Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Married (22 page)

It's looking a little grim.

But then I catch my big lucky break in the chillaxing tent. A bunch of teens are lounging around on beanbags, including three nearly identical doe-eyed lip-glossed girls, all from the Grace-Trinity gymnastics squad, otherwise known as the Jumping Jacks. They agree to do a performance and I say, “Fabulous! You'll be the stars!” Then behind me I hear a voice. Someone says, “Hells, lady,
I'm
a star.”

There's a white kid standing behind me. He's short, skinny, looks almost like an albino . . . possibly with a thyroid condition. He has spiky white-blond hair and pale, paper-white skin that offsets his startlingly blue eyes, and he has arms and legs that both seem too short for his torso. He wears big baggy oversize clothes and a baseball hat that says
BIG JC!
I step back and say, “You're . . . a star?” I didn't mean to sound quite so uncertain.

“Hells yes, I'm a rap star! I'm Iced-Tea. That be me. The best God rapper there is, 'cause I only sing for the big JC!”

I stare at him.

“The big JC?” he says, pointing to his hat. “Jesus?”

“Oh! You're a Christian rapper?” I feel my heart beat faster; I think I just hit pay dirt. “Do you go to Grace-Trinity?” I ask him, and he says, “Hells no! Lady, I'm from south central!”

“South central . . . L.A.?”

“South-central
Minnesota
! I cook it Burnsville style! But I raps all over; ever heard of the Funky Jesus Rappin' Road Show?”

“No. Seriously?”

“I'm the
star
of the Funky Jesus Rappin' Road Show. I got fans all over and they is
for real
! You put out the word that Iced-Tea is rappin' center stage tonight and my people will come, like sweet sure sugar, 'cause Iced-Tea peeps is
for real.
I even got my music with me.” He pulls out a CD from his baggy pocket and hands it to me. I read the track titles.

 

Pimpin' 4 Jesus

Da Rapture

Holy Sh*t!

Holla Back, Jesus

The Notorious Big J.C.

Funky Jesus

Saved Soulja Boy

Jesus Is My N-Word

Are You There, God? It Be Me . . . Iced-Tea

 

“Good enough for me.” I shrug. “You're on.”

“For . . . reals?” he says. “For
really-reals
?”

“Yep, for really-real super-reals. Just be at the bonfire by six o'clock. All right?”

“Lady, you will not be sorry! Hells yeah. Play track two, ‘Da Rapture.' ”

I walk away, my heart singin' all gangsta style.
This is perfect.
Perfect! Sorry, Mother Keller, but I rule. I hurry to find a media guy who can run a power line down to the fire pit on the beach while Iced-Tea power-rehearses with the church's dance squad, who I bamboozled into performing with him. I find the bonfire is already going in the large stone-ringed fire pit next to the lake, the giant cross looming overhead. Electricity is no problem; in fact they already have a whole sound system right there, cleverly hidden in a nearby grove of plastic bushes. A big group of campers is already sitting around the fire pit, and suddenly the Louises come up beside me. “All ready then, Jen?” Big Louise asks.

“Oh, I'm ready,” I tell them. “
Very
ready.”

More and more campers file down the beach and take their seats on hay bales around the campfire, until there are no more seats left. It's standing room only. Then more campers come and there's not much standing room either. “Where are all these kids coming from?” Dirty Louise marvels. “There are way more here than there were during the day.”

Pastor Mike uses a megaphone to welcome everybody and leads the group in a prayer, in which he blesses sinners and saints alike. Then the pre-sermon entertainment starts.

Dirty Louise is up first. She bravely goes onstage, takes a deep breath, clears her throat, and tells the teens a carefully crafted campfire story that has both a camping theme
and
a Christian theme, which is . . . odd. The story is something about a serial killer with a golden arm who murders teens having premarital sex in the woods. He finds these sinful teens camping and
zip!
He cuts their heads right off with his golden arm, which also has some sort of knife- or saw-like attachment. The police try hard to catch him, even though they understand his desire to correct sinful deviant teen behavior, but the teen-sex killer is too clever for them. He never leaves any clues, except somehow everybody knows he has a golden arm with a knife- or saw-like attachment.

