Читать книгу Hairdresser on Fire - Daniel LeVesque - Страница 9

I was born early, as in premature, one of those miracle babies so cherished in Roman Catholic families. Oh, he’s a miracle baby. Wasn’t supposed to make it, ya know. I was born jaundiced and cold to the touch, with an old-timey condition called The Rh Factor, which sounds like a teevee show but it’s a real thing. There was a war going on inside my blood, I was rejecting it, allergic. I was immediately rushed to a larger hospital for a transfusion. Nervous hands passed me away and out of the hospital, away from my mother.

One hour old, needles were already penetrating my tiny veins, screaming. Bad blood out; good blood in. Some vibrating machine behind my head with its electronic brrt brrt brrt, pumping someone else’s blood into my right arm as my own poison blood was sucked away. I wonder what they do with it, the poison blood.

This girl, April, who lived two houses down from the Pagans was born with it too, the poison blood. She was older than me and the science wasn’t up to snuff when she was born so she didn’t get the transfusion in time, and as a result she was retarded. That’s what we said then. Mental retardation. April was retarded in a very profound way. She lived with her parents, a five-year-old brain trapped in a 22-year-old body. That could have been me, I thought. What would I be like? Would I stand around watching my posters for hours like I was looking out a window? Never go to school, drive, or live what everyone thought was a normal life?

My sister reminded me of my connection to April as often as possible. “Shut up, you were almost retarded,” she’d say. “Retard.”

“I am not retarded!”

“You are, too! Just not all the way like April. Ask Mom. You’re a little bit retarded.”

Maybe I was a little bit retarded and that’s why I felt this way all the time, prickly and anxious. Sometimes I envied April and wished the transfusion hadn’t come in time. We sat behind her one time in church as my parents were schmoozing their way to the front, row by row. Nobody wants to be seen in the back of the church. Or nobody can be seen, rather.

My parents sidled up, sixth row, sliding in behind April’s family, my mother trying to get a good view, peeking around April’s big hat. She had on her big hat and a fur coat, she was always so fancy. Even in summer she liked to wear her church coat, she said. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. My mother wanted to rip her hat off so she could see Father Moe.

After communion — where the people line up, eat the host and take their sip of wine — we knelt at our seats, back in the sixth row. After it was decided we could sit and not kneel, a time frame I have never figured out, we sat. Small throat-clearing noises started from under April’s giant muffin hat. It sounded like a bubble in her throat, some sort of trapped burp.

Wishing she would be okay, I looked up as she started coughing, a real gagging sound gurgling in her throat. I became transfixed, gripping the rail of the pew with my summer arms. The wetness pushing up from her throat brought the final hack, a plop of the chewed-up host, the Body of Christ, regurgitated onto the shoulder fluff of her rabbit fur coat. It just sat there, white cracker chewed and glistening, while my fingers pressed into each other, waves of empathy ripping through my tightened skin. I closed my eyes, hoping it would disappear from her jacket, the hunk of Flesh gelled in morning spittle, shimmying soft on the needles of a rabbit’s fur.

In the early 1970s, my parents looked to take their faith in radical new directions. The search didn’t lead in any fun directions, like Transcendental Meditation or Satanism, but was more of an inside-the-box approach, like How Can We Get A Fire Under This Kettle O’Christ?

My family began its escape from the stoic practices of the Church by befriending the Bilders, whom my sister and I had always watched in wonder. My mother had been sizing them up for a few weeks by now, edging closer each time, pew by pew, until contact was made after communion during the Peace Be With You / And Also With You. The elite church people love this part of the mass. The who-knows-who part.

My mother reached around a second-pew person to shove her hand into that of Alice Bilder. “Peace be with you!”

“And al-so with you!” shouted Alice. Wilton was shaking my dad’s hand right off the wrist, deliberate over-firm handshakes all around. The Bilders were the people that sat in the Front Row. Every church has them.

