The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [68]
Although the church itself claimed a different reason for having this cell structure—Reverend Sorensen, of course, had basically said that the cell structure gave the church an organizational framework to rely upon in the event of a terrorist attack upon the church building—I saw clearly that the cell/tribe structure was an absolutely necessary innovation, a brilliant way of transforming an utterly impersonal megachurch/TV-preacher religious corporation into something even more intimate than a backwoods, ten-pew country parish.
What the followers of Cornerstone craved more than anything was personal contact, a sense of being connected to something in the world, and the cell group, not the church, was what fulfilled that need.
Through Laurie I’d joined a cell group and had begun going to meetings. I’d been a bust at the first one, which had been just a meet-and-greet at a member’s house, a modest one-bedroom ranch with Formica floors and slate faux-masonry walls within earshot of a highway. Frightened by a clowder of fifty-something housewives with crayon-thick eyeliner and Nancy Reagan hairdos—and anxious to avoid their pious, potbellied, truck-driving husbands—I spent the entire meeting clinging to an octogenarian Japanese anesthesiologist named Hiroshi Nakitomi, a stroke victim with memory lapses who sat mute at the dinner table tranquilly clutching a cane with a saintly smile on his face. I must have spent nearly forty minutes quizzing the good old doctor about the types of anesthesia he used over the years. Like all drug addicts, I have an unhealthy fascination with this subject.
“You ever use methoxyflurane?” I asked. “I mean, what was your go-to general?”
He looked at me and smiled. “Putting them out isn’t the problem,” he said. “The trick is making sure they wake up.”
He nodded, pleased with his joke. I laughed with him.
“How about trichloroethylene? When do you use that?”
“We used to use halothane,” he said. “Of course, putting them under isn’t the problem.”
“No?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “The problem is making sure they wake up.”
He laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. He smiled again, a broad, kind smile. The doctor was losing it, but he was a good man.
“That’s a good one,” I said, laughing. “And what did you use in the nineties? Before you retired?”
“The nineties,” he said, shaking his head.
“Right, the nineties,” I said.
“I miss it, you know,” he said wistfully. “I had fun being a doctor.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
“Of course, putting them under wasn’t the problem…”
We went on like this for a long time. I started to notice eyebrows being raised around the room. It was weird enough for me to be a young, single man in this company of older married Christian couples, most of whom had grown children who had already left the hearth. And yet here I was, not only single but ignoring the host and hostess and accosting the only foreigner in the room with weirdly involved questions about chemicals. This was certainly about the least amount of effort I’d put into keeping my cover since I’d come to Texas, and I felt sure that I was blowing things on many levels. Moreover, as I later learned, there were rumors flying in the group that I was Laurie’s new beau, and I can only imagine what kind of talk that inspired. So it was with some trepidation that I showed up at the next meeting, which wasn’t just a social meeting—we were actually going to worship and praise and “get teaching.”
I came late. This meeting was at the home of our cell leaders, Richard and Cassie Wiggle, who owned a biggish house on the north side of town.
Richard was a sloe-eyed fellow with a full head of silver hair and a faintly nautical-looking beard; he addressed the group in a