A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (10 page)

Adler thinks a parallel can be drawn between our time and the years between 1825 and 1837—the Great Awakening—in upstate New York. Young people were moving en masse out of Boston and New York as society stratified. There were jobs to be had digging the Erie Canal. Towns like Buffalo and Binghamton experienced exponential growth, and 60 percent of the population was under twenty. Those who couldn’t find work, drank. The American Temperance Union sprang up, and the term “nation of drunkards” was coined.

Besides the Union there were rural communities, utopian communities, and—more to the point—a huge Christian revival movement. It was characterized by a rejection of traditional work roles, a contempt for the false values of “the World,” a conviction that the Devil was hard at work battling for the souls of men, and by ecstatic behavior, such as speaking in tongues. Above all there was the Apocalyptic vision: the sure knowledge—knowledge beyond the shadow of a doubt—that the world would end soon. The event was flat-out scheduled for 1837.

While the situations are not strictly analogous, certain similarities between the people of the Great Awakening and today’s Jesus people suggest themselves. We are experiencing a youth population explosion as a result of the postwar baby boom. There is widespread joblessness and an accompanying heavy drug use. “In 1825 it was alcohol, today it’s speed or heroin or downers,” says Adler, who
believes the specific drug is “an accident of the market.”

Further, according to Adler, we are in the midst of a vast social upheaval. Corporate clerical workers are no longer treated like professionals, and small shopkeepers are going out of business at an unusually high rate. A country that buys its clothes from ready-to-wear manufacturers doesn’t need tailors; one that buys its furniture from automated factories doesn’t need woodworkers. The craftsman class is sinking into the muck of history.

The threat of nuclear holocaust and/or ecological disaster is seized upon by people like Susan Alamo who see doom in Biblical verses. And war, Adler points out, has always generated a conviction that humans are so hopelessly cretinated that they must soon perish. In the seventies we will have to contend with the stale carcass of Vietnam. In the 1820s Americans were recovering from the War of 1812, while Napoleon raged in Europe. The landed gentry in upstate New York suffered status-death as a basically rural economy shifted over into an urban waterpower society virtually overnight. Everyone, it seemed, was either waiting for the end or smashed out of their senses on demon rum.

The end of the world, however, failed to roll around in 1837, and a lot of people got splendidly drunk on New Year’s Eve. “By the 1840s,” Adler said, “all these groups had become lost little islands of impotence and incompetence.”

But for me, a week earlier, lying sleepless on the floor of the Alamo Foundation in the blackest hours of the morning on Holy Saturday, there were no convenient sociological communalities. I found myself seriously disoriented; thinking, on the one hand, like an FOC parent, that these gentle Jesus folk were wasting their lives babbling inane gibberish and living in some of the most squalid and humiliating poverty in America. On the other, like ACLU lawyer Mike Pancer, who has been battling Patrick, I felt that since they had freely chosen this life, they should be free to live it. Even if they were being sorely victimized.

I dropped into a fitful sleep, full of nightmarish disasters, and started awake shortly thereafter overwhelmed with the conviction that something weird was going on. Frank was
sitting near my head, a human alarm clock, demonstrating the proper way to wake up when you’ve just been saved.

“Praise you Jesus thank you Jesus praise you Jesus thank you Jesus praise you Jesus thank you Jesus praise you Jesus thank you Jesus praise you Jesus thank you Jesus …”

M
y Thank you Jesuses were as cold and hard and artificial as the linoleum floor I had slept on.

“The Lord loves a broken spirit,” Frank told me. My soul, apparently, was in danger, and the signs could be read in the sleepy sullenness on my face. We had rolled up our gear and were stepping over some still-sleeping bodies, moving into the bathroom, which was pervaded with an unpleasant diarrhealike odor. The two sit-down toilets were in constant use, and I made an immediate vow of voluntary constipation for the duration of my stay. Showers were out of the question because the stall was already half full of blankets and sleeping bags. A speaker above the last sink spewed out scratchy Bible verses: Leviticus it was, information on how to offer sacrifices, what to do when the smoke doesn’t rise, how to tell the difference between what is holy and unholy, what is clean and what is unclean.

