Bring Out The Snakes: A Pentecostal Holiness Revival in Covington, Kentucky
My father was a Pentecostal Holiness preacher. He also worked on the railroad for his main occupation. When he wasn’t working on trains, he was at church. I was three months old when he died on my mother's 39th birthday at age 61. He would be 129 on the day I write this. After his death, my mother used to take me to several Pentecostal Holiness churches that were sprinkled all over town because she still had lady friends who attended there. She went often during the week.
I saw some crazy things in those churches. You would hear of all kinds of knucklehead feats those morons would do, like bringing out a bag of snakes. Some fool who felt weak in his faith and wanted to bolster it up in a dramatic way for all to see went to church one night during the week and decided to see if God was going to take care of him. Into a burlap bag he inserted his hand where a nice fat timber rattler awaited him. God took care of him alright. The viper injected two large, curved hypodermic needles into his forearm and filled him up with a copious load of venom. So the guy decided that now was the time to wait it out and see the healing begin. Well, have you ever seen a basketball? The man of faith saw his forearm swell up in a huge knot the size of a world globe. It reminded me of Popeye’s after inhaling a can of spinach. Somebody in the congregation felt led to call an ambulance after the evidence revealed that he didn’t really have that much faith after all. I read about this in the obituary the next day.
So as a teenager from that day on whenever I stepped across Pentecostal Holiness thresholds, I looked under seats and scanned for people carrying around burlap bags with a writhing knot at the bottom. I usually tried to get near an exit, but if I found myself trapped at the end of a pew next to a wall and somebody thought it was time to exercise serpentine faith, I was prepared to install a new door in the church right at the end of my pew.
Many nights after she came home from work, Mom would mosey down to this particular church in Covington, Kentucky, where my dad had apparently posted up and delivered a few barn-burners from the Bible. In the 40’s and 50’s this place was often called some kind of Tabernacle, I believe, and the pastor there was a dude named Brother Oden. Brother Oden looked like a Holiness preacher. He was handsome and had a thick, jet black, wavy pompadour mounted on his crown above the bulge of his stomach that roosted there from drinking glasses of gravy and inhaling fried chicken at the church potlucks.
Most of these preachers in those days seemed to have wavy hair, and many of them wore white suits. Not all of them were pastors of congregations. Some roved the country and lighted in high population areas where a goodly number of ignorant people seemed to live among the population. They would jump on the radio and advertise miracle services. Sometimes they would command people to get up off the sofa where they were lying like a walrus with a chicken wing in their hand and put their paws on the radio to be healed. Some of these people claimed they felt something like electricity come through their AM band, especially if it had a short in it. But if they couldn’t get healed over the air waves, then an entire flock of old, fat, sick, and crippled people would wobble down to some tabernacle so that the miracle-worker could get his hands on them and make things happen.
Then there were the preachers on the radio who were just there for the money. I remember one guy who urged his radio flock to send him $10, and he would send them a miracle twig that was the same thing as a bottomless checking account at Bank of America. According to him, he had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and had brought back to America with him an entire fig tree like the one Jesus had cursed. He got the brainy idea that he would lay hands on one of the branches, bless it with an economic prayer, and suddenly anyone who happened to own even the smallest portion of this thing would be financially set for the rest of his life. How he got an entire fig tree out of Israel and onto an airplane was never explained. But for weeks he was on the airwaves coaxing the morons in radio land to send him $10 cash, and he would reimburse them with a piece of bark or a stem from his money tree. I used to think about that. Here was a complete idiot who literally owned a money tree. And what was he doing? He was giving it away piecemeal for a mere $10 bill. Why would he give away the goose that laid the golden eggs (the tree) for $10 a sprig when he had the entire tree? He said he had a fig tree, but he was on the radio for weeks sending out timber in the mail. His fig tree must have been the size of a redwood.
One of the most unforgettable characters was an evangelist over in Cincinnati where Mom would venture to on occasion. He was holding forth for a number weeks in one of Cincinnati’s opulent movie theaters whose heyday had been in the 40’s but was now out of business. His name was Brother Ivy. He was always decked in white and marched around on stage healing people by slapping them in the head with the butt of his calloused right hand and nearly knocking them out. After they had been clubbed directly in the fontal lobe, they would stagger back stupefied and nearly unconscious while Ivy’s associates weaved behind them with their arms spread out trying to predict where they might land. It was sort of like firemen holding a net down below for a suicide candidate who is running up and down a ledge on a high-rise building trying to figure out where he was going to dismount and do a swan dive. What they were trying to do was prevent one of these idiots who submitted to Ivy’s hammer-drive fist to their brain from cracking his skull on the hickory floor. They wanted everyone to know that when you boldly walked up on the stage and cowered before Brother Ivy while waiting for him to heal you by delivering into your face the equivalent of the fat end of a baseball bat like Mickey Mantle, you would be caught by them before a worse fate happened to you just in case you were knocked senseless. Besides, an offering was going to be taken after the display of miracles had been rolled out, and people had to be alive and well to make significant donations.
Ivy’s routine went like this. He would invite a trembling healee forward from the front of the line that strung out from the back of the room to the stage. Holding a microphone, he would inquire of the disabled one,”Tell me your name and the city in which you were born-ed.” Ivy was from the South and had a strange way of saying things. He would then ask the one about to be delivered what the problem seemed to be. The afflicted would tell Ivy that he had cancer, TB, a bad back, the Shingles, or any number of maladies and where it hurt. Ivy would pause, hand his mike to an associate, and appear to go into a trance. Now here was the moment everyone waited for because Ivy followed a very distinct sequence from this point on. All of us who had seen it knew what was going to happen next, even the one who was about to be healed because sometimes he would shuffle back a bit preparing himself for what was about to come down. First, from a frozen position Ivy would suddenly jerk to life and spring on top of the disabled, nearly scaring the crap out of him. He would seize him by the back of the head with his left hand, and then his right hand would clamp across his face like that thing that came out of that guy’s stomach in the movie “The Alien.” Bending the impaired one’s neck back, Ivy would get up in his face and throw in a little glossolalia by screaming mumbo jumbo like “Sh-Boom-Sh-Boom-Duba-Bop-Bop-Oh-Du-Bop-Sh-Down-Down-Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong” with a fountain of spit spraying from his mouth. He did this as he squeezed the dupe’s entire head and neck as if it was in a vice, giving the healee’s entire skull a Novocain effect.
