Hell on Church Street Read online

  So you see, it’s all my father’s fault.

  As for my mother, what can I say about her except that she was the type of woman who would marry my father. They divorced when I was thirteen. I stayed with her, of course, which thrilled her not one little bit, but she did enjoy suing him for child support. He kept threatening to kill her, which I think secretly turned her on, and he was sent to jail for a time. Not long after he went away, Mom left me with her mother-in-law and ran off. The last time I tried to track her down, I found that she’d been working as a prostitute around truck stops in Texarkana.

  It was my uncle Ronald—my mother’s little brother and a surprisingly sane human being—who first took me to church when I was fifteen. He was dull and balding, with a fat wife and a crappy job at Maytag, but he was a nice man who thought church might do me some good.

  And it did.

  It’s difficult to say now if I would have been any worse without the church, as the church played such a pivotal part in the undoing of my life. I don’t know. I do know that as a rawboned teenager I had nowhere else to go. At school I was an anathema to most people. I was nerdy, but lazy about homework, so I wasn’t considered smart. I always said the wrong thing at the wrong time, so I wasn’t considered quick or funny. To make matters worse, I’d inherited my father’s lanky body and my mother’s dull face and looked, I thought, like a very homely girl. I was really small in those days. Becoming fat has been an act of the utmost will. Back then I was a geek, everyone’s geek. I was the geek even the geeks could look down on, the salve to everyone’s shaky self-esteem.

  The Baptist Church, and in particular the youth group, changed that. What I discovered at the youth group was not that I was suddenly popular, or even that I suddenly had friends. No, what I discovered was that they had to accept me. They were obligated to accept me. My youth minister was a former outcast like myself, a portly, red faced young guy named Leonard. He reached out to me, as they say, and told me God loved me.

  Now, of course, I didn’t believe that. Nothing in my fifteen years would have served as proof of God’s existence, much less as proof of his love. I was underwhelmed by the fact that Jesus Christ of Nazareth had been executed by the Roman Empire two thousand years before my birth. One might as well say I should feel God’s love because John Wilkes Booth shot Abe Lincoln in the back of the head. Scripture said that we should consider the sparrow and God’s care of it, but I’d seen birds lying dead on the side of the road, their corpses being picked apart by ants. So I knew it wasn’t true that God loved me, but I said I believed it and I was baptized because what I did believe was that the people at the church felt they had that obligation to me. If it was some idea of God’s love that made them duty-bound to accept me, so be it.

  Our church was a modest country congregation with only a few hundred people attending on a regular basis. The youth group numbered about thirty, and I soon found that I was able to rise among these ranks into someone who was genuinely accepted and even, on some occasions, liked. I even found, much to my delight, that my Christian friends were forced to acknowledge me as a peer at school. After fifteen years, I’d found my niche.

  I’d also found a profession. Brother Leonard became my hero, and as I watched him work over the next few years I began to realize that his job was a sick joke.

  I mean, the ministry can be a hard job. Ministers see people at their worst, and they are sometimes called on to mediate the most contentious of disputes and bear witness to the worst of human tragedies. They are expected to bring light into utter darkness.

  But that’s exactly why, for the most part, religion’s a scam. For all its history and prestige, for all the buildings built to honor it and all the blood spilt to propagate it, religion is no different than reading palms or staring at tea leaves.

  Leonard, he of the big heart and wide smile, probably didn’t work more than three hours a week. But he got paid like he worked fifty! He was supporting a wife and two teenaged kids by reading Bible stories on Wednesday night. This was not lost on me.

  It hit me like divine inspiration. Religion is the greatest graft ever invented because no one ever loses money claiming to speak for the invisible man in the sky. People already believe in him. They already accept they owe him money, and they think they’ll burn in hell if they don’t pay him. If you can’t make money in the religion business, you need to give up.

