Purple Cat Big Heist Caper! Praising Lord!

For more background and Halloween hijinx, go here!

My mother found Jesus the way a Peterbilt truck finds a raccoon on the highway-sudden, hard and messy. At first it was a positive thing...for a short (and rather confusing) time, she went from being God's miserable hemorrhoid to being Jesus ' little sunbeam. Was this my mother? Smiling?
Anyway, for a variety of reasons I may go into at another time, I found myself an unwilling participant in what rapidly became my mothers religious mania, going to what were termed 'Charismatic Catholic' , Born-Again style prayer meetings three evenings a week.

Lemme digress a bit. Catholicism in white, working-class America isn't remotely ecstatic. Catholicism in white, working-class America is in fact about as exciting as attending a talk at the public library about Gypsy moth infestation, except with more kneeling and a light snack towards the end.

Understandably, then, Catholics did not do the charisms, or 'ecstatic religiosity' very well. These prayer meetings tended to be rather shy and restrained things until the very, very end, when people got that 'now or never' feeling and suddenly went belly-flopping awkwardly into the deep end. It was essentially two hours of quiet prayer with upraised hands followed by a half-hour of crying, speaking in tongues, falling, twitching, and singing loud songs with accompanying gestures while hopping up and down.
Yes, really. Barney the Dinosaur meets Jesus.

Still, I honestly think the greater part of the people in attendance were sincere, if misguided. Unfortunately my mother, being who she was, got drawn into the lunatic fringe.
Eventually she was running buddies with this unbelievably odd bunch of Jesus-groupies. All of them were garden-variety unfulfilled Catholic women...morbidly obese 50-year-old virgins, glum married lesbians in brick-wall denial with six kids , borderline (and not-so-borderline) psychotics, rage junkies, low-norms who smelled like pee and beat-down throw pillows, mostly. All of them could have been case studies in a book called 'Women You Should Never, Ever Be Like When You Grow Up'.
And I took note, yo.

One evening there was a new member in attendance, a thin, trembling fawn of a woman draped in scarves and ethnic fabrics, like an aging ballet dancer with a thyroid problem. Her buggy eyeballs never stopped scanning the room. She smoked with a strange metronomic regularity, sipping at the filter and blowing steadily until the cigarette was one long ash drooping gracefully down over her red bony knuckles. She sat at the edge of the group drawn up into a knobby heap on the metal folding chair .

The Fringies were instantly enthralled. The poor thing, let's go be friendly!
Poor thing indeed.
Soon she was in the middle of a circle of chairs filled with a whole bunch of terribly friendly, sympathetic fat women listening raptly to her 'testimony'.

This stuff was usually pretty gross, so I went outside and lit a smoke.*

I was joined by one of my moms' friends a short while later. "You'll never believe what happened to this poor woman," she said.
She was right.

According to 'Bambi', she'd grown up in a wealthy family, her father was a very well-known public figure who she was afraid to name, all of them were against her and they wanted her to stay married to a man who was beating her. They had been drugging her for years and had finally poisoned her with a mysterious substance in an attempt to 'keep her quiet'. She was also being chased by a cult, by organized crime and by an ex husband, and all of them were trying to kill her while at the same time plotting to have her committed to a mental institution. This was why she was hiding out on the streets and in homeless shelters AND living in her car and also why nobody could know her real name.

Man, I was 16 and I smelled this shit a mile away, even secondhand. The woman breathlessly recounting all this to me was 56. You could tell she thought this was the coolest, most glamorous and interesting thing that she had ever heard EVER.

Once I'd finished my cigarette I went back inside. 'Bambi' was being prayed for.

Now, in an ordinary setting, this might mean that people were, you know, sitting, maybe kneeling, hands folded, praying.

In this group it meant that everyone present stood and placed one hand on the person being prayed for and raised the other hand high into the air (presumably to get better reception) closed their eyes and made bossy demands on the Lord. "Jesus! See this woman! Jesus, help this woman! Yes! Jesus, help her bear this burden! HEAL her! Heal her now! Jesus heal her! HEAL HER NOW! IN JESUS NAME! LIFT HER BURDEN! LIFT THIS BURDEN FROM HER!"
They typically did this in turns, getting louder and more vehement until the whole group was crying, moaning, and speaking in tongues. Just another typical Friday night.

