Simple Simon

by William Poe

  “Perhaps, Kawasaki-san, but I thought the church was about brotherhood and, well, family—not conflict.”

  Kawasaki looked worried. “Father depends on you, Simon.”

  I was hoping to depend on Father.

  “Many captains left the family from the mobile fundraising teams,” Kawasaki revealed. “When your team had a problem, you called headquarters and took advice. You were willing to fast. Father recognizes your faithfulness.”

  “Father knows me?”

  “He does, Simon. When Father saw the list of team captains who set out after the World Day competition, he remembered you from Little Rock. He told us that your friends walked out during Father’s speech and that your sister and her husband were among a group of Christians who pushed their way into the auditorium. Father sang ‘Arirang’ to calm the spirit world after they were forced to leave.”

  “My friends nearly ruined everything.”

  “Father said they must love you very much. They were concerned about you. Father said that your faith is strong.”

  I had almost forgotten that life was about more than driving a van, fasting until I collapsed, and worrying about physical attacks on my team members. Father remembered me personally, didn’t judge Connie and Derek, and forgave the antics of Jake, Jewell, Mojo, and the rest of the hippie band.

  Kawasaki took a sip of coffee. “Your team is making one of the highest averages. Father is aware of that.”

  “Then no one is making the three hundred–dollar goal?”

  “I will tell you a secret, Simon-san. Father set that goal to see what members would do. He wanted to know who would give up, and who would make an effort. Who repented for not making the goal? You, Simon.”

  I felt both proud and sad.

  “Leaders will arise from the mobile fundraising teams,” Kawasaki predicted. “Father needs American members who understand the Divine Principle.” He paused a moment, again studying me. “Father needs a trusted brother, Simon. Someone who can work with Mitsui and me.”

  Kawasaki took another sip from his cup. “The important thing right now,” he said, motioning for the waiter to bring our check, “is that we need to find a large house. It should have four or five bedrooms.”

  That night, Kawasaki took my team to a Japanese restaurant on Clark Street. He charmed them with his down-to-earth directness and joking manner—not to mention the fact that he had released them from fundraising for an evening.

  CHAPTER 24

  “Harris wants to see you,” Joshua insisted as he shook me from a light sleep. “It sounds urgent.”

  The schedule at the rehab center offered few chances to relax, and I didn’t like someone rousing me from a nap, even someone with a grin as cute as Joshua’s. I pulled the pillow over my head and growled.

  “Fuckin’ drug addict,” Joshua cajoled, tugging the pillowcase. “Come on, get up.”

  It was useless to resist. I eased myself down from the bunk, catching a glimpse of Joshua fingering his navel. He was shirtless and barefoot. Tight jeans emphasized his muscular thighs.

  “Don’t call me a drug addict,” I complained. “And quit being a prick tease. I have a lover, and I don’t need the temptation.”

  The Vietnam veteran in the lower bunk shouted his favorite phrase: “Shut the fuck up!”

  Before we disturbed him, the vet had been busy with his hobby—piecing together plastic model airplanes. The movement of the bunk had shaken a freshly glued propeller from its engine.

  “Fucking queers,” the vet glowered.

  “Delightful place,” I muttered, scrambling past Joshua and heading toward the back stairs. I desperately needed a cup of coffee. Of all the times for Joshua not to bring me one!

  Joshua followed me across the room, all the while taunting me. “How am I a tease? What do you mean?” When I didn’t respond, he snapped, “Sorry I bothered you.” Even so, he continued to follow me.

  When we were halfway down the stairs, I turned around. Joshua’s jeans were unfastened, and the zipper was beginning to spread.

  “Don’t be angry,” he pouted.

  “I’m not angry. But stop it! Whatever you think you’re doing, just stop it.”

  Joshua grinned as he turned around and retreated up the stairs.

  “Go bother someone else,” I hollered, but he had already disappeared into the dorm.

