HOLY HOURS

Patches the horse—who’d been taught how to answer the telephone, retrieve a beer from the refrigerator, ride in a convertible, and use his teeth to pull the covers of the bed he slept in over his shoulder—loved cheeseburgers. Maybe you know this already. Maybe you’ve seen the video where Patches’ owner pulls up to a McDonald’s drive-thru in a boatlike and possibly homemade white convertible splatted inexplicably with what looks like brown paint spots, and asks Patches, who’s riding shotgun, if he wants a cheeseburger, and the horse nods and then sure enough, after the drivethru lady hands over the food bag, the guy feeds Patches an honest-to-God cheeseburger. Thinking about Patches and how he learned to do all that he did and whether or not he might’ve cared had he known that those burgers he ate with such enthusiasm had been made out of the meat of fellow beasts of burden, made me think about Mister Ed, the talking horse. So I googled him. I learned that the actor Alan Young, who played Mister Ed’s owner on the show, started the totally false rumor that trainers encouraged the horse who played Mister Ed—whose real name was Bamboo Harvester—to move his lips by putting peanut butter on his gums. This was maybe a better and more crowd-pleasing story than saying, “Though we used to put a nylon string in his mouth, he eventually learned how to move those lips on cue, simply by his trainer touching a finger to one of his hooves.” In 1986, an Ohio preacher claimed that the “Mister Ed” theme song—you know, “a horse is a horse of course of course,” etc.—contained a secret message and that if you played it backwards, listeners would hear the phrase “I sing this song for Satan.” If you were a Christian teenager in the 1980s, as I was, you were no doubt disturbed—and also fascinated—by the idea that rock musicians might be secret Satan worshipers. You might have read Rock’s Hidden Persuader or Backward Masking Unmasked, and you may have watched the documentary Hell’s Bells, in which a man with a mustache and a mullet narrates the ways that the devil uses rock and pop and metal to turn humans away from God, and though a thirtysecond section of this movie focused on The Cure, which was my favorite band at the time, it also seemed that the evidence against them was pretty weak, not only because the narrator claimed that “the unappealing nature of the church and Christianity is the subtle message of the song ‘Faith,’” or because the documentary then featured a shot of the album cover overlaid with the lyrics “I cannot hold what you devour / the sacrifice of penance during the holy hour”—and not only because who could say for sure what “the holy hour” referred to, but also because the song seemed downright tame when compared to hits like “Blasphemous Rumors” by Depeche Mode, which claimed that God had “a sick sense of humor,” or to “Dear God,” a song by the band XTC in which the singer addresses the Almighty and says, “I can’t believe in you.” I was thinking about this documentary—and also about my boarding school’s assistant chaplain, who’d engineered a Walkman so that it would play cassettes in reverse, so students could listen to “Stairway to Heaven” backwards and hear Robert Plant sing “my sweet Satan” in real time—when an alert appeared on my computer, an email from a former student named Angel, who happens to be spending the summer working at her aunt’s real estate office in West Virginia, a state where, Angel claims, there are Trump signs everywhere, and she has to talk to clients who think Trump is some kind of savior, and that Obama is a terrorist, and that the people who deserve to be blamed for stuff are minorities and Millennials, both of which represent categories to which Angel belongs, and that she’d rather be at Virginia Beach, with her English bulldog, or in Atlanta, with her boyfriend, whom she once painted an eight-foot portrait of in a style that made him seem like some kind of baller gangsta saint—with a halo. Thunder boomed overhead. I welcomed it. I was at home by myself, safe in a house, supposedly writing, actually getting nostalgic about thirtysomething-year-old documentaries that purported to uncover the secrets of demon-inspired rock music when I realized that the windows in my car were down. I couldn’t help, at this point, to miss my old neighbor and good friend Chris, who works at the Radford Arsenal, a plant that produces propellant for missiles used by the United States military, and who used to call me whenever it was starting to rain because he’d remember that he’d seen that I’d failed—once again—to raise my car windows, but now that we’ve moved across town, Chris cannot see my windows, and my new neighbors are either less observant or content to let me lie in whatever bed I make, which means that today I had to run outside, into a downpour so furious that it made the air brighter, as if the day had every intention of washing itself clean.