CHAPTER 3
“MILES,” I said, when the bridge was fifty miles behind us, “do you mind very much if we drive home by way of Scranton?”
Miles knew what I was referring to. My parents lived there. I wanted, frankly, to cry on their shoulders a bit.
By the time we reached Scranton, next morning, the story was in the newspapers. The Michael Farmer trial was well covered by the press, but news items on it had begun to run scarce. The grisly aspects of the murder had been explored and editorially shuddered at until the last ounce of horror had been wrung from them. The psychology, sociology, and penology of the case were long since exhausted. Now, just as the flow of ink was threatening to falter, here appeared a bizarre sidelight to warm an editor’s heart, and the papers made the most of it.
We were in the outskirts of Scranton before it occurred to me to wonder how my parents would be affected by all this. I’d been as eager to see them as a little boy with a hurt, but now that I was actually here I dreaded the moment of meeting. After all, the name that I had exposed to ridicule was theirs also.
“Maybe,” said Miles as we turned into their driveway, “they won’t have seen it.”
They had seen it. A newspaper was spread out on the kitchen table, turned to the UP account of the wild-eyed, Bible-waving young preacher who had been thrown out of the Michael Farmer murder trial.
Mother and Dad greeted me politely, almost formally.
“David,” Mother said, “what a ... pleasant surprise.”
“Hello, son,” said Dad.
I sat down. Miles had tactfully gone for “a little stroll,” knowing that those first few moments should be private ones.
“I know what you’re thinking.” I nodded my head toward the newspaper. “I’ll say it for you. How are we ever going to live this down?”
“Well, son,” my father said, “it’s not so much us. It’s the church. And you, of course. You could lose your ordination.”
Realizing his great concern for me, I kept silent.
“What are you going to do when you get back to Philipsburg, David?” Mother asked.
“I haven’t thought that far yet.”
Mother went to the icebox and got out a bottle of milk.
“Do you mind if I give you a piece of advice?” she asked, pouring me a glass. (She was always trying to put pounds on me.) Often, when Mother was ready to give me advice, she didn’t stop to ask my permission. This time, though, she waited, milk bottle in hand, until I had actually nodded my head for her to go on. It was as if she recognized that this was a battle I’d have to fight out by myself, and that I might not want a mother’s advice.
“When you get back home, David, don’t be too quick to say you were wrong. ‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.’ It’s just possible this is all part of a plan you can’t see from where you’re standing. I have always believed in your good judgment.”
All the way back to Philipsburg I mulled over Mother’s words. What good could possibly come out of this fiasco?
I took Miles to his house and then drove to the parsonage by a back street. If it’s possible to sneak into your own driveway with something as big as a car, then that’s what I did. I closed the car door so that it wouldn’t slam, and I almost tiptoed into my own living room. There was Gwen.
She came over and put her arms around my neck. “Poor David,” she said. It was only after a long, silent time just-being-together that she finally asked, “What went wrong?”
I told her in detail what had happened since I’d seen her last, and then I told her of my mother’s thought that perhaps nothing had gone wrong.
“You’re going to have a hard time convincing this town of that, David. The telephone’s been ringing.”
And it kept on ringing for the next three days. One of the town officials called to bawl me out. Fellow ministers didn’t hesitate to tell me they thought it was cheap publicity. When I finally dared to walk downtown, heads turned to follow me all along the street. One man who was always trying to bring more business into town pumped my hand and slapped me on the back and said:
“Say, Reverend, you really put old Philipsburg on the map!”
Hardest of all was meeting my own parishioners that Sunday. They were polite—and silent. From the pulpit that morning I looked at the problem as squarely as I could.
“I know that all of you must be asking yourselves questions,” I said, talking to two hundred stony faces. “First of all, you feel for me, and I appreciate that.
“But then, you must be saying to yourselves, ‘What kind of egoist do we have for a preacher, a man who thinks that every whim he gets is a mandate from God?’ This is a legitimate question. It would surely look as though I had confused my own will for God’s. I have been humbled and humiliated. Perhaps it was to teach me a lesson.
“And yet, let’s ask ourselves honestly: If it is true that the job of us humans here on earth is to do the will of God, can we not expect that in some way He will make that will known to us?” Stony faces, still. No response. I wasn’t making a very good case for the life of guidance.
But the congregation was remarkably kind. Most of the people said they thought I had acted foolishly, but that they knew my heart was in the right place. One good lady said, “We still want you even if nobody else does.” After that memorable statement, she did spend a long time explaining that she hadn’t meant it to sound like that.
Then a strange thing happened.