  After passing through the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, I found Harris’s door open. He was at his desk jotting notes in a case folder. When I knocked on the doorjamb, he slipped the file under some books.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Harris followed my line of sight to the folder; he had failed to cover the label, which had my name on it. Nonchalantly, he picked up the books and the folder, and placed the stack on the floor. “That’s better,” he said, as if the point had been to tidy his desk. He obviously didn’t want me to ask what he had been writing in my case file. In fact, I didn’t want to know.

  “Vivian called,” Harris said. “She and Thad want to visit this afternoon.”

  My heart skipped a few beats. I felt ashamed to see Vivian, and though I missed Thad, I wasn’t sure I was ready to see him just yet. My discomfort must have shown, because Harris’s forehead wrinkled with concern.

  “It’s up to you, Simon. Do you want to see them?”

  “I suppose so,” I said hesitantly. “Should I telephone Vivian?”

  “She’s expecting me to call her back,” Harris explained.

  I shuffled in place, staring at the floor.

  “Something else you want to talk about?” Harris asked.

  “Kind of. Do you have a few minutes?”

  Harris motioned for me to sit. “Always time for my clients,” he said, tapping his desk with the eraser end of a pencil. “What’s on your mind?”

  I stalled, rubbing my hand on the arm of the chair. “What should I do about Joshua?”

  “Is something going on?” Harris seemed genuinely surprised. I guessed he had not noticed Joshua dogging me.

  “He keeps hustling me, and damn it, the guy’s succeeding.”

  “Perhaps Thad’s visit will allow you to examine your priorities.”

  “You mean, do I want a lover or a one-night stand?”

  Harris leaned back in his chair. “Your choice.”

  “I thought I had made that choice. Then Joshua started in on me.”

  “Want me to have a talk with him?” Harris offered.

  “And what would you say? Quit coming on to Simon.” I stood up to leave. “You seem to understand my predicament pretty well. Are you sure you’re straight?”

  Harris tapped out a syncopated rhythm on the edge of his desk with finger and pencil.

  I paused at the door with raised eyebrows, wondering if he was going to reply.

  “Definitely,” Harris confirmed with a final drumbeat.

  I thought I might volunteer for dishwashing duty, but somebody else had beat me to it. The cook, an old sea biscuit who violated every health code in the book, chewed on the butt of cigar as he stirred a roiling vat of stew.

  My attraction to Joshua was as fraught with peril as my desire to do drugs, and I had to avoid him. Thad was the real deal—a companion and a lover. And yet, I longed for a sexual experience without the complications of love. I slipped out the back door, where a game of basketball was under way, and headed toward the picnic table by the cottonwoods. On the way, I passed the recreation room window and saw Joshua, still shirtless, talking to an old man who had just come into rehab.

  From the picnic table, I spotted a riverboat called the Belle of Arkansas. It advanced in front of the Delta Queen, a much larger vessel from Memphis. The traditional rivals raced once a year and had just made it to Little Rock for this year’s event. I went to the edge of the road to watch them dock across the river. As they came into port, waves from the side paddle wheel of the Delta Queen rocked the smaller Belle of Arkansas, stalling its rear-mounted wheel and nearly running it aground.
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  I stretched out on the picnic table and tried to unwind. The clouds sped by unnaturally fast. The sight made me laugh, thinking how I had once given credence to the notion that the new Messiah would appear on the “clouds of Heaven” and how that had struck me when I saw Reverend Moon’s airplane disappearing into the clouds over Little Rock. It seemed a lifetime ago, and yet, writing about those times, they could have happened yesterday.

  Eventually, I gave up trying to relax and sneaked upstairs. Retrieving a notepad from the drawer beside my bunk, I figured I might as well spend the time writing. I went back to the picnic table, but every passing car distracted me as I anticipated the arrival of Vivian and Thad.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  During my last period in Chicago, I worked as liaison to the teams under Kawasaki’s charge. The job allowed me to meet all the team captains in the Midwest and to become confessor to hundreds of members.

