by Tim Cahill
There are, of course, multiple unknowns in the world, and it could very well have been the Devil himself who caused me to almost miss the Alamo bus, but if it was, his agent was photographer Tim Page, who was waiting around the corner for me. Page, a British citizen, was wounded five times in four years as a combat photographer in Vietnam. His brushes with death left him with an insatiable appetite for "scummy bars," places with what he calls, in GI parlance, a "numbah ten clientele."
The bar we found pleased Page immensely. At five in the afternoon of Good Friday, it was filled with cheap hustlers and even cheaper hookers. We ordered a couple of drafts and studied the tract, which informed us that Tony and Susan Alamo were the first two to take the gospel to the streets. This was about 1967, when the young people were declaring war on the Establishment, taking drugs, and talking about burning down the churches. So it said. Tony and Susan stopped this nonsense in its tracks and turned the dregs of the drug society to Jesus. The tract hit heavily on the theme of drug temperance and rejoiced that these former stoned revolutionaries now go about "appealing to the Establishment to turn away from their sins."
Tony, born Bernie Lazar Hoffman, confessed that he was a vocalist, a record company owner, a fast-stepping PR man, and the owner of a chain of health spas. "All highly successful ventures," it said, but neglected to mention that in 1967 Tony was "broke," by his own admission. His life "was filled with sin, filth, despair, torture, and torment." Now, six years later, after committing his life to the Lord,
Tony Alamo drives a black Cadillac Fleetwood with personalized license plates and lives in an elegant hilltop mansion in Saugus.
A bulletproof waitress in a miniskirt arrived with our third beer, and I asked her to look at the picture of Tony and Susan on the tract.
"He looks sneaky and she's got a face like an elbow," she said.
"Ah, Sister, that's the Devil talking," I said mildly.
She gave me a quick sideways glance and left, I suspect, to tell the bartender to keep an eye on us.
So much for the testimony of sinners.
The red, white, and blue bus—with a destination sign reading Heaven —was right there on the corner of Highland Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard as it is every day at six o'clock. On the way a fresh set of Alamo-ites tried to hand me another tract, but I told them I was getting on the bus anyway. "Don't let the Weasel talk you out of it," another very short Christian told me. "The Weasel?"
"The Devil, the Weasel, the Old Boy. He's going to sit on your shoulder and tell you to go have some dope instead." "He is?"
The diminutive evangelist thought it best to walk me the last thirty yards to the bus.
"Thank you, Jesus," he said to no one in particular as I stepped aboard. It looked like a school bus, and a capacity crowd of about sixty was aboard. Perhaps fifty were reading Bibles. The other ten were lost sinners, like myself, on their way to the Foundation for the first time. I sat next to one of the few clean-cut Bible readers, a man of about twenty named Hal, who immediately noticed the beer on my breath. "The services aren't like any you've ever seen," he told me through an obviously forced smile. "You . . . will . . . like them." He opened his Bible and said no more. If
Hal was a hypnotist, he had a serious problem with technique.
A Christian cheerleader of sorts made his way down the aisle, stopping every five rows or so to break into song.
My Savior leads the way My Savior leads the way My burdens all seem light now Since Jesus came to stay.
The bus, I surmised, was a purchase from the Mexican government. All the exit signs were in Spanish. Someone was reading the Bible verses to the driver and he had to shout them out as the engine labored and the gears rasped on the steep hills of the Golden State Freeway. I caught a startling verse about the "loathsome diseases of the loins," and simultaneously wished that I had taken the time to relieve myself in the bar. Here I was, I thought, on a Mexican bus, on my way to Heaven, and I had to take a piss.
I began to chuckle softly, and Hal looked up from his Bible and gave me a severe look, a look that seemed to say, "laughter is the Devil's tool and no Good can come from it."
"Excuse me," I offered, and Hal, sorry hypnotist that he was, went back to his Bible. I sat with my legs tightly crossed and bit my lip for the next twenty miles.