Dirty Louise says it was on a night
just like this one
that the crazed teen-sex killer was about to strike again. He found some teens camping in the woods and he crept up outside their tent. He assumed they were sinning because (A) they were teenagers, (B) they were in the woods, and (C) they were making some pretty strange sounds inside the tent, which turned out to be them just trying to open a pickle jar, but he didn't know that. The fiendish killer raised his horrible golden arm up high and
slash!
He ripped the tent wide open and found the teens engaging in . . . Bible study? The killer lowered his arm. The situation was confusing for everyone.

You see, these were good, godly, nonsinning,
nonsexing
teens who had gone camping in the woods, and those godly teens showed that mean old teen-killer a Bible and he read it. He realized he'd better change his ways if he wanted to go to heaven and not to hell, where all those sexed-up teens would be. He cried and repented right there in the woods and the godly teens baptized the killer with Mountain Dew, because that's all they had, but that was good enough. Then the killer went to the police and confessed all his hideous crimes and begged the parents of all those sexed-up teens he killed for their forgiveness, which they gave him because even though they were mad at him, they also understood his desire to correct sinful deviant teen behavior. The killer went to prison, but he was happy, because he knew the Lord loved even him and also he got an operation to replace his golden arm with a simple wooden one, which the church paid for and which was the kind Jesus would've worn if he needed a prosthetic while on Earth, because he was a king but he was also a carpenter.

The end.

Dirty Louise finishes her story and stands there onstage. It's quiet. Real quiet. Nobody knows what's going to happen next, not even the crowd. I think to myself,
Oh boy, here we go. They're gonna kill her . . .
But they don't kill her, they start . . . clapping? Slowly at first and then louder and louder, like it's the best story they've ever heard in their lives. Pastor Mike says the spirit moved them. I say Dirty Louise's plotline completely baffled them, but who knows. The Lord works in some damn crazy ways.

Big Louise is up next. She dusts off her butt, marches out onstage, tells the audience they're going to sing, and attempts to lead them in a not-quite-rousing round of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It bombs. Then she tries “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.”
Bomb.
Even good old reliable “Amazing Grace” . . .
Big fat bomb.
The campers become restless. A few start booing, some start shouting. One kid yells, “Man, who the fuck is
Michael
. . . and why is that motherfucker always
rowing
?” Sensing their disinterest, she switches gears and they all sing “S.O.S.” by ABBA. “Ha!” someone heckles.
“Total lesbian! Knew it!”

By the time Pastor Mike pulls Big Louise off the stage, it's a catcalling contest and thrown soda cans are skittering across the stage.
Great.
Thanks, Louise. Great act to follow. I pace around in the staging tent and I panic, I sweat, I consider the consequences of stealing a church shuttle bus and fleeing for somewhere God can't find me. Better yet, I pour the remaining contents of the stolen whiskey flask into my water bottle. My heart nearly stops when it's our turn. Pastor Mike introduces me, shouting through his megaphone, and I take the stage, hands trembling as I hold the microphone. The next hour is a blur. I can't remember much of it, but I remember enough that I can't say it went . . . well.

The belching freshman chokes.

The Korean foreign-exchange student can't find any cabbages and so uses raw eggs, which he drops all over the stage and a few of which he sends sailing into the crowd, clearing large sections out as girls start screaming.

The chubby kid reads a
Star Trek
poem, which might've been fine, but he chooses to read it in Klingon. Some kid jumps onstage next to him and starts a phony erotic translation. Then the girl with dark eyes reads her short story, which is an epic saga of depression, bulimia, and contemplating suicide. And that's the uplifting part.

The girl in the back brace twirls her canoe paddle right off the stage, nearly decapitating a counselor. The karate students couldn't find a plank and try to karate-chop a red plastic lunch tray instead. They fail miserably, despite trying for nearly twenty minutes.

I finally introduce the last act. The grand finale.

“Kids and adults!” I say. “Please welcome
Iced-Tea
! Accompanied by the Grace-Trinity Jumping Jacks!” The intro music kicks up and the Jumping Jacks bounce onto the stage doing cartwheels and flips. Iced-Tea, however, is still backstage.

