CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In which I become embroiled within a great misunderstanding

 

Now, why what happened next happened, I can only guess at, but let me put on my Mr. Wisdom hat and attempt to briefly examine what became of me during the summer of 1972, when I disappeared into a dense and convoluted mirage from which I felt lucky, many months later, to emerge once again.  You see, up until this point in my life, I had always been 100% right about everything, with the compliment of this precarious imbalance manifesting itself at the same time, which is to say that everybody else was always 100% wrong.  Nobody can live under this kind of pressure indefinitely without some kind of support network, so what I proceeded to do at this point in my journey down the path of righteousness was to become a disciple of those whose expertise in that path had preceded my limited experience by many generations.  I have since come to consider this group of parasites as child pornographers who missed their calling in life, but they would probably prefer to be remembered as Bible-thumping, tongue-wagging, holy-rolling, brain-snuffing cultists whose all-out, hard-core, 100% all-for-the-lord Jesus Freakism was sweeping through the nation’s youth movement at that regrettable point in our nation’s history like napalm through the jungle.  Let me tell you how this came to affect my so-called life.  And it is fortunate that it did, because the experience of spending a year-and-a-half of my life making a complete and utter fool of myself at every conceivable opportunity gave me my first taste of real humility when I eventually woke up from that particular dream, because from then on out I knew somewhere deep inside my empty shell that it was not always necessary for me to protect my sacred dignity above all other things.

So the diagnosis of my deeper wisdom is, as always, that things could have been worse.  I could have been kidnapped by white slavers and sold to Amazons in the jungle for use in secret sex rituals.  But no, I had to be standing out in the middle of the road when the Jesus People came stomping through town, and darned if I didn’t get sucked up into the drama of the whole thing.

What really rips me a new asshole is the way that the real evangelists lay low in the background, putting my recently converted peers up as our new leaders.  One day, when I wandered into the Rabid Flock Jesus Fellowship House, which was financed and directed behind the scenes by crew-cut Republican businessmen from the local Pentecostal churches—and let me say right up front that I was only there in pursuit of a brand-new convert named Pamela Hearty—all I could see was kids my own age grinning from ear to ear, jumping up and down, waving their arms and hollering, and having more fun in five minutes than I had experienced in my whole entire lifetime up to that point.  And to drive the nails the rest of the way into my coffin, up at the front of the room, which was decorated in psychedelic posters and carpeted in scraps and remnants of many colors, up there at the front of that room, with its old rotten floor about to cave in under the leaping masses of ecstatic, youthful Realizers, up there at the very front of that room, beatifically understated in their faded Levis, leather thongs, old flannel shirts, holy T-shirts and halter tops, there sat the most obviously Together group of 19-year-old Perfected Guitar-Plunking Beings that a gloomy, bored, downtrodden, lonely 16-year-old philosopher like myself could ever want to emulate.

And besides, Pamela Hearty was in there somewhere, bouncing up and down with the rest, her impeccable songbird grafting of Mama Cass with Grace Slick carrying out way over the others’ empty heads, and I was just waiting for all this complete nonsense to be over with so I could grab her and continue where I left off when she had ditched me by disappearing into the Rabid Flock after my seventeenth attempt that week to get her alone somewhere.

But being from the wrong side of the tracks, Pamela Hearty knew more ways to ditch boys than there were boys to ditch, and when it was all over with and the crowd had dispersed enough that I could tell she had beaten me out of another chance to prove my love to her, I hung my tail between my legs and slunk out into the night air.  When a pair of blue-jeans and thongs appeared within my sights a few minutes later, I found myself sitting cross-legged in the grass, leaning up against the outside wall of the firehouse next door to Jesus’s house, my plans to commit suicide nearly complete.

I looked up.

It was Larry Love, the young man from up front at the Jesus gathering who looked and sang just like one of my favorite pop idols, Donovan.

He smiled his sad little smile and sat down on the grass at my side.  “You look bummed out,” he said.

That’s their first line of offense:  they get you when you’re displaying your tender underbelly.

I shrugged and looked back at my grass-stained feet.  He wanted to know if I wanted to talk about it.  I told him I didn’t care.  He hugged me and asked me if I’d met Jesus yet, and since I wasn’t sure exactly which Jesus he meant, I just held my tongue.  He wanted to know if I would mind if he prayed with me, and I tried to tell him he’d have to pray all by himself because I didn’t pray with nobody, but I couldn’t quite choke out any words right then, so I just hung my head a little lower when he placed his palms on my thorn-scarred scalp, and let him do his thing.

Then he wanted me to go inside with him.  Well, what the hell, I never could say no to anybody that could tolerate my presence, so in we went, and he started introducing me to the other blue jeans that were set up to look like they were running that joint, and before I knew what was happening, I had promised to come back the very next day, “just to say hello.”

The Rabid Flock Jesus Fellowship House was closed on Sundays.  I found out later this was to keep the local churches from losing business.  But the other side of the closed-on-Sunday trick was that, six days a week, 24 hours a day, the Rabid Flock was Open, Open, Open, and never in my life had I ever found a place where you could go hang out and be part of One Big Happy Family any time of the night or day, where the door was always open and the oldest authority figure in the place was still sizzling from his last big LSD blast, and not shy about talking about it, and not old enough to consider me a pest for coming back every single night for more of his stories about life as an acidhead in the big city.

