by Stephen Biro
After my parents finally ousted their visitors, they argued about which one of them had wanted to join the church. They seemed on the verge of a huge fight when they noticed me sitting on the couch. My mom asked if I’d been there the whole time. Without waiting for an answer, she ordered me to bed. They were both pretty drunk, so I made it to my room without further conversation. I closed the door but tried, in vain, to continue following the conversation in the other room. I flopped down on my bed and thought about how fucked up it all was. I was just starting puberty and feeling the tug of manhood but didn’t know what to do. The hotness of the minister’s wife, with her tight dresses and high heels, was exciting. Yet the fantasy was destroyed, as the pastor was an old man with a white-haired Elvis pompadour.
I still didn’t know much about religious beliefs, but I knew the minister had some power over people. That power, at least over my family, had been destroyed in a single drunken conversation. We never returned to that church or saw them again. I don’t know their names; I don’t even know exactly where the church was (we were living in nearby Gaffney, South Carolina). I’m sure they ended up getting arrested eventually because stuff like that can’t remain secret when children are involved. I just hope and pray they stopped abusing kids right after those confessions.
These shocking events helped keep me in the Atheism camp. But my mom and stepdad just pretended it never happened, and mom went in search of another church.
She found a Mormon one that wasn’t bad. The same kind of rituals were performed, but it wasn’t in a doublewide, and hopefully the minister wasn’t screwing his neighbors’ kids. Everything went fine until my mother wanted me to be baptized. I had already been baptized Lutheran as a baby, but Mom insisted I be baptized into the Mormon faith. I was to have my sins washed away and become a Mormon. I don’t think a sixth grader has that many sins darkening his soul, but what the hell? My Mother wanted it, and if it made her happy, I was game.
So when the day came, I was dressed in all white and taken to church to get my baptism on, Mormon style. (That almost sounds dirty, doesn’t it? “Mormon style.” I figure one sense of that term would mean three quick pumps in missionary and it’s over. But then again, you’d have more than one wife. So it would be three pumps here, five pumps there and maybe ten pumps into the last one. To tell the truth, I’ve never seen a Mormon have sex, but I don’t think I’d want to. Not kinky enough for me, even with the multiple wives.)
In any case, I was standing in church with five other kids with the eyes of the congregation on us. I was third in line to get dunked and was nervous, mainly because of the crowd. When the praying and singing started, the first kid was led to a large white tank surrounded by white tiles. While the priest or minister or whatever he was (I forget the Mormon terminology) continued to pray, he dunked the kid in the water and pronounced him baptized. Everyone clapped and praised Jesus, or whoever it is that Mormons praise (I told you I’m not good with this Mormon stuff).
The next kid walked to the tank, and the singing and praising continued. Then he was dunked and saved. I didn’t know any of the other boys, and the whole thing seemed weird, but I was only a sixth grader, so what did I know?
The organist played, the people sang, and it was my turn to march towards the dunking tank. The minister kept ranting, and I wanted to curl up in a ball of self-consciousness. I walked calmly into this oversized bathtub and stood next to the minister/priest/whatever as I waited for him to dunk me.
The music and ranting stopped. He held me by the back, laid his hand on my head, and said, “Do you take Jesus Christ as your personal savior and now belong to the Mormon faith?”
“I do,” I whispered.
He started mumbling some other stuff and suddenly dunked me in the water. I wasn’t ready because he had done it so quickly. The water rushed up my nose and down my throat and I began gasping and thrashing around until he lifted me to pronounce me saved.
But he didn’t.
He looked at the congregation, then me and said, “Not all of your hair submerged, so you’re not saved yet. Let’s do it again.”
It’s damned annoying when you’re not saved because of a mistake on the clergy’s end, but I stood there quietly. He went through his spiel again and dunked me a second time. Chlorinated water went right back up my nose, and I again flailed my arms, desperate to breathe.
He raised me and gave me a look. He turned to the congregation and said, “It happened again. We have to totally submerge him so he can be fully baptized.”
