So, in the spring of '67 they kicked me out of high school a month before I was supposed to graduate. Wrapping up thirteen years of "education" with nothing but a footprint on your ass is pretty disheartening, but these things happen. What's more, the momentum of my expulsion hurled me away from home and onto the road, and for a couple years I bummed around the Great Midwest and down into Texas and even out to New Mexico. I never made it to the West Coast, which I still regret. Seems I had an invisible rope attached to me, and whenever the centripetal loop of my wandering reached some invisible apogee, the rope would start winding itself around the center pole and pull me back to Stella. From this I derived a maxim: Life is like a game of tether ball, round and round with nothing but the amusement it affords us to reward the activity. That may sound nihilistic, but it's not. Because of the amusement.
You might think I had a swell time hitchhiking and hanging out in the high times of the late '60's, but you'd be wrong. If you read the "Meditation on Aunt Prim," you'll see that I wasn't the iconic, long haired, doe-eyed Lothario who graced album covers and appeared in movies. I weighed maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, which is damned skinny even for a fellow five and a half feet tall. Smoking Camels didn't help my height or my weight. Or complexion. True, my hair was long but not sexy long. It poofed out around my head like the hair-doo of a fifty-year-old woman. I looked like my mother. I tried growing a mustache but only managed to sprout a few pitiable hairs. I was eighteen but looked fifteen. It was a hell of a time, but not in the good way.
In short, I was a prime candidate for a cult because cults prey on the depressed and the dispossessed, the lost and lonely who can no longer abide their insignificance and will do anything for relief. In our non-verbal desperation, the lost and lonely cry out, "Take me, take me." I think it was Groucho Marx who said he refused to join a club that would have him as a member. Well, people accepted into a cult don't have enough self-awareness to recognize its open arms as a warning rather than a welcome.
Anyhow, it was mid-September, and I was trudging down Highway 50 with my backpack and guitar case—everyone carried a guitar in those days—when a car pulled up behind me and a dude hollered out, "Where you going?"
I turned around. "Nowhere. I'm just going."
"We're headed to Topeka."
"Okay."
"You want to go with us?" I wasn't sure, so I started walking again.
"Hang on." The fellow on the passenger side got out and walked up to me. "I'm Randy." He was a pretty big guy, average height but stout, and he had long brown hair and a Fu Manchu.
"I'm Otis." We shook hands.
"You ought to come with us."
"Why?"
"Why not? Let me help you with your backpack."
"Okay."
"Wow. That's heavy. What you got in there? Your mother?"
"That's a weird thing to say." "No."
Then he reached for my guitar, but I said, "I'll hang on to that."
"Suit yourself."
Randy put my pack in the trunk, and I squeezed in the back seat with my guitar. The car was about as classy as a potato dumpling and comfortable as a thumbtack. Even as short as I am, I had to sit cross-legged.
"Sorry there's not much room back there. I'm Ger." The driver was looking at me in the rearview mirror and smiling. He looked kind of like Paul McCartney with a neat little cropped beard. His eyes looked sad even when he was smiling. My envy was excruciating.
"I'm Otis."
Ger put on the blinker and pulled onto the highway. Then Randy craned around and smiled. They were a couple of smilers.
"Where you coming from?"
"Dallas."
"What's in Dallas?"
"Nothing but a good reason to get out of Dallas."
But Randy didn't give up. "You don't look very comfortable."
"I'm alright."
"It's a Morris."
"Huh?"
"The car. It's a Morris 1800. British. That's why it's so small."
Ger's face in the rearview again. "You hungry?"
"Yes."
"We're going to eat with some friends. Would you like to join us?"
"I guess. How long will it be?"
"A couple hours. They'll have supper ready."
Randy asked, "What kind of guitar do you have?"
"Gibson. It's a Hummingbird."
"Cool. You any good?"
"What's good enough for me has never been good enough for anybody else." That shut them up for a while.
I woke up to Ger shaking me gently by the shoulder. "Otis. We're taking a break to stretch our legs." He opened the door, and I unknotted myself and got out.
"Where are we?" Behind us the sun was beginning to set, and in front of us was a river. There was a covered picnic table on a concrete pad, and someone had left two empty Coke cans on the table. One of the cans had cigarette ashes on top. No one else was at the roadside park.
"That's the Wakarusa River. We're outside Topeka."
I thought, Why'd we stop if we're almost where we're going? But I asked, "The Waka-what?"
"Wakarusa. It means 'hip deep.'"
"I need to pee, or I'll be hip deep." I went and peed in the river.
When I was coming back, Ger and Randy were sitting on the hood of the car and smiling, of course.
"Feel better?" Randy asked.
What do you think? But I said, "We ready to go?"
"Not yet." Ger slid forward off the hood. "Otis, Randy and I just came from the California coast, and we saw something there we'd never seen before."
Okay. Here it comes. I knew it.
"People, young people, were giving their hearts to Jesus and being baptized in the Pacific Ocean. Otis, we felt the Spirit in a way we never had before. It was amazing!"
I didn't say anything.
Ger went on. "There were people being healed from addiction and some had illnesses that just went away."
"And you're telling me this because—?"
"Because we want you to know Jesus like we do." Ger's handsome face was ecstatic, practically glowing with zeal and love. "Do you know Jesus?"
"I guess so. My folks and I were watching a Billy Graham Crusade, and at the end Ethel Waters was singing 'Just As I Am,' and I went in my bedroom and asked Jesus into my heart."
"That's wonderful!" Ger was smiling, and I thought maybe I had slipped the noose.
By now, Randy had joined us. He put his hand on my shoulder. "You may be a Christian, Otis, but have you been walking in God's power?"
You could tell by looking at me I wasn't walking in anyone's power. Remember? Five and a half feet tall, 120 pounds, bad skin, big hair, going nowhere. But I said, "I don't know."
"Otis, we want you to have the power! Whatever you've done and whatever you feel inside, God can transform it with his Spirit, and—you'll be—somebody in the name of JEE-sus." I had never heard the name of Jesus said like that, and it was impressive, but what really hooked me was the "you'll be somebody." I didn't care whose name it was in.
I said, "Okay."
But Randy said, "Not yet. You're crawling with demons. I see 'em all over you."
"What? Are you saying I'm demon possessed?" I didn't like that at all.
"Not possessed. Obsessed. They're on you, not in you."
"What do I do?"
"We're going to drive them away from you!"
The next thing I knew Randy and Ger were speaking in tongues and putting their hands on my head and calling down the Holy Ghost.
Then Randy started yelling, "What is your name?"
And from somewhere I said, "Lust." I had, in fact, been obsessed by lust for some time.
"In the name of JEE-sus, I rebuke Lust. What is your name?"
"Homosexuality." That surprised me as much as it did them.
I had never had a homosexual experience in my life. And I never had those "urges." I'm not being judgey here; I'm just saying that ever since I saw a Playboy magazine at the age of twelve, I had been obsessed with ivory skin and coral nipples and blond hair, but I never thought about guys that way. Problem is when you're a little fellow with bad skin, and you're not getting any, you start worrying if you might be a homosexual, and maybe you haven't discovered it yet. For whatever reason, I said, "Homosexuality," and Randy had something to hold over me.
By now it had gotten dark. They were still praying in tongues and asking, "What is your name?" and I kept creating demons I feared I might have, and Randy kept rebuking them, until finally, I closed my eyes and saw a light emerging from somewhere, a greenish glow like what you see in a cave when you don't have a flashlight, and you're straining hard to see. The light rolled over me, and I started speaking in tongues and raising my hands in praise. And sure enough, I felt like somebody.