Diary of a Misfit, page 10
The only way to forget disappointment, my mother told me, was to lose yourself in God and stories. She prayed for hours every morning, and she checked out library books a dozen at a time. She imagined herself as someone else. She listened to the Bee Gees and danced alone in the living room, her eyes closed and her hand held up, as if an invisible person were guiding her along the carpet. Her make-believe worlds never lasted, though. Whatever pain she buried found its way to the surface. She’d call a neighbor, or she’d go to the doctor, then she’d return with bottles of Percocet, and she’d sleep the rest of the week.
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AS A KID, I didn’t understand what drove my mom toward the pills. She seemed to me then to be such an ancient, wise figure. She was my mother, and she’d read every book in the fiction stacks. She taught me how to read and write whole paragraphs long before I started school, and she could recite Bible stories from memory. But when she took pills, she seemed like a child herself. She cried a lot. She begged for attention. She needed things the way a kid does—desperately, irrationally. I realize now she was twenty-two.
By 1988, my mom had five doctors and eleven different prescriptions for Percocet. My dad couldn’t afford to cover all her medical bills with the little he earned driving a truck, so that summer, broke and worried about the hot checks he couldn’t repay, my dad enlisted in the army. The military promised him a $3,000 signing bonus, plus roughly $750 a month to work on a base near Savannah, Georgia. He used the signing bonus to buy a used Ford Tempo, then we headed east. I was five, and my brother was three.
We spent a year in a brown, two-bedroom apartment. After that, when my dad got approved for free military housing, we moved into a neighborhood with streets named Hero, Courage, and Liberty. Our new home was a two-story brick town house that had carpeted stairs and a tiny backyard full of azalea bushes. We didn’t own it—we would never own anywhere we lived—but my mom scrubbed the surfaces every afternoon with Pine-Sol and Comet as if the town house were an investment she couldn’t let degrade.
When she wasn’t scouring our place, my mom cleaned for a rich old lady whose house looked haunted. It was big and gray and full of old dolls. The woman’s daughter had died by suicide a year earlier, and the old woman mostly sat in a rocking chair and cried. In the refrigerator, she kept a tube of lipstick she said the mortician had used on her daughter at the funeral. My mom took us with her to the house most afternoons, and she forced us to sit in a corner far away from the old lady and all the dolls. My mom would pray that nothing demonic there took hold of us, then she’d begin working her way around with a broom. Occasionally, she’d stop and tell the old lady that she’d lost someone to suicide, too, and the old lady would stand, and they’d hug and cry, and I’d watch from the corner, hating Cam for hurting my mother.
My mom didn’t have special sponges or even plastic gloves like other cleaning ladies had. To mop, she dunked an old towel into boiling water spiked with Pine-Sol, then she spread the towel on the floor, bent down on top of it, and scooted across the ground in circles, using all her weight to scrub the dirt away. The job left peeling sores all over my mom’s hands, but she seemed energized by the move to Georgia. She made a best friend at the commissary, and they talked on the phone every night. My mom sat with me while I finished my first- and second-grade homework, and some evenings I found her at the table, working ahead in my textbooks, filling in vocabulary words or writing out the times tables I hadn’t yet learned. She did my science fair project for me two years in a row, and I won both times. She tested paper towels one year to determine which brand held up best while cleaning spills. The next year, she asked our neighbors to put clothespins over their noses while they ate bites of onion, apple, and potato, so she could see whether they could taste the difference without smelling the bites. She let me keep the first-place ribbons. For her, learning was prize enough.
She was good at every school subject, but she thrived most at church. In Georgia, we attended Live Oak, a mixed-race megachurch with velvet pews and a spotlight that followed the pastor across the stage as he broke down the New Testament in punchy, half-hour sermons. My mom taught Sunday school and joined the board of a Christian women’s group, and she helped organize the after-church potlucks we held in the smaller sanctuary everyone called the children’s church. My mom cooked gumbos and butter-rich casseroles that disappeared before any other dishes did. Some weeks, as soon as the pastor said amen, people rushed over to the children’s church to spoon out heaps of my mother’s manicotti before the pan was scraped clean. They’d call later that evening to ask for her recipe, but she always left out one ingredient.
