by Ed Gorman
Kenny had been here many times to see me. He was careful with his cigarettes (Kenny was an ash-flicker, and ashes on couches and chairs can mightily displease the hostess) as well as his language. “Coffee’s fine,” he said as he seated himself at the table. He was, in his words, “duded up.” Starched white short-sleeved shirt with a red-and-black striped tie. And it wasn’t a clip-on. I wondered where he’d been or where he was going. As Wendy was pouring him a cup of coffee, he said, “How much would you charge me to sue somebody for slander?”
“Are you serious?”
“Very serious.”
“Who’s slandering you?”
“From what I’ve been told, Reverend Cartwright is going to do it tonight in that moronic hippie play he’s giving in the park.”
“Who told you he was going to do it?”
“You know Mrs. Windmere from his church?”
Wendy laughed. “That old gossip? She used to help my mother clean house. We had to let her go because she made up these stories about what a sinful family we were. She even got Cartwright to show up one night and tell my dad that he was going to save our souls. My mother thought it was hilarious. My dad was so mad he grabbed Cartwright and threw him out the open doorway. I wouldn’t believe a word she said, Kenny.”
“How did you get hooked up with the Windmere woman, anyway?”
“I was having a cherry Coke at the Rexall fountain and she came up and told me that somebody was finally going to stand up to me. It took me a few minutes but then I remembered who she was. She was the old bag who chased me down the street one day. She kept screaming, ‘Repent! Repent!’ So here she was again. Of course I didn’t have any idea of what she was raving on about. I was so embarrassed I could barely hear her anyway. You know how I hate scenes. All these people were standing around watching and listening now and then she said it: ‘Reverend Cart-wright has written you into his play. Finally, a man of God is going to treat you the way you deserve to be treated.’ Then she looked around at everybody and pointed to me and said, ‘This man is a pronographer.’”
“‘Pronographer’?” I said.
Wendy giggled. “Oh, God, that’s right, Kenny. I forgot. Mrs. Windmere is always mispronouncing words.”
“So I want to sue him.”
“How about we wait until you see the show?”
He sat back in his chair, calm for the moment. “That’s what I wanted to ask you two about. I really don’t want to go alone. I even dressed up for the occasion so nobody could call me a hippie.”
“Won’t Sue go with you?”
“She would have, Wendy, but she doesn’t want to take Melissa out into all that heat. You know, with the bugs and all.”
“I’m sort of a baby myself, Kenny. I kind of like it here, you know, with the air conditioning and all. And the TV set and the indoor plumbing and the nice cold beer. But I’m sure your friend and mine Sam would love to go with you.”
“Really? Damn it, Kenny, I don’t want to go see that stupid show. It’ll probably be crowded.”
“You really think it’ll be crowded?” Wendy said.
“Sure. All of Cartwright’s people’ll show up and then all the hecklers. Cliffie’ll have a couple cops there to keep the hecklers in line but they have a way of getting heard no matter what.”
“I don’t want to remind you of all the information I get for you, McCain. And I do it free gratis.”
“Oh, that’s right. You’d never want to remind me of that, would you?”
“Maybe it’ll be fun.”
“Well, if you think it might be fun, Wendy, why don’t you go?”
“I miss out on all kinds of fun, Sam, and you know it. And at my advanced age it doesn’t bother me.”
“If he slanders me, McCain, we can sue him for millions.”
“He doesn’t have millions, Kenny.”
“Well, maybe we can at least get him off the air.”
Knowing I was going to go, I said, “That’s the first real incentive you’ve given me all night, Kenny. Let me change my clothes.”
As I was closing the bathroom door, I heard Wendy say, “I knew you could talk him into it, Kenny. He’s a pushover. But that’s why we love him.”
There’s a librarian named Trixie Easley who sets up displays of old photographs from time to time. Generally these deal with our town from the 1870s to today. The pictures of the stage next to the bandstand in the city park are especially helpful for time traveling because in the various shots you see the town, the people, the clothes, the transportation, and the plays themselves as they fade era into era.