  Chapter Three

  A few months out of college, I got my first job as a youth minister at a place called Higher Living Baptist Church in the southwest section of Little Rock. They were looking for a youth pastor, and Leonard knew the preacher and thought he’d take a chance on a kid fresh out of school.

  Leonard had convinced me that I needed to go to a little junior college and pick up a two year degree in communications. The classes themselves were boring, except for the Speech class, which was terrifying. I got through the class okay, though, and learned something valuable about myself: I could speak in front of people. The first time I got up to talk, my voice disappeared. Once I found it, I sounded like a timid bird. But slowly I began to loosen up. I hit my stride in that class when I realized the first fundamental truth of this life: most people just want you to tell them what they want to hear. Double-check me on that; you’ll find that it’s true. Most folks are happy if you just maintain the balance in their lives.

  Once I figured out how to do that—and I was already doing it on a smaller scale, with people like Brother Leonard—I was ready.

  I drove down to Little Rock in the snow and met the preacher and let him look me over. He was a dim little guy named Brother Card, a fool, but he didn’t know it, and I didn’t tell him. There’s no bigger fool than the one who thinks he’s wise, so from the start, I could tell Brother Card wasn’t going to give me any trouble.

  The first time I met him, he was sitting at his desk printing off the outline of his sermon. His office was cold because he was trying to cut back on the heating bill. That should tell you what you need to know about the church. It was a rundown place with a small sanctuary, a handful of classrooms, one reception hall where the youth group met on Wednesdays, and the preacher’s shabby office. I walked in and knocked on the door. “Brother Card?”

  He looked up from his computer. The old printer on the desk next to him rattled and spat out his sermon. “Yes,” he said. Despite the cold, his balding head gleamed with sweat.

  I told him who I was.

  He smiled and stood up. He was taller than me, with no chin and a round gut stretched against a bright red t-shirt that read: Ask Me About Jesus. “Good to meet you,” he said. I went over to his desk and we shook hands. “You’re a protégé of Leonard’s, right?” He motioned to the visitor’s chair opposite his desk.

  We sat down, and I said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Good fella that Leonard.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good man of the Lord.”

  “Yes, sir, he is.”

  You see how it went. Card told me I would have to meet the congregation and the youth group, and then the church would vote on me.

  “Yes, sir, I understand. I’m really optimistic about being here. The Lord has given me a strong sense he wants me to be here.”

  Card nodded and shut down his computer. Then he leaned back. “The youth minister’s position is massively important,” he said, pressing his fingertips together. “I can’t stress that enough.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The challenges our young people face today are the toughest of any generation in the history of our country.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “They need guidance more than ever.”

  “Boy, you said something there. With the television and music and magazines out there…”

  “All sex and violence.”

  He shook his head sadly. “It is. We’ve got to compete. The church has got to compete against an adversary of incredible power…”

  “Yes, sir, it’s true.”

  “Wh
ile making it clear that our side will win.”

  “ ‘No weapon formed against us shall prosper,’ ” I quoted.

  “Amen to that,” he said with a smile. “I’ve got a good feeling about you.”

  I met the rest of the church the following Sunday and the youth group on the following Wednesday. It wasn’t too hard. Just told them what they wanted to hear. I preached a little sermon on Wednesday. I gave my best, all around stump speech. A good youth sermon, I’d figured out, has three parts: 1) The world is evil, 2) your parents and the church are good, and 3) you have to choose between 1 and 2.

  Now I’m more eloquent than that, or I was, but those were the basic elements. I polished it all off with the story of my tragic childhood and glorious salvation and they nearly cheered me at the end. It’s exactly what the people wanted to hear, and it went over like gold with the Higher Living Baptists. They voted me in as youth minister.

  Afterwards everyone came up and shook my hand, and that was the first time I met her.

