The Bible Study

A string of accidents and coinkydinks land Mark back in school

Late last week, I was squatting in my second-favorite break spot when two black dudes rolled up on me. They were both mountains of manhood, easily 13’ and 500lbs of meat put together. But no alarm bells were going off in my lizard brain, so I was chill. In fact, I quickly became very curious.

That’s probably due to the costume. While one of them was dressed rather unremarkably, the other guy was remarkable as hell. His bulk was draped in a purple silk jacket, dazzled all over with gold lamé crosses and other sigils. If that wasn’t clue enough, the words “Jesus Christ” were emblazoned across the breast. I thought he looked like the star of some impossible movie genre that blended superheroes, pimps and televangelists. But he carried himself with the confident ease of a Kung Fu master, which made the crazy jacket seem all the more surreal.

“Good afternoon, young brother,” said Super Jesus Space-Pimp. “How are you today?”

The three of us chatted for a couple of minutes, though His Purple Mountain Majesty did most of the talking. I quickly learned that he was the head honcho of some tabernacle or temple or such, and his buddy was some sort of high ranking minister. Obviously, I knew the score from the start: I would be invited to join them at a service this coming Sunday. There was no high pressure pitch, however, nor fiery demands for repentance or rebirth. They just seemed like a couple of decent, friendly guys, actually. When the conversation ended, I was handed a pamphlet and a 4x6 glossy notecard. We fist bumped, then they strolled languidly away. Without revealing any geographic details, I can safely say this: the direction they walked off in struck me as patently absurd. There was — almost literally — nothing that way.

I studied the card first. It featured a photo of the same honcho, this time dressed far more modestly in what appeared to be the standard Men-in-Black priest suit. Below the image was a string of acronyms that presumably listed his credentials. There were a lot of those, and some struck me as totally bizarre (CDC? Did this jive turkey work for the Centers for Disease Control?). The rest of the card was all just the standard spacetime data and ad copy. Whens and wheres, sprinkled with a dash of whys.

I flipped through the little pamphlet without quite reading it (you know how I am with instruction manuals). This seemed to also be the standard fare. I scanned it for something juicy — talk of space aliens, intelligent comets, lizard people, etc. — but to no avail. It just wanted to save me. Or, I guess more accurately, it wanted me to save myself, through acceptance of Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Like I said: the usual.

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Would I attend?

Duh! Of course I would! As I’ve mentioned before, I go with the flow, these days, particularly when that river flows someplace new to the palate, and from a seemingly uncanny source.

When Sunday arrived I put on basic attire — jeans, sneakers, a tee-shirt and hoodie. No way I was gonna cosplay as some shirt-and-tie stiff for this flock, especially after having witnessed the shepherd’s flashy threads. As a brief aside, it’s worth noting that I had my own exotic costume in my teenage years When I was fourteen or thereabouts, I constructed what was essentially a custom baseball jersey from Hell. The jersey itself was a velvety crimson, and very long and loose when worn untucked. I took it to one of those sporting goods shops that made uniforms for high school teams, and had them emblazon it with the numbers “666” in a bright yellow typeface. As a final touch, I replaced the buttons with ones from a WWI officer’s jacket I’d bought in a thrift store a few years back (Yeah, I was that kid. Fuck off). Anyway, I’m trying to imagine how our conversation might’ve gone had I’d been wearing that garment at the time. I suppose not terribly well, but maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe the pastor would’ve been even more interested in saving my stupid ass. At the very least, we’d make for a great comic book cover.

I rolled up to the designated spot about five minutes before the show was set to start. I imagined it would be quite the show too; I’d been to black services before, of a couple of different denominations. So I was bracing myself not just for a loud experience, but a very long one.

The entrance was draped with white flags, each of which displayed a cross and the ministry’s “buzz words”. This was also pretty normal, even back when I was a kid. It was marketing 101: you link your brand to a memorable keyword or phrase, but keep it suitably vague in order to accommodate different associations and tastes. The building itself was not a church, but some sort of megastructure that housed a variety of entertainment spaces and workshops. I knew this was no traveling roadshow, however; I’d been seeing the congregation’s placards and flyers around the neighborhood for years by then. This venue was apparently just their regular spot, rented once-weekly from the church’s coffers. On the way over, a thought about collection plates crossed my mind; I assumed one would be passed my way at some point this morning. Would I pay? Depends. How good was the show?

