“Man, this night was the shit!” Asher said. “Best birthday present ever. Hands down.”
“Yeah, you know it,” I remember saying as we listened to the waves crashing somewhere in the darkness.
“Do you think we’ll come back to this hotel when we’re adults?” Asher asked. “Do you think we’ll still be hanging out?”
If you would have put my grandfather’s Nazi P-38 handgun to my eleven-year-old head, told me to tell the truth or die, and then asked me if Asher and I would be best friends for life, I would have said yes on that night without hesitation.[40]
“Probably,” I said, and then we just sat dangling our feet off the boardwalk.
We really didn’t say much more than that; nothing all that extraordinary happened—just typical stupid-ass kid stuff.[41]
Maybe it was the type of high only kids can get and understand.
There were hundreds of adults drinking alcohol and gambling and smoking that night, but I bet none of them felt the high Asher and I did.
Maybe that’s why adults drink, gamble, and do drugs—because they can’t get naturally lit anymore.
Maybe we lose that ability as we get older.
Asher sure did.
One day after a long, depressing afternoon wearing my funeral suit and studying miserable adults in Philadelphia, I exited my town’s train station, and this girl[42] I had never seen before stuck a piece of paper in my face. Then she said, “The way, the truth, and the light!”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Here’s a tract. Read all about it.”
I took the piece of paper, which was like a mini-comic book. The pictures and words were all in red ink, which looked dramatic and intense. On the front cover was a picture of a smiling man. Underneath his kind face were these words: You can be the nicest guy in the world, but without Jesus in your heart, you are going to hell.
I remember laughing when I read it, because it seemed so over the top—like a joke maybe. And I wondered if this throwback-looking girl was playing some sort of game—like this was just part of her spiderweb, her trap.
“Who are you?” I said, trying to sound cool and collected and Bogie-like.
“My name is Lauren Rose. And I’m here to show you the way. Tell you the good news.”
Her name was Lauren and she was a tall blond.
Lauren.
If I were the type of person who believed in signs, I would have been a little freaked, because she actually looked very much like a youngish version of Lauren Bacall, a tall blond who was also cat-faced, and was devastatingly beautiful in her prime—irresistible. And after watching Bogie win Bacall so many times in black-and-white Hollywood land, I felt a sort of inevitability. This would be the first girl I would kiss. I declared it in my mind—set the goal, and then I locked on like a greyhound chasing a rabbit.
“What good news?” I asked, trying to sound as calm, suave, and confident as black-and-white Bogie—pretending that we were in The Big Sleep. “Because I sure could use some.”
“That Jesus Christ died for your sins.”
“Oh.”
I didn’t know how I felt about that, and her selling religion seemed to snap me out of the scene for a moment, but I had already set the goal—and I knew that Bogie always gets Bacall no matter what the odds, no matter how many bad guys are in his way. So I tried to change the subject.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you before. Do you go to high school here in town?”
“No, I don’t,” she said to me, and then said, “Jesus loves you,” to a group of businessmen who ignored her and the tract she was trying to hand them. They didn’t even look at her. It was like she was invisible. And while I’m not really one for getting into debates with religious people either, I felt bad for Lauren, because she had this desperate look in her eyes—the kind that needs someone else to make it go away. I imagined she was invisible to most commuters, who only wanted to go home after a long day of work, which I knew from many hours of observation.
I mean—there are people who believe in one of the various gods available already and therefore don’t need the tract, and then there are people who will never believe in this sort of thing. And I imagine the gals and guys in between mostly aren’t interested in being harassed on their way to and from work.
“Where do you go to school?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Oh, I’m homeschooled.”
“So your mom teaches you?”
“And my dad. Yes.”
She kept looking eagerly at the people coming out of the subway station and wasn’t really paying me much attention anymore, which I thought was weird, since I was the only person who had taken her pamphlet. You’d think she’d concentrate on winning me over, right? She was a classic femme fatale—determined, gorgeous, a real dame.
“Why?” I said.
“Why what?”
“Why are you homeschooled?”
