The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  “I’m a businessman,” the bartender said again. Then he got it and added: “What the hell.”

  “Not another word,” I said. “I promise. Just a pitcher for my friends over there.” The grass skirts flapped from the air moving through the open front door. The bartender picked up his rag from the ground and wiped out a plastic pitcher, shaking his head and talking to himself.

  I walked over with the pitcher. The smell of it alone sent my insides sailing. The bald guy with the tattoo perked up when he saw the pale yellow beer and said hello. “I remember you from the pier, man,” he said. “I never would have pegged you for a Jimbo’s guy.”

  “I hope you don’t peg me at all,” I said.

  We exchanged names. His was Anthony, which somehow made sense. We talked about how the waves were, and other breaks up and down the coast, from Black’s to Terra Mar to Old Man’s. The other guys drifted back from the karaoke machine, saying it was fucked. They sounded really broken up about it. I had trouble following their conversation. Maybe it was because they were sauced, but they also had a private language of “likes” and “dudes,” acquired catchphrases and neologisms in put-on Spicoli accents. It was disorienting and a little frightening, like taking a beating in some rough verbal shore break. Or like gnarly, sucking-out pockets smacking right on the rockflops and schflitting your barney skull open, bra, as they would have put it.

  Sometime during all this I heard the opening burbles of a synthesized, stripped-down version of Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight.” A midrange, squeaky voice sang along, switching to falsetto for the female parts. It was the goiter kid, looking for all the world like he had a giant clown nose pulled over his head. His eyes were shut. His throat undulated, and he worked hard to hit the right notes. He was trying. It was cute but pitiable, like a toddler strapped into tap shoes.

  After the song ended, he set the microphone on the stool and wandered over. Anthony introduced him to me, calling him Shaw because, as was made immediately apparent, of a persistent lisp.

  “It’sh good to meet shew,” he said, shaking my hand. We chatted a minute, and I offered him a pour from the pitcher. I poured myself a half glass, too, because not having one would send the wrong message. More talking doesn’t always lead to more trust, but sharing a drink, I knew from enough direct experience, could get someone talking.

  “Hey,” I started in, “you know a friend of mine, I think.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Shaw said. “Who? Besides these circle jerksh.”

  “Right,” I said, with a little fake laugh. “No, her name’s Cindy.”

  Shaw had a thin line of foam clinging to the balding caterpillar he called a mustache. He made a puzzled face and didn’t say anything for a minute. You could almost see his eyes flipping slowly through index cards of former friends. “I don’t shink I know anybody named Cindy,” he finally said.

  He didn’t seem like he was lying, but I decided to push a little further. “Sure you do. You guys talked on the beach, north side of the pier. Flat, hot day. A week ago, maybe.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. I took her out for a surf lesson. Then she was reading on the beach, and I was out in the water with you guys. That’s where I first met Anthony. And when you went in, you two talked for a while.”

  A light went on behind Shaw’s eyes. It was dim and oddly colored, chartreuse maybe. “Oh, I remember the girl. I get chillsh just shinking about her. She’s a piecsh. She’s a four-piecsh shpecial.”

  My heart slipped in my body, like it was the last colored square twisting into place on a Rubik’s Cube. I was worried about her. About where she had gone. The fact became clear to me, in a way it hadn’t been before, that I wanted to know she was okay. Maybe it was the mess of the last few days, the mess of my heart and the shoddy wiring in my head, but it didn’t send up a warning flare, this unfamiliar feeling: care.

  Maybe I was too eager when I asked if he’d seen her since.

  Shaw gave me a sly look with one pinched eye. It was a suspicious, you-dog-you look, as given by a dog. “You? And her? You’re kidding me, man. And now she’s not anshwering your telegramsh? Hate to break it to you, brother, but you’re part of a big club there.”

  My throat was so hot and dry I almost took a swig of beer without thinking. I forced a laugh and patted Shaw on the back and then gripped him around the shoulder hard. “How’d you know Cindy, man?”

  “That’sh not her name.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I shaid. That’sh not her name. It’sh Emily. And thanksh for the hug, bra, but you can—”

  “Emily?” I said. “Emily what?” Inside me the Rubik’s Cube was being twisted at random by an unseen hand, and I felt a little nauseated.