“I don’t want anyone to know my secrets,” she’d tell me.
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WE JOINED LIVE OAK instead of another church on base because the congregation there spoke in tongues. To us, “tongues” was a holy gibberish, heavy on Hebrew-sounding syllables that our pastor said were proof that God was speaking through us. At most Live Oak services, one person stood, said an incomprehensible string of sentences, then waited until someone else rose and interpreted the message. Other people fell to the ground, writhing and praying in a way that we called “slain in the spirit.” I can’t remember what I thought the first time I saw this spectacle, but I imagine I must have been scared as I watched adults lose all control. Time seemed to stop in a creepy way when an interpreter stood to decipher a message. My mom taught me that speaking in tongues was the highest manifestation of God, though, and by the time I was seven, I was begging the Lord to fill me with the spirit, too. Our pastor told us we were just like the apostles who’d spoken in tongues after Jesus ascended to Heaven. He pointed us toward the book of Acts, where, in chapter two, during the time known as the Pentecost, the apostles saw tongues of fire, then began speaking in other languages. My mom loved Acts. She highlighted, underlined, and starred its verses, and some nights, at home cooking dinner with her Bible propped against the coffeepot, she’d lean into the stove and start speaking a babble she said was sacred.
Back then, I assumed that our way of worshiping was the only way of worshiping. Everything else was a cult, my mom told me. Especially Catholicism. Years later, long after I’d left the church, I discovered that the version of Christianity I grew up with wasn’t the same brand people had been practicing for millennia. In the United States, there’s no modern record of anyone speaking in tongues before 1900, when a preacher named Charles Fox Parham founded a church in Topeka, Kansas. Like other evangelical Christians, Parham wanted to preach the gospel across the world, but he couldn’t speak any foreign languages. Hoping to remedy that, Parham started a Bible school in a stone mansion, and he taught his students that if they could get the Holy Spirit the way the apostles had, they’d be able to preach in every country, no matter which language the locals spoke. The class met for an all-night prayer party on New Year’s Eve, and just after midnight, one of the students began muttering random syllables. Parham believed that the Holy Ghost had empowered the woman to speak Chinese.
“In a few moments, we realized what it was, and we fell on our knees and gave thanks to God,” Parham told a reporter at the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper.
By the end of the week, Parham’s students believed that they could speak Japanese, Arabic, and a dozen other languages. Parham called reporters across the Midwest, and his students spoke their foreign languages into the phone, but the journalists remained unconvinced. They mocked Parham’s miracle, and they described the supposed holy tongues as gibberish. After Parham sent in a sample of the “Chinese” characters a student had written, The Topeka Daily Capital ran a picture of the scribblings with the caption, “specimen of Miss Auswin’s handwriting which the Apostolic brethren claim is inspired by God himself.” The script looks nothing like Chinese. It’s swoopy and disordered, the kind of messy graffiti a child might pen. Parham’s message spread anyway. He traveled across the Midwest and the South, preaching and opening Bible schools. In 1905, William Joseph Seymour, a Black man whose parents had been enslaved in South Louisiana, met Parham in Texas. Parham was a KKK sympathizer, but he needed converts, so when Seymour showed up to Parham’s Bible school in Houston, Parham told Seymour to sit in the hallway and listen through an open door. Even at a distance, Seymour was persuaded. The next year, he moved to Los Angeles and opened a church in a former stable. Soon, Seymour’s congregants were spinning, shaking, and speaking in tongues the way they believed the apostles had.
