CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In which I find it advantageous to change horses in midstream

 

It was during the summer between my junior and senior years of high school that, with the assistance of my on-and-off Brother in the Lord, Batanwa Jim—who was usually confused enough to go along with anything that involved companionship—I committed the Great Indiscretion.

It had come to my attention, by way of the religious leaders who did most of my thinking for me, that the Arts were the sole territory of God, and that any work of art that was not created specifically to Praise His Name was, by default, a work of the Devil, and must be denounced and destroyed.  There were even art forms, such as dancing and playing cards, that were so inherently blasphemous that there was no True Christian version of them at all.

One of my tasks as a Guitar Plunker for Jesus was to re-write popular songs in order to make God’s music of them.  But I had a collection of phonograph records, including some old 78 rpm collector’s items I had lifted from my parents, that had once been my pride and joy, and which were now taunting me from the depths of my closet.

“Destroy us,” those records kept saying.  “We are evil.”

It was not an easy thing to comply with.  But destruction of prized rock music collections was quite the thing among Rabid Flockers that summer, and had become the mark of a true warrior for Christ, so finally the challenge of keeping up with the Joneses got the better of me, and I could no longer ignore my spiritual obligation to irradiate the Devil’s work.

It was as if I expected to one day leave the Lord’s work behind me, and was saving those depraved Simon and Garfunkel records for such a day.  Such a back door faith was inexcusable.

So I recruited Batanwa Jim one day when I knew my house would be empty, knowing that my Mama would have me thrown in the nuthouse before she would let me destroy my music collection, and after I wheedled and guilt-tripped Batanwa Jim out of his initial hesitancy, we ceremoniously smashed to splinters all the Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, Tiny Tim, Gordon Lightfoot, etc., that I had spent most of my allowance on for the past several years.

By that time the room was covered with splintered vinyl, since the modern record album was purposely made nearly unbreakable, and it required a sincere effort to break them over our knees, and the black splinters had flown everywhere.  By the time I’d finished destroying the manuscripts of the two novels I’d written when I lived in Albuquerque, Batanwa Jim was dancing around and shrieking like a banshee, the Irish spirit that wails and moans to prophesy impending doom.  I was so pissed at myself that I scrounged around for something else to destroy, and in my sober ecstasy I landed on the old 78s, which I had not planned to break since they were irreplaceable, and they weren’t even mine.  But the momentum of my Great Indiscretion overcame my hesitancy, and—

—but wait.  What is an old 78?

 

“Barney Google with the Goo-Goo-Googley Eyes:”  may you rest in peace, my cartoon brother; as punishment I later spent many agonizing hours in your cartoon nightmare world, waiting for megadoses of hallucinatory concoctions to depart my bloodstream.

 

Life gets Teejus, Don’t It?

 by Carson Robison

 

The sun comes up, and the sun goes down,

the hands on the clock keep going around,

I just get up, and it’s time to lay down.

Life gets teejus, don’t it?

 

Hound dog howlin’ so forlorn,

laziest dog that’s ever been born.

He’s howlin’ ‘cause he’s settin’ on a thorn,

and he’s just too tired to move over.

 

 

And there was “Open the Door, Richard,” a comedy about a man who comes home at 4:00 one ice-cold morning and has forgotten his key, and no matter how much he pounds on the door and bemoans his condition, he can’t get his roommate to wake up and let him in:

 

Open the door, Richard!

Open the door and let me in!

Open the door, Richard!

Richard why don’t you open the door!