  She was sixteen or seventeen years old, and she was nearly invisible. Unattractive and overweight, she drifted among the people of her church touching no one. Unspeaking, she stared at the floor. Her hair, pale blonde to the point of being colorless, draped her shoulders. When she stepped up to shake my hand and lifted her empty blue eyes to my face, her thick mouth jarred itself loose from a perpetual pout into something approaching a nervous smile, and she gave me only the briefest, perfunctory “Hello,” but the moment our hands touched an overwhelming desire for her consumed me. How can I explain it? She was not pretty, nor was she evocatively dressed. In fact, her drab green sweatshirt and long denim skirt seemed designed to make her as sensual as sheetrock. Was it that she was unattractive, that she was such easy pickings? That night I met other girls, pretty girls, and none of them moved me in the slightest. With her sad face and her bland clothing, this girl simply seemed more real to me. It’s safe to say that she seemed more real to me at that moment than anyone else ever had in my life.

  Nothing in her face betrayed any desire, any recognition. She let go of my hand and moved on. I watched her go, not wanting to gawk for too long, and I resumed shaking hands with the rest of the congregation.

  I was a changed man, though. I was thinking only of her. I knew something had happened, something wonderful, but something terrible, too. Loneliness, that vast emptiness, had always extended around me in every direction. I had spent my life as a speck of dirt in an endless world of white. But when I saw her, I thought that things might change.

  I also knew, however, the danger this brought with it.

  I was contemplating this when a portly woman with dyed black hair walked up to me and announced herself, “Sister Card.”

  “Sister Card, so nice to meet you,” I said, snapping out of my reverie. I was very quick to suck up to all the right people back then. The pastor’s wife was someone it would pay to be nice to.

  She held onto my hand in that way church people tend to do. I’d noticed Leonard had perfected the hand-gripping conversation.

  I held her hand and smiled and nodded while she told me, “We’re so glad to have you here. You’ll have to come over for dinner some night this week.”

  “I’d be pleased,” I said.

  A young, good looking guy slid up next to her and told us, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got to get out of here and I didn’t want to go before I met the new man.”

  Sister Card released her grip on me. My hand felt sweaty and vile, so I wiped it ever so discretely on my leg while she introduced the handsome man. “This is Nick Hargrove, one of our deacons,” she said. “Nick’s one of our bright young men.”

  I put that little piece of information into a file in the back of my head. Bright young men are often problems.

  Nick just shrugged. He was tall and lanky, with a big nose and thick eyebrows, but somehow he hung together just right, as if through a force of will. “I do what I can,” he said. “I just want you to know we’re all behind you,” he told me. Then he gave me an enthusiastic handshake of the ex-jock variety. “We’re looking for you to take these kids to the next level.”

  I won’t disgrace myself by repeating the tired, Vincent Lombardi-meets-Apostle Paul bullshit platitudes I fed him, but he seemed to like it and said goodbye to us.

  “A good man,” Sister Card told me. “He’ll be running this church one day.”

  Behind Sister Card, she walked by again and Sister Card motioned at her. The girl turned and came toward us. My heart slowed and I felt sweat trickle down my scalp. She looked at me and smiled—a polite smile only, but a smile that made me want to fall down. Sister Card said, “You’ve met our daughter, Angela.”

  I almost yelped when she said it, but I just nodded. “Yes. I believe we met briefly.”

  Angela didn’t look at me and told her mother, “I’m going outside.”

  “Okay,” Sister Card said. She watched her daughter wander out of the room. Then she patted my back. “It will do her good, I think, to have another positive role model in this church.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “So how about coming over on Tuesday night? Would that be good for you?”

  “It would be divine,” I said.

  I spent the next day setting up my new home. I’d been given a small, white clapboard house that was less than five minutes away from Brother Card’s parsonage and ten minutes away from the church. We were all located on Church Street: me on one end, the Cards in the middle, the church at the other end. My little shack had originally been the home of some ancient pillar of the church who had maintained in her will that the house be set aside for the youth minister or sold to profit the youth group.

