The Joker: A Memoir (13 page)

While Mr. B himself was easygoing, the camp was intensely religious, with one service right after breakfast and one in the evening, all leading up to a Decision Service on Friday night. This was the crux of the week, when the campers were, in the preacher’s altar call, exhorted to come forward and profess their faith in Jesus as their personal lord and savior. The pressure increased daily; the preachers grew more urgent, their stories more dire.

Mr. B stopped short, though, of letting the visiting preachers and missionaries tell what we counselors jokingly called “flaming car wreck stories”—lurid tales of kids dying suddenly without being saved, and therefore going straight to hell without, as we said, “passing Go.” We’d all heard them and, to amuse ourselves, some of us performed elaborate and grotesque mini-sermons about church buses hit by trains, junior-high football teams wiped out when lightning strikes the goalpost, stray bullets zinging through vinyl siding and into the skulls of fourteen-year-old boys who’ve gone to bed without saying their prayers.

Preachers love these stories. They terrify adolescents into a facsimile of faith. It isn’t faith, of course; it’s a craven capitulation to eschatological extortion, and it fades as soon as the fear wears off.
But in the short term, the stories work. Trembling kids stumble sobbing, snuffling, and hiccupping down the aisle to claim the eternal life held out to them at the end of the sermon. By outlawing such a reliable tactic, Mr. B risked antagonizing the preachers whom the camp, as well as the statewide Royal Ambassadors program, depended on for support.

Only once did a preacher, desperate for converts at the end of his week in residence, violate the rule. In the outdoor chapel the campers sat on plank benches that stair-stepped down the cleared hillside to a pulpit, an oak tree cut off at chest height. Sunlight filtered through the water oaks, pines, and hickories, and at night it yielded during the course of the sermon to the flickering yellow flames of the sibilant Coleman lanterns. By the final prayer, we were snugly held against the darkness of the surrounding forest by the honey-colored cathedral light of the lanterns reflecting off the underside of the leaves spreading above us.

“You could die tonight,” the preacher chanted. “You could die tonight in your tent. There’s no guarantee you’ll wake up tomorrow morning. Your tent mate might very well wake up and find your cold lifeless body there on the cot, dead.”

I cut my eyes around to the other counselors. They looked as uncomfortable as I felt. Only when I saw another counselor with his mouth hanging open did I realize mine too was agape.

“Death comes like a thief in the night, without warning. If you accept Jesus into your heart here tonight, your soul will fly to heaven with God when you die. But if you don’t, if you turn your back on Jesus, who suffered and died on the cross of iniquity with the nails driven through his hands and feet, if you turn your back on Jesus, when you stand before God the Father Almighty at judgment tonight, you’ll cry out to Jesus, cry out to him for mercy, but because you turned your back on Jesus here tonight, Jesus will turn his back on you and say to God, ‘I know him not.’ ”

The preacher paused, sucked in a deep breath, and went on, his voice now soft, confiding:

“You know what it feels like when you touch a stove, don’t you? You know how bad it hurts when you burn yourself on a hot coal from the campfire?” He was leaning on the pulpit, and two ten-year-olds in the front row, eyes rapt, were nodding in agreement. Yes, they knew what it felt like.

“That’s what it’ll feel like all over your body, every square inch of your body covered with blazing fire, when you die outside the love of Jesus Christ. Every square inch of your skin burning, and it’ll never stop. It’ll burn like that forever.”

I looked down my row of campers. They were squirming and several lower lips were trembling. In the row behind me, two boys were sobbing.

“Tomorrow, when you’re driving home from camp, a huge Mack truck could veer across the center line of the highway into your lane. It could crash into your car, and kill you and your whole family. . . .”

Mr. B walked to the pulpit, clapped one of his powerful hands on the preacher’s shoulder. The preacher, startled, fell silent, and Mr. B said cheerfully, “Thank you for such a fine sermon.” He wedged himself into position behind the pulpit, forcing the preacher aside, and said quickly, “Tommy, would you come up here and lead us in ‘Amazing Grace’? And I want everybody, as the second verse starts, to walk quietly and reverently back to your campsite with your counselors.”

