Читать книгу Anxious Gravity - Jeff Wells - Страница 12

God is not a magician, but a Harry Houdini: a cosmic escape artist cheating Death and the Devil with a twinkle in his eye. The world wiggles with enchantment: a bothered nose, dripping blood like an Amityville faucet, recalls the blessed spigot tapping the veins of the sinless Son of Man. A smudge of rainbow in a puddle of gasoline pictures God’s promise and threat that never again will the world be destroyed by water. Next time, it’s fire.

Christ wears our flesh more comfortably than a politician dons hard hats and headdresses at election time. Of course, having once ascended to the right hand of the Father He reigns forever, but He doesn’t neglect his constituency. He still cares about all his flock’s lost loves and odd socks. Take the time to pray — always more expedient than writing your member of parliament — and every wrong will be righted and every hurt avenged in one world or another. Nothing is too trivial to escape the attention of a personal saviour: a comforting thought for a teenage fundamentalist with a clean conscious; a thought that sometimes haunted me at three in the morning.

When home for Christmas my first year of Bible School I began to suspect that my stereo, specifically my tape deck, was demon possessed. As Lucifer and a third of the angels fell on account of pride, and as my equipment — down to its three fat knobs for volume, balance and tone — was a 15-watt exercise in humility, I thought it judicious not to jump to conclusions. I only owned one Black Sabbath LP and had gone off Alice Cooper since my conversion. (Though as I anticipated Christmas break, I’d softly sung “School’s Out” to myself a couple of times.) Most significantly, I never played anything backwards. But if there was one area of my life that I hadn’t surrendered to the Lord (two, including my monkey-boy libido — Onan the Barbarian, another sweaty-palmed virgin for Christ), I had to admit it was my love of rock music.

Overcomer’s music policy was strict but fair, forbidding as it did almost everything composed since the death of Sousa. This meant leaving my scratchy Stones albums at home for the school term. (I’d left Frampton Comes Alive in my mother’s basement for the long, long term.) Rumours of Bob Dylan’s baptism in Pat Boone’s swimming pool lifted my spirits, encouraging me to hope that someday O.B.I. might come to accept that redemption could have a back beat. Until that great day, I determined that while on campus I would faithfully observe the music policy. Christmas vacation was another matter.

Of course I wanted to see my family, but I hadn’t heard “Tumbling Dice” for three and a half months. In early December, during a pop quiz on the Pelagian theory of sanctification, I even found a moment to fantasize of my earthly reward: a big bottle of Coke, a family-sized bag of barbecue Lays and my precious, unscathed copy of Exile on Main Street.

Things took a turn for the unearthly my second night home. Exile was cooling on the turntable and I was lying on my bed nodding off to Your Shoes Are too Big, Lord. Beau Hammond had just defended his dropping out of a B.C. Baptist seminary as “all I could do to salvage my soul. I’d been Daniel in a den of perverts, antinomians and closet hyper-Calvinists,” when the Best of the Doobie Brothers fell from the cassette rack that stood on top of the receiver, and broke apart on a blue cotton throw rug at the foot of the bed. The sudden clatter at the margins of my sleep was startling, but I didn’t suspect the machinations of “?l” Sooty Face” (Hammond’s words) quite yet. The cassette rack was no more than an inch from the stereo’s edge, and I figured that even 15 watts could have danced a tape that distance. I returned the Doobies to the rack, which I moved a couple of inches back from the corner, closed the book, jerked off remorsefully and fell asleep.

About four o’clock that morning I awoke to the sound of rolling, deep-throated laughter coming from my speakers.

I moved reflexively to turn off the stereo, but froze in the dark. There was no warm, green glow from the wave band indicator — I hadn’t left it on. Listening to the chortling basso profundo, I sat upright and clasped my arms around my shins, telling myself I was awake. The laughter lasted about forty-five seconds, but it faded so gradually I couldn’t tell the moment when it became a fearful memory. After a while I turned on a light, wondering why I’d sat in the dark through the whole thing, prayed, then tried to read more of Hammond but was too rattled. Still, having a book in bed with me settled my nerves some, but by the time I was relaxed enough to read it I was too sleepy to turn a page. With the foggy rationale of someone who, despite everything, is suddenly and truly tired, I decided to worry about it in the morning. (Though I also decided against turning off the light.) When I rose about six to take a piss I was ready to believe I’d dreamt the whole thing. Almost, that is, until I noticed my Best of the Doobie Brothers tape, shattered again, lying at the foot of my bed.

