Velociworld

Praise the Lord

When The Bride and I were first married - or perhaps when we were still living together: I forget, as I recall those days with Saran corneas - we lived on the 12th floor of the Chatham Apartments, the highest residence in Savannah, with an expansive view of Forsyth Park. God, that was a great apartment. Downtown, two blocks from a grocery store, two blocks from Johnny Gannem's restaurant and liquor store, perfect. It was an old biddy home, but The Bride's grandmother lived there, and got us an in. There were only six people under 65 in the building, and we were two of them. All for $110 a month, utilities included.

Our favorite pasttime on Sunday mornings was to stagger across the street to Clary's Drugstore for breakfast - fast, greasy, atherosclerotic - and try to recreate the prior evening's events. After achieving a modicum of agreement we would return to the apartment, climb back into bed, and watch local soul preachers on television while smoking gold bud.

Our favorite was the Prophetess Idell Cheever amen!, who was a huge, glorious woman who could shame the socks off the most unrepentant congregant amen!, bellow fire and brimstone from a morbidly obese body amen! and wore huge, flowery hats that must have made her milliner rich as Croesus amen!

The Prophetess could bring it on, and she took no prisoners. Witnessing in the aisles, impromptu baptisms, fainting in thrall, knee-crawling abject confessionals, Springer had nothing on her. She had class, though. No laying on of hands. No audience plants. No money grubbing. No blathering in tongues. This was tent religion with electric guitar and snare drum, organ and lighting. Television as a vaste wasteland? You weren't watching what we were. Hell, occasionally I would stir from the haze and be actually, you know, moved. A fleeting thing, of course, but still. That is power.