For the dapper, for instance, homburgs gave way to straw boaters and eventually to felt hats such as fedoras. For women, hats ranged from bonnets to fancy straw to cloche to pillbox and variations thereof. The vehicles were equally interesting-from wagons to surreys to comic-looking early automobiles to family Fords to flivvers to the sedans of today. When I was young I’d look at the people in these photographs and think how easy life had been for them psychologically. There was always so much flag-waving and spirited talk about hardy souls and all that they seemed like a different species. But as I got older I knew that these mythic generations were just that, mythic. They trod through this vale of tears just like every generation. To confirm that truth all you have to do is read the newspapers and police reports of that time. I took ironic comfort in that fact; what did I have to bitch about when every generation had faced the same travails and terrors we have? And they didn’t even have Walter Cronkite.
Downtown was bright and crowded. Cliffie had put several extra cops on the street. We had to park three blocks away. The air was turgid and hot. The sidewalks were full of people hurrying. Even from this distance we could hear recordings of Reverend Cartwright singing. He hawked his records along with his diet tip books and his collected sermons, you know, just the way Jesus did.
Wolf packs of teenagers filled the streets with their low-slung cherry bomb mufflers competing with the tinny voice of the good reverend. As we reached the edge of the tiny park I saw that my prediction had been accurate. Gathered close to the stage were the faithful, probably a couple hundred of them. This was strictly BYOS, bring your own seating. They sat on lawn chairs, blankets, and even a few air cushions. Most of them had come family-size, wee ones as well as kids as old as sixteen or so. I had to wonder how many of the older ones had had to be dragged here tonight. Or maybe that was just my cynicism. Many of them could be just as sincerely devout as their parents.
Behind them were the smart-asses. You could identify them easily by their cigarettes, long hair, and smirks. Cops walked up and down in front of them, like army sergeants assessing their men. Cliffie would have given them strict orders to take no shit whatsoever. He was probably right in doing so. Abhorrent as Cartwright was-not to mention stone insane-he and his followers had the right to watch the play in peace. Of course when I was a teenager I might well have been one of the smirkers out tonight.
While the smirkers weren’t officially hippies-they got into too many fights to be all peace-and-love-brother about life-a number of them affected hippie styles. Bell-bottoms, vests, tie-dyed T-shirts, and peasant blouses and long full skirts for the girls. A number of girls had come braless and that was all to the good. A new crew of them arrived in an elderly van painted with flowers and a peace sign.
The stage was long and flat, buttressed by folding metal props beneath. Behind it were heavy wine-colored curtains held up by thick steel rods. You could set up and take down the stage easily. Over the years it has been used by some actual celebrities. Kate Smith sang here pushing war bonds during WWII. Johnny Ray appeared here pushing for the polio drive, then the scourge of young and old alike. And most recently a local kid named Ryan Boggs had brought his guitar and a three-piece combo here to sing his one-and-only hit song that had won him a spot on American Bandstand and The Lloyd Thaxton Show. He was riding a little too high one night in the Quad Cities when some loudmouth picked a fight with him.
The guy swung on Boggs and Boggs hit him back. In falling down, the loudmouth hit his head on the metal edge of the footing underneath the bar and died. Boggs’s record company decided that Johnny was not a “decent representative of American youth” and canned his ass. He now plays beer parlors.
The first person to appear on stage was a teenager dressed up in a long-haired wig and a tie-dyed T-shirt covered in so many love beads he would probably suffer a neck injury from trying to support them. He wore jeans torn at the knees. He was barefoot. He came mid-stage. There were enough standing microphones to pick up just about every word. Music came up, sounding like Lawrence Welk playing something by The Doors.
The one thing the faux hippie was good at was portraying insolence. I wanted to slap the bastard across the fake beard and mustache. I knew tonight was going to be nothing but stereotypes, but nobody needed to make this town any more unfriendly to hippies. Even though the majority of citizens believe in live and let live, the aginners always spoke louder.