It’s a good thing because Brother Ivy’s healing hand was just about on its way. He bellowed out his guttural stock phrase - “Be healed! Come out of him, son of Beelzebub. Thank you, JAAAAAAAAAA-sus.” That was the fatal key word - Jesus. It is the word that we all waited for and the one that the infirm feared the most. Saying that word was the same thing as reaching the end of a trigger pull on a 12-gauge Mossberg. I would say that right then the last conscious thought the healee had was, “Incoming…” because a split second later the healee saw exactly what the inside of the Mammoth Cave looked like. Like lightning, Ivy’s right arm recoiled back like the chamber in a semi-automatic that had just been fired. Just as fast it came forward like a piston going through the block and hood of an automobile, landing squarely into the cerebrum of the stooge who stood before him and jarring his brain like a halfback running straight into a brick wall with his helmet on.
The responses were predictable. Some of them were instantly knocked out cold and dropped back as if they had been run over by a train. Others seemed to be completely stunned for a moment and then darkness passed over them as in slow-motion they descended back like a piece of plywood on the hinges of a WeatherGuard toolbox. But there were others - especially large or fat people - for whom Ivy had a special treat. Ivy had had enough experience battering people in the head to know that these did not receive healing without an extra measure of special restorative power. Cures for cancer, leprosy, and kidney stones just didn’t take unless they were driven through the skull like nails and got inside where they could work. Healing was proportionate to the force it took to make sure it got to the right place. So before Ivy delivered the coup de grace into their encephalon, his army of body-catchers moved back a few feet. Following the same pattern as above, Ivy knocked them half way across the stage. Their towering hulks would stagger backwards like Frankenstein, trying to remain on their feet just before the shade of unconsciousness was drawn and they went down like a Douglas Fir.
Before long Ivy’s victims came back to their senses after they went down for the count. Most got to their feet jerking like they had just been electrocuted. This was supposed to be evidence that the Spirit had done His work. But Ivy knew just where and how hard to piledrive somebody’s head so that the nervous system emulated a divine healing. As they stood there mindlessly going in and out of consciousness and trying to mumble a coherent word, Ivy would declare, “She’s been healed!”, and this would sometimes - if anybody had any idea of just where he was - cause the formerly halt and maim to cast off whatever device signified their infirmity. It could be hearing aids, crutches, or a wheel chair. Some believed their cancer had disappeared and began to do a little jig. The guy on the Wurlitzer would start in when he saw this, and the tambourines would soon follow while others sang and clapped “There’s power in the blood…” I thought the power seemed to be more in Ivy’s right arm. To prove their healing to those of us who awaited confirmation, some would attempt to walk around or do something to prove to themselves a miracle had happened. The crippled would sway and reel around the stage like a drunk or take a couple of uncertain steps that convinced most of those who were expecting and hoping for a cure that a miracle had taken place as if the Virgin Mary’s face had appeared on a sausage biscuit at Mc Donald’s. All the healings I saw would have taken place with far more spectacular results if somebody had simply brought a cobra out on the stage.
After a couple of miracles like that, it was time for the real purpose of all this. Not healing. Money. Ivy would go into his spiel about how his itinerant ministry all over the globe was suffering and how the theater was going to shut down and be without his healing presence if these fools who were there most nights didn’t dig deep and shell out a silent offering. Ivy’s big line every night was “dig deep, no coins.” Go past the copper and silver and get to the paper. Ivy didn’t like the sound of change banging on the bottom of the offering trays. Hearing nothing sounded like everything to Brother Ivy.
Anyway, back to Brother Oden. When he jumped into his navy blue suit, he looked like all these evangelists I saw all over the place. His wife had gray hair, no lipstick, and a bun fused on the back of her head. When Oden got into high gear and ignited revival fire, which wasn’t very often, she worked the organ maniacally like somebody who was on crack. Oden had a couple of pre-teen daughters with pale complexions and black pigtails that he guarded like a German Shepherd. No makeup, of course.
So when Mom got in the mood for the old-fashioned gospel and the desire to see some of her old cronies, since I wasn’t old enough yet to wander off by myself, I got stuck going to this joint to hear Brother Oden. Once in a while Oden would give us all relief by bring in some screaming evangelist when he thought he had finally bored the pants off of everybody. Once the music died down and everybody stopped clapping and prancing around, the evangelistic windbags came to the pulpit to start their harangue. In those days, I couldn’t stand any of this stuff. So It didn’t take long, and I was soon marching out the door to the water fountain in the foyer to spend the rest of the night in the nursery area while the preaching drone hummed along till about 10 o’clock. Before long, Mom was rooting through the foyer to drag me back into where hell-fire and damnation was being served up on a hot griddle. At that point, I fell back into the arms of the Sandman till all this nonsense mercifully came to an end. I can still smell this place today. Seeped deep into the walls was the scent that greets everyone who enters a small church. But this place was mixed with a lot of heavy breathing, plaster weakened by nightly banging on tambourines for years, and the humidity of excreted sweat on hot summer nights when the agitated saints perspired like they were in a sauna.
