The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [121]
“Booo!”
“Dolphins suck! Dolphins suck!”
Giants Guy shakes his head. “Didn’t see that coming,” he says.
“Neither did I,” I say. “Shit, Quinn could fall all the way to the second round now. He’s fucked.”
“Look, they’ve got a camera on him!”
We look up at the monitor; close-up on jilted Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn’s harried face. With his curly Laguna Beach locks and his square jaw, Quinn is supposed to be some kind of sports sex symbol, the Hunkback of Notre Dame, but to me he looks like every smug public school bully who ever dumped my books in junior high. Now he doesn’t look so tough, though; in fact he looks like he could burst out crying any minute, and ESPN, it goes without saying, wouldn’t miss that for anything. Extreme close-up now, the whole hall staring at him. Meanwhile, on the phone, the woman’s voice returns.
“Okay, I’m back, I’m sorry about that,” she says. “For your problem, I can give you some scriptures.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Like, Ephesians chapter six, verse eighteen. ‘And pray in the spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.’”
“Okay. Ephesians six-eighteen.”
“Okay?” she says. “And Acts chapter one, verse eight. ‘Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost will come unto you,’ and then it goes on and on…”
“You see, that’s what I mean,” I say. “I feel like I’m not receiving power.”
“Well,” the lady says, “sometimes you have to do it on faith.”
“Right, on faith,” I say. Whatever that means.
“And eventually it comes,” she says.
“Right,” I say, still watching the screen. Quinn not crying yet.
“And then there’s Acts chapter one, verse five,” she says.
“Okay.”
“And, um…Acts chapter two, verse four.”
“Okay.”
“That’s a real good one,” she says, brightening. “Acts two-four is a real good scripture.”
“What does that one say?”
“It says, um, ‘And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues as the spirit gave them other utterance.’”
“Hmm.”
“You know, the only thing I can say is, you have to do it by faith.”
“Right,” I say.
“It’s just like salvation. When you gave your heart to God and accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. You had to do it on faith.”
I look around at the crowd, then down a few rows ahead of me. Adrian Peterson, the star Oklahoma running back just picked by Minnesota, is making his way through the press section with his entourage. A spindlylegged, middle-aged white fan with his pimply kid staggers forward and hounds Peterson to take a picture. The old creep puts his arm around the poor tie-clad new black millionaire, smiles, and, amazingly, gets his little son to take the picture. Peterson, too late, realizes he’s not stopping for the sake of the kid, but for this creepy grownup suburban white clown in a Packers jersey. What the hell, you can see him thinking, I guess this is what I’m going to get all that money for. He smiles weakly as the little boy snaps the flash photos. I lean into the phone.
“Look,” I say, “I feel like I’m trying as hard as I can to pray in tongues, but you know there are other people in my family, it just seems to pour right out of them—blada bladada bladada, you know—but I’m just standing there watching out of the corner of my eye like a jerk. And then I just make these squirrel sounds. And they all seem to be so filled with the spirit, and here I am with these little squeaky sounds. It’s embarrassing, you know what I mean?”
Silence on the other end of the line. Houston was on the clock. Giants Guy gives me a look, as if to say, Who do you like? I cup my hand over the phone and whisper, Okoye.
“Well,” the woman on the phone says finally, after a pause, “maybe on a one-to-one basis with a minister, you could work this all out.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll meet with a minister.”
“Okay,” she says. “Well, good luck and God bless.”
“God bless you, too.”
I put the phone down, feeling dirty. For a moment I was almost overcome by a powerful sensation of living in a sick world. I wasn’t sure whose fault that feeling was—mine at least in part to be sure, but there