A few years later, Parham was arrested in Texas for a sex act many speculated was a homosexual dalliance. He lost his Bible schools, but Seymour’s congregants started their own churches, and within a decade, people were speaking in tongues across the world. Still, Pentecostals were considered a fringe group in the early twentieth century. The Los Angeles Times covered Seymour’s church under the headline weird babble of tongues, and a reporter wrote that “night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshipers.” Other newspaper dispatches from the early 1900s made Pentecostalism sound like an incoherent cult. In Alabama, reporters described the worshipers as religious brawlers under a spell. And in Vermont they were roaring dervishes, crazed people who ran around a movie theater, searching the seats for Satan. Pentecostals rolled around on straw floors in Pittsburgh, and in Chico, California, a pastor beat a man with a chair because he mistook his red hair for the Devil.
The denomination became more normalized after World War II, as churchgoing increased across the United States. Pentecostalism eventually split into a web of sub-denominations, and as it did, it reached even more worshipers. Among those was the Assemblies of God, the majority-white Pentecostal offshoot that my parents first joined in Monroe. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the number of people who attended Assemblies of God churches quadrupled to two million. Live Oak was Church of God, another Pentecostal-style denomination, but we rarely used that term. We just called ourselves evangelicals.
Today, people use “evangelical” as a catch-all term to describe the conservative Christians who help Republicans win elections. But back then, when nearly a third of Americans identified as evangelical, we used it to describe our mission. Evangelical meant that we tried hard to tell other people about Jesus. At school, I passed notes to other students, inviting them to attend any Sunday or Wednesday. I told my teachers about the sermons, and I bribed neighborhood kids with promises of potluck lunches that always included at least six kinds of cake. It was easy to persuade people to visit because Live Oak was genuinely fun. We hosted Christian rap concerts and carnivals, Saturday-night slumber parties full of pizza and s’mores. Every summer, my brother and I went to church camp and vacation Bible school, retreats where we pretended to be Moses wandering the desert or Joshua blasting our trumpets toward Jericho. We were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, wading through fire, untouched by the flames.
Live Oak’s congregation believed in biblical infallibility, which meant that I grew up thinking every word was literally true. I believed that God created the earth in six days and Mary was still a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus. Some Sundays, our pastor spent the whole service digging into one story, but mostly he jumped around, reading out verses as if each were a commandment.
Years later, I tried to look for the line that made my mom believe we’d be strangers in Heaven, but I never could find one, so I asked her which it was. She remembered that she’d been heartbroken to discover it—not because she wouldn’t be my mother, but because she thought it meant she wouldn’t recognize Cam. But she didn’t remember where she’d learned the verse. Maybe someone had said it on The 700 Club, or maybe she’d read it in one of the Christian books she checked out from the church library. Most of those books promised a kind of doom far scarier than any horror movie. She kept them in the freezer, tucked behind packages of hamburger meat, as if that might lessen their blows. The books had names like This Present Darkness and He Came to Set the Captives Free, and they all chronicled a spiritual warfare marked by demon possession and eternal damnation. In the early 1990s, my mom read a book called Turmoil in the Toy Box, and afterward, she told us that the devil lurked in mundane places. We could catch a demon watching the Care Bears or the Smurfs. Video games were evil. Impure thoughts were evil. If we let them consume us, the pastor said, God would forsake us, and we’d burn in Hell forever. Most of the sins confused me. I knew I shouldn’t lie or scream at my parents, and I definitely had no plans to murder anyone, but what was a false idol? Why was Super Mario sinful? How could I stop myself from coveting the Barbie Corvette richer girls owned?
We talked about Satan as if he might show up unannounced any minute. Twice, our pastor cast a demon out of a woman he said had been possessed. The woman’s name was Trana, and it took three men to drag her down the aisle toward the pulpit. I remember she wore a purple blouse and blue eye shadow, and she sobbed as the men pulled her to the front. Trana kicked the pastor, and my mom told me to close my eyes. She pressed her hands over my ears so I wouldn’t hear the demon hiss into the microphone.
“You can’t cast me out,” the demon said. “I dwell here.”