One night when I had gotten a little older, I was sitting up near the front by myself thinking of doodling away the ennui by playing tic-tac-toe with myself on a paper tablet while Mom lounged in the back. But it just so happened that on this particular night, Oden was taking a vacation and giving us all some relief. He had employed the services of some fly-by-night pulpit pounder I had not seen before. His job was to step in, wind up and revitalize the herd here on this Tuesday night. But this guy was different than the usual bore that brought the hammer down. I was looking for some entertaining distraction, and little did I know that he was boredom’s terminator. First of all, he was one of those preachers that is omnipresent at every point on the platform. He would stroll back and forth behind the preaching stand, kick his feet out like he was delivering a can of whoop-ass right into the devil’s pants, chop the air, hammer on the pulpit, jump up and down, race back and forth across the stage like his pants were on fire, and screech at the top of his lungs. His face would flame up like a roaring fire, and his veins would bulge from his neck as his hair flopped around like Conan O’Brien's. In addition to that, he had one of the most bizarre delivery methods I had ever heard. Once he got revved up and started to get into rhythm, he would tack an “uh” or a “huh” at the end of every sentence or on the backside of every major word he wanted to emphasize. He especially liked the words that had to do with sin, judgment, and hell fire. They always got the “huh.” Bringing his fist down and then bringing it back up as if it had bounced it off of a rubber pad, he would intone “brimstone-uh.” I had never heard that one before and felt very uncomfortable because this affectation made him look like a fool. After a while though, this “uh-huh” pattern seemed to give him more authority and made the things he was saying seem even worse than I imagined them to be. “The Lord is going to judge-uh all the women-uh who wear-uh the same pants-uh that devil wears-huh. They will go down into hell-fire-uh and burn in everlasting brimstone-uh.”
Now the effect of all this did not go unnoticed. The Pentecostal crowd is always keenly aware that any moment the Spirit may descend, and a full-scale revival might break out and land right on top of them with all kinds of signs and wonders and other bull-crap taking place. Apparently “huh” at the end of every sentence had been a signature catalyst to genuine revival in days past, and this guy was starting to roll down that path. When he got really stoked and started in with the “huh” routine with every sentence, that brought out a chorus of booming “Amens!” from somewhere in the back. The evangelist apparently picked up a clue here, because after a while of heavy breathing and jackhammering the oak pulpit, he paused briefly and yelled out, “Somebody give me an A-man-huh!” Now there was another new one. I had heard a lot of preachers pray and tack “Amen” on the end of every prayer. I had no idea what it meant, but in it’s context with everybody’s eyes closed, it seemed like it was a different way of saying “The End” for those who couldn’t see. Regardless, it always sounded plural to me - “A-men.” But this guy was into singular with A-man. After a brief pause…an ensemble of “A-mans” boomeranged back to him. I guess that “uh-huh” business impressed everybody and made them think he knew more about it than they did.
The echo of “A-man” was like starting a running race with gunfire because with that the evangelist was off again into full-blown sermonic mode delivering heavy-duty, aerobic preaching with “uh-huh” like he was lifting heavy weights on a bench press at Gold’s Gym. He was wound as tight as a spring. His arms were flying like a fan, sort of like a cross between a white-gloved traffic cop in the middle of a New York City intersection at rush hour and an instructor sweating to the Oldies in a Pilates workout down at LA Fitness. This guy was in his 50’s and elevating his blood pressure right up to where a cardiologist stands by you with a stopwatch while you do a treadmill stress test just short of death’s door. Some kind of break had to be coming soon, or they were going to carry this fire-breather out feet first.
As I look back on it now, not knowing then what it took to sustain an hour’s pulpit-pounding without shouting out to the congregation to help me along because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I know that his Bible battery was losing its charge and that he needed some more sermon preparation time to think up some new material for delivery. He had huffed and puffed his way out of things to say. It is always easy to figure out when Pentecostal Holiness revival-type preachers are running out of gas. When they can’t think of more content to present, they go into repetition mode by repeating the same old meaningless crap that they have heard other preaching windbags recite when their minds were also going blank. As his sermonic content ran dry, he began to string out “HAL-LEE-LOO-YAHs”, “PRRR-AIS-A-LICOUS”, and “AMEN AND FM” type stuff, chirping those phrases almost every other word as he took out the handkerchief he had just blown his nose on and mopped the dripping sweat and panic from his brow as if he had been standing in a rainstorm. He was stalling for thinking time. But how do you dream up more content when you are in the middle of a sermon and suddenly realize that you are short on fuel to burn? I was about to find out.
While I was watching him break down, a whole other phenomenon was going on around me. The souls who were being lashed by the “uh-huh” schtick were starting to rise and get into the program. This is really the essence of this kind of Pentecostalism. By and by, these people wanted to get into the action because true religion is about losing control and setting yourself on fire with the Spirit. They just needed the flame to light the kindling. That is why they were there, to get pumped up with that old-time religion. Some of them were already out in the aisles doing the Watusi. The pastor’s wife was going to town on the organ, rocking back and forth like Ray Charles, as if a Presidential nominee at a political convention had just stated the last sentence in his acceptance of the nomination, “And I will give a free car to everybody in the United States. God bless America.” The band started up like this was the fanfare to the second coming. Some woman was on the tambourine, slapping it against her hip like she was driving Seattle Slew down the stretch and across the finish line. All hell broke loose. Some had their hands over their heads looking up into the heavens and twisting their wrists like they were unscrewing lightbulbs. Others mirrored the evangelist’s lingo every time he recited one of his stock, fill-in phrases to buy sermon preparation time. The Spirit had seized a few others and they were going berserk either right where they sat or where they stood by doing a speed-up version of a tap dance as if somebody was firing a six gun at their feet. Meanwhile, my mother, who was very conservative, and I sat there as if we were reading Woman’s Day Magazine in a doctor’s office while waiting for the nurse to call us in for our appointment. Totally oblivious to and unmoved by the pandemonium that was swirling about us.
