| By Sam Singleton Atheist Evangelist |
| Jesus Christ, DDS |
Every child thinks his parents are idiots, but only in particular areas.
When it comes to their overall grip on reality, a child wants to believe
that his parents can be relied on to know the difference between real life
and make believe. Like when my folks tried to convince me that god
himself put gold fillings in my daddy’s teeth. Let me explain.
From time to time and place to place in our wanderings we came across
this low-rent evangelist named Lee Gerard. Every time we saw Lee
Gerard he was always wearing the same brown suit and the pants were
shiny in the ass. He had a dilapidated excuse for a tractor-trailer rig with
his name painted on the side, and the Cadillac parked next to it was near
about as old as our Chevy. His entire evangelistic team consisted of
himself, Sister Gerard, and the requisite good-looking young white guy
who could sing like he was black and play the shit out of a Hammond B3
and a pair of Leslies. I always wondered who drove the truck. It took a
bare-bones operation to show a profit on such offerings as could be
wrung out of a couple dozen of the likes of us. And even though, as he
spoke, he was standing on the stage of some dank old tomb that’d have to
be majorly renovated to be brought up to the aesthetic and safety
standards of, say, a skid row porn house, Lee Gerard always had news of
some big tent revival he’d just concluded in which thousands were saved
and hundreds were healed and uncounted numbers had gotten in-filled
with the holy ghost.
All evangelists are in the collections business. They’re the lord’s thumb
breakers. And all of the faithful are chronically behind on their payments
and the evangelist’s job is to cajole or browbeat them into bringing their
account current. The crooked part—well, it’s all crooked—is that the
evangelist skims one hundred percent of the take. He stiffs god. Which
oughta be a clue right there as to how much the evangelist actually
believes in what he’s selling. If you truly believed in an all-powerful and
vengeful god, would you rip him off? Anyway, collecting a good offering
is all about the pitch, and usually runs better than 20 minutes, and more
than the sermon or the faith healing or the soul winning, is the actual
point of the revival. Any evangelist that doesn’t work harder on his
offering than on his preaching and praying is never going to be any Oral
Robert. Well, Lee Gerard was never going to be an Oral Robert
anyways, but it wasn’t for want of ingenuity. It was purely a matter of
numbers.
Getting folks who can’t even provide for their own children to divert a
portion of their income to your care and feeding takes something special:
balls, callousness, a sociopathic absence of conscience— you know, being
called to the ministry. Con a buck or two out of a third of the chumps
that pack a revival tent that seats twenty thousand and you can get a
house in Palm Springs and build your own phony university and name it
after yourself. Reduce the size of the crowd to fewer than fifty, Lee
Gerard territory, and you’re lucky to live any higher on the hog than the
ones you’re sponging off of. If Oral Robert was a criminal mastermind
fronting a racket empire, Lee Gerard was a dim-witted sneak thief that
kept robbing the same poor people over and over again.
Somewhere in his taking-up-the-offering pitch, Lee Gerard always
worked in how in Acts Four as many as were possessors of lands or
houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and
laid them down at the apostles' feet.
"Laid them down at the apostles feet. The people of god, god’s people,
would not stand by and watch the preacher go hungry. He’d lay in a little
Luke 6:38 to boot. Give and it shall be given unto you, good measure,
pressed down, and shaken together, and running over."
There was the customary, "The lord told me that he had burdened ten
people here to put a hundred dollars each in the offering. You know who
you are."
And he could never shut up without he’d drug the third chapter of
Malachi into it. "Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye
say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed
with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all
the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and
just see if I do not open unto you the windows of heaven, and pour you
out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it."
And when he asked the lord to bless this offering we’re about to take up
and to bless them that gives, it was really just an excuse for him to talk
about you to the lord so that you can’t help overhearing.
And on cue Organ Leroy would fire up the Hammond, something
stirring to make you want to dig deep, and Sister Gerard would
ceremoniously convey the offering basket to the custom-made altar
bench so that everybody got to be seen making a contribution whether
they gave a widow’s mite or one of those hundred dollar donations god
was bragging about backstage.
One thing about Lee Gerard was that he always had something new,
some special angle that the lord had laid on him since the last time he
showed up. Of Lee Gerard‘s innovations, the one that I remember best is
when he prayed for people’s teeth. Apparently, it wasn’t something that
the lord would do just any old time. He needed at least a day’s notice and
some advance publicity. So Lee Gerard spent most of the first night’s
service—this was a week-long miracle crusade—pimping the second night’s
service, about how the lord was gonna be doing dental work for free. He
didn’t say anything about an offering being taken but it was understood.
