CHURCH, The Television Show
Season One
Episode One
After a terrorist attack on a Spanish Subway, scores of Spanish are dead. Hundreds more are injured. Bloodied and crying faces flash across the television screens at British Intelligence Headquarters.
“The Americans are winning their wars, quite humanely I must say, but they are doing nothing to stop this terror. Their wars are merely fanning the flames in the hearts of these jihadists,” MI-6 implores. “The people the Americans are fighting in the Mid-East are not the threat, we’d never let those guys into our countries. It’s the ones who are already here that we have to worry about- a network of cells that can sleep for decades.”
“So, what do we do?” The Prime Minister asks.
“Well, these suicide bombers who’ll lay down their lives under the guise of religious morality are no more pious than our friends, the American Christians. To remain undetected, the sleepers keep no friends. They have no contact with their families or home countries. All the waiting is quite a bore, I imagine. So they spend their allowances on whores, and drugs, and booze really,” MI-6 educated.
“Yes…,” The Prime Minister salivated.
“The only other people who they contact with are the vilest of criminals, ones who have so much blood on their own hands that they can do nothing else but live by a code of absolute silence,” MI-6 continued. “Let’s put MI-5 into Britain’s sleaziest nightclubs and see just how many terrorists we can flush from the toilets.”
“Yes, MI-6, get the DJ! I like the way you think.”
Six months later, MI-6 is back in The Prime Minister’s office reporting that his program, filling England’s nightclubs full of spies, has netted three separate terrorist cells in two English cities, and that one of these cells had planned an imminent attack.
“Call President Monkey, I think it’s time we tell the Americans how to win this war.”
“That is why you are merely a spy,” Prime Minister laughed. “Don’t you know how the Americans work? President Monkey is just the face they put on T.V. He’s like our Queen, except they actually let him think he’s the one in charge.”
“Who then?” MI-6 asked.
“Call the NSA. They don’t talk to anybody, and they have the entire American military machine at their disposal. Oh, and call your DJ. Tell him to marry an American woman for the citizenship. The Americans are hypocrites when it comes to spies!”
Six months later, in America:
The Manager, a small and humble Marine, is sitting in the British DJ’s office. In only 24 weeks DJ has transformed a decaying nightclub behind The Ballpark into The City’s hottest nightspot by expanding it three-fold and adding a line-up of world-class concert performers. Now, everyone in The City wants to get into Club Babylon.
“DJ, Pawn is calling me every day to meet. Yesterday, at three in the morning, he left a message, crying. He thinks that Club Babylon ruined his life. What are we going to do?” The Manager asked his superior.
DJ’s eyes lit up. “This is perfect,” he exclaimed with the Leprechaun-ish accent he’d not been able to lose. “Give him some cocaine; tell him that it will make him feel much better. We’ll get him hooked, we’ll set him up to become a dealer, we’ll subsidize his trade, and The City’s whores will be eating out of the palm of our hand. We’ll follow the prostitutes who will lead us right to the Hajjis, or whatever you Marines call them.”
“Eh,” Manager groaned, “here you should call them terrorists. What you said is kind-of a slur against Arabs.”
“Just do what I say,” DJ cried.
So, that evening, Manager met with Pawn, who had been a bar-back at Club Babylon all the way up until a week ago, when he quit.
“You’ve ruined my life,” Pawn started to cry. Tears rolled out of his two black eyes and snot bubbled from his broken nose. “Last night two guys jumped me in the alley and said that it’ll be worse next time if I don’t learn to keep my mouth shut. They kept punching me in my belly.” He cried harder, it was hard for The Manager to watch.
“Maybe you should leave town for a little while,” The Manager recommended.
“I can’t. I’ve failed out of school and I’ve lost my loans. I don’t have a job, I don’t have any money. I don’t even think I’m going to make next month’s rent.”
“Well, I’d hate to break this to you, but that’s what happens when you just walk out of your job and you don’t even say why.”
“You want to know why! Somebody told my girl-friend that, when she dies, she’s going to wish that she’d been more promiscuous. She got passed around by the bartenders, I caught herpes, and I got a picture message of her with two dicks in her mouth. Why?! Why?! You want to know why I quit!!” Pawn stood up, full of rage, and lunged at The Manager with clenched fists.
“Look, it wasn’t me. It was DJ who told her that – but I think he was only trying to help you. She’s young, trust me from my experience that girls cheat, and that it was only a matter of time before she cheated on you. Better that you found this out now, than after you got married…you know what I mean?”
Pawn sat back down and started crying again.