It was scary and thrilling, and for weeks after, I stayed up late, listening to my own brain replay the demon’s hiss. I worried something evil would possess me. I knew what demons looked like because I’d seen them in Christian music videos. A singer named Carman was big then, and in each of his songs, Satan and a band of demons set out to destroy humanity. Carman’s videos were heavy on special effects, as slickly produced as the Terminator movies, and they rendered Satan’s ghouls with a frightening specificity. The demons were green and pointy-eared monsters in “Revival in the Land.” They were short and burnt-looking in “Satan, Bite the Dust.” Their skin was always wrinkled and covered in warts, and their voices were a high-pitched wicked. As an elementary school kid, I believed if I sinned for even a second, one of those creatures would creep after me, and take hold of my life. I shuddered in my bed. The demons alone were horrifying, but what I feared most was not the monster. Instead, I stayed up late, terrified that our pastor might someday drag me to the front of church to cast the devil out.
I know we read the Bible every night, but now, as an adult, I can’t remember much beyond a few stray verses and the most famous stories. I had my own Bible, a Precious Moments edition that my mom gave me in April 1990, the first time I got saved, but the stodgy language eluded me at six. I’m not sure I ever understood the context behind the verses my mom adopted as edicts. Some people at church switched Bibles every year, but my mom always used the same one, a creased and coffee-stained New International Version. It was a women’s devotional Bible, so it was pink and included easy-to-read summaries after each chapter. My dad gave it to her a few months before his unit left to fight in Saudi Arabia, and she used it as a surrogate journal in his six-month absence. She wrote people’s phone numbers on the inside flap. She highlighted and dated verses she found comforting, and she added her own commentaries in blue cursive throughout. Next to a Leviticus scripture about “mediums” and “spiritists,” she wrote “psychos.” And in 1991, she highlighted Psalm 34, verse 18, “the Lord is close to the brokenhearted.” Next to it, she wrote, “I am not alone.”
The movie Ghost came out the year before my dad went to war, and while he was gone, my mom moped around the house, carrying her Bible and listening to “Unchained Melody” on repeat. I could never tell if she was missing Cam or my dad, but I watched from the carpeted stairwell as she led herself around the living room in a solo slow dance. Most days, she called the 700 Club Prayer Center or the Richard Simmons Deal-a-Meal hotline, sometimes seeking advice, sometimes just wanting to talk. At night, she sat in the bathtub and read Anna Karenina. She told me it was her favorite love story, even if Anna killed herself in the end.
We couldn’t call my dad in Saudi Arabia, and the internet didn’t exist yet, so my mom talked for hours into a recorder, then mailed the tapes to his base. Every Sunday night, we read the week’s newspapers, and we cut out articles about the war. I imagined my dad in the desert, dodging bombs and defeating Saddam Hussein as part of the 24th Infantry’s Victory Division. I felt closer to him when we read the articles, but my mom seemed to grow more depressed. She used pills in stretches, though I didn’t know back then what caused her eye to droop and her words to slur. Usually, it started with her not sleeping. She’d wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me she’d spent two hours bleaching the bathtub, a chore that was supposed to be mine. Or she’d turn on my light to present a plate of pork chops she expected me to eat before dawn. The next day, she’d drag around the house begging for attention. She’d complain that her head hurt, and she’d blame the oak tree from Cam’s funeral. Eventually, she’d keel over somewhere, and she’d sleep five days before she returned to normal. Maybe my mom could feel a spell coming on because she always stocked the freezer with our favorite TV dinners before she passed out. My brother liked Salisbury steak and a brand called Kid Cuisine, but I preferred Hungry-Man’s “Mexican style fiesta,” a supposed pound of enchiladas, refried beans, and a wiggly dessert the brand called “cocada pudding.” On the nights my mom was zonked, I’d pry two dinners out of the cardboard, slit their plastic coverings with a butter knife, then slide them into the oven. Some mornings, she’d drift around the kitchen, somehow able to cook a cheese omelet with her eyes closed, and other days, we ate Pop-Tarts or cereal, then took ourselves to school. Just as I was starting to tire of the cocada pudding, my mother would wake up, clear-eyed and cooking for the church potluck as if nothing had ever happened.
