Have A Little Faith In Me (5 page)

When Norman was eight years old, the salvation he had prayed for came at last. 

On September 22, 1996, the Family Victory Church opened its enormous doors to the people of Georgia.  Reverend Norman McCoy had ridden the wave of “pro-family” sentiment in the country to a position of national prominence.  That the Defense of Marriage Act was signed into law one day before the first service in his new church surely showed the whole world that God’s will was still at work in the United States of America. 

The church was larger than most theaters, seating thousands of the faithful.  “Our God is an Awesome God,” the band on the stage announced as the parishioners filed in.  It was hard to argue with that, when He had brought this arena into being, an arena in which the Christians and not the lions were triumphant.

The Reverend was no fool.  He knew that young people found traditional churches as appealing as broccoli.  He had hired a marketing consultant away from his job with the Christian Coalition, and the consultant had told him that if he wanted to “grow the brand,” showmanship was the way to go.  “You can’t build a church the size of a Broadway theater and not put on a show,” was the take-away message.

In Reverend McCoy’s old church, there had been singing, but…not this.  Not a full band with guitar, drums, keyboard!  Norman had never heard a live band in his young life, and he was drawn to the stage like a moth to the flame. 

Norman stood there, entranced, as the band played a cover of George Michael’s “Faith.”  The lyrics had been radically revised, of course.

Well, I guess it would be nice if I could touch your spirit,

I know not everybody has got a spirit like you

The people in the hall, including Norman’s grandmother, were clapping in time with the song.  Until they heard it, felt it, they didn’t know that this was what had been missing in the old church – a beat. 

Music in the McCoy house had been nonexistent.  The radio played the “devil’s music,” and never mind the television, which was kept in a locked cabinet so Norman couldn’t be exposed to its unwholesome messages. 

The band on the stage was like the Monolith in
2001
, the thing that made a great mental leap possible for him.  All those things that composed popular culture were forbidden, but this…  If it was allowed here, it was allowed to him.  He stared at the lead singer’s guitar as if he could will it into his possession.

That night at dinner, after they’d said grace, he asked.

“Father, may I please learn to play the guitar?”

Reverend McCoy’s fork paused on his way to his mouth.  He looked at his son.  Then he looked at his mother, forming the third at their table since his wife had passed away.  He searched her face to see if there had been any conspiring on this.  After all, Faith McCoy had once been Satan’s slave, playing guitar on the circuit with Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash.  But she was just as astonished as he was. 

“I’ll only ever play God’s music, I promise,” Norman said.  He was a good child, a good boy, but like any observant child, he had watched and listened to the world around him and seen what kind of behavior would get him what he wanted.  The TV was unlocked for shows like “Touched By An Angel,” and Norman knew the appeal that would make his grandmother cry.

“Oh, Lord, child,” Faith said.  “That’s wonderful!”

“Well,” the Reverend said, “I don’t know.”  But this was for show, of course.  He had to remind them that he was the master of the house, and not so easily swayed.

“Please, father, I’ll work extra hard, I’ll mow the lawn at church!”

Faith and Norman Senior both laughed at the idea of Norman Junior pushing a mower over the massive grounds. 

“All right.  If,” his father raised a finger, “you keep up your studies.  And you keep your promise, only Christian music.”

“Yes, thank you!”  Norman would have made a deal with the devil at that point, if that’s what it took.

He took to the guitar like a duck to water.  His grandmother was already his home-schooling teacher, so adding a music lesson to the curriculum was easy.  He’d been amazed when she’d shown up one day with a battered guitar case, and pulled out a beautiful Gibson acoustic guitar. 

“This is the old girl I used to play on the circuit,” she sighed softly, looking at it like a lost lover.  “it sure has been a while.” 

Norman watched her silently, recording the affection she had for the instrument. 

She shook herself.  “Well, time marches on.  And the march of time, thank the Lord, has brought us the Korg.”  She showed Norman a device about the size of a pack of cards.  He was fascinated by the way the digital needle moved on the display as Faith plucked a string and adjusted its tuning key, until the needle was in the “sweet spot.” 

After a few notes, Faith shook her hand as if burned and sighed.  “I used to have fingertips as tough as nails.  Well, I guess we’ll have to go get some picks.” 

They rode through Marietta to Ken Stanton Music.  Inside the old store, Norman’s eyes lit up.  The way some people would gasp with awe in a jewelry store, so Norman felt in here.  He wanted to play
everything
he saw.  The drum sets, the keyboards, everything in the store was shiny and glossy and more alluring than any diamond. 