 

For my part in the Great Indiscretion, I was punished several years later by being forced to act out “Open the Door, Richard” on the front stoop of a house in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district where me and Batanwa Jim had gone to purchase marijuana and LSD.  We were staying the night at our dealer’s apartment, and he had gone out on a date and left me and Batanwa Jim to sample his wares.  After we smoked our brains out, I had to go over to see another dealer about some LSD, and was nearly mugged when I got there, until I convinced my would-be mugger that I was just a penniless, drugless, lunatic wandering the streets.  When I finally got through buying the LSD from a character who was almost as bad as the joker that tried to mug me, I went back to the apartment where Batanwa Jim and I were staying.  He had passed out from smoking too much, and I couldn’t make him wake up.  The neighbor upstairs refused to come down and open the door, and hollered down from his balcony that if I didn’t stop ringing the buzzer, he’d call the police.  Since I was carrying drugs, I had to sit there quietly in my shirtsleeves and freeze till 4:00 in the morning when Batanwa Jim finally woke up and came downstairs to look for me.

It was a small price to pay for having committed the Great Indiscretion.

If not for the courage of my fearless hormones, I might have slipped inextricably into that unfathomable morass of trying to please the Perfect One who I had invited to inhabit my empty shell, but because those other internal hombres wouldn’t take no for an answer, whereas the Jesus living in my empty shell was starting to sound like a wimpy perfectionist, it eventually became necessary for me to make room for my greater interests, one of which was being free to lust after young women without having to ask God’s forgiveness each time, and the other being the need to think for myself and to occasionally act on my own impulses.  Let me attempt to relate how my career in God’s Kingdom came to its bitter end.

As I started into my senior year of high school and my second year as leader of the school prayer meetings, I couldn’t help but notice that my followers’ previous lack of responsiveness had, during the course of the summer vacation, evolved into a stony-faced silence that my insides read as firm resolve:

I could tell that they were not going to take any more of my shit.

So after a few more pathetic attempts to pretend that I was capable of leading them in the Joy of the Lord, I stopped going to prayer meetings altogether, allowing my own inner joy to emerge publicly for the first time in over a year, as that thing called backsliding.

The official definition of backsliding is “doing what you want,” and since it had been the aim of my style of Christianity to abort this type of thing, the relief that I felt when my backslidden state was no longer my little secret was substantial enough to keep me alive, but since I still believed that I was being bad, it soon became apparent that further steps would need to be taken.  After fifteen months of not enjoying most aspects of what I was professing to believe in, I had little hope of finding the answer anywhere, but in my profound confusion I found myself, one fateful evening, back at the Rabid Flock, being too depressed to finish my janitor job at the Presbyterian Church that my Mama and Daddy belonged to.

I snuck in the back door of the newly carpeted and painted Rabid Flock and slithered way into the back of the big room, which was packed with conservative-looking kids who had never met Tony and Brooksie and would probably not have had the imagination to have appreciated doing so.  I leaned up against the back corner of the room.  The lights were out for some reason; perhaps they were showing Jesus movies, or maybe they were sacrificing babies.  I don’t remember, and wasn’t paying attention anyway, as I closed my eyes and let my regret-infested mind wander back over my career as a Fool for Jesus, from the early companionship and good vibes, to the last thing I’d let myself get sucked into, which was to become the necktie-wearing disciple of Brother Headfull, the truck driver-turned-preacher who commandeered the Foursquare Gospel Church and had become the real dictator of what had once been the Rabid Flock Fellowship House, and by Fellowship I mean the act and feeling of being together because it felt good.  Under Brother Headfull’s tutelage, Larry Love’s sad little smile had disappeared altogether, and his formerly milquetoast pussywhippings of his congregation had degenerated to the point that he was just clinging to his job as long as he could, though he obviously wasn’t having any fun.

Three major influences conspired to get me to the point of giving up on the whole Jesus thing:  one was my job, which was one obligation too many, piled up as it was on top of the infinite obligation of giving up my identity to serve God; another was Tony and Brooksie’s wedding in Oklahoma City, where Larry Love was best man and I was next to best man, and where I learned the sad truth about what my young leaders did when they weren’t on stage at the Rabid Flock; and another was the last time I ever attended Brother Headfull’s church.