  “Emily who-fucking-knowsh, man. Shounds like she was working you. Shtill have your wallet?”

  I didn’t want to believe him, wanted to believe she’d given him a fake name. But mentally I felt for my back pocket, so it’s not that I thought she was a saint. I asked Shaw how he knew her.

  “I was going to ashk you the shame shing, old-timer.”

  My hand found the back of his neck and grabbed it hard. Maybe I shook him a little, too. I knew what I was doing. I was getting ahead of my brain a little, felt bad about being another bully in Shaw’s sad life, and did it anyway. “It’s a long story,” I said, “and besides, I asked first.”

  The kid’s shoulders tensed up the longer I held his neck. “Maybe mine’s a long shtory, too. Come on, that really hurtsh.”

  “That’s okay, man,” I said with a little bite in my voice. “We’re storytelling creatures. Where’d you know her from?”

  “Chrisht, get your faggoty fucking handsh off me, grandpa,” Shaw said with a squeaky whine that made him sound like a tantruming dolphin. One of his buddies looked over at the sound. I let go of the back of his neck.

  “It’s important,” I found myself saying plainly. I wasn’t sure why yet, but somewhere during the last hour it had become true. I said it was important because it was, and it was the first sincere thing I’d said all day, probably longer. Maybe a lot longer. Knowing what had happened to Cindy or Emily or whatever her name was had become imperative.

  Shaw softened, straightening out the short-sleeved plaid shirt on his shoulders. “Look, man. I knew her through a guy we used to party with a waysh back. When I shaw her at the beach, it’d been a little while, and I shought I could get her number. Can’t blame a guy for trying. That’sh bullshit, unless you’re her dad or shomeshing.”

  “I’m not her dad,” I said, feeling an odd urge to punch the kid and then buy him a self-help book. “So she was just some girl you met at a party once?”

  “Naw,” Shaw said, lighting up, “we used to go out to dude’s houshe all the time. Crazy partiesh, man. Everyshing you’d want, right there.” He got a little sheepish, looked down, shook his head. “To be honesht, it was freaky shit. I like a good time, but fuck. Horshe, cryshtal, and shome real shketch fuckersh. Kinda fun at firsht, but then it shtarted getting real weird.”

  It was easy enough to place Cindy/Emily in a place like that. It wasn’t a surprise, but still my stomach clenched slightly in a kind of protective anxiety. “How weird?” I asked.

  Shaw ducked his head, and we looked at each other for a minute. Then he shook off the eye contact and said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all thish, becaushe you’re a dill. But damn that shit was fucked. Chick Emily? She was real cool to me when we firsht shtarted going out to the partiesh. Real friendly, ashking queshtions, getting drinksh. But she was alwaysh way faded. All the time. She sheemed to live at dude’s house. He was dealing and maybe making, I don’t know. Longer we shpent there, the more I shtarted sheeing all these guysh—weird guysh, shometimes looking like crackheads and shometimes just like golfer dudes in polo shirtsh—and they were all taking her into the back room, or maybe she was taking shem, or who knowsh when everyone’sh that fucked up. But that guy Sammy, it wash his p
lace, and he watched it all go down in this creepy fucking way, I don’t know. It was bad vibesh, man. I shtopped going. Too crazy.”

  My heart wasn’t beating. My brain was a dull buzz. All I could feel was a dark, deep, endless angry blackness that was the inside of my body. “Sammy who?” I managed to ask.

  “When I shaw Emily at the beach,” he said, still lost in the story in his head, “I wanted to get her number, yeah, but maybe I jusht wanted to shee if she was okay. She hadn’t been there the last couple times we went.”

  “Shaw her at the beach?” I said meanly. Meanness was the only way I could get myself to speak at full volume. “How long ago did you shtop going there, Shaw?” Shaw lowered his head farther, which didn’t seem possible, and his eyes went from his left shoe to his right, back and forth. He looked awfully sad, and I felt cheap.

  “A few months ago.”

  “And Emily was still there?”

  “Yeah,” he said sullenly.

  I asked again, “What was this Sammy guy’s name?”

