The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [29]
Trying to be exactly that—the jellyfish, that is—I slumped in my seat and buried my face behind a copy of Tribulation Force, the second book in the Left Behind series. For some time I sat there wondering about the names in the book—half of them are either building terms or elements (Steele, Plank, Barnes, Jetty, Stonagal) or derivatives of southern city names (Hattie Durham). Were these books written in a Home Depot in North Carolina?
Across the aisle and a few rows back, a man about my age, also wearing glasses and also slumped in his seat, read from a book called They Shall Expel Demons. Maria, meanwhile, quietly munched her cheeseburgers, glancing sideways occasionally, trying not to look self-conscious.
“I WAS VERY, VERY, VERY GOOD—at everything!” shouted our hulking exparatrooper pastor, Phillip Fortenberry, into the barely visible mouth mic that curled around his ruddy face. “I was a Green Beret—top of the class. Six foot four, two hundred and twenty-five pounds. A star athlete, basketball player. Starting outside linebacker on the varsity football team…”
The crowd cooed as our spiritual leader rattled off his macho credentials. Our supercowboy pastor was the perfect foil for the Revenge of the Nerds–style crowd of fatties, addicts, loners, and broken-home survivors populating the warehouse-sized building where we were all destined to spend the next three days together.
Bearing a striking resemblance to ex–Vikings quarterback and notorious ESPN loudmouth Sean Salisbury, Fortenberry had bounded onstage upon our arrival in a plaid western-style shirt and crisp, belt-tightened rancher’s blue jeans hiked up to an uncomfortable height on the strapping hard fat of his middle-aged trunk. He did everything but tape-measure his biceps in his introductory speech. His autobiographical tale of an angry overachieving youth who fell into a young adulthood of false pride, only to rebound and be reborn as a turbocharged, army-trained enemy of Satan (“A friend of mine once joked that he saw my picture hung up in a post office in Hell,” he quipped) with no fewer than two graduate agronomy degrees from Texas A&M was to serve as the first chapter of our collective transformation—and to work it had to impress the hell out of us scraggly wannabes.
It did. “I’m going to start tonight by telling y’all two stories,” he began.
The first was a story from his army days, about having to take a training flight in the Pacific Northwest as a young man and being trapped in the back of the transport plane when the landing went wrong and the plane ended up crash-bouncing along the runway.
Fortenberry told stories well, but he lingered for quite some time on a loving description of the interior of a C-130, which I thought at first was a rhetorical mistake—until I saw both the men and the women glowing with excitement as he recalled the plane’s unusual flush-against-the-fuselage seating arrangement.
“If you’ve ever been in the back of a C-130, you know what I mean,” he said, and I saw nodding heads all through the audience. The pastor subsequently would not miss a single chance to drop the name of a piece of military equipment.
The second story was more personal. It was about being a little boy in a small southern town whose father ran around on his mom with a local barmaid. Dad used to bring little Junior to play golf with him, keeping his arm around the barmaid in the golf cart for the entire eighteen holes; finally Dad left Mom to shack up with the barmaid in a house down the road. Dad was so busy with the barmaid that he never came to see Junior’s ball games. But from time to time he would come home to Mom, moving back into Junior’s world, turning his life upside down.
“And every time he came back,” the pastor said, waving his hand up and down, his voice fairly breaking with tears, “it was like one more bounce along that runway, bouncing in that C-130,