Then two things happened. As I sat there on my wooden theater seat that folded down, something got hold of the fool on my left. Up until this moment, he had sat there propped up in his seat like a corpse. There was no sign that he was about to become airborne. But within a split second - out of nowhere - both of his arms came flying up. They were folded at the elbows like he was getting ready to do the Chicken Dance at a wedding. Instead, he mightily forced them back like he was going to crack his back and smashed me right in the mouth with his elbow. With that, he jacked to his feet as if somebody had poured boiling water between his legs and commenced a tap dance like a mad man on the wooden floor next to me. Having seen this kind of thing before, I knew that he was about to eject from this spot, which he did. As if he were Michael Jackson doing the RiverDance, his feet were going like he was standing barefooted on red hot coals. With his legs flying, he plowed left down the narrow aisle trampling the feet of some old lady who silently mouthed a curse word I used to hear in high school. She yanked her head back as his backside passed closely right in front of her nose just in case his diet was heavy with beans and legumes. He heedlessly waltzed into the center aisle like a clogger coming onto the floor at a square dance.
Believe it or not, this was just STARTING to get good. If you ever go to one of these churches, this is when you want to be there. There is no way to tell what might happen next. All these other people were like warm-up acts for Elvis Presley in Las Vegas because the headliner now stepped into the spotlight. The evangelist, sensing the whole joint was beside itself, and being in need of a few more minutes of prep work to recall some illustrations and tried and true sermonic techniques to keep the ball rolling, did something I have yet to see repeated anywhere else. He had been preaching high and lifted up on a stage that was about three off the main floor. Perhaps he did not notice this or did not care. But suddenly from behind the pulpit, it was as if he was Secretariat and the gate had opened for his record run around Belmont. He reared up and bolted to the left of the congregation in full gallop. When he hit the side of the platform, he took flight, stretching his legs out like he was running the 120-yard hurdles, and landed smoothly on his feet heading for the church wall at full speed. He calculated the distance accurately and then slid across the wooden floor right up to the wall. Bouncing off it, he took off again, charging down the left side of the church with his feet now muffled by the maroon carpet. He was going so hard that I thought he might go through the back of the church. But, again, he pulled up and when he hit the wooden floor in the back, he glided into the back wall and crashed into the offering plates and Bibles. As those thundered to the floor, he ricocheted off the wallboard, poured on the coal again, and barreled across the back of the church in full throttle over the plank floor. I heard his wingtips clattering like hooves. When he passed over the thick carpet that trailed down the center aisle, his leather soles and heels were dampened like a train on a trestle, only to resume their clacking sound when they tramped on wood again. Predictably, he skated across the slick surface again and banged into the holy walls in the back right corner. In another mad dash, he opened her up like he was on the far side of the track in the straight away. He stampeded headlong up the rug on the right side of the building. Thinking he might make an olympic leap back up into the air and land on the runway from which he had lifted off, he rounded the front seat and pulled back on the stick again to make not two, not three, but successive rounds in the building as the bedlam increased. His whirlwind tour around the church seemed to catch on like a tornado. Soon others were caught up like chunks in a blender and came on to the track like racers at a NASCAR rally. Those in the pews were jiggling and quivering while the preacher, some deacons, and a few women on the outside circled them like juice in a NutriBullet. It reminded me of the tigers circling the tree and making butter in Little Black Sambo.
This guy with a parade of Pentecostals in his wake ran till new sermonic horsepower materialized in his mind. Because when he eventually let up on the gas and left the track, he wiped his head and neck, consoled himself and everybody else by mumbling “A-man” endlessly like Jimmy Swaggart and wheezed his way back into the pulpit like he had just finished a marathon that was all uphill. He was a new man. Everybody sort of slowed down, got hold of themselves, and climbed back into their seats to get ready for the second round. This wasn’t a Baptist or Presbyterian church. They didn’t do it once and then want to get the hell out as fast as they could. Oh, no. If it was good one time, then let’s do it again. And if we can do it a third time, let’s go for it. Since most nights were similar to this, that is why they came down to this joint almost every night of the week, including Sunday.
Within seconds, the preacher was off again as if he had stepped from inside the eye of a hurricane into it's seething wall. The “uh-huh” endings came more frequently now. “Everybody-uh who didn’t-uh get up and be filled-uh with he Spirit-uh is in danger-uh of going to hell-huh.” The crowd was on fire as if somebody had set a match to kerosene soaked logs. They sensed the tongues of revival were licking upon them, and the 100 yard dash around the church was just a preliminary to even greater things. The guy next to me who had nearly knocked my teeth out now had glazed, half-closed eyes rolled up back into his head. He started shaking involuntarily like a zombie on “The Walking Dead.” I looked to my right. There was a clear path down my row of seats. I leaped from my seat just as this guy’s right fist whizzed by my head. My quick exit must have been the sign everybody was looking for. Surely I had just been saved and was going to take a few proof-of-salvation laps around the track myself. Since I appeared to be running when I hit the aisle, I heard scores of “A-MANs”. In their minds, the breath of life had at last been breathed into the valley of the dead bones. But my kidneys were about to burst, and I was merely headed to the lobby for relief and respite from the mayhem before I got killed. Nevertheless, the moment I stepped onto the salvation racetrack, full-bore. all-out, come-to-Jesus revival broke out afresh. The tambourine, the organ, all of it started in again. It was as if everybody was on ecstasy at a techno club. The place was a din of chaos and bedlam.
Then I saw it. The burlap bag. Some joker was waltzing down the aisle holding aloft and away from his body a bag heavy laden with something ominous inside. At the sight of that bag, everybody knew immediately what that meant. The excitement went to the next tier and whipped the madness into a frenzy like sharks consuming chum. I guess my perceived leap of faith onto the track called forth even greater miracles, and somebody thought the time had come to separate the sheep from the goats. The true from the false. Mere amateur sprinters from the the Olympic champions. But while some were thinking of performing a miracle, others were receiving an inspired vision. The vision of an Eastern Diamondback with his mouth open wide and displaying dripping fangs firing out of that bag like an arrow off a bow string. Right then it was as if Mission Control in Houston had calmly announced “We have lift off” when Apollo 11 started for the moon. Within seconds, a whole lot of people were on their feet and headed for the exit. Somebody else could have said, “Elvis just left the building,” because as one man all of us who had this vision and were only there for the pre-show were already through the glass door and sailing past the nursery - and the bathroom - like Eric Liddlell in Chariots of Fire. We picked up the pace like we were neck and neck for a photo finish when we heard the preacher scream out, “BRING OUT THE SNAKES-UH!”