  My visits were welcome, mostly because I had learned to listen and be forgiving. Life on the MFT was difficult in many ways. We may have believed in ideals, but we were human. Like any human group, the teams dealt with grudges, jealousies, and on occasion, physical attractions. When members asked, I tried to arrange for relocation to a different team.

  I was surprised to learn how many brothers “had been” homosexual before joining. Often, a brother would ask to move to a team of all sisters in order to get better emotional control. Several sisters asked the opposite, to be on a team with brothers. When I witnessed how valiantly everyone fought their desires, it put my own struggles in perspective. I was not alone by any means.

  Though I became a confessor to many, I had no one to talk to. I never mentioned my struggles to Kawasaki and never considered speaking to Mitsui. For the most part, I lied to myself, pretending that God had already taken away my lustful feelings. I became two beings in one body—the religious Apollonian and the sexual Dionysian. I “listened” to my sexual desires as if another being were having them.

  As difficult as it was to conceive, I never intentionally masturbated for years. Whatever Dionysus did, it was while Apollo slept during the night.

  After the Yankee Stadium rally, where Father had proclaimed the coming of a new era to the amazing accompaniment of something like a windstorm that was confined to the stadium itself, the entire MFT was called to a meeting at a former monastery purchased by the church in Barrytown, New York. Father didn’t actually say that our three-year mission had become thirty, but it was clear that the MFT would become a permanent fixture of church life. Father announced that every member coming to the movement would join the fundraising teams for at least three and a half years, and after that, spend the same amount of time witnessing, with the goal of bringing three people to the church. This would be the “standard course” by which members prepared for marriage.

  Mitsui reorganized the MFT, setting up something like a Japanese feudal structure. In this view, Father was the emperor and Mitsui his taicho, or highest general. Kawasaki stood next in line, like a daimyo in the feudal hierarchy. The MFT regional leaders became known as commanders, and under them, team captains.

  The MFT office moved from the gatehouse on the Belvedere estate to a suite of rooms in the New Yorker Hotel, a moribund structure the church had acquired just before the Yankee Stadium speech.

  Mitsui created twelve MFT regions. Stanley, whom Kawasaki had taken under his wing in Chicago and helped develop into a successful fundraising leader, became commander of the Texas region headquartered in Dallas. I became commander for the Midwest, taking over the fundraising center Kawasaki and I had established.

  With the reorganization, the MFT entered into direct competition with the state centers, at least in terms of fundraising. The MFT commanders, all Japanese men, cared nothing about complaints from the state leaders. For them, the mission of the MFT was all-important. As a result, the local centers became more obstinate than previously; sometimes, they even denied participation to MFT members at special services on church holidays. Considering the other quasi-independent groups, such as the Korean-led organization that witnessed exclusively on college campuses, the “unification” church comprised several organizations, as disparate as Catholic, Orthodox, and the many Protestant churches.

  Willard Bozeman strongly dissented when Father made the MFT permanent. He believed that the movement should concentrate on witnessing and educational activities. He argued that the church centers were becoming little more than recruitment centers for the MFT. Given Father’s edict about the standard course, Bozeman’s complaint held merit. The MFT had yet to send any fundraisers back to the witnessing centers.

  Mitsui told us that God had blessed Abel (the expanded MFT) and rejected Cain (the state leaders) and that, through the situation, God expected the state leaders to submit to the MFT leadership and indemnify the tragedy of Abel’s murder. In short, Bozeman should bow to Mitsui.

  I kept thinking that the Cain and Abel story was more complex than people made it out to be. The Divine Principle also taught that Abel was as arrogant as Cain was self-centered. Shouldn’t Mitsui “restore” the true nature of Abel and win over Bozeman through humility?

  Guess not.