For the second night’s meeting the crowd was good, probably close to
fifty. The service itself was the same old shit, up until after the offering
and sermon. Then he called those with bad teeth to come up on the stage
so he could minister to their mouths. I was thinking he should change his
name to Oral Gerard. He had him a hand mirror and a flashlight. Sister
Gerard did as his hygienist, holding the mirror so that the patient could
follow the procedure while, with one hand, her husband directed the
flashlight straight into the problem area, and with the other, planted
firmly to the patient’s forehead, commanded the devil to depart from that
mouth in the name of jesus and take all his tooth decay with him. Then
he assured the lord that it was now clear for him to go in there and fill
the cavities with solid gold. Brother and Sister Fitch were first and second
in line, my father was third. I do not know why my mother declined to
have god fix her teeth.
After the service, the Fitches came over to the house and everybody went
on and on about their new gold fillings, showing each other, comparing
the brightwork.
I said, "Let me see.'
My father opened his mouth so I could see in there. It was full of cavities
and all sorts of awful stuff and he had bean breath. There was no more
gold in his mouth than in his pockets.
"I don’t see any gold in there."
Well then you aren’t looking in the right place. Back there. On the right.
On both sides. There in the back. Plain as day. Gold fillings all over the
place.
Brother Fitch, too. "Look at them fillings."
I declined to look in Brother Fitch’s mouth, not knowing where it’d been.
I figured the problem had to be on my end. Why didn’t I see the gold? I
sure didn’t want to believe that I was supposed to just outright lie. Which
would mean that my father and the Fitches and everybody else was lying.
I did wonder why, if god could make gold appear out of nowhere, he
didn’t just give some to my folks so that they could pay the rent and buy
groceries, but I never asked. And I’ve never asked my father whether he
tried to recover the gold from them divine fillings when he got his
dentures.
What I knew of gold when I was a little boy was that heaven’s streets
were supposed to be lined with the stuff. If you got hard up, you could
go out to the curb and gouge out a few nuggets. Of course, everybody
knew the gospel according to John, chapter 14, verse 2, by heart: In my
father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told
you. I go to prepare a place for you."
Everybody was always talking about these big rewards, but we were still
poor. You know how some people say how they were poor but they
never knew it? We were poor and you’d had to’ve been an idiot not to
know it. I could tell by our raggedy-assed clothes and the fact that when
we ate, we ate only beans and cornbread. Not a one of us had ever been
to an actual dentist. God-given gold fillings my economically
disadvantaged ass.
When it comes to their overall grip on reality, a child wants to believe
that his parents can be relied on to know the difference between real life
and make believe. Like when my folks tried to convince me that god
himself put gold fillings in my daddy’s teeth. Let me explain.
From time to time and place to place in our wanderings we came across
this low-rent evangelist named Lee Gerard. Every time we saw Lee
Gerard he was always wearing the same brown suit and the pants were
shiny in the ass. He had a dilapidated excuse for a tractor-trailer rig with
his name painted on the side, and the Cadillac parked next to it was near
about as old as our Chevy. His entire evangelistic team consisted of
himself, Sister Gerard, and the requisite good-looking young white guy
who could sing like he was black and play the shit out of a Hammond B3
and a pair of Leslies. I always wondered who drove the truck. It took a
bare-bones operation to show a profit on such offerings as could be
wrung out of a couple dozen of the likes of us. And even though, as he
spoke, he was standing on the stage of some dank old tomb that’d have to
be majorly renovated to be brought up to the aesthetic and safety
standards of, say, a skid row porn house, Lee Gerard always had news of
some big tent revival he’d just concluded in which thousands were saved
and hundreds were healed and uncounted numbers had gotten in-filled
with the holy ghost.
All evangelists are in the collections business. They’re the lord’s thumb
breakers. And all of the faithful are chronically behind on their payments
and the evangelist’s job is to cajole or browbeat them into bringing their
account current. The crooked part—well, it’s all crooked—is that the
evangelist skims one hundred percent of the take. He stiffs god. Which
oughta be a clue right there as to how much the evangelist actually
believes in what he’s selling. If you truly believed in an all-powerful and
vengeful god, would you rip him off? Anyway, collecting a good offering
is all about the pitch, and usually runs better than 20 minutes, and more
than the sermon or the faith healing or the soul winning, is the actual
point of the revival. Any evangelist that doesn’t work harder on his
offering than on his preaching and praying is never going to be any Oral
Robert. Well, Lee Gerard was never going to be an Oral Robert
anyways, but it wasn’t for want of ingenuity. It was purely a matter of
numbers.
