by Rucker, Rudy
* * *
Note on “Drugs and Live Sex—NYC 1980”
Written Spring, 1980.
Appeared in Journal Wired, Winter, 1989.
I wrote this in Heidelberg, Germany, after a foray back to the US to look for a teaching job. Eddie Marritz and I thought it should appear in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section, but we knew that would be out of the question.
The Milanese psychiatrist/conman Armando Verdiglione organized a conference in New York City in 1981 which I attended, mistakenly thinking Verdiglione was going to pay for my hotel. I read “Drugs and Live Sex—NYC 1980” as my conference presentation, and Eddie videotaped the reading, which was simultaneously translated into French, German, and Italian. I had a squeeze-bulb bicycle-horn in my knapsack, and when I got to the part in the story where the man comes, I took out the horn and tooted it.
Eventually I got this piece into a small-press magazine, Journal Wired, which was an SF-related literary magazine published by Andy Watson and Mark V. Zeising. It had no connection at all with the large magazine called Wired.
Jerry’s Neighbors
This all started back in 1980. I was in Heidelberg at the time, writing science fiction and living off a mathematics grant from the German government. The grant was running out, and the only job I could get back in the U.S. was teaching math at a women’s college in Lynchburg, Virginia. I had a vision of a county courthouse, a public square, trees, drinking, party boys, hot women with drawls. At this point I’d never heard of Jerry, but the sound of “Lynchburg” was a bit…troubling. I wondered if I should go.
The only older relative around to consult with was my ninety-year old German grandmother. “Lynchburg,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s called that because in the old days bad people had to live there, and anyone who wanted to was allowed to shoot them. Pow!” She cackled and pretended to aim a gun. She was getting old.
“Grandma, that’s all wrong. Anyway, it’s the only job I’ve been offered. I’ve got to move back to America.”
A week later I came home from my office at the Mathematics Institute to find my wife looking at a copy of Life magazine.
“Look at this, Rudy. Your brother sent it. It’s an article about this awful man called Jerry Falwell who lives in Lynchburg.” I looked over her shoulder. There was a picture of a fat man in a three-piece suit. Praying on his knees. Nice Life photography, with shadows and wrinkles but…the guy was clearly some kind of evil demagogue. On the next page he was driving an ATV three-wheeler, chasing one of his guards around his walled estate.
“I don’t believe this.” My visions of checkers and whiskey in the courthouse park went up in flames. I saw a city of angry robots, pointing out my sins. Jerry denouncing me from the pulpit. The annual Full Gospel Hog Roast, with me on the spit. “I don’t believe this is the only job I can get.”
The people in Lynchburg looked really strange. The women especially. There were all these fifty-year old women in lime-green skirts and pink alligator shirts. I couldn’t figure out if it was time-warp or space-warp: on the one hand I’d been out of America for the last two horrible years of the Seventies; on the other hand, I’d never lived in a small town in southern Virginia. Turned out it was a little of both.
“Preppy,” my ten-year old daughter told me, after her first week of school. “I want to look preppy. That’s what’s in, Dad. I want an alligator shirt and a pink corduroy skirt.”
“Are you kidding me? That stuff went out in the ‘50s. I didn’t march on the Pentagon so my children could be preppy.”
“You don’t know anything, Daddy. You’re groovy.”
So the people were preps, but so far I didn’t see any angry robots. Socially, at least. The week after we bought our house, representatives of four or five sects came by to try and sign me up. Robots for sure but not angry…though who knew what lurked inside those bulging Bibles. I heard stories about Jerry Falwell’s church sending out guys in vans to drive children to Sunday School. A woman wrote the paper about it. She said the van drivers had lured her children off by promising them snacks and games. A girl from Jerry’s college, Liberty Baptist College, a.k.a. LBC, accosted my daughter at a bus stop, asking her if she was saved, and if she loved Jesus, and where she’d go if she died right now.
I signed my family up at the Episcopal church. My fellow college teachers thought I was nuts to go to church at all, but I figured it was better to have a cover. Anyway, I’m used to church, I’m the son of a preacher. I believe in God, and even if I don’t agree with all the details, it’s nice, every few weeks, to sit in a church and have nobody talking about money.
Except at Thomas Roads. Every weekend the paper had a big ad for Thomas Roads Baptist Church, with a picture of “Doctor” Falwell. As a writer, I felt it was incumbent on me to go check the service out. I took my wife and the three kids. My wife kept telling the kids not to give out their names, “or the van will come get you.”
Actually the guys at the door were nice enough, maybe not quite Rotary Club material, but trying hard, smiling and flashing their glasses and not fluffing their lines even if I did have a strange look in my eyes.
The only odd treatment they gave us was to have a hard-looking guy in a trench coat follow me in and sit right in front of us, with his hand on a zipped-up leather Bible case. I definitely didn’t want him to undo that case and come out blazing. I made no sudden gestures.
The church is basically a theater, with a sloping floor and with seats radiating out from the stage. There are three or four heavy gray TV cameras mounted in the theater; each one has a red light on top that goes on when it’s transmitting. Jerry and some other people walk around on the stage, and standing at the back of the stage is the choir.
There was one black person in the church. She was standing in the front row of the choir, right next to the Asian-American woman. The odd thing about the choir was that they didn’t really sing. When it was time for a song, a tape recording would come on, and the choir would lip-synch it. Control, control, everything under control.
