The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

Everything about him reeked of artificiality, from his plastic, over-manicured appearance to his name, which was supposed to evoke the phrase “earnest angel.”
    Every week, he called a variety of crippled people to the stage and supposedly healed them in front of millions of TV viewers. He would poke his finger in a deaf person’s ear or a blind person’s eye, yelling “Evil spirits come out” or “Say baby,” and then wiggle his finger until the person on stage passed out. His sermons were similar to those at school, with the Reverend painting the imminent apocalypse in all its horror—except here there were people screaming, passing out and speaking in tongues all around me. At one point in the service, everyone would throw money at the stage. It would rain hundreds of quarters, silver dollars and wadded-up dollar bills as the Reverend went right on testifying about the firmament and the fury. Along the walls of the church were numbered lithographs he sold depicting macabre scenes like the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding through a small town not unlike Canton at sunset, leaving a trail of slit throats behind them.
    The services were three to five hours long, and if I fell asleep, they’d reprimand me and take me to a separate room where they held special youth seminars. Here, they’d chastise me and about a dozen other kids about sex, drugs, rock and the material world until we were ready to throw up. It was a lot like brain-washing: we’d be tired and they purposelessly wouldn’t give us any food so that we were hungry and vulnerable.
    Lisa and her mother were completely devoted to the church, mainly because Lisa was half-deaf when she was born and supposedly the Reverend had wiggled his finger in her ear and restored her hearing during a service. Because she was a churchgoer and her daughter had been blessed by a miracle of God, Lisa’s mother constantly condescended to me, as if she and her family were better and more righteous. Every time they dropped me off at home after services, I imagined Lisa’s mother making her wash her hands because they had touched mine. I was always distressed by the whole experience, but I went to church with them anyway because it was my only chance to be with Lisa outside of the skating rink.
    Our relationship, however, soon went awry. Occasionally, something will happen that will change your opinion of someone irrevocably, that will shatter the ideal you’ve built up around a person and force you to see them for the fallible and human creature they really are. This happened when we were heading home after church one day, goofing off in the back seat of her mother’s car. Lisa was making fun of how skinny I was, and I put my hand over her mouth to shut her up. As she began to laugh, she spewed a huge wad of thick, lime-green snot into my hand. It didn’t seem real, which made it even more revolting. When I pulled away, a long string of it hung between my fingers and her face like apple taffy. Lisa, her mother and I were all equally horrified and embarrassed. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling of her mucus stretched out and webbed between my fingers. In my mind, she had debased herself and shown me her true nature, proven herself to be a monster behind a mask, much like I imagined Reverend Angley to be. She wasn’t any better than me, as her mom would have me believe. I didn’t say another word to her—not then or ever.

    A NGEL IN THE CLOUDS
    Disillusion had begun to set in at Christian school as well. One day in fourth grade I brought in a picture that Grandma Wyer had taken on an airplane flight from West Virginia to Ohio, and in the photo there appeared to be an angel in the clouds. It was one of my favorite possessions and I was excited to share it with my teachers, because I still believed everything they taught me about heaven and wanted to show them that my grandmother had seen it. But they said it was a hoax, scolded me and sent me home for being blasphemous. It was my most honest attempt to fit in with their idea of Christianity, to prove my connection with their beliefs, and I was punished for it.
    It confirmed what I had already known from the beginning—that I wouldn’t be saved like everybody else. I knew it every day when I left for school trembling with fear that the world would end, I wouldn’t go to heaven and I’d never see my parents again. But after a