He came to save souls… but first he had to score.

The year was whatever you wanted it to be. Probably ’75. Maybe ’77. There was still garbage in the streets, heroin in the veins, and Patti Smith howling through busted windows on Avenue C.

Jesus of Avenue B stood shirtless in a stolen chinchilla coat, cigarette dangling, eyeliner melting. His feet were filthy. His hands? Also filthy. Everything was filthy. That was the point.

“We need eggs,” he said, looking around the theater squat like he was about to give the Sermon on the Fucking Mount. “Real ones. Not chocolate. Not plastic. Hen-laid, Harlem-fried, goddamn honest-to-God eggs.”

Peter, who hadn’t bathed since Watergate, looked up from his perch on a stained mattress. “The bodega two blocks down has ’em. I saw a crate get dropped this morning.”

Jesus turned to Judas, who was cleaning his nails with a switchblade and wearing a leather vest with nothing underneath. His afro was tight, his voice tighter.

“Time for a heist?” Judas grinned.
“Time for a heist,” Jesus echoed.

That night, they descended upon El Rey de Huevos, a grimy 24-hour joint that smelled like fried plantains and cat piss. Jesus walked in first, kissed the cashier on the forehead, and pulled a smoke bomb out of his boot.

“Let there be fog,” he whispered, dropping it to the tile.

Chaos.

While Jesus distracted the staff with existential questions about mayonnaise, Judas and Bartholomew snuck through the back and loaded two trash bags full of real eggs — fresh, cold, and gently rattling like secrets waiting to be broken.

They made it back to the squat just before dawn.

The Coloring

Mary Magdalene — or Mags, as she insisted people call her now — leaned over the trash can fire and squinted. Her mascara was older than most of the kids OD’ing outside. She looked like Andy Warhol’s muse if that muse got kicked out of The Factory for having too many opinions.

“You boys got your eggs?” she rasped, adjusting her balls and tossing her long, tangled wig over one shoulder.

“We got more than that,” said Jesus, dumping the contents of the bag onto a busted poker table.

Judas pulled out a box of Rit dye and a half-used bottle of red Manic Panic. “Let there be color,” he declared, as if Moses himself had just turned bathwater into Kool-Aid.

They boiled the eggs on a hot plate plugged into a stolen extension cord, dipped them in piss-colored water and food coloring that had expired during the Nixon administration. John the Baptist showed up with a sock full of glitter and a fifth of Wild Turkey.

“We gonna hide these for the children?” asked Peter.

Jesus shook his head. “No, Peter. These eggs aren’t for the children. They’re for the lost. The broken. The junkies and whores. The night people.”

Mary snorted. “So… the children of New York.”

They dyed fifty-two eggs. One for each week of the year. One for each of Jesus’ silent screams into the void. One was just Sharpied with the words “FUCK YOU, DAD.”

It was holy.

The Hiding

By Easter morning, the city was glowing like a festering wound under neon stitches. They hit the streets at 3 a.m. — Jesus, Mary, Judas, Peter, John, and the rest of the dirty dozen — tucking dyed eggs into sewer grates, leaving them in ashtrays, under sleeping bag nests of the unhoused, inside the mouths of payphones. One went into the pocket of a dead cabbie slumped over his wheel. He looked peaceful. Like he’d won.

Jesus placed an egg on the steps of St. Mark’s and crossed himself in beer.

“You know what this is?” he asked Judas.

“Performance art?”

“No. It’s resurrection. It’s fucking hope, man.”

Behind them, Mary Magdalene was turning tricks in the alley next to an adult video arcade, trying to score enough for a bag of dirty heaven.

“This city don’t want a savior,” she said, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of a stolen mink. “It wants a hit.”

Jesus lit her cigarette. “Same thing.”

The Crucifixion That Wasn’t

Later, Jesus preached in front of a condemned movie palace on Rivington, standing on a milk crate throne with graffiti angels behind him and a blacked-out marquee that read “2 /7 X XX F I M S”

The congregation was cracked-out, crust punk, cross-legged and cross-faded. Former drag queens, future overdoses, and everything in between. Every word He said was gospel — not the kind in dusty pews, but Gutter Glam Gospel — written on bathroom walls and passed out in matchbooks at peep shows.

“I say unto you,” he cried, “the meek will not inherit shit unless they steal it back!”

Cheers.

“And the pure in heart? They’re already dead or in Jersey!”

More cheers.

“And I — I shall be crucified not on a hill, but in a tenement, by the very people I came to save!”

Silence.

