I called him Rev. He’d been officially ordained by two different denominations, and so had a legitimate claim to being called “Reverend.” But in his case, “Rev” had more to do with revelation and revving his psychic engine than as a shortened form of the church’s honorific. Never a brainless Bible-beater, nor a New Age sap, he mixed the Gospel (which he said was orginally “God’s spell”) with amulets, seer-stones, good luck charms, and fire magic.
Rev used a lot of different terms to describe himself: pagan, preacher, naturist, prophet, Druid, songwriter, story-teller. He claimed to have the healing powers of a “Reiki master,” and never charged a cent for using them. When I met him, he was the pastor of a Dutch Reformed church in the town of Sodus. He’d been sent there from the mid-west, assigned by the denomination (“banished,” he said) to this hardly-flourishing church in an obscure town on the shore of Lake Ontario.
His church was on the main street of Sodus. That name – like so many town names in New York State – is a mangled version of a native word. Supposedly, it is derived from “Assorodus,” which is claimed by the locals to mean “silver water.” Rev said his call to Sodus was an exile to nowhere, but he took some pleasure in the weirdness of the name.
“Assorodus sounds more like Asmodeus, the King of Demons, than an Iroquois word.” This started him in on one of his esoteric rants. “Do you know about him? In Jewish legend – it’s in the Book of Tobit – Asmodeus was a demon who lusted so fiercely for a woman named Sarah that he killed seven successive husbands on their wedding nights to keep her for himself. The name is spelled a couple dozen ways, some of them pretty damned close to Assodorus. He shows up everywhere: the Apocrypha, the Talmud, medieval books on witchcraft, Kabbalah, the Quran, and even in the Arabian Nights. He was handsome, with slick manners and seductive ways. But he walked with a limp because one of his feet was clawed like a rooster’s. Assorodus – the church in all its great wisdom – sent me here for a reason. Then they kicked me out and left me stranded here.”
I met him at a Sacred Harp sing. He and his wife had crossed the line into my county to join their voices with a few dozen others, singing old, raw, unaccompanied American hymns. I was already deep into Sacred Harp music, traveling from Vermont to Alabama in search of that lost-and-found sound. Rev pointed out that our day of song fell on the winter solstice. While others called this event a Christmas sing, Rev said we were celebrating Yule, the pagan holiday that Christmas had been grafted onto centuries before. “A time of death and rebirth,” as he put it.
Sacred Harp singers joke about “being born with the gene”: either you love the sound and can’t get enough or you head posthaste for the door and never come back. There’s no place for soloists in a Sacred Harp singing; it’s entirely communal and democratic. I wouldn’t call Rev an egomaniac, but he always played by his own rules and any event – musical, ceremonial, therapeutic – that didn’t give him a chance to stand out and shine was not to his liking. So, he stayed for only part of the event. As the sun slid below the horizon we sang a minor key hymn to darkness.
The day is past and gone
The evening shades appear.
O may we all remember well
the night of death is near.
The Christmas tree (that is: the pagan relic of ancient solstice rituals) glowed and twinkled. “Life is ever a circle,” Rev said. “We are born, live, die, and are born again.”
We poured our voices into the old songs – rich and strange.
We lay our garments by
Upon our beds to rest
So death will soon disrobe us all
Of what we here possess
Then we broke for a potluck feast. Rev stayed to eat and talk, but headed back home when we started up again for the next round of loud hymns to light and darkness.
The next time I met Rev, a year or two later, he was no longer a part of the Dutch Reformed Church. His sermons had called into question the validity of infant baptism. Some doctrinally pure old-guard members of his church had complained to his higher-ups, and after a perfunctory inquiry, he’d been removed from the pulpit.
He’d taken some of his congregation with him and was now pastoring a small storefront church. The area’s Mennonite bishop, both kindly and wise, was willing to take Rev in and provide pastoral credentials. But only his denomination, not his demeanor or look, had changed. No straw hat, no suspenders or frizzy beard, no cutesy Amish kitsch. His messages were even more challenging now, and he always shucked off his shoes before beginning a worship service. “We’re standing on holy ground. Everywhere we walk, when we’re in the spirit, is holy ground. So, I take off my shoes and show some respect.”
