A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (9 page)

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-men,” everyone shouted.

A brief announcement before dinner. Baby Christians—the newly saved—had another gift in store for them, “the baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Our older Christians would tell us about it.

“God promised that the saved would speak in tongues,” I was told by the man who was to become my teacher. “Don’t be denied. Seek for the gift with all your heart. Just keep saying, ‘God, you promised.’ ” The process, as it was explained to me, was that one started by “just praising and thanking Jesus.” At a certain point, he will begin to stutter, a signal that he is about to begin speaking in tongues. My older Christian invited me into the prayer room to give it a whirl, and since it seemed to be the thing to do after being saved, I followed him through the wooden door.

Given a generally tense state of mind, the prayer room is no place to be reassured about the sanity of the Foundation’s saved. The room was a windowless expanded closet, perhaps four steps wide and ten long. There was a muted light in one corner, and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that there were wooden bench seats along three walls and an ancient, puffy sofa along the fourth. The linoleum had been torn up to reveal a wooden floor. The walls were rough-hewn wood, like a rustic sauna.

After the first few seconds of ripping claustrophobia, one became aware of a milling crowd and the monotonic sound of spoken gibberish. People were tromping back and forth lengthwise, and their footsteps produced a constant low rumble, a counterpoint to the words “thank you Jesus, praise you Jesus.” Christians stood in various corners and trilled out nonsense syllables: “Ah na na na” and the like at a rapid rate. Talking in Tongues.

I was later to happen upon a few verses in Chapter Two of Acts concerning this phenomenon. Forty days after the death of Christ, the Apostles gathered, “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Bystanders were amazed that the Apostles were speaking in their own
languages, while, “Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine.”

My older Christian sat me on the bench and took up a position on my right. Someone else sat close by on my left. Both men began rocking back and forth, chanting, “Praise to you Jesus, thank you Jesus.”

I have been at Catholic services, where everyone suddenly kneels at some signal, and willy-nilly, I found myself on my knees. It was impossible to remain seated. In the same way, it was difficult to sit in that room and not rock and chant.

“Thank you Jesus, praise you Jesus,” I said for a little over an hour.

Presently the three of us began rocking faster, chanting locomotive-style, “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus …” I assumed—half-believed—that there was some sort of self-hypnotic process in the works, and I intended to get thoroughly stoned. Several people seemed to be in a state of trance. I thought there might be some psycho-physiological process in which the tongue spewed out syllables of its own volition after a long chant. For me this was not the case.

“Thank you Jesus,” my older Christian said, then began stuttering slightly. “Thank you Jesisisis, thank you jisisisis, dank eh jsiis, dada a jisisisis.” I found myself stuttering along. The pace increased and the man on my left broke into tongues. “Ah yab dadaba doedoedoe,” he stated. “Ah ra da da da da,” the man to my right replied. “Thank ooo jeejeejee,” I ventured. Apparently it wasn’t enough, and we started the whole process again.

I could not, try as I might, get from the stutter to the tongues organically. I sneaked a look at my watch and realized that I had been rocking and chanting for almost two and a half hours. I was developing an unpleasant prayer sore at the base of my spine, and it was becoming painfully obvious that I wasn’t going to get out of there until I began speaking in tongues.

We were working toward another crescendo. “Dank oo jejeje,” I said and burst into a tense, conservative burst of
tongues. “Er rit ta tit a tit a rit,” I said, taking care to roll my
r
’s. “Ah yab a daba daba daba raba,” the man on my right shouted. “A nanananan nana nah,” the other Christian said.

I opened my eyes slightly on the down rock, saw feet gathering around me and experienced a mainline shot of mortal dread. They knew I wasn’t speaking in tongues. They were going to stomp on me like a rat caught in the cheese box. “Er rit a tit tit tita,” I babbled, heavy on the rolling
r
’s. “Rit ti tit tit.”

There were more feet. Several people stopped chanting and were standing in a semicircle, speaking in loud and extravagant tongues. Someone shouted, “Oh, thank you Jesus, thank you for the victory.” The victory, I realized with relief that approached joy, was that I had said, “Rit ti tit tit.” I was in. I belonged. Everyone was with me. “Rit ta tit tit, diddla dit dit,” I said, introducing a pleasing variant on my basic tongues. This was well received. “Rit a little did a dit diddle dit dit.”