  The conflicts between the MFT and the state leaders became fertile ground for the seeds of doubt that had long been germinating in my mind. I began to consider what the press was saying—that Reverend Moon was no more than an egocentric charismatic like so many others throughout history and that the Divine Principle, for all its seeming theological depth, was nothing but an amalgam of Christian heresies coupled with shamanistic beliefs and fueled by Korean nationalism.

  Reverend Moon had exploited Japanese subservience to powerful male leadership and tapped into the yearnings of disheartened American youths. Korea—the people who knew him best—had the smallest church membership of the three countries.

  The national press knew little about the many church factions. To reporters, we were all the same. The San Francisco church received the greatest scrutiny. Members who had joined there, and who had subsequently left the church, accused the leaders of converting people through sleep deprivation, low-carbohydrate meals, and monotonous lecturing. There were even hints that female members used promises of sex to entice men to lectures. I hadn’t witnessed such tactics, but no outsider truly knew what went on at the San Francisco church’s training camps.

  The irrefutable fact was that the San Francisco church successfully recruited members, and everyone in the family respected that. The other thing everyone knew was that the members who joined in San Francisco barely understood the Divine Principle. Many had never even heard Father’s name. We often wondered what group San Francisco members thought they were joining.

  By the time the MFT became permanent, the state churches had sent so many members to the fundraising teams that they were left with few members to support their own centers. The San Francisco church was the only group with a surplus. Their leader, a Korean man nicknamed Abbanim (something like Korean for “poppa”), had refused to comply with Father’s edict to send members to the MFT.

  Eventually, Father negotiated with Abbanim to start sending members to the MFT. The idea that the Lord of the Second Advent needed to negotiate with an underling shocked me. I knew of rumors that Abbanim considered himself to have a holy blood lineage, not unlike Father’s. Evidently, he and Reverend Moon had once belonged to a spiritualist group in Korea that practiced ritual sex. The stories implied that both had received purified blood through sexual intercourse with the group’s female leader—a spiritual “Mary” figure—during something referred to as a pigarum ceremony and that Abbanim also claimed to be without original sin.

  For the most part, I had put the stories out of my mind. But Father’s powerlessness over Abbanim made me wonder.

  According to the agreement, San Francisco members were to arrive on a monthly basis. Mitsui decided to create a process for assimilating them and wanted me to lead a workshop at the New Yorker.

  When
asked whom I would suggest as a lecturer, I immediately thought of Norman. Among state leaders, he was the most supportive of the MFT. I hadn’t seen Norman since the days of the One World Crusade, but I received news about him from members who came to the MFT from his center. Norman readily agreed to lecture.

  He arrived in New York before I did and spent time conferring with Mitsui and Kawasaki. Norman met me at the airport two days later.

  “I see you haven’t gotten any shorter,” I quipped, setting down my carry-on bag to shake his hand.

  Norman pushed my hand aside and picked me up in a bear hug. “Are you really that timid young man who got off the bus in Hattiesburg?”

  “Less timid, but the same guy,” I said.

  “Let’s get coffee and catch up on the last few years,” Norman said. “There won’t be much time after we get to the New Yorker.”

  We found an out-of-the-way table at the airport restaurant. Norman didn’t know about the events during Father’s Little Rock speech and had not heard that Connie and Derek were active in the anti-cult movement.

  “I can’t believe the things they say about Father,” I told Norman. “I’ve seen Connie on television crying about how she ‘lost her brother’ to the anti-Christ. Funny thing to say. We barely knew each other growing up.”

  “I’ll have to tell you about my own brother someday,” Norman said. “But what about Stanley? You haven’t mentioned him. What’s up with your old friend these days?”

  “Stanley’s leading the Texas region. We’re not close anymore. When the commanders meet, I try to talk to him, but he cuts the conversation short. It’s a shame. We were such good friends before joining the family—or at least I thought we were. But even when we lived at the same center in Chicago with Kawasaki, we hardly spoke.”

  “I can see why it’s mysterious to you, Simon. But he’s probably jealous. You make everything seem so easy.”

  I started to protest, but Norman stopped me.