There had been a guest preacher that night at Brother Headfull’s church, a man whose specialty was casting out demons.  After a rousing hellfire-and-damnation sermon and hours of swaying and waving our arms in the air and hollering gibberish, we were about ready to pass out, and it was then that the long-awaited demon-casting performance finally began.

The guest preacher, Brother Dalbert Moribund, gave an altar-call, instructing anybody who was led by the spirit to believe that their empty shell might be inhabited by demonic forces, to come on down and get reamed out by the Mighty Sword of the Lord.

In my desperately depressed condition I was ready to try anything, and as a matter of fact I wouldn’t have missed a good sword-reaming for the world.  Somehow I ended up on the far right end of the line of swaying, demon-infested, True Believers that stretched across the front of the sanctuary in front of the altar.  Since Brother Moribund started his performance at the other end of the line, I got to stand up there and watch everyone else’s demons get exorcised first.  And this is what I saw:

First, Brother Moribund warned the congregation to not be shocked if people had a tendency of being “slain in the spirit” when he cast out their demons.  He explained that it was perfectly normal for a body to swoon upon the departure of the evil forces that had been inhabiting it.

One by one, each victim would get Brother Moribund’s big sweaty hands pushing down and back on his head, while an assistant would stand behind the victim and place comforting hands on the victim’s burdened shoulders, with perhaps a slight backwards tugging so they wouldn’t fall forward and hit their heads on the altar.  Finally, after screaming in all kinds of languages known only to the Holy Ghost, and with the crowd in a similar sort of uproar, Brother Moribund would signal the devil’s departure with a final, “Begone Satan!” and a backwards shove, and the poor victim’s eyes would roll back in his or her head and he or she would swoon backwards into the waiting arms of the assistant, who would gingerly lay him or her on the floor.  The little toothless man who served as usher was hovering around with a handful of white cloth hankies, so that when women wearing skirts fell down he could place the hankies on their legs, to keep the demons from looking up their dresses.

Ever so slowly, the front of the sanctuary filled up with prostrate forms, until no one was left standing but me.  When Brother Moribund finally placed his big sweaty palms on my head and started pushing, I sensed that he was getting a little tired and maybe eager to finish for the evening, because it seemed that he was pushing harder than he really needed to.  Being a big, strong 17-year-old, that didn’t bother me much, and I stood up straight and tall and waited to be slain in the spirit.

And waited and waited and waited.

Nothing happened the first time Brother Moribund cried, Begone Satan! and tried to push me over, so he gibbered a bit more and tried a little harder.  I swayed a little bit but got my balance back and planted my feet a little farther apart so I wouldn’t accidentally fall down.  I was after the real thing; I really needed some help.  I was not going to fall down prematurely and miss my chance to have all my problems really disappear down the magical drain that empties into the bowels of hell.

And then, guess what happened?  He gave up!  He just up and walked away from me, leaving me standing there like an idiot, with fifteen other idiots to my left being helped up off the floor by their tearful friends and relatives, congratulating them on their successful fight against the plague of Hell’s hounds.

Of course I did not know, and Brother Moribund failed to tell me, that my demon had left me a long time ago, which is the only reason I wound up as a victim of religious con artists anyway.  My demon would have known better.

I stood there awhile, invisible in my conspicuity, while the slain victims were helped back to their pews.  I found a seat too, but it was not the pew I had been sitting in before the exorcism; it was the driver’s seat of my truck which was parked out front.  Since then I have avoided any public performance that requires me to fall down in order to receive the applause of my peers.

On second thought, maybe I should wish that were true.

Anyhow, there I was leaning in the back corner of the big room at the Rabid Flock, thinking about something I’d read about how religious devotees and other cultists will rationalize away any contradictions that threaten their absolute, unquestioned belief in whatever swill their self-serving leaders try and get them to swallow.  Rationalize.  That was a new word for me.  It had been pursuing me for weeks.