Beside me, my older Christian ran through a few changeups, interspersing his standard “Yab ba da ba da ba” with nice syllables that sounded like the names of Biblical towns. “Ah Shal-la-dah, ah shal-ah-dah-dah.”

I began to realize that whatever nonsense syllables you said were all right as long as you said them rapidly, in a loud trancelike monotone. It was best if your tongue bounced rapidly off the roof of your mouth. I tried to come up with some good Old Testament sounds, but the only nonsense that came to mind belonged in old rock and roll songs.

“Ah Sha nana nana nana nana nah,” worked excellently. I was confident enough to vary my rhythms. My tongue was very loose. My friends and I took short, increasingly more rapid solos: dueling tongues.

After about twenty minutes, we tapered back down to a half an hour of “praise you Jesus, thank you Jesus.” It was past midnight when we left the rat box, and the man who accompanied me to the saving block marked down three and a half hours on a sheet of paper on the outside of the door.

We stood outside the door and finally introduced ourselves. My Christian’s name was Frank, and he wanted to know if I would like to stay at the Foundation and serve the Lord. The bus was about to leave.

“Any guests want to go back to Los Angeles?” the driver called.

Frank gave me to believe that my rebirth might not take if I returned to “the World” with its manifold temptations. He said I could backslide into “filth,” which he defined as dope, pornography, and possible homosexuality. Women, he said, were often agents of the Devil. I told him I would stay a few days because I was curious about what was involved in “serving the Lord.”

Frank shook my hand, said praise the Lord and introduced me to several other Christians who greeted my decision with “praise the Lord,” uttered in the same vague tone other people say “far out.” I was given a dog-eared Bible, and the two of us moved to the far section of the church and sat in a booth. I should, I learned, read only the sections Frank recommended. “See,” he said, “if you just opened it up, you might get into some of the heavy prophets and it could blow your mind.”

We were to read the Book aloud. Frank asked me to begin with Matthew, Chapter Nine. Before I could start, he closed his eyes and rotated his head from side to side in a painful manner, as if he had a chiropractic problem with his neck. He muttered something about “burning the words upon our hearts” and looked up crossly while I stared at him. I realized he was blessing the reading and obligingly rotated my head and muttered along. I got through the first fifty-seven verses without incident, but when I came to fifty-nine through sixty-two, Frank stopped me momentarily to say that I was coming to “heavy scripture.”

In these verses, Jesus is preaching to the multitudes, and a man tells him he will follow him after he buries his father. “Jesus said unto him, ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ ”

“Thank you Jesus,” Frank said.

I continued. “ ‘And another also said, Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell which are at home
at my house. And Jesus said unto him, “No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of Heaven.” ’ ”

I asked Frank to “interpret” that last verse, and he bristled. The Alamos do not interpret the Bible, he said. They tell you what the words mean, and in this case the words were plain enough. If I took my hand from the plow, that is, if I left the Foundation and scorned the work of the Lord, I wouldn’t be fit to enter heaven. He pointed out that there were only two places to go after one dies.

“Hell is so terrible you can’t even conceive of it,” he said, and as he spoke, I felt his genuine Fear. The Alamos had a friend, he said, a woman who was a born-again Christian but who had fallen in with backsliders and found herself surrounded by Devils in some sleazy gin mill. One of the Alamos told the story over the pulpit: how the woman had passed out behind the jukebox only to have a horrifying vision of eternal torment. The lost souls were confined in a blast furnace with sloping sides. Some tried to scramble upward, toward heaven, but they fell back into the pit. The others stood stiffly, like mannequins, and cried out to God like dumb beasts.

“Mercy, Lord, mercy.” Frank imitated the hoarse, hopeless croak of the damned, and a shiver ran through his body. “The woman said that if her own mother tried to stop her from serving the Lord, she would gouge her eyes out with her high heels.”