I went out to Sodus for a Sunday service and heard Rev preach from the Gospel of Luke.
“There are two stories about Jesus and shouting demons and cliffs. In the first one, people were enraged at his teachings, so they dragged him out of town and took him to the top of a hill. They meant to throw him over the cliff, but he walked through the middle of the crowd and went on his way. Right after this, he went to the synagogue and met a man who had a demonic spirit in him, and he screamed ‘what do you want with us? Are you here to destroy us?’ Jesus ordered the spirit, ‘Be quiet and come out of that man.’ The demon threw the man down in front of them all and went out of him without doing any harm.
“And a couple of chapters later, Jesus was met by a man who had demons in him. For years, he had gone naked and spent his time in the burial caves. When he saw Jesus, he gave a loud cry, threw himself down at his feet and shouted, ‘Jesus, Son of the Most High God! What do you want with me? I beg you, don’t punish me.’
“Many times, the demons had seized him, and even though he was kept a prisoner, his hands and feet bound with chains, he would break the chains and be driven by the demons into the desert.
“Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’
“‘My name is Legion,’ he answered, because an army of demons had gone into him. The demons begged Jesus not to send them into the abyss.
“There was a large herd of swine nearby, feeding on the hillside. So, the demons begged Jesus to let them go into the swine. He cast them out of the man and they went into the swine, and the whole herd rushed to the side of the cliff, and threw themselves over and into the lake, where they drowned.”
Rev took off from those stories and led his little tribe of listeners into strange, unsettling, places. Cliffs – the edge of doom. Screaming demons – seeing Jesus for who he was. The power of the divine – overthrowing the spirits of evil.
Months later, we met up again at a gathering of church leadership. Rev and his wife were at one end of a long table; I was at the other end. I couldn’t hear much of what he said, but the name “Camarillo” reached through the dinnertime chatter and I turned my gaze toward Rev. “What do you know about Camarillo?” This was a psychiatric hospital about fifty miles from L.A. The only reason I’d ever heard of it was because Charlie “Bird” Parker, the greatest alto sax player who ever lived, had been locked up there after a bad bout of public junkie madness.
Rev looked my way and said, with real challenge in his voice, “What do you know about Camarillo?”
I’d never been there; I’d never even set foot in California. But having listened to countless hours of Bird’s recordings, and having read about the endless disasters that made up his short life, I was well aware of his time in the notorious mental hospital, detoxing from his heroin habit. He’d even recorded a tune called “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” an ironic goof on the miserable treatment he’d received. Rev, in one of his much earlier incarnations, had worked at the mental hospital as a “heavy-weight intern.” That is, he was called in whenever patients needed to be subdued.
At its peak, over 7,000 patients were housed at Camarillo: a wild tribe of schizophrenics, psychotics, the mentally retarded, people with tuberculosis, and heavy drug users. On an almost daily basis Rev was called to one ward or another to “take down” patients who were out of control. “I stood toe to toe with those guys sometimes, and traded punches with them until they gave in and let us get them into a straight-jacket.”
“Punched?”
“Yeah. It wasn’t pretty. In fact, it was pretty damn ugly most of the time. I took it and I gave it back.”
Though we had met at a Christmas party singing old hymns from the Sacred Harp, we forged an esoteric bond, talking about Bird and the hell-hole of madness called Camarillo. It was, however, Johnny Cash and his Ring of Fire that sealed our friendship.
Rev made no apologies – not for his occult practices, not for his ego or his loud voice, not for homemade sorcery songs, not for being such a wild mishmash of east and west, old and new, Christian and Pagan.
“T’was the night before May Day, and all through the land, all the spirits were stirring, both the blessed and damned.” This might have been a nursery rhyme, or the start of a magic spell, or both. Centuries before, on the Brocken in the Harz Mountains of central Germany, witches gathered for their dusk to dawn orgy. I had only traveled seven leagues, across the county line, not all the way back to my ancestral lands. There were no great mountains where pagan ceremonies might take place, but Wayne County contains the world’s largest cluster of drumlins, (upjutting knolls left by the retreat of ancient glaciers.) These oddly-shaped hillocks, I imagined, cast their mystic shadows on our rites.
