Every morning at dawn—including this very morning, this very dawn—the Prophet of the Present bends over the side of his pocket cruiser moored time immemorial in the 79th Street Boat Basin on the Isle of Manhattoes and dunks his head into the Hudson. Oh, that’s briny, bracing, thick with city slime. Bass with bizarre stripes and American shad mutated beautifully by Indian Point shimmer by. Yet this little head-sized patch of the Hudson is not merely water and human waste and plastic nurdles; it’s also the river of history, a tremulous leyline that only he can see. There! No, here! Ahoy, motherfuckers! Stand clear of the closing doors, please!
The Prophets sees and sees and sees. He spots an oyster from the prehistoric era, hello, a bivalve the size of a man, a corn-fed offensive guard from contemporary heartlands who took the Greyhound to the Port Authority to make it on Broadway. The Prophet gives the oyster a perfunctory wave, yoo-hoo, because he’s a busy man, the Prophet is, was, has been and will be, his calendar loaded with appointments unending and uncountable.
The Prophet blinks. A drowning Viking sinks under the weight of a broad sword he’ll never swing again. The Viking has a message for this apparition of a head above him and the Prophet hears his final words and promises, with a wink and a consoling head shake, to preserve them for the betterment of posterity, a scrap of knowledge to help hammer into shape the hot metal arc of history, twisting it toward the Good and the Kind and the Just. See the sparks fly, hear the anvil sing!
The current changes. The Prophet blinks. Two Lenape children canoe by, dragging their fingers in the water like little rudders. The shore is coated in a cool fire of endless old growth green. Again, the current shifts. Again, the Prophet blinks. Bottoms of tugboats churn along the river above. Owned by gilded robber-barons, they’re the fat blood cells of this watery artery, circulating coal and grain and fish and iron. If there’s a truth here or there, now or then or anywhen, rest assured the Prophet intuits it, gleans it from the muffled gurgling the engines thrum in underwater hiccups and burps, from the children’s laughter, in the Viking’s dying eyes. He blinks again and is launched into a Hudson of the future, fatter, wider, eating into Jersey’s Palisades, clawing its way into the city’s subways, dropping in a maddening trickle on the forehead of the American economy and this Chinese water torture is a language too which the Prophet understands. The world bustles. Commuters clog all the highways as the Prophet skips and hops across time with his head submerged, his pocket cruiser rocking with the current. The city continues to city.
The Prophet withdraws from the river, towels off, turns on his single burner marine stove and makes a cup of Zabar’s Vienna Roast the mayor keeps him supplied with as part of the memorandum of understanding he signed with the first human to scramble through the forests of this island, bare-assed, wide-eyed and terrified. He renews it with every mayor though Bloomberg dragged his feet hoping the Prophet had some lucrative stock tips he’d be willing to share and Fernando Wood, that slippery skinflint, tried to raise his moorage fees. Oh, the Prophet is willing to share, to pay. Just not with stock tips. He wants to share his knowledge for what good is a prophet sans a prophecy? He does just this daily at dusk, resubmerging his head into his beloved Hudson, and yelling across time to all who drift by, warning bridge builders of the bends and intelligence agencies of impending attacks and party bosses of consequential elections and researchers of pandemics gurgling in the blood and guts and brains of bats and chimps and thirsty skeeters.
The Prophet suffers for his art. He believes in his cause, his responsibility. Believes in humanity. In communication. In truths that shine for and across and in all times, for all peoples, to illuminate the dark nooks in their hearts and drive away the demons of Want and Fear and Pain (Why, didn’t old Fiorello La Guardia give shovels to the hobos so they could build playgrounds? Didn’t Giuliani flood the subterranean homeless out of their hidden caverns and flush them down the coast? And what about Big Bill de Blasio routing the charter schools? Or Adams skewering all those sneaky rats?). Fling the doors wide, the Prophet commands, and welcome the angels of Love and Peace and Wisdom. Excelsior! The Big Apple is sweet and crisp and ripe for the picking!
The city in all its iterations is on tenterhooks. The audience is rapt, hushed, attentive. They hunger for the Prophet’s truths, willing ears in ageless pews paying desperate heed to the strange head floating above or beneath or within them, as the case may be, as the mayor’s policy dictates or the epoch allows, as the Prophet sucks in sewage overflow and chemical run-off and fish turds and flesh decaying off the corpses of cement-shoed mobsters and urban explorers, lapping up the river fed by the hot and rising sea, he simultaneously spews out these prophecies, dutifully ejaculating a spume of invaluable auguries—including this very evening, this very dusk—yet no one understands a single word.
— Jon Doughboy was an emerging writer in the short-lived Hobbyist Scribbler Movement (2023 – 2024) which sought to defetishize writing, focusing not on writing as a craft or a credentialed profession or a precious calling, but a hobby, even a fun one. He was found drowned in the toilet in the third stall of the men’s room at the Walt Whitman Travel Plaza in New Jersey. Police ruled it an uncanny accident but his fellow hobbyist scribblers know his blood is on Literature’s joyless hands. Read his obituary @doughboywrites