I was flustered, though not as spooked as one might expect. Since Filmore’s fall from the cliff, and particularly since my growing acquaintance with Delbert and his peculiar, sacred obsessions, I’d been feeling an encroachment of supernatural powers upon my person; as though I were Ground Zero in an intimate, other-worldly war. This wasn’t a big deal — it was nothing but the Christian life. The air hung heavy with the cloud of witnesses from Hebrews 12:1, and was so charged with angels and demons that when their spiritual brawling finally opened a second front in the material world I practically said, “What took you so long?” I heard no more laughter, but over the next couple of nights, despite my moving the cassette rack further away from the edge until finally I laid it on it’s back nearly a foot from any vertical, the tape (and inexplicably, only that tape) flew to the ground three more times. Though my wallpaper didn’t drip blood or even peel worse than usual, and though I saw no apparitions and heard no voices telling me to get out of the house, after fourteen weeks of Bible School I found it both effortless and uncomplicated to believe that Satan must be picking on me.

Perversely, I confess, I felt flattered by the attention.

I imagined a boardmeeting in the bottomless pit, with a middle-management succubus pointing to a pie chart of my soul while he detailed a scenario to stop me before I won all those headhunters for Christ. “We can get to Gideon through our music,” he’d tell the others, who would nod their scarlet heads and scribble notes in their asbestos spiral binders. “He’s particularly fond of the opening riff of ‘China Grove’.” I’ll have to tell Moon about this when I get back, I thought. He’ll be so jealous.

One evening I approached my father — his left hand deep in a tin of mixed nuts and his right clutching the latest Worker’s Vanguard— and nonchalantly mentioned that I suspected some sort of demonic activity in my bedroom. He looked up at me slowly, pushed his glasses back against his bridge and popped an almond in his mouth. “Count your blessings,” Dad sighed, tugging at his moustache just as a car honked in front of our house. It was his carpool. “Rally at the consulate,” he explained. “Exorcism.” He shrugged and smiled wanly, then stood and left the room. What must life have done to him, I wondered, and made a mental note to pray extra hard for him later that night.

After Jeopardy I almost called my mother tor counsel, checking myself only when I considered that she’d probably blame the evil visitations upon my Father and insist that I move back in with her. Besides, I was certain that she would be paralysed by any inference that I was rooming with Lucifer. She’d likely live in expectant dread of my hissing at the crucifix of some astounded Catholic priest, or my head spinning as though my spine were a string of rosary beads. No, she could never know.

During Maude I called Pastor Fillmore, and he told me quite calmly that he had two other possible cases of demonism on the go, and could he possibly get back to me, no later than mid-week? I was equally alarmed and disillusioned that my predicament wasn’t as novel as I’d thought. Perhaps this was just a run-of-the-mill haunting; a rite of passage for the common Christian rabble — nothing to write home about. Left to sort things out, I saw two courses of action before me: a radical purging of my record and tape collection, eliminating everything that smacked of syncopation (which was everything except a Steve Martin comedy album), or just deep six the Doobies. Since their tape seemed to be the focus — and given that Filmore’s indifference had led me to believe that it wasn’t such a big deal — I found the latter course most prudent. Just to be safe, I also scrapped Wild and Crazy Guy.

Say what you will, but that was the end of it.

When Filmore finally got back to me he was glad to hear that the disturbances had ceased (though he sounded nonplussed I hadn’t trashed all my albums, and perhaps slighted that God hadn’t needed him to cast out a demon after all. He alluded to his having put the devil to chase on other fronts, but didn’t offer details.) After chatting amiably for a while about the power of the blood and what I wanted for Christmas, Filmore asked whether I might be interested in scoring quickie Christian Service points over the holidays.

“You know Johnny, don’t you, Gideon? Johnny Cicero? A short fellow, but stocky — tough and leathery — an ex-biker, actually. Sings in the choir.”

“Oh right — I know who you mean.” Barely. We’d shaken hands a few months before, when he’d heard I was leaving for Bible School and had wanted to wish me well. All I remembered was a squat, fleshy man in a corduroy suit that matched his tan, with a grip that could splinter my palm like a pistachio shell. A raw pistachio.

