The Karma Kaper

Copyright 2018, Revised 2022 ©Noel Anenberg.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Buttonwillow Press, Los Angeles, California

ISBN: 978-1-66786-389-4

DEDICATION

Dedicated to Nooshie

The love and light of my life…..

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my wife, Nooshie, for her forbearance, to Geoffrey, Nicole, Allan, Mac, Nico, Hazel, and Walter for all their love. To my manager, Stanley Corwin, whose editorial notes were illuminating, to Jeff Balton, Elliot Kahn, Bill Noctor, my writing students at Pierce College, whose enthusiasm and hard work is a constant source of inspiration, and to all the various and sundry good-hearted people who listened to and commented upon the story as it evolved.

Groucho Marx wrote, "Outside of a book a dog is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it is too dark to read!"

I could not agree with him more.

A whetstone is no carving instrument,

And yet it maketh sharp the carving tool;

And if you see my efforts wrongly spent,

Eschew that course and learn out of my school;

For thus the wise may profit by the fool,

And edge his wit, and grow more keen and wary,

For wisdom shines opposed to its contrary.

~~GEOFFREY CHAUCER, Troilus and Cressida

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE END

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

THE BEGINNING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE END

I stepped off the solar-powered tram at Heaven’s Gate thinking: How do I get out of here? I’m not supposed to be dead!" My internal dialogue continued.

You’re not supposed to be dead? What a joke! Of course you’re supposed to be dead. You were murdered, you idiot! I warned you! I warned you over and over and over again not to buy into your brother Barry’s sham movie deals! Did you listen? Nooooo!

I looked around. This is Heaven? The scene looked like the entrance to Disneyland on the day after Christmas. It was a dreary gray scene without flowers. There were drab stuccco ticket booths, maybe 500 of them. Each had a sign on its top:

Preregistration

Start Here

The signs were faded, the paint on the ticket booth counters were chipped, the angels in the booths had the same dead eyes as the clerks behind the counter at the DMV. When most people, even the dead, see a line they join it—sometimes without even knowing what the line is for. It was no different at Heaven’s gates. Each booth had a hidiously long line of the dead attached like giant anacondas. And, they weren’t the dead you’d imagine waiting to enter heaven, like nice elderly, silver-haired couples who died in their Boca townhome after taking their Metamucil. These dead were a deluge of humanity so immense they could have filled Calcutta, twice. Then it came to me. You don’t die and go to Heaven because you lived a good life, no! First you die, then like applying for unemployment or food stamps, you go to Heaven, get in line, and apply to get in.

I did not join one of the lines. I’ll say it again, I was not supposed to be dead. Even if I was supposed to be dead, Heaven was out of the question just as standing in line was. I’m a Jew. We don’t stand in lines; we make reservations! There is no heaven for us. You die and poof, you’re gone; ashes to ashes. 

Every imaginable type of human being was represented. The stench was horrible. There were obese Midwesterners with pinkish corn-fed complexions; barefoot Bhindis with asphalt eyes and red-dotted foreheads; a group of Chinese tourists carrying oversized Louis Vuitton bags, who must have been killed on their flight from Paris to Peking; Susan Boyle; an Afghani shopkeeper with aged-rutted skin and brown, rotting teeth; leering Somalis chewing khat; old Persians with short, clipped beards, dark pin-striped suits, and tieless white shirts buttoned at the neck, who walked with the air of a prince; actual Saudi princes; Mexicans; a bent, old Arab woman in a burkah, who looked like she’d died carrying a bindle of hay for her husband who was too cheap to buy a donkey; more Mexicans; pie-faced Mongolians; two crippled Eskimos, Richard Nixon; scattered barefoot, psychotic, homeless with sooty toenails grown out into long vinelike potato shoots, carrying on animated conversations with who knows; a cluster of blue-haired Germans walking with hands clasped behind their slightly tilted backs; old Jewish Yentas with morbid facelifts dressed for lunch at Versailles; spartan athletes wearing hi-tech sports gear who took early leave; Julia Childs; little children with gut-wrenching innocent eyes; junkies; meth-heads; winos, Black and Brown bangers; Moldovians; hookers; a lesbian dwarf and her blind, nonbinary Latina/Latino wife.

There were three separate booths marked United States. To serve social justice, each of these booths had reader boards indicating the percentages of dead arrivals by race, disability, sexual preference, and privilege. Whites with privilege and Asians were still way ahead of gays, Blacks, and Latinos. 