Faith saw the look on her grandson’s face and smiled.  “I know that look, young man.  I tell you what.  You work hard and practice every day and when you’re ready, I’ll bring you back here to get you your own guitar.” 

Norman looked at his grandmother, and his grin split wider than it ever would on Christmas morning.

Faith was stunned by his progress.  After only a few tuning sessions, Norman no longer needed the Korg to get the guitar in tune.  She experimented with twisting the tuning keys way out of whack, and held the tuner out of his sight as he worked.  Sure enough, he sent the needle into the sweet spot every time, just by ear.

He learned fast, knocking out “Amazing Grace” and “Red River” in no time.  She was hesitant to use the word “prodigy.”  It was prideful, for starters.  She’d been a prodigy, and it had led her down the garden path to sin.  It had taken so much prayer to have the strength to walk away from that life, and she swore to God she would keep Norman from even looking down that road.

All the same
, she sighed. 
I know who’s got God’s gift when I see it.

One day there was an event that seemed insignificant at the time.  But aren’t those always the ones that we look back on later and realize, that’s when it all changed?

Until that point, the bedroom had been strictly for sleeping.  He spent his evenings in the living room with his father during “Family time,” praying or doing Bible study or his homework.

But mastering a musical instrument starts with mangling a musical instrument.  Norman would sit in the living room and practice after all his other tasks were complete.  But there were so many wrong notes, so many false starts, that it got on his father’s nerves. 

“Go on up to your room and do that,” his father said, not looking up from his account books.

Norman was stunned.  Until now, being sent to his room was punishment.  That room was a monastic cell with no posters, no music, and no books other than the Bible and a copy of “Left Behind.”

But he didn’t argue.  He took his guitar and his lesson book and went upstairs.  He had one of the musician’s first formative experiences – what it sounds like, what it feels like, to play alone in a small, empty room.  To make mistakes with nobody to hear, to judge.  And then even, one day, to softly and tentatively sing the words to the song he was playing, to do something that he hadn’t asked permission to do, a first tiny rebellion.

Norman had no idea that the six steps up from the church floor to the stage could be such a long and terrifying journey.

“I don’t know,” the Reverend said, shaking his head at his mother’s suggestion.  “It might give the boy a big head, having all those people applaud him.”

Faith wasn’t to be stymied.  Norman’s progress in the nine months since they’d started had been uncanny.  “If they’re applauding him for doing good Christian music, and they will, because he’s that good, well…  If you want him to use this gift to serve God, you’d better get him up on the church stage before some other stage lures his soul.”

The camera frightened Norman more than the thousands of people who were waiting for him to perform.  The cold, impersonal eye broadcasted a gigantic version of him onto the screen above the stage, so that even the faithful in the far reaches of the balcony could see him up close.

Faith saw his nerves when he looked at the camera.  She walked over and stood by the cameraman, smiling, so that it was her that Norman saw.  He smiled back, relieved, and sat down on the little stool in front of the microphone.

He launched into “I’ll Fly Away,” singing the lyrics in his sweet, high, nine-year-old voice, his fingers deftly plucking the notes.  He didn’t just play with technical facility, but with such feeling for the sad song, an old man’s song, really, about waiting for death, that for one blasphemous moment Faith wondered if there was such a thing as reincarnation after all, and that Norman was an old soul reborn.

Norman didn’t know about getting old and thinking about death, but something in the song spoke to him anyway.  As he sang it, he looked up at the skylight in the ceiling, a hundred feet above him, and thought about what it might be like to be a bird, to just…take off, to just go.  He looked at his grandmother and for some reason he thought about how sad it was to be a bird in a cage, and that’s what he sang about.

When he finished, the church roared its applause, coming to their feet.  He felt a surge of ecstasy, a chemical response to some pheromone released into the air by that many people expressing so much enthusiastic approval. 

Until that day, he’d played at being a fireman, or an astronaut, or a policeman, from one day to the next.  But after that day, there was no more pretending.  He knew now what he would be.

As the years went by, Norman had more and more time to himself.  “Family time” evenings with his father weren’t possible when Reverend McCoy was gone so often, as he took taking a larger and larger place on the national stage.  The Defense of Marriage Act wasn’t the end of the battle against the gay agenda – not by far. 

No, the gays were insidious; they would continue to undermine the family, the gays and all the secular humanists who were oppressing the Christian majority with their war on faith.  Reverend McCoy was in demand on Fox News, at the National Prayer Breakfast, at conferences put on by Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition and Liberty University.

