But we were quietly subversive, goody-goodies with a secret stash of black humor. One night when we were in ninth grade, we were sitting around at Rivka's house in our matching flannel dog-print pajamas, flipping through TV channels and hoping to alight on something either of quality or of such un-quality that we could derive sick entertainment from it. That evening it seemed that the meter pointed strongly to "un-quality," because first we came upon MTV's Jackass, where a man in a Speedo was about to dive headfirst into a kiddie pool packed with elephant dung. We watched in fascinated horror for a few minutes until we could bear it no longer (here was unadulterated jackassery, here was scatology in its purest form-- it was like looking straight into the sun, beautiful and terrible and unsustainable). So we continued our odyssey through the channels and eventually hit the ultimate jackpot of Atrocious Syndicated Entertainment-- Kevin Costner's Waterworld.
For the blissfully uninitiated among you, Waterworld is a notoriously dreadful post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie from 1995. In this fine feature film, polar ice caps have melted and inundated the globe, obliterating most human life save a few nomadic factions who roam the waves on their makeshift rafts, getting into petty little scuffles and searching for a mythical landmass upon which to kick-start human civilization. (Can't you just feel that nascent '90s global warming anxiety? I'm convinced that Al Gore watched the very same rerun of Waterworld that Rivka and I stumbled upon in 2000 and, already having been shunted away from the Oval Office, spontaneously rerouted his career from politician to environmentalist in order to ensure that the events of Kevin Costner's epic flop would never come to pass). Anyway, Waterworld was supposedly the most expensive film ever produced up to that point, and it bombed at the box office. Titanic, another nautically-inflected cinematic masterpiece, would soon surpass it in terms of production costs, but we all know how that one fared commercially so it's not really the same story. (Also, Titanic was SCHLOCK whereas Waterworld was DRECK, and therein lies a key semantic difference, my dear friends who are not yet attuned to the nuances of the Yiddish tongue. Look it up).
Anyway, in the movie, Kevin Costner plays a mysterious figure known only as
So back to ninth-grade Alana and Rivka. We lost it at the gills line, absolutely cracked up, rolling around on the floor and developing abdominal cramps from the propulsive intensity of our silent laughter. The delivery of the line was so wooden, so B-movie on top of the inherent mockability of the subject matter. We gasped for air; I thought I'd never be able to breathe normally again.
When we finally regained composure (this took approximately twelve minutes) we started pondering the significance of The Mariner's fishy anatomy. "Well, it's clear that he's some kind of prophet or Christ figure," I said (we had been learning about Christ figures and other hero archetypes in English class recently-- I distinctly recall that a classmate, a very cool one, had asked our teacher, "So Jesus is, like, one of those Christ-like figures, right?" and I had facepalmed and groaned and internally bemoaned the stupidity of the human race, but now this girl works in finance somewhere and makes more money than I will ever make in my life, so I am retroactively knocking fourteen-year-old Alana off of her freaking high horse already). Anyway, Rivka agreed with me about the religious overtones of The Mariner's character: "Yeah, a Christ figure for sure. Christ with gills!" "Christ with gills!" I replied. "Gill-Christ. Sounds like the surname 'Gilchrist. I wonder why that's even a name?'"
And then my eyes lit up insanely as my neurons started firing off associations (most of these associations being things that I had learned in our mandatory Bible Studies class the previous fall-- see, I used to really pay attention in school once upon a time). "Wait. Hold up," I said, mind racing. "Gills on Christ. There's all this 'fishy' stuff surrounding Jesus... the feeding of the masses with the loaves and FISHES... the walking on water... and remember when he said 'Come, and I shall make you fishers of men and women'? And the SYMBOL! There's the Christ symbol! You know the one, the little loopy fish... it's almost like a stick-figure... you see it as a magnet on cars sometimes... or you see the other ones with the amphibian feet and they're Darwinist symbols... but anyway, my dad-- you know how my dad is chock-full of those religious history nuggets-- so my dad used to tell me that Jesus had a code name among early Christians, you know, when they were being persecuted and fed to lions and everything. And the name was 'Ichthus,' the Greek word for FISH! And that's why the symbol exists. And then there's that Gilchrist name. So I'm thinking... I'm thinking that there's more to this than symbolism. I'm thinking there was a major cover-up. I'm thinking... what if Jesus WAS ACTUALLY A FISH??"