Getting folks who can’t even provide for their own children to divert a
portion of their income to your care and feeding takes something special:
balls, callousness, a sociopathic absence of conscience— you know, being
called to the ministry. Con a buck or two out of a third of the chumps
that pack a revival tent that seats twenty thousand and you can get a
house in Palm Springs and build your own phony university and name it
after yourself. Reduce the size of the crowd to fewer than fifty, Lee
Gerard territory, and you’re lucky to live any higher on the hog than the
ones you’re sponging off of. If Oral Robert was a criminal mastermind
fronting a racket empire, Lee Gerard was a dim-witted sneak thief that
kept robbing the same poor people over and over again.
Somewhere in his taking-up-the-offering pitch, Lee Gerard always
worked in how in Acts Four as many as were possessors of lands or
houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and
laid them down at the apostles' feet.
"Laid them down at the apostles feet. The people of god, god’s people,
would not stand by and watch the preacher go hungry. He’d lay in a little
Luke 6:38 to boot. Give and it shall be given unto you, good measure,
pressed down, and shaken together, and running over."
There was the customary, "The lord told me that he had burdened ten
people here to put a hundred dollars each in the offering. You know who
you are."
And he could never shut up without he’d drug the third chapter of
Malachi into it. "Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye
say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed
with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all
the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and
just see if I do not open unto you the windows of heaven, and pour you
out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it."
And when he asked the lord to bless this offering we’re about to take up
and to bless them that gives, it was really just an excuse for him to talk
about you to the lord so that you can’t help overhearing.
And on cue Organ Leroy would fire up the Hammond, something
stirring to make you want to dig deep, and Sister Gerard would
ceremoniously convey the offering basket to the custom-made altar
bench so that everybody got to be seen making a contribution whether
they gave a widow’s mite or one of those hundred dollar donations god
was bragging about backstage.
One thing about Lee Gerard was that he always had something new,
some special angle that the lord had laid on him since the last time he
showed up. Of Lee Gerard‘s innovations, the one that I remember best is
when he prayed for people’s teeth. Apparently, it wasn’t something that
the lord would do just any old time. He needed at least a day’s notice and
some advance publicity. So Lee Gerard spent most of the first night’s
service—this was a week-long miracle crusade—pimping the second night’s
service, about how the lord was gonna be doing dental work for free. He
didn’t say anything about an offering being taken but it was understood.
For the second night’s meeting the crowd was good, probably close to
fifty. The service itself was the same old shit, up until after the offering
and sermon. Then he called those with bad teeth to come up on the stage
so he could minister to their mouths. I was thinking he should change his
name to Oral Gerard. He had him a hand mirror and a flashlight. Sister
Gerard did as his hygienist, holding the mirror so that the patient could
follow the procedure while, with one hand, her husband directed the
flashlight straight into the problem area, and with the other, planted
firmly to the patient’s forehead, commanded the devil to depart from that
mouth in the name of jesus and take all his tooth decay with him. Then
he assured the lord that it was now clear for him to go in there and fill
the cavities with solid gold. Brother and Sister Fitch were first and second
in line, my father was third. I do not know why my mother declined to
have god fix her teeth.
After the service, the Fitches came over to the house and everybody went
on and on about their new gold fillings, showing each other, comparing
the brightwork.
I said, "Let me see.'
My father opened his mouth so I could see in there. It was full of cavities
and all sorts of awful stuff and he had bean breath. There was no more
gold in his mouth than in his pockets.
"I don’t see any gold in there."
Well then you aren’t looking in the right place. Back there. On the right.
On both sides. There in the back. Plain as day. Gold fillings all over the
place.
Brother Fitch, too. "Look at them fillings."
I declined to look in Brother Fitch’s mouth, not knowing where it’d been.
I figured the problem had to be on my end. Why didn’t I see the gold? I
sure didn’t want to believe that I was supposed to just outright lie. Which
would mean that my father and the Fitches and everybody else was lying.
I did wonder why, if god could make gold appear out of nowhere, he
didn’t just give some to my folks so that they could pay the rent and buy
groceries, but I never asked. And I’ve never asked my father whether he
tried to recover the gold from them divine fillings when he got his
dentures.
What I knew of gold when I was a little boy was that heaven’s streets
were supposed to be lined with the stuff. If you got hard up, you could
go out to the curb and gouge out a few nuggets. Of course, everybody
knew the gospel according to John, chapter 14, verse 2, by heart: In my
father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told
you. I go to prepare a place for you."
Everybody was always talking about these big rewards, but we were still
poor. You know how some people say how they were poor but they
never knew it? We were poor and you’d had to’ve been an idiot not to
know it. I could tell by our raggedy-assed clothes and the fact that when
we ate, we ate only beans and cornbread. Not a one of us had ever been
to an actual dentist. God-given gold fillings my economically
disadvantaged ass.