by Matt Taibbi
“I’m just saying,” I said, “that this is something a secular person might say.”
“Oh,” he said, frowning. “Well, okay then. Let me ask you, Matthew, have you ever told a lie?”
“Sure,” I said.
“What would that make you?” he asked.
“A liar, I suppose.”
“And have you ever lusted after someone?”
“Sure,” I said. “I suppose you might even say that I’ve committed adultery. In my heart and even in fact.”
He smiled. Now we were getting somewhere. “Are you aware that you’ve broken the Ten Commandments?”
“I am,” I said.
“And if God were to judge you according to the Ten Commandments, do you think you’d be innocent or guilty?”
“That’s an irrelevant question,” I said, “because I don’t believe in God.”
He frowned. “But say you did—”
“I can’t,” I said, “because I don’t.”
“But it’s written in the Bible—”
“Yes, I know, but, you see, I don’t care. I don’t believe in the Bible.”
Joe glared at me. This wasn’t helping.
“I can see you’re going to be a hard-ass about this,” he complained.
“A what?” I said, reverting to my Christian state, pretending to be mortified by the word “ass.”
“A—I mean, you’re not making this easy.”
“I just wasn’t sure what word you used,” I said. “I didn’t hear.”
“Nothing,” he said defensively. “I didn’t say anything.”
I shrugged. “It’s just hard, dealing with nonbelievers,” I said. “I never know what to say when people say they don’t believe. If they’re not afraid of burning in Hell or having their arms pulled out or whatever, what can you say? W, D, J, D—none of the letters work.”
He thought about that. “You’re right,” he said. “I know.”
“It’s just—it’s tough.”
“Yeah, it is.”
We sat there staring at each other for an uncomfortably long pause. Finally he clapped his hands.
“Well,” he said, “I guess we should switch places.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“Let’s pretend we’re in Miami Beach,” he said. “I’ll be a tourist by the pool. You try to convert me.”
“Okay. Miami’s nice.”
He reclined in his chair and whistled. “Wow,” he said. “Just look at all those bikinis!”
He gestured toward the “bikinis,” actually the other side of his den. I looked over. Three pairs of dumpy role-playing housewives. But Joe was really in the role.
“I sure would like to get some of that action!” he said. “How about you? Would you like summa that?”
I looked back at Joe with alarm. He was really imagining those bikinis. Momentarily I was offended for God’s sake. We were in decent company, after all.
“Oh, I’m not interested in sex,” I said sternly. “I’m a Christian.”
Joe slumped, looking subdued again all of a sudden. “Right, right,” he said. “Of course.”
The meeting ended shortly thereafter. I stopped to see We Are Marshall on the way home, then studied my evangelical materials, preparing for my first day saving souls.
“WHAT’S WRONG with your arm?” Janine asked a few days later, as she and I and Laurie walked from the Rolling Oaks Mall parking lot toward the entrance of Dillard’s department store. Each of us was carrying Bibles and stacks of little Bible tracts and evangelical icebreakers—little “Million Dollar Bills” with gospel messages on the back, New Testament answers to the “billion-dollar question” about where we all go after we die.
“It’s nothing,” I said, scratching furiously. “Just a rash or something.”
“Mmm,” she said.
The Rolling Oaks Mall is one of San Antonio’s newest and most opulent, a huge spread on the northeast corner of the 1604 highway loop. It has an odd design, with a series of big teapot domes with spires dotting its roof.
“Wow, those really do look like boobs,” I said, looking up.
“I told you,” said Laurie. “They’re just trying to get the male customers.”
“It’s amazing what this world has come to,” I said, shaking my head.
We chose the mall as a target site for our first day out evangelizing more or less by process of elimination. The original plan was to hit a gun and tackle store off the McDermott Freeway, but when Laurie and I showed up there I was immediately spooked by the sight of security trucks cruising the parking lot. We ended up going inside, where I spent six bucks in a target-shooting gallery.
