the arms of her goons. People pointed and howled as Kathryn was fanned with missals. My father swooped me up and brought me up the aisle, past our seats and out to the lobby.
After the Revival, the faithful filed out of the Civic Center vibrating with the Light of Jesus, hooting like frat boys. Not wanting the magic to end, they cluttered the parking lot with lawn chairs and coolers full of Tab. Fish-shaped windsocks drooped from the antennas of woodpaneled station wagons, flopping limp in the windless Providence heat.
The lot was charged with the same carnival atmosphere exhibited at a Grateful Dead concert, and a passerby would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. The same long hair, acoustic guitars, incense, and copious hugging could be witnessed from a helicopter fly-over. I was convinced that the Charismatics were tripping their teeth out, all hopped up on Jesus. I wanted some but like any scene there was an elitist bent: if you didn’t feel it, you didn’t get it, and were thereby square. I lugged my tired little body into the back of my father’s Impala and waited for the drive home, cat-napping to the entangled sounds of generators and The Saved speaking in tongues.
When I got home I knelt by my bed, recited the Lord’s Prayer and said ten Hail Mary’s. Something had to give. The Saints and the Angels were asked for their intercessions and I begged for a sign, some message that I could join the Saved. I tried to feel a tingle, a vibration dropping on my scalp like soft fingers, but nothing. My tongue tried to find the inspiration to blurt out foreign exclamations but all that would come out were the lyrics to “Sometimes When We Touch” by Dan Hill.
“Sometimes when We Touch” was one of the first 45s I bought when Lu drove us to Mammoth Mart one Saturday. I bought it thinking it would be dirty. When I got home and played it I realized it wasn’t the disc of filth I had been hoping for. I pleaded with my sister to trade with me. She had bought “Strutter ’78” by KISS. She did the trade. It is still the best deal I ever got. Somehow the lyrics stuck in my head when I tried to speak in tongues: Sometimes when we touch / the honesty’s too much / and I have to close my eyes / and hide. It was as close to a foreign language as I could get. I felt ripped off again.
Does glossolalia just happen or do you have to practice? Everyone else seemed so good at it, each one having their own style of nonsense words at the ready. Wilton really had a flow. He would do a whole thing with his shamanamama grrraamaaaalla luuuunti, where it sounded like a combination of Nepalese and Latin, dished up from the depths of his throat. Very Churchy. I tried harder but the elusive “gift of tongues” was not in me. There was no way for me to access it.
I got into bed and lay there staring at the ceiling, watching its plaster dripping down in hardened points like the surface of the moon, Dan Hill swishing his lovey-dovey gibberish around my brain pan. I wanna hold you till I die / till we both break down and cry… My hands pressed against the sides of my head in hopes of dulling the mellow.
A few weeks after the last Conference, it was somehow decided that I should be able to attend my first concert, a trip with the boys, chaperoned by a van-driving neighbor. All the kids got to go, I said, and it was KISS, so. My sister was pissed. “Why does he get to gooooo?” I don’t think she’d even seen Foreigner yet. So mad. She called me “hateful” in French. “Heeee gets to go?” She was pointing at me.
“Yuht, because he’s going out with the guys,” my mother said. She made these little ditch attempts, occasional one-offs to see if I wanted to hang out with the guys. Hunting trips, fishing, godforsaken ice races with stupid Boy Scouts. I forget what they called it. Something with Alpine in it, Alpine Derby or something, either way it was freezing, with stupid Boy Scouts competing, and obstacles and other things I hated. Hunting. Me with my dad posing in front of the woodstove — at five a.m., an hour I don’t know unless I hadn’t slept yet, even then — me looking evil and so pissed for being woken up I could kill a pheasant using my eyeballs.
KISS was not something I’d need to be dragged to. I was going. In fact, my mother would have to pry her own eye pencil out of my dead hands, and even then. I was already there, busy in my head planning my outfit. Nobody cared if it was a group of Satanists driving me. It was the ’70s, in a Van. With the boys. I remember the ride, classic ’70s from the movie in your head. Bubble windows, curtains. I shoved myself deep into the bowels of the Chevy Van and bounced on carpet, my sweatshirt getting snagged on the inside of the door. “Shit,” I said.
“What?” said Marty.
“Whassamata, Frank?” said his dad.
“Nothing! I’m fine!” I ripped my sweatshirt from the door and sat up, they turned around and Marty’s dad mumbled something. Probably about me. They all laughed. All I saw was my own bouncing.
The show was held at the Providence Civic Center, where just weeks before I watched Kathryn Kurden working her magic spells on the Charismatics. KISS was going to inhabit the same stage where my head got pushed. This time I wasn’t dressed like a cult kid, in a bright orange shirt with a dove on it. Conversely, I had dressed up for the occasion. With my make-up and talcum powder flaking, I must have looked like a zombie Paul Stanley in Zips, but nobody cared. I fluffed my hair.
Past the red velvet curtains thick as doors, we took our seats. First row balcony, stage left, which was a certain drag for the Ace Frehley fan I was but still not too shabby. As soon as we settled, the boys and the rest of the room disappeared into a swirl of pot smoke, lighters — all those lighters — and the sound of people screaming WE WANT KISS WE WANT KISS like this mob, they were demanding it, all sweaty and swearing and openly puking into their fingers. I was enchanted.
My seat was the last thing I wanted at this tent revival and the lobby was a distant planet. I clung to the metal bar in front of me, waiting. Waiting for the voice. The house lights clacked off and the place went quiet for a second before going apeshit.
You Wanted The Best And You Got The Best: The Hottest Band In The World: KIIIIi-uuSSSS!
The demands were met. KISS appeared from under the stage, trap doors coughing with fog machines, their costumed bodies running back and forth in front of the sign. Oh, the sign, with its giant letters: K-I-S-S-K-I-S-S-KISS-KISS-KISS-K-I-S-S blinking in seizure patterns. Sometimes the lights would be all the way around the edges. Or one letter at a time. Or my favorite, the less common every light on the sign on, where the giant KISS would blind you for a second, blasting so much wattage that when you closed your eyes it still said KISS.
“Detroit Rock City” started and I fell over backwards. In 1978 there was zero regulation on how many explosives a band could have and KISS had a shitload of explosives. Giant flames on both sides of the stage licked the metal ceiling of the Civic Center, heating up my face.
“Hello!” screamed Paul Stanley, looking directly at me, pointing his right index at my face. Push. I needed a barf bag or a diaper, I couldn’t tell. I was coming apart, shaking. The stage was going up and down mad with hydraulics, spirals of white light shooting out of Ace’s guitar. And God of Thunder, with the blood? Oh my God, the blood!
Vibration shook my every cell in harmonic assimilation, synapses making connections that hadn’t existed before the lights came on. People were falling out all around me and I realized, finally, I was on fire. Whatever it was the Charismatics had felt when Kathryn Kurden shuffled across the golden stage, I felt it now. I looked across the flames, and He looked right at me. It was God, in seven-inch leather heels, singing “Do You Love Me?”
“I do,” I whispered, “I do,” deep into the neck of my sweatshirt.
“Thank you!” he said to me. Push. My head rocked back on my neck. “Goodnight!” he shouted to the rest of the crowd.
The
