Faux Christ, Faux Texan

He looked like the paintings of Jesus Christ that decorate hundreds of churches and Sunday School texts only without the radiance. He was dressed in robes that would have been in style in Jerusalem in 20 A.D., probably more to keep him warm. The look was not totally first century. I doubt if Christ wore sports socks in his sandals. This man had a crutch in place of a staff to lead his sheep. The crutch was the kind that grasps the lower arm not the kind that is thrust into an armpit. As this Faux Christ waited for the No.9 bus at Eaux Vives, he took the crutch and started spinning it like a proud majorette at an American high school football game. The bus came, he got on perhaps on his way to try to stroll across Lake Geneva.

This man probably in his late 50s early sixties is French speaking but he wears cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, not a small one, but a huge one that if it were not for the design would stand taller than a top hat. He is always dressed in an impeccable beige suit with a thick leather belt around his waist that crosses one shoulder Canadian Mountie style. His pants have a butter-cutting crease. Over his suit he wears a long black leather coat with ribbons on the shoulders with both the right and left held down by a sheriff’s badge. A third sheriff’s badge, at least six inches in width and length is over his heart. Two American flags are in each of the coat’s lapels. Like the Faux Christ he carries something to help him strut, not a full crutch but a cane from which dangles a Swiss Army knife.

The words of a Christine Lavin song came to my mind in both cases. She sang about derelicts and crazies with the lyrics “He once was somebody’s baby.” I don’t know what made the Faux Christ and the Faux Texan into what they are, but at one time a woman held each of them as a baby in her arms as she gave him a breast or a bottle never dreaming of their future.