I Think Mom’s Goin’ To Hell
And I’m pretty sure we are, too (*comedy)
The weekend was coming to a close like every other sunny Sunday afternoon in the summer of 85.
We grew up somewhere in between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace, on the tall corn side of a dirt road, outside Fayetteville, NC. I appreciate the area as much now as I did back then, and that ain’t sayin’ much.
My brother Greg and I had just spent the weekend at our Moms’ house up in Durham, and she was driving us back to the redneck commune where Dad and his wife Jettie lorded over us.
At the tender age of twelve, my brother and I met the woman from the country who belonged to the same Evangelical Holy Roller church my Dad decided to become a bible-thumping member of after snubbing his nose at his Catholic faith and science altogether.
Dad met Jettie in 1984. I’ll never forget it because my younger brother Greg and I met her once before their big day. After all these years, I probably wouldn’t remember meeting my future stepmom for the first time if it hadn’t been for the fact that on the day we met, she slapped my ten-year-old brother hard across the face and made him cry.
I was dumbfounded, and when I looked to Dad for help, my heart sank to the bottom of the earth. He was smiling and looking at that woman with eyes I’d never seen before and a smile filled with something I didn’t understand.
They were married in a fever three days after I turned twelve. That was only a couple of months after she impressed my pops with her willingness to slap his child unapologetically.
This family transition took place right about the time Stephen Kings, Children of The Corn, was being turned into a movie, and by some cruel twist of fate, Dad had married the lady from the cornfield. No joke, she lived in a creepy house on a dirt road out in the country, surrounded only by cornfields and a few other houses that were occupied by her many sisters and their children, the cousins.
We learned she wouldn’t be moving in with us over Christmas break when we discovered we’d be starting the new year at a new school and living a better life in the country. There goes the neighborhood. Literally.
Dad and Jettie built their relationship on the lunatic fringe of an evangelical church, one they forced us to go to every Wednesday night and twice on Sunday. Most kids spend Sunday evenings dreading the coming school week. I spent my Sundays wishing for things that never came true.
Unless it was our weekend at Mom’s. Those weekends away were great. Mom treated me, my brother, and my sister like kids she wanted around; she never forced us to pray, we got to hang out with my sister, and there wasn’t a bible in sight. Thanks, Mom!
So, there we were, riding back towards the armpit of the south, probably talking about the movie Mom rented for us or listening to the devils’ music on the radio when Mom told us she’d be dropping us off at church instead of taking us back to the house like usual.
That was a buzz kill because when we got dropped off at home while Dad and Jettie were at night church, we had an hour or two to pretend the place wasn’t a prison. But what could we do? Mom was driving.
It wasn’t long after that we pulled into the parking lot of the death-star. The church was that big, a massive modern structure with a dome like a planetarium and three huge crosses to ensure everyone who passed by knew this was not a place of science; it was the house of the lord.
The sign on the wall boasted over 3000 members and counting. Having been raised in a small Catholic church, I surmised, churches with that many members were up to something, and it was more than not paying taxes and collecting tithes.
Anyway, night services never drew the same crowds as the morning’s main event, but there were still a couple of hundred cars in the parking lot that evening. It seemed packed for a Sunday night, but I didn’t think much of it beyond that.
Mom drove slowly, and we arrived a bit later than anticipated as she piloted her car into an empty parking spot. We all told each other how much we loved each other and said a sad goodbye until the next time. I watched Mom and Julie pull away, and we waved at each other until the car was out of sight. Greg and I found Dads’ Buick in the parking lot, dropped our bag in the back seat, and strolled into what was hopefully an early night for the long-winded pastor.
It was eerily quiet as we walked into the church’s side entrance, where one of the ushers would have usually greeted us. Of course, we always refused to be ushered to a seat other than the back. Tonight that wouldn’t be an issue because the ushers weren’t around. I always thought they had the best job at church because they spent their time opening doors for people, especially stragglers, and ass-draggers like Greg and me. Very odd. No ushers.
We noticed the same thing about two steps in through the front door. It was quiet. Too quiet. Dead Quiet. Greg and I looked at each other in a state of confusion. We should hear some preaching or singing or someone gibber-jabbering in a language that doesn’t exist. But we heard crickets. Nada. Nothing. It was probably some deep, solemn prayer, so we opened the door with a whisper and slinked into an empty chapel. All the lights were on, but nobody was home.
I remember the two of us, Greg and I, looking at each other in disbelief. With all of the cars in the parking lot, there should easily be 300 people here. Instead, there were two. We decided to walk over to the old sanctuary across the parking lot.
Maybe they were over there baptizing each other or performing some other rite of passage, but whatever they were doing, they weren’t doing it in the main chapel where they always have night church. The doors were locked when we made it to the old sanctuary, and this was starting to feel more peculiar by the minute.
Mobile phones were decades away, and Mom wouldn’t be home for two hours to answer a collect call from the payphone across the street. We rushed back into the main building and thoroughly searched the church. Looking for a few hundred people shouldn’t be too challenging, but something strange was going on that night.
Greg pointed out that there was no evidence people had been there. In the hundreds of rows of seats, there wasn’t a single purse or bible left behind. We’d searched for probably 20 minutes altogether when I decided I would find out once and for all if anyone was here. If they were playing an elaborate joke on us, they were about to be in for a shock.
I marched onto the stage and looked at an auditorium filled with ghosts. Then I began yelling at the top of my lungs, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck this stupid fucking church! Goddamnit!” Nothing.
Greg started laughing hysterically, and admittedly I did too until I realized the truth about what was going on. That’s when I told my little brother what was happening.
Thirty-seven years later and I remember the moment with crystal clarity. I looked down at Greg from the pulpit and broke the news to him. A reality that had just shaken me nearly to tears, but I had to hold it together for the two of us.
I steeled my nerves and said, “Dude, I think the rapture came. The rapture happened, and everyone’s gone to heaven; that’s why nobody’s here. The only ones left are the sinners. And that’s why we’re here. We’re going to go to hell.”
Greg looked shell-shocked and asked, “Do you think Mom and Julie are going to hell too?” I hadn’t thought of that.
All I could come up with was, “What do you think? We were all together. Of course, they’re going to hell too.”
We were beside ourselves. Two boys all alone in a church that should have been teeming with nutters. We were royally fucked. We were on the highway to hell, and so were Mom and Julie. Jesus, this was a problem of biblical proportions.
After about an hour, we decided to go outside to find Dad’s hide-a-key because we’d have to attempt the drive home. There was no way in hell we were gonna spend another minute stuck in an empty church that should have been full of people. It was time to cut our losses and make a plan.
As we were making our way out to the Buick, a line of buses appeared in front of the church and began taxiing through the parking lot to the back of the lower parking lot, where all of the outreach buses were usually parked. The buses that hadn’t been there were returning with the entire Sunday night congregation!
It turned out that the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was having a convention, and all of the most dedicated Jesus freaks in the area got together so they could all give glory to God and money to Jimmy. It was heaven on earth for them. It was a one-way ticket to hell for us.
That was one of the rare moments in my life when we were happy to see my Dad and his wife. It was mostly because it meant that Mom wasn’t going to hell, and neither were Greg, Julie, or I. We acted like it was business as usual when they told us what happened. This turned out to be the most fun I ever had at that church of theirs.
