keyword "masquerade" title "at the gates of heaven" in "the next big thing" flash fiction

If you’re famous, on your death, some hack cartoonist will draw the shallowest representation of your life, standing at the gates of heaven. Even if you died at ninety, if the thing you’re famous for happened when you were nineteen, that’s what you will be drawn as at the gates of heaven.

Even if what made you famous ended up limiting you, type-cast you, made you one-dimensional, even if it was a blip in the ocean of what really defined you, a minor accomplishment compared to your far-finer less well-known deeds, your family or charity or hard-earned life philosophies, that is how you will be, drawn in the end at the gates of heaven.

Even if you didn’t believe in the mainstream Christian heaven, even if you didn’t believe in any afterlife at all, if you thought you’d be reincarnated, taken to Valhalla or simply stopped being anything, there the thinnest version of your life will be, standing in front of Saint Peter and he
will spout a sad or funny version of some ancient catchphrase of yours at the gates of heaven.

Adam West hadn’t been Batman since nineteen sixty-eight, yet fifty years later he was in that damn cowl and masquerade in his thirties again, climbing a bat-rope up to Saint Peter’s door.

This is what fame does, you think it helps the world understand you, you think it may help other people better understand themselves through the manifestations of your works but in death, you will be reduced to a soundbite version, a Cliffs Notes xerox-copy of yourself. Jesus Christ was a socialist who preached to hookers and day-laborers, told folks to pay their taxes and to take axes up against corrupted churches and the banks. But the elevator pitch about coming back from the dead and you can too, that was the hook His friends used to market His philosophy out to the rest of the world and pretty soon all that was left, the hook. Now there are Prosperity Gospel and now there are Crusades and now there are people justifying hatred of the outcast by quoting one of the promotional books. Because the price of being renown all the world around is that most people will only give a damn about the hook.

Prince with that weird logo-shape guitar at the gates of heaven. Bowie in Ziggy Stardust make-up he’d retired in the Seventies at the gates of heaven. Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire gag-drag at the gates of heaven. Jesus on the cross at the gates of heaven.

Fame will take that from you, make the whole world remember your name but also completely misremember you, leave you as a fill-in-the-blanks cartoon climbing Paradise’s walls on a rope in your old bat-suit, at the gates of heaven. Not that I wouldn’t try it, of course, we all believe we are the exception to the rule, even though we won’t be, even though we’re all fools, once we get to the gates of heaven.

Last updated August 02, 2018