Mary sat off to the side in a faux-fur coat that still had a price tag dangling from the armpit. It read $2.99 – Value Thrift. Her legs were hairy. Her face was beat to hell but her lipstick was a challenge. Mary had the presence of someone born with a dick and baptized in sequins. The kind of woman Andy Warhol would’ve traded his last Polaroid for. She was what she was before there was language for it, before it was cool or political — just necessary.

A girl with a trucker cap and fire in her eyes pushed through the crowd. Young, fierce, furious. The kind of feminist who quoted Gloria Steinem like she was Che Guevara but never paid for her own abortion.

She raised a pistol. Chrome glint. Eyes glass.

“Your Messiah is just a man!” she hissed. Jealousy wrapped in ideology. Holy rage. Diked out. “God doesn’t come in eyeliner anymore. God doesn’t come at all!”

Cli—

Mary’s body moved on instinct — high heels clacking, adrenaline roaring. In one motion, she yanked that heroin needle she’d saved for later from her bra, popped the cap, and whipped it through the air like a carnival dart.

Mid-arc, Bartholomew leapt up — junkie reflexes like divine choreography — and caught the syringe midair. With a holy shout and a junkie’s aim, he alley-ooped it straight into the feminist’s temple.

Click. Pop. Plunge.

The gun fired — wide, into a mailbox. The bullet ricocheted off a STOP sign and hit nothing but shame. Maybe a homeless guy, who knows.

The girl gasped, staggered, tried to scream — but the direct mainline to the brain hit faster than any ideology. She started convulsing and violently coughing out blood, then collapsed sideways like a puppet cut from God’s own string.

High. Then Dead. Both.

“Wow, that’s some good dope,” John said.

“You know I ain’t no bottom feeder,” Mary argued despite the compliment.

Judas reached into the shooter’s jacket, pulled out a Velcro Caterpillar wallet on its chain, and grinned. “Bitch got fifties.”

Peter grabbed the gun. A Saturday night special, .22 short. “What do we do with this?”

Jesus, calm as ever, nodded toward the East River. “Let it be baptized.”

The Gospel According to the Rats

They left the body behind a Howard Johnson’s dumpster, tucked into a busted milk crate like expired produce. Her fingers still clutched the pistol that was no longer there. Blood seeped between the sidewalk cracks like it was looking for a place to hide. Maybe it was.

The rats would get her before the cops did. That was the liturgy of the Lower East Side.

Mary pulled a crumpled tissue from her purse, dabbed the corner of her mouth, and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. “She was aiming for the wrong Messiah,” she said, voice all husk and drag queen tragedy.

Bartholomew pocketed the last of the cash. “You think she was with the feds?”

“No,” said Jesus, wiping blood from his sleeve like it was dust. “She was with something worse. She believed in something.”

They didn’t run. They strolled. Like royalty in a burned-out kingdom, like the saints of a failed religion. Jesus carried a carton of stolen eggs under his arm, dyed with food coloring and Kool-Aid, some cracked and leaking yolk like soft-spoken martyrdom.

Peter tossed the gun into the East River. It hit the water like a baptism gone wrong. Just another toy from a city full of broken things, at the bottom of a river of broken dreams.

They caught the F train at Delancey. The platform smelled like piss and revolution. The kind of place that always felt like it was waiting for someone to get famous or die.

Across from them sat a bunkie — skin yellow, eyes rattling in his skull like loose change. His lips were twitching. Withdrawal poetry. Probably hadn’t seen decent dope in weeks. Bartholomew handed him a half-dyed egg.

“Happy Easter,” he said.

The bunkie smiled like it was gold.

The train screeched into the tunnel and Jesus and Mary boarded, settling into plastic seats like king and queen on a palanquin to nowhere. Mary curled against Jesus’s shoulder. She looked like a murder scene dressed for a disco.

Jesus kissed her on the forehead. “You’re my favorite miracle,” he whispered.

“I know,” she said, adjusting her balls, then her wig, with bloody fingers, “You ever feel like we’re not coming back?”

“We never do,” said Jesus.

As the doors closed, their friends, The Apostles of the Resurrection Hustle (or of the Velvet Pain, depending who you asked), stood on the platform — Judas, Bartholomew, Peter, John, Thomas, and the others — still high, still laughing, still blessed in the dirtiest way possible. They waved like it was the end of a funeral or the start of a sequel.

The subway slipped into darkness.

And Judas, leaning back against a pillar, flicked a lighter to life and grinned at the other guys.

“Aight, boys… where the white women at?”

The End.