“Johnny does lots of work with a nifty little street mission downtown called Wise Up! Heard of it? Been with them ten years now. Johnny’s director of their open-air campaigns. He often gets some of our young people to help out. Surprised you haven’t yet. Anyway, he asked me to recommend a young man who might give his testimony on Christmas Eve.”

“Oh?”

“How about it?”

“Well .…” The man of sin inside me, my Old Adam, said Nomotberfuckingwayleavemethefuckalone. The new man said Get thee behind me, Satan.

“How many points does Overcomer hand out for street evangelism?”

“Five. I’ll do it.”

“Good stuff. I’ll call Johnny. And, Gideon,” Filmore added with sotto voce,“I wouldn’t say anything about the Doobie Brothers and all that, son,” he suggested. “What Johnny’s looking for is a basic conversion story. ‘Once I was lost and now I’m found’ kind of stuff. Devil talk could, you know, distract from the greater miracle of God working in your heart. Besides, we don’t want to give ?l’ Sooty Face any free publicity, eh?”

This, then, was how, while balancing on a folding chair in the open air at the corner of Yonge and Dundas, I came to meet Oppie Szabo.

Cicero called the evening of the 23rd to confirm the arrangements, and was as blunt as any man should be who’d been making the same phone call for 10 years. He told me to meet him at 4:30 in the Cliffside parking lot. (“a.m. or p.m.?” I inquired. “What?” he barked. “Never mind.”) Then he asked if I was nervous. “Well, I guess,” I answered. “Good,” said Cicero, and that was that, besides telling me to be on time and to dress “for the street.” He’d hung up before I had the courage to ask him what he meant.

Snow had been falling since mid-morning, and was beginning to choke the parking lot when I arrived at 4:20 on Christmas Eve in my oatmeal wool sweater, beige double-knits and blue vinyl coat. The mission van was already there with the motor idling; it had been parked long enough for its tracks to almost fill with snow. Cicero rolled down his window and spat out a pink wad of chewing gum, folded his copy of the Toronto Sun away on the dashboard, then stretched across the passenger’s side and opened the door.

“Hop in. You got the death seat. The girls’ll be along soon.”

“Girls?”

“Augusta and Sally,” he answered, as though I should know them. “They do the singing. Good kids.”

Cicero seemed remarkably underdressed for winter, wearing only frayed jeans, a stained maroon sweatshirt and a ragged denim jacket, the back of which I would discover he’d embroidered with ruby-coloured sequins that spelt “Jesus is Lord.” His thinning black hair was pulled back and tied off in an unnecessary ponytail, and beard stubble spotted his cheeks and neck like iron filings do a bar magnet. A leathery man, Filmore had called him. That and more. He looked like cowhide, with the cow still inside.

“Glad to have you with us, Gideon.” His voice, sweet like a Macintosh seeded with razor blades.

“Glad to help out, Mr Cicero.”

“Johnny. We don’t stand on formalities. Not on the street.”

“Sure, okay.”

And that was all that was spoken between us until Augusta and Sally showed up. In the meantime I admired his diploma in New Testament studies from Swift Current Bible College, which he kept taped to the back of the van’s sun visor.

“You gals’ve done this before,” he said, once they’d arrived just on time and found their seats, “and Gideon’s an OBIer. There’s not much a punk like me can tell you college kids. You know where we’re goin’, and you know why we’re goin’ there. Any questions?”

“I’m just wondering about the order of things.”

“I’m gonna start, then Augusta and Sally’ll sing a few songs, then I’ll say something more, then the girls again, then you, and then me again.” He sounded like Bob Hope, outlining a Christmas special to Johnny Carson. “Sally, I might ask you to use the felt board, but we’ll see how the Spirit leads. That’ll probably take us to seven or so. Then we’ll do an invitation to know the Lord and see if anyone needs counselling.”

“And um, about how long should my testimony be?”

“Oh, whatever. Not long. Fifteen minutes or so’d be fine. Sally, you got a playlist or something I can look at?”

“No — sorry, Johnny,” Sally said. “We didn’t think that was necessary.”