Wilton and Alice were the power couple at our church, boasting six beautiful children — three boys, three girls — all factually perfect. Wilton, with his lumberjack’s build and silver hair, the same silver hair that coated his forearms and chest, stood like a tribute to virility, holding his huge arms high in the air as he prayed. He was the JFK Jr. of our Church, everyone wanted to be near him. His voice boomed the Apostles’ Creed like nobody’s business, loud and in charge, enunciating “We believe in One God, The Father, The Allll-mighty, maker of Heaven and Earth,” on and on. It’s a long prayer.

Every week, more eyes were on Wilton than were on the priest, who sat glowering from behind the wooden pulpit. Wilton made the pulpit for the church out of rosewood, sawing away shirtless in his driveway. Wilton was a real dick.

Alice Bilder, Wilton’s wife, worked a puritanical blue twin set with black flats, a crinkly blouse choking her at the neck with a tight crucifix crushing the collar. Her ginger curls were a bit too tight, never brushed out enough, forming a round puff of dirty-penny crunch around her skull. I wanted to grab the hairbrush that my sister kept in her back pocket and go to town on Alice’s head. Everybody wanted to.

My family started hanging out at the Bilders a lot. They lived in a two story/one-family country house on the corner. White, with white shutters, it was huge with a backyard barn and double garage. A compound, cut off from the street by a seven-foot white picket fence. A cartoon of a fence, it looked so tall to me as a kid. The slats were too close together so it seemed like a solid fence when you played inside it.

Wilton was forming a new group, a group of Church Families Who Sat in the Front (there were seven in all), who wanted something more. Saint Agatha’s is a great church, Wilton said, but more was happening. He wanted to connect outside of church, to grow as families and foster ideas, to celebrate the Lord with abandon, unrestricted by the confines of a Sunday Mass.

Seduced by the strumming hands of the Hippie Jesus Movement, my parents traded in their rosaries for a tambourine and a belt-making kit. Copper buckles were shined and attached with rivets, holes were punched and within days all of us sported wide leather belts that said “Jesus Loves You” or “Jesus Is Lord” in block script, the individual letters burned in with an alphabet of branding irons by Wilton and The hideous Men. It was settled: we were in a cult.

The blood hit my sneakers in crimson hailstorm, loud plops of clotted tissue smacking down like hot cherry cordials onto the white leather of my new Nike Cortez. Joshua Bilder’s friend stood in front of me yelping, a coat hanger stuck up his left nostril. All the way up and hooked onto the other side.

The taste of copper wire and blood filled his stomach as the Adults converged in a tight circle, throwing their hands and bodies onto him. The Men bound his arms from pulling at the coat hanger, keeping him from reacting, pulling down hard and making everything worse.

The women prayed. That’s what they did, The Community. They prayed. Prayed as they removed the bent hanger from the boy’s nose. Prayed as they ripped the wire out, leaving shredded sinuses and bloody nasal passages in its jagged metal wake. The Adults spoke in unknown languages, praying and mopping up blood as the boy’s mother spun panic circles at the perimeter of the bloodbath.

Lu was the resident Church Lez at Saint Agatha’s. Deep lez, complete with shag and Wranglers bearing the biggest key ring in New England, she was official. Nothing could pull Lu from her closet. “Satan, get behind this child! Remove the hanger and leave the boy… in Je-sus name, in Je-sus name, in Je-sus name…” she said, her voice joining the other peons, forming a choir chanting demands on The Lord.

Part exorcism, part medical emergency, the chanting ritual in the driveway pulled gawkers out onto their front porches, front row seats to the show. The Bilders always performed their Holy Acts as close to the street as possible. Wilton explained that exhibiting the miracles of Christ publicly, as Christ himself did, would draw more followers to the Community.

Shocked by the penitence of the Bilders and their small camp of followers, the neighbors gossiped, sometimes calling police when things got too bloody. When they could hear the snap of a whip coming from the garage, or the scream of demons escaping as finishing nails were driven in with a hammer, what else could they do but call 9-1-1?

