..."wasn't that the Jackson family over there in the corner?" thought Mookie.
It wasn't their singing that caused him to notice. Like everyone else in the Hall, their lips barely moved as they stared blankly ahead.
"I wonder how long Mrs. Jackson spends picking out all those afros. Well, I suppose it would take about 10 minutes for each one, and, let me count... just how many kids?..."
The complexity of this mental arithmatic would have been painful had not the song "Purple Haze" been looping through his head. That had a rather calming effect on him, perhaps because it reminded him of his last really good trip, about six years ago...
...just about all thought in Mookie's cognitively dissonant mind ceased right then. Before the startlingly uplifting chorus "but the Bible tells us that soon there will be..." could jostle him out of his reverie, his eyes rolled back in his head; he even began to drool.
If someone would have been watching his lips just then, focusing on, not the drool, but the intent of Mookie's sub-sub-sub cortex to utter praise for this sublime moment, they could have seen a barely preceptible, "wowwwwwwwwww"
...
"I SAW YOU drooling over Sister Doogooder's rear during the song!!!!"
Mookie was being accosted at the close of the meeting by an older woman he hadn't even met. He knew that he hadn't been checking out Sister Doogooder's rear. Well, she had been standing right in front of him.
But if he had been thinking of anything besides good-trippin' (somehow 1969 was the year of only GOOD trips), Jimi Hendrix, and how many Jackson's there were besides the 5 with which he was so familiar, it was only Cookie.
"Oh really, you don't know what I'm talking about?" shouted the old woman, unaware that Mookie was not nearly as deaf as she.
"Well, you should pay more attention then, sonny! I was with her yesterday when she picked out her dress for next week's Memorial, and...now let's see what was I talking about...oh yes, she said something..."
Then her voice dropped to a whisper, which sounded as if she were whistling through her gums. She pulled Mookie really close to her face, still thinking he was deaf (or stupid). For a moment, Mookie thought he saw infinity in the depths of that toothless, dark maw.
"She said something about being excited to have an occasion to dress real pretty. She picked out a nice blue dress, and you know she hasn't worn any color since her sister, Diana Ross, quit studying and decided to do a remake of The Wizard of Oz. Are you baptized yet, or still studying? Because, you know, we're having the Memorial next week. You are coming, right?"
Mookie knew neither what this 'Memorial' was all about, nor this 'baptism' mumbo jumbo. But he did recall faintly overhearing some comment by Brother Doogooder about 'dunking him before the Memorial'. And it did sound strange to be invited over for a Memorial day pool party in April! <edited to omit commit about Mookie mistaking the pink sausage for 'bloodless'>
Mookie tried to pull himself away from the old woman before she sucked anymore life out of him. But he couldn't escape her grasp, or her fetid breath, just yet.
"Can't you see??? She likes you!"
But just then Mookie saw Cookie leaving the Kingdom Hall. And she was all he saw. Oh, and the numbers 36, 26, and 36 (Not to be confused with 666) for some reason popped into his head.
As Mookie wondered why she was leaving without saying goodbye, or even hello, little did he know that she was thinking of a) how sexy she would look in a nice new blue dress (coincidentally, of course), and b) whether her husband would notice she had snuck out with his checkbook.
Little did she know that the checkbook she had grabbed was actually...