I panicked as he shoved me back under the water. I can only imagine what the congregation was thinking: “Surely he’s the Devil’s spawn, and that’s why he can’t be baptized.” I was choking and splashing as the minister/priest/sadist pulled me back up.
“All of your hair still didn’t get wet,” he said in disbelief. But he was finished, and he shook his head. He pronounced me baptized in a weary voice, and the organist pounded on the keys. I struggled out of the tub, humiliated and confused.
Was I baptized or not? If the baptism didn’t take because of some dry hair, and if the holy man just gave up on me, was I going to Hell? Even though I considered myself an atheist, my almost-adolescent mind was fretting on the matter for weeks afterwards. If that asshole would have dunked me good and proper, I would have been saved a ton of grief.
This Mormon near-drowning seemed to give me another reason to follow my dad’s advice about belief in God. That’s a fucking shame, and I can only guess how many religious people have shattered a child’s faith. On the one hand, it’s a fucked-up irony that religion can destroy the very seeds of faith. But on the other hand, maybe it’s to be expected—religion is man’s business towards God, and man is nothing if not fallible. Gross misdeeds, fits of greed, and other human failings are bound to fuck up any religious system in the long run. But even if explained by human imperfection, the mishaps of religion still constitute a juicy target for atheists.
Soon afterward, my stepfather was fired for being drunk at work, and we moved to Nebraska, where he had found work at a beef processing plant. We lived in a town of 296 people. I know the exact population because it was written on a sign at the edge of town. The town was Jacksonville, and it was in the middle of nowhere.
Talk about small. I was in a class of ten kids, and this was the combined seventh and eighth grades. Both grades were mostly girls (“Can I hear an Amen!”).
The class had a teacher who loved his job, but here, it was roughly a sixth-grade curriculum in the seventh grade. I wasn’t challenged, as I already learned it all the previous year in South Carolina (and as I’ve mentioned before, the sixth grade in South Carolina was New Jersey’s fifth grade; I’m not exaggerating, although I wish I were).
So I was one of three boys in a sea of seventh-and eighth-grade girls. The other two guys were genuine rednecks (buck teeth on one, two silver front teeth on the other), and I was the new city-slicker kid everyone wanted to know about (I got to play New Kid in South Carolina too, but with only ten kids in my Nebraska classroom, it was a lot more interesting). All the girls were pretty, but I still had no clue how to make a move, so I didn’t fool around.
We lived there for about a year. I enjoyed being the jock and the go-to guy for answers, but it was boring in the middle of nowhere unless you had a motorbike. I began to save for one, because I seemed to be the only guy in town without either a motorbike or a three-wheeler.
Tired of everyone zooming past as I walked around town on two boring ol’ legs, I became more enterprising and accelerated my savings by picking up occasional odd jobs. Mowing lawns, raking leaves, washing cars, most neighbors turned me down, but I persisted until I managed to save about $300. I was getting close to that motorbike.
Around this time, I realized the extent of my stepdad’s alcoholism. He was always stumbling around drunk, but he wasn’t mean. He was a nice drunk. I got home from school one day to find Mom and Tom really excited about something.
“Ste
phen,” they said. “We have a surprise for you in the garage. Go see what it is.”
I rarely got gifts, so I excitedly rushed to the garage. Inside was a pedal-driven moped with a bow on it. I looked at it confusedly.
“What is that?”
“It’s a moped, honey. We took your money and bought it for you! We figured your stepdad could make a more informed purchase and negotiate a better deal than a kid could.”
I was flabbergasted.
“You took my money and bought me a moped? How am I supposed to drive that thing with my friends in the woods?” It was true. We were in the boonies, surrounded on all sides by dirt, a surface that can’t be negotiated by a moped. Mom looked at Tom, who was beginning to get a little sloppy from his latest round of drinks.
“Come to think of it, why did you get a moped?” she asked.
“Well, I was talked into it by the guy. It’s German engineering, you know. Anyway, I can’t take it back now.”