“I know. I’ve never asked for one before, but you haven’t been on the street with me since October and, well, now it’s Christmas.” I glanced over my shoulder at Augusta and Sally. They looked as clueless as I felt.

“What’dya plan to sing?”

“The usual,” Sally answered, “plus a few carols.”

“Yeah,” Cicero sighed and scratched his head. ? thought you might. Sorry, I should have talked you sooner. It’s not your fault. I just would rather that no carols be sung.” He released the brake and put the van into gear. “Jesus ain’t a baby no more.”

Cicero was the only Christian I’d met who didn’t object to the materialism of Christmas; his problem was with its spirituality.“It’s nothing but a Babylonian feast day,” he explained on the way downtown. “Egyptian, too. December 25th was celebrated as the birth of Horace, the son of Isis. I’m not telling you nothing you don’t know when I say that Christmas was a compromise of the early church to accommodate pagan culture. ‘Yule’ is Chaldean for ‘infant’. Not too many people know that.” Baal, Moloch, Osiris, it didn’t matter which gods of which godless nations were invoked: they were all in it together so far as Cicero was concerned. He objected to Christmas ever having been introduced into the Christian calendar. In fact, he despised the notion of a Christian calendar altogether. It was nothing but “veneration of the moon and cycles of the earth, pure and simple”: another concession of the first popes to the earth and sky cults “I’ve got a saying. ‘Santa’ is ‘Satan’ spelled sideways. We gonna preach Christ crucified, baby!”

Then Johnny fell silent until we crossed the Don River, when he decided the time was ripe to share some stories from the street. It sound like a warm-up exercise; one I imagined that Augusta and Sally must have heard many times, for they weren’t listening now, as they whispered alternative selections and chord changes to each other before we parked in an emergency snow removal zone

The girls. To me, a pair of strangers in the Lord. They attended an Associated Gospel Church on Kingston Road that was infamous for icing the dirtiest hockey team in the East Metro Christian League. Augusta, I learned, was a Trinidadian in her sophomore year at York University. The previous winter a Youth for Christ representative had rescued her from Pentecostalism; an affliction she’d so come to dread, I gathered, that she now avoided feeling much of anything just to be on the safe side. She stuttered when she spoke, which wasn’t often, and wouldn’t meet my eyes the whole evening, but she sang without stumbling and without emotion. Sally was a stubby, husky-voiced blonde in a blue parka with a face like one of my grandmother’s old apple dolls. I thought she’d probably make a wonderful grandmother herself, if only she could find someone to get the ball rolling. Augusta and Sally: I never did learn their last names.

“1 didn’t believe there was a God before I believed there was a devil,” Cicero said as we exited the van. “I used to live in outer darkness — no different than some of the people that’ll be out tonight. That’s why I keep coming back. Soul-winning’s my life, and my mission field’s the asphalt jungle.”

Johnny, I hear, also had a wife and three children. But they were already saved, I suppose.

“I’m really glad to be here tonight to tell you what the Lord’s done for me.”

It was nearly seven by the time Augusta and Sally closed their last set with “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” (upon Cicero’s recommendation, after his late scratch of “Silent Night”), and my 15 minutes finally arrived. The snowfall had stopped during Cicero’s second call to repentance, and what remained on the ground had either been churned to slush by ten thousand pairs of Kodiaks or spotted the pavement like a field of dandelions gone to seed. Johnny had assured me that I needn’t stand on the chair if it would make me uncomfortable. “Naturally the girls don’t use it,” he’d said. I took that as a dare. When I stepped up there were perhaps a dozen people standing in a ragged crescent around it, almost half seemingly friends or groupies of “the girls” (a couple of them I recognized from their church hockey team) come to provide them with an assured audience. Now — with a wave, an embrace and a chuck on the shoulder — three of them and then a fourth began to drift away. My mother had made me a similar offer but I’d begged her to stay home, promising to drop by later so together we could weep through It’s a Wonderful Life. (The Wayne Rogers, Mario Thomas version.) Facing Yonge and Dundas — the Caesar’s Palace for Canadian open air evangelists — with the lurid fluorescence of the Eaton Centre glowing red and green at my back, I was sorry she wasn’t here.