The Foundation is a single-story building quartered by a kitchen and a boothed-ofF dining area where much of the Bible study takes place. The other half of the building might once have been the dance floor and bandstand. It was now a church, set up with a combination of lecture-seat rejects and folding chairs. A crowd of about four hundred were waiting for services to begin and engaging themselves in exalted conversation.
"Christ is so close to coming. I feel it in every pore."
"Amen."
"It says so in the Bible."
"It's the Word of God, Brother."
"Thank you, Jesus."
No one seemed interested in hypnotizing, brainwash-
ing, or even talking to me at this point, so I circulated aimlessly through the well-integrated crowd. Males outnumbered females vastly, and the typical resident might be described as a male longhair, between the ages of twenty and thirty and dressed pretty much like street folk the country over.
I found myself near a door to the left of the pulpit that said Prayer Room. Inside I could hear people shouting in undifferentiated syllables, without cadence. An occasional man's voice leather-lunged, "Oh, God, I wanna be ready." A hand-lettered sign on the door listed three things to pray for: Susie's health, someone's sister, who had "a cancer," and "that God will stop Ted Patrick and all other Devils coming against the Foundation."
A young black resident took the pulpit and said, "Let's hear a mighty Amen!"
"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-men!" the four hundred shouted.
This was followed by a prayer, and then the band—a disparate collection of about sixty tubas, trombones, saxophones, flutes, and clarinets dominated by an electric bass, an electric organ, and three sets of drums—was off and running, slicing into standards like "The Old Rugged Cross" and country devotions like "My Savior Leads the Way." People stood and clapped and expressed thanks to God for the music. The orchestra sounded like a tank town high school band.
After "King of Kings," the big finish, various of the Saved stepped up to the pulpit to give testimony. "I know there's a burning Hell," one crisp sister in gingham non sequi-tured, "because I experienced a little bit of it out in the World." Hell, in fact, seemed to be the big selling point for salvation and it beat out heaven in terms of mention about ten to one.
The words "born again" and "born again in the blood" were mentioned often. Very big was the phrase / know beyond the shadow of a doubt. The theme was drugs, rotten lives, torture, torment, filth, and despair in "the World" as opposed to "Peace" at the Foundation while "Serving the
Lord." Most testimonies ended "so come on up and get saved."
"You may think you came here for a free meal," the leader said, "but God drew you here for a very special purpose." He hit briefly on the soul rockers: hellfire, the end of the world, judgment before the Lord, and the Prophecy of the Second Coming before revealing to sinners in the crowd that the Biblical promise of eternal life was within our grasps that very evening. All we had to do, it turned out, was to humble ourselves before God—and, of course, everyone else at the service—by kneeling in the little area between the first folding chairs and the pulpit. There we would publicly confess that we led sinful lives in the manner of American POWs taping war crimes confessions before international cameras.
"I put before you this day both a blessing and a curse," he said.
The organist began a churchy solo, and elect Christians threaded through the crowd, looking for obvious sinners. Another short, rather pleasant-looking man in his mid-twenties stood by my chair.
"Why don't you come up and get saved," he stage-whispered.
I shrugged stupidly.
"It's easy," he said. "I'll
come with you."
A few sinners and their Christians were moving toward the saving block. The organ finished, stopped momentarily, but at a signal from the man at my side, it started again. The same song, from the top.
"I couldn't say that prayer and mean it," I pointed out.
"It doesn't matter. If you kneel and say it with your lips, God will come into your heart in a very special way. Why do you think God brought you here?"
It was difficult to argue the point with every person in the place watching us, so I let myself be led forward to kneel on the hard linoleum floor, under a long fluorescent light. I said the prayer word for word and at no time did I feel God come into my heart, which, I suppose, is as it should be.
"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-men," everyone shouted.
A brief announcement before dinner. Baby Christians— the newly saved—had another gift in store for them, "the baptism of the Holy Spirit." Our older Christians would tell us about it.