The blood flow unstoppable despite several attempts at healing through The Power of The Lord, the boy’s mother’s instinct kicked in hard and she loaded her son into the back of her Volkswagen Rabbit to take him to the emergency room. Stitches, antibiotics, and a saline nasal spray to flush out the blood clots hourly.

The Community surrounded the car like zombies as she rolled up her window, her hand not turning the crank fast enough before they could cram their dead white fingers through the crack. She screeched off and never came back.

The Bilders lived close to my family. Two, three houses up on the right. I walked home alone, confused and wondering if the boy would die and what would become of me should I ever jam a wire hanger up my nose. Would I have enough faith to make it through? I doubted it.

I saw the kid at school the next week. He was in first grade, I was in fourth. Passing in the cafeteria, I’d crane my neck searching for visible scarring from the hanger but there was nothing. Wow, kids are resilient, I thought. Having heard it said about me so many times I knew it to be true. If you woulda been one inch closer to the corner of that table you’d be dead. Dead. Since there was no disfigurement I figured the kid was alright in the end. No prosthetic nose or difficulty breathing, at least none that I could pick up on when I passed. I counted the cracks in the sidewalk with a stick, vowing to never try anything with a hanger. My head was held low with thoughts of the boy as I walked up the stairs to the screen door. I didn’t see her till I was on top of her and I backed up fast.

“This your cat?” A sixth-grader was standing on my front steps, holding a heap of teeth and blood clots matted in fur. Tigger’s tag and blue collar were in the street.

The girl stared off, Tigger flattened dead in her arms. She was a big girl, tall and boney, and she clearly had a reputation, snapping her chewing gum the way she did. They must’ve held her back a grade or two; she was an absolute monster of a sixth-grader.

Her mom’s car tire had Tigger’s head pretty well smashed, almost to the point of full decapitation, but the girl kept holding on to him, her meaty hands waiting for some exchange, some impossible reward for the return of a mutilated cat. My mom took Tigger out of the girl’s arms and said, “Thanks, hon,” pretending she just received a box of Thin Mints and not a dead cat.

The killer was sitting in the car smoking, pretending she didn’t just murder my cat. As for the girl, she wasn’t moving from the top step. She blocked my exit with an I Could Kick The Shit Out Of You Right Now facial expression, like someone who’d been blocking exits their whole life. She was about to get real tough with me until wails of mourning launched from the back of the house. My sister, an eighth-grader, let the early stages of grief rip as my mom got the shovel out of the shed.

“Mom says Wilton said that you get your rewards in heaven so you better beat it. Especially before my sister gets out here,” I told her. “If my mom comes back she’ll try to make you go to church, you and your mother. You been baptized?”

“Of course I got baptized, stupid.” She was getting nervous as my sister’s screams got louder. “My whole family’s real religious, we all got baptized.”

“By fire? Your family been baptized that way? Feel the Holy Ghost all up on ya?” I sneered like a preacher, holding for a short pause, then ripped into her, “Or are you a sidewinder?” I stretched out that last word, raising my pitch for effect, aping the Men I had seen at churches and conventions.

The word I meant to use was backslider, not sidewinder, but it worked just the same. The girl didn’t know the jargon any better than I did. I smiled at her as she spit her gum onto the top step, turned and walked back to her mom’s car.

“Jesus loves you!” I screamed at the window of the car, a thick green Riviera with a low idle. They must have been new in town or they wouldn’t have approached our house in the first place, dead cat or no dead cat. There were seven houses in our neighborhood whose families belonged to The Community, and we lived in one of the seven.

Kids would dare each other to ring our bell and run, like Jem and Scout did to Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird. Our house was the Radley house, a family of five Boos, but this is not a racial story. We were The People in The Cult, and most folks assumed that my mom would try and recruit them if they got too close to our house.