In my nightly prayer sessions, one particular verse of scripture kept occurring to me. It came into my mind again and again: “All things work together for good to them that love God and are called according to His purpose.”
It came with great force and a sense almost of reassurance, though to the conscious part of my mind nothing reassuring was conveyed. But along with it came an idea so preposterous that for several nights I dismissed it as soon as it appeared.
Go back to New York.
When I had tried ignoring it three nights in a row and found it as persistent as ever, I set about to deal with it. This time I was prepared.
New York, in the first place, was clearly not my cup of tea. I just did not like the place, and I was manifestly unsuited for life there. I revealed my ignorance at every turn, and the very name “New York” was for me now a symbol of embarrassment. It would be wrong from every point of view to leave Gwen and the children again so soon. I was not going to drive eight hours there and eight hours back for the privilege of making a fool of myself again. As for going back to the congregation with a new request for money, it was out of the question. These farmers and mine workers were already giving more than they should. How would I explain it to them, when I myself did not begin to understand this fresh order to return to the scene of my defeat? I had no better chance than before to see those boys. Less—because now I was typed in the eyes of city officials as a lunatic. Wild horses couldn’t drag me to my church with such a suggestion.
And yet, so persistent was this new idea, that on Wednesday night, I stood in the pulpit and asked my parishioners for more money to get me back to New York.
The response of my people was truly amazing. One by one, they again got up on their feet, marched down the aisle and placed an offering on the Communion table. This time, there were many more people in the church, perhaps 150. But the interesting thing is that the offering was almost exactly the same. When the dimes and quarters, and the very occasional bills, were all counted, there was just enough to get to New York again. Seventy dollars had been collected.
The next morning Miles and I were on our way by six. We took the same route, stopped at the same gas station, took the bridge into New York. Crossing the bridge, I prayed, “Lord, I don’t have the least idea why You let things happen as they did last week or why I am coming back into this mess. I do not ask to be shown Your purpose, only that You direct my steps.”
Once again we found Broadway and turned south along this only route we knew. We were driving slowly along when suddenly I had the most incredible feeling that I should get out of the car.
“I’m going to find a place to park,” I said to Miles. “I want to walk around for a while.” We found an empty meter.
“I’ll be back in a while, Miles. I don’t even know what it is I’m looking for.”
I left Miles sitting in the car and started walking down the street. I hadn’t gone half a block before I heard a voice:
“Hey, Davie!”
I didn’t turn around at first, thinking some boy was calling a friend. But the summons came again.
“Hey, Davie. Preacher!”
This time I did turn around. A group of six teen-age boys were leaning against the side of a building beneath a sign saying, “No Loitering. Police Take Notice.” They were dressed in tapered trousers and zippered jackets. All but one of them were smoking, and all of them were bored.
A seventh boy had separated himself from the group and walked after me. I liked his smile as he spoke.
“Aren’t you the preacher they kicked out of the Michael Farmer trial?”
“Yes. How’d you know?”
“Your picture was all over the place. Your face is kind of easy to remember.”
“Well, thank you.”
“It’s no compliment.”
“You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
“I’m Tommy. I’m the President of the Rebels.”
I asked Tommy, President of the Rebels, if those were his friends leaning against the “No Loitering” sign. and he offered to introduce me. They kept their studiously bored expressions until Tommy revealed that I had had a run-in with the police. That was magic with these boys. It was my carte blanche with them. Tommy introduced me with great pride.
“Hey fellows,” he said, “here’s the preacher who was kicked out of the Farmer trial.”
One by one, the boys unglued themselves from the side of the building and came up to inspect me. Only one boy did not budge. He flicked open a knife and began to carve an unprintable word in the metal frame of the “No Loitering” sign. While the rest of us talked, two or three girls joined us.
Tommy asked me about the trial, and I told him I was interested in helping teen-agers, especially those in the gangs. The boys, all but the carver, listened attentively, and several of them mentioned that I was “one of us.”
“What do you mean, I’m one of you?” I asked.
Their logic was simple. The cops didn’t like me; the cops didn’t like them. We were in the same boat, and I was one of them. This was the first time but by no means the last time that I heard this logic. Suddenly I caught a glimpse of myself being hauled up that courtroom aisle, and it had a different light on it. I felt the little shiver I always experience in the presence of God’s perfect planning.
I didn’t have time to think more about it just then, because the boy with the knife at last stepped up to me. His words, although they were phrased in the language of a lonesome boy on the streets, cut my heart more surely than his knife would have been able to do.
