Long Hard Road Out of Hell Read Free Page B

waiting to burst out of that repressed

    Christian facade. I hated her for giving me nightmares my entire teenage years. But I think I hated her even more for the wet dreams she inspired.
    I was an Episcopalian, which is basically diet Catholic (same great dogma but now with less rules) and the school was nondenominational. But that didn’t stop Ms. Price. Sometimes she’d start her Bible class by asking, “Are there any Catholics in the room?” When no one answered, she’d lay into Catholics and Episcopalians, lecturing us about how they misinterpreted the Bible and were worshipping false idols by praying to the pope and the Virgin Mary. I would sit there mute and rejected, unsure whether to resent her or my parents for raising me as an Episcopalian.
    Further personal humiliation came during Friday assemblies, when guest speakers would talk about how they had lived as prostitutes, drug addicts and practitioners of black magic until they found God, chose His righteous path and were born again. It was like a Satanists Anonymous meeting. When they were done, everyone would bow their heads in prayer. If anyone wasn’t born again, the failed pastor leading the seminar would ask them to come on stage and hold hands and be saved. Every time I knew I should have walked up there, but I was too petrified to stand on stage in front of the entire school and too embarrassed to admit that I was morally, spiritually and religiously behind everybody else.
    The only place I excelled was the roller-skating rink, and even that soon became inextricably linked with the apocalypse. My dream was to become a champion roller skater, and to that end I nagged my parents into squandering the money they had been saving for a weekend getaway on professional skates that cost over $400. My regular roller-skating partner was Lisa, a sickly, perpetually congested girl but nonetheless one of my first big crushes. She came from a strict, religious family. Her mother was a secretary for Reverend Ernest Angley, one of the more notorious televangelist faith healers of the time. Our pseudo-dates after skating practice usually began with making “suicides” at the rink’s soda fountain—discolored combinations of Coke, 7-Up, Sunkist and root beer—and ended with a trip to Reverend Angley’s ultraopulent church.
    The Reverend was one of the scariest people I’d ever met: his perfectly straight teeth gleamed like bathroom tiles, a toupee sat clumped on top of his head like a hat made from wet hair caught in a bathtub drain and he always wore a powder blue suit with a mint green tie. Everything about him reeked of artificiality, from his plastic, over-manicured appearance to his name, which was supposed to evoke the phrase “earnest angel.”
    Every week, he called a variety of crippled people to the stage and supposedly healed them in front of millions of TV viewers. He would poke his finger in a deaf person’s ear or a blind person’s eye, yelling “Evil spirits come out” or “Say baby,” and then wiggle his finger until the person on stage passed out. His sermons were similar to those at school, with the Reverend painting the imminent apocalypse in all its horror—except here there were people screaming, passing out and speaking in tongues all around me. At one point in the service, everyone would throw money at the stage. It would rain hundreds of quarters, silver dollars and wadded-up dollar bills as the Reverend went right on testifying about the firmament and the fury. Along the walls of the church were numbered lithographs he sold depicting macabre scenes like the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding through a small town not unlike Canton at sunset, leaving a trail of slit throats behind them.
    The services were three to five hours long, and if I fell asleep, they’d reprimand me and take me to a separate room where they held special youth seminars. Here, they’d chastise me and about a dozen other kids about sex, drugs, rock and the