There is a bad drug—don’t try it—it’s called smack. Smack is a bad drug, the baddest drug. Don’t try it. Priests will tempt you, they’ll pressure you with their peg-legs and their hook-hands. Diabolical! You must ask yourself: What are the priests really after? Do they have my best interests under their parrots, cooling in their hearts?

The priests want to use you to get to me. Decades ago I stole their tattooed maps, when they served me meals in their restaurant, the Priest House. A house of fine priest dining, serving fine priest stew and seafood sandwiches. Squid by the bucket, and excellent squid at that. Crabs and lobsters and mussels and oysters you got to whack with little hammers.

I saw how patrons entered the restaurant, bloody-eyed and wary of the light, to be seated at reserved corner tables, serenaded by priests on mandolins and priest-harps, shanties of tragic maritime love. I saw how the cabin boys bore steaming plates of mackerels over their heads, and how—

Sometimes the priests look really, really cool. I know. The priests look really, really cool when they’re smashing car windshields. You will not have ever seen anything cooler. At my dining table I sat in awe, straining to peer through the window. Out in the street, the priests went after the windshield of a stalled Camry with their blunderbusses. The glass buckled out, but it held in a smashed-up sheet, like fragmented crystals on a string, like half-eaten rock candy on astring; the priests again pummeled the glass with their screaming parrots; they hit and hit and broke a jagged hole; the glass sprayed up and into the listless car like ice pebbles, like hurtling pearls from a snapped pearl necklace; the priests sang and bellowed and cheered their priestly belly cheers. My god, but they were cool.

They’ll make it look natural, casual, nonchalant, an everyday substance, appropriate to want. They’ll call no undue attention to themselves as they model it, consume it, showy advertisements at work displaying their junk. When that transparent charade of a spectacle fails—as it must fail!—they’ll grow pernicious. They’ll entice you, they’ll surround you, they’ll clutch you to sweaty chests and offer you peg-legged parrots, pearl necklaces, lost fleets, tragic women tattooed with treasure maps—anything if you’ll try.

Yes, the priests are cool. But no you should not take the smack, take the smack from their clutching hands. Is it that you are afraid that you will hurt the priests’ feelings? The priests feel, they weather the storms of emotion, like you and I. The priests write bad poetry. But don’t take the smack! Oh my god, the stuff is so bad, what can I say to get through to you?

This is priest poetry:

My lady love

rots at the bottom;

She’ll sing to me no more, no more—

In moonlit coves

I sail, forgotten;

Never to hear her sing no more,

No more no more no more—

Do not mistake this for the one thing in the universe that is good. How do you think they got those metal hook hands? How do you think they lost those legs, now wooden?

I will pick up some stones and I will beat them against your head. I will slam my fists into the walls, over and over again, over and over again, over and over again, my fists into the walls. My god! Do you hear how I am screaming? Do you see how I stomp my feet? But my protests have no effect: the priests have already exerted their control. While my back was turned, in the single second my guard was down, they somehow tiptoed past me. Their priestly plot, this verybad drug, has turned you against me; it has already entered our home.