On this Night of St. Walpurga, we sat in a circle around Rev’s backyard fire pit. He served pork and kraut, cooked in cast iron on coals. After homemade mead and German beer were poured and enjoyed, we talked about the proper hallucinogenic use of datura and belladonna fly ointment. Then Rev asked what we thought about Jesus and his magical powers. “Ancient healing ways: mixing mud and spittle and putting it on a blind man’s eyes to restore his sight. That’s magic. Throwing out demons, laying on hands, raising the dead. That’s magic too.”
As the coals were burning low, Rev brought out cornhusk effigies. “Jesus used magic,” he said, with not a flicker of doubt in his voice. “Jesus was a magician.” And with a sly smile, he added, “And The Greatest Cowboy of Them All.”
I didn’t follow.
“You don’t know that song? I’ve got the album somewhere. I’ll show you later.”
It’s cool these days to say you like Johnny Cash. But in 1979, when he recorded “The Greatest Cowboy of Them All” for his album A Believer Sings the Truth, no punks, metal heads, or so-called Americana artists were listening to the gospel sound of Johnny Cash.
When he says that Jesus is his hero, he means it. With reverb-soaked rhythm guitar right out of his early Sun recordings, “The Greatest Cowboy” has an archaic feel. He’s got some back-up ghost-girl singers, but mostly it’s guitar and the big basso voice, singing the praise of the Jesus in rattlesnake boots and Stetson. “Some people brush off the song is just juvenile nonesense.” Rev said. “Something myth-drunk boys might think was the height of legendary cool. I say the song is a glimpse of Judgement Day.”
There’s no mention of the cross, no sermons, no Easter triumph. This Jesus doesn’t talk. He acts: riding the dawn, taking us through the wire, loving his doggies, stooping down to save a fallen maverick. The Second Coming Jesus looms here too, as American as an ancient Jewish messiah can get. Like an updating of “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” the song conjures a squadron of sunrise angelic cowboys with rifles, six shooters, cigars and whiskey on their breath.
“Jesus with cowboy boots,” Rev said. He did a lot of traveling on the cheap, pulling a small camper behind his car, and on one of his trips he paid his respects to the Lone Star Christ. “He’s up in the northeast corner of Texas, near the Red River. He’s carved out of granite and stands over the grave of Willet Babcock in Evergreen Cemetery in Paris, Texas. I saw him with my own eyes.”
What makes this statue famous are the cowboy boots that Jesus wears, peeking out from under the hem of his robe. Maybe he’s supposed to be on the road to Golgotha, taking a little rest before getting nailed, and grabbing the opportunity to show off his fancy footwear.
“Some people say it’s not even the Messiah, but some kind of grieving angel. Beardless, almost girlish, leaning on the cross like the swooning women in so many Rock of Ages tattoos. Or – I imagine – even more troubling to the average Texan admiring the stone is his air of foreignness. Even with the snazzy boots, maybe he’s not American at all. More than one person who’s spent time there has noticed that the sleepy vaguely-Asian face looks more like a traditional Buddha than Jesus.”
This makes Rev smile. “I don’t presume to be an expert on Texan messiahs, but I like the idea that a Chinese or Indian holy man – wearing cowboy boots – has been seen impersonating Jesus seventy-five miles from Dallas.”
A fire-eaten log caved in, casting a cloud of sparks. Rev nodded, as though acknowledging that he’d received a message. He gave each of us a cornhusk doll and also various colors of thread. “You can think of anyone you like. Tie the colors around the doll and put it in the fire. It’s not a curse. We’re calling them from the shadows, liberating the powers, opening them up, sending them out, into the sky. You don’t have to believe anything. Just do it and see what happens.” I agreed: belief is just verbal assent to unprovable statements. But ritual actions, devotion, lost and found songs, sitting in a ring around glowing coals – these can make a difference.
I asked for some black thread, and wound this around my effigy. Then in Rev’s kitchen I found some hot sauce and gave the head a good dousing. One by one we consigned the dolls to the flames. I was last. Kneeling, I sang the first few lines of “Ring of Fire,” thinking of Johnny Cash, calling to his spirit.
