Survivor

Super Bowl. All those disasters I predicted, the lives I saved.

You know the old saying: It's not what you know.

It's who you know.

People think it's so simple to be me and go up in front of people in a stadium and lead them in prayer and then be seat-belted on a jet headed for the next stadium within the hour, all the time preserving a vibrant, healthy facade. No, but these people will still call you crazy for hijacking a plane. People don't know the first thing about vibrant dynamic healthy vibrancy.

Let them even try to find enough of me to autopsy. It's nobody's business if my liver function is impaired. Or if maybe my spleen and gallbladder are enormous from the effects of human growth hormone. As if they themselves wouldn't inject anything sucked from the pituitary glands of dead cadavers if they thought they could look as good as I did on television.

The risk of being famous is you have to take levothyroxine sodium to stay thin. Yes, you have your central nervous system to worry about. There's the insomnia. Your metabolism ramps up. Your heart pounds. You sweat. You're nervous all the time, but you look terrific.

Just remember, your heart is only beating so you can be a regular dinner guest at the White House.

Your central nervous system is just so you can address the UN General Assembly.

Amphetamines are the most American drug. You get so much done. You look terrific, and your middle name is Accomplishment.

'Your whole body,' the agent is yelling, 'is just how you model your designer line of sportswear!'

Your thyroid shuts down natural production of thyroxine.

But you still look terrific. And you are, you're the American Dream. You are the constant-growth economy.

According to the agent, the people out there looking for a leader, they want vibrant. They want massive. They want dynamic. Nobody wants a little skinny god. They want a thirty-inch drop between your chest and waist sizes. Big pecs. Long legs. Cleft chin. Big calves.

They want more than human.

They want larger than life size.

Nobody wants just anatomically correct.

People want anatomical enhancement. Surgically augmented. New and improved. Silicone-implanted. Collagen-injected.

Just for the record, after my first three-month cycle of Deca-Durabolin I couldn't reach down far enough to tie my shoes; my arms were that big. Not a problem, the agent says, and he hires someone to tie all my shoes for me.

After I cycled some Russian-made Metahapoctehosich for seventeen weeks all my hair fell out, and the agent bought me a wig.

'You have to meet me halfway on this,' the agent tells me. 'Nobody wants to worship a God who ties his own shoes.'

Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails, as a regular person. You have to be everything regular people aren't. Where they fail, you have to go all the way. Be what people are too afraid to be. Become whom they admire.

People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won't settle for just a human being.

'For you, a wig is better,' the agent said. 'It's got the level of consistent perfection we can trust. Getting out of helicopters, the wash of the prop, every minute in public, you can't control how real hair is going to look.'

How the agent explained his plan to me was, we weren't targeting the smartest people in the world, just the most.

He said, 'Think of yourself from now on as a diet cola.'

He said, 'Think of those young people out in the world struggling with outdated religions or with no religions, think of those people as your target market.'

People are looking for how to put everything together. They need a unified field theory that combines glamour and holiness, fashion and spirituality. People need to reconcile being good and being good-looking.

After day after day of no solid food, limited sleep, climbing thousands of stairs, and the agent yelling his ideas to me over and over, this all made perfect sense.

The music team was busy writing hymns even before I was under contract. The writing team was putting my autobiography to bed. The media team was doing press releases, merchandise licensing agreements, the skating shows: The Creedish Death Tragedy on Ice, the satellite hookups, tanning appointments. The image team has creative control on appearance. The writing team has control of every word that comes out of my mouth.

To cover the acne I got from cycling Laurabolin, I started wearing makeup. To cure the acne, someone on the support team got me a prescription for Retin-A.

For the hair loss, the support team was spritzing me with Rogaine.

Everything we did to fix me had side effects we had to fix. Then the fixes had side effects to fix and so on and so on.

Imagine a Cinderella story where the hero looks in the mirror and who's looking back is a total stranger. Every word he says is written for him by a team of professionals. Everything he wears is chosen or designed by a team of designers.

Every minute of every day is planned by his publicist.

Maybe now you're starting to get a picture.

Plus your hero is spiking drugs you can only buy in Sweden or Mexico so he can't see down past his own jutting-out chest. He's tanned and shaved and wigged and scheduled because people in Tucson, people in Seattle, or Chicago or Baton Rouge, don't want an avatar with a hairy back.

It's around floor number two hundred that you reach the highest state.

You're gone anaerobic, you're burning muscle instead of fat, but your mind is crystal-clear.

The truth is that all this was just part of the suicide process. Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.

Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven?

This wasn't a question of whether or not I was going to kill myself. This, this effort, this money and time, the writing team, the drugs, the diet, the agent, the flights of stairs going up to nowhere, all this was so I could off myself with everyone's full attention.

This one time, the agent asked me where I saw myself in five years.

Dead, I told him. I see myself dead and rotting. Or ashes, I can see myself burned to ashes.

I had a loaded gun in my pocket, I remember. Just the two of us were standing in the back of a crowded, dark auditorium. I remember it was the night of my first big public appearance.

I see myself dead and in Hell, I said.

I remember I was planning to kill myself that night.

I told the agent, I figured I'd spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest.

The agent said that sounded pretty realistic.

We were smoking cigarettes, I remember. Down onstage, some local preacher was doing his opening act. Part of his warm-up was to get the audience hyperventilated. Loud singing does the job. Or chanting. According to the agent, when people shout this way or sing 'Amazing Grace' at the top of their lungs, they breathe too much. People's blood should be acid. When they hyperventilate the carbon dioxide level of their blood drops, and their blood become alkaline.

'Respiratory alkalosis,' he says.