This all made it difficult for me to tell Frank that I wanted to call my friends and tell them I wouldn’t be home. Still, I insisted, and he agreed on the condition that I “witness to” my friend. “Remember, he hasn’t been saved, so the Devil will be working through him. He’ll mock you, and you’re going to have to be strong.” He stood at my elbow while I dialed Cardoso. “Don’t forget to tell him you’ve been born again in the blood,” Frank whispered.

“Hello?” Cardoso sounded sleepy or fuddled in some other way.

“Bill, it’s me,” I said, while Frank hung on every word. “Say listen, I’ve been born again in the blood and I’m going
to stay in Saugus and serve the Lord. Everything is … 
swell.”

“Swell?” Plainly Cardoso couldn’t remember what that was supposed to mean. “You sure it’s swell? Are you all right?”

“I’m … swell,” I gritted.

“What’s the matter, can’t you talk?”

“Praise the Lord.”

“Need help?”

“No.”

“Call tomorrow.”

We hung up.

“You have to witness to them stronger than that,” Frank said. “Pretty soon they say to themselves: that guy must really have something up there.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll call him tomorrow night when I know a little more,” I said.

“Well …” Frank didn’t seem to think that was such a good idea. We moved back to a booth and called for some food. While we waited, I learned that as a Baby Christian I was forbidden to speak to other Baby Christians and that I would have an older Christian assigned to me who would be my instructor and guide. As I learned later, you could literally not even go into the bathroom without your older Christian.

The food consisted of a pile of noodles, some vegetables, and a tomato stuffed with beans. I shared five meals at the Foundation and never did I eat anything that contained either mind-controlling drugs or enough protein to propel a mouse. We spent another hour in Bible study, Alamo-style, before Frank finally took me to the bathroom. It contained a row of dirty sinks, two urinal troughs, two sit-down toilets, and a shower filled to the ceiling with sleeping gear. I was given two mothy blankets. Frank had an old sleeping bag made out of some miracle fiber; the kind of thing you find at J.C. Penney’s with pictures of the characters from “Bonanza” on the inside.

The folding chairs in the church section had been taken up, and the two of us found a spot to sleep right there on
the holy linoleum. We formed a small part of a wall-to-wall human carpet consisting of perhaps as many as 125 sleeping men.

“When we get up,” Frank said, “we wake up just praising and thanking Jesus.” I agreed to wake up praising and thanking and said good night.

“Amen,” Frank yawned.

Belly down in the sibilant, snoring silence, I reviewed Patrick’s charges. I had not been hypnotized, drugged, nor asked to sign away my worldly possessions. And if I were to discover that the brainwashing charges were not altogether groundless, the plain fact was that it was being done with the complete and devoted cooperation of the saved. There were, in fact, five separate occasions when I could have refused the Foundation without substantial rebuke: when my first witness left me on the boulevard; when I got on the bus; when I moved up to be saved; when I entered the rat box; and when I chose not to take the bus back to Los Angeles. At no time was there anything that resembled a physical threat, and what mental coercion there was fell far short of being irresistible.

No, the people at the Alamo Foundation were there because they
wanted
to be there, a fact that strained my perspective immeasurably considering they lived what struck me as a joyless life vibrating with a strong undercurrent of psychic terror.

A week later, in search of a historical context, I visited the San Francisco offices of psychotherapist Dr. Nathan Adler. I mentioned that in my stay at the Foundation, I was surprised to discover that many of the saved had been jailed at one time or another—in two cases on the chickenshit charge of loitering. In general, the people I met were not the familiar middle- and upper-middle-class dropouts of the mid-sixties. My impression was that the majority of them were stone down and outers, kids with a lower-middle-class background suddenly on their own and riding the ragged edge of poverty. Few of the saved I talked to had steady jobs before being born again.

“Youth is underemployed in our country,” Adler said.
“There are simply no jobs for young people. They used to be apprentices or errand boys, but today our society seems to have no place for people under twenty-five. They are treated like old people in this respect.”

We discussed the sociological statistic that there are presently some one million people under the age of twenty-five on the road and in the streets: the largest body of unemployed nomads since the Depression years. They can’t get case work services, food stamps, or welfare because they have no permanent address. A goodly number, of course, could give a shit because they are stoned on whatever’s cheap and available on the street.