The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [36]
“He’s something,” the pastor said. “He went to an antiwar rally in Washington, D.C., once and asked them antiwar protesters”—the words fell out of his mouth like dead snails—“he asked them, ‘Hey, can anyone speak here?’ And they said yes, and he got up with a megaphone and started tellin’ them about the gospel.”
This story elicited raucous applause. I could feel the crowd’s collective blood rising at the mere mention of antiwar protesters. Weirdly, I actually forgot for a moment that I was one and had probably been at that Washington protest.
Anyway, this same nephew had called up Fortenberry one night and told him that he was having trouble with his kids. Apparently they had had some problems with disobedience, and Fortenberry’s nephew had been wondering what it was his kids had done to separate themselves from God. But he hadn’t taken the step of calling big Phil Fortenberry for help until one terrible day when things took a dramatic turn for the worse.
“Both of his kids had fallen on the ground in respiratory distress, half-conscious, writhing around, gasping for air,” Fortenberry said. “And I said to my nephew, I said, it isn’t something they’ve done. It’s something you’ve done.”
The crowd murmured in assent.
“I told my nephew to look around the house,” Fortenberry continued. “I said, ‘Do you have a copy of Harry Potter?’ And he said yes. And I said, ‘That’s your problem.’ So I told him to go get that copy of that book, tear it in half, and throw it out the window. So he does it, and guess what? Both of those kids stood up completely recovered, just like that.”
He snapped his fingers, indicating the speed with which the kids had jumped up in recovery. The crowd cooed and applauded. I frowned, wondering for a minute what life must be like for a person mortally afraid of toothless commercial fairy tales. It struck me that Phil Fortenberry’s nephew was probably more afraid of Harry Potter than of Macbeth, which to me said a lot about this religion and about America in general.
During a break in these lessons about curses and demons, a pair of youngish women came and sat at my end of the chapel. One was a heavyset blonde in her late thirties/early forties with a broad smile and a warm, inviting face who looked like she might have been a grand Texas dame in her youth. The other was a thin, somewhat nervous-looking woman in her early thirties with sad eyes and freckles who looked a little like a pale, depressed version of Joan Allen.
“Hi,” said the blonde. “Can I ask, did you come here by yourself?”
I smiled. “Yes,” I said.
“Oh, good,” she said. “So did my friend Janine here. So y’all should get along real good.”
She indicated the thin girl, who blushed. It was a very forward setup, and I was momentarily embarrassed, but at the same time I was beginning to despair of making any friends at the retreat and was relieved to meet some friendly people. I smiled, recalling Fortenberry’s words: Don’t be afraid to look behind the bush. I shook Janine’s hand, and we all introduced ourselves. The blonde’s name was Laurie.
Laurie was a piece of work. She had a great sense of humor and was absolutely uninhibited. I would later find out that she was a terribly lonely woman who had recently been the victim of some extremely malicious gossip at the hands of other church members. But at the moment she was a real breath of fresh air to me—a genuinely friendly person reaching out to someone sitting quite conspicuously by himself.
“We were looking around the room and wondering if there were any men here, and then I saw you and I was like, ‘Look at that one,’” she said, holding up a hand and making the r-r-r-r-r purring-cat-claw gesture.
“Um,” I said.
“I said to myself, ‘He looks like Tom Selleck, he does.’”
I laughed. I couldn’t possibly look less like Tom Selleck.
“Who’s Tom Selleck?” said Janine.
We all ended up eating together during meals for the rest of the weekend and became fast