"God promised that the saved would speak in tongues," I was told by the man who was to become my teacher. "Don't be denied. Seek for the gift with all your heart. Just keep saying, 'God, you promised.' " The process, as it was explained to me, was that one started by "just praising and thanking Jesus." At a certain point, he will begin to stutter, a signal that he is about to begin speaking in tongues. My older Christian invited me into the prayer room to give it a whirl, and since it seemed to be the thing to do after being saved, I followed him through the wooden door.
Given a generally tense state of mind, the prayer room is no place to be reassured about the sanity of the Foundation's saved. The room was a windowless expanded closet, perhaps four steps wide and ten long. There was a muted light in one corner, and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that there were wooden bench seats along three walls and an ancient, puffy sofa along the fourth. The linoleum had been torn up to reveal a wooden floor. The walls were rough-hewn wood, like a rustic sauna.
After the first few seconds of ripping claustrophobia, one became aware of a milling crowd and the monotonic sound of spoken gibberish. People were tromping back and forth lengthwise, and their footsteps produced a constant low rumble, a counterpoint to the words "thank you Jesus, praise you Jesus." Christians stood in various corners and trilled out nonsense syllables: "Ah na na na" and the like at a rapid rate. Talking in Tongues.
I was later to happen upon a few verses in Chapter Two of Acts concerning this phenomenon. Forty days after the death of Christ, the Apostles gathered, "And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance." Bystanders were amazed that the Apostles were speaking in their own
languages, while, "Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine."
My older Christian sat me on the bench and took up a position on my right. Someone else sat close by on my left. Both men began rocking back and forth, chanting, "Praise to you Jesus, thank you Jesus."
I have been at Catholic services, where everyone suddenly kneels at some signal, and willy-nilly, I found myself on my knees. It was impossible to remain seated. In the same way, it was difficult to sit in that room and not rock and chant.
"Thank you Jesus, praise you Jesus," I said for a little over an hour.
Presently the three of us began rocking faster, chanting locomotive-style, "Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus ..." I assumed—half-believed—that there was some sort of self-hypnotic process in the works, and I intended to get thoroughly stoned. Several people seemed to be in a state of trance. I thought there might be some psychophysiological process in which the tongue spewed out syllables of its own volition after a long chant. For me this was not the case.
"Thank you Jesus," my older Christian said, then began stuttering slightly. "Thank you Jesisisis, thank you jisisisis, dank eh jsiis, dada a jisisisis." I found myself stuttering along. The pace increased and the man on my left broke into tongues. "Ah yab dadaba doedoedoe," he stated. "Ah ra da da da da," the man to my right replied. "Thank ooo jeejeejee," I ventured. Apparently it wasn't enough, and we started the whole process again.
I could not, try as I might, get from the stutter to the tongues organically. I sneaked a look at my watch and realized that I had been rocking and chanting for almost two and a half hours. I was developing an unpleasant prayer sore at the base of my spine, and it was becoming painfully obvious that I wasn't going to get out of there until I began speaking in tongues.
We were working toward another crescendo. "Dank oo jejeje," I said and burst into a tense, conservative burst of
tongues. "Er rit ta tit a tit a rit," I said, taking care to roll my r's. "Ah yab a daba daba daba raba," the man on my right shouted. "A nanananan nana nah," the other Christian said.
I opened my eyes slightly on the down rock, saw feet gathering around me and experienced a mainline shot of mortal dread. They knew I wasn't speaking in tongues. They were going to stomp on me like a rat caught in the cheese box. "Er rit a tit tit tita," I babbled, heavy on the rolling r's. "Rit ti tit tit."
There were more feet. Several people stopped chanting and were standing in a semicircle, speaking in loud and extravagant tongues. Someone shouted, "Oh, thank you Jesus, thank you for the victory." The victory, I realized with relief that approached joy, was that I had said, "Rit ti tit tit." I was in. I belonged. Everyone was with me. "Rit ta tit tit, diddla dit dit," I said, introducing a pleasing variant on my basic tongues. This was well received. "Rit a little did a dit diddle dit dit."
