34

‘FATHER THOMAS’

Fat Joe was really fat. I don’t know how much he weighed, but it was a lot. He had trouble moving about and had to sort of turn sideways to get in my door. The very first time he came to visit, he broke my chair when he sat down. I’d had it since the very beginning and I was a bit sad to see it go like that.

‘I’m so sorry. I’ll pay for the damage,’ he insisted. ‘Or I’ll buy you a new one.’

‘That’s OK. It was already broken,’ I lied. It was a perfectly good chair, but I guess it just couldn’t take Fat Joe.

‘We’re off to a bad start, aren’t we? It’s probably best if I sit here on the bed.’ He started manoeuvring sideways but before he could get there, I intercepted him with my reinforced stainless-steel chair.

‘No, no, no! Here – this one’s stronger.’ I liked my bed and didn’t want him breaking any of those springs. They’re very hard to replace. Besides, I had the mattress just right, with the groove in the centre how I liked it, and I didn’t need him ruining it. ‘And it’s not already broken, like the other one was,’ I added, to save his feelings.

Fat Joe’s real name was just Joe, but in my mind I always called him Fat Joe. It just seemed to suit him better. Several times I think I almost said it aloud because he always arrived completely unannounced and I was often so stoned that I couldn’t distinguish between the voice in my head and my real voice. He probably wouldn’t have minded me thinking of him as Fat Joe, though; he had a good sense of humour and made jokes about himself all the time. Deep down, he must have been pretty unhappy about being so big, but he made such an effort to be jolly all the time that I came to admire him.

Fat Joe was American. And while I usually didn’t accept Americans on the prison tour, he got himself through the gates on his own and turned up on my doorstep, just as Mark Johnson had.

‘You must be Thomas!’ he shook my hand warmly. ‘I’m Joe. I’ve heard a lot about you.’ I couldn’t just turn him away.

‘Joe. Hi. Come inside.’ I was used to people visiting me through recommendations, although I avoided asking who had recommended me. With so many visitors coming through my door, it was impossible to remember some guy called Alex or John I had met eighteen months before.

Fat Joe was really friendly and, although he had broken my favourite chair, I liked him a great deal. He asked a lot of questions, mainly about what conditions were like in the prison, whether I was happy, and so on. He was absolutely amazed that we had to pay for everything ourselves and wanted to know how prisoners without money survived and if there were any organisations that supported them.

‘No. Just their families,’ I told him. ‘And the other inmates sometimes. If they’re lucky.’

When he was leaving that first time, he gave me fifty dollars to cover the damage to my chair. Chairs certainly didn’t cost that much, but I didn’t argue because I saw how much money he had in his wallet.

A couple of days later, Fat Joe arrived unannounced a second time.

‘You came back!’ I said, offering him the steel chair straight away before he got the chance to line up any more of my furniture.

I still wasn’t keen on taking him on a tour around the prison, but it seemed that he didn’t want to, anyway. He had just come to talk to me again. We chatted about the same things as before and this time he placed a hundred dollars on my dresser as he was leaving. I liked it when people left me something to help out, but a hundred dollars was a lot of money, so I was a bit suspicious of what strings might be attached.

‘No. There’s no charge,’ I told him. ‘You already paid more than the cost of a tour last time. This time you’re my visitor, so you just pay seven bolivianos to the man at the gate.’

‘I know, but it’s a present for you, Thomas. You need it. Don’t be ashamed if a man offers you something from the goodness of his heart.’

‘I can’t take it. It’s too much.’

‘It’s OK. We want you to have it.’

I accepted the money, but it was strange that he had said ‘we’. Fat Joe was a big man and ate for two people, but as far as I knew, there was only one of him.

On his fifth visit, Fat Joe finally revealed the real purpose behind these trips to the prison.

‘Are you a religious person, Thomas?’ he asked casually, but I immediately saw where the question was leading.

‘Not very. But I’m a Christian, I guess.’

It had happened to me countless times during my time in San Pedro: someone would arrive and befriend you, then try to convert you to their religion when you were at your most vulnerable. The only thing I didn’t know was which particular church Fat Joe belonged to. Most of Bolivia was Catholic, and we had a beautiful church in the prison with a statue of Santa Guadalupe, but we also had priests from the Evangelical Church, the Seventh Day Adventists and even a few Jehovah’s Witnesses.

‘Thomas, do you have many dark moments here in prison?’ Joe asked next.

I was a bit stoned and didn’t want to get involved in a heavy discussion about religion. But I didn’t want to be rude, so I decided to make light of the situation before he could get started properly.

‘Yeah, I do. All the prisoners do,’ I bowed my head sadly. ‘Especially at night. They cut the electricity all the time.’ But the look Fat Joe gave me made me feel guilty.

‘In all seriousness, Thomas, do you ever pray?’

‘Sometimes. When I’m down and I need hope. But at the moment I’m OK, really.’ I tried to slide out of it again, but he kept repeating my name and asking me questions that I had to answer ‘yes’ to.

‘Thomas, do you ever feel that you are alone in the world? That there’s no one to turn to?’

I nodded. Of course I did.

‘Well, you’re not. God is with you. Do you believe in God, Thomas?’