  Shaw took a minute to respond, and when he did his voice was so quiet I had to ask a third time. “Sammy Ray,” he said. I almost asked to hear it once more, still disbelieving, but the kid spoke up: “Sammy Ray Gans. The partiesh were at his houshe out in bumfuck Ramona.” Shaw kept leering at his footwear sulkily. Then he said he needed to piss and ran off. I stood by myself, rocking on my legs like a prizefighter whose bell was so rung it had cracked, broken in two, and been melted down and remolded into a few thousand loose brass tacks.

  Cindy was Cindy or Emily or some other name neither Shaw nor I knew. But Sammy was a specific, was attached to something solid: Sammy Ray Gans. I hadn’t heard the name in fifteen years. He was something of a friend, in a previous life. Just thinking about him seemed to push at the edges of my being, like I was surrounded by a curtain of thick, dark cloth and the shapes of two hands, ten fingers, pressed in from the outside, displacing material. It made the space inside smaller but, in its suggestion of an outside, opened up onto something like the rest of the world.

  12.

  THE REST OF THE WORLD HAD ALWAYS BEEN THERE, OF COURSE. IT DOESN’T vanish when you blink—and whenever I did, it wasn’t the annihilation of the known universe I saw but the face of the person I needed to call to find Sammy.

  A couple months before, I had ended up chasing decent waves farther south than I usually ventured. I wound up in Cardiff, at a break called Seaside. The beach was state owned. The houses along the bluff above, which were stabbed into the cliffside like elaborately inedible decorations on a cake, clearly were not. But the swell was hitting the break just right. The waves were slightly overhead and powerful, yet the reef created a channel that made the paddle out less of a struggle. A set came through, six waves each barreling into a stiff shoulder to the right and peeling away like an expertly undone orange to the left. It was early, so the parking lot was mostly empty with fifteen cars in it. Which was good, relatively speaking.

  While I paddled out, a thick fog rolled in. Sitting near the peak of the break, I couldn’t see the shore. I caught a few waves over the next hour. I floated mostly. More people arrived, emerging from the mist. Then the fog burned off and a pack of twelve teenagers on shortboards paddled out, eyes less on the waves and more on their arm muscles as they flexed and stroked. They took turns shouting “Jesus! Jesus! Jee-sus!” like He was a favorite WWF wrestler.

  Their tone wasn’t mocking. They looked so proud and so confident, possessed by idiotic enthusiasm like they were cheering on number 3 in the piglet races at the fairgrounds. I paddled farther south, even though the next peak wasn’t breaking as well. I didn’t want that kind of company.

  From that position I watched an older man on a longboard paddle through the group and then out a bit farther. He turned and joked with them. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him at that distance. I didn’t like being around familiar people, even people who only seemed familiar. I didn’t trust them. Strangers, at least, were honest.

  A solid set came through, and the man caught the second wave. He let one of the kids take the left, which was the better wave, and he took the right, not stalling near the lip to set up a nose ride but pumping impatiently up and down, the front three feet of board slapping like a kid’s foam pool noodle. It was energetic, graceless surfing, and it carried him south. So when he paddled back out, he did so right near me. I recognized him immediately.

  “Hey, Mark,” the man said breezily, as if running into a racquetball buddy after a few missed matches at a gym. “Long time.” He had a fat face for someone with such a merely pudgy body. His nose was streaked haphazardly with zinc oxide. He wore a blue long-sleeved rash guard and green paisley trunks and was shivering, just a little. His breasts quivered underneath the Lycra.

  “Andy,” I said. “Happy to see you’ve taken up sponsoring a group of young felons.” I waved toward the kids.

  “Those ones?” he said. “Good kids. I mean, they’re all good kids, right?”

  “Well.” I was thinking about what he must have been like as a child. My best guess: mocker of the dyslexic and lord of the porn stash by the train tracks.

  His expression went to one of deep concern: the furrowed brows, the puckered mouth and hound eyes of the contrived empath. “How about you? Have you been well? It’s been so long since we’ve seen you.” There was a sneer somewhere in those fat, stupid lips.