  Brother Card explained to me the old lady had a “burden for the young people” which is churchspeak for “she liked kids” and he’d never even entertained the idea of selling the house.

  So I moved in and didn’t have to pay rent. The house was too small for more than one person to live there, and it smelled like mothballs and old linen, but I aired it out, bought some candles and moved in my stuff. Now, since this was pre-internet, I had acquired by that time a substantial pornographic VCR collection. I knew that the discovery of this little treasure trove would be the end of my career, so I had it situated neatly in a locked trunk in my closet. I kept the VCR in the bedroom and the key to the trunk in my pocket.

  That night, however, as I sat watching a video of a woman having sex with two men, my thoughts drifted. I thought of Angela—not pornographic thoughts, understand. These were clean thoughts, thoughts of marriage, of babies. I’m not a monster, you know. I dreamed of being married to Angela and being a preacher and having the youth group over to the house to watch Christian videos and eat popcorn. Square fantasies, you understand. Fantasies of normalcy and virtue. As the woman on the screen was turned into a human sponge, I dreamed of holding my sweet Angela’s hand and telling her how very much I loved her.

  So, you see, starting out I had good intentions.

  Chapter Four

  When I showed up at the Cards’ house for dinner, I was wearing a turtleneck, clean khakis and some new penny loafers. I looked like a geek, but that helped, too. I had gotten a little bigger since school, but I was still a slight man, skinny and pale, and my hair had begun to thin a little. I wore glasses, and I had attempted a beard but nothing much happened there. My chin wouldn’t produce more than a few pathetic wires, so I gave up trying to look like a man’s idea of a man and opted instead for the small, sensitive look. People seemed to like it, all in all. Women weren’t drawn to me, of course, but I looked (and acted) harmless and people tended to regard me that way.

  It goes back to that fundamental truth of life I was talking about earlier. People wanted me to be a geek. They wanted me harmless and meek. The timidity I wore as a mask was a comfort to people: well, we know he’s okay. Look at him. Women could assume I was sweet; men could assume I was weak. It’s what everyone wanted; I made t
hem all feel good about themselves. And hell, sometimes I felt good about making them feel good.

  Sister Card answered the door wearing a t-shirt with a picture of puppies on it. She smelled like onions, and in her left hand she held a butcher knife. I looked down and ever so causally noted the knife.

  “I hope that’s not for me,” I said.

  She looked down at the knife and burst into laughter. “No. I completely forgot I was holding it. Heck, that must look odd.”

  I shook my head, and she let me into the house. It was warm and bright. Thomas Kincaid prints of small country homes hung on the wall. The television was blaring in the living room, but no one was watching it.

  She gestured at a long blue sofa. “You can sit down if you’d like. Brother Card will be out in a minute.”

  I said okay, but I thought it odd that she was relegating me to the living room. I took this as a sign she didn’t like me—a suspicion I was rarely wrong about with people.

  “Would you like a drink?” she asked as she walked toward the kitchen. “We have Cokes and sweet tea.”

  “No thank you,” I said. I took my seat on the couch, and she retreated into the kitchen. I watched her go. From where I sat, I could see a scented candle burning in the middle of a long dining room table.

  I looked around. The coffee table was wrought iron with a freshly cleaned glass top. On the television, some steroid-thickened gorillas chased a football down a snowy field while a freezing congregation of the brainless cheered them. Turning away from that, I noticed pictures of the family along the wall. I stood up and investigated them.

  There she was. Angela—or a collection of different Angelas, like variations on a theme: a little girl in blonde pigtails and a Pac-Man shirt holding a paint brush and a turtle with a shiny pink shell; a pimply twelve year-old with a noticeable gut and a barely perceivable training bra, standing with her older brother in front of the house; and finally, a teenager squeezed into a flag line outfit, a smile on her wide face as she poses with a much thinner, prettier cheerleader. I stared into her eyes. Was there anything there? Anything crying out for help?