After I went home that first night, and lay down in my bed in the basement to begin my nightly routine of counting ceiling tiles till morning threatened to rear its ugly head, when I would finally pass out from exhaustion, what happened was that instead of mulling over the day’s endless string of stupid mistakes like I’d always done while waiting for sleep to come, I got extremely pissed at god.  And that just pissed me off worse, because I didn’t even believe in that heartless, soul-sucking, arrogant, flophouse whore who made a dishonest living off the chronic schizophrenia of the human race.  Lying there in a boiling pot of pure rage, there was nothing I could do but to begin losing what was left of my mind, and the most convenient handle I could grab to keep myself from drowning all at once was the old “I’m gonna kill myself” ploy.

As I started going through the usual list of pros and cons, it all became infinitely useless, and even the thought of suicide failed to cheer me up.

At that very moment, a brilliant light suddenly shone through my window.  It was probably the moon coming out from behind a cloud, or a prowler shining his flashlight in the backyard, but for some reason I began repeating the Lord’s Prayer, over and over, until, long before it was scheduled to arrive, sleep came and put me out of my misery.

In the middle of the night, I woke to discover to my shame and utter dismay that there was a smile on my face.  I couldn’t believe it; I had been smiling in my sleep!  I felt like I had been caught masturbating.  I had never been so embarrassed in my life, and hoped that god—not that he existed—wasn’t looking.

I went right back to sleep, and when I woke up the next morning, that asinine thing was still glued to my unwilling face.

That’s really why I went back to the Rabid Flock for the second time:  to find out what the hell was wrong with me.  But I must report, since I am a pathologically honest person like my Mama and my Daddy, that I was miraculously and permanently cured of the insomnia that had plagued my life for sixteen years, and for the next three months I was the happiest human being in Hazing, Kansas.  Not knowing any better at the time, I gave Jesus all the credit, and became one of his greatest supporters.

Becoming a bone-fide Pentecostal is a two-step process.  Unlike the heathen Baptists, who only preached salvation, in which you must confess to God that you are a sinner and invite Jesus Christ His Only Begotten Son to inhabit your empty shell, the Pentecostals went one step further and insisted that their followers also become Filled with the Holy Spirit.  This means that, while your more advanced brethren lay their hands on you, you must invite the Holy Spirit—who is sort of like God’s brother-in-law—to inhabit your empty shell also.  This no doubt serves the purpose of keeping Jesus company.  And if this is true, then Jesus must be multilingual, because the primary symptom of being Filled with the Holy Ghost is that you spontaneously and without any premeditation on your part begin “speaking in tongues.”  Speaking in tongues, or, technically-speaking, “tongue-wagging,” is no mere spewing of gobbledegoop; it is what happens when the Holy Spirit knows better how to pray to God than you do yourself, and so he damn well does it for you.  For you see, that Pentecostal God is so hell-bent on being worshipped that, if necessary, he will just get down on all fours and, by God, worship himself.

In the early days of the Rabid Flock, when the policy was complete openness and the more serious converts like myself were usually to be found hanging out upstairs in Director Larry Love’s apartment, wisely nodding our heads as he recounted tales of his tragic past as a teenage hashish smoker hiding in his Mama and Daddy’s big two-story house on the hill, we were the first to meet the hitchhikers that Larry Love would pick up off the freeway and bring home to test his next Saturday night’s sermon on.  One of these was a young soldier who was either trying to get back to the army base down the road a ways at Fort Riley, or to find the way back to his Mama’s little cabin in West Virginia, I don’t remember which.  He waited till he was alone with me to show me his marvelous mustache, which he had growed all by his self.

The other hitchhiker that I remember most clearly—apart from a few female ones who only spent a night or two at Larry Love’s directorial suite—was Loren Hautberg, the young man with the perennial grin, who Larry had found on a freeway on-ramp, either running away from home or returning home for provisions when Larry found him and hauled him off to the Rabid Flock, where he became saved, filled with the Holy Ghost, and Larry’s right-hand man, eventually succeeding him as the great leader of the Pentecostal Youth Movement in Hazing, Kansas.  He will appear briefly as a prominent figure later in this narrative, but for now I cannot resist the temptation to relate the distressing tale of what happens when a mere donkey-for-the-lord like myself assumes to measure up to a great leader like Loren Hautberg.

The Rabid Flock was a little old wooden two-story house that had been bought by the group of Pentecostal businessmen mentioned earlier as a place to keep their kids and their kids’ friends off the streets, and as a tax-deductible donation to the Lord.  Most of the walls had been torn out of the ground floor area to make a big room out of it, but one bedroom had been kept intact so that difficult cases could be taken aside by God’s cohorts for custom conversion counseling while the bulk of the congregation shouted their Hosannas in the big room.  The little room was right there off of the big room, with nothing separating the two but a flimsy wooden door.