Much of the sidewalk traffic was done with and home for the holidays, but there remained lots of straggling workaholics and frenetic mall hounds for me to harangue. A number of them, laden with bags and looking unseasonably ugly, would pull a Moses and part the crusade team from our congregation in order to beat the lights. At the Dundas curb just beyond our little band, a fresh clique of commuters formed every ten minutes or so to await the next streetcar. Mostly they pretended we weren’t there, but a couple of faces would turn towards me, and another couple of ears.

“You’ve just heard Augusta and Sally sing about a ‘love so amazing, so divine

Giving my testimony was no big deal. At Bible School, “How did you come to know the Lord?” was as common a question as “What kind of soup is this?” and “Can we take our ties off yet?” But now at this gig for nonhelievers, I felt like a stand-up Christian suddenly unsure of the strength of his material. “Lord,” I whispered during Augusta and Sallys last song, “please, make me interesting.”

After all, it’s not as though this were the only show in town. Less than half a block south an African Methodist preacher was in full flight, his voice carrying up the street like a snowball with a pebbled heart. I was also competing with the Salvation Army thrash and bugle corps dug in at the northeast corner of Dundas, who were storming through the scripturally suspect “I Saw Three Ships.” Then there was the warty street vendor peddling flags of the world and windup, cymbal-crashing monkeys; a pensioner playing chess for chump change, who looked like a Santa who’d lost his bag of toys; and our ever-engaging and truly world class assortment of demented and derelict urban garden gnomes. All of that, over-dubbed with an aural collage of a thousand fleeting monologues, attitudes and conversations.

Most critically, I was competing with the example of Johnny Cicero: a man who’d sinned — “sinned grandly,” he boasted — and so had a larder full of lurid anecdotes with which to flavour the gospel. My life before Christ just hadn’t been very spicy. What kind of a witness was 1, when almost everyone in earshot who wasn’t asleep in momma’s arms must have been more seasoned in vice than myself? I was parsley to Johnny’s curry: nolo contendere.

“I’m here today because I want to tell you how that same love has changed my life.”

The wail of an ambulance graciously interrupted me. Black ice and a choked intersection slowed its progress north on Yonge, and as heads turned towards the street mine turned to Johnny. He pursed his lips in a playful frown and nodded encouragement. Two fire trucks and a Mr Pong’s Chinese Food delivery car followed straightaway, and I waited until they passed before trying again.

“Like I was saying … you’ve been hearing a lot about the love of God this evening. I’d like to share with you some of what that love has meant for me.”

“Preach it, brother!”

“Glory to Jai-sus! Praise Gawd and Halleylooyah!”

“Can somebody give me an amen?”

Two young toughs, full of roguery and eggnog, taunted me in tacky TV Evangelese while sprinting behind my back and across Dundas for an idling westbound streetcar. Besides one chippy defenceman who lingered long enough to mask his laugh in a cough, my humble flock didn’t flinch. Behind them at the eastbound stop, however, five or six were curious enough to cast sly, sidelong glances towards the punks, to me and then back to their paper or bootlaces with a smirk and chuckle. But for one, the rest behaved as I used to in math class when I’d neglected an assignment: Don’t react and avoid eye contact — you might get called upon.

That single exception was a young woman in candy cane coloured tights and a black leather jacket that was at least three sizes too big for her. Her head was bare, and her squidink hair had been given a brush cut much like many a floor monitor’s in a Bible School boy’s dorm. She wore no gloves, and though I could see her breath and her hands looked chapped, she didn’t even warm them inside a jacket pocket — even the one that was without a cigarette. She wasn’t smirking like some, and she didn’t have her back to me like the others. No — she was smiling right at me.

Though on my bad days, these days, I believe that in the end we’re all just carbon deposits, to be mined like the dinosaurs by creatures which we can’t imagine, on that day a stranger’s smile was enough to transport me to the bosom of Abraham. Suddenly I didn’t worry if I was dull. I wouldn’t have minded if everyone dismissed me as just a gangly Bible-thumper who couldn’t whistle even a single song of experience. Everyone but this one young woman. Perhaps most remarkably, I no longer cared about the Christian service points. Suddenly it was so much bigger than that.

