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REVEREND H

The world changes all the time and more and more people or situations become acceptable every day. But although we might not always say it out loud, we are still not really comfortable dealing with people who are the opposite of what they do, like a very thin chef, a bald hairdresser, a smoking doctor, a depressed psychologist or our current police force. This true story I will tell you now is about one of those people.

I believe many people have chosen to follow the wrong path after their families had made them go to church and suffer through a childhood of dull sermons conducted by a preacher devoid of all joy, happiness, excitement, attractiveness or life itself. That is a tragedy. An even greater tragedy is when you attend a service and the preacher is a beautiful, charismatic, fit, youthful explosion of energy and heat, and the last thought in your brain is entering the gates of heaven. Nobody can step onto the road of eternal goodness while facing a movie star on a pulpit.

When I was a teenager almost all people went to church every week and congregations had many preachers to save their souls. At the exact age when I was at my most vulnerable, confused and impressionable, we got a new preacher called Reverend H. He had a real name but I will call him that because he is still very much alive. He would have loved being called Reverend H because he looked like a secret agent. He was tall and handsome with black eyebrows, dark, shiny skin and a body as hot as the ovens of hell. He wore suits that no preacher could afford and combed his hair back like The Saint – not the one in heaven, the one on TV.

Reverend H was different from all other preachers, he could not be reached in the afternoons when elderly flock members were at their most needy, he was having his tan. He wore a shiny ring on his tiny finger and he would take a magazine and tell us boys that it was a sin to look at pornography, like this, and this, and this, and then show us twenty pictures of naked people. We never knew what he was going to do next.

One Sunday we were all sitting quietly in our seats when the vestry door opened and Reverend H climbed the stairs to the pulpit wearing a pair of big black sunglasses. Everybody stared in disbelief.

I was sitting next to my mother. She always had three main emotions, excited, nervous and worked up, all of which made her speak very loudly.

Before anybody could whisper a thing, she said in an extremely loud voice, It’s an infection!

It boomed through the church like the voice of a messenger announcing that everything was all right, but I could see her hymn book trembling and I knew she was hysterical.

The next day we heard Reverend H was wearing sunglasses because he had discovered a wrinkle, people said they could hear him scream all the way to the chemist. I couldn’t under­stand what they were saying, to me he looked like George Hamilton would have looked in Zorro, the Gay Blade, it was the most glamorous thing I had ever seen.

Two weeks later it was Baptism Sunday and Reverend H appeared wearing his sunglasses and the biggest diamond ring ever seen in a church. Later we heard he bought the ring after he had found a hair growing out of his ear. He baptised a baby and then his ring got hooked onto the baby’s lace and he dragged the baby and the mother all the way up the stairs of the pulpit before he noticed it. Their heads were bouncing like breasts at a fun run, but we thought they were fine, only later we heard the mother had started injecting herself with household products. The baby is now a well-known grown-up and sings at local festivals with a backtrack.

A month later Mrs Bella’s geyser exploded in the middle of the night, but she had taken two sleeping pills and drowned in her bed. At her grave Reverend H, with his sunglasses and diamond ring, gave a speech that made everybody cry. Then the wind started blowing and lifted his robe. Underneath it he was wearing the tightest pair of black leather pants. It looked like the bottom half of Tom Jones. I had to pick up a stone and chew on it so I wouldn’t scream.

People just sighed and threw their hands up in the air.

It’s the Change Of Life! they said, Pathetic!

To this day I don’t know why people are so negative towards the Change Of Life. My Change Of Life started the day I earned my first money. I bought a pair of enormous black sunglasses. A month later I bought the biggest ring I could find and a pair of leather pants.

People talk about ageing, maturity, dignity and grace. But it’s all panic and desperation. Have they learned nothing? If you’re hot, you’re hot. That’s all. The rest is for beginners.

(from the Honeybee stage production, 2013)