“Hallelujah,” the brothers said, standing before the filthy sinks. There was no hot water, and my sink filled to the top and overflowed because the drain didn’t work. It had to be emptied with a cup into a floor waste-pipe. It occurred to me that it was best to keep the mind firmly focused on Jesus in a crowded stink-hole like this: Satan was ever-present, trying to pump the brothers full of pride.

“The Weasel wants you to think bad things about the Foundation,” Frank said. “Just say ‘The blood of Christ is upon you Satan’ or ‘Get thee behind me Satan’ until he goes away.”

Like everyone else, I had slept in my clothes. I was itchy and distinctly showerless. My mouth tasted like the foulest depths of the Pit, and I wanted a cigarette.

“We smoke in the back,” Frank said. He didn’t smoke,
but stood about five feet away, an inspiration of self-denial while I indulged my vice. “The Bible doesn’t say anything about smoking, so that’s up to you,” Frank said, but he had a shivery tale to tell about tobacco. “Tony used to smoke a lot and then one day after he was saved, he was about to light up and Jesus came down and stood right in front of him.” Frank stepped over and stood in front of me. “He put his hands on Tony’s arms”—Frank put his two hands on my biceps—“looked Tony straight in the eyes”—Frank looked straight in my eyes—“and did this.” Frank shook his head no, slowly, sadly. Instantly he brightened, laughing with the cosmic logic of it all.

“If Jesus did that to you, wouldn’t you quit smoking?”

I admitted that it would be a powerful incentive.

Later, we stopped into the prayer room for a quick half-hour chant, then spent a few excruciating hours while Frank read aloud, stumbling over the big words in Matthew, chapters one through six. I felt surly and argumentative. We came onto a verse in which Jesus instructs the multitudes not to pray using “vain repetitions, as the heathens do.…”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “we just spent half an hour saying ‘praise Jesus’ in there.”

Frank considered the problem in a sincere, furrow-browed silence. Three older brothers were summoned for a boothside conference, out of my range of hearing. After several minutes, one of the strange brothers approached with the answer.

“The repetitions,” he said severely, “are not vain.”

“Of course.” I slapped my forehead, Dumbo-style. “I should have known.”

“After you’ve been here for a while and are older in the Lord you’ll be able to think better.”

“Thank you Jesus.”

“Praise the Lord.”

“Hallelujah.”

“Thank you Jesus.”

“Praise the Lord.”

F
rank told me there were rules I had to live by if I wanted to serve the Lord. I couldn’t go anywhere without my permanent older Christian. If I wanted to leave the Foundation for any reason, I had to put the request on a list on the bulletin board entitled “Ask Tony.”

“We ask Tony everything: if a guy wants to work on the ranch or drive the bus, he asks Tony. Tony is so smart. Sometimes he’ll just write, ‘You’re not ready,’ and a guy’ll think about it for a while and realize that Tony was right.”

Another strict rule was “no pairing off.” This meant that I was not supposed to associate with the Christian women or even to read the Bible with them. Frank read some verses in Proverbs to reinforce the rule: “ ‘For the lips of a strange woman drip as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.’ Heavy scripture,” Frank muttered.

I was curious. Frank has been at the Foundation for three years. Had he never had a date? He was a handsome man.

He tried to smile—a quick man-to-man glance—but his eyes were full of bitter experience, dark with wormwood. “Most women,” he sneered, “are tramps. They’re evil.”

Later I spoke to Richard, a gangling former songwriter and reader of poetry. Now that he has been saved, the works of his favorites, people like Dylan Thomas, strike him as “trash.” “Anything outside the Word of God is a lie and it’s a waste of time to listen to lies,” he said.

Jim, a frail, watery-eyed Christian, had come to California “to take a lot of acid in the mountains” because—here he laughed at his own stupidity—he thought he would find God there. Somehow he ended up in the city, where he was arrested for fuddled loitering. Shortly thereafter, he was born again.

Syll, a big, handsome black man, is a star at testimony time. He hated whites, thought black was beautiful, and,
says he, ran guns for “the Black Nationalists.” Now he works for his people by “bringing the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to them.” His testimony stuck with me, and when I saw the Alamo house, the word
plantation
occurred to me. Much of the money used to build that house came from outside donations: gifts, presumably, from the kind of people who rejoiced that men like Syll had broken their spirit before the Lord.

