Jim and Tammy Faye, The American Dream and Chiclets
On the way home from work this afternoon I noticed that the same broken and battered piano bench I'd seen this morning was still sitting on the shoulder of the highway. It must have fallen off the back of a truck and its owner decided it wasn’t worth going back to pick up when he looked into his rearview mirror and saw it flipping and splintering down the road. He probably considered himself lucky that the formerly musical chair didn’t crash through the grill of some soccer mom’s minivan and cause a 20-car pileup. The walnut-colored bench rested on its seat with its two remaining legs pointed toward the sky in a way that made me think about the nights I spent at the First Assembly of God Church in Ozark, Alabama in the early 1980s. The men and women at that church would reach their arms high into the air - straight as arrows - and rhythmically open and close their hands while Rev. Merle Nation did his best to fill them to the rim with “the spirit of the Lord”.
The First Assembly of God’s congregation was mostly made up of blue collar guys who wore clip-on ties with short-sleeve shirts and had a little grease under their fingernails no matter how hard they scrubbed them, and plump women who wore too much makeup and sent weekly checks for ten dollars to The PTL Club, c/o Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. I was a regular visitor of the church on Wednesday nights with my friends, Skip and Bill Nicks. Skip and Bill's mom and step-dad didn’t fit the aforementioned physical descriptions – she was a pretty, thin blonde woman in her early thirties, and he was a balding middle-management type who wore starched dress shirts and khakis - but I do remember their livingroom TV being tuned into The PTL Club on a regular basis. I’m sure at least a little of their hard-earned money made its way to the “Pass The Loot” headquarters in Charlotte, NC before Rev. Jim got sentenced to 18 years in prison (he only served five) for stealing millions of dollars from his adoring flock.
It wasn’t unusual for the folks at the First Assembly of God to speak in tongues with their eyes rolled back in their heads (this totally freaked me out) and for Brother Nation to heal the sick by putting the palms of his hands on the foreheads of the afflicted and shouting “Be healed in the name of Lord!” Most of my experience with worship services up to that point had been at mild-mannered Methodist churches, so I wasn’t used to the fainting, crying and yelling that went along with most of Brother Nation's services. He was an ex-Marine like my father and he preached in a way that always reminded me of the guys I watched every Saturday on Georgia Championship Wrestling. “There will be fried chicken and mashed potatoes served in the fellowship hall after the service!” was delivered in the same fervent tone as “Jesus Christ will be returning soon, so you better get right with the Lord!”.
There were moments when I would get just as caught up in the theater of Brother Nation as I did in the matches between Tommy “Wildfire” Rich and the evil Austin Idol. He could put a verbal can of whoop ass on Satan that I’m sure would have impressed even “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes. While they held services on different days, the messages I got at the First Assembly of God and from those TV wrestling matches were pretty much the same: No matter how good you are, or how many times you win a gold belt, you always need to be on the lookout for a bad guy who’s standing in the shadows with a metal folding chair in his hands.
I would be lying if I said I went to that church for the sermons. I went because I got to spend more time with my friends and several of the older church ladies always brought delicious cakes and chocolate chip cookies. Wednesday night services became especially important some time in 1983 when a girl named Lucy Herman started letting me French kiss her in the holly bushes that lined the side of the fellowship hall. Skip would stand next to the light pole at the corner of the building while Lucy and I made our way through a little gap between the branches and prickly leaves. Lucy would always rip the corner of a packet of Chiclets she had in her pocket and pour a bunch of the tiny pieces of fruity bubble gum into her mouth before we’d start making out. She would lean against the building’s brick wall where just enough light would break through the bushes so I could see the outline of her face and the occasional sparkle of her rarely open eyes.
Skip's job was to be our watch-out and to whistle the song “Dixie” if he saw a grownup headed in our direction. He chose that tune because it was the song the horn on the General Lee (Bo and Luke Duke’s car from the show the Dukes of Hazzard) played, and he was a fanatical fan of the show at the time. He actually got a bicycle horn for Christmas one year that played that song. The day that ridiculous little megaphone-looking monstrosity stopped working was one of the happiest moments of my life up to that point. On the rare occasion that Skip did whistle Dixie, Lucy and I would freeze and try not to make a sound until he signaled the coast was clear by yelling the “Marco!” part of the Marco Polo swimming pool game. I’m not sure why we had a different signal for “it’s safe to go back to making out”, but I’m pretty sure that was my idea. I was 13, so cut me a little slack.
Lucy and I didn’t talk much during the few months of our tryst. I don’t remember many conversations that included more words than “hey” or “what’s up?” before or after our awkward make-out sessions. Something brought us together for those 10 minutes or so per week in the bushes, but it had very little to do with verbal communication. Whatever it was, it faded for Lucy as soon as we hit the 9th grade – she moved on from behind the holly bushes with me to riding in pickup trucks with boys who had facial hair and wore camouflage t-shirts. I stopped watching wrestling and going to church on Wednesday nights around that same time, but it did take me a while before I could pass a pack of Chiclets on a convenience store shelf without my stomach feeling like it was in one of Ric Flair’s famous figure-four leglocks.
Some names have been changed to protect the innocent.