On the night in question, Loren was going through a particularly difficult phase of growing incredibly constipated-in-the-Lord, and he was off in the next room by himself, during the regular well-attended Saturday night celebration, wailing and moaning and hollering at the top of his lungs in some language that I fear even Allah wouldn’t have been able to translate.  As he gave his talk, Larry Love kept looking in that direction, for we could all hear every incomprehensible word, and Larry kept shaking his head in pious admiration of Brother Loren’s obviously total and complete devotion to communicating directly with God.  It soon became apparent to myself and a couple other young men of God that Brother Loren was having a lot more fun exercising his vocal cords than we were having listening to another of Larry Love’s diatribes on what we were and were not supposed to be doing as true members of Jesus’s army.  So we quietly got up and joined Loren in the next room, and before long there were four of us in there, hollering in unison, and it sounded something like this:

 

Oh, balla-walla bing-bang jizmee assmo poo!

Silly-willy ding-dong, credulary too!

Spiffen-spaffum beegee pumpum cravet job-a-lob spittoon,

If’n you can say this you can be a Christian too!

 

Those aren’t the exact words, but God knows what we were trying to say, and that’s all that matters.

Well, pretty soon the tempo picked up a little and the Holy Ghost started competing with himself to see who he could get to holler the loudest and in the most slain-in-the-lord tone of voice.  It got to where I couldn’t even hear the other three above my own hollering, I had become such an open and spontaneous channel for the Holy Ghost to express his most heartfelt disappointment in the human race, and as I knelt on the floor facing the back corner of the room with my tearful eyes squeezed shut, punching a big sofa cushion with my fists, I cannot remember His Ghostliness’s exact words—they being in some unintelligible tongue anyway—but I can clearly recall the tone of my wailing, and in retrospect I think it must have sounded like I was saying—in Murumbu or Swahili or Urguk—something like:  Oh my bleeding asshole of Jesus!  Someone has taken a roto-tiller and chopped up Aunt Harriet’s Chihuahuas into teeny-tiny little pieces!  Somebody call the police!

It was at about this point in the development of my religious frenzy, and just as I was getting wound up to go to the next decibel level, that I was startled by someone tapping me on the shoulder.

The Holy Ghost vacated my vocal cords faster than you can say Jack Sprat could eat no fat, and the first thing I noticed was that there was not a sound in the room, nor any in the next room.

Ever so slowly I hauled my face out of the tear-soaked cushion on the floor and gathered myself together to turn and face the interloper.  It was Larry Love, looking very serious.  Brother Maxwell, he said, Perhaps you would like to join us in the other room so we all can hear the sermon?

Every eye was on me as I obediently pulled myself together and joined the other three, who looked like they felt very lucky to have quit while they were ahead.  They looked so relaxed and natural, sitting in the big room amongst the strangely silent flock, Loren with his perennial grin, Randy leaning against the wall like he’d been there for an hour . . .

It gave me pause.

Of course, my utter and complete mastery of the wholly Pentecostal concept of “being a Fool for the lord” led to my being elected to lead the prayer meetings at school that September.  For it was necessary that we hold our meetings in full view of the entire student body as they socialized before first period, this being the School Without Walls.  Since everybody else was too chickenshit to sit at the place of leadership while our former peers gawked and jeered from the hallway, their view of our activities unmolested by wall or door, I not unwillingly put my relative fearlessness of being considered an absolute fruitcake right up on a pedestal for the world to see, and it was not long before my little sheep—some of whom were trying to hide their Bibles under their math books—had me pegged as a true Asshole for Jesus, in this Great Spiritual Movement.

For you see, my three months of pure joy at having found myself able to sleep at night knowing that I was part of One Big Happy Family had come to a screeching halt when my idols, Tony the ex-Acidhead and his girlfriend Brooksie the Great Mother, had been ousted from the directorship of the Rabid Flock for being a little too interesting, sociable and friendly, and replaced by Larry Love, a serious and complicated young suburbanite guitar-toting ass-kisser who knew the meaning of bedtime—a long-standing midwestern tradition that some Mamas and Daddies in Hazing, Kansas still wished for their children to observe.  Despite my longing for the cherished days-gone-by of the summer of ‘72 and the new lease on life I experienced under the wing of Tony and Brooksie’s companionship, I tried to be fair to Larry in his struggle to make us feel as sad and guilty as he felt, and therein I cannot say that I failed, at least insofar as I myself ended up feeling that way, though I did my best to spread my Christian cheer throughout my unwilling fellowship.  For although I held my post as Head Jesus Freak of Hazing High School South for over a year, it was a dwindling membership that I found myself dictating to each morning:

 

Why aren’t you carrying your Bibles to class for all to see?

Why weren’t you at church Sunday night?

How many heathen sinners have you told about Jesus this week?

Who is going to write an article for the Morning Star newsletter this month?

 

And on and on.

What I could not admit to my increasingly disgruntled congregation was that it was my own rapidly diminishing interest in the Things of the Lord that was driving me into a deep and prolonged depression, a guilt trip of the greatest magnitude, a self-loathing whose depth knew no bounds.