Even more lucrative, perhaps, were the former addicts who cold-turkeyed with Jesus. And while I was to meet a few out-and-out addicts, the majority of the people I met seemed not to have or have had serious drug problems. Every man or woman who had ever dropped a pill or toked a joint seemed anxious to represent himself as a former junkie.

A man I’ll call Allen made much of his drug habit. He was a slight, nervous man of twenty-two who bit his fingernails as close to the quick as possible but still managed to get dirt under them. His face was literally corrugated with a case of acne that could only have been the result of diligent neglect.

“Before I was saved … I took a lot of dope all the time and … got arrested a lot … mostly for drinking and taking dope and fighting.…” Allen told me that his mother had been saved and that she loved the Foundation.

A week later, out of curiosity, I visited Allen’s mother in the low-rent flatlands of Los Angeles. Like her son, she was slight and nervous. There was a Bible on the coffee table, and in the back hall, pinned to the wall, there was a blowup-sized poster of Allen in his army uniform looking clear-skinned and patriotic.

We talked about the Foundation and the work of the Alamos for a few minutes, and I asked her how long Allen had been at the church.

“About a year and a half,” she said, and her voice quavered strangely. “He … he went up there a few days before Christmas, and he called.…” Here, to my intense and sympathetic discomfort, the woman burst into tears. “He called and said he wouldn’t be ho … ho … home.…” She
took a tissue from her purse, wiped her eyes, and put the spent Kleenex beside her on the sofa.

I changed the subject. “In Allen’s testimony, he said he did a lot of dope.”

“Yes, it was dope. It had to be dope. He came home one night and he had a gadget with a feather on it … you take it and hold cigarettes with it? I can’t remember what he called it.”

“A roach clip?”

“That’s it! A roach clip. Stupid thing. He was real gay and happy and he told me that he had been drinking wine. Sally, his girlfriend, told me he had been smoking marijuana, too.”

Shortly after this confrontation, Allen turned away from his drug-crazed life on Sunset Strip and was saved. Sally joined the Foundation some time later, by her own admission to be near Allen. “A few weeks later I drove up to see them. I asked Allen, ‘Where’s Sally?’ He said, ‘She split. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m all through with her. Don’t ever mention her to me again. She was saved and she walked out on God. It’s just like … 
nailing Christ to the cross again!’

“I said,” Allen’s mother continued, “ ‘Oh, Allen, you’re sick. She didn’t want to stay up here and sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor and you think she’s nailing Christ to the cross. My God, you’re mad.’ ”

In a later conversation, Sally told Allen’s mother: “I went up there to see if I could be near Allen, but they wouldn’t let me near him. We had to sit on opposite sides of the church. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I left.” Allen’s mother was crying again. She blew her nose and dropped the Kleenex beside the others on the sofa. “Sally said, ‘I love Allen and I always will but I know he’ll never speak to me again.’ ”

Not too long ago a well-dressed black man appeared at the door and told Allen’s mother he was doing a survey about the Alamo Foundation. He expressed great surprise that he was speaking to a woman whose son was actually there.

“Was this man Ted Patrick?”

“No. I saw him in the papers. It wasn’t him. I don’t want to be involved. All these kidnappings.”

The black man, who was not Ted Patrick, asked her, “How do they run that Foundation? Do you mean to tell me that they can have that home and buy all that property from that little thrift shop they run on Hollywood and Vine? You’re a brilliant woman, you know as sure as we’re both standing on this porch that they couldn’t possibly make any money in that little store. The rent would be enormous.”

“He was a very smart man,” Allen’s mother said. “And he was dead against the Foundation. He said: ‘I’ve got so many many mothers and fathers and—’ ”

But Allen’s mother cut him off. “My son wouldn’t appreciate it for me to join anything like that,” she said. The tears were flowing again, and she took a moment to wipe her eyes.

“I love my son very much and I give Tony and Susan credit for being, for being able …” She found herself choking on the words and had to start over. “For being able to go to Hollywood and walk out and preach Jesus to these children, drug addicts.…” There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally: “It’s just so sad. Even Jesus, when he was dying on the cross, he told one of the Apostles, ‘Take care of my mother.’ Even when he was dying. Oh … oh my God, I must have done something wrong.”