Jerry talked about all the people who want to stop his ministry. The drug pushers, the communists, the homosexuals, the abortionists, and the pornographers. I tried to look inconspicuous.
Jerry talked on and on, stressing the point that they were against us, making the world outside his theater sound vicious and scary. He referred to the service as “this program,” and sometimes he broke for a commercial. One of the commercials was for a copy of the entire Bible printed on a microfiche, a little square of plastic.
“It’s a good tool for…soul-winning,” smiled Jerry. “A good way to…start a conversation.” I found myself really wanting a whole Bible printed the size of a postage stamp. How big would the letters be? Could you actually read it with a microscope? And it was free, although you were certainly urged to include a prayer offering.
Several times, while the TV stations were running their own commercials, the choir would lip-synch a song or two, and some men would go around and take collection. That impressed my children, the way Jerry took collection over and over, like a parking meter.
The thing that really got me was that there was no gospel and no prayers. At one point Jerry did open up a Bible, and he started in on reading a lesson, but after a verse or two he broke off and said, “Friends, why don’t I just summarize this for you; summarize it and share some of my insights with you.”
“He can’t stand to read it because it isn’t something he wrote,” my wife whispered to me.
The people in the audience looked just like you’d expect, only more beat up. Honest working people with bad luck and no money. Maybe a drunk in the family, maybe a druggie, maybe a daughter knocked up. Payments behind on everything, the bank wanting to take back the car, no money to go to the doctor and get those lumps checked. If any people needed God’s grace, it was these folks right here. And still no prayers; still no Holy Spirit! Then, finally, almost at the end, it came.
“Friends,”
said Jerry, bowing his head, “Close your eyes and let’s join in a moment of prayer.” All right! “As you know, our enemies are trying to get this program off the air.” Huh? “We’re close to bankruptcy, Lord.” Then how’d you get so sleek and fat, man? “If we don’t get two million dollars by next month, our television ministry must cease. Two million dollars, Lord, two million dollars by next month. Amen.”
All those people there, plenty of them hurt and needing something, and all Jerry Falwell could think to help them pray for was two more millions of dollars for himself. Unreal.
In the long run it gets tiring. Just when you think Falwell can never get any more wrong-headed, he tops himself and gets another run in the press. His broadcasts supporting the “Peacekeeper” missile. His circus trial against Larry Flynt. His this, his that. You mostly just live with it. The South is weird. I have a theory, for instance, that Jimmy Carter had the CIA shoot Flynt for having printed a picture of Jimmy’s sister, the evangelist Ruth Stapledon. Shortly after the highly publicized plane ride during which Ruth “saved” Flynt, there was an issue of Hustler that said, “Inside: Ruth Stapledon Shows Pink” on the cover. The issue was shrink-wrapped, and I didn’t buy it, so I’m not sure what kind of picture of the President’s sister it was. But a month later, Flynt was shot in the pelvis while traveling in Georgia. Very little effort was made to find the sniper. Is Larry Flynt the Martin Luther King of the ‘80s? Is Jerry the Hitler?
By almost any objective standard, Jerry Falwell is a racist, a war-monger, and a fascist—but it’s hard to make these charges stick. When cornered in an argument, Jerry starts talking about America and God, and he gets that little smile in the corners of his mouth, and people begin to feel that…well, at least he’s sincere. The sincerity seems to have a life independent of what he is saying. I often get the feeling that Jerry doesn’t really care what he is saying at all—he simply picks as outrageous a position as possible, a position guaranteed to draw news coverage, and then he slathers his oily sincerity all over the cameras.
A corollary of his main stock in trade being sincerity is that Jerry does appear to be moral and honest in his personal life. His various organizations pull in a lot of money, but it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Jerry is using religion to get rich. I doubt if he is very interested in the luxuries that wealth can bring. He’s interested, rather, in being famous and powerful. The money his broadcasts make is spent on more broadcasts. His religion might best be thought of as a kind of non-malignant tumor. It draws in energy which is expended almost entirely on itself. Jerry Falwell raises money so he can afford bigger shows to raise more money.
If I speak of him as non-malignant, it is because he does not overtly preach violence and hatred. Wrong-headed as his ideas are, Jerry Falwell doesn’t have death-squads to wipe out his detractors. He doesn’t funnel money to the lunatics who go around murdering abortionists. Demonstrators at his church are not beaten, and people who make fun of Jerry are not hounded out of Lynchburg. After Reagan’s landslide re-election, a number of my fellow left-wing friends in other cities expressed a fear that “now Jerry Falwell is going to run the country.” “He’s already supposed to run Lynchburg.” I told them, “And people here can say whatever they want to.”
I tested this out in April, 1984, as the following story will demonstrate.
At that time, the head of Jerry’s Moral Majority organization was a man named Cal Thomas. (Cal has since stepped down to become a full-time syndicated columnist.) As it happened, Cal Thomas lived about a block from me. I was going through a difficult period in my life just then—I was jobless and broke, I’d just finished writing my tenth book and felt resentful about my lack of recognition, I was smoking pot and drinking too much. The fact that successful, right-wing Cal lived nearby was starting to rankle—not that he knew me.