As when the Lord flashed his backside to Moses on Sinai, so when I beheld that smile I caught a glimpse of a hallowed and uncommon knowledge: This is where I’m supposed to he. I regretted none of the doors I had closed or ignored in my 18 years to bring me to that speck and blink of space and time: the chair on which I stood was the fulcrum about which the Wheel of Heaven spun out God’s and peculiar will in an instant, one kind smile from this stranger(a rather attractive young woman, I couldn’t help but notice) had become blessed assurance that I was performing my Father’s pleasure. She might smoke, dress like a tramp and even have been with a man, but all I knew and cared for was that Jesus loved her and wanted me to tell her so. I was as humble a mouthpiece for the Holy Ghost as my stereo had been for Beelzebub, but the woman’s smile was a smidgen of rainbow to me — a promise of a covenant she didn’t even know. It’s okay, she might mean by it, don’t let those punks get to you; or, Sure it was funny, but I’m listening; or even, Amuse me til my streetcar comes. But God was whispering through her scarcely parted lips, This is the reason I’ve led you here.

“I used to be a communist. Actually, a Maoist — not that that matters. I was disrespectful to my parents; full of wicked thoughts. Like many of you, I’m sure, I was desperate for something to give meaning to my life …. Desperate, that is, until I found the answer in the one who’s birth we’ll be celebrating tomorrow.” Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Cicero wince. Oh oh: Christmas.

“1 didn’t come to that answer easily. I had a rebellious heart and lots of distractions. I was doing lousy in school — geometry, especially.” I notice a few smiles and nods of empathy. “But when I gave my life to Jesus, he changed me. I don’t mean my problems suddenly vanished — I failed geometry — but at least I knew my problems happened for a purpose.”

“So, how come you failed geometry?” It was a boy in the back, maybe 15. Maybe struggling himself with the curriculum.

“Ah! Well you see, I would have been able to get into university if I’d passed. But the Lord arranged things so I’d only be able to get into Bible College.” I flush, with something like pride, at the tittering.

“Couldn’t you have made it up at summer school?”

“Well yes. Technically.” I imagine Cicero hanging his head, and I glance over and he’s done precisely that. “I didn’t really want to do that. And Cod doesn’t allow us to be tempted beyond our ability to resist.” A rumbling of muffled snickers, and I press on. “All problems are sent to test us; to draw us closer to the Lord. Even geometry problems. So today I might not know how to calculate the circumference of a circle, but I’ve learned that Heaven has glories that cannot be measured.” Cicero raised his head and turned sharply towards me. He looked confused. The smile broadened on the face of the woman in tights and leather.

Perhaps if I’d been saved a little later in life — say, with six more months of puberty under my belt — my testimony would’ve been as savoury as Cicero’s. But this was great; no exaggeration, no apology. My heart was racing. I thought of Polycarp, the third century bishop of Smyrna, and recalled Amphora Faulker’s impassioned sketch in Church History 101 of his glorious, sticky end. I heard her syrupy, southern drawl recount his hymns of praise as the flames licked his body, the streams of blood from the stabs of impatient centurions, and their astonishment as the blood doused the fire. I thought of Dylan, ass-deep in Pat Boone’s shallow end, squeezing his hands tight across his narrow chest and falling backwards into new life. All of us were fools for God. Be not afraid of them that kill the body …. Fear him who hath power to cast into hell.

As the son of a Trotskyite, I’d had many opportunities to contend with public humiliation. Now, while I played this dinky part in premillennial history, this was my first time to use that experience in the service of the Lord. I felt the Holy Ghost tickle the base of my spine and I practically swooned, steadying myself only upon the weight of my burden for a single immortal soul. Here I was, then: a tiny link in the ancient chain; the great chain of being a Bible-thumping pain in the ass.

“I’m not talking about a religion; it’s a relationship. The most intimate you can imagine.” The several sniggers from the curbside crowd emboldened me. “I thank God he saved me before I fell too deep into the ways of the world, because I know that all it offers can’t be compared to one mo-”

“So, you’re like a virgin?”

If the question had been asked by anyone but the woman in tights and leather, I would have ignored it. But this was my stake; my centurion’s spear.

“Yes, I am a virgin. A virgin and unashamed.”

“You haven’t missed much.”

It was as though the hour had struck: a long dash following five seconds of silence. After a startled hush, the shoulders of those who’d seemed to have been hiding from my math teacher began heaving with laughter. A couple of chunky guys in bomber jackets started hooting. Soon, Augusta and Sally and almost everyone else were either chuckling or grinning shyly. Even me. The only two who weren’t smiling were Cicero and the woman.