“My parents want me to have a Christian education.”
“What’s that?” I said, just to keep the conversation going.
“An education rooted in the Bible.”
“Oh.”
“Jesus loves you,” she said to an old man who ignored her outstretched pamphlet.
“If I read this,” I said, holding up the story she gave me, “can we talk about it afterward?”
She turned to face me and her eyes lit up. “Are you serious? You’ll really read it and consider giving your life to Jesus Christ?”
“Sure,” I said, and then laughed. I must have been the first person who ever agreed to read her tracts. She was acting like a little excited kid, but she had to be about my age—and yet she seemed so much younger, maybe unspoiled, like she could still get really excited about something in public without trying to hide it. Even though she was getting excited about Jesus, I liked the fact that she was genuinely keyed up about anything.
She said, “Do you want to come to my church this Sunday?”
“Let me read this and we can talk about it.”
“How will you contact me afterward?” she said, looking very concerned.
“I’m going to read it on that bench over there and then we can talk, okay?”
She bit down on her bottom lip and nodded way too enthusiastically—like it sort of creeped me out—and if she wasn’t doing that cat-eye thing that Lauren Bacall sometimes does in Bogie films, the thing where she squints sophisticatedly and looks up at her man from under her eyebrows or seductively out of the corners of her eyes, I probably would have left right then.
When I started toward the bench, she said, “Oh, wait,” and then began shuffling through her papers. She smiled and said, “Read this one instead,” and extended a new pamphlet toward me. “It’s for teenagers.”
“Okay.” I sat down on the bench and read it in about five minutes.
It was sort of unbelievable.
Actually, it was a little insane—and should have been my cue to get the hell away from this dame.
The basic gist is that there are four teenagers in a convertible, out “cruising”—two guys, two girls. They go to the woods to “park,” which I gather basically means to drink beer, make out, and feel each other up. The protagonist of the pamphlet is the boy in the backseat, who is a “born-again Christian” and feeling a bit conflicted about the “sins” that are happening. In the little bubble over the kid’s head it said something like, “Cindy is so beautiful and I really want to go all the way with her, but I know Jesus would be disappointed in me. I already let him down by drinking beer.”[43]
At one point you get the protagonist’s view of the front seat—it’s one of those old-style front seats that’s like a bench with no space in between the driver and passenger, or no center console, which makes me think this is a very old tract—maybe from the 1950s. And we see the girl’s naked ankles sticking up in the air, which I guess means the couple in the front is having sex. Cindy, the girl in the backseat, says to the protagonist, “You know you wanna. Let’s have some fun. Didn’t your mother ever tell you to try new things?”
The next frame shows protagonist Johnny chugging a beer.
And then we see them driving home and the driver’s eyes are slits, which I assume means he is drunk.
We get a close-up of Johnny’s face next, and the bubble over his head reads, “I let you down, Jesus. Sex. Booze. I’m so so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?”
You won’t believe this but the next frame shows the car crashing into a tree, and then we see Johnny’s ghost floating up to heaven, which is when I figured out that he was dead. I was sort of happy that the other three teenagers lived at least, but I couldn’t figure out the point of the story.
The pamphlet shows a sober Johnny in heaven speaking with Jesus, who has a typical Jesus beard and white robe and halo, but Jesus kind of looks like a professional baseball player to me and I’m not sure why. He has that baseball-player look with shaggy hair and a beard, but he’s clean-cut at the same time. Not like a hillbilly or anything. Do you know what I mean?
“I’m so sorry I let you down, Jesus,” Johnny says.
“You asked forgiveness and I have forgiven you because you are a Christian,” Jesus said, which I thought was pretty nice.
“Thank you for sparing the lives of my friends,” Johnny says.
Jesus gets this really sad look on his face, which lets you know that the friends didn’t live, and I almost stopped reading right there, because I was pretty sure I knew what sort of bullshit was coming. “Why didn’t you tell your friends about me before they died?” Jesus says. “You had so many opportunities.”
“My friends died?” Johnny says with this horrible look on his face.