My little Man in Black caught and went up quickly. What, I wondered, is the burning thing Johnny Cash sang about so passionately? Perhaps the sun in eclipse, the circle of darkness and the blazing corona that after a few short minutes must disappear. A fiery fleeting zero in the sky.
Down – down – down. Round and round. Though “Ring of Fire” is attributed to June Carter Cash and Merle Kilgore, Johnny’s first wife insisted that “Johnny wrote that song, while pilled-up and drunk, about a certain private body part.” Yes indeed, “love is a burning thing.” It could, however, have other, more esoteric meanings. A wedding band throbbing red hot on the adulterer’s finger, the concentric circles of Dante’s hell, the noontime sun making me blind, a flaming hoop for a tiger to jump through, an angelic halo, or Satan’s jeweled crown?
Johnny Cash’s first wife insisted that the Ring of Fire was the infernal heat in her secret nether regions. Who was I to cast doubt on such a beautiful thought?
And using a corn husk doll to conjure the spirit of Johnny Cash? The great singer would say “no way – absolutely not” to such an idea. He’d call this sacrilege, or blasphemy, or idolatry. That’s okay though. I don’t mind a little pushback from the world of the dead. Prophets and saints, once they’ve gone on, are public domain. Look what happened to the other J.C. after he was killed. They called him a superstar and the son of God and made him wear a silky bathrobe.
I’m not suggesting that Johnny Cash was God’s direct male descendent. But some say that he was known to enter into the holy realms. If you pop enough Benzedrine and Dexedrine, if you stay up three or four days straight, eating speed and singing about love, murder, and God, you’ll see some visions too. The Man in Black comes to me in dreams sometimes, and in these nocturnal visitations, I can’t tell if he’s dead or alive, which side of the line (if indeed there is a line separating death from life) he’s on now.
Never sure of his own redemption, never entirely free from the amphetamines and barbiturates that slammed him back and forth throughout his earthly life, Johnny Cash always brought a sadness and a gnawing doubt to even the most conventional Christian tunes. “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”, “Oh Bury Me Not”, “Wayfaring Stranger”, and his surpremely doom-struck “The Man Comes Around” – all of these are built on unanswerable questions. How much of this Christian story, they seem to ask, can I trust? Will this get me past my own private lies, weakness, denial, sin?
“The Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea” had been recorded a number of times before Johnny Cash’s version. It’s the only song I know that rhymes “old country church” with “stagger and lurch.” Like the demoniac who called himself Legion, the drunk calls out, “Lord, have mercy on me.” And while the Louvin Brothers’ version, with Ira (a chronic alcoholic) singing a high mournful keen, is both heartfelt and heartsick, Johnny Cash gives the song a deeper doomy gravitas. There was no way he could have gotten away with changing the title to “The Kneeling Speed Freak’s Plea,” but listening to him sing about graves and “coming one day too late” to say goodbye to his dying mother really got to me.
Nobody ever mistook Rev for Johnny Cash, though they were both a few inches over six feet, broad in the chest and strong in the arms, though they both did songs of guilt and redemption with rock solid conviction. Rev played some guitar, but it was the depths of his voice – like Johnny Cash – that set him apart when he got to singing.
Neither were saints and neither made any apologies for what they’d done. (Rev was working at Camarillo, which is only six hours by car from Folsom Prison, when the Man in Black recorded his most remarkable album there.) Johnny Cash did more drugs when he was young and played much bigger venues. Rev did more fighting with his fists when he was young and dared to ask harder questions, if only at the fire circle in his back yard.
“What’s wrong with calling Jesus a magician? Nothing, as far as I’m concerned.” Then he said we should tell who our little corn husk effigy represented. Grandparents, teachers, a twin brother: they were refined and released in the fire. When it was my turn, I told them.
Rev was directly opposite me. I could see him, and he could see me, through the waves of heat and tendrils of smoke. I hesitated, but not long. “Johnny Cash.”
Rev nodded his approval. “Damn straight. The Man in Black.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right. And the Ring of Fire.”