  I said I couldn’t be better and scanned the horizon. A small swell appeared on the surface of the ocean, but it wasn’t enough to turn into a wave I could catch to escape Andy. I chopped at the water and asked, “How’s my old job?”

  Andy cracked his neck. “The community continues to grow. It’s a blessing, a true blessing, to know these young people and be a force of good in their lives. But you know what I’m talking about. You made it all possible.”

  “Glad I could help,” I said.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Andy said. “What you went through was awful. I don’t mean that. First your sister, then . . .”

  “It wasn’t a day at Legoland,” I said. “Sleepovers in the psych hospital are close, though. Lots of craft time. Does wonders for your perspective, and I still know people there. I could put in a good word.”

  He looked at me like I was pitiful and soulless. I gave him a look intended to say, Well, who isn’t?

  After a deliberate pause, he said, “You should be happy to know that the community thrives. Over twelve hundred parishioners now. Our outreach programs are doing wonders for Encinitas.”

  Encinitas wasn’t exactly desperate for renewal. It was a wealthy coastal enclave with a self-absorbed, yogic bent. Its Self-Realization Fellowship, white stucco and golden mushroom domes on expansive bluff-side grounds, had given the break Swami’s its name. Paramahansa Yogananda wrote his Autobiography of a Yogi there, which was responsible for doing something ineffable to George Harrison and Steve Jobs—enough of a reason to avoid it, even if it wasn’t just a new flavor of exotic, miracle-greased masturbation for well-off and vaguely questing Americans in search of another way to have their cake and give their parents’ Father Carnohan the finger, too. Cardiff-by-the-Sea, where we were, was technically part of Encinitas and had cloyingly cute Anglophilic street names, as if restaging some colonial standoff with its Indic neighbor. But of course both parts of town were overpopulated with the white and the wealthy.

  “Tending to the sick and needy,” I said. “Good to hear. I thought I’d heard there was an E. coli outbreak in Trader Joe’s organic cantaloupe.”

  “Right,” Andy said, seemingly bemused. “The Lord is good, and we minister where He leads us. And I don’t need to remind you that you didn’t exactly choose to start a mission in Tijuana.”

  “Look,” I said, trying to bore a telepathic hole into his glossy, pug-like forehead, though I wouldn’t have turned down a material one either. “You know I don’t go in for God anymore. I know you know. Cut the shit, Andy.”

  “What do you mean
?”

  “Stop baiting me.”

  Andy looked genuinely stricken. “I wasn’t trying to bait you. I’m sorry. Just trying to show you some concern. I didn’t imagine you were getting much these days, at least from people who really knew you.”

  “You know dick,” I said.

  “Fine, fine. You know we’re not into pressuring people at New Hope.” He looked down at his hands, knocked them against the fiberglass of his board.

  I was just calming down enough to think maybe Andy wasn’t a complete sociopath when he said, drawing the words out with uncertainty, “Maybe you should know, though.”

  “What?” I said.

  He gave that pooch-lipped look again. “We at New Hope will always be there for you if you need us.”

  “If I need you?” I asked. “I need to start a retirement account more than I need anything at New Hope. I need a four-day work week and a two-month vacation, better strawberries at the discount grocery, and some vitamin B. I need a staph infection more than anything you’re offering. So what I need the most is for you to go fuck yourself and paddle away. Preferably in the reverse order, because I don’t want to see your nightly Lubriderm bacchanal.”

  Andy nodded deeply and smirked, maybe, I couldn’t tell, as he lay down on his board. When he was five yards farther out, farther than any wave had broken all morning, the pudgy man lifted his stout arms toward the sky. He began a just-audible prayer. It involved the usual thanksgivings, the apologies—I tensed waiting for my name to appear in that roster, but it never came—and an appeal for waves. For big, beautiful, God-given waves, one especially for himself.

  Andy finished praying and splashed his hands around in the water. Not ten minutes later a bigger set came toward us, at first just bands on the horizon, then growing into steep mounds approaching from the west.

  I was too far inside; I’d be caught by it, for sure. Meanwhile, Andy was in the perfect position. He paddled for it, looking openly smug, deservedly rewarded by the God who at that very moment was letting who knows how many children die of exposure, of AIDS, of starvation and the violence of criminals, warlords, parents.