‘Sort of. Well, not really. I believe in God, but it’s more my own version of God.’

Fat Joe exhaled loudly and placed his hands on the table, palms facing upwards and I knew something big was coming.

‘Thomas, I am a Mormon,’ he declared.

The way he said it was like a confession and the words were just left there, dangling in the air, like he had informed me he was a homosexual or had cancer. He looked at me very earnestly, but I didn’t know how I was supposed to react.

‘Really?’ I nodded my head. ‘That’s nice.’

It was a stupid thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything else. To be honest, I had a bad impression of Mormons. Even though I didn’t really know much about them, people always talked about them in a negative way, like they do about bible bashers and all those religions that take your money. Fat Joe was the first Mormon I’d met in person and I really liked him. If the rest were like him, then I figured the Mormons couldn’t be too bad and I should at least hear him out.

‘Thomas, if I gave you some of our literature, would you be prepared to read it? Don’t worry. I’m not going to push anything on you. It’s up to you.’

‘Sure. Why not?’

He tried to leave another fifty-dollar note that time, but I refused. I intended to read the material he had given me, but I wasn’t going to do it because he was paying me to. Besides, if I accepted the money, it would only make it harder to say no when he came again.

The next time Fat Joe visited, things got even more serious than I expected.

‘Have you read the material I gave you?’ he wanted to know.

‘Some of it. But I’ve been very busy,’ I lied. I hadn’t read much of it at all. Since his most recent visit, there had been several parties with the tourists and I always found it very difficult to concentrate on reading when I was high on cocaine. Especially the Mormon bible.

I don’t think he believed me – what could keep me so busy when I was stuck in prison? – but he nodded kindly. ‘Yes, I understand. And what did you think of what you read?’

‘Interesting … umm … I’m not sure about it, though.’ I told him I wasn’t ready to commit. Actually, I wanted to say ‘no’ outright, but it was so difficult because Fat Joe was such a nice man and I felt like it would break his heart if he had to condemn me to burn in Mormon hell for refusing to believe in his religion. It got worse, though. Not only did he want to convert me to Mormonism, he also wanted me to help find other people who were ‘in need’, as he put it.

‘We are looking for someone to help other people to understand. That person is you, Thomas. God has chosen you. The word is only just arriving in Bolivia, and we want to give everyone the opportunity to share in our beliefs.’

Fat Joe explained his master plan: he wanted to open a chapter of the Mormon Church inside the prison itself and he wanted me to be the head of it. They would cover all the expenses and send me the materials and money required to set everything up. He needed a decision soon because he was heading back to the United States in a few days. It was a grave responsibility; if I said no now, I would be denying other people the opportunity of being saved.

‘I don’t think I know enough to teach other people,’ I said, hesitantly. ‘There’s no way I could read your whole bible in such a short time. And to be honest, I’m really not sure about it myself … I just … I’d feel guilty accepting if I didn’t truly …’

‘That’s OK. You don’t have to believe in everything one hundred per cent right now. As long as you have an open mind and you think there’s a chance to learn about our ways. In the meantime, you can still give other people hope. There’s nothing hypocritical about that. You’re a good person, Thomas. Anyone can see that. People listen to you.’

When he put it that way, I didn’t see anything wrong with agreeing to being a Mormon, at least for the time being. I didn’t have to commit myself completely, but everybody would benefit: the Mormons would get their church, other people would have the chance of being saved and I could make some money on the side.

‘OK, then.’

‘That’s fantastic,’ Fat Joe shook my hand. ‘Welcome to the church, Thomas.’

‘Thank you.’

And that’s how I became Bolivia’s first ever Mormon priest in prison. Father Thomas. It had a nice ring to it. Even nicer than Thomas the tour guide.

I kept my word to the Mormons. Well, sort of. The money arrived first, then a week later a whole bundle of bibles and promotional material came by courier. I bought a cheap room in one of the other sections and converted it into a kind of church. I didn’t really know what a Mormon church should look like, but I laid out lots of candles, bought some cheap furniture, set the bibles out and sent Joe a photo to show that I was as good as my word. The leftover money I kept for myself.

Quite frankly, Father Thomas was a complete failure. No one ever set foot in my Mormon church apart from me, and I never managed to convert anyone to the religion. Not a single person. I handed out free cups of hot chocolate, but everyone just drank them then left. Even those inmates who weren’t strict Catholics were strongly against Mormonism.

‘That’s a gringo religion. They just want to take all your money,’ they warned me.

‘That’s not true at all,’ I argued back. ‘I don’t have any money for them to take.’

But even when I explained that it was the other way around and that they were paying me and maybe others could get some commission too, it was impossible to persuade anyone to so much as consider becoming a Mormon. No one was interested at all. I felt bad, so when Fat Joe and his colleagues rang for progress reports every few weeks, I lied to them about how things were going. I told them that my following was growing rapidly and they should send me more money.

If they ever made the trip back down to San Pedro to check up on my religious leadership, I had paid about ten of my friends to go along with the story that they were devout Mormons who came to my little church regularly. And the other fifty followers I had converted? Well, they’d finished their sentences and been released, hadn’t they? They were now out in the wide world converting other people who were in need.