22%       Asians

11%       Hispanic/Latino

  8%      African Americans

  1%      Native Americans

  9% LGBTQ

58%       White privileged

I spotted a retiree in a polyester golf shirt standing by the main entrance on the other side of the booths. He had gray hair, a Polident smile, and cheap Lenscrafter bifocals like he’d just arrived from Lesiure World. His angel’s wings were silver-tipped and marked with the golf ball brand Titleist. He was waving preregistration card holders like a Walmart greeter. He looked like someone I could talk to. I took out five crisp hundies from my wallet (even though the Russians had fed me through a giant sausage grinder, I was whole), dressed as I was when they plucked me off of Larchmont. My Patek Phillipe, although it had stopped at 5:37, was on my right wrist and my new Dries Van Notens were barely scuffed. I held the bills like a five-card stud hand so that he would see each $100, tucked it into my palm, then plowed my way through the reeking throng to speak to him. 

He turned out to be a hologram, standing, waving people through like an automaton, aimlessly chanting:

Welcome! Please step forward to the people mover!

Welcome! Please step forward to the people mover!

He was standing next to a 4K reader board displaying blue sky and white fluffy clouds floating across it.  It looked like the Fly the Friendly Skies of United Airlines video they play on the seat back monitors before a flight. I stood and read the message before trying to talk to the hologram:

"WELCOME TO HEAVEN…NOW THAT YOU HAVE PRE-REGISTERED, IT IS TIME TO SEE ONE OF OUR ADMISSION PARTNERS…DUE TO HIGHER THAN NORMAL ARRIVALS, WAIT TIMES TO SEE AN ADMISSION PARTNER MAY BE LONGER THAN USUAL…PLEASE MOVE FORWARD TO THE PEOPLE MOVER WHERE OUR GUIDE ANGELS WILL ASSIST YOU IN EVERY WAY TO MAKE YOUR ARRIVAL AS PLEASANT AS POSSIBLE…THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE!

YOUR GOOGLE HEAVEN TEAM"

Your Google Heaven Team! Google! I have a Gmail account! They’ll have every e-mail I’ve ever sent! I’ll never get into Heaven.

I flashed the cash and tried talking to the hologram. Listen, I was killed by mistake, mistaken identity. It was my twin brother they wanted. Is there anyway I can talk to a supervisor? He pixilated, then regained his resolution; he resumed waving people in, Welcome! Please step forward to the people mover!

I felt stupid, really stupid. My money was worthless. I dropped the folded bills on the floor; I looked at my Patek Phillipe, then my $850 Dries Van Notens and began hopelessly hyperventilating.

This totally sucks! It’s so unfair. My twin brother went out of his way to avoid doing anything honest, decent, or generous; he lied, cheated, and stole without a hint of remorse. I tried to live a good life, I tried always to be a stand-up guy, one of the good guys. I was on the Mediterranean Diet; he ate like a pig. I never cheated on my wife, he was on his fifth wife and never let an actress into a movie without first holding a private audition in his office. I kept telling him to stay away from making B movies with easy money borrowed from his network of shyster money launderers, to make something legit out of Shore Productions, our Hollywood film production company. He ignored me, then whack! I’m up here, dead, and he’s probably getting ready for dinner at Bestia.

There you go again! We are not talkiing unfair; we are talking stupid, naïve. No, we are talking crazy. Isn’t that what they say about people who make the same mistake over and over again but never stop?

Shut up!

I flashed back to the minutes before I was murdered. I never knew it was coming. I was walking out of Ho Lee Fook on Larchmont where I had picked up some locally sourced clean vegan Chinese for dinner; my wife Hannah was 23 days from delivering our first child. I was happy! I was going to be a dad! I had the world on a string! I was carrying the box of to-go cartons with little red pagodas printed on them, holding my iPhone up to my ear with my shoulder, telling Hannah I was on the way home—when out of the blue, two juice men from a local Russian syndicate Barry had stiffed on a loan stepped up from behind me, slipped their meat hook hands under my armpits, and lifted me up onto my toes until I was walkiing like a ballerina. They knocked the box of Chinese food out of my hands.

Now you are coming with us, greasy balls!

I could hear Hannah ask, Walter, who is that?  What’s the matter, who is that, Walter? But before I could answer, they slapped my new iPhone X away from my ear. Walter! Walter, talk to me! Hannah was crying. I sensed that would be the last time I would ever hear her voice.