Subtle he wasn’t. He pulled from his front pocket a twisted runt of a cigarette. “Tune in, turn on, and drop out. Those are my words to live by. Excuse me a second.” He lit the joint, inhaled deeply, held it, then exploded smoke from his lungs. “If everybody smoked a little dope, this’d be a cool, cool world.”
The smirkers were nudging each other and grinning. The cops were giving them dungeon looks.
“I bet if Jesus was alive today he’d be smoking joints right along with the rest of us.”
Now it was the turn of the followers to react. Some booed; others poked each other and shook their heads.
“And he’d be into a lot of things the squares don’t understand. Like how everything should be free and how people like me should run the government and how this whole war thing is a complete lie. He’d be on our side.”
More subtlety. The sound effects of lightning and thunder, the music quick-fading underneath. The whole stage shook. And then from behind the drapes a new character appeared, the Lord Jesus Christ himself. He was tall, he was bearded, he wore the flowing white robe of all the traditional paintings. The one difference was the face. Where Christ was usually portrayed in a sentimental, almost sweet way, this Christ looked like he’d kill your mother for fifty cents. The broken nose, the long scar on the left cheek, the big fists dangling from the arms.
And then he spoke. He had the voice you’d expect from that face-rough, deep, threatening. He walked right up to the hippie and slammed his hand into the kid’s chest, shoving him back a few feet. The hippie almost went down. “You’ve got some of your hippie friends here. Bring them out. I want them to hear this, too.” He snapped his fingers.
While we waited the half minute for four other hippies-two girls, two boys-to appear, Kenny leaned in and said, “You know that bumper sticker: ‘Jesus is coming and boy is he pissed’?”
My laugh was loud enough to attract attention, including that of the cops. Kenny was right. I had been raised to believe that Jesus Christ had been an understanding and forgiving man who helped the sick and the poor and the troubled. That was the Jesus I loved-whether he was merely man or son of God didn’t matter much to me-and this cartoon travesty was perverse even for Reverend Cartwright.
All four of the new hippies wore wigs, meaning that they were the children of church members where long hair, among many, many other things, was forbidden.
“Now get this and get this straight. I’m going to tell you how to live the right way and unless you want to go straight to hell when you die, you better listen to me. You got that?”
The hippies all pretended to be terrified. They looked like bad actors in old silent films, hands over their faces as if trying to repel an attack, one of them falling to her knees and folding her hands in eager prayer. And they all chorused, “Yes, Jesus! Yes!”
“You know how in the Western movies there are towns that need to be tamed? Well, that’s what you’re going to do right here. And you’re going to start right now. No more drugs, no more sex before marriage, no more pornography reading or writing and no more rock and roll.”
They faked confusion, standing there in their bell-bottoms and tie-dyes and wigs, looking at each other in theatrical bafflement. Finally, the girl rose from her knees and said, “But how can we do this, Lord?”
There was a long pause filled with babies crying. A few of the smirkers were lighting joints.
“I am going to send one of my most loyal servants to the mountain the way it was done in Biblical times. There he will commune with me so that when he returns he will share my message with you. And from that message you will learn how to rid your town of the filth that stalks your streets.”
The sound effects were better than I would have thought. Crackling lightning, deafening thunder.
And while it was startling the ears, the good Reverend Cartwright strode onto the stage wearing colorful biblical robes and carrying a staff. This was a very different get-up from the recent time when he’d set himself on fire trying to burn Beatles records. You had to admire him for trying again. Of course, being Cartwright, he stumbled as he moved to center stage.
He threw his hands wide the way he did when he healed people. His staff flew off stage right. And somewhere the kid with the tape recorder hit the thunder and lightning sound again.
“You heard the Lord. I will go to Pearson’s Peak, where I will wait until he contacts me with his word of how to bring this entire town to his ways. And I will broadcast my daily shows from there with a live remote so you will not have to fear for my well-being.”
The smirkers were already laughing and shouting. “Pearson’s Peak ain’t a mountain!”