Reverend McCoy had taken the lessons of his marketing consultant to heart.  He was one of the first to set aside the vituperative anti-gay rhetoric, if not the sentiment behind it. It turned out that anti-gay ordinances and measures polled so much better when they had a happy face on them. 

You didn’t have to say that the gays wanted to destroy marriage, if you said you were “defending marriage, protecting marriage.”  You didn’t have to say that gay people couldn’t marry because gay sex was a sin and sin put you outside God’s love; you just said that “marriage is about love, the love between a man and a woman,” and everyone knew what you meant.  You didn’t have to say that gay people were unfit parents when instead you could say that “a child needs a mother and a father.”

“Love the sinner, hate the sin” had worked for years, but now it was set aside because the word “hate” just didn’t poll well in any context.  If you didn’t use negative words in your speech, the enemy was defanged – they couldn’t run a pull quote displaying your ignorance and hatred if all the words were about love, and defense, and “building strong families.”

Being a widower had made the Reverend a sympathetic figure after his wife passed from cancer when their son was only two.  But in recent years, the ladies of the church had pressured him to remarry, to give Norman Jr. the mother and father that he himself preached was what a child needed.

But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t.  “I’m married to my work now, to God’s work,” he’d say.  “And my mother is an angel, she has the woman’s place at the table in our family.” 

And they’d nod and smile and still they’d wonder in the back of their minds if there wasn’t something wrong with him, not being married himself even as he worked so hard to defend marriage.  There had to be something funny about any man who wasn’t married, after all.

Left alone in his room, with no computer (it was downstairs and crammed with parental filtering software anyway), no TV and no music other than the music he made, Norman was lucky, really.  As the rest of his generation got sucked deeper and deeper into their devices, becoming passive, compulsive consumers of entertainment, he had no choice but to create his own.

He only needed two things to build a whole world – pen and paper.  He wrote poems and lyrics, and when that Muse was dry, he sat there and doodled.  He drew his guitar over and over, his tongue between his teeth as he tried again and again to draw the straight lines of the strings, until finally he mastered it.  In time, his doodles became figures, and figures became characters.  He drew circles over and over until finally he could draw a head, with a realistic pair of eyes.

He drew people he’d seen in church, their eyes closed, their hands swaying.  He drew his father at the pulpit, a hand chopping through the air to make his point.  He drew the view from his window, and he drew his grandmother, over and over.

In January 2001, Faith McCoy was happy just to be alive for her 66
th
birthday.  The world hadn’t ended with the turn of the millennium, though there was still 2012 to worry about, if you believed in that sort of thing. 

She gasped when 12-year-old Norman presented her with a handmade birthday card, inside of which was a portrait of herself with her guitar. 

“Did you do this?” she asked.

Norman smiled.  “Yep.  With a roller ball pen.”

“It’s…” She hadn’t known!  All this time he had been learning to draw, keeping it from her and his father.  

She hugged him.  “You’re incredibly talented, Norman.  So gifted.  You have to…”

She almost said, “You have to show your father.”  But for some reason she couldn’t explain, and wouldn’t care to think about, she was thrilled that her grandson had a secret life, a thing that was his and his alone.

And besides, she could see what the Reverend would say, anyway.  He was concerned about the boy – he wasn’t social, and he wasn’t athletic.  He’d been injured his first week in Little League, a dislocated shoulder that he had stoically refused to blame on anyone but himself. 

But Faith had seen the way the other boys had smelled his difference, his natural apartness from the pack.  And the pack had responded, and attacked the runt of the litter.  He hadn’t gone back to Little League, and Faith had made excuses for him when the Reverend called from the road to ask about it.

“The boy’s sensitive,” she’d said, then regretted it.  “Sensitive” meant only one thing in a boy.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” her own son said back to her.  Faith had married an old fashioned man, always ready with his belt and his hand and, maybe worst of all, a hard word.  They hadn’t spared the rod on Norman Senior, and in the fullness of time she now had cause to regret it.

One day when she and Norman were doing schoolwork, Faith set aside their science textbook, “It Couldn’t Just Happen!  Fascinating Facts about God’s World.”

“Norman, would you like to be a Boy Scout?”

His eyes dilated in fear.  “Do I have to?”

“You’d get to do a lot of fun things, learn skills, go camping, meet other boys your age…”

She saw the dismay on his face when she got to “boys your age.” 

“I just worry that you don’t, well, you don’t have any friends.”

