GOOD CHRISTIAN NEIGHBORS | PAGE 2
Soon after moving in, we met Nick and his 21-year-old son, Donny, the Baptist missionaries who lived upstairs. Nick sized us up with eyes as hard and narrow as two grains of bulgur. "You seem pretty nice," he said cautiously. Unlike the Swedish-blooded suburbanites of the church next door, Nick was an Italian New Yorker with swarthy skin and ample tattoos on his swollen biceps. "The ladies here before you -- they was nutty." He shook his head. "I went down to the garden to mow the lawn and they started screaming: 'Rapist! Rapist!' Like I was raping the fucking garden." Under his muscle shirt on his left pectoralis, I spied a tattoo of an impaled heart with the words "Pump for Me, Jesus." "Donny, get your ass out here!" From the apartment came a sonic wall of rap music. "And turn off that fuckin' racket." Donny -- a younger, hairier version of Nick -- sauntered down the stairs. He shook our hands, then leaned back against the railing, one hand loosely grabbing his crotch gangster-style. "Those ladies, they hated my music -- said it was too loud. You like rap music?" "Oh yes," I cried, "It's my favorite." Gangster Christians, I thought, how refreshing. "Those ladies lived here together." He paused. "You know what I mean?" "You mean they were lovers," I said. He shrugged. "They didn't like my music." "Is that why they moved out?" "It was like a war, you know?" Nick explained quickly. "Every time we walked across the room, they was calling us up to scream ..." Hank and I gazed down, suddenly intent on the layers of peeling paint. To take the side of a couple of muscle-bound Bible thumpers over a pair of quiet, garden-loving lesbians was unthinkable. But to argue was also not an option. They were our new missionary neighbors -- the moralistic, God-fearing folk I feared would complain about our late-night parties, well-pierced friends and feminist drum core meetings where we chanted: "Keep Your Rosaries/Off My Ovaries." But in the weeks that passed I became increasingly confused about the exact meaning of "conservative Christian." Nick and Donny played mind-numbing gangsta rap 24-hours a day, sheltered a stream of noisy temporary residents and fought like characters from a Tarantino film. Had they not been missionaries, I would have assumed they were running a crack ring. Late one night before the dreaded nuptials, when Hank was on tour, Donny wandered down the back steps, straddled my open window and lectured me on the sin of sex before marriage. "Sometimes I feel like gettin' busy, but I control myself 'cause the Bible says it's a mortal sin." He glanced over his sculpted chest like a preening bull and cupped his genitals smugly. "Everybody wants to get busy sometimes," he whispered. "But it's wrong." I didn't bring up his Filipina girlfriend, who carted her juicy cleavage over to the house several nights a week for sleepovers in which throbbing funk barely masked her sultry early morning giggles. Worse than the premarital orgies were their drag-out fights of crashing furniture and junior high school dialogue. "Pete says you were talking to Sammy at the Burger King," Donny would shout. "Pete says you were acting like a slut!" "Pete's a total liar!" she would wail, bursting into sobs as wet as a busted dam. "Why were you talking to that guy? You're just a whore, that's what you are." The noise reached a crescendo one night when Donny came home drunk to a locked apartment and began screaming that he was going to burn down the building if Nick didn't let him in. He shrieked every blasphemy in the book for over two hours. Death by shooting, bombs and poison were each mentioned at least once. When his ranting reached thoroughly psychotic proportions, Nick let him in the front gate, where they thrashed it out against our beveled glass door. I didn't want them to write us off as impossible neighbors like they did the former tenants, so I restrained my complaints to polite notes riddled with qualifiers and apologies. After several months, I began keeping a broom next to the bed in order to jab the ceiling, sending a shower of sparking plaster onto our blanket and leaving the cottage cheese plaster pathetically pock-marked. Yet something more than pragmatic diplomacy kept me from waging war. Despite my disapproval of fundamentalism, I found it difficult to believe that "regular Christian folk" could really be so demonic and, more importantly, so discourteous. When the church began undergoing construction next door, Donny and Nick declared the noise intolerable and moved to the suburbs. The need to contemplate such aberrant Christians no longer plagued me. I found as much relief in this as the absence of midnight brawls and blaring music. One day Dan, the church electrician, was fixing a shorted fuse in our kitchen when we began talking