The thing was, they were all on the downslope of middle age, and they couldn't stand for very long without getting tired. They started to droop and lean on one another after they'd been at it for a while. From a distance this looked like a bunch of people peering at something down a well while signaling to passing aircraft.
And as I knew from personal experience, the person in the middle, the one being prayed for, bore the full weight. Poor waif- like Bambi was nearly bent double.

We heard a lot from Bambi in the passing weeks. Bambi threw off a group praying for her with 'supernatural strength'. Bambi had 'spoken in an unnatural voice and cursed God'. Bambi had 'accepted Christ and suddenly become ill'.

Clearly, Bambi was under demonic attack.

Consequently Bambi became very, very popular. Everyone had Bambi over for dinner. Everyone took Bambi out for coffee after the meetings. People fought over who would drive Bambi back to the shelter. The group took up a collection and got Bambi out of the shelter and into an apartment. Everyone listened raptly to Bambi's stories about being raped by shadowy figures on orders from her family, receiving threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, Bambi finding her belongings had been gone through by the Mafia, Bambi seeing demonic messages appear on the ceiling above her bed at night. The 'let's pray for Bambi' session at the end of every meeting became the main draw. You never knew what would happen, and something dramatic always did. Attendance was never better.

One evening I was smoking outside in the garden when one of the Fringe came out to get me.
'We need you to come help us! Do you think you could be a prayer warrior?' she said breathlessly, clutching my arm.
" Well, let me finish my smoke first," I replied. "What's going on?"
"Bambi's apartment is haunted!" said the Fringie. "That's what's been at the center of all these disturbances!"
"You mean her new apartment she just moved into?" I asked.
"It's not new," said the Fringie. "It's in an old house. And there were people who were drug addicts and Satan worshippers living there before she moved in. And they had orgies."

I'd like to say that I laughed in her face, but no. Whaddya gonna do; it's how I was raised.

Now how drug-dealing Satan worshippers had managed to move into a place owned by one of this Christian groups' leaders and live there, holding orgies, drugging and worshipping away for a matter of years, was never explained. What I accepted without a thought at the time** was that Milwaukie, Oregon was simply raddled with Satan-worshipping, orgy-holding druggies, and that that kind of thing called up demons and opened a PORTAL TO HELL.

And I was being asked to help cleanse it! I was being asked to help cast out demons, to help a fellow Christian and to bring the light of the Lord into her home! Well fuck yeah I'll help, are you nuts? An exorcism? I am A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL! Color me there!

We all piled into the Mystery Mobile-I mean, the former prostitutes' car- in an excited, bible-toting heap...the grumpy lesbian, the vindictive Jap-hater and the former prostitute that nobody was supposed to have figured out was a former prostitute in the front seat, and the 55- year-old morbidly obese virgin, the sixteen-year-old smoker, and the smokers batshit-nuts mother in the back. We zoomed away, praying and holding hands. When the traffic lights changed we prayed for the traffic light to turn green.
Some of the ladies in the front seat started getting a little excited. Unknown tongues began creeping into the mix.

"Don't get carried away by the Spirit,' called the former prostitute as she drifted a corner on two wheels "I don't have any insurance!"

We prayed for her to get a raise so she could buy insurance at the next light.

We caromed through downtown Portland and over the Powell Blvd. bridge. Smokers' Mother had the brilliant idea to roll down the window so that upraised hands could poke out.

We passed the Poulson House, a grim Victorian I was secretly in love with. 'That's a Satanic looking place,' said the Jap Hater darkly. "I've always hated it."

We prayed holding hands over the back of the seat, all the way up McLoughlin Boulevard and down River Road until we drove up to the house, the house of evil, and stopped. We prayed a little more before we climbed the stairs.

We prayed before we went inside.

We went inside, and stopped to pray in the foyer.

Bambi was already there, looking pale and twitchy in the bare overhead light.
"Where's the disturbance?" Demanded former prostitute.
"I don't know", breathed Bambi. "It's the whole place, I think.."
We all joined hands and began to....guess?
Pray.

The whole group moved in an awkward clump into the first room off the foyer. Speaking in tongues began in earnest. Then singing in tongues. I got mashed into a wall by 55-Year-Old Virgin's huge ass and there I remained. Trembling hands reached out and touched the walls. The furniture. The pictures. The telephone. "You never know," said Jap Hater. "Oh! Good idea!" they agreed.