I made the best of it, but driving in the snow was horrible, and it was impossible to keep up with my friends’ dirt bikes and three wheelers. I was the laughingstock of the streets, but I was used to the feeling. And what’s more, I could hit 30 miles an hour and get 50 miles to the gallon.
I lived next to Kevin, and we would play baseball or Atari video games at my house. My family had the only Atari in the neighborhood at that time. We also had one of the first VCRs, as my stepdad had stolen it from his Sears engineering workplace. The VCR and Atari were downstairs in the basement, which was my magical, secluded place of video games and R-rated HBO programming. Life as a seventh grader seemed like Heaven, and I was just about to discover a new basement pastime.
Understand: Back then, I had a knack for picking locks. Give me a coat hanger or a library card, and I was in. And we had two extra rooms in the basement. One was a laundry room where my mother stored her canning supplies (canning was a common practice for women in snowy Nebraska), and the other was my stepfather’s storage room.
Predictably, since his storage room was off limits to all of us, I knew there were forbidden treasures in there. So I jimmied the door one night, after everyone had gone to bed, and I looked around. It was a mess, stuff strewn about everywhere, but I noticed a fireproof safe in one corner and a shelf in another. I walked over to the shelf and inspected the several videotapes on it.
Even if the videos had been mainstream cinema, I would have been thrilled. The local video store was 40 miles away, and we only made that trek once a week. The video store only had 300 films or so in their collection. This was when VHS was new, and barely anything had been released. So I was really excited to have some different videos.
I picked up the tapes and noticed the titles: Debbie Does Dallas, Little Girls Blue and Cherry Truckers. I didn’t yet know exactly what I held in my hands. I’d seen some pseudo-naughty films on cable that had gotten my heart beating a little faster. The Internet hadn’t been invented, and my main exposure to pornography had been in magazines. As has become my mantra already in this book: The ’70s were a different time. In any case, I thought I merely had naughty booby movies in my hand.
I took the videotapes into the basement den and instinctively hid two of them under the couch. I turned off the lights and slid Debbie Does Dallas into the VCR. The Caballero logo appeared with a nice thrumming sound as if it were one of the big studios. Believe it or not, I was contemplating popcorn when the first trailer started. By the time the trailers finished, I had seen hot model-looking chicks naked … and sucking … and getting fucked … and threesomes … and cum shots—all on regular 35mm film. My mind spasmed, and popcorn was no longer on my mind.
When the title told me “The Main Feature Is About to be Presented,” I ran up the stairs and locked the basement door. My eyes were glued to the screen during Debbie Does Dallas, and for some odd reason, my pants didn’t fit any longer. Tight pants or not, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. My new friend Porn was always there for me, almost daily, for several months. Then my stepfather discovered what I was up to and hid the videos in the ceiling of his bedroom.
My last sentence should indicate I knew the videos’ new secret hideout. I removed them from the ceiling and replaced them after each time I had, ahem, “hung out” with new buddy Porn. Months later, he was wise to me again and put them in his fire safe. Perhaps he noticed I hadn’t rewound them to the exact same spot. But I had a paperclip and determination and was soon watching Little Girls Blue again. I think any boy with raging hormones would have done the same. Porn had been locked away in an airtight safe and longed to escape and hang out with the hot-blooded boy with the diamond-hard dick.
So life in Nebraska was good, especially down in the basement. I think I must have been shooting out knee cartilage after a while.
I got into the occasional spot of trouble in Jacksonville. Kevin had a slingshot, and we were hunting birds one day. We followed a couple of pigeons back to an abandoned building filled with old cars, records and arcane devices from the ’30s and ’40s. We walked through a hole in the wall and shot at the birds. I managed to shoot four pigeons and Kevin shot three. We picked up their limp bodies, thinking of bringing them home for our moms to cook. They had huge breasts on them, so when I brought them home, my Mom was actually excited. She began dressing them when there was an angry knock on the door.