about an incident the day before when a man from the apartment across the street pointed a gun at the carpenters on the construction site. Dan was a boyish guy in his late 30s who had grown up in the loving shadow of the church and currently dated a board member's daughter. "Can't keep anyone in prison for pointing a gun. Just keeps you off the job for a day." He shook his head at the irony of it all. "I don't do that kind of work anymore." "You used to work construction?" "Naw, I used to point guns at people! Hee-hee." His laughter was guilt-free and eerily contagious. "I just got tired of police coming to my door all the time, dragging me down to the station." "That must have been very inconvenient for you." "I don't carry a gun anymore. I carry a knife or two. Or three." He peeked mischievously at me between the wiring. "Hee-hee." "Hee-hee," I responded, silently mapping my escape route. "I study knife fighting with a Chinese guy." "Is that a martial art?" Thirteen feet to the door. Seven steps to the street. "Naw, we just like to kick ass." Where to run -- the church? If only there was a house of Satan nearby, I could have breathed more easily. Dan began recounting his most recent "lesson," in which he and his teacher went to an Irish bar and hung outside waiting for "action." When a bunch of locals acted "disrespectful," the teacher pulled his knife and got "them Irishmen" pinned up against a wall. Then out came the girlfriend who "got in his face" and so the teacher "whaled on her," not with the knife but his fists, "because she's a lady, after all." The woman fell and knocked her head on a fender and blood gushed from her ears. "We got out of there fast," he concluded, his eyes twinkling. "Was the woman dead?" He pondered the question perfunctorily, as if I had asked him about the necessity of keeping energy-saving bulbs in the store room. "Sure was a lot of blood. Hee-hee." Later that month, I came home to find two church youth group leaders polishing the giant brass doorknobs of the church at 1 a.m. They worked in the darkness, their hands moving in jerky dances between slow scans toward the neighborhood park where dope dealers were doing a clipping business. Either the youth leaders were undergoing a special evangelical penance or they were tweaking heavily as they waited for their connection to arrive. And why not get a little Christian chore done in the meantime? I knew there were different kinds of Christians and I was well acquainted with the loopy, liberal 12-steppers who give Christianity a good name, but polishing the church doorknobs jacked up on drugs was just a bit much. Actually, the episode seemed the perfect metaphor for all that I had encountered with this peculiar brand of Christians. Hard drugs, domestic violence and even maybe a spot of homicide were forgivable for believers, but allow a couple of bohemians to park in your lot with a "We Believe You Anita" bumper sticker and a domestic partnership certificate and you're aiding and abetting a mortal sin. Add to the mix a couple of middle-aged lesbians with a passion for weeds, and you've got a regular den of iniquity. Why did it take me so long to get wise to my neighbors? Partly, it was spiritual intimidation: How could "heathen rebels" like us take the moral high ground with Jesus lovers? Wasn't it their job to object to us? I had read articles in progressive rags about spineless liberals ceding the moral high ground to the right wing, without realizing that I myself was walking proof of such abnegation. I had always assumed that fundamentalists needed their strict rules to keep them from shooting crack and beating their girlfriends, but now I realized I had been too charitable. In the right hands, conservative Christianity provided a perfect cover for not living by an ethical system at all. One night after months of speculating on the strange practices of the church, Hank nearly came to blows with the church's retarded night watchman, who spouted rude comments about the two lesbian tenants before us. Later that week we had the pleasure of meeting one of the women who lived in our apartment. She was a shy, earnest accountant who specialized in doing taxes for artists. When she spoke of her harrowing experiences with the church and the neighbors, her face drew back like a cat on a roller coaster. Hank, still seething from his encounter, mentioned the night watchman. "Julian, how is he?" she said, furrowing her brow sympathetically. "He's slow, but what a nice man." We said nothing. Sometimes there's nothing you can say without shattering someone's simple faith that those who claim to be good, really are.
Are hellish Christian neighbors like these an anomaly or not? Discuss it in Table Talk. P R E V I O U S T R U E S T O R I E SThe Husband's Revenge By Hank Hyena (02/24/97) |