Norman startled her by bursting out into the sunniest, happiest smile she’d ever seen on him.  “Oh, but I do.  I have my guitar, and my sketchbook.”

The next time she talked to the Reverend on the phone, she made her case.  “I think it’s time the boy goes to school,” she said.  “Home schooling is all well and good, but if you want him to learn to socialize, he’s got to be with kids his own age.  And public schools here, well, it’s not like the local school board is a hotbed of liberalism, you know.”

The Reverend laughed, knowing that was true, since he’d help make sure of it.  “I’ll think about it.”

She knew not to press the issue, but she wasn’t done.  “All the same, with you gone so much, I have so much to do to keep this house going.  I want to bring in a tutor to help him with his studies.”

There was a pause on the other end.  She knew what she was doing, pushing a guilt button by reminding him that raising Norman Jr. was all on her, that he was an absent father. 

“Fine.”

She smiled.  She had asked the head of the household for a tutor, and he had agreed.  She had done her duty.  There was no reason to tell him the tutor would be an art teacher.

Like everyone else in the nation, Norman and his grandmother were glued to the television set in the days after 9/11.  But they weren’t tuned to CNN, or the networks.  They were watching Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell was his guest.

“The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked,” Falwell said. “And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.’”

“I totally concur,” Pat Robertson said.

Norman turned to his grandmother.  “So the gays crashed the planes into the buildings?”

She almost gave in to horrified laughter.  “No.  They didn’t.”

“But they made the planes crash.”

“No,” Faith said.  Her denial should have made her feel like Judas.  But it didn’t.  She hadn’t lost her faith in God that moment, but she’d lost her faith in something.

Norman clutched his backpack, looking back at his grandmother, waving from the car.  “It’s everyone’s first day,” she’d comforted him.  “Not a single one of these kids has been in this school before.  So they’re all just as nervous as you are.”

He wanted to believe that, but as he walked into the halls of his first public school as a fourteen-year-old high school freshman, he knew it wasn’t true.  The other kids all knew each other, having spent their whole lives together in the system.  They laughed and squealed and shouted and threw things and slammed locker doors and ran through the halls. 

He realized that he looked a fool in his dress shoes and slacks and button-down short-sleeve shirt, the outfit Faith had chosen for him so he’d look nice on his first day – so he’d make a good impression.  The other kids were in shorts, loudly colored shirts, dressed for play, not work.  Norman looked more like a teacher than a student.

He entered his first classroom, already full of chattering kids.  His instinct had been to go to the back of the room, to hunker down and be invisible, but one look at the boys in the back fixed that.  Two of them were his former teammates from Little League, who’d thrown him to the ground and screwed up his shoulder.  He hadn’t been able to play guitar for weeks.  They were smirking as if they were in on a joke that nobody had to tell, ready to get away with things back there they hadn’t even thought of yet.

There was a desk open in the first row, near the teacher.  This looked safe – how much could they do to him with the teacher right there?

He sat down and looked nervously about.  The girl on his left was turned around, giggling with a friend.  On the other side was a black boy, who looked even more uncomfortable than Norman.  And dorkier, too – he had old fashioned glasses that looked like he’d inherited them – the heavy silver “aviator” style that had been so trendy in the 70s, and would not be trendy again (save for a moment in Brooklyn ten years hence), other than with mechanical and electrical engineers who wanted something sturdy and didn’t care how ugly they were.

The boy looked sideways at Norman, and Norman whispered “Hey.” 

“Hey,” the boy whispered back, as if they were strangers who had both found themselves hiding behind the same wall, taking shelter from the riot on the other side.

Someone kicked his chair from behind, hard.  “Race traitor,” the boy whispered.

Norman whipped around, surprising himself as much as anyone else.  “Ignorant cracker,” he said loudly.  “Why are you calling me a race traitor?”

The boy flushed.  “I di’n’t say nothin’.” Then the teacher came in and the class quieted down.

After class, the black boy followed him down the hall.  “You know that guy behind you?” he asked Norman as he changed out books at his locker.

“No.  I don’t know anyone.”

“You just move here?  You sound local.”

“I’ve been homeschooled.  I’m Norman.”  He extended his hand.

“Korey,” the other boy said, shaking it firmly.  “Well, see you later.”

“You wanna hang out?” Norman asked him.  It occurred to him that it would be nice to have a friend. 

Korey looked at him, his eyes magnified by the thick lenses.  “You’re asking for trouble, you know.  Hanging out with a black boy.”

Norman shrugged.  “I don’t care.”

Korey smiled.  “Okay dude.  So, do you like music?”