Later Laurie and I met up with Janine and her daughter at a Taco Bell and settled on “The Boobs” as the target location.
By the time we got to Dillard’s we were all deeply nervous. Laurie and Janine decided that we should stop and pray before we went inside. So the three of us stood in a circle holding hands, with hanging heads, in between the two sets of heavy glass entryway doors in front of the giant department store. Mortified, I clasped both hands lightly and sent my mind racing for a quick prayer I might be able to say in order to fake my way through this scene. Laurie, meanwhile, had begun her recitation:
“Lord,” she said, “we ask that you bless us with a spirit of strength and courage.”
Waves of shoppers were entering and exiting the store, and each was staring at us. One little child pointed at me, and her mother quickly yanked the kid by the hand and dragged her out to the parking lot—spiriting her child safely away from us, as though we were emitting sulfur fumes.
Janine was up next and had begun her prayer. Janine’s prayers were always strange, original, and poetic. “Lord,” she said, fidgeting as a shopper nudged her aside, “I ask you to bless us with your rain. Rain on us, dear God!”
A young man burst through the door behind us. When the door flew open, the handle nailed me right on the coccyx bone. Worse, I was panicking at the thought of actually praying out loud in this doorway. I wasn’t sure I could do it.
“Your turn, honey,” Laurie said.
I bit my lip. “Can I pray later?” I said.
They frowned. “Why?” said Laurie.
“I just feel shy,” I said, wincing.
This didn’t go over well—the women eyed me strangely—but eventually we shrugged it off and loped through the store. I was walking funny after taking that blow and also momentarily captivated by a store ad for the “Cabernet Full-Figure Deep-Plunge Seamless Bra” that featured a distracted russet-haired beauty and a ridiculously long cleavage line. Again, perhaps I had been in the church too long, but the ad just seemed way over the top. Children shop in this store, I thought.
Christ, I’m losing my mind.
As we walked through the store, Laurie and Janine were talking about the “Million Dollar Bill” icebreakers we were about to use.
“Whose face is that on the bill?” Laurie said.
“I don’t know,” said Janine. “Matt, do you know?”
“It’s Enrico Fermi,” I said, still staring at the bra ad.
“Who?”
I looked at the bill again. Actually the husky bearded figure in the picture was Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a nineteenth-century icon of the fundamentalist movement, probably the world’s first megachurch preacher. He once preached to twenty-three thousand people at the Crystal Palace in Victorian London. They handed us this stuff in church without telling us any of it—I’d had to look it up the night before.
“Enrico Fermi,” I repeated. “He founded Grace Bible College.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” said Janine.
“I’m nervous,” said Laurie.
“Me too,” I said.
“Me too,” said Janine.
In a few minutes we were in the food court. Janine and her little girl sat down at a table. At the moment of truth, Janine couldn’t actually approach anyone and decided to assist in the venture by offering prayer
support. So she sat at a table in front of the China Super Buffet and began whispering prayers to herself.
Laurie, on the other hand, immediately started accosting strangers—she was a natural. She hit a whole crowd full of shoppers and had them eating out of her hand in about eight seconds. Laurie had a lot of good qualities. She was fearless and easy with people. Her tragedy was that while these were wonderful traits to have, they didn’t help her self-esteem. She would make friends but not be soothed by them, so then she would have to make more. For a few minutes I stood behind her, just mumbling under my breath, and then I fumbled the snap with my first solo try, inspiring laughter from Laurie when I invited a young man with a Limp Bizkit–style chin beard to come visit Cornerstone.
“You’re not supposed to invite them to the church,” she said.
“I’m not?”
“No,” she said. “Just go by the program.”
“WDJD,” I said, smacking my head in exasperation.
“That’s right, honey,” she said. “You’ll get it.”