I saw some crazy things in those churches. You would hear of all kinds of knucklehead feats those morons would do, like bringing out a bag of snakes. Some fool who felt weak in his faith and wanted to bolster it up in a dramatic way for all to see went to church one night during the week and decided to see if God was going to take care of him. Into a burlap bag he inserted his hand where a nice fat timber rattler awaited him. God took care of him alright. The viper injected two large, curved hypodermic needles into his forearm and filled him up with a copious load of venom. So the guy decided that now was the time to wait it out and see the healing begin. Well, have you ever seen a basketball? The man of faith saw his forearm swell up in a huge knot the size of a world globe. It reminded me of Popeye’s after inhaling a can of spinach. Somebody in the congregation felt led to call an ambulance after the evidence revealed that he didn’t really have that much faith after all. I read about this in the obituary the next day.
So as a teenager from that day on whenever I stepped across Pentecostal Holiness thresholds, I looked under seats and scanned for people carrying around burlap bags with a writhing knot at the bottom. I usually tried to get near an exit, but if I found myself trapped at the end of a pew next to a wall and somebody thought it was time to exercise serpentine faith, I was prepared to install a new door in the church right at the end of my pew.
Many nights after she came home from work, Mom would mosey down to this particular church in Covington, Kentucky, where my dad had apparently posted up and delivered a few barn-burners from the Bible. In the 40’s and 50’s this place was often called some kind of Tabernacle, I believe, and the pastor there was a dude named Brother Oden. Brother Oden looked like a Holiness preacher. He was handsome and had a thick, jet black, wavy pompadour mounted on his crown above the bulge of his stomach that roosted there from drinking glasses of gravy and inhaling fried chicken at the church potlucks.
Most of these preachers in those days seemed to have wavy hair, and many of them wore white suits. Not all of them were pastors of congregations. Some roved the country and lighted in high population areas where a goodly number of ignorant people seemed to live among the population. They would jump on the radio and advertise miracle services. Sometimes they would command people to get up off the sofa where they were lying like a walrus with a chicken wing in their hand and put their paws on the radio to be healed. Some of these people claimed they felt something like electricity come through their AM band, especially if it had a short in it. But if they couldn’t get healed over the air waves, then an entire flock of old, fat, sick, and crippled people would wobble down to some tabernacle so that the miracle-worker could get his hands on them and make things happen.
Then there were the preachers on the radio who were just there for the money. I remember one guy who urged his radio flock to send him $10, and he would send them a miracle twig that was the same thing as a bottomless checking account at Bank of America. According to him, he had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and had brought back to America with him an entire fig tree like the one Jesus had cursed. He got the brainy idea that he would lay hands on one of the branches, bless it with an economic prayer, and suddenly anyone who happened to own even the smallest portion of this thing would be financially set for the rest of his life. How he got an entire fig tree out of Israel and onto an airplane was never explained. But for weeks he was on the airwaves coaxing the morons in radio land to send him $10 cash, and he would reimburse them with a piece of bark or a stem from his money tree. I used to think about that. Here was a complete idiot who literally owned a money tree. And what was he doing? He was giving it away piecemeal for a mere $10 bill. Why would he give away the goose that laid the golden eggs (the tree) for $10 a sprig when he had the entire tree? He said he had a fig tree, but he was on the radio for weeks sending out timber in the mail. His fig tree must have been the size of a redwood.
One of the most unforgettable characters was an evangelist over in Cincinnati where Mom would venture to on occasion. He was holding forth for a number weeks in one of Cincinnati’s opulent movie theaters whose heyday had been in the 40’s but was now out of business. His name was Brother Ivy. He was always decked in white and marched around on stage healing people by slapping them in the head with the butt of his calloused right hand and nearly knocking them out. After they had been clubbed directly in the fontal lobe, they would stagger back stupefied and nearly unconscious while Ivy’s associates weaved behind them with their arms spread out trying to predict where they might land. It was sort of like firemen holding a net down below for a suicide candidate who is running up and down a ledge on a high-rise building trying to figure out where he was going to dismount and do a swan dive. What they were trying to do was prevent one of these idiots who submitted to Ivy’s hammer-drive fist to their brain from cracking his skull on the hickory floor. They wanted everyone to know that when you boldly walked up on the stage and cowered before Brother Ivy while waiting for him to heal you by delivering into your face the equivalent of the fat end of a baseball bat like Mickey Mantle, you would be caught by them before a worse fate happened to you just in case you were knocked senseless. Besides, an offering was going to be taken after the display of miracles had been rolled out, and people had to be alive and well to make significant donations.
Ivy’s routine went like this. He would invite a trembling healee forward from the front of the line that strung out from the back of the room to the stage. Holding a microphone, he would inquire of the disabled one,”Tell me your name and the city in which you were born-ed.” Ivy was from the South and had a strange way of saying things. He would then ask the one about to be delivered what the problem seemed to be. The afflicted would tell Ivy that he had cancer, TB, a bad back, the Shingles, or any number of maladies and where it hurt. Ivy would pause, hand his mike to an associate, and appear to go into a trance. Now here was the moment everyone waited for because Ivy followed a very distinct sequence from this point on. All of us who had seen it knew what was going to happen next, even the one who was about to be healed because sometimes he would shuffle back a bit preparing himself for what was about to come down. First, from a frozen position Ivy would suddenly jerk to life and spring on top of the disabled, nearly scaring the crap out of him. He would seize him by the back of the head with his left hand, and then his right hand would clamp across his face like that thing that came out of that guy’s stomach in the movie “The Alien.” Bending the impaired one’s neck back, Ivy would get up in his face and throw in a little glossolalia by screaming mumbo jumbo like “Sh-Boom-Sh-Boom-Duba-Bop-Bop-Oh-Du-Bop-Sh-Down-Down-Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong” with a fountain of spit spraying from his mouth. He did this as he squeezed the dupe’s entire head and neck as if it was in a vice, giving the healee’s entire skull a Novocain effect.