The doors opened onto a large, high-ceilinged lobby with blue carpets and vast picture windows compromising one side. There were a few people milling about, but the space was otherwise very quiet. Two official-looking ladies stood near a table of literature, wearing purple lanyards and breezy smiles. To my surprise, one of them was white. I strolled up to them, holding forth the card like it was some kind of talismanic hall pass.

They both smiled sweetly and pointed in the direction of a partially concealed hallway, similar to those you see in movie theatres. This in turn led me to a mid-size auditorium that clearly doubled as a concert venue. I say “clearly” because the stage up front was decked out with all manner of musical instruments. There was a drum kit, a couple of synthesizers, several guitars propped next to steel bar stools, a bunch of mic stands and so forth. But there was a certain ingredient someone apparently forgot to include: people.

Where the hell was everybody?

That’s not to say the place was totally empty; there was exactly one row that was partially filled, all the way at the front. These people were listening intently to a man who was sitting on the edge of the stage, his legs dangling in a way that was almost childish. His audience was mostly male, perhaps fifteen in all. The only other occupant of the theater was a small black kid who looked to be about ten years old. He was seated in the shadows near the back of the theater, his ears plugged with headphones and his eyes and fingers on a cell phone. I felt him acknowledge my presence (though, just barely) as I passed.

The man holding court was neither the superhero nor his sidekick. He was thin, black, about six-foot and shorn completely bald. His dress was casual and clean, a sort of non-style from nowhere. This cat most definitely noticed my presence, and immediately waved me over mid-sentence.

“Come on down, brother. Join us.”

Come on down! You’re the next contestant on The Mark Fucks Up Show! I realized by now that I’d shown up too early, and had stumbled upon some form of pre-game event. But I still did as he asked (and as the flow demanded of me, apparently). For whatever reason — Force of habit, perhaps? — I did not sit in the front row with the others, but instead took a seat in the third row, a bit off to the right.

There were only three women among them. All three were black, and one was, shall we say, a woman of a certain age. The rest of the party was comprised of young men. When I say “young” I mean younger than me, and some perhaps as young as their early twenties. However, I myself am often told I look far younger than I am (Not to brag, but the lowest guess in the past year has been thirty-two, which is quite a distance off). I didn’t feel like a misfit among them, at least in that sense. There was even another white guy there, and the rest of the group was far less “black” than I would have guessed. There were several colorings and features which suggested Hispanic, for instance, and even one face that somehow struck me as Hawaiian.

Introductions were made. I told them my name was Mark, and one-by-one they all craned their heads back to tell their own. It was clear these people were longtime students who all knew each other, and I was yet again to play the part of Freaky Space Invader #1. I started wishing I’d invited my buddy from the Low Mass to come along, at least to provide some cover fire.

With my intro out of the way, the teacher (I’ll call him “Everett”) resumed his lesson. Everyone whipped out their bibles, except for yours truly. I mentioned the problem to Everett, apologizing that I “came to class completely unprepared.” I think part of me hoped this would get a giggle out of my classmates, maybe break the ice a bit. Nope.

Everett was cool with it though, and just advised me to follow along as well as I could. He proceeded to read a passage from the King James Bible, regarding the coronation of David as King of the Israelites. As context for this, he made certain to impress upon us that “Israelites” referred to Christians in the modern telling, who were the spiritual heirs to the tribe. There was nothing controversial about that, to my mind; I’ve heard more or less the same sentiment in every Christian church I’ve investigated, including in the Catholic churches of my youth.

The passage itself was sort of inscrutable to me. It wasn’t that I found anything particularly wrong with it, but rather that I couldn’t quite parse out what was right. It was one of those “God speaks to [X]” verses that seemed far too prosaic and fixed in time to be of much use. The most I could glean was that David was found unworthy to be king, but that this unworthiness was also the reason he was chosen. Sort of a one-hand clapping rumination, maybe. Its moral seemed to be something along the lines of “We are all born in the same state of wickedness, including those who rule us.” Fair enough.

