STRAY COUNTRY

Family reunion of sorts.  The kind that pulls distant cousin into each other’s orbit.  We’re a long way from summer.  A long way from fried chicken in a bucket in a park.  A long way from a family tree in the corner connecting the vague lines between people.  It’s November.  Long after dark.  The long dark of a junior high school hall.  Two boys and a janitor are about to learn a white plastic grocery sack and a light bulb are distant cousins, once removed.

Ritual you’ve seen before.  One of the coarsest threads in this curious American tapestry.  Once upon a time practiced on occasion, by accident, via cattle-drivers scratching their names in the American dirt.  Codified and enshrined by the motion picture camera for a generation.  Two men.  A couple guns between them.  An itch in their fingers.  Dust in the air.  And American’s most sunburnt backdrop behind them.  Now updated for the suburban era.  A janitor in one corner.  A white plastic sack in the other.  A junior high school the new American vista.  And a swinging lightbulb keeping time.

Phillip Morris.  R. J. Reynolds.

Competing denominations of the same religion.

Which is to say the religion of angel making.  Churches who took the doctrine of the Good Book – dust unto dust – quite literally in forming their religion. 

A religion dedicated to many things, but above all the conversion of men and women to dust. 

And though both denominations are dedicated to the cause let it be known it is R. J. Reynolds who’s made the most angels.

Because R. J. Reynolds’s sermonized cigarettes would become the greatest angel makers of all time.  50 years before Mary Poppins would teach us all ‘a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down’ R. J. Reynolds had already learnt the lesson.  You see, sugared tobacco has a transmutative power coveted by Jesus Christ himself.  It takes a doctrine that’s very hard to swallow and makes it easy to inhale.  Yes, R. J. Reynolds’s and his candied tobacco figured out how to get his religion into people’s lungs, not just their mouths.  Convert a man’s mouth and they’ll sing your hymns.  Convert a man’s lungs and he’ll give you every last breath he’s got. 

But religion, as in life, is as much discovered by pure happenstance and chance.  The specific valence of sugar-soaked tobacco opening the floodgates on folk’s lungs is owing to a strange, sad, and singular fact - an aspect of R. J. Reynolds’s American heritage.  One the janitor is about to harp on -

Because pound for pound sugar was cheaper than tobacco.

Portrait of a smokestack at work, the only work it’s ever known, doing the same work as Mrs. Mary Brogan at the sacrament of her religion – the strange Church of Phillip Morris.  Consider, if you will, whether or not a smokestack and a church steeple really are so dissimilar. 

In the rolling mills and sheet mills, in the harr and boom of the blast fires, iron and carbon are pounded into a bar of steel.  By the process smoke comes out the stacks. 

In the rolling pews and sheetmetal chapels this Sunday, like every Sunday before, sit iron men and carbon women.  People taking a pounding.  Ready to be alloyed.  A fiery process that turns sinners into saints.  A process that uses the hammer of the Holy Bible, the flame of the Holy Spirit, and certainly, most definitely, must send smoke up the chimney – or in this case – steeple. 

Remember, you can’t see men shucking sin.  You can't smell a woman’s prayers.  You’ll never find the molt of a person’s mistakes.  But that doesn’t mean that a church isn’t a refinery making angels out of men.  Angels made from clay, fired by a ghost, with a byproduct of smoke going somewhere. . .

Commonplace – if somewhat strange – unsocial location known as a janitorial closet.  On the short list of places to hide.  Absent from the list of places to wax philosophical.  But this is the very place the janitor of Bonneville Junior High has been rubbing two thoughts together for years seeing if they catch fire.  The janitorial closet.  The halls.  The bathrooms.  His own bush-league ivory tower.  His mop a lectern podium.

Today’s lecture -

How come the churches aren’t as churchy as they used to be?

Billy, Jack and a janitor.  Staring at a junior high school window.  Hoping . . .  wishing . . . sweating . . . maybe, even praying the only thing out there is night.  Stray cats.  Slumbering houses.  Autumn leaves.  November wind . . .

Let the record state that there was something impressively abnormal about the Janitor’s childhood.  From perhaps his third to ninth year he was what we might call a sensory prodigy.  The ability to see through walls, read letters through envelopes, books through their covers.  Fence and play ping-pong blindfolded, find things that were buried, read thoughts. 

While night may be a blindfold to the rest of us the janitor’s got a kind of sight the sun doesn’t set on.  While our polite little houses sown in neat little rows may be a pair of blinders for all, he can see through it still.  The type of man who could look over our tiny little world of tarred roofs, tarred roads and smoking bricks and see something amiss.

anything amiss . . .

Imagine, if you will, you are being followed by a white plastic grocery sack. 

What would such a thing want from a person?  Sacrifice?  Worship?  Or just fear?  What could you do to stop it from troubling you?

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There's a little story about a family in west Texas who learned the gross skill set of butchery in order to survive in the capitalist world.  This same family was later replaced by machines.  Country folk who bent their minds to slaughter for a place in the world and the world spat them out once they were no longer needed.  Some folks called them killers.  And be assured, killers they were.  But let us consider another term for such folks - victims of industrial capitalism.

If a ramshakled family of cannibalistic killers in a derelict farmhouse in west Texas horrifies you, maybe you should have a good long look at the road we're on.  Because there is no outlet this way.  Only the dead-end of the industrial capitalistic experience.