House of Prayer No. 2 (10 page)

When you confide to your best friend about your unsuccessful attempt to find a
Playboy
magazine, he tells you the solution is simple: all you have to do is go down to the bus station behind the queer real estate guy's office and steal one. The long afternoon you stand across from the bus station on your crutches you learn an important lesson: there are many great protections against temptation, and cowardice is one of the best.

The other person who haunts the old library is a Pace sister. She died a long time ago, and people think she is the reason books fall from the stacks, the broken clock in the main reading room chimes, and the front door sometimes opens and closes by itself. The librarians take the Pace sister's presence for granted. The people in the school board office upstairs aren't so sure, until in the middle of one of their meetings a woman came into the room, someone they thought at first must have been homeless and looking for the welfare office, her clothes were old and odd. When the secretary asked the woman if they could help her, the woman turned and disappeared into a wall.

Since then, they think they've identified the woman from an old photograph that is one hundred and forty years old. To this day, if you ask people who work in that building about the Pace sister, they usually say,
I don't know, I just know she seems to hang around that front parlor
.

Your other haunt is the movie theater owned by the alcoholic gay musician from Indiana who arrived first in a small Carolina
town just over the border in a raccoon coat to play the enormous pipe organ they had installed in their movie house and nobody could get much music out of. People say he played at Radio City Music Hall and with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He's a nice man when he's sober. Sometimes when he's drinking, he bursts into the Saturday matinee in the middle of
Flipper
and chases children screaming into the street. You hang back and wait for him to climb the stairs to the projection room and see if the projectionist is able to talk him into going home. When you see the film begin to jump out of its sprockets on the screen into blinding whiteness, you figure it's time to go.

The projectionist lives on your street, and sometimes he lets you follow him down to open up the theater, and he lets you in for free if you help turn on the lights and start the popcorn, and you sit up in the Colored Balcony, the best seats in the house, where sometimes there's a party when the black children, who have to come up through an outside fire escape entrance, flatten popcorn boxes and send them sailing into the white audiences below.

Once, coming through the lobby, you tell the owner that was the best movie you have ever seen, and he says yes, Laurence Olivier is pretty good. Then he asks you if you would like a job there, and you say no, you and all of your friends have been warned away from the owner by parents. One Halloween, way after it was time for you and your best friend to be home from trick-or-treating, you found yourselves at his house loading up on the candy no one else had come to collect. The only people out on the streets were black teenagers throwing eggs and it was a
long walk home. Your best friend called his mother, and when he told her where you were, she yelled,
I'll be right there!

The woman who takes tickets at the movie theater says she's been raped by a black man and the police catch him. She never gives you back your change because you don't look twelve, she says you look too old for a kid's ticket. Without that ten cents you can't get any popcorn. You stop pressing her for the dime after she throws it at you saying,
Here!

At that time, in your state, rape is a capital offense; you go to the Big House in Richmond, where they strap you into the electric chair. The Commonwealth's Attorney lives on your street, down three houses in the next block. The Preacher lives across the street with Janet and the boys. The Commonwealth's Attorney presses for the death penalty for the rapist and the jury delivers it. On the day the rapist is executed, The Preacher goes across the street and knocks on the Commonwealth's Attorney's door. When the Commonwealth's Attorney answers, The Preacher says,
Well, I hope you're proud of yourself
. The Commonwealth's Attorney says,
Yes, justice was served
.

In the years to come, the two men will barely speak.

In the years to come, you hear that the rapist had been extorting protection money from the poor blacks who lived in the neighborhoods behind you, neighborhoods from which the Commonwealth's Attorney collected rents. Janet will say that on Saturday nights The Preacher would be sitting in bed going over the next day's sermon, trying to ignore the singing and piano playing coming from the Commonwealth's Attorney's house across the street.

ONE MORNING YOU'RE SITTING
at the dining room table and your mother stands in the kitchen doorway and says she has water boiling, what do you want for breakfast, soft-boiled eggs or oatmeal, and you croak,
Oatmeal
. Your voice has changed overnight. It happens, your doctor says later, sometimes with choirboys, boys from warm climates. Your mother almost drops her wooden spoon and runs to fetch your father, who comes into the dining room still holding the pair of square brushes he uses to get his crew cut to stand perfectly up.

Tell your father what you want for breakfast
, your mother says, and you say
Oatmeal
again, this time even deeper. Your mother looks at you with her fearful Catholic-lapsed eyes as if your head might spin around and everything her mother has been telling her is true.

Augie, the radio station manager who lives across the street, tells your father that you could have a career in broadcast radio, and your father wants to know if you can start right away. Well, sure, says Augie, and pretty soon you are riding your bicycle down to the little radio station in the strip mall by the river on the edge of the black part of town.

The other announcers teach you how to pronounce the letter
W
. You pronounce it
Double U
. Then they have you read some news copy off the clattering UPI Teletype machine in the newsroom. They roll some tape, and you record your first commercial for Leggett's department store, spring specials for men. When the announcer who has the four o'clock show quits, Augie asks you
if you can get down to the station on your bike after school and fill in. You'll have to get a work permit because you are underage. The juvenile judge is willing to sign the work permit for you even though your best friend's dog bit his son. It has been noted that you are a surly boy and maybe this will straighten you out.