You’re Molotov’s guys, right? We were walking towards a black Hyundai Genesis.

Molotov, Gorbachov, Putin, doesn’t matter. Get in car.

It does, it does matter! Because you have the wrong guy! It’s my twin brother Barry you want! Barry handles the money, I’m only the accountant. I lied. I knew what he was doing and begrudgingly helped him work one lender against the others. Let me take you to Barry; he’ll get you the money! I’m the wrong guy.

We have right Jew! one Russian said as the other held a photo of their quarry, me, next to my face.

I’m the wrong Jew. That’s my brother! See the birthmark on his left cheek?

They paused. One gorilla looked at the other and said, Maybe we call Molotov before feeding this one to meat grinder!

Meat grinder! If you kill me how are you going to get your money? Please don’t kill me. I’m going to be a father, please! I’ll get your money, I promise. My brother always pays his debts, okay sometimes he falls behind, but in the end…

Molotov has shit for brains; this one is reasonable facsimile!

Reasonable facsimile? If you want a reasonable facsimile, buy a fax machine! I’m the wrong man! I never cheated anyone. Look, I’ll find you the money if it’s the last thing I do. Just let me live! I don’t want to die. Please don’t kill me. I’ll get you your $2.5 million, I swear on my brother’s name!

One of the Russians pushed me into the back seat of the Genesis. This is not about money. This is about message. We are sending message to Hollywood Jews.

"If you want to send a message to Hollywood Jews, take out an ad in Variety or the Jewish Journal! No one will even hear about this!" 

I was punched on the jaw. Knocked out. The next thing I remember was hearing a loud grinding sound like a cement mixer. I looked up through the back window of the Genesis and saw a big neon sign in Soviet block red font, Moskovskaya Sausage Works – From Russia with Love flashing against a pitch black sky.

I thought I was having a nightmare until I hit the gleaming blades of the meat grinder.

CHAPTER 1

I slipped past the hologram into the Google Greeting Pavilion and stood at the cordoned  entrance to the people mover. There were six lengths that coiled back on one another like a giant anaconda. Each of the lengths was packed with the dead and stretched out into the clouds. The scene was like the image you see on television news when the airlines’ computers go down on the day before Thanksgiving (like clockwork every year) and everyone in every airport anywhere in the United States, Canada, and New Jersey is stuck standing in lines so long the people in the front of the line are standing alongside the people at the back of the line. There was really no difference between the faces of the living in the news reports and the dead on the people mover except that the dead seemed to have some glimmer of hope that they would actually get somewhere, like into Heaven!

A recorded message began. 

Cheerful Angelic Woman: Welcome to your New Google Heaven!

Cheerful Angelic Man:  We are working hard to make your arrival and processing a pleasant experience!

Cheerful Angelic Woman: To help us improve our service please be sure to complete the Customer Satisfaction Survey once you have been processed.

Cheerful Angelic Man: Just before boarding the people mover, you will be required to set up a Google account, so please think of a username and password you would like to use.

Cheerful Angelic Woman: If you had a Google account, please feel welcome to register with your existing username and password.

Cheerful Angelic Man: Once we have all of your personal information it will be moved to the cloud. And remember above all else, we value your privacy!

The cloud! So that’s what the cloud is! Someday, everything will be in it and no one knows where it really is.

Cheerful Angelic Man: You will find collection stations for items such as clothing and jewelry.

Cheerful Angelic Woman: Prosthetic medical and dental devices, eyeglasses, teeth, arms and legs, crutches and walkers, hearing aids…

Cheerful Angelic Man: Colostomy bags and any other removeable items.

Cheeful Angelic Woman: To help us keep pace, please be prepared to deposit your personal effects prior to your arrival at each of the collection stations.

Cheerful Angelic Man: "And, don’t forget. Be sure to hold on to the preregistration voucher you received upon arrival.  We are unable to process those without preregistration vouchers.

I recalled a dinner party conversation about where we go when we die. Because Hannah and I were so happy together, I liked to wait until everyone was finished with their religious or philosophical treatise on what will happen to our souls once our bodies fail then propose that maybe, just maybe, where we were in that particular moment in our lives was the heaven so many people prayed for. Maybe our extraordinarily comfortable lives were the reward for having evolved in past lives, like from good karma. My theory always drew glassy eyes, What?

Cheerful Angelic Man and woman: We’re here for you!

There were two concourses. The concourse on the left was indentified by a flashing green neon sign marked Nirvana, the