It’s a good thing because Brother Ivy’s healing hand was just about on its way. He bellowed out his guttural stock phrase - “Be healed! Come out of him, son of Beelzebub. Thank you, JAAAAAAAAAA-sus.” That was the fatal key word - Jesus. It is the word that we all waited for and the one that the infirm feared the most. Saying that word was the same thing as reaching the end of a trigger pull on a 12-gauge Mossberg. I would say that right then the last conscious thought the healee had was, “Incoming…” because a split second later the healee saw exactly what the inside of the Mammoth Cave looked like. Like lightning, Ivy’s right arm recoiled back like the chamber in a semi-automatic that had just been fired. Just as fast it came forward like a piston going through the block and hood of an automobile, landing squarely into the cerebrum of the stooge who stood before him and jarring his brain like a halfback running straight into a brick wall with his helmet on.
The responses were predictable. Some of them were instantly knocked out cold and dropped back as if they had been run over by a train. Others seemed to be completely stunned for a moment and then darkness passed over them as in slow-motion they descended back like a piece of plywood on the hinges of a WeatherGuard toolbox. But there were others - especially large or fat people - for whom Ivy had a special treat. Ivy had had enough experience battering people in the head to know that these did not receive healing without an extra measure of special restorative power. Cures for cancer, leprosy, and kidney stones just didn’t take unless they were driven through the skull like nails and got inside where they could work. Healing was proportionate to the force it took to make sure it got to the right place. So before Ivy delivered the coup de grace into their encephalon, his army of body-catchers moved back a few feet. Following the same pattern as above, Ivy knocked them half way across the stage. Their towering hulks would stagger backwards like Frankenstein, trying to remain on their feet just before the shade of unconsciousness was drawn and they went down like a Douglas Fir.
Before long Ivy’s victims came back to their senses after they went down for the count. Most got to their feet jerking like they had just been electrocuted. This was supposed to be evidence that the Spirit had done His work. But Ivy knew just where and how hard to piledrive somebody’s head so that the nervous system emulated a divine healing. As they stood there mindlessly going in and out of consciousness and trying to mumble a coherent word, Ivy would declare, “She’s been healed!”, and this would sometimes - if anybody had any idea of just where he was - cause the formerly halt and maim to cast off whatever device signified their infirmity. It could be hearing aids, crutches, or a wheel chair. Some believed their cancer had disappeared and began to do a little jig. The guy on the Wurlitzer would start in when he saw this, and the tambourines would soon follow while others sang and clapped “There’s power in the blood…” I thought the power seemed to be more in Ivy’s right arm. To prove their healing to those of us who awaited confirmation, some would attempt to walk around or do something to prove to themselves a miracle had happened. The crippled would sway and reel around the stage like a drunk or take a couple of uncertain steps that convinced most of those who were expecting and hoping for a cure that a miracle had taken place as if the Virgin Mary’s face had appeared on a sausage biscuit at Mc Donald’s. All the healings I saw would have taken place with far more spectacular results if somebody had simply brought a cobra out on the stage.
After a couple of miracles like that, it was time for the real purpose of all this. Not healing. Money. Ivy would go into his spiel about how his itinerant ministry all over the globe was suffering and how the theater was going to shut down and be without his healing presence if these fools who were there most nights didn’t dig deep and shell out a silent offering. Ivy’s big line every night was “dig deep, no coins.” Go past the copper and silver and get to the paper. Ivy didn’t like the sound of change banging on the bottom of the offering trays. Hearing nothing sounded like everything to Brother Ivy.
Anyway, back to Brother Oden. When he jumped into his navy blue suit, he looked like all these evangelists I saw all over the place. His wife had gray hair, no lipstick, and a bun fused on the back of her head. When Oden got into high gear and ignited revival fire, which wasn’t very often, she worked the organ maniacally like somebody who was on crack. Oden had a couple of pre-teen daughters with pale complexions and black pigtails that he guarded like a German Shepherd. No makeup, of course.
So when Mom got in the mood for the old-fashioned gospel and the desire to see some of her old cronies, since I wasn’t old enough yet to wander off by myself, I got stuck going to this joint to hear Brother Oden. Once in a while Oden would give us all relief by bring in some screaming evangelist when he thought he had finally bored the pants off of everybody. Once the music died down and everybody stopped clapping and prancing around, the evangelistic windbags came to the pulpit to start their harangue. In those days, I couldn’t stand any of this stuff. So It didn’t take long, and I was soon marching out the door to the water fountain in the foyer to spend the rest of the night in the nursery area while the preaching drone hummed along till about 10 o’clock. Before long, Mom was rooting through the foyer to drag me back into where hell-fire and damnation was being served up on a hot griddle. At that point, I fell back into the arms of the Sandman till all this nonsense mercifully came to an end. I can still smell this place today. Seeped deep into the walls was the scent that greets everyone who enters a small church. But this place was mixed with a lot of heavy breathing, plaster weakened by nightly banging on tambourines for years, and the humidity of excreted sweat on hot summer nights when the agitated saints perspired like they were in a sauna.