“Jesus looooves you!” I hollered again as the car windows went up and the killers rolled away. I didn’t believe it but I screamed it anyway. Religious outbursts always seem to shut people up, and that’s all I cared about. I’d seen it work before. My mother invited Jehovah’s Witnesses into our house once and they never came back again. I don’t know what she said but they wouldn’t knock on our door again if they were burning to death, which, according to Wilton, was their inevitable destiny anyway.

After the incidents of the afternoon, and despite — or perhaps due to — my dispassion over the death of Tigger, my mother decided best I should stay home from school the next day. I agreed it was crucial that I took the day off, particularly with the big event slated for that evening. For this year, it seemed, I had found a way out of going to school on Halloween.

Halloween day isn’t a whole lot of fun when you’re the only cult member in your class. Every minute of every day all I wanted to do was dress up, Halloween or not. But Halloween could be the one day I wouldn’t get laughed at for dressing up as Ruth Buzzi from Laugh-In with the big handbag. As I looked through my wig box, the resentment grew. I chickened out again and I never would find out if they would have laughed at me or not.

In an incredible mixed message, I was allowed by my mother to have wigs, props, and clown costumes of all kinds. She didn’t love the idea but she didn’t want to stifle me either. On Halloween, however, costumes from the wig box were not to be worn. Halloween was the Devil’s holiday, and to celebrate it customarily was to do the Devil a favor, give him an inlet to pour wickedness into the souls of innocent children.

Halloween day the previous year I begged my mother to make me a costume like all of the other kids at school were wearing. I knew from past experience that all of the other kids would be dressed in elaborate costumes. Jessica would be a witch, Billy would be a vampire, and Tonya would probably be a kitty cat. Going to school out of costume, being forced to explain why I wasn’t allowed to celebrate the holiday like everyone else, would be suicide.

I wept until my mother gave in and made me a last minute costume. She took a paper grocery bag and cut out two holes for eyes. She drew on a smile, put the bag on my head, and sent me off to school. The bag said You have a FRIEND at Almacs across the back in red letters. The eyeholes were too low so I had to keep pushing the bag up from the bottom. The kid with the killer Magilla Gorilla costume kept laughing and asking me what I was supposed to be but I had no idea, no answer. I kept that bag on my head all day.

When I got home from school I went about my usual routine of putting on clown make-up, getting a plate of Chips Ahoy and a big glass of milk, and settling in to watch General Hospital. God, why can’t I live in Port Charles? Even Luke and Laura had costumes on. Shit, even Edward Quartermaine was donning a set of fake-schnozz glasses. What about me? I grew intensely bitter as Bobbie Spencer walked into the hospital with bunny ears and a rubber nose on.

Dinner at my house was at four-thirty like clockwork. I washed off the clown lotion and Maybelline eyeliner, and assembled at the dinner table with my family. After we held hands and said grace, I spoke my mind. I told them how embarrassing it was, wanting them to realize how hurtful it was. Wanting them to make it up to me somehow, me explaining how I went to school as The Bag-Headed Boy, but they didn’t care. They laughed.

They all nearly choked on their shepherd’s pie, laughing. Laughing at me harder than Magilla Gorilla. Laughing as I ran from the table into my room, crying and punching my pillow. Laughing as I screamed, “I hate you!” at the top of my lungs. But it wasn’t them I hated. It was Wilton who I hated. Wilton was making me hate my family. Wilton was making me hate God.

In lieu of allowing us to go trick-or-treating like the Normals, Wilton approved a Community celebration called the Light of the World Party. Held in the church basement, the party ran simultaneously with a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, draining all the anonymity from their group. By Monday, everybody at school would know that Mr. Demrest, the gym teacher, was a teetotaler.

For the party all Community members were required to wear costumes of a biblical nature, and Wilton called Jesus first. The Risen Christ version, with long flowing white robes and sandals. He jumped in with the alcoholics when they joined hands in their circle, leading them in the Lord’s Prayer. Standing in costume with the drunks, Wilton was radiant, holding the hands of his partners way too tight and speaking in tongues. So happy to have them surrounding him, he played out the Gospel story of Christ and the lepers, trying to fix broken hearts and shaking limbs with what sounded like Pig Latin.

