Saved on the Sly

I must have been six or seven years old when Richie's mother pulled up in her Buick and told us to all pile in. "I'm takin' you kids to be saved!" she croaked in that hoarse voice common to heavy-smoking women. "But don't tell your parents, OK? Let's surprise 'em!" Richie sat next to her smiling, and motioned for us to get in. I'm just guessing I was six or seven because I think I would have been too smart to do this if I'd been much older. His mom was a once pretty now hardened woman who looked ten years older than she should. She wore black horn-rimmed glasses and was smoking Viceroys I'd bought her earlier that day. "Just tell Roy at the Texaco they're for Penny Jones," she had told me, and Roy handed them to me with a chuckle and went back to shooting the shit with his mechanics.

I was standing in front of my house with Diane and Jeannie when Richie and Penny drove up. The girls lived next door and we had just finished playing florescent light in their dad's shop. The light cast a strange unearthly glow and made a mesmerizing buzz we loved. We were open to suggestions. It was also a beautiful warm day, and only a few weeks into summer vacation. Our small midwestern town had leapt fully to life after the relentless rains of spring and getting out and around seemed like a good idea.

Richie lived a couple blocks from us and across the street from the Bible Baptist Church. He would have been called a hillbilly if he'd had an accent, but since he did not he was merely white trash which was fine. Richie ate laundry starch to quell his hunger pangs and his house always smelled of urine thanks to his two-year-old brother, Jesus. I thought it odd for his brother to have such a name, but I never asked about that or the starch. 

Richie had told me about his small cinder block church a couple weeks before and how they watched film strips during sunday school. "You're so lucky," I said with envy. At the Presbyterian sunday school I occasionally attended all we did was arts and crafts.

"Yeah, today they showed us one about little kids who were caught smoking cigarettes and Jesus cut off their hands!" He seemed pretty impressed. I tried to take it all in. I imagined little boys and girls with tears streaming down their faces, holding up their tiny blood-spurting stumps in horror. I imagined bone marrow in the middle of each of the children's stumps, like the bone marrow in the Sunday ham I'd just eaten. I even wondered about the artist who had drawn it, because it did not seem like something you would photograph. Like most kids I too was a literalist, and hoped Jesus didn't cast his net too wide when it came to children and tobacco. I did not interrogate Richie or discuss the different vision of Jesus I was taught on my infrequent excursions to church. Making crosses out of popsicle sticks was starting to look pretty good.

So the girls and I climbed in the car and travelled crosstown to a field by the foundry where all the real hillbillies lived. There was no revival tent but, instead, a makeshift stage and some temporary stands. There were a hundred or so people and most of them were kids. I'm not sure how many had been Kidnapped for Christ but my guess is probably half. I had no idea of what was going on and remember very little.

There was a man with a southern accent and high, dark hair on stage who talked about God and how God always helped him out. He spoke of driving "coast to coast" and discovering that God had put more money in his wallet every time he opened it. Then he held up his hand and sighed saying "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," and he fanned out one, then two, then three 20-dollar bills. I don't remember many oohs or ahhs when he did this. He was from an earlier pre-visual generation and while he may have only known radio, we had TV. Maybe we only had three channels and they were all in black and white, but we'd seen magic tricks on all three. He encouraged us to come forward to accept Jesus but none of my group did, even Richie, whom I presume had done it before.


When Penny dropped us off at home the shit hit the fan. "Where have you kids been?" my mother cried. "We almost called the police."

"We've been getting saved, Mom," I told her. "Richie's mom took us to be saved." 

And then I told her about the cigarettes.

I wish I had been old enough to understand the gravity of what happened next. It must have been beautiful. My dad stormed over to Richie's, our former-boxer-turned-minister from the Presbyterian church paid a visit to the Bible Baptist Church, parents called parents and yelled on the phone, the Texaco was off limits, and I never saw Richie again.  

Two or three years later, different people moved into Richie's house after his family had left town. I had my first paper route by then and when I went to collect for the previous week's delivery an old man opened the door and invited me in. As he shuffled around searching for his coin purse I noticed the house still smelled of urine. On the wall near the door hung a small sign saying "Jesus Lives Here." And indeed he had.