“I know: I haven’t missed a thing,” I said as the laughter tapered down to titters. “The Bible says that ‘God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ What I want to ask is, what have you missed?”

“And Jesus wants an answer!” Cicero jumped on my line like a cat upon a pigeon’s neck. I hadn’t finished, but the spark in his eyes made me feel like a bundle of dry kindling, and the throbbing vein at his temple was a telegraph that told me to step the hell down fast. He was up on the chair and preaching before I’d touched ground. “That’s why we’re here this evening: to tell you about the bridge that God built with the flesh of his only begotten to bring us all back into his holy fellowship.”

“Praise em, eh? Fine job, boy,” whispered a middle-aged Asian woman with a bad cold as I backed out of the semi-circle. “There’s no shame in saving yourself.” Then she blew her nose, examined the tissue and walked on.

Now, I didn’t know what to make of it. I enjoyed the rush of being a fool for God, but I didn’t expect that afterwards I’d feel nearly so foolish.

“We’re all born in sin, cut off from God,” Cicero boomed, and he motioned for Sally to raise the felt board. It showed a familiar enough scene, straight out of my Principals of Soul Winning textbook: two fudge-coloured cliffs separated by a deep valley and orange licks of hellfire. Above one cliff hovered a pale yellow crown, and upon the other stood a black stick figure that looked like an airport sign indicating the nearest men’s room.

“Jesus said ? am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” continued, slapping a swollen scarlet cruciform right in the chasm’s middle, it’s crossbeam bridging the gulf. ‘“No man cometh to the Father but by me.’” So no one would miss the point he walked the stick figure across to other side.

I backed away a little further from the crusade, my brow creased by my longing to learn the mind of God. Pacing slowly towards the Dundas sidewalk, idly kicking the snow into dirty coolwhip, I noticed the woman in black leather approach me. She was smiling again; rather shyly, now.

“Sorry if I embarrassed you. It wasn’t personal. I just pull that shit sometimes.”

“No problem. It’s okay.” I tried to quell the flutter in my voice, but I again felt the thrill of all things working together.

“Too bad about geometry. I had to go to summer school three fucking summers in a row for French and all I can say is Oùest la salle de bain?”

“Hmmm, yes. Well, the Lor — “

“Scott! Sorry, it’s my fucking boyfriend. Been waiting forever for the — Shit! Scott! Where the bloody fucking hell are you going?”

Down Dundas West, about a 100 feet away, stood a young man, his body frozen in mid-stride towards the Eaton’s Centre as he faced us with a stupid grin. He was wearing baggy pants that looked like quilted terrycloth, a red checkered flannel shirt and a buttonless, much distressed, grey leather greatcoat that reached the tips of the tongues of his tattered Doc Martens. He would have been shorter than his girlfriend but for a green mohawk gelled into five, 10-inch spikes.

“Scott’s a musician,” she confided as he loped towards us. “Thinks he is, anyway. Calls himself Scott Mission. Least he has since the Santa Claus parade. His real name’s Poors, so he figures it’s kind of a pun. He thinks he’s funny, too. Oh, fuck it,” she sighed. “Ignore me. I’m just pissed he’s late. He’s the bassist for the Bangkok Lady Boys. Heard of them? They suck dick, but he’s sure they’re gonna be the next Masturbation Death.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah,” she nodded, and took a drag on her cigarette. “Don’t be scared. He’s not exactly harmless, but — Scott, sweetie,” she shouted, “where the fuck have you been?”

“Alarm didn’t go off,” he rasped in a reedy voice. “I thought we were meeting at the subway.”

“Well, we know better now, don’t we, ya sweet, dumb bastard?” As Scott ambled closer she smiled, tossed her cigarette into the street and stretched out her arms as though she were about to feel her way across a darkened room. After their embrace and sloppy kiss, Scott kept one hand around her waist while the other fished a pack of Marlboro’s out of his coat pocket. He was staring at me as it he’d never before seen blow-dried hair.

“I’d like you to meet my street preacher friend — sorry, what’s your name?”

“Gideon. What’s yours?”

“Oppie.”

“Oppie?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Like Poppy. Just hold the ’?’”