One night when I had gotten a little older, I was sitting up near the front by myself thinking of doodling away the ennui by playing tic-tac-toe with myself on a paper tablet while Mom lounged in the back. But it just so happened that on this particular night, Oden was taking a vacation and giving us all some relief. He had employed the services of some fly-by-night pulpit pounder I had not seen before. His job was to step in, wind up and revitalize the herd here on this Tuesday night. But this guy was different than the usual bore that brought the hammer down. I was looking for some entertaining distraction, and little did I know that he was boredom’s terminator. First of all, he was one of those preachers that is omnipresent at every point on the platform. He would stroll back and forth behind the preaching stand, kick his feet out like he was delivering a can of whoop-ass right into the devil’s pants, chop the air, hammer on the pulpit, jump up and down, race back and forth across the stage like his pants were on fire, and screech at the top of his lungs. His face would flame up like a roaring fire, and his veins would bulge from his neck as his hair flopped around like Conan O’Brien's. In addition to that, he had one of the most bizarre delivery methods I had ever heard. Once he got revved up and started to get into rhythm, he would tack an “uh” or a “huh” at the end of every sentence or on the backside of every major word he wanted to emphasize. He especially liked the words that had to do with sin, judgment, and hell fire. They always got the “huh.” Bringing his fist down and then bringing it back up as if it had bounced it off of a rubber pad, he would intone “brimstone-uh.” I had never heard that one before and felt very uncomfortable because this affectation made him look like a fool. After a while though, this “uh-huh” pattern seemed to give him more authority and made the things he was saying seem even worse than I imagined them to be. “The Lord is going to judge-uh all the women-uh who wear-uh the same pants-uh that devil wears-huh. They will go down into hell-fire-uh and burn in everlasting brimstone-uh.”
Now the effect of all this did not go unnoticed. The Pentecostal crowd is always keenly aware that any moment the Spirit may descend, and a full-scale revival might break out and land right on top of them with all kinds of signs and wonders and other bull-crap taking place. Apparently “huh” at the end of every sentence had been a signature catalyst to genuine revival in days past, and this guy was starting to roll down that path. When he got really stoked and started in with the “huh” routine with every sentence, that brought out a chorus of booming “Amens!” from somewhere in the back. The evangelist apparently picked up a clue here, because after a while of heavy breathing and jackhammering the oak pulpit, he paused briefly and yelled out, “Somebody give me an A-man-huh!” Now there was another new one. I had heard a lot of preachers pray and tack “Amen” on the end of every prayer. I had no idea what it meant, but in it’s context with everybody’s eyes closed, it seemed like it was a different way of saying “The End” for those who couldn’t see. Regardless, it always sounded plural to me - “A-men.” But this guy was into singular with A-man. After a brief pause…an ensemble of “A-mans” boomeranged back to him. I guess that “uh-huh” business impressed everybody and made them think he knew more about it than they did.
The echo of “A-man” was like starting a running race with gunfire because with that the evangelist was off again into full-blown sermonic mode delivering heavy-duty, aerobic preaching with “uh-huh” like he was lifting heavy weights on a bench press at Gold’s Gym. He was wound as tight as a spring. His arms were flying like a fan, sort of like a cross between a white-gloved traffic cop in the middle of a New York City intersection at rush hour and an instructor sweating to the Oldies in a Pilates workout down at LA Fitness. This guy was in his 50’s and elevating his blood pressure right up to where a cardiologist stands by you with a stopwatch while you do a treadmill stress test just short of death’s door. Some kind of break had to be coming soon, or they were going to carry this fire-breather out feet first.
As I look back on it now, not knowing then what it took to sustain an hour’s pulpit-pounding without shouting out to the congregation to help me along because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I know that his Bible battery was losing its charge and that he needed some more sermon preparation time to think up some new material for delivery. He had huffed and puffed his way out of things to say. It is always easy to figure out when Pentecostal Holiness revival-type preachers are running out of gas. When they can’t think of more content to present, they go into repetition mode by repeating the same old meaningless crap that they have heard other preaching windbags recite when their minds were also going blank. As his sermonic content ran dry, he began to string out “HAL-LEE-LOO-YAHs”, “PRRR-AIS-A-LICOUS”, and “AMEN AND FM” type stuff, chirping those phrases almost every other word as he took out the handkerchief he had just blown his nose on and mopped the dripping sweat and panic from his brow as if he had been standing in a rainstorm. He was stalling for thinking time. But how do you dream up more content when you are in the middle of a sermon and suddenly realize that you are short on fuel to burn? I was about to find out.
While I was watching him break down, a whole other phenomenon was going on around me. The souls who were being lashed by the “uh-huh” schtick were starting to rise and get into the program. This is really the essence of this kind of Pentecostalism. By and by, these people wanted to get into the action because true religion is about losing control and setting yourself on fire with the Spirit. They just needed the flame to light the kindling. That is why they were there, to get pumped up with that old-time religion. Some of them were already out in the aisles doing the Watusi. The pastor’s wife was going to town on the organ, rocking back and forth like Ray Charles, as if a Presidential nominee at a political convention had just stated the last sentence in his acceptance of the nomination, “And I will give a free car to everybody in the United States. God bless America.” The band started up like this was the fanfare to the second coming. Some woman was on the tambourine, slapping it against her hip like she was driving Seattle Slew down the stretch and across the finish line. All hell broke loose. Some had their hands over their heads looking up into the heavens and twisting their wrists like they were unscrewing lightbulbs. Others mirrored the evangelist’s lingo every time he recited one of his stock, fill-in phrases to buy sermon preparation time. The Spirit had seized a few others and they were going berserk either right where they sat or where they stood by doing a speed-up version of a tap dance as if somebody was firing a six gun at their feet. Meanwhile, my mother, who was very conservative, and I sat there as if we were reading Woman’s Day Magazine in a doctor’s office while waiting for the nurse to call us in for our appointment. Totally oblivious to and unmoved by the pandemonium that was swirling about us.
Then two things happened. As I sat there on my wooden theater seat that folded down, something got hold of the fool on my left. Up until this moment, he had sat there propped up in his seat like a corpse. There was no sign that he was about to become airborne. But within a split second - out of nowhere - both of his arms came flying up. They were folded at the elbows like he was getting ready to do the Chicken Dance at a wedding. Instead, he mightily forced them back like he was going to crack his back and smashed me right in the mouth with his elbow. With that, he jacked to his feet as if somebody had poured boiling water between his legs and commenced a tap dance like a mad man on the wooden floor next to me. Having seen this kind of thing before, I knew that he was about to eject from this spot, which he did. As if he were Michael Jackson doing the RiverDance, his feet were going like he was standing barefooted on red hot coals. With his legs flying, he plowed left down the narrow aisle trampling the feet of some old lady who silently mouthed a curse word I used to hear in high school. She yanked her head back as his backside passed closely right in front of her nose just in case his diet was heavy with beans and legumes. He heedlessly waltzed into the center aisle like a clogger coming onto the floor at a square dance.