The clump shuffled down the hall and moved to the next room, lead by Bambi. An overhead bulb flickered and she screamed. "It's here!"
The praying gained volume.
I got mashed into a door by the 55-Year-Old-Virgin.
We entered the kitchen. The kitchen was tiny.
Closet doors were opened and prayed into. Someone started swaying, and the whole group started rocking back and forth in unison. I was mashed into another wall at this point, and resigned myself to simply trying to draw breath while the others did the heavy battling with the demons infesting the cabinets. "It's here! I can feel it moving! It's running before us!" various people commented. "Where's it going? It went past me! I felt it!"

The whole group moved as one, in a clump. A couple of the women were already reduced to panting, barely able to gasp 'Thank you Jesus, Thank you Jesus' by this point. Nobody'd told them that Satan would be wearing track shoes.

"It went in here! cried Bambi. The group surged forward.
'Here' was the bathroom.
A very tiny, tiny bathroom.

The group pushed forward and found that not all of them could fit into the claustrophobic, closet-sized room at once.
Satan had obviously chosen the venue for this final showdown with care.

The group decamped to the entry and considered. Bambi twittered and meeped in the background like a nervous gerbil with a bad nicotine habit. I noticed that there wasn't one single place on the floor that didn't have a cigarette burn.

Suddenly "I found it!" cried the former prostitute. She was a tiny woman, and had wormed her way to the front of the group. "Come look! I found it! Here it is!"
Everyone crowded forward.

Ever heard of Masonite? It was marketed as a waterproof, decorative material for tub surrounds in the 60's and 70's...kind of a cross between Formica and wallboard. The smooth 'space age' material it was coated with supposedly*** rendered this material moisture-resistant and easy to clean. This coating was often printed with designs...flowers, snowflakes, geometrics...
This tub surround was printed with a tropical island scene.
Straw huts, palm trees, coconuts, ocean waves.

And Tiki god statues.

"I knew it! I never felt comfortable in there! I always felt like I was being watched!" exclaimed Bambi.

Grumpy Lesbian was crammed against the sink. Former Prostitute was seated on the toilet. Jap Hater had what floor space there was in the center of the room.
I was crammed into the bathtub, by now utterly mortified, with Smokers' Mom and the 55-Year-Old Morbidly Obese Virgin.
'Now everyone put their hands on the wall and pray!" Former Prostitute commanded.

And they prayed. Please, God, deliver this house from the clutches of Satan. Please, God, drive the presence of demons from the images on this bathroom wall. We refute thee utterly, Satan, and all thy works, and thy leering image of thyself as rendered in driftwood and dogs' teeth by the Polynesians and the DuPont Corporation in gold glitter paint.

Oh yeah... there they were. Jesus' little prayer warriors. Standing in the bathtub.

Exorcising the wallpaper.

Amen.



___________________________
*one of the first things I found out about being a charismatic catholic was that the typical unfulfilled adult catholic woman had really good reasons for being that way, most of them horrifically gynecological. also, that it takes very little provocation for your typical unfulfilled catholic woman to explain the exact nature of her particular problem at length and in excruciating detail.

**also the subject of yet another story. lucky you!

***masonite is bullshit. one scratch and the stuff swells up with black fungus like the black plague. god i hate masonite.

one of the three things which nice people never discuss in company

All this happened 27 years ago this month.

Ok. So it's 1977 and it's August. Elvis the king, resting on his throne, is wondering why he's so tired and out of breath all the time. Me, I am 17 years old and the only unmarried non-virgin in a five mile radius.

I am at a religious family retreat that my mother has quite matter-of-factly blackmailed me into attending ( which circumstances are worth several cringe-inducing posts in theyownselves. ) Nice place, lots of trees, and not jack shit to do.

I hit the bookcase in the main lodge and started ripping through the collection. I'll read anything. They had a lot of anything.
'Hansi, the Girl Who Loved the Swastika'...I think you were required to own an edition of that if you were Born Again in the 70's...'Crossroads Collected Stories of Inspiration'...'The Billy Graham Story'...'Christy'-hoo, that was a ball of fire...'Intra Muros', a strange, self-published little book about a womans' visit to heaven that was also making the rounds at the time...and one slender volume on medieval art.

'A Meditation on Grunewalds' Crucifixion' is my best memory of the title. I'm almost certain the author was a Jesuit scholar. What this book was doing in amongst the lightweight 'Charismatic Catholic' selections I have no idea. I mean, this thing had footnotes. And despite it's somewhat lugubrious tone it made me very happy.

The type of religion being peddled on our social level was a religion of fluffy, happy niceness, where nice happy people had clean, nice houses and worshipped the Lord with upraised hands, a religion that sincerely believed that 'God never gives you any burden which you are incapable of carrying.' A religion so useless that when it happened that someone was handed a burden they couldn't seem to lift it simply went unacknowledged.

