The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [103]
He smiled. Now we were getting somewhere. “Are you aware that you’ve broken the Ten Commandments?”
“I am,” I said.
“And if God were to judge you according to the Ten Commandments, do you think you’d be innocent or guilty?”
“That’s an irrelevant question,” I said, “because I don’t believe in God.”
He frowned. “But say you did—”
“I can’t,” I said, “because I don’t.”
“But it’s written in the Bible—”
“Yes, I know, but, you see, I don’t care. I don’t believe in the Bible.”
Joe glared at me. This wasn’t helping.
“I can see you’re going to be a hard-ass about this,” he complained.
“A what?” I said, reverting to my Christian state, pretending to be mortified by the word “ass.”
“A—I mean, you’re not making this easy.”
“I just wasn’t sure what word you used,” I said. “I didn’t hear.”
“Nothing,” he said defensively. “I didn’t say anything.”
I shrugged. “It’s just hard, dealing with nonbelievers,” I said. “I never know what to say when people say they don’t believe. If they’re not afraid of burning in Hell or having their arms pulled out or whatever, what can you say? W, D, J, D—none of the letters work.”
He thought about that. “You’re right,” he said. “I know.”
“It’s just—it’s tough.”
“Yeah, it is.”
We sat there staring at each other for an uncomfortably long pause. Finally he clapped his hands.
“Well,” he said, “I guess we should switch places.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“Let’s pretend we’re in Miami Beach,” he said. “I’ll be a tourist by the pool. You try to convert me.”
“Okay. Miami’s nice.”
He reclined in his chair and whistled. “Wow,” he said. “Just look at all those bikinis!”
He gestured toward the “bikinis,” actually the other side of his den. I looked over. Three pairs of dumpy role-playing housewives. But Joe was really in the role.
“I sure would like to get some of that action!” he said. “How about you? Would you like summa that?”
I looked back at Joe with alarm. He was really imagining those bikinis. Momentarily I was offended for God’s sake. We were in decent company, after all.
“Oh, I’m not interested in sex,” I said sternly. “I’m a Christian.”
Joe slumped, looking subdued again all of a sudden. “Right, right,” he said. “Of course.”
The meeting ended shortly thereafter. I stopped to see We Are Marshall on the way home, then studied my evangelical materials, preparing for my first day saving souls.
“WHAT’S WRONG with your arm?” Janine asked a few days later, as she and I and Laurie walked from the Rolling Oaks Mall parking lot toward the entrance of Dillard’s department store. Each of us was carrying Bibles and stacks of little Bible tracts and evangelical icebreakers—little “Million Dollar Bills” with gospel messages on the back, New Testament answers to the “billion-dollar question” about where we all go after we die.
“It’s nothing,” I said, scratching furiously. “Just a rash or something.”
“Mmm,” she said.
The Rolling Oaks Mall is one of San Antonio’s newest and most opulent, a huge spread on the northeast corner of the 1604 highway loop. It has an odd design, with a series of big teapot domes with spires dotting its roof.
“Wow, those really do look like boobs,” I said, looking up.
“I told you,” said Laurie. “They’re just trying to get the male customers.”
“It’s amazing what this world has come to,” I said, shaking my head.
We chose the mall as a target site for our first day out evangelizing more or less by process of elimination. The original plan was to hit a gun and tackle store off the McDermott Freeway, but when Laurie and I showed up there I was immediately spooked by the sight of security trucks cruising the parking lot. We ended up going inside, where I spent six bucks in a target-shooting gallery.
Later Laurie and I met up with Janine and her daughter at a Taco Bell and settled on “The Boobs” as the target location.
By the time we got to Dillard’s we were all deeply nervous. Laurie and Janine decided that we should stop and pray before we went inside. So the three of us stood in a circle holding hands, with hanging heads, in between