'ludes.'
The Assembly met in a concrete-block building with linoleum-tiled floors and a high frosted glass window instead of stained. A modern fruitwood cross loomed in front, and a woman with a puffy hairdo played the organ. We sat on white folding chairs, Carolee on my left, face dark with sullenness and headache, Starr on the aisle, glowing with excitement. Her skirt was so short I could see where the dark part of her pantyhose started.
The organ playing crescendoed and a man walked to the lectern wearing a dark suit and tie with shiny black shoes, like a businessman. I thought he would wear a graduation-type robe. His short, side-parted brown hair glistened like cellophane under the colored lights. Now Starr sat very straight, hoping he would notice her.
As he spoke, I was surprised that he had a sort of speech defect. He swallowed his /'s, so it came out 'alyive' instead of 'alive.' 'Though we were dead in our error, He made us alive together in Christ. By the Cross, we have been saved. He lifts us up to the life .. . everlasting.' He raised his hands, lifting us. He was good. He knew when to build and when to let off, and when he got quiet, that's when he came in for the kill, with big shiny eyes and little flat nose, and a lipless mouth so wide he looked like a Muppet, like his whole head opened and closed when he talked. 'Yes, we can live again, even when we are dying of ... the sin virus.'
Carolee shifted, making her chair squeak on purpose. Starr flapped her hand, nudged me and pointed at the Reverend, as if there was anything else to look at.
Reverend Thomas started telling a story of a young man in the sixties, a good-hearted boy, who thought he could go his own way, as long as he didn't hurt anyone. 'He met a guru who taught him to look for the truth within himself.' The preacher paused and smiled, as if the idea of truth within yourself was absurd, ridiculous, the red light warning of doom. 'You are the judge of what is true.' He smiled again, and I began to see that he always paused to smile when he said something he disapproved of. He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he was smashing them.
'Oh, he was by no means alone in his philosophy at the time,' Reverend Thomas continued, his button eyes shining. ''Do your own thing, man,' was the wisdom of the day. If there was something you wanted, it was good, because you wanted it. There was no God, no dying. There was only your own pleasure.' He smiled at the word 'pleasure,' as if pleasure was hideous, an abomination, and he felt pity for anyone who would be so weak as to value it. 'And if anyone spoke of responsibility or consequences, they were held up to ridicule. 'Lighten up, man. Don't be square.'
'Yes, the young man had unwittingly contracted the deadly virus. It had infiltrated his heart, weakening the structure of his conscience, liquefying his judgment.' Reverend Thomas seemed positively overjoyed. 'After a while, there just didn't seem much difference between right and wrong.'
So how could the kid have ended up as anything but one of the Manson killers?
I had sunk back in my chair as far as Carolee by now, and Starr's perfume and the hissing words of the Reverend were making me sick to my stomach.
Luckily, in prison, the young man had a revelation. He realized he was a part of a raging epidemic of the sin virus, and through another inmate discovered the Lord and the life-giving serum of His Blood. Now he was preaching to the other inmates and doing good works among the hopeless. Although he was twenty-five years into a life sentence, his life was not a waste. He had a reason for being, to help others, and bring the Good News to people who had never looked an inch beyond their own momentary desires. He was redeemed, a new man, reborn in the Lord.
It wasn't hard for me to imagine the Manson kid in prison, his hardness, his warped thinking, a killer. Then something had happened. A light had come on, which let him see the awful reality of his crime. I imagined his agony, when he saw what a monster he had become and knew that he had ruined his life for nothing. He could have killed himself, how very close he must have come. But then came the ray of hope, that there might be another way to live, some meaning after all. And he prayed, and the spirit came into his heart.
And now, instead of living out his years as a walking corpse in San Quentin, hating and more hate, he had become someone with a purpose, someone with the light within him. I understood that. I believed it.
'There is an answer to this deadly epidemic laying waste our vital substance,' Reverend Thomas was saying, lifting his arms, like an embrace. 'A powerful vaccine for the devastating infection within the human heart. But we have to recognize the danger we are in. We have to accept the grave diagnosis, that by acting upon our own desires instead of following God's plan, we have become infected by this terrible plague. We have to receive the knowledge of our responsibility to the heavenly power, and our own vulnerability.'
Suddenly, a scene that I had kept at bay all these months came flooding in. The day I'd phoned Barry to warn him, and then hung up. I could feel the weight of the receiver as I put it on the cradle. My responsibility. My infection.
'We need Christ's antibodies, to overcome this contagion within our souls. And those who choose to serve themselves instead of the Heavenly Father will experience the deadly consequences.'
It wasn't surreal anymore. What Reverend Thomas was saying was true. I had contracted the virus. I had been infected all the while. There was blood on my hands. I thought of my beautiful mother, sitting in her tiny cell, her life at full stop. She was just Jike the Manson kid. She didn't believe in anything but herself, no higher law, no morality. She thought she could justify anything, even murder, just because it was what she wanted. She didn't even use the excuse of who was she hurting. She had no conscience. I will not serve. That's what Stephen Dedalus said in Portrait of the Artist, but it meant Satan. That's what the Fall was. Satan would not serve.
An old lady stepped forward from the choir and began to sing, 'The blood that Jesus shed for me, way back at Calvary ...' and she could really sing. And I was crying, my tears coming down. We were dying inside, my mother and I. If only we had God, Jesus, something larger than ourselves to believe in, we could be healed. We could still have a new life.
IN JULY, I was baptized into the Truth Assembly of Christ. It didn't even matter that it was Reverend Thomas, how fake he was, how he looked down Starr's dress, the way his eyes fondled her when she walked up the stairs in front of him. I closed my eyes as he laid me back in the square pool behind the Assembly building, my nose filling with chlorine. I wanted the spirit to enter me, to wash me clean. I wanted to follow God's plan for me. I knew where following my own would get me.
Afterward, we went out to Church's Fried Chicken to celebrate. Nobody had ever given me a party before. Starr gave me a white leatherette Bible with passages highlighted in red. From Carolee and the boys I got a box of stationery with a dove in the corner, trailing a banner in its beak that said, 'Praise the Lord,' but I knew Starr must have picked it out. Uncle Ray gave me a tiny gold cross on a chain. Even though he thought I was nuts to be baptized.
'You can't really believe in this crap,' he whispered in my ear as he helped me put the necklace on.