Everett was extremely animated in the discussion to follow. To borrow a term from those who study body language, the man had huge illustrators, wielding his hands as though they were shaping vast objects from invisible clay. On occasion, this illustration would inhabit his entire body. He’d break out into little dance routines, call out to imaginary people from his past. At times he read to me as “closeted-gay”, but maybe that’s just a bit of my inner “Rorschach” peeking out. Hurm…

Panels from Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, (pg.20)

Regardless of the answer, he was certainly performative; this was a man who’d found his calling in public speaking, if not exactly in dialectics. For a teacher, I thought he called on us quite rarely for answers, and those were usually kept pretty brief before he cut back in. This is not to say he was rude, mind you; it was something more akin to excitableness. He made sure to make eye contact continually amongst us, and to frequently speak our names. Still, I think it’s fair to say he looked at me most of all. And why not? I was breathtakingly handsome the new kid on the block. He wanted to make sure I was engaged. Indeed I was.

It’s worth noting that I answered one of his questions “correctly”, so to speak. He was in the middle of speechifying about how religious belief and spiritual development was actually very simple: It was all right here in this book, you see? He literally tapped and flipped through the bible to illustrate this. But if that’s the case, he asked, then why do so many of us fail?

The first to answer was the suspected Hawaiian (jeez, I really am turning into Rorshach). He said, quite simply, “The flesh.”

Everett’s eyes sparked the way any teacher’s would, when someone offered part of an answer. He spoke deftly about the concept of embodiment, and the ways in which it tricks us into materialist thoughts. When he was finished, he clapped his hands like a coach in a locker room.

“Come on people! What else? What else.”

A long silence passed before I finally piped up. “Distractions,” is what I said.

The older woman at the end of the row spun around and looked sharply at me. She was light-skinned with bleach-white hair cropped close. Her eyes were the kind that some black people have which look almost blue in certain kinds of light. That was how they read now: blue, with a touch of “Who da Hell dis white boy?” in them. Or a much softer variant of that, I guess, more impressed than she was suspicious or surprised. Though likely in her sixties, the lady was still quite a looker, and practically wrinkle-free. I got the sense she was a dazzling beauty in her day, the kind who dragged long tails of boys wherever she went.

Everett was impressed as well. I’d learn shortly that the older woman was his mother (“Mommy”, he called her. which I found rather amusing). He prompted her to elaborate further on my answer, which she did in eloquent fashion. Distractions loomed everywhere, vampiric in their lusts for our attention. Their competition had only heated up over time, and the consequences for our souls were getting worse by the day. Music. Video games. Social media. Porn on-demand. My thoughts turned to the boy in the back of the theater, enthralled by his little rectangle of light and sound. I shuddered when I realized he was almost certainly the son of one of these bible students, dragged there by momma or papa against his will.

I remember being in a similar situation when I was his age. While the men sat home, drinking beer and talking football, the women dragged us kiddies off to church. There was no such thing as cell phones back then, but I was nevertheless granted my own tools of distraction to cart along. In my case it was paper and pencils, with which to make my art. During the priest’s homily, I would crouch low in the pew and work on my sketches. These drawings were almost always of monsters, and usually ones of my own design. I always kind of wondered why my mother let me do that, and what she thought of it.

Anyway, like I said: Everett and Mommy were duly impressed. What they didn’t know was that I had wanted to blurt out a different d-word. But I figured that would be a bit much: some jumped-up white-boy crashes the gate and starts talking about demons. Even I would hate that guy.

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The class went on for about a half-hour. I was a little amazed when it stopped; I had never attended a bible study of any kind, so I assumed it would conclude with some form of meditation or prayer. But despite Everett’s occasional comic outbursts and dance moves, its structure was fairly formal. For the most part, people just made quiet notes in their bibles and pondered the teacher’s words. There was no climax, and no homework assigned. Next week, they would simply return to hear and notate a different passage. Interestingly enough, there wasn’t even a standard textbook; Everett read from King James, but granted that the verse might be slightly different, depending on which bible you showed up with.

I left quietly without speaking to anyone. I can’t remember if I saw the boy on the way out. There were many more folks out in the lobby now, chatting and laughing like old friends. But I had already decided not to stay for the main event, whenever that was scheduled for. I thought I’d flowed far enough for one day.