She went off again, this time hitting a crowd full of teens over by a sporting goods store. I would later learn that one of the teens in this crowd was wearing a hat with an anarchy symbol on it, which would lead Laurie to conclude days later that they had been Satanists. Anyway, I sighed, sucked it up, then marched down toward the other end of the food court. For a moment I paused and stared out at the river of plump shoppers with glazed eyes. I was about to be hit with a major surprise—the lamer my religious come-on was, the more people would respond to me.
I could scarcely even start my rap with half of these people before they started reading back to me the transcripts from their latest group therapy sessions. It was like none of these people had ever had a friend before. No creature on earth is more inclined to public verbal diarrhea than a modern American; whether it’s the AA culture, or the post–Me Generation emphasis on “finding yourself,” or all those neo–Woody Allens confessing to their therapists, or just too many damn people fantasizing about telling the audience of Oprah what influenced their latest album (“In the fourth track, I’m trying to share the sacred message of His Holiness the Dalai Lama…”), we live in a country where people believe implicitly in their right to bore the living shit out of absolutely everybody within haranguing distance with tales of their miserable, lonely, and inevitably self-deluding searches for personal fulfillment in the emotional desert that is our crass commercial culture.
It’s like a sacrament in the American religion of the Self—the seminal post-Oscar Charlie Rose interview where you talk about Truffaut and your battle to overcome your glue addiction. You know the one I’m talking about—since in the national fantasy we’re all celebrities, we all get to have our Cuba Gooding/Rod Tidwell moment tearfully confessing our love for Jerry Maguire to ESPN’s Roy Firestone after we sign our inevitable $11 million deals (nirvana, in the American religion). That’s why it’s always dangerous to ask a stranger in America about himself, because the likelihood is that he’s been practicing his “Ralph Knobshlutz Reveals All!” interview in his head for years.
When I asked one gothed-out girl in front of Java Jo’z whether she thought she was a good person or not, she immediately confessed to me that she’d been on Paxil and that it was “helping with her impulse control,” which was great because before she started on the drug, she’d just say anything that came into her head, which affected her relationship with her mom, which on the other hand was actually getting better lately, etc., etc. A youngish housewife then told me she had trouble forgiving people because she had been abused (“I have triggers that make the bad thoughts come back”), and that although she was “in a good place right now” she’d like to see some literature because she liked to “work on herself.” None of these people had a discernible filter. The few men I approached were even quicker to tell all.
“You’re absolutely right,” said one older man in a PING golfer’s hat. “I’ve got to start getting back to church. I’ve been backsliding since my divorce.”
“Well, this is your opportunity to get right with the L—”
“And then I started drinking, too,” he said. “I never used to drink that much before. But at least I know I have a problem now, you know what I mean? But I’m beating it now, God willing, so long as I go to my meetings.”
I stepped back a little. “Um,” I said.
“I tried to blame everyone in my family for my drinking but me,” he went on. “Everyone was responsible but me. I’d tell myself that it was my wife’s fault for not giving me my space after work. Then I’d tell myself I was okay because I’d like give up vodka for beer for a few weeks…”
This guy was like a walking ONE DAY AT A TIME bumper sticker. I frowned. “Yeah, I hear you—”
“The thing is, I went through all the steps, I admitted that a higher power can help me, and I accepted God’s power over me,” he said. “Anyway, I may not come to your church, but I appreciate what you’re doing, it’s important. People need to know they can’t do it alone.”
My God’s OK, your God’s OK. As long as his name is Jesus. I sighed, spotted an oldish Hispanic woman, and walked over, deciding to make one last try.
“Excuse me, can I ask you something?” I said.
The woman looked up and said nothing. I looked down at the letters WDJD written on my hand and recited:
“Would you consider yourself a good person?”
The woman was probably in her late forties and looked like she had a few hard mothering years behind her. She was carrying an Image Trends-wear bag.
“I don’t know,” she said finally.
“Have you ever told a lie?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you know that it’s against the Ten Commandments to lie?”
