Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (17 page)

And I thought Heritage USA was going to be dumb. But I'd
only been there fifteen minutes and I was already confronted by
enough serious theological questions to send St. Thomas Aquinas
back to Bible college. Did Santa die on the cross? Will he be
resurrected at Macy's? Were Christ's disciples really elves? When
the second coming happens, will Jesus bring toy trains?

While I puzzled over these mysteries Dorothy went shopping. She's normally as good at this as any human female. But she was
back in minutes with no bags or packages and a dazed, perplexed
expression, like a starved Ethiopian given a piece of wax fruit.
What could be the matter?

We went into the bookstore and I found out. There on the
shelves were personal affirmations of faith by Roy Rogers and Dale
Evans, a born-again diet plan, a transcription of the horrible
(though rather unimaginative) things you can hear if you play rock
and roll records backward, and a weighty tome arguing that every
time the New Testament says "wine" it really means "grape juice."
But I couldn't find anything you'd actually call a book. The Bibles
themselves had names like A Bible Even You Can Read and The
Bible in English Just Like Jesus Talked.

Then we went into the music store. It was the same thing.
There were racks of tapes and records by Christian pop groups,
Christian folk groups, Christian heavy-metal groups, Christian
reggae groups, all of them singing original compositions about the
Lord. No album was actually titled I Found God and Lost My
Talent, but I'm sure that was just an oversight. There was even a
"Christian Rap Music" cassette called Bible Break:

And so on to Revelations with complete lack of rhythm or meter. (I
was witnessing a miracle, I was sure, or auditing one anyway: Here
was something that sounded worse than genuine rap.)

The toy store was weirder yet. The stuffed toys had names like
"Born-Again Bunny" and "Devotion Duck." A child-size panoply
of biblical weapons was for sale, including a "shield of righteousness," a "helmet of faith," and a "sword of truth" that looked ideal
for a "clobber of little sister." And there were biblical action
figures-a Goliath with a bashed skull, David looking fruity in a
goat-skin sarong, Samson and Delilah as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver. "Comes seductively dressed" read the sell copy
on Delilah's bubble pack. Here was a shopper's hell indeed.

I looked at the people crowding the Heritage "Main Street"
mall. They didn't seem to be having much fun. Many of them were
old, none looked very well-off. There was a dullness in their
movements and expressions. Even the little kids looked somber
and thick. In the men's room stall where I went to sneak a cigarette
there were only four bits of graffiti:

Do you know were [sic] you wife is at

Jesus is #1

666

Please don't mark these walls

The last scratched into the paint with a key or pocketknife.

I almost don't have the heart to make fun of these folks. It's
like hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle and scope. Then
again, I have to consider what they'd do to me if they caught me
having my idea of a vacation-undressed bimbo in a sleazy Florida
hotel room, bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care lotion, some drugged
wine. . . . In fact, you already know what they did when they
caught Jim Bakker. Heck, they want to hang the likes of Jim and
me. And all I want to do is rib them a little.

I've always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot
He'd have given us bigger behinds to sit on and smaller heads to
think with. But God or carbohydrates or something had done that
for these people. They all had huge bottoms, immense bottoms. It
looked like everyone in the place had stuffed a chair cushion down
the back of his leisure slacks. And what leisure slacks! Heal them,
oh Lord, for they are injured in the taste buds. Dorothy and I had
dressed quietly for the occasion. But my button-down shirt and
chinos and her blue blazer and tartan skirt made us stick out like
nude calypso dancers. We were wearing the only natural fibers for
2,300, acres in any direction.

"You know what you've got here?" I said to Dorothy. "This is
white trash behaving itself-the only thing in the world worse than
white trash not behaving itself."

"Shhhh!" said Dorothy. "That's mean."

"These people aren't having any fun," I said. "They should
join the Klan. They'd be better off. They could hoot and holler and
what-not. The Klan doesn't do all that much really bad stuff
anymore because there are too many FBI double agents in it. And
if these folks joined the Klan, they could smoke and drink again.
Plus, they'd get to wear something halfway decent, like an allcotton bed sheet."

"P. J. !" said Dorothy, "Stop it! Everybody can hear you."

"I'm serious," I said. "All you people, you really ought to..."
Dorothy slapped a hand over my mouth and pulled me outside.

The next day, Dorothy and I pretended to be married and went
house hunting in the Christian condominium sub-development.
The homes were mostly free-standing ranch jobs built on slab
foundations and supplied with a couple hundred dollars of old-
timey exterior trim. Each unit is supposedly built to order, but
neither the designs nor the floor plans can be altered. (What God
and contractor have joined together let no man put asunder.) Condo
prices range from $128,000 to $144,000. I checked the real estate
sections in the local papers, and this seemed to be almost a third
again the going rate.

The model homes showed no special religious features, no
Last Supper-style dining areas, walk-on-the-water beds or totalimmersion adult-baptismal pools in the johns. There was also a sad
lack of evangelical hard sell. Dorothy and I had hoped for a real
estate sales person who spoke in tongues, not that real estate
persons don't usually.