In the parking lot, my own distraction device lit up. My wife wanted me to make a beer run on the way back. I stopped in the nearest liquor store, and grabbed a sixer of “Resin” (9.2% alcohol; the chick is no sucker when it comes to cost-efficiency). I paid in cash with a twenty dollar bill. The clerk handed me back something I found quite weird: not one, but two two-dollar bills.

I’m sure my face registered a bit of shock, and I even said something like “Whoa.. look at that.” But the clerk was totally placid, as though it was the most normal change in the world to give me. He didn’t even shrug.

I haven’t seen a two-dollar bill in a quarter century or more. The dates on both bills were 2003; two of a 121,600,000 supply printed that year, as I’d learn later that day. This would mark the last big batch Uncle Sam would set loose into the wilds (although, relatively speaking, it wasn’t all that “big”; the Pentagon couldn’t even buy a single F-22 Raptor at its current price, even if it had all of them). The next printing wouldn’t be until 2012, in that case a limited run of 512,000. Don’t ask me why. I don’t understand half of the money printer shenanigans these clowns get up to. Maybe you should ask that genius Ben Bernanke.

Why do I mention this? I don’t know. It’s probably just a coincidence, after all, and not exactly on the order of some zany Black Swan event. And besides, even if it wasn’t a coincidence, what could it possibly mean? I joked with some friends that perhaps I was meant to buy a 22-ounce longneck of “Colt 45” (I’ve been told on good authority, it works every time).

Cosmic accident or not, it was still a fairly weird conclusion to what had been a fairly weird string of events. That’s kind of been the story of my life, and especially for the past month or so. One of these recent events was simultaneously so weird and so ominous that not only have I resisted the urge to write about it, I’ve also stopped myself from thinking about it in any structured way. I guess I fear those thoughts might devour me, and I’ve got too much shit to do.

But apart from that incident, it’s mainly been a general texture of weirdness, like I've been transported into an alternate reality of a TV show. Sometimes the show is a comedy, as it was a few weeks back when an eight-point buck sidled up alongside me, to peruse a restaurant’s menu (No venison, thankfully). Other times, as I alluded to, it hasn’t been funny at all. By comparison, the twin two-dollar bills were just a bland, boring species of weird. I sent a picture of them to my Low Mass buddy, but his mind is currently engrossed in other matters. “Distractions” I suppose, but of the work and family variety, instead of the sinister kind.

Anyway, I don’t quite know what to do with this experience, or with the bills themselves. I’m no numerologist, and frankly that field has always struck me as an absurd waste of time; you can see all kinds of shit in clouds, after all. For now, I just tucked them under a stack of books to flatten them out a bit. I don’t think I’ll spend them. Maybe they’ll be worth something someday😜.

I thought of including a picture of the bills here, but what the fuck would that prove? You either believe me or you don’t, and those who don’t probably wouldn’t care about this outcome anyway, or see it as anything apart from blind chance. Maybe they would’ve have already spent the damn things, or fed them into an ATM. And maybe that’s the correct way to look at it. But only maybe.

I’ve come to find “maybe” is the best way to look at many things in life, including at the spiritual level. As part of a recent review, I made some scathing comments about atheism as potentially a masquerade for darkness. What I meant was that particular form of atheism which proselytizes, functioning more or less like a religion but without the pesky gnosis. I’ve come to think of it as a toxic version of what might otherwise be simple unbelief; a secular cult that not only can’t bring itself to say “maybe”, but seeks to erase that word from all other vocabularies as well.

That brings me back around to the bible class. Will I ever attend another? Maybe.

Or maybe I’ll let this little string of accidents and incidents just be what it was: a free trip to the alethiology casino, where the prize was four-bucks-American and a six pack of beer. Or maybe I will go check out the real show next week, as was my initial intent. Maybe events will somehow re-conspire to lead me there, where I’ll sing and dance and pray with Everett and Mommy. I bet I could impress her with my dance moves, too.

Maybe.

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P.S. If you found any of this valuable (and can spare any change), consider dropping a tip in the cup for ya boy. Suggested donation is $1 USD. I’ll try to figure out something I can give you back. Thanks in advance.