In case you allowed yourself to be misled by the biblical use of the word “mountain,” just as there is no ocean or surf in Iowa, there are no mountains. Pearson’s Peak is a tall spot of red clay above the river road. It is approximately a thirty-foot drop to the pavement below. Many years ago, back when even the most elegant among us still used outhouses, somebody sarcastically named it after Pike’s Peak.
This was typical Cartwright, the whole thing. His followers genuinely wanted to run the hippies out of town, and no doubt Cartwright found them irritating. But this ham play and the word from the Lord was all to promote his radio show. I’m pretty sure Jesus never used a live remote, but then Jesus didn’t have Cartwright’s skill with self-promotion. Or confidence games if you prefer.
You see, Jesus ordered Cartwright to the mountain every year about this time. Cartwright did his communing inside a comfortable little trailer, while all around him were booths offering religious pamphlets he bought in bulk at two cents each and charged $2.50 for. Then there were his self-published books, record albums, children’s books, and Jesus sweaters, caps, and jackets. His church ladies sold burgers and hot dogs and pop at jacked-up prices. And every time he emerged from his trailer to speak to the two or three hundred people who’d gathered there, a plate was passed around. The shakedowns never ended.
He kept talking, or tried to. The smirkers kept shouting insults and laughing at him. Not even the cops walking among them could shut them up. Cartwright’s flock turned on the smirkers and started chanting their own cleaned-up insults right back. Cartwright the mountaineer was drowned out completely.
And then finally, it broke. Whether the smirkers rushed the followers or the followers rushed the smirkers, it was hard to say, but somebody threw a punch at somebody and about a dozen bodies were entangled in pushing, shoving, and throwing a few fists.
The cops rushed to form a broken line between the two groups. They shouted, too-for both groups to shut the hell up.
For the past few minutes I’d sensed somebody staring at me, but in all the shouting I hadn’t looked around. Now that I started scanning the people behind me, I didn’t see anybody taking any particular interest in me. These were the true onlookers. They’d come to the crash site just to check it out. They weren’t followers and they weren’t smirkers. I suspected that most of them in
this blistering, sweaty night were here for the yuks. This might well be more interesting than anything on at the drive-in. (I’d checked and it was.) I started to look back at the groups who were bringing the cops to understandable anger. But then peripherally I caught somebody waving. He’d quit waving by the time I’d started looking again. I was about to give up when I saw him lean from behind a tree and wave again.
Tommy Delaney, high school football player and tortured soul of his parents’ many deadly battles, walked in my direction. I thought maybe he’d seen somebody behind me he wanted to talk to, but then there he was putting out his hand.
As we shook he said, “I’m sorry I was such a jerk to you before, Mr. McCain. I ran into Sarah this afternoon and she told me you were a good guy and that I should apologize.”
“I didn’t know you and Sarah knew each other.”
“Yeah. My uncle owns the used-book store over on Main and Chandler. I used to work there sometimes. She was always coming in. She’s a big reader.” He had a shy smile. “We didn’t get along at first. You know, she can come on pretty strong with the hippie stuff. But eventually we got to be friends. I even took her to the movies a couple of times.” Then he nodded to Kenny. “We sell a lot of your books there, Mr. Thibodeau.”
“I wouldn’t admit that to anybody, Tommy.”
Tommy smiled, but now his body tensed. Hands into fists, his eyes jittery. He gulped twice. He looked around at the melee that was calming down. He was going to tell me something. Then the tension and the anxiety drained from him and he said, “Well, I better get going. I-I’m not real popular with Mr. Mainwaring now. You know, I’ve kinda lived there for the last year and a half. It was real peaceful there. But I don’t think he wants me around anymore. I wanna see if I can patch things up. I hate to be-you know, banned from there for good or anything.”
The sadness looked wrong hanging on the beefy teenager. He should be flattening players on the field or pouring himself a sloppy beer at a kegger or making it with a comely cheerleader in the backseat of a car. All that energy, all that popularity, all that raw strength-but now he was stooped again, bereft as an orphan in those Dust Bowl photographs of the Depression ’30s. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that he’d cried about this-or even that he might cry about it now, as soon as he was out of my sight.