The next frame shows the three other teenagers screaming and holding their faces as a sea of flames burns and engulfs them.
“They could be here in heaven right now with you, Johnny, but you didn’t tell them about me,” Jesus says.
Johnny puts his head in his hands and weeps.
Then there are numbers you can call and websites too, all of which will help you give your life to Jesus.
Jesus Christ! I thought.
It was a wild story, and I was mostly confused, so I walked over to Lauren and said, “I’m not sure I get it.”
This awful, anxious look bloomed on her face and she said, “You don’t want to go to hell, do you?”
I was going to say I don’t believe in hell, but I was determined to kiss Lauren Bogie-style, so I didn’t want to say anything that would end the conversation. I had seen enough Bogie films to know that you have to ride out the insanity when it comes to beautiful women, and even with all the crazy talk, Lauren seemed to get more and more attractive every time I looked at her. Also, this was the longest conversation I’d had with a girl my age, so I didn’t want to blow it.
I asked, “Why didn’t Johnny go to hell if he had sex and drank, just like the others?”
“He asked Jesus into his heart.”
“What do you mean?”
“No matter what you’ve done, if you ask Jesus into your heart, you get to go to heaven. The blood of Jesus Christ washes our hearts clean as snow.”
“So you just have to say magic words?”
“What?”
“If you say, ‘Jesus come into my heart,’ you are covered? You get to go to heaven then. That’s it?”
“You have to mean it.”
“How can you tell if you mean it?”
“You know in your heart, and God knows. What’s in your heart?” Lauren pointed at my chest.
“I don’t know,” I said, because my heart was full of desire. I wanted to kiss Lauren like the girl kissed Johnny in the car. I wanted to “park” with Lauren in the worst way. That’s what my heart was telling me.
“Do you want to come to my church this Sunday?” Lauren asked.
“Will you be there?”
“Of course! My father’s the pastor. You can sit with me in my family’s pew, right up front!”
I didn’t want to go to any church, but I knew going would help my cause, so I said, “Okay, then.”
That Sunday I went to Lauren’s church, which I had walked by a million times without even giving it—or what it stood for—a thought. It was a medieval-looking stone building with an impressive steeple, a classic bell tower, circular stained-glass windows, red cushions on wooden pews, and all the rest.[44]
The men inside were wearing suits and I had come in jeans and a sweater, which made me feel self-conscious, but no one said anything to me about it, which I thought was civilized of the churchgoers.
I found Lauren sitting in the front row with her mother, who was also a head-turner, like Lauren, which gave me high hopes for the day.[45]
They looked more like sisters than mother and daughter, and I wondered if believing in Jesus kept you younger-looking. But then I thought, if that were really true, Linda would be the biggest Jesus freak going, because she’d drown a baby in a bathtub if it would make her look ten years younger.
The best part about the church were the huge organ pipes at the back, up in the balcony, which were so loud you could almost see the air buzzing when the organist played. It made me feel like I had traveled back in time, that organ music, although I’m not really sure why.
Just to make things more interesting, I pretended that I was an anthropologist from the future sent back to observe what religious life was like in the past.
There were announcements about various church goings-on—like Bible study groups meeting at this or that time, and church dinners, and which people needed help, and who was in the hospital—which was nice, because it really made you feel like everyone took care of each other here, like they all were part of a gigantic family.
I could really see the appeal, for sure.
Next, everyone sang a few hymns—which was also kind of nice, because where else will you experience a few hundred people singing together?—and then Lauren’s father gave a talk about humility and humbling ourselves so that we might be able to best serve God, which I didn’t really understand.
If god existed and he created the whole universe, like these people believed, why would he need our help, let alone our praise?
Why would he need us to serve him?
Was god really both all powerful and emotionally needy?
It didn’t really make any sense to me at all, and I knew I was going to have a hard time conveying this idea to my superiors in the future when I—being a time-traveling anthropologist—report on ancient religions.
There was more nice singing after that, and then we all waited in line to shake Lauren’s dad’s hand, because he was the head of this church.