She hung her head. “Yes,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Now, have you ever hated anyone?”
She stared at me with blank eyes, confused.
“Because you know,” I said, “the Bible says that if you’ve hated, it’s like committing murder in your heart.”
She looked away for a moment, then looked back.
“I have done many bad things,” she said.
“Well, God’s going to forgive you for that,” I said. “But first, you have to—”
“I did this thing with a car,” she said.
I looked at her carefully.
“What kind of thing with a car?” I asked.
“I drive the car away,” she said absently.
“Away from what?” I asked.
“I have to go,” she said, and started to walk off.
“Wait!” I said. “Away from what? What did you drive the car away from?”
She glared back at me and hurried down the mall aisle.
A few minutes later I walked over to Janine’s seat in the food court.
“I’m trying,” I said, “but it’s tough sledding out there.”
“We’ll do better someday,” she said.
THERE WAS no next time. Other business took me out of Texas, and after a while I became increasingly sloppy, continually forgetting to water the Matthew Collins plant. I was in Washington one afternoon in the reception room for Massachusetts congressman Jim McGovern when Laurie called. I picked up; she wanted to have lunch. I told her I couldn’t, I was at the gym. Later on I got sick and decided to go home to New York for a few days’ rest. Laurie called repeatedly; I just lay there in bed, piles of Japanese and Thai food containers on my desk, letting her call go to voice mail. I missed one cell meeting, then the next. I was a lapsing Christian, but in what direction was I lapsing? To nowhere, to nothingness. As absurd as the church was, it was an improvement over my actual life because there was at least a pretense of meaning there. Back in New York, I was just eating and taking up space, a depraved postmodern creature on the job, carrying pebbles up the media anthill. As I convalesced in my Midtown apartment, I began, weirdly enough, to feel a strong urge to get back
to Texas.
Finally I recovered and booked a trip back to San Antonio. When I arrived, I pulled out of the freezer a cone of henna tattoo mix that I’d bought from an Indian family some weeks before. Using a tourist’s guide to Israel I’d bought in D.C., I traced a brown blotch on my left forearm in the shape of the Holy Land. Later that day Laurie called and invited me to lunch—she sounded bad. We made a date for the next day.
I found the restaurant—coincidentally, yet another Chinese place, this one a sit-down joint—and walked inside. We talked for a while about Laurie’s problems. She was having some issues at work; a client was trying to stiff her out of a real estate commission. The client was a fellow Christian, someone she’d met through the life coach orientation. “And she calls herself a Christian,” she said. “Of course, in reality, they always turn out to be the worst ones.”
She got sad after that, then, a few minutes later, returned to her story about her conflict at work. She went on about it; it really was a sad story. The poor woman was being shunned by people from the church, and much of it was her own fault, because she didn’t know how to keep quiet, how to be political. It was typically ugly human-being stuff, the kind of thing that happens in all communities, Christian and non-Christian alike, but what was so difficult about it was Laurie’s belief that the church was supposed to be a refuge from this sort of thing. That it turned out not always to be so was, I could see, very painful for her.
My heart sank as she looked at my arm. I’d told her over the phone that I’d seen a Jewish doctor in Houston and that he’d pointed out to me that my “rash” was exactly in the shape of Israel. My plan, originally, had been to show my “rash” to our cell group and then later announce that God had told me it was a sign, and that I should move to the Holy Land. Then Matthew Collins would disappear to Israel.
When I first came up with this plan in the middle of the night some weeks back, it seemed to make literary sense. Having this strange born-again imposter disappear back to the Holy Land by means of some absurd and weirdly banal maybe-miracle seemed like the correct play here, come-dically. But that was in a vacuum, dealing not with real people but with uncomplicated Christian villains. But most of these people were just plain sad, and pulling this kind of stunt was turning out to be meaner than even I was willing to be. Listening to Laurie tell her terrible story, I was beginning to wish I’d kept my sleeve rolled down.