rev. winchester winston weal iii was neither ordained nor the grandson of any weal, winston, or winchester, but an odd son of chaos. he ran, drove, and dealt the assembly of the true disciples of christ, a motley lovable deck of working class cads and cards who met to worship twice each sunday for services so long they blurred into each other, creating a marathon song of ecstatic repentance so sweaty it must have transgressed at least one divine law. there they’d be: 100 bacchants and their satyrs, arms raised to tickle the clouds of their sins, thighs undulating with mob delight, eyes closed, inward on some obscure redemption of hell in which violation and grace are the same act, crooning songs to jesus, always to jesus, jesus, jesus, grand lover and rapist of their souls.
although the congregation’s official dogma was the superiority of maleness in heaven and on earth and all gendered planets everywhere, the women were the throng’s spiritual center. they knew how to repent better, how to wail better, how to expose others’ flaws better, how to sin better. they were the moral pulse of the assembly, its lived parameters of truth that tightened, strangled, and expelled anyone who crossed the police lines of jesus. the beauty of the system was that the laws depended on a complex interrelationship of the ever-shifting social hierarchies and jealousies, the biblical moods, the amount of debt each was in, the time elapsed from last orgasms … and so were never firm. the 10 commandments writ on water. adumbrations of the new order creeping across the earth like a vast fog from an unmapped planet. requiring a discernment so subtle and sensitive, only one raised in a primordial binarized hyperstatic theocracy could thrive.
a system so complex and fluid that a newcomer would spend their entire first year in holy confusion and tears. all this, of course, was the assembly’s initiation; if you demonstrated sufficient penance, self-abnegation, and masochism the first year, you might be ok. you might get to stay and interpret for others the signposts on the highway to heaven.
the methods of appeasement, to clamber up the ladder of grace, to melt the righteous armor of god’s clique, were manifold. sometimes a simple hug, with honey and vigor, was sufficient. how many shots of eroticism should be added? one sunday, sister vernon should be treated as an asexual virgin, the next as a hierodule, the following as a bored but faithful housewife. one learned the signals and how to adapt. one had to. other times, one schemed for months, meeting in night’s alleys with those who demanded the currency of night, singing louder, longer, falling harder, faster … even then, results were far from guaranteed. the ascent up heaven’s stairway was directly proportional to nothing.
during most of my tenure at the assembly, peggy gooch, sometime spouse of mr. gooch, was the lead holy woman. she’d slip to #2 a few times a year to keep her uncertain and humble, and once, for a few very dark weeks, held the #3 spot. brother grange whispered to me when under the influence of something or other that, during the internecine days when the assembly was little more than a squirm in god’s scrotum, when sister fought sister and jesus still scrimmaged with the father for supreme rights, sister gooch had fallen down the well of disgrace to position 16 or 17 (at those depths, precise positioning was difficult). but no one really talked about those times, nor should they. and brother grange knew it. in the weeks following his disclosure, he spoke ominously of the mortal sin of gossip, how it was evil seed sown on the pastures of divine revenge; indeed, he was hit by a truck soon after; confined to a wheelchair, he contracted lou gehrig’s disease within a year and went to glory almost immediately. such was divine justice and the moral code of god’s children.
peggy was large, hairy, surfaces of soft-spokenness swelling over viperous and rancid depths. no one knew her age or asked it. she worshipped at the back, where seats were reserved for the most advanced and sybilline elders; there, from their just and blessed perches, they could survey the energy levels of the devotees, adjusting them accordingly. knew when anyone had to go the bathroom, how long they were there, most likely what they did in those cubicles of expulsion and grace. saw the flesh each woman exposed, under which conditions, to whom and why, and whether such carnal revelation was permitted according to the novitiate’s proximity to god. even when sister gooch had been overcome by the powers of heaven, swooning beneath the twitching phalli of the lord, the lord almighty, the almighty in battle, a third eye remained open and, if necessary, her profound bulk would swoop to action at the speed of prayer.
her lechery was soft too; you’d see it in the needlepoint of her stare, hear it in her velvet hallelujahs, smell it on her tsunamis of sweat. but a sufficient number of the members had been sucked into its hard vortex that while one took daily comfort in the soft façade, no one believed it. you believed the rumors and the hope. you sang of peace like a river, but you trusted the feral swirl at darkness’ delta. when she hugged me in the spirit of love and truth and love and her folds swam into me and drowning was possible, that soft and mushy womb became home again, a home of light and jesus’ sweet chatter.
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