Read Online A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg by Tim Cahill - Free Book Online Page B

uncomfortable seconds. Hypnotism was definitely not Chris’s forte. He collected his thoughts and came back with a strong verbal blast of fire and brimstone.
    “Ah, come on,” I said, “why would a loving God make someone with the express purpose of sending him to hell.”
    “You think God is Love,” Chris accused. His voice took on a sneering singsong quality. “You believe in a forgiving God. You only see what you want to see.” His voice dropped an octave. “Well, He is a God of Wrath. He is not a … permissive … God.” I further learned there was no hope for me, that I was surely hellbound, but that God had taken pity on me because I was talking to Chris, and that I could save my soul by catching the Alamo bus at six.
    “I put before you this day,” Chris said, “both a blessing and a curse.”
    “Here’s the good news and here’s the bad news,” I said, smiling.
    Chris did not smile. He apparently disapproved of jokes. His face became pinched and severe. The blessing was eternity in heaven praising God for Christ’s sake and the curse was a burning eternity of hellfire.
    We had been standing in front of the toy store, talking for nearly twenty minutes. I would have stayed longer but Chris had better things to do.
    “Read the tract,” he commanded, “then come get on thebus. Remember, the Devil is going to try his best to stop you from getting to the Foundation.”
    “I’m going to go drink a beer or two and think it over,” I said. Chris folded his face into an ugly mask of contempt. “That’s the devil talking,” he stated flatly and stalked off down the boulevard to win another soul for Christ.
    T here 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.
    T he red, white, and blue bus—with a destination sign reading H EAVEN —was right there on the corner of Highland Avenue and