“Brother Maxwell.”  It was a familiar voice.  I opened my eyes to discover that the service was over and the room had pretty much emptied out.  There stood my friend Paco, with his gentle smile.  Paco’s Daddy was a math professor and his Mama was a former Southern Baptist missionary.  Paco and his big brother were the two smartest kids in my whole entire school.

“I thought you’d backslidden,” I said.

“I have backslidden, and I am enjoying it very much, praise the lord!  How are you sliding yourself?”

I looked at my shoes.  “Jesus is trying my patience.  I guess he’s trying to make me grow up.”

Paco looked deep into my empty shell, and made a noise in his throat so that I knew he was about to say something important.  “Maxwell, here is a parable for you.  Let’s say you are a delicate little plant.  Now presume that Jesus wants you to grow.  What is he going to do to get you to grow?  Step on you?  Or water you?”

I looked into Paco’s clear, shiny eyes, and a light came out of his forehead and zapped me right between my eyes, and started something vibrating in there.

I took Paco home in the ‘52 Chevy pickup my Daddy had gotten for me to drive around in, and went back to the Presbyterian church to finish my job.  I was in the sanctuary vacuuming, which was my least favorite part of a job that I hated in general, and I couldn’t get Paco’s parable out of my vibrating head.  Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I had a talk with Jesus—in English—in which I told him what a miserable person I had become, trying to have a relationship with him.  I complained about walking around like a basket case, riddled by guilt for not reading my Bible every day, not praying enough, not witnessing, not being joyful in the lord, and on and on, and when I ran out of words to say, I sat down on a pew and listened for his response.

“Maxwell,” said a voice that I hadn’t heard in over 17 years.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s me, Jesus.”

“It doesn’t sound like the Jesus I know.”

“I have many voices.  Listen, Maxwell.  This is about our relationship.”

“Yes?”

“You’ve got me all wrong, kid.  I’m a big boy.  I’m God’s only begotten son, for Christ sake.  I get more love and devotion than I know what to do with.  Most of it is so sick and twisted I can’t even use it.  You should see the scrap heap out back.  It’s downright dangerous.  Do you really feel like you have to add more garbage to my pile?”

“But, Larry Love and Brother Headfull told me—”

“They are not Jesus.  I am Jesus.  Now listen to me, Maxwell, and listen good.  My Daddy gave you your very own eyes, ears, heart and brain.  If he wanted a robot he would have made you a robot.  But God didn’t make robots because he isn’t interested in robots.  He likes people.  He says he was one himself once, on some other planet.  You can’t believe everything you are told by everyone who considers himself the ultimate expert on me and my Daddy.”  The voice paused, and then continued.  “I have a plan for you, Maxwell.  Do you want to hear it?”

I thought for a second, and nodded.

“You’re fouling your own nest with useless emotions that don’t even belong to you, and frankly, I don’t need that shit from you or anyone else.  I’m releasing you, as of this very moment, from any and all obligations that my so-called representatives have foisted on you.  Your backsliding days are over.  You are now an upslider.  I don’t need your devotion.  Have a relationship with someone else.  Here, I have just the companion for you . . . Good-bye, Maxwell.  Have fun upsliding.”

I felt Jesus slipping away from me, and at the same time, I felt the vibration in my forehead spread into my empty shell and fill it up, and then the vibration spoke to me:

“Hello, Maxwell.”

It was a familiar voice, but I couldn’t place it.  “Who are you?”

“I’m an old friend.  We used to be partners.”

“Where have you been?”

“Here and there.  Sniffing into things.  Doing research.  Hunting for treasure.”

“Are you going to live in my empty shell from now on?”

“Only as long as you let me.  The minute you start up with your crap, I’ll be gone again.”

“What crap would that be?”

“You’ll find something.”

I stood up and finished vacuuming the carpet, and the conversation with my demon gradually faded from my memory.  For the first time in many months, I felt real gratitude toward Jesus.  Out of habit, I started to say, “Thank you Je—”

The words stuck in my craw, and to clear them out I said, “Thank you, Paco,” and went on with my life as an upslider.