Without waiting for Tommy to finish strapping on the accordion, Mr. B pitched into the hymn, and the preacher, standing shrunken beside him, sang too.

•  •  •

Over the left side of his mouth Mr. B had a large flesh-colored mole, and its bee-sting fullness made his face seem lopsided and
effeminate—an effect his prissy lisp did not undercut. Though a few staffers at the main Baptist camp down the road mocked him, flipping their wrists and lisping, we counselors gave them cold stares. We admired the loving attention Mr. B paid to his campers, counselors, and cooks—and we admired his muscular Christianity; it had real muscles.

During set-up week at the beginning of camp and take down week at the end, Mr. B, though nearing fifty, worked all day in the wet, one-hundred-degree Alabama heat, lugging heavy wooden tent platforms and the concrete blocks we set them on. Only a concern for us, the eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old counselors who panted with exhaustion, made him stop for precisely timed ten-minute breaks once an hour.

While living in the woods, surrounded by deep believers and very dark nights, I struggled to accept again the apocalyptic faith I’d grown up in. I was obsessed with judgment and the end-time, furious with myself for letting what I was pretty sure were fairy tales get under my skin. But apocalyptic thinking is, on one level, just a way of confusing one’s fear of death with the death of everyone and everything, a self-aggrandizement natural in young men and even more natural when you walk every night to your bed through the pitch-dark piney woods of North Alabama. I was like Johnny in the story about the pastor speaking to a group of kids about being good and what a wonderful reward heaven will be if they live good lives. At the end of his talk, he asks them, “Where do you want to go?”

“Heaven!” cries Suzy.

“And what do you have to be to get there?” he asks.

“Dead!” yells little Johnny.

Over iced tea one evening after work, I listened to a group of the older counselors, seminary students, puzzle over what the Bible says about the end of the world. We all knew about the Rapture,
when “the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.” We all had heard sermons about the car that would, at the Rapture, continue on driverless as the driver, a believer, vanished. Or the man who, when his wife disappeared from the breakfast table on the morning of the Second Coming, looks at her suddenly empty chair with sad understanding. But how does Paul’s prophecy of the Rapture fit in with Revelation’s prophecy of the thousand-year reign of the Beast, which we took to be Satan? Did the Rapture precede the thousand years or follow it? Nobody got hot under the collar, merely confused as they debated, trying to sort out what the Bible says.

As they talked, Mr. B strolled over, stepped in, and explained that the book of Revelation says history will end when the Antichrist comes to power and rules over the human race for a thousand years. But Revelation is a dream vision; it’s fuzzy on whether Christ will return to earth to take the faithful with him
before
or
after
the thousand-year reign of the Beast. The pre-millennialists believe that Christ will return and take all his believers to heaven with him before the Rapture. The post-millennialists believe the Antichrist will come first, and his millennium-long reign will test the believers before Christ comes to save the faithful. The timing of the Rapture is a fearfully urgent question in end-time religions.

Though the pre-millennialists have now pretty much carried the day, the ambiguous issue then was fraught with tension: high words were exchanged among believers, and churches split. For me, the issue smacked of apocalyptic scientific fiction, which made it both slightly comic and all the more frightening—comic because I recognized the literary genre in which I was expected to live and frightening because I did, at least partially, live there.

After Mr. B finished explaining, someone asked, “What do you believe? Which are you?”

“I am,” he said, chuckling and pausing for effect, “like the old preacher who declared himself a pan-millennialist.”

“What’s that? You didn’t tell us about pan-millennialists.”

“I figure that, in Christ, things’ll pan out all right in the end.”

We laughed, of course. It was a well-timed bit of wit, played to puncture our seriousness, and to redirect us to the essential point: God’s love is more important than quibbles over doctrine.

Mr. B’s good humor and humanity about something so apocalyptic as the Apocalypse itself made me deeply happy. His easy-going faith softened my revulsion to a religion that depended so much on fear and not nearly as much on love as it might have. If I were to remain a Christian, a pan-millennialist was what I wanted to be.

