God was finally arrested on the Lower East Side. They found him at his apartment smoking crystal meth. He was huddled in a corner, shaking, and refused to answer questions.
        He had taken his favorite form—a long haired vagrant, whose five o' clock shadow sideburns poured vacuously into a scraggly beard which hung down the front of his chest, tickling the ribcage through his red flannel shirt. The first things the two officers of the New York Police Department Drug Enforcement Division noticed were the week old stains and burn holes on the shirt and his shaky hands. Apparently God liked to nod out and would forget to extinguish his cigarettes. His hands were shaking because the officers were employing the classic tactic of dealing with criminals by screaming at them.
        "Where are the drugs!" the officers had wanted to know. God was surely reluctant to supply the answer. The concept of answering that question must have seemed like handing the bullets to one's own executioner. Later, the police report indicated, the cops found his meth stash above the bathroom toilet behind a ceiling tile they pushed up while investigating the place. At the moment of arrest, however, God was huddled in a corner with a single light bulb, encrusted with burnt crystal meth—not enough of the drug to make any charge stick for long. He was afraid, nonetheless, and shook spastically as the police department kicked down his door, clutching his thin arms in a panic. He responded to direct questions by babbling a queer form of glossolalia, conveying no meaning—the police attempted to decipher this and wrote everything down in a little notebook.
        After a screaming fit, God's anxiety subsided somewhat, the calm of a lamb being led to the slaughter. Placidly, he asked the members of the police department to move closer to him, referring to them as "my children." He maneuvered to offer something to his guests—the officers were on alert to receive an attempt of bribery—but were conceded only a hit from the crystal meth pipe. They refused.
        According to psychiatric tests conducted at the 5th Precinct station, the accused is burdened with a bizarre type of Freudian complex, bordering on schizophrenia; he lives under the illusion that those around him are in fact his offspring—that he, through some type of mystical sexual prowess, has immaculately impregnated all the women of New York and is now acting as a kind of deadbeat father figure for the community. He admitted to the impossibility of being able to effectively care for this number of progeny, although he seemed honestly surprised that child services hadn't caught up with him already, demanding that he pay excessive sums of money a man in his economic position couldn't possibly afford. After he was determined not to be a significant danger to himself or those around him, the subject was given some Thorazine and brought to a holding cell.
        God told me all of this as we shivered under the caustic morning light leaking in through the windows of the concrete cell. His tone was undisturbed; almost as if the break in and the arrest were things which had happened to someone else.
        Really, it was only a matter of time before someone arrested God. He didn't exactly carry himself as a wallflower; his long hair, which he often forgot to comb, hung down and symphonized visually with bedraggled brown corduroys, rainwater soiled Doc Martens. He had been reported frequently for loitering on a corner in Greenwich Village, causing what is described in police files as a public disturbance. What this amounts to in laymen's terms is caterwauling in a disorganized fashion at business men and tourists. The most common topic of his street corner rants was damnation; the human race was ruining itself, through the proliferation of plastic chain stores and daytime TV—the people, he said, had lost their humanity through the 21st century sins of starting wars over oil reserves, talking on cell phones while driving. When God grew especially impassioned, he would howl that he would personally destroy the tumorous growth of our society in a rain of fire, or a catastrophic flood—this bitter twist would occur most often after he had made it through most of a pint of Wild Turkey. At this point, God was liable to lash out at the closest passerby, his apocalyptic diatribe growing harsher, raindrops of spittle launching themselves from the corners of his mouth—eventually, his angry words collapsed into absolute glossolalia, unintelligible and alien. There's only so long something like that can go on before the offender is brought in for questioning.
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