Boys Life

leaving their best girl home on a Saturday night. “Sex garbage! God help our daughters!”
    “The man,” my father said as he leaned toward Mom, “is as crazy as a one-legged toad-frog.”
    As the song played, Reverend Blessett raged on about disrespect for the law and the destruction of the family, about Eve’s sin and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. He was spouting spittle and flinging sweat, and his face got so red I feared he was going to explode at the seams. “The Beach Boys!” he said with another ferocious sneer. “You know what those are? They’re bums who wouldn’t know a good day’s work if you handed ’em a hoe and paid ’em fifty dollars! They lay around all day out there in California and fornicate in the sand like wild beasts! And this is what our young people are listenin’ to day and night? God help this world!”
    “Amen!” somebody shouted. The crowd was getting worked up. “Amen, brother!” another voice yelled.
    “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet, my friends!” Reverend Blessett hollered. He picked up the needle, put his hand flat against the record to keep it from turning, and as the player’s gears whined in protest, he searched for a groove on the disc. “Listen to this!” He disengaged the gears, and he lowered the needle while his other hand rotated the record backward.
    What came out, in a slow groan, was: Daaadeelsmaaastraaabaaaa.
    “Hear it? Hear it?” The reverend’s eyes glittered with triumph; he had unlocked the mystery at the music’s heart. “The devil is my strawberry! That’s what they said! Clear as a bell! They’re singin’ a song in praise of Satan and they don’t care who knows it! And this thing is goin’ out on the radio waves all over the country right at this very minute! It’s bein’ played by our children and they won’t even know what they’re hearin’ until it’s too late and there’s no turnin’ back! It’s the devil’s plan to snare their souls!”
    “I think they said the same thing about the Charleston,” Dad said to Mom, but his was a small voice in the fevered chorus of amens.
    This is the way the world spins: people want to believe the best, but they’re always ready to fear the worst. I imagine you could take the most innocent song ever written and hear the devil speaking in it, if that’s what your mind told you to listen for. Songs that say something about the world and about the people in it-people who are fraught with sins and complications just like the best of us-can be especially cursed, because to some folks truth is a hurtful thing. I sat in that church and heard the reverend rage and holler. I saw his face redden and his eyes gleam and the spittle spray from his mouth. I saw that he was a terrified man, and he was stoking the hot coals of terror in his congregation. He skipped the needle around, playing more snippets backward that to me sounded like gibberish but to him held satanic messages. It occurred to me that he must’ve spent an awfully long time huddled over that record player, scratching the needle back and forth in search of an evil thought. I wasn’t sure he was trying to protect people as much as he was trying to direct them. In this latter area he was highly successful; soon he had most everybody yelling amens like the cheerleaders at Adams Valley High yelled for touchdowns. Dad just shook his head and crossed his arms, and I don’t think Mom knew what to make of all this commotion.
    Then, with sweat dripping from his chin and his eyes wild, Reverend Blessett announced, “Now we’ll make the devil dance to his own tune, won’t we?” He snapped the wooden box open, and from it jerked something that was alive and kicking. As the Beach Boys continued to croon, Reverend Blessett gripped a leash and made the creature on its other end start dancing crazily to the music.
    It was a little spider monkey, all gangly arms and legs, its face spitting with fury as the reverend jerked its chain this way and that. “Dance, Lucifer!” the reverend shouted, his voice carrying over even those of the Californicators. “Dance to your music!” Lucifer, who had been cooped up in that cramped box for Lord knew how long, did not look too pleased. The thing hissed and snapped at the air, its tail flailing like a furry gray whip, and Reverend Blessett kept shouting, “Dance, Lucifer! Go on and dance!” as he wrenched the monkey back and forth on the end of its tether. Some people got up and started