Gladys had always been prideful, I guess, or that is what her cousin Edna May says about her. I have always stood up for Gladys when people spoke badly about her, thinking that it was my Christian duty. But now that she is speaking in tongues and does not seem to be able to stop herself, some pretty terrible things have happened which I am not proud of, but I want to get this whole sordid thing told and get it behind me.
I know that Gladys has always had an inferiority complex because she has got that third nipple on her back. It is not really awful like, for instance, a two-headed pig, but it has always caused some meaner girls to make fun of her. I have tried to make her feel normal as much as I can. Like in our freshman P.E. class, when Miss Barnhart got mad because she didn’t dress half the time, I popped right up to her defense.
“Miss Barnhart,” I pleaded her case right there in front of thirty other girls, “Gladys is self-conscious because of her ‘growth.’”
I mean, I tried to be as delicate as I could about it, and later in the shower room, I told her, “I like that third nipple, Gladys. It don’t look deformed or anything. It is kind of cute, you know, in a sick way.”
But she wasn’t having any of my charity, let me tell you that. She dressed really quick and huffed her way out of there like it made her mad for me to defend her and try to help her fit in. I never had a third nipple myself, so I couldn’t speak from experience, but I guess it must secrete some kind of hormone that makes you irritable. She was always fussing with girls in our class and back-talking her mother and her Sunday School teachers. Then she got pregnant by that Manuel her junior year in high school.
He was a nice looking boy named Manuel Suelos who worked out on the Benson farm with five other Mexicans, living in that drafty barn and hitchhiking into town every weekend to buy beer and hang around the bus station. Gladys was working at Woolworth’s which was just half a block from the Greyhound station, and somewhere along the way, she got the hots for Manuel. He stayed around long enough to get her knocked up, but then he headed out for the territories, leaving Gladys with a little Manuel baby growing inside her and, of course, that third nipple.
Her mother Lois kept trying to make it out to be some blond soldier on his way to Fort Knox who came through one night and fell in love with Gladys and then went off to the Gulf War to die. But several people had seen Gladys at various times making out with Manuel on those park benches back in the trees behind the Confederate soldier.
My friend Cloella said, “You should have seen Gladys sucking on that boy’s face. It was a shame and disgrace before God and China. I was walking my dog Peewee, and I came around that corner and heard her over there moaning and slobbering and sticking her tongue down his throat. I nearly threw up just standing there for fifteen minutes waiting for them to stop so I could walk by in a normal fashion. You wouldn’t think that a girl with a third nipple would carry on like that.”
So, anyway, that baby was born, and it came out as blond and German as Speedy Gonzales, and there was no way for Lois to explain how that blond soldier and red headed Gladys produced that baby. By then, everybody knew it was Manuel’s child because Gladys kept writing post cards to Brownsville, Texas. The post mistress Dee Ann Railey said the post cards came back Return to Sender, but she just tore them up and threw them away. She didn’t feel like that there was any reason for Gladys to lose hope, and as long as she thought the cards were getting through, it gave her a reason to think that Manuel was probably in a new Cadillac coming on up to get her and the baby and take them back to live with him in Dallas where she told everyone he was “into real estate.”
After she had the baby, Gladys dropped out of high school and worked at both the 7-11 and Woolworth’s and started studying for her GED, driving everywhere in that old Chevy Nova that needed a new muffler. We all tried to be nice to her and include her in things, but she went on a hayride one Saturday and brought that baby, and the baby squalled and carried on so that nobody had any fun, and Walt Davis yelled out, “Give that baby a taco” which he thought was real funny and several of the boys laughed and Gladys jumped off the wagon with that baby under one arm and walked six miles back to town. We told Walt that he was heartless, but he said, “It is just a fat girl with a Mexican baby. It ain’t a fucking soap opera,” and when Reverend Timmons heard that, he made Walt get off the wagon, so he walked back to town about half a mile behind