Now remember, these were Born-Again Catholics. So add to that the good ol' Catholic 'if you're not miserable you're sinning' mindset.

And yet none of it explaining how, say, infants born inside-out, for example, could have been expected by God to bear that kind of condition, or could have been 'not right with the Lord', but I digress.

I found more to admire in that book that in anything I had learned in catechism up to that point in my life.

I honestly think that Grunewald was inspired, offering up that view of the Passion . He had painted it to be used as part of an altarpiece*, for a monastery devoted to caring for people dying of ergotism, of plague, of cancer, of infection. He showed them a Christ that had suffered exactly what they had suffered, in all its appalling detail. A human Christ consumed with pain and dying, not already passed into nothing more than an anatomy study. Most importantly, in those pre-Vatican II days, the priest who served the mass had to look that Christ in the eye every every time he went to open the altarpiece. The same priest who later went in and ministered to people suffering identically, who looked similar.

So Christians did see torment. They did acknowlege the insupportable. They did think. At least
two of them had; and I had the proof in my hands.

Until that point my only comfort, or my only 'faith in faith' if you will, had been found in writings by Jews who had survived the Holocaust. Catholics romaticize suffering because life is supposed to suck at best so you work with what you get. Charismatics in practice completely denied it because life was supposed to be perfect 100% of the time and anything else meant you were on the Cannonball Express to Hell. The Jews said, 'This happened. It sucked. God was with me then and is with me now and I struggle to understand. "

It impressed me on a secular level as well. I would have never read it had I not been so utterly starved for intellectual stimulation at the time. I had never read an advanced work of nonfiction. I struggled to understand and I wished I had a dictionary, and I wanted MORE IMMEDIATELY.

In the meantime I was trapped on a ten acre tract in the middle of the mountains with a bunch of people convinced that God wanted them to go out in the woods for two weeks and act like retards. No chance of getting laid, I quickly found out.

No 17 year old wants to be anywhere with a parent anyway; it's excruciating. Now add the sheer embarrassment of watching a bunch of Catholics trying to 1. enjoy themselves, and 2. experience 'ecstatic' religiousity with no cultural referents. If I'd heard the phrase 'you shouldn't be so NEGATIVE' one more time I was going to ram a goddamn owl up someone's ass. So I dummied up and watched these (goofy fucking white people) secretaries and Taco Bell managers raise their hands and praise the Lord, throw away their medications and cast out demons and speak in tongues and perform healings and interpret prophecy and read from the 'Living Bible' and fall on the floor and knock over chairs 'fainting in the Spirit' and have to get stitches. Yes, really.
The Charismatic Movement was not pretty.

I was told that the reason for my dissatisfaction lay in being too worldly. I listened to rock and roll (that old devil!) and read too many secular books and, it was hinted, probably was not as smart as I thought I was, so maybe I'd be better off if I just stopped pretending to be better than everyone else and start joining in.

And you know, I tried. It was not in me. I hated myself, and I mentally apologised to God every inch of the way.

So in a very sideways and backwards kind of manner, I actually did increase my understanding of religion during the course of that retreat. I came out of there understanding that religion was ridiculous. I came out of there having seen what belief could be, what it could encompass, and I left knowing there was nothing worth having from these grinning dipshits singing "I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart"

And yes, I gotta say, I owe it all to Jesus. That's why I think about converting to Judaism...something which, were it not for the fact that I am bone agnostic, I would do tomorrow.
That makes sense if you're me.



with thanks to Minka and DaNator for the hotmail how-to.

*should I explain this? here goes: think of one of those old-fashioned dressers with a folding mirror attached
to the top. Replace the folding mirror with the 'altarpiece', a painting on a decoratively cut piece of wood that usually had folding doors attached on each side, and every surface decorated. Replace the dresser with a sort of lectern or small console table to be used as the altar proper. The whole thing was meant to be used for serving Mass in a chapel or a small space. The painting part was removeable so you could carry it from place to place and make an instant 'church' . The table half could then be used for something else, which is why most of them got lost over time and only the altarpieces remain.
That said, some altarpieces were huge things, made for permanent installation in a church. Some were only one panel . Some were very complicated and had many folding panels with detachable angels and statues and things to decorate it. Some were tiny and meant to be carried in a pocket, and those are called 'devotionals' . Bear this in mind the next time you go shopping for medieval art.