It is a small station located between a discount clothing store for black people on one side and a beauty parlor and a Laundromat on the other side. Across the dogleg parking lot is a discount drugstore and a supermarket, both patronized by black people. The secretary of the radio station tells you to bring your bicycle into the station in the afternoons, don't leave it out on the sidewalk.

There are two large turntables covered with green felt that is replaced every time the town's saloon keeper puts new green felt on his pool tables. Augie and the other salesmen ask the Lebanese saloon keeper if they can have the scraps. Augie has said on the air that the Lebanese saloon keeper is the only man in town more popular than Jesus Christ. Augie can say things like that, he is the voice of your town. When he introduces the black disc jockey who follows him in the mornings to do the R&B show, Augie says,
And now, in living color, Wally Hale!
After Wally Hale's show, Augie comes back at noon to do the
Farm Hour
—crop prices, weather forecasts, and the state of crop subsidies, which your scoutmaster says are part of a larger Communist plot. After the
Farm Hour
a lady who chain-smokes plays country music until you arrive at four o'clock.

You play records from Augie's rack and some from Wally's, you read the news off the Teletype machine, do Billboard of
the Air—mostly cakewalks, church dinner announcements, lost animals—read the final news, play the national anthem, and shut down the transmitter. You take out the trash, load the Teletype with paper, turn out the lights, lock the door, and then ride your bicycle home in the dark.

You make two dollars an hour.

Saturday mornings you no longer have to drag chain through the woods for your father, because you have the afternoon shift. If you need the whole day off to go camping with the Boy Scouts or participate in trash walks along the highway where once you found a fetus in a cider bottle, the other salesman with gouty feet can fill in, always happy to play the records from his days entertaining at the London USO Club during the war where he met his wife. His English wife doesn't understand his thrifty enthusiasms—spray painting their family car canary yellow with a box of aerosol cans he got in a convoluted radio commercial deal with a hardware store that was going out of business. Sometimes he turns the studio monitors up so loud that the hair dryers in the beauty parlor next door vibrate, and they hate to call but they do.

On Sunday mornings you all take turns hosting the
Gospel Show
. One Sunday a month you get up at five in the morning, ride your bike over to the cemetery, make sure the three red lights are burning on the antennae so you can check off the maintenance log. For a while there was a grave that broadcast the station, something to do with the metal lining of the burial vault and the fillings in the teeth of a lady's corpse, theorized the station engineer when some people from a television station came to investigate; then one day it stopped.

Then you ride through the sleeping town and open the station. You have to let the tube equipment warm up for a half hour and check the pile of Teletype that has been layering up all night. Vietnam. Patty Hearst. You used to have a crush on Jane Goodall but now you have a crush on Patty Hearst, the heiress who joined the Symbionese Liberation Army, after Jane Goodall never answered your letters. In your love letters to Jane Goodall you lied to her about the respect you had for what she was doing for all those monkeys. Secretly, you wanted to live with her in a tent with only books and a lantern among animals who walked comically worse than you do. On the transmitter, there is a series of flip levers and buttons to hold in for five seconds simultaneously and then release, knobs to turn just so to bring the station on the air, you're always nervous you'll get it wrong and blow up the transmitter. At 6:00 a.m. on the dot you pop in the cartridge with the national anthem played by the Air Force Academy orchestra. You're live, you're on the air, you're thirteen, good morning.

You watch carloads of black men pull up in the empty parking lot outside the studio through the large plate-glass window. There's the first preacher, a tight little man in a black suit, Bible under his arm. There's the Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Gospel Harmoneers, is that the Blind Boys? Some of the players, the guitarists and bassists, the keyboard musicians, have come straight from shot houses and roadhouses out near Four Corners or Checkboard Square or South Quay, they smell of cigarettes and gin, some are still a little drunk in sweaty yellow or purple faded tuxedo shirts with sprung collars and missing cuff links. They set up their equipment in the tiny B studio and make a lot of noise
you can hear in your headset while you've got the microphone open reading the Darden Oil Company news.

You cue the little black preacher through the window to the B studio and he welcomes all the brothers and sisters listening and introduces the first hymn you're going to hear, already the bass player is walking a few steps with his bass, and three or four singers gather around the old standing microphone you patched in as Augie showed you. You sit back at the console and trim the levels and listen.

After the hymn, the preacher starts in with his good news about the author of our salvation while the players clunk around and whisper and open and shut the door and go out and get cold drinks from the vending machines at the Laundromat. You study the little black man who is off and running now, his eyes closed as he preaches and starts ticking back and tocking forth in his chair, his microphone is picking up the squeak in his chair and there's nothing you can do about it. Watching this man through the studio glass, you see that he is a believer. He believes in the hope of redemption and in the promise of salvation. You lose track of time. You let him run over. You wish you had his passion for Christ Jesus. You think that someday you would like to be saved as well.