Rivka cracked up again, probably because she now had ultimate clinching proof that her best friend was bonkers. But she played along, and soon enough we had created an entire doctrine, the core tenet of which was the fish-ness of Christ Jesus. We christened our fledgling cult "Osteichtheism" (osty-ICKTHY-ism). This title was a mashup of "osteichthyes," the taxonomical class name for "bony fish" that we had learned in biology recently (again, marvel at our erstwhile scholarly enthusiasm and sponge-like learning capabilities-- long gone, they are) and "theism," a noun or suffix meaning-- well, y'all know THAT one, I ain't condescenin'. Once we had a name, we got to work on the details. We marshaled evidence to support our bonafide bony-fish theory. We composed a pseudo-Gregorian chant for the clandestine services and rituals that we were going to hold. We made plans to convert the masses-- we would confer new identities on our most shining members, grant them "fish names" to denote their status within the organization. Rivka and I, of course, would be the Dear Leaders to whom all members would defer.
We giggled with the wrongness of what we were concocting, we two vaguely Jewish misfit girls who attended a warm-and-fuzzy private Episcopal school that doused the student body with messages of tolerance and respect on a daily basis. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! We kept our sacrilege a secret from our more sanctimonious friends, and the element secrecy, of course, made the whole thing even funnier to us. (Perhaps some of my current acquaintances of the sanctimonious stripe are even reading this now, becoming steadily more offended and resolving to pray for the desolate empty crater where my soul ought to be... but if this kind of thing bothers you, then I suggest that you get off the internet right now, because there is an abyss of debauchery out there and I am just the very tip of the Debauched Abyss-berg. Seriously, you should just close your browser right now and go turn on Sesame Street [though that might offend you too, come to think of it, what with the show's decidedly New York Jewish cultural sensibility and the black people and the two male muppets who are clearly in some kind of sinful domestic partnership]).
Anyway, our "commitment" to the "faith" flagged as we made our way through high school and became preoccupied with dopey boys and choir rehearsal and Driver's Ed and practice SATs and college counseling and whatever else seemed so life-or-death back then. But we still inscribed the Ichthus symbol in one another's yearbooks and reminisced, from the incomparably more mature vantage point of Senior Year, about that time way back in the day that we created a cult. It was a pact of friendship more than anything else.
Or was it? Poor reader, you are probably sitting there scratching your head and just trying to puzzle out why I decided to add this random-ass story from the Annals of Alana to the selective and authoritative Canon of Schlock (and you are also possibly praying for my poor immortal soul-- again, if that is you, just kindly leave me alone and go watch Teletubbies. But wait. The gay purple one. Shoot.) Well, let me elucidate. I believe that the Osteichtheism episode from yesteryear not only cemented a lifelong friendship, but also spoke a secret yearning on my part to become a cult leader. I shelved this aspiration for a long time, believing that I was not charismatic or testicular enough to hold sway over a population, and resigned myself to a schmoozicological life of obscurity. But then. But then! Last year I created a Schlockspot, the very same one that you are wasting your time perusing right now. At first my endeavor had only had a few fringe supporters, a few die-hard devotees who also happened to be, um, my close friends or my blood relatives. Slowly, however, the little Schlock-Site started to pick up more hits. From whence emanated the hits? My site-meter was not so specific, but still it informed me that my Schlocky message was being spread, that the masses were starting to take note. Cult status was within reach. A Schlock-Cult! I could almost taste it! It would be kind of like the Occult, but with less paranormalcy and with more cliched whining about the indignities of the twenty-something life!
Any respectable cult, however, needs a few influential heavyweight members, a few Tom Cruises and John Travoltas. I knew that I had truly broken through when I gained an eminent and well-respected acolyte, one whom I would not have pegged to enjoy amateur scattershot prose peppered with choice words like "dilche," but I would not have pegged Señor Cruise as one to fall at the feet of the Dark Lord Xenu either, so search me. And since I seem to be on a roll with gaining followers these days, I am eying Kevin Costner as a new recruit because he seems ripe for inculcation (doesn't he?) and because he has gills! That could only be an asset!
Also, any respectable cult requires a significant endowment to