“Davie,” the boy said. He hiked his shoulders up to settle his jacket more firmly on his back. When he did, I noticed that the other boys moved back a fraction of a step. Very deliberately, this boy closed and then opened his knife again. He held it out and casually ran the blade down the buttons of my coat, flicking them one by one. Until he had finished this little ritual, he did not speak again.
“Davie,” he said at last, looking me in the eye for the first time, “you’re all right. But Davie, if you ever turn on boys in this town . . .” I felt the knife point press my belly lightly.
“What’s your name, young man?” His name was Willie, but it was another boy who told me.
“Willie, I don’t know why God brought me to this town. But let me tell you one thing. He is on your side. That I can promise you.”
Willie’s eyes hadn’t left mine. But gradually I felt the pressure of the knife point lessen. And then his eyes broke away. He turned aside.
Tommy adroitly turned the subject. “Davie, if you want to meet the gangs, why don’t you start right here? These guys are all Rebels, and I can show you some GGI’s too.”
“GGI’s?”
“Grand Gangsters, Incorporated.”
I hadn’t been in New York half an hour and already I was being introduced to my second street gang. Tommy gave me street directions, but I couldn’t follow them. “Boy, you are a rube aren’t you! Nancy!” he called one of the girls standing nearby. “Take the preacher down to the GGI’s, will you?”
The GGI’s met in a basement on 134th Street. To reach their “clubroom” Nancy and I walked down a flight of cement stairs, weaving our way past garbage pails that were chained to the building, past thin cats with stiff filthy fur, past a pile of vodka bottles, until finally Nancy stopped and rapped, two-quick, four-slow, on a door.
A girl opened it. I thought at first that she was playing a joke. She was the perfect clichéd stereotype of a tramp. She had no shoes on, she held a can of beer, a cigarette hung sideways from her lips, her hair was unkempt and the shoulder of her dress was pulled down in a deliberately revealing way. Two things kept me from laughing. This girl’s face showed no signs of amusement. And she was a child, a little girl in her teens.
“Maria?” said Nancy. “Can we come in? I want you to meet a friend.”
Maria shrugged one shoulder—the one holding her dress up —and opened the door wider. The room inside was dark and it took me a while to realize that it was filled with couples. Boys and girls of high-school age sat together in this cold and ill-smelling room and I realized with a jolt—Tommy was right: I was a rube—that Maria had probably not taken off her own shoes, nor pulled down her own dress. Someone switched on a wan overhead light bulb. The kids slowly untangled themselves and looked up with the same bored eyes I’d seen in the faces of the Rebels.
“This is that preacher that was kicked out of the Farmer trial,” said Nancy.
Immediately, I had their attention. More important, I had their sympathy. That afternoon I had a chance to preach my first sermon to a New York gang. I didn’t try to get a complicated message over to them, just that they were loved. They were loved as they were, there, amid the vodka bottles and the weary, searching sex. God understood what they were looking for when they drank and played with sex, and He yearned for them to have what they were looking for: stimulation and exhilaration and a sense of being sought after. But not out of a cheap bottle in a cold tenement basement. God had so much higher hopes for them.
Once, when I paused, a boy said, “Keep it up, Preach. You’re coming through.”
It was the first time I heard the expression. It meant that I was reaching their hearts, and it was the highest compliment they could have paid my preaching.
I would have left that basement hideout, half an hour later, with a feeling of great encouragement, except for one thing. There, among the GGI‘s, I had my first encounter with narcotics. Maria—she turned out to be President of the GGI Debs, the girl-gang attached to the GGI’s—interrupted me when I said that God could help them toward a new life.
“Not me, Davie. Not me.”
Maria had put down her glass, and she had pulled her dress back up over her shoulder.
“Why not you, Maria?”
In answer, she simply pulled up her sleeve and showed me her inner arm at the elbow.
I didn’t understand. “I don’t follow you, Maria.”
“Come here.” Maria walked over beneath the light bulb and held out her arm. I could see little wounds on it like festered mosquito bites. Some were old and blue. Some were fresh and livid. I suddenly knew what this teen-age girl was trying to say to me. She was a dope addict.
“I’m a mainliner, Davie. There’s no hope for me, not even from God.”
I looked around the room to see if I could catch in the other youngsters’ eyes a sense that Maria was being melodramatic. No one was smiling. In that one fleeting glance into the faces of a circle of kids, I knew what I was later to find out in police statistics and hospital reports: medicine does not have an answer to drug addiction. Maria had expressed the opinion of the experts: there was virtually no hope for the “mainline” addict, the one who injects heroin directly into the bloodstream.
Maria was a mainliner.