Jonathan C. Lewis
City of Angels
A fictional travelogue; three minute read.
My Lyft driver’s unruly jet-black hair spills over his shirt collar. When he leans forward to check the GPS, I glimpse an emaciated, Christ-like physique—if Christ were a rideshare driver. The app tells me his name is Sam.
The car radio plays Bach’s Mass in B Minor. I prefer John Lennon’s “Imagine,” but say nothing.
“Do you drive full-time?” I ask. He’s about the same age as my college-age son Ben.
“No, this is a side hustle. I’m writing a movie script about the life of King Solomon,” he says. If Ben were here, I’d whisper a dad joke, “I wonder if he wears a Bible belt?”
Dangling from the rearview mirror is a small cross of the kind Catholic teens wear on dates to ward off pregnancy. The car smells of day-old incense.
When my driver flaunts his Christianity, he’s a gambler. In America, there’s a sixty percent chance a customer will share his faith. Better than casino odds.
We steer between the grandest cathedrals in L.A.—skyscrapers. In the sky-high pews, bankers, investors and venture capitalists pray to a muscular god—money.
My driver and the money-mongers share a sensibility about the cosmos. He believes in an Invisible God; they believe in an Invisible Hand.
In the side door pockets, proselytizing pamphlets proclaim, “Jesus Loves You.” That’s pretty awesome since we’ve never met.
At the next stop sign, Sam leans out his open window and calls to a traffic cop, “Bless you for the work you do.”
In my head, I squeak, “If God is omnipotent, why are you bothering to bless strangers? Aren’t you usurping God’s job?”
Trapped in a mobile monastery, I rethink my classroom sermonizing. If religion is a manmade superstition, then maybe the social justice I teach is just another ethereal fiction. What does it mean that I believe in evolution, the speed of light and economic justice—even though I’ve never seen any of them? I fiddle with my seat belt.
In this city of angels, I’m proof that the all-knowing hand of God keeps on making sinners and heretics. I’m working my way through the available sins to decide if any of them merit repetition.
As we inch through traffic, I give thanks to the Almighty Nothing because Sam doesn’t ask about my heathen thoughts. I sink lower into the back seat. It’s a trick I learned from my high school students who don’t want to be called on.
A few blocks from all the Hollywood glitz and glam, the gated mansions and the gleaming malls, I stare out the car window at God’s forsaken children huddling under thin blankets and sleeping on hard benches. Sam is silent, his eyes focused on the roadway.
I wonder if Sam has ever considered that a truly all-powerful deity might be duty-bound, as the Bible commands, to “defend the rights of the poor and needy.”
“Doesn’t your God read his own Bible?” I’d like to ask, but don’t.
My hand grips the door handle. I check the rideshare app. Twelve minutes to my destination.
I want to ask, “How did you pick Jesus? Why not be a Buddhist, Hindu, Jew, Muslim or Sikh?” If Ben were here, he’d have the courage to ask.
Instead, I say, “Do you like stained glass windows?”