If they didn’t want a drink before Wilton crashed their circle, they sure as hell would need one now. Even AA considered The Community to be a cult, so we must’ve been pretty official. The AA’s quickly finished up their serenity prayer and got their wagon out of the church before our party hit full stride.

Apple-bobbing, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and other church-friendly games were played for prizes. First place was a Bible, second place a plastic rosary and on down from there to fourteenth place. It was the Everybody is a Winner model of competition even for me, always ending up with a box of raisins. There were dangerous three-legged races involving dispassionate cult kids strapped together with leather belts, hopping through lanes of metal tables and fold-up church chairs painted brown. As the races went on, blood and prayer were as inevitable as the clotting of raisins when they set, sweating, in their box for too long.

Out the window I could see my neighbors, the Pagans, going door to door with impressive caches of razor-filled candies. Jennifer was dressed as a bumblebee and her brother Marty was a giant can of Raid. So clever.

I could imagine Marty bustling around before trick-or-treat, up and down the carpeted stairs, the final touches on his bug-spray costume being applied with splendid precision, while next door my mother dressed me as Nameless Shepherd. I looked like an eight-year-old oil magnate, wearing a blue and white checked turban that my father brought from the Holy Land, and draped in a yellow sheet, with sandals.

All I wanted was trick-or-treat, to take my chances on razor blades instead of listening to Wilton pontificate over the hum of The Community Music Ministry, singing away and strumming hard with thick picks. Some of them clicked tambourines, Lu dragged a stick down a corrugated, hand-held wooden Jesus fish, making a krrrrr-it sound in time with the honking band.

Running away to the Pagans was just a matter of disappearing after dinner, I thought. I spent a lot of time there, doing sleepovers whenever I could. My parents were so absorbed in The Community they couldn’t attend the goings-on in their own nuclear family. I was free to do as I pleased, as long as I didn’t bother them during Community meetings or work, which was most of the time, so I could do Ruth Buzzi unsupervised in the wall mirror for hours.

My father permitted us to live our lives as normally as possible when inside his walls. In exchange for robbing us of our childhoods he turned double agent. Holding the façade of a strict disciplinarian when in the presence of the misogynist Men of The Community, at home he stuck to the ideals of a working stiff, trying his best to give his family what they needed without interference from Wilton Bilder.

In the presence of Community members, mentioning the allowance of toys and props I had accumulated in my father’s house was forbidden. No mention of the make-up and wigs cluttering my toy box, and sundresses and heels just one room over in my sister’s closet, where I played Normal City Girl, a serialized performance piece inspired by Marlo Thomas in the teevee show That Girl.

Further mastering the mixed message, my parents forced us to give up our favorite rock group, KISS, for Lent. All the Christian organizations were focusing on the evils of KISS, claiming the name was an anagram for “Kids In Satan’s Service” and warning parents about the backward masking on the records. From a book titled “Backward Masking: Unmasked,” my mother learned that all rock groups, even The Captain and Tennille, were Satanists. So we gave up Satan for Lent.

We did it, too, we gave up KISS. Driving in the car my oldest sister would change the station when “Rocket Ride” came on the radio. We would plead from the back seat to cheat and listen to the new KISS song, just the one song? But my sister was a rock. Now that she had her license it was her responsibility to protect my father’s car from accidents, spilled drinks and, during the Lenten season, Satan.

She wouldn’t have listened even if she was alone. She was a Peter Criss fan, on the mellow, low end of the KISS fanaticism scale; I was rabid for KISS, especially Ace Frehley, with his toxic silver make-up and shoes I would’ve killed a nun for. My other sister claimed Gene Simmons as her favorite. Poseur. Though I loved Ace and his total look, I was in love with the hirsute Paul Stanley, something I was crystal clear with. All through Lent I was a kid without KISS, forcing me to find other costumes. No pointy make-up, no heels, nothing. No KISS. It was an eternity.