Believe it or not, this was just STARTING to get good. If you ever go to one of these churches, this is when you want to be there. There is no way to tell what might happen next. All these other people were like warm-up acts for Elvis Presley in Las Vegas because the headliner now stepped into the spotlight. The evangelist, sensing the whole joint was beside itself, and being in need of a few more minutes of prep work to recall some illustrations and tried and true sermonic techniques to keep the ball rolling, did something I have yet to see repeated anywhere else. He had been preaching high and lifted up on a stage that was about three off the main floor. Perhaps he did not notice this or did not care. But suddenly from behind the pulpit, it was as if he was Secretariat and the gate had opened for his record run around Belmont. He reared up and bolted to the left of the congregation in full gallop. When he hit the side of the platform, he took flight, stretching his legs out like he was running the 120-yard hurdles, and landed smoothly on his feet heading for the church wall at full speed. He calculated the distance accurately and then slid across the wooden floor right up to the wall. Bouncing off it, he took off again, charging down the left side of the church with his feet now muffled by the maroon carpet. He was going so hard that I thought he might go through the back of the church. But, again, he pulled up and when he hit the wooden floor in the back, he glided into the back wall and crashed into the offering plates and Bibles. As those thundered to the floor, he ricocheted off the wallboard, poured on the coal again, and barreled across the back of the church in full throttle over the plank floor. I heard his wingtips clattering like hooves. When he passed over the thick carpet that trailed down the center aisle, his leather soles and heels were dampened like a train on a trestle, only to resume their clacking sound when they tramped on wood again. Predictably, he skated across the slick surface again and banged into the holy walls in the back right corner. In another mad dash, he opened her up like he was on the far side of the track in the straight away. He stampeded headlong up the rug on the right side of the building. Thinking he might make an olympic leap back up into the air and land on the runway from which he had lifted off, he rounded the front seat and pulled back on the stick again to make not two, not three, but successive rounds in the building as the bedlam increased. His whirlwind tour around the church seemed to catch on like a tornado. Soon others were caught up like chunks in a blender and came on to the track like racers at a NASCAR rally. Those in the pews were jiggling and quivering while the preacher, some deacons, and a few women on the outside circled them like juice in a NutriBullet. It reminded me of the tigers circling the tree and making butter in Little Black Sambo.
This guy with a parade of Pentecostals in his wake ran till new sermonic horsepower materialized in his mind. Because when he eventually let up on the gas and left the track, he wiped his head and neck, consoled himself and everybody else by mumbling “A-man” endlessly like Jimmy Swaggart and wheezed his way back into the pulpit like he had just finished a marathon that was all uphill. He was a new man. Everybody sort of slowed down, got hold of themselves, and climbed back into their seats to get ready for the second round. This wasn’t a Baptist or Presbyterian church. They didn’t do it once and then want to get the hell out as fast as they could. Oh, no. If it was good one time, then let’s do it again. And if we can do it a third time, let’s go for it. Since most nights were similar to this, that is why they came down to this joint almost every night of the week, including Sunday.
Within seconds, the preacher was off again as if he had stepped from inside the eye of a hurricane into it's seething wall. The “uh-huh” endings came more frequently now. “Everybody-uh who didn’t-uh get up and be filled-uh with he Spirit-uh is in danger-uh of going to hell-huh.” The crowd was on fire as if somebody had set a match to kerosene soaked logs. They sensed the tongues of revival were licking upon them, and the 100 yard dash around the church was just a preliminary to even greater things. The guy next to me who had nearly knocked my teeth out now had glazed, half-closed eyes rolled up back into his head. He started shaking involuntarily like a zombie on “The Walking Dead.” I looked to my right. There was a clear path down my row of seats. I leaped from my seat just as this guy’s right fist whizzed by my head. My quick exit must have been the sign everybody was looking for. Surely I had just been saved and was going to take a few proof-of-salvation laps around the track myself. Since I appeared to be running when I hit the aisle, I heard scores of “A-MANs”. In their minds, the breath of life had at last been breathed into the valley of the dead bones. But my kidneys were about to burst, and I was merely headed to the lobby for relief and respite from the mayhem before I got killed. Nevertheless, the moment I stepped onto the salvation racetrack, full-bore. all-out, come-to-Jesus revival broke out afresh. The tambourine, the organ, all of it started in again. It was as if everybody was on ecstasy at a techno club. The place was a din of chaos and bedlam.
Then I saw it. The burlap bag. Some joker was waltzing down the aisle holding aloft and away from his body a bag heavy laden with something ominous inside. At the sight of that bag, everybody knew immediately what that meant. The excitement went to the next tier and whipped the madness into a frenzy like sharks consuming chum. I guess my perceived leap of faith onto the track called forth even greater miracles, and somebody thought the time had come to separate the sheep from the goats. The true from the false. Mere amateur sprinters from the the Olympic champions. But while some were thinking of performing a miracle, others were receiving an inspired vision. The vision of an Eastern Diamondback with his mouth open wide and displaying dripping fangs firing out of that bag like an arrow off a bow string. Right then it was as if Mission Control in Houston had calmly announced “We have lift off” when Apollo 11 started for the moon. Within seconds, a whole lot of people were on their feet and headed for the exit. Somebody else could have said, “Elvis just left the building,” because as one man all of us who had this vision and were only there for the pre-show were already through the glass door and sailing past the nursery - and the bathroom - like Eric Liddlell in Chariots of Fire. We picked up the pace like we were neck and neck for a photo finish when we heard the preacher scream out, “BRING OUT THE SNAKES-UH!”