“Have some cocaine?” The Manager offered. “It will make you feel much better and you’ll pick up a new girl-friend this weekend. Trust me; girls go crazy for this shit.”
So that Friday night Pawn was back at Club Babylon, coke’d out of his mind. He approached DJ, who was standing in the music booth next to their resident disc-jockey, Mister Made-in-Taiwan.
“Hey Pawn, good to see you back at The Club again and having a good time,” DJ said and slapped the boy on his back. “Been fucking like a bunny lately?”
“How will I have sex with all these sores on my penis?” He asked
DJ dismissed Pawn’s murderous eyes. He chuckled.
“I’m going to fucking kill you!” Pawn screamed, brandishing a knife. He raised it, ready to plunge into DJ’s heart, its silver reflected like glass.
In an instant The Manager ran up from behind Pawn, grabbed his chin, and snapped his neck. The Pawn flopped to the ground; he was dead in an instant.
“Holy Christ, you didn’t have to do that!” DJ exclaimed.
“He was going to kill you! Did you see those eyes? Quick, let’s get him out of here before anyone sees. We’ll throw him off the fire-escape and it’ll look like he fell, or jumped – it’ll look like he took all that cocaine and thought that he could fly. Mister Made-in-Taiwan, hit the lights and turn up the fog; we’re going to need some cover!”
So they did exactly as Manager said and within five minutes both DJ and The Manager were back inside the club. They didn’t even call the cops. No one knew what had happened, except for DJ- a British spy, Manager- NSA, and Mister Made-in-Taiwan.
“If you ever, ever say a word of this to anyone I’m personally going to make sure you never talk again and you are never even going to see it coming.”
“You can’t threaten me,” Mister Made-in-Taiwan, much braver than his five feet in height, challenged. “If I go to the cops you’ll be in jail and I’ll have nothing to worry about. You and DJ, because he is your accomplice.”
DJ was still nervous from it all, plus, he was British and wouldn’t last a second in U.S. Federal Custody. “Look,” he haphazardly prepared to reveal, “what if I told you that The Manager knows the American President and that we can get you anything you want. Pawn was a terrorist, once he wrote about shooting kids in a school,” DJ lied. “Anyway, it was self-defense. Just tell us what you want; we’ll get you anything you want.”
“Manager doesn’t know the President, you guys are lying.”
“Oh yeah,” Manager rolled up his sleeve. “What’s that? It’s the eye of God! Ever looked at the back of a dollar bill?”
“If you’re telling the truth, then I want to play the largest stadium in Taiwan, so my whole family knows what a star I really am. If you make that happen, then I’ll never tell another soul.”
“Done!” DJ promised.
After everyone had left the club, including the last ‘regular’ employee, DJ and The Manager poured themselves two large glasses of vodka so they too would wake up with little recollection of what actually happened that night.
“You shouldn’t have promised that, you over-stepped your authority,” The Manager condemned.
“You’re the one who-,” DJ stopped; silence was something the British were good at when it came to lies and spies. “Anyway, it worked didn’t it? He’ll never talk again.”
“Yeah, except that the NSA very much prefers to speak to the President as little as possible and now I’m going to have to find a way to get one of the worst disc-jockeys in The City booked at some stadium in Taiwan…if they even have a stadium.”
“Here is what you do…run it up the ol’ American flag pole and have the DOD tell the Army to sell some of its outdated helicopters rusting out in South Korea to the Taiwanese Government. In exchange, they’ll throw some National march parading the helicopters and they can book Mister Made-in-Taiwan to play the music. It’ll be great; I can just see it now.”
“Yeah, the Chinese are going to love that deal. It would’ve been easier to have just made him disappear, you know what I mean?”
“And then everyone in the club would be out looking for him. No, this is much better. You’re friends in the Army might even make a little black-ops money on the side from the arms sale.”
The next morning, Pawn’s body was discovered lifeless in the alley behind Club Babylon by The Garbage Men. And that night, The City cops interviewed everybody that had worked at The Club the night before.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Manager repeated to The Detective.
“One of your employees falls from the fire-escape and nobody notices that he was missing? Nobody calls to report it?”
“That guy walked out on his job a week ago and never said a word to us since. I wasn’t even aware that he was here last night. Did you check him for drugs? He probably thought that he could fly and jumped from that balcony.”
“If I find out that you’re lying to me I’ll personally make sure that you go to jail for obstruction of justice, for interfering with a murder investigation,” The Detective threatened.
“Oh, relax. Check his blood. Like I said, I’ll bet you that he jumped,” The Manager brushed aside.
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