I knew he was nuts, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t right.
4
God is not a magician, but a Harry Houdini: a cosmic escape artist cheating Death and the Devil with a twinkle in his eye. The world wiggles with enchantment: a bothered nose, dripping blood like an Amityville faucet, recalls the blessed spigot tapping the veins of the sinless Son of Man. A smudge of rainbow in a puddle of gasoline pictures God’s promise and threat that never again will the world be destroyed by water. Next time, it’s fire.
Christ wears our flesh more comfortably than a politician dons hard hats and headdresses at election time. Of course, having once ascended to the right hand of the Father He reigns forever, but He doesn’t neglect his constituency. He still cares about all his flock’s lost loves and odd socks. Take the time to pray — always more expedient than writing your member of parliament — and every wrong will be righted and every hurt avenged in one world or another. Nothing is too trivial to escape the attention of a personal saviour: a comforting thought for a teenage fundamentalist with a clean conscious; a thought that sometimes haunted me at three in the morning.
When home for Christmas my first year of Bible School I began to suspect that my stereo, specifically my tape deck, was demon possessed. As Lucifer and a third of the angels fell on account of pride, and as my equipment — down to its three fat knobs for volume, balance and tone — was a 15-watt exercise in humility, I thought it judicious not to jump to conclusions. I only owned one Black Sabbath LP and had gone off Alice Cooper since my conversion. (Though as I anticipated Christmas break, I’d softly sung “School’s Out” to myself a couple of times.) Most significantly, I never played anything backwards. But if there was one area of my life that I hadn’t surrendered to the Lord (two, including my monkey-boy libido — Onan the Barbarian, another sweaty-palmed virgin for Christ), I had to admit it was my love of rock music.
Overcomer’s music policy was strict but fair, forbidding as it did almost everything composed since the death of Sousa. This meant leaving my scratchy Stones albums at home for the school term. (I’d left Frampton Comes Alive in my mother’s basement for the long, long term.) Rumours of Bob Dylan’s baptism in Pat Boone’s swimming pool lifted my spirits, encouraging me to hope that someday O.B.I. might come to accept that redemption could have a back beat. Until that great day, I determined that while on campus I would faithfully observe the music policy. Christmas vacation was another matter.
Of course I wanted to see my family, but I hadn’t heard “Tumbling Dice” for three and a half months. In early December, during a pop quiz on the Pelagian theory of sanctification, I even found a moment to fantasize of my earthly reward: a big bottle of Coke, a family-sized bag of barbecue Lays and my precious, unscathed copy of Exile on Main Street.
Things took a turn for the unearthly my second night home. Exile was cooling on the turntable and I was lying on my bed nodding off to Your Shoes Are too Big, Lord. Beau Hammond had just defended his dropping out of a B.C. Baptist seminary as “all I could do to salvage my soul. I’d been Daniel in a den of perverts, antinomians and closet hyper-Calvinists,” when the Best of the Doobie Brothers fell from the cassette rack that stood on top of the receiver, and broke apart on a blue cotton throw rug at the foot of the bed. The sudden clatter at the margins of my sleep was startling, but I didn’t suspect the machinations of “?l” Sooty Face” (Hammond’s words) quite yet. The cassette rack was no more than an inch from the stereo’s edge, and I figured that even 15 watts could have danced a tape that distance. I returned the Doobies to the rack, which I moved a couple of inches back from the corner, closed the book, jerked off remorsefully and fell asleep.
About four o’clock that morning I awoke to the sound of rolling, deep-throated laughter coming from my speakers.
I moved reflexively to turn off the stereo, but froze in the dark. There was no warm, green glow from the wave band indicator — I hadn’t left it on. Listening to the chortling basso profundo, I sat upright and clasped my arms around my shins, telling myself I was awake. The laughter lasted about forty-five seconds, but it faded so gradually I couldn’t tell the moment when it became a fearful memory. After a while I turned on a light, wondering why I’d sat in the dark through the whole thing, prayed, then tried to read more of Hammond but was too rattled. Still, having a book in bed with me settled my nerves some, but by the time I was relaxed enough to read it I was too sleepy to turn a page. With the foggy rationale of someone who, despite everything, is suddenly and truly tired, I decided to worry about it in the morning. (Though I also decided against turning off the light.) When I rose about six to take a piss I was ready to believe I’d dreamt the whole thing. Almost, that is, until I noticed my Best of the Doobie Brothers tape, shattered again, lying at the foot of my bed.
I was flustered, though not as spooked as one might expect. Since Filmore’s fall from the cliff, and particularly since my growing acquaintance with Delbert and his peculiar, sacred obsessions, I’d been feeling an encroachment of supernatural powers upon my person; as though I were Ground Zero in an intimate, other-worldly war. This wasn’t a big deal — it was nothing but the Christian life. The air hung heavy with the cloud of witnesses from Hebrews 12:1, and was so charged with angels and demons that when their spiritual brawling finally opened a second front in the material world I practically said, “What took you so long?” I heard no more laughter, but over the next couple of nights, despite my moving the cassette rack further away from the edge until finally I laid it on it’s back nearly a foot from any vertical, the tape (and inexplicably, only that tape) flew to the ground three more times. Though my wallpaper didn’t drip blood or even peel worse than usual, and though I saw no apparitions and heard no voices telling me to get out of the house, after fourteen weeks of Bible School I found it both effortless and uncomplicated to believe that Satan must be picking on me.
Perversely, I confess, I felt flattered by the attention.
I imagined a boardmeeting in the bottomless pit, with a middle-management succubus pointing to a pie chart of my soul while he detailed a scenario to stop me before I won all those headhunters for Christ. “We can get to Gideon through our music,” he’d tell the others, who would nod their scarlet heads and scribble notes in their asbestos spiral binders. “He’s particularly fond of the opening riff of ‘China Grove’.” I’ll have to tell Moon about this when I get back, I thought. He’ll be so jealous.
One evening I approached my father — his left hand deep in a tin of mixed nuts and his right clutching the latest Worker’s Vanguard— and nonchalantly mentioned that I suspected some sort of demonic activity in my bedroom. He looked up at me slowly, pushed his glasses back against his bridge and popped an almond in his mouth. “Count your blessings,” Dad sighed, tugging at his moustache just as a car honked in front of our house. It was his carpool. “Rally at the consulate,” he explained. “Exorcism.” He shrugged and smiled wanly, then stood and left the room. What must life have done to him, I wondered, and made a mental note to pray extra hard for him later that night.
After Jeopardy I almost called my mother tor counsel, checking myself only when I considered that she’d probably blame the evil visitations upon my Father and insist that I move back in with her. Besides, I was certain that she would be paralysed by any inference that I was rooming with Lucifer. She’d likely live in expectant dread of my hissing at the crucifix of some astounded Catholic priest, or my head spinning as though my spine were a string of rosary beads. No, she could never know.
During Maude I called Pastor Fillmore, and he told me quite calmly that he had two other possible cases of demonism on the go, and could he possibly get back to me, no later than mid-week? I was equally alarmed and disillusioned that my predicament wasn’t as novel as I’d thought. Perhaps this was just a run-of-the-mill haunting; a rite of passage for the common Christian
