About a hundred years ago, on a hot Sunday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, my 7-year-old self discovered a great-balls-of-fire entertainment for a boy who would rather be watching “The Wild, Wild West” than sitting through an unending sermon, just waiting for “Just As I Am” and the last “Amen.”
Between you and me and the deep blue sea, here is my secret sure-fire technique to get through interminably long church services. If you want, you can try it, too.
The church janitor had just dusted and waxed the long hardwood overly-varnished pews the day before. I could smell the redolent odors of Old English Cream Wax. I could also feel the impossibility of sitting upright, as my lower self kept wanting to slide out from under my upper carriage.
A blazing light bulb of 10,000 lumens switched on in the depths of my cranium. A supernova had gone off in the little boy land of audacious daring do, populated by King Arthur, Davy Crockett, Flash Gordon and a veritable population of gallants and knights errant. “What if,” came a suggestion mystically seeping up from the blue zone of conceptual mischief, “one were to lie down at the pew’s end cap, countdown from 10 like a Gemini Titan 2 booster, then kick off?”
Wow. What a prospect. What a remarkable possibility. Of course, I didn’t use these terms, nor did I use the subjunctive mood back then. But I wanted to. Those words and verbal shades were still floating in the Platonic idea-world, and hadn’t yet seen fit to slide down the chute into a pre-Cub Scout head.
Then the voice slathered icing on the cake: “Do you think you could make it to the other end?”
No boy on God’s green earth could have ever failed to jump to the occasion of such a challenge. I mean, all of manhood (or rather, boyhood) was at stake. The survival of America, Oklahoma, my loving mom and dad and little sister, and the Tulsa First Church of God were all in the offing, all relying on and holding their breath for my 7-year-old self to succeed at this holy quest.
Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Lift off.
And what a flight it was. I remember breaking the sound barrier like Chuck Yeager and going Warp Factor One like James T. Kirk. I watched a strobing succession of ceiling bulb lights flash from south to north in my eyeballs and heard the distant echoes of my dad preaching. It was, all told, a breathtaking Icarian experience.
But crashes there must be for any who fly close to the sun. There was total deceleration in the twinkling of an eye. Tumult and alarum. That smashing sound you must have heard, ages hence, echoed from my poor pate chancing upon the unyielding singularity of the opposing end cap of the pew. A factor that had not been entered into my calculations.
I clutched the top edge of the pew in front of me and wanly raised my head, which lay at the center of thousands of spinning stars and chirping bluebirds.
And behold. Every single gaze of my dad’s congregation — Choctaw and Cherokee Americans, Hispanic and African Americans, with just a soupçon peppering of Caucasians — and most dire of all, the iron gaze of my father, so rudely interrupted in his peroration — every single brow was fixing a hairy eyeball upon my emerging head with grim reproach. After “Just As I Am” that night, I entered into the winter of my discontent. And it wasn’t even winter.
It was infernal August. We thought it was a cooldown when the thermometer tumbled down to 90. The only oasis was sticking my face in the vent of the gargantuan cooler my dad filled up twice a day with the garden hose.
That long hot summer persisted long into September, when it was time that I hied off to Burbank Elementary. I don’t know how it happened, but I was informed, on the first day of school, that I had been chosen for Reading Group Number Three. It was a great group to be in. It looked like my Sunday School class and my Church Camp near Fort Coffee, Arkansas, where it was Bible School in the morning and revival every night.
Now that kind of church service was sure interesting and needed no pew-sliding to make it palatable. Everyone sang loud and often for hours on end, and you never ended up where you started off. The only air-cooling going on were ladies waving those paper fans glued on to big tongue depressors with a picture of Jesus by Warner Sallman, donated, of course, by the Johnson Funeral Home down the road. And smack dab in the center of the folding wooden chairs was a zinc bucket of water with a big ladle in it.
I was surrounded by great pals at the Fort Coffee Bible Camp, and at my Sunday School. Now, new best buddies in Reading Group Number Three. We were inseparable in class and on the playground. We waited for each other. We took care of each other when someone cried, because, truth be told, we were kept away from by all the other kids. There was not a little meanness sent our way. We were all “socially backward,” but that was OK with us.
But it didn’t matter to us — Russell seemed like he was 6 feet tall, kinda slow, but he was always smiling, always helpful. Jose could run a hundred times faster than anyone at recess, which was often a good thing. Billy had the coolest, friendliest parents of all when they picked him up from school in their multicolored, rust-spangled VW van.
We were, in our little brotherhood, the original Rainbow Coalition. When people sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” they were actually singing about Reading Group Number Three.
I made the mistake, though, of going above my station. Unfortunately, I had put my hands on a pretty book in the bookshelf and started to read it out loud. How was I to know that it had been written by the school principal, and that my teacher would go crazier than a sprayed cockroach, almost jumping up and down shouting “Amen” and “Hallelujah?”
Mrs. Clay called in the principal and had me read out loud in front of him. Finding out that I was reading something at the seventh grade level meant nothing to me. Except for one thing. “We don’t know how you ended up in Group Three. You’re Number One now.” They were ecstatic that they had saved me from the lower ranks, pulling me up by my own bootstraps.
My new reading group didn’t look like Number Three, nor my Sunday School Class, nor my pals in Fort Smith. They looked kinda the same as me. And they had rules. That day, the Number Ones met under the monkey bars, which was owned by the group. The leader, a blonde buzzcut named Mike Epp, announced to the members “they way things was”:
“You, Randy, are my Number One Friend. You, Roger, are Friend Number Two. You, Scott, are Number Three. And you, Donny, are Number Four. You, Jonathan, are Number Five.” We never had numbers in Reading Group Number Three.
It was the saddest day in my 7-year-old life. Not because of Mike’s rules or even of his denying access to the monkey bars to anyone other than the members of this reading group or its women’s auxiliary. But mainly, only, because I decided, that day, to climb up to being Friend Number One.
I had thrown myself out of the Garden, and, bearing the mark of Cain, wandered into exile in the grownup land of Nod, east of Eden. Never did I see again the prelapsarian members of Reading Group Number Three, except in memory. Not in the Platonic Idea-World, but beyond the blue event horizon, in the age to come, in the Last Day Garden … of Eden Again.
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