“Get out there!” I hiss. “Get out there now!”

“Why they screamin' for
Ice-
Tea?” he asks angrily. “You say my name wrong?”

“No, I didn't say your name wrong! Get out there!”

The sound guy pulls his earphones off and says to the kid, “You never heard of the rap star Ice-T?”

“No!”

“Ice-T, the father of gangsta rap? The legendary icon who started on the streets of South Central and became a hip-hop superstar? Recorded Grammy-award-winning megahits like ‘Home Invasion' . . . ‘Straight-Up Nigga' . . . ‘Cop Killer'? You never heard of him?”

“I'ma
legendary icon
your face in one minute!”

I grab Iced-Tea by the shoulders and push him onstage. “Get out there or so help me I will hunt you down and bust a cap in your white ass crack!
Go!
” Iced-Tea bounds onto the stage, hollering out to the crowd. They seem confused. People start booing.

“That ain't Ice-T!”
somebody shouts.
“They said Ice-T was playin'!”

Then they're throwing stuff, liquid soap samples, mini mouthwash bottles, and toothpaste kits from the goodie bags. They bounce off the big wooden cross and plunk into the fire, which smells like burning mint.

Thwap.

A chunk of hay from a nearby hay bale catches fire and rolls to the base of the cross. Iced-Tea keeps right on a-rappin' away, unfazed by the situation, which makes me wonder if he's familiar with it. The girls who are dancing most definitely are not used to being booed. Uncertain of what it means, and having never experienced miniature bottles of mouthwash being chucked at them before, they cling fiercely to their routine, speeding it up and performing with wild expressions of smiling terror frozen on their faces.

I finally tell the sound guy to cut the music, which is unnecessary. The song is just ending, with Iced-Tea belting out the last lines of his freestyle rap. In all the commotion I hadn't really heard his . . . violent, sexist, racist, homophobic, horrifying lyrics, which end with the catchy line:
“That's what Jesus told his Jerusalem bitches. Talk back again and you gonna need stitches. PEACE, MOTHAFUCKAS!”

That's the cue for the girls to do their finale triple flip and I don't really know what goes wrong. One minute they're up and dancing and the next minute they're stumbling into the fire pit. Chaos ensues. Bouncy Blonde is pulled safely out of the fire by some quick-thinking counselor, who rips off the streamers that are on fire and trailing behind her. “Just what the hell was that?” Big Louise thunders, marching up with her arms akimbo. I start rattling off a nonsensical list of details that might've caused all this until Dirty Louise looks up and whispers, “Dear Lord . . . No.” It turns out the quick-thinking counselor who tore off the burning streamers chucked them out of harm's way . . . and onto a hay bale. Counselors rush in to stamp the flames out. Big Louise throws her can of diet soda, which bounces off the cross and rolls away. Then she grabs my water bottle and throws its contents on the fire too, assuming there's water inside, not whiskey.

Poom!

A bright fireball flash.

Within moments the giant cross catches fire and we stand there frozen, looking up, mouths agape. Roaring flames race up the cross and beat into the sky, burning so brightly you could see them from across the lake. The crowd swells as campers abandon their various hidey-holes and hay bale party rooms and come running to see. The number of black campers present has just about quadrupled.

Using drill whistles and megaphones, counselors direct kids away from the fire and herd them toward the mess hall, where they get hot chocolate and finally hear Pastor Mike's cool fireside sermon. I forgot about the sermon. The one where he was going to save all these poor underprivileged kids from the inner city who've been recently traumatized.

Right. Not betting on it.

As the crowds part, maintenance crews wheel down industrial pumps and toss long hoses to the lake. I find myself standing next to the Louises, their eyes squinting and watering from the smoke. Everything seems so surreal; I keep hoping I'll wake up. Soon people will want answers . . . and what could I say
?
“Everything would've been fine if Big Louise hadn't thrown my Goddamned water bottle filled with whiskey into the fire”? Why was she getting involved anyway? Is she a certified firefighter? No, she is not. Probably not. Maybe. She does have CPR training.