The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [98]
ELEVEN
PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE
IN EARLY MARCH I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea—literally woke up laughing. As it happened it was a Sunday, in the predawn hours. I looked down at my forearm, chuckled, then went back to bed.
Within a few hours I was dressed up and back in church, sitting next to Laurie and Janine and a few other familiars, watching on the dual church JumboTrons as Pastor Hagee played a few homemade public service announcements. One of these was a spoof of Apple’s “Get a Mac” ad campaign—those irritating “offbeat” computer ads where effete hipster actor Justin Long (“Mac”) tries endlessly, against a seamless digital white-screen background, to console the hapless pudgy humorist John Hodgman (“PC”). In the “hilarious” church version, the two characters were “Man of God” and “Man of the World”—with the Man of God a cool, together cat and the Man of the World a helpless, flailing dickwad with a comb-over.
“I live according to the holy values and principles set down in the Bible, the revealed word of God!” was the kickoff statement of the suave Man of God.
“I get my values from pretty much anything and everything that I read and see, with no direction or guidance whatsoever!” moaned the goofball Man of the World.
The audience roared with laughter. Someone behind me, I swear, slapped a knee. Laurie, sitting next to me, chortled out loud.
“Oh, that is funn-ny!” she said.
“Hilarious!” I agreed. “First-rate stuff.”
She looked down at me.
“Are you okay, honey? Something wrong with your arm?”
I was scratching my left forearm furiously.
“No,” I said. “I’m fine. Just a little itch.”
She shrugged. “Okay, then,” she said. “I hope you’re okay.”
I smiled. I felt firmly in my element by now. I had even been baptized in the church, an amusing if sensually unpleasant ceremony. Hagee farmed out the orientation process to a fifth-string pastor named Larry, an aging, bitter old curmudgeon whose mangled beet-red face was a mess of exploding capillaries. Larry’s crushed-cauliflower nose passed air to his lungs very spottily, and as a result the old meanie’s speech was almost completely incomprehensible, which made his narration about our impending spiritual journey into grace somewhat less enthralling than it might have been. In a cramped second-floor storage room, he kept telling stories about what a mean drunken prick he used to be before he found God, and how after he was saved he became just a flat-out frickin’ awesome individual. Everyone in the room looked bored. It didn’t help that he had a cold and kept sneezing and hacking in the windowless chamber, causing, I noticed with some amusement, some Mexican children in the front row to recoil continually from his speech.
“I tell ya, I was one mean ole boy,” he rambled. “But then I found Jesus, and I completely changed. You’ll change, too. You’ll be just like me.” Then he sneezed again.
I looked around the room. A few couples, a few teens, but lots of loners like me. Single men with bad skin and sad eyes. One very skinny young man with a wavy 1970s hairdo smiled at me. He doesn’t fit here, I thought. A few minutes later, when Larry led us to the changing room, I noticed that same young man; with his shirt off, he looked emaciated, like a concentration camp victim. We each then put on cheap blue polyester ceremonial cloaks and descended a set of wet stairs toward the baptismal pool, which was strategically located just behind the church pulpit in the main chapel. Skinny Man was behind me and tapped my shoulder.
“Your first time?” he asked.
A very strange question, when you think about it. I wondered if there had ever in history been an instance of someone having a second go at defiling the baptismal ritual for journalistic purposes.
“Yah,