I admired Mr. B and I was swept up in the camaraderie of the other counselors, hard working, earnest, cheerful men to a one. They didn’t curse or drink. They dated the counselors from the G.A. (Girls in Action) Camp, but, judging from the boy I saw convulsing in the locker room Saturday night after a date, hunched over, pale, writhing in pain with blue balls—vasocongestion caused by sexual frustration—they didn’t have sex either. A couple of guys gathered around, talking him through his discomfort, telling him it would fade, and I, while I admired his restraint, suppressed an impatient impulse to suggest he go to his tent and masturbate.

My new friends didn’t seem tormented by pessimism, depression, and doubt—just blue balls—and I wanted to be like them, although I felt like a hypocrite in their midst because I cursed, masturbated, and anguished over religious doubts and spiritual torpor. I wanted so strongly to believe, wanted so much to share their sense of divine purpose, that I half-convinced myself I did.

When camp closed down in August, I found a late high school graduation present waiting for me back home in Montgomery, a huge chrome alarm clock with an electric-blue face that I thought was beautiful. It ticked so thunderously, however, that it spent the
remainder of its life in the top drawer of my dresser, swaddled in socks and underwear. In my thank-you note to Mrs. Stallings, I gushed about my renewed faith and how wonderful I felt to live a changed life, redeemed by the love of Jesus Christ. For months afterward, I flinched with embarrassment every time I imagined my mother’s friend in California reading this cliché-ridden effusion from a boy she hardly knew and probably barely remembered. My embarrassment was compounded because I thought I’d blurted a compulsive, inexplicable lie. It took me a long time to understand that I wrote those words to see if, by saying them fervently enough, I could make them true.

•  •  •

During my freshman year at Huntingdon College, which was a mile and a half from my house, I took two required semester-long classes, one in the Old Testament and another in the New Testament, both taught by Barnes Tatum. A thin, energetic, Methodist minister, Dr. Tatum did not tread delicately on the religious preconceptions of fundamentalists. He quickly introduced us to the higher criticism of the Bible. His teaching could not have been more revolutionary if he had told the class Martin Luther King Jr. was as surely a Christian prophet as the apostle Paul—which, in fact, he did.

I had a hard time deciding what to make of my new knowledge. I saw Dr. Tatum was right when he showed us there are two different and incompatible creation stories in Genesis. How had I missed that for eighteen years? (I consoled myself by remembering that great scholars had missed it for eighteen centuries.) He showed how the four gospels tell the story of Jesus’s life in significantly different ways and that the Bible certainly does assume the Earth is the unmoving center of creation, with the sun circling it. Attempting to bring us to a more complex understanding of our faith, one that acknowledged and accepted these truths, Dr. Tatum rubbed our noses in many biblical errors and irresolvable textual contradictions.

Before class one day, I mentioned to the woman sitting next to me how excited I was by what we were learning. She looked up sharply from her notes and said, her voice thin with obstinacy and loathing, “I’ll put down what he wants me to on the test, but I don’t have to believe it and I don’t have to think about it.”

I did. As much as I envied her refusal, I
had
to think about what we were learning.

Because I lived at home and commuted to school, my father required me to continue attending church with my family, which I did sullenly and with as little grace as I could get away with. I’d sit in church on Sunday as my Baptist preacher told the congregation the same thing I’d heard preachers say my entire life: that the Bible was divinely inspired and inerrant; it was literally true in all particulars. If it could be shown to be false in even one detail—“even so much as a comma, one jot or tittle”—you might as well throw the whole thing away because you could no longer trust it. The whole edifice of Christian belief would tumble down around us like the walls of Jericho. If the Book of God could be proved to have one error in it, God was a liar, Jesus was a liar, and he himself, the preacher standing before us today, was a liar worse than the lowest, most desperate murderer, blasphemer, or adulterer who had ever walked the face of the earth.

I was so saturated by all-or-nothing thinking that I thought of my classmate’s sharp face, makeup caked around a mole on her chin, as if her resentful and furious “I don’t have to believe it” were a voice in my head. The religious edifice she and I had spent eighteen years building depended on every brick being sound, and here was our teacher—a minister!—pointing out with more than a bit of showmanship and glee every mismatched brick, every line of crumbling mortar, every gap in the facade.