Bad Moon Rising

JESUS CHRIST WAS NOT A HIPPIE

In the summer of 1968, the good Reverend Cartwright, last seen setting himself on fire while attempting to burn a huge pile of Beatles records, purchased six billboards around town to make sure that believers and nonbelievers alike got the message that Jesus Christ had not been like hippies during his time on earth.

Three weeks earlier, an eighty-six-year-old woman had written the local newspaper to defend our resident hippies from the slings and arrows of those who hated them. She said that given how the adults had screwed up the world there just might be a chance that these young people had some ideas worth listening to. Further-and you can imagine the bulging, crazed eyes of the good reverend as he read this-further, as a lifelong Christian she was pretty sure that if Jesus Christ walked the earth today he would walk it as a hippie. Not, I assumed, in Birkenstocks, but you get the idea.

So now Reverend Cartwright was on the attack. Seeing the billboard, I realized that it was in fact time for his radio show. Lately I’d been using it as my humor break for the day. For lunch I’d pull into the A amp;W for a cheeseburger and a Pepsi and sit in my car and listen to his show. It always opened with a tape of his choir-one of the worst I’d ever heard-singing some song about the righteous Lord and how he was going to disembowel you if you didn’t do exactly what he told you to do. Then the reverend would come on. He always opened-as he did today-with the same words: “I spoke with God last night and here’s what he told me to tell you.”

I’d been hearing his show all my life. My father used to listen to it on the days he wasn’t working. He’d laugh so hard he couldn’t catch his breath at times. I’d be laughing along with him as my mother would peek in and say we shouldn’t be wasting our time on a moron like that. But then, she didn’t understand our weakness for The Three Stooges, either.

Today, as I jammed extra pickles under the top of my bun, the reverend said: “If Jesus Christ was a hippie, as some local infidels are saying, then that would mean that Jesus Christ would sanction what goes on at the commune right on the very edge of our town. A town I have personally sanctified to the Lord. If you will support me with your prayers and your pledges I will see that that commune is closed down and the infidels driven from our midst.”

His pitches for money were the dullest part of the show, and since he was obviously headed in that direction I twisted the selection knob looking for some news. I counted three stations playing “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” a song critics likened to a three-minute hillbilly version of the novel Peyton Place.

I found a newscast and quickly wished I hadn’t. The war the war the war. It had brought down LBJ and had returned to prominence Tricky Dick Nixon.

When I finished eating, I sat back and smoked a cigarette. Right then I felt pretty down, but nothing would compare to how down I would feel less than ten hours later.