When the Satan-free Lenten season ended on Easter Sunday, each of our baskets held not only candy but a copy of the record albums Hotter Than Hell, Rock and Roll Over, and the much awaited KISS: ALIVE II. My parents were good people. Brainwashed, but good. They wanted us to have fun and we did. There was always love, not the constant tension floating in the air down the street at The Bilder compound.

My father saw the unhappiness the cult caused and even though the cult didn’t pay his mortgage, he tried to make light of it, always entertaining the kids. He went along with my mother’s religious whims often, attending giant Charismatic Christian conferences at the Providence Civic Center, as if being dragged to church on Sunday wasn’t bad enough. When theology crimps my free time, you can keep it.

Twice a year we would drive to the big city and file into the venue under the cover of daylight. The conferences were always slotted for Saturday and Sunday afternoons, ruining any chance of weekend plans at the Pagans. Ten thousand Wilton Bilders from all over New England would take their seats, teeth shining white and unholy in the blast of the house lights, which would remain on throughout the length of the conference.

My dad kept me close by, trying to make me laugh, trying to undo any psychological damage that was being done. Always aware of my terrific sensitivity, my father held my hand as the Christian band began to play and the energy in the room turned claustrophobic, people already sweating, fanning themselves with anti-abortion leaflets. My father was no less terrified than I. The tension in my hand was digging into his with a force he didn’t know I had.

“Is it that bad?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, grabbing his wrist with my free hand.

The feeling inside the Civic Center would freeze me up. We’d go to the snack bar as much as possible, my dad buying me a Coke and him a beer each time. He wasn’t the only one drinking beer. There was a line of people secretly drinking beer out of soda cups, some of them at a conference for the very first time and in need of brain lubrication to ease the confusion, some of them at a conference for the very last time, scarred and burned with no eyelashes and no remaining hope for healing. Some were just plain alcoholics trying to level out the shakes, and I was glad every time my father raised his brow to say You wanna go back to the snack bar?

Watching the Civic Center employees flitting around, refilling soda and beer kegs, sweeping up leaflets, we would drink slowly from our cups, my sneakers scraping against the red velvet carpet in the lobby, doing anything to avoid reentering the inner sanctum.

Through the curtain were thousands of people speaking in tongues, arms raised high to the metal ceiling. Kathryn Kurden pranced around the stage like Vegas royalty, laying her pampered hands on cripples in wheelchairs or with canes, knocking them backward with the Holy Smack of Jesus. People would shriek, falling over in convulsions, being slain in the spirit and cleansed of their sins.

All of this healing only made me think of horror and death. Why couldn’t I feel the spirit that these people seemed to be so overwhelmed by? Why was I not being healed? There must be something wrong with me. These people were not faking it. They were feeling something, something powerful and spastic. Whatever it was, it was turning their lives over on to their ends while my life stayed the same.

The folks in the cheap seats were falling out, sweating, dancing. They were picking up on this energy that I couldn’t feel. All I knew was I wasn’t being healed. I couldn’t be. I didn’t feel anything. None of what made these people cry out in tongues or writhe on the ground ever got around to me.

At Wilton’s prodding, while my father had run to the bathroom, I was dragged up onto the stage to face the healer, Kathryn Kurden. She floated like a ghost in her beaded turquoise gown and the bubble of light around her was thin and dark with gold flecks spinning everywhere. When I’d try to pin down a fleck it would jump to her ankles. She was mercury. Her hair was teased to the sky, poking out of her bubble. It must have taken hours. Only a corpse could sit through that much backcombing.

In front of the thousands assembled, her shaking hand reached out to my head, my bubble resisting hers. The force had her hand bent back when she pushed on it, pushed on my head. Pushing, pushing, her eyes blackening. I should be falling over and shaking, she knew that. She kept pushing, her mouth twisted and spiraling at the corners.