The angry knocker was the proprietor of the local gas station. He was pissed and was asking about the slaughter of the breeding pigeons in his barn. I looked at him and plainly said, “I did it. I didn’t know that was your barn; I thought it was abandoned.”
He was amazed. “My daughter saw you boys leave the barn. I already asked the other boy, and he denied it. But you had the guts to own up to your actions.” My Mom was upset, so I said, “How can I make up for it?”
He laughed and said, “I suppose you can work at my garage for a couple of weeks.”
“Yes sir.”
I didn’t get in trouble from Mom, but she did throw away the pigeon breasts. I went by the garage right after school. I worked there a couple of weeks, schlepping stuff around and sweeping the driveway.
Wanting to be closer to Tom’s job, we prepared to move to South Sioux City, which borders Sioux City, Iowa but is still in Nebraska. I had three weeks to go before graduating. We had a big baseball game with all the kids in town, and I was playing first base. My friend Kevin was pitching, something at which he was not known to excel at. Everyone was getting pissed because he couldn’t even put the ball close to the plate, much less anyone allowing for hits or strikes. The other kids were clamoring for me to take over on the mound. Kevin kept telling them to shut up, and he kept pitching the ball 15 feet from the plate. As everyone kept begging for me to pitch, the silver-toothed Kevin got frustrated and pitched worse and worse. One of the guys got hold of the ball and threw it to me, telling me to relieve Kevin.
That’s when my friend lost it. He became a fucking maniac, grabbing an aluminum bat and charging me, swinging at my head. Running in circles as if chased by a serial killer, I yelled to my friends to throw me a bat. Nobody did, and that may have been a good thing. So I kept running, and after Kevin announced he was going to kill me, I decided to run to my house, which was very near the field. I couldn’t run straight into my house so I went towards the fence.
Kevin caught up with me, took a swing and connected with my kneecap. I went down hard.
“You fucking psycho! What the fuck is wrong with you!”
He lifted the bat high into the air, and it was poised to crack my skull open. My mother suddenly appeared and grabbed the bat away from him as he began his death blow.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she screamed.
Kevin ran towards his home, next door. I was clutching my knee and Mom suggested we go to the hospital.
The cops weren’t called because, well, that’s how we played it back then. I was given a splint and told to stay off my leg for a little while. I couldn’t return for the l
ast several weeks of school since the building had its share of staircases, and I had a class on the fifth floor. I was passed anyway since I was at the top of the curve. We moved to South Sioux City three weeks later.
There, my stepdad received his fifth or sixth DUI (yes, drivers could get that many back then without license revocation). Mom and Tom’s marriage began to deteriorate faster than before. The drinking was out of control, and my Mom secretly saved money to leave him. Soon we were packing for Florida, where my Mom’s parents lived.
My grandparents didn’t like me because I grew my hair long, and my sister and I grew even further apart. We moved several times and settled in Tarpon, Florida.
*
I’ll conclude the “growing up in the ’70s” portion of the memoir here. Hopefully, you have a picture of my mind as I grew up, including my early relationship with religion. I wanted you to know the psychological foundation on which my later insanity, faith and desperation was built.
I’ll now change gears and show you what I more recently experienced, all the while giving you the exact sense of what I felt. Call it schizophrenia, religious experiences, psychosis or whatever you understand easiest. We’re now going to have fun, and I am going to scare the shit out of you.
I’m not trying to intentionally scare (well, maybe just a little), but the extreme details of my Christian conversion and the manipulation from outside forces is too important to water down or whitewash.
God, Lucifer, damnation, salvation, Heaven and Hell, the afterlife. These all deserve some considering. Your death is going to happen and should come into your thoughts as you live. Everyone dies, both good and bad, and those in between. My story, my life, should serve as a warning for some.
I want you to take a break. Put the book down and try to imagine where it is you’re going. Rest a day and look forward to what you’re going to read. I want you to imagine you’re in front of the looking glass about to step through. Your lips are pursed, about to drink a small potion so you can fit through an undersized door. You found the golden ticket while swallowing the red pill, and while staring into the mirror.