“Street preacher?” Scott cried. I nodded, and gave a little shrug and smile to tell him that I was still human. He let loose with a phlegmy laugh that quickly became a hacking cough. “No shit! You’re just in time. Oppie an’ me need saving, baad!” And he squeezed her ass

“Bastard!” Oppie said, slapping his arm. “Behave yourself. He doesn’t need you to embarrass him, too.”

“Why? What’d you do?”

“Tell you later — just be good.”

“Be good?” Scott leered at me. “But that’s not enough — is it, brother? It’s not enough just to be good, is it?”

“No, that’s right.” Suddenly I was in a wind up, about to cast my string of pearls. “The Bible says, ‘Our righteousness is as filthy rags.’ Everybody falls short. That’s why Jesus came; so that ‘we might be made the righteousness of God in him.’”

“Have you been born again?”

“Yes. Have you?”

“Why make the same mistake twice?” Scott smirked as though he’d caught my pearls on one of his spikes, then he wiped his mouth. His fingers poked out of his coat sleeve like little piggies in a blanket. He lit a cigarette and then leaned towards me, his gelled points quivering, and put his hand on my shoulder. “You probably wouldn’t think to look at me, but I’m into God.”

“Great. What does that mean, exactly?”

“I like talking religion and shit. My folks are Catholic. I’ve read the Bible — more than I can say for them.”

“Well, good. That’s good.”

“Pretty hot stuff. That Song of Solomon — I mean, Whew! I can dance to that.”

“Scott, must you be such a prick?”

“I don’t know; I guess. But Jesus, Oppie, I’m just joking. God should be big enough to take a joke, eh?”

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Oppie told me. “He’s always like this.”

“So save me — in twenty-five words or less.”

“I can’t do that,” I smiled beneficently. “That’s up to God. I can’t argue you or anybody into Heaven.”

“So it’s up to God then, who gets into Heaven?”

“Well, that’s one side of it. But it’s also up to us. The Bible says, ‘Whosoever will come unto me I will in no wise cast out.’”

“‘No wisé ?” he laughed. “What the fuck kind of way is that to talk?”

“Anyway,” I said, pressing on. “What the Word tells us is we’ve got free will. It means that on one side, God chooses us, and on the other, we choose God.”

“Why do you think God gave us free will?”

“Because he loves us. Because he wanted creatures who could love him freely.”

“Where’s the freedom in that?” Scott coughed as he poked the air with his Marlboro. “If we don’t make the choice he wants, then he sends us to hell? If that’s freedom, I’ll take Door Number Three, Monty. Shouldn’t God love us whatever choice we make?”

“But the thing is, God’s holy. He hates sin but loves the sinner.”

‘Uh huh,” he nodded taking a puff while werghing which plank of the Creed he should splinter next. “So I guess you think we’ve got immortal souls or something?”

“Can you imagine not existing?”

“Tell me, what was it like before you were born?” He was leering again. “You didn’t exist then, did you? Why is it so tough to accept that someday you won’t? I think, maybe, our life energy or something goes on in some form

“Ah, well, there you go.” I felt the hint of a smirk begin warming my face.

“But your soul’s got personality, right?” I nodded. “Let me tell you something. My Dad was in a bad car crash a couple of years ago; had a real serious head injury. Personality doesn’t even make it out of this life, brother.”

“But — I’m very sorry about your father — but there’s a lot of comfort in knowing that God loves him.”

“Right,” he spat. “And if I treated my lover the way your God treats his, I’d be thrown in jail.”

“Scott, our streetcar’s coming.”

“Merry Christmas, preacher.”

“Merry Christmas. Nice meeting you, Scott, Opy.”

“Oppie! Ritchie Cunningham used to be Opy.”

“Oh hey, just a sec, would you mind if I gave you something?” I reached inside a trouser pocket for a couple of gospel tracts entitled This Was Your Life that were stamped with Cliffside’s address for soul-winning emergencies.

“Ooh, cartoons,” Oppie squealed, and took them both. Scott was preoccupied counting exact change.

Once they’d boarded the streetcar I returned to the crusade. Cicero was still heralding the Day of the Lord, but he’d finished with the felt board and it now leaned against the chair. The cross still bridged the great gulf, but the golden crown and the black stick figure had both slid to the ground and the grey slush.