This healer woman had me convinced that I was dying, right there on the stage. What am I being healed of? Is it curable? Is it my brain? It is, isn’t it? No saving this one, she thought. This is the damned, she thought, and I heard it. She knew I heard it and took a half-step. She thought she had easy game with a young kid but I couldn’t feel her, I wouldn’t feel her, and she hated me for it. Push. It must be from birth, what I have. Push. Genetic. I knew what she was thinking. She couldn’t get me out of her head. PUSH.PUSH.PUSH. Did she know about me? How I was born allergic to my own blood?

I was pushed out, early and aware. The lights were bright; I couldn’t see my mother. The tiny body of a tiny Christ dangled over my head by a tiny nail, and the plaster was cracking. I knew this crucifix could have fallen on my head at any moment, counting the seconds until it fell and impaled me, Feet-of-The-Savior-first, through the membrane covering the hole in my skull. Little baby Damocles, fighting against the prayers, one hour old. Fighting against the angels with their bright, smiling faces. Even now, smiling faces make me want to run and hide, to sink comfortably back into the cold concrete that created me.

On her next push I pushed back, and my bubble flashed as the sword dropped, she saw it all and fell back into the arms of her goons. People pointed and howled as Kathryn was fanned with missals. My father swooped me up and brought me up the aisle, past our seats and out to the lobby.

After the Revival, the faithful filed out of the Civic Center vibrating with the Light of Jesus, hooting like frat boys. Not wanting the magic to end, they cluttered the parking lot with lawn chairs and coolers full of Tab. Fish-shaped windsocks drooped from the antennas of woodpaneled station wagons, flopping limp in the windless Providence heat.

The lot was charged with the same carnival atmosphere exhibited at a Grateful Dead concert, and a passerby would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. The same long hair, acoustic guitars, incense, and copious hugging could be witnessed from a helicopter fly-over. I was convinced that the Charismatics were tripping their teeth out, all hopped up on Jesus. I wanted some but like any scene there was an elitist bent: if you didn’t feel it, you didn’t get it, and were thereby square. I lugged my tired little body into the back of my father’s Impala and waited for the drive home, cat-napping to the entangled sounds of generators and The Saved speaking in tongues.

When I got home I knelt by my bed, recited the Lord’s Prayer and said ten Hail Mary’s. Something had to give. The Saints and the Angels were asked for their intercessions and I begged for a sign, some message that I could join the Saved. I tried to feel a tingle, a vibration dropping on my scalp like soft fingers, but nothing. My tongue tried to find the inspiration to blurt out foreign exclamations but all that would come out were the lyrics to “Sometimes When We Touch” by Dan Hill.

“Sometimes when We Touch” was one of the first 45s I bought when Lu drove us to Mammoth Mart one Saturday. I bought it thinking it would be dirty. When I got home and played it I realized it wasn’t the disc of filth I had been hoping for. I pleaded with my sister to trade with me. She had bought “Strutter ’78” by KISS. She did the trade. It is still the best deal I ever got. Somehow the lyrics stuck in my head when I tried to speak in tongues: Sometimes when we touch / the honesty’s too much / and I have to close my eyes / and hide. It was as close to a foreign language as I could get. I felt ripped off again.

Does glossolalia just happen or do you have to practice? Everyone else seemed so good at it, each one having their own style of nonsense words at the ready. Wilton really had a flow. He would do a whole thing with his shamanamama grrraamaaaalla luuuunti, where it sounded like a combination of Nepalese and Latin, dished up from the depths of his throat. Very Churchy. I tried harder but the elusive “gift of tongues” was not in me. There was no way for me to access it.

I got into bed and lay there staring at the ceiling, watching its plaster dripping down in hardened points like the surface of the moon, Dan Hill swishing his lovey-dovey gibberish around my brain pan. I wanna hold you till I die / till we both break down and cry… My hands pressed against the sides of my head in hopes of dulling the mellow.