as afraid and shocked as you are (we average between 18 and 36) and hold up a sign. That’s it. Cars honk and thumbs fly up behind windows as commuters on their way home from Albany pass by. We’re all trying to count the number of honks in our heads, all firmly half-believing that the number we come up with will tell us whether America will be okay. Public support is healthy, but I’ve never made it past 11 without forgetting where I was and having to start over. But for 45 minutes you’re not alone in your phone, scrolling and scrolling until your brain gasps for air. That’s the money.

But we’re not the only group there. There’s also the Jesus guys.

No one knows how this happened. But every Tuesday at exactly the same time, and in exactly the same place, as we are protesting against Trump, between one and three men - always men - are protesting for Jesus. I’d like to believe that we just have two different, not necessarily opposed, messages. But c’mon: This is an eight-dimensional political analogy, a many disastered, psychedelic MRI of an American zeitgeist that is fractured in 45 places. Also, on a practical level, it is just very uncomfortable.

Maybe it’s a permit thing? Like we just both accidentally got permits for the same day. But I don’t know if either of us has or needs permits. It would definitely make sense for us to take alternating days. They can keep Tuesday. I’m fine with Wednesdays. At the very least, for the sake of communications clarity, we should coordinate different corners. Jesus could get the Key Bank corner. Fuck Donald Trump could get the FoCo Taco corner. But that’s not how it is. There is no coordination or even acknowledgement. I have never seen any one of us talk to any one of them.

Until last week.

I’ve been to more protests in the last six-months than I went to in the first four years of Trump, so I keep all my signs in a pile for easy re-use. I was going to take my “Hands Off Medicaid” sign, but the fuckers had just passed the bill that gutted Medicaid the previous Wednesday, so I took my “Stop The Insanity” sign instead.

The heat that afternoon was golden, radiating from every direction and making your insides sweat. I held up the sign over my chest like I was in a mug shot. I pumped my fist and threw thumbs-ups wherever I thought I saw someone behind a windshield smile. Whatever this is, I thought, it must count as “making a difference.” I had my earphones in but felt it would have been a betrayal of Democracy if I actually hit play on my podcast.

In the corner of my eye I saw one of my fellow Fuck Trump-ers, an older woman in a floppy gardening hat, lower her sign and begin talking with someone. He was sweating through a collared shirt: A Jesus Guy.

“It was the Democrats that started slavery,” the Jesus Guy said to the Fuck Trump-er.

Normally I would need IKEA instructions and probably an allen wrench to figure out how to insert myself into someone else’s conversation. But I must have blacked out and done something horribly rude. I had no idea where my fellow protestor, who I must have just stepped in front of, had gone. Now I was talking with the Jesus Guy.

I have lived several lifetimes since election night 2016, and waking up in this moment I knew that every single day, through each and every one of them, I have been waiting to talk to this guy. Not yell, just talk. Really, I didn’t need to convince him. I knew I couldn’t. I just wanted to politely pop open the hatch for two-seconds, even just one second, and see how the Jesus-gear turned the Trump-gear in his head. I know there must be a million YouTube videos of people explaining this mechanism, but I’m not sure how sincere internet people anymore or if I’m just watching the hot take olympics.

So I went big. Big for me.

“I’ve seen you here before,” I smiled with my whole being. “And I really respect what you’re doing.” (Moderately true: I’m not sure stern sign holding is meaningful Christian witness, but on a certain level I feel about the First Amendment the way non-sporty grandmothers feel about sports: I just like to see everyone participate and have fun.) “You were talking about slavery?”

“Have you heard of the transatlantic slave trade?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” I said. (True: In fifth grade.) I could have yes-and-ed him, busted my sixth-grade triangle trade facts right over his head. But I didn’t want to show off. (False: I did. But I wanted to talk to him more.)

“Well that was all Democrats that supported that,” he nodded and leaned back on his heels. “Davis. Jefferson Davis and all those people who supported slavery. They were Democrats.”

“100%. Totally correct,” I said. (True) “Can I ask you, I’m not trying to be a jerk here, I’m just curious - have you heard of the Southern Strategy? Richard Nixon? 1972?” I was not trying to zing him. If he got zung, that was purely incidental. There was just no other way for me to know if he knew about the party switch.

“I think yeah,” he murmured.

“So I understand why Democrats and slavery would be offputting. Definitely. Totally,” I said. “But –”

“500,000 people leave New York State every year,” he said. “It’s the socialism.” (Entirely false: the net is 216,000 and a good chunk of them are leaving for the nearby workers’ paradises of New Jersey and Connecticut.)

“Population outflow is definitely an issue,” I said. (I had to keep him talking.)

I was still trying to figure out a way to get back the Southern Strategy.

“But really I’m mostly about the power of Jesus,” he zagged. (I had the clear sense that one of us was rope-a-doing the other but without being able to tell who was who.)

“Me too,” I said. (Somewhat true: In a way that is not easily discussable given the current social and political climate, or even outside of it. But I’m at St. Vincent’s every Sunday, and while my rosary collection is small, it is entirely unironic.) “That’s really important to me as well.”

A look of shock and amazement? A lightning bolt of respect? Would have been nice. It could have been a small, dim lightning bolt. But he just blinked.

Which didn’t really matter because now the door was open. The topic was right there. The only topic. The question I wanted to ask transcended time and circumstance: I had known this Jesus Guy for 90-seconds, but I had wanted to ask him this question for years. What do you think about Matthew 25:35?

(the sheep and goats TL;DR here is that JC tells the crowd that, come the last judgement, that they will all be herded straight to hell…unless they feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and clothe the naked.)

I wasn’t even going to tie it back to what had just been done to SNAP and Medicaid benefits of America’s hungry naked strangers. I wound up:

“And while we’re talking about Jesus,” I said. “I was curious to know what you thought about –”

It’s possible he sensed I was going to try to pin him with whatever was coming. Which I wasn’t going to do. Probably I wouldn’t have. I might have tried. But he couldn’t know that for sure, yet.

Just then, a fellow Fuck Trump protestor tapped me on the shoulder, saying we had to post pictures or none of this happened. (True.) As I smiled in the other direction, my Jesus Guy said to the other Jesus guy that he was going to roll.

I caught him steps away. We were both sweating like I’d been chasing him for miles.

“It was really good to see you here,” I said. (True, I think.) I held out my right fist for a bump. “I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m Louis. (Boringly true.)

I have the opposite of a photographic memory. I forget what I saw even as I am still seeing it. All I can really ever hold onto, meaning-wise, are the liminal-light afterimages that are left after you close your eyes. I could not tell whether his uncomfortable smile was more uncomfortable or more of a smile.

“I, yeah…that’s my name too. Louis,” he said.

(True? He had to be fucking with me. Or…maybe?)

And then he left.

Postscript - The entire ambiguous experience left me embarassingly self-aware, seeing the whole thing in retrospect was like seeing this video, wherein I was the Yeti and Daffy Duck would represent an attempt at political inter-species dialog.