Instead, there was a lonely-looking middle-aged lady with a
layer of Tammy Bakker-style makeup. "Now, I live by myself
here," she said, "but gosh there are so many things going on I
never have a moment to feel lonely." She was interrupted by a
phone call from Maine. "Excuse me," she said, "this lady is calling
from all the way up in Maine."

The caller was, I gathered, very elderly.

"Yes," said the real estate lady on the phone, "you can live
right here at Heritage USA.... No, Jim and Tammy don't actually
live at the Heritage Center.... But they live real close by. . . . No, dear, you shouldn't buy something you haven't even seen... .
Well, maybe you can get your minister to drive you down."

We slipped out during the phone call, feeling a little creepy.
Something is drawing forlorn old ladies and poor, morose families
to Heritage USA. Five million of them came in 1985. It can't be
Jesus doing a thing like that. He's. a compassionate guy, isn't He?

We took one more walk through the Heritage mall. I was
eavesdropping hard, hoping for some final, telling quote. No luck.

Everybody was on good behavior just like the day before.
There were no screaming toddlers, no running kids, no griping
adults. It was like being in the First Church of Christ Hanging Out
at the Mall. Dorothy heard a jewelry salesman tell his customer, "It
has a life-time guarantee-or until Jesus returns, whichever."

A goody-two-shoes treacle seemed to flow sluggishly through
the place, and I think it was making Dorothy a little crazy. She kept
tugging on my coat sleeve and whispering that we should go behind
a Coke machine or in a mop closet or someplace and "pet." They
must have this problem a lot at Heritage USA because all the Coke
machines were right out in the middle of the rooms and the mop
closets were locked. We tried a stairwell, but it had a floor-toceiling window opening to the hotel lobby.

And that was when it dawned on me. There's only one explanation for Heritage USA. Jim and Tammy were working for the other
side. Their own recent behavior seems to make that obvious. And
consider the other evidence: a bookstore without books, a record
shop without music-what else could these be but the vain and
empty works of the devil? And Heritage USA has lots of rules and
ugly architecture just like communist Russia, that den of Satan.
And don't forget that fundamentalism prohibits premarital sex, yet
you can't have a proper Black Mass without using a naked virgin as
an altar. Put two and two together-it's not a pretty picture.
Furthermore, as a result of our visit to Heritage USA, Dorothy and I
had committed every one of the seven deadly sins:

Pride Looking at our fellow visitors had turned us into awful
snobs.

Wrath-We wanted to murder the architects.

Lust-If we could have found an open mop closet.

Avarice-By proxy (Jim and Tammy Bakker, as founders of
Heritage USA, had committed this sin for us.)

Envy-How come Jim and Tammy get to live so high on the hog?
Why didn't we think of Heritage USA?

Gluttony-For a quick drink.

Sloth-We spent three days in bed recovering from the drunk we
went on after we got out of there.

This is no way to have fun. Everybody likes a good laugh, and
there's nothing wrong with that. But on this year's vacation steer
clear of Heritage USA. For the sake of your immortal soul, stay
home and take drugs and have sex the way Jim and Tammy do.
(After all, I understand they've been forgiven.)

MARCH 1987

Well, everything's fine in the Philippines now. Smelly old Marcos has
been given the gate and earnest, Catholic, good-to-the-bone Cory
Aquino is president. Everyone in the country has a fulfilling career.
All those cardboard houses down in the Manila slums are being
gentrified-track lighting, redwood decks, nickel plated Victorian
plumbing fixtures from Renovator's Supply. The citizens of the Philippines are rich and happy. They won't go Communist or get another
corrupt and egomaniacal dictator for at least a week.

I was nine years old when I fell in love with the Philippines.
My father had been there during World War II, practically the only
place he'd ever been outside Ohio. He was a salesman who had
wanted to be an engineer. He'd taken some night courses but, what
with the Depression and a family to support, it never happened.
Yet for one moment he was an engineer, a chief petty officer in the
Navy Construction Battalions, the CBs, building docks, warehouses and barracks in the Philippines.

When my father died in 1956, I found his photo albums from
the war. To a more sophisticated kid, the Philippines might not
have seemed like much. Famous for what, house boys and ugly
mahogany water buffalo carvings? But to me, in Toledo, Ohio, the
Philippines represented everything I could hope for in the way of
romance. The albums were filled with pictures of burned-out Jap
tanks, bomb craters and sunk LSTs and also of lustrous beaches,
mangrove-edged lagoons and ancient Spanish mission churches.
There were pictures of my dad, not the pale, workaday dad I'd
known, but a thin, tanned guy in faded khakis with one foot on the
bumper of a Jeep and a Lucky jammed in the corner of his mouth.
That dad had a smile I don't think you can get in Ohio. And, at the
back of one of the albums, folded behind a flap of paper, were
pictures of Philippine women-dark, smooth, small, beautiful
women who seemed to have misplaced their bathing suits.