Beside me, my older Christian ran through a few change-ups, interspersing his standard "Yab ba da ba da ba" with nice syllables that sounded like the names of Biblical towns. "Ah Shal-la-dah, ah shal-ah-dah-dah."
I began to realize that whatever nonsense syllables you said were all right as long as you said them rapidly, in a loud trancelike monotone. It was best if your tongue bounced rapidly off the roof of your mouth. I tried to come up with some good Old Testament sounds, but the only nonsense that came to mind belonged in old rock and roll songs.
"Ah Sha nana nana nana nana nah," worked excellently. I was confident enough to vary my rhythms. My tongue was very loose. My friends and I took short, increasingly more rapid solos: dueling tongues.
After about twenty minutes, we tapered back down to a half an hour of "praise you Jesus, thank you Jesus." It was past midnight when we left the rat box, and the man who accompanied me to the saving block marked down three and a half hours on a sheet of paper on the outside of the door.
We stood outside the door and finally introduced ourselves. My Christian's name was Frank, and he wanted to know if I would like to stay at the Foundation and serve the Lord. The bus was about to leave.
"Any guests want to go back to Los Angeles?" the driver called.
Frank gave me to believe that my rebirth might not take if I returned to "the World" with its manifold temptations. He said I could backslide into "filth," which he denned as dope, pornography, and possible homosexuality. Women, he said, were often agents of the Devil. I told him I would stay a few days because I was curious about what was involved in "serving the Lord."
Frank shook my hand, said praise the Lord and introduced me to several other Christians who greeted my decision with "praise the Lord," uttered in the same vague tone other people say "far out." I was given a dog-eared Bible, and the two of us moved to the far section of the church and sat in a booth. I should, I learned, read only the sections Frank recommended. "See," he said, "if you just opened it up, you might get into some of the heavy prophets and it could blow your mind."
We were to read the Book aloud. Frank asked me to begin with Matthew, Chapter Nine. Before I could start, he closed his eyes and rotated his head from side to side in a painful manner, as if he had a chiropractic problem with his neck. He muttered something about "burning the words upon our hearts" and looked up crossly while I stared at him. I realized he was blessing the reading and obligingly rotated my head and muttered along. I got throug
h the first fifty-seven verses without incident, but when I came to fifty-nine through sixty-two, Frank stopped me momentarily to say that I was coming to "heavy scripture."
In these verses, Jesus is preaching to the multitudes, and a man tells him he will follow him after he buries his father. "Jesus said unto him, 'Let the dead bury the dead.' "
"Thank you Jesus," Frank said.
I continued. " 'And another also said, Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell which are at home
at my house. And Jesus said unto him, "No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of Heaven." ' "
I asked Frank to "interpret" that last verse, and he bristled. The Alamos do not interpret the Bible, he said. They tell you what the words mean, and in this case the words were plain enough. If I took my hand from the plow, that is, if I left the Foundation and scorned the work of the Lord, I wouldn't be fit to enter heaven. He pointed out that there were only two places to go after one dies.
"Hell is so terrible you can't even conceive of it," he said, and as he spoke, I felt his genuine Fear. The Alamos had a friend, he said, a woman who was a born-again Christian but who had fallen in with backsliders and found herself surrounded by Devils in some sleazy gin mill. One of the Alamos told the story over the pulpit: how the woman had passed out behind the jukebox only to have a horrifying vision of eternal torment. The lost souls were confined in a blast furnace with sloping sides. Some tried to scramble upward, toward heaven, but they fell back into the pit. The others stood stiffly, like mannequins, and cried out to God like dumb beasts.
"Mercy, Lord, mercy." Frank imitated the hoarse, hopeless croak of the damned, and a shiver ran through his body. "The woman said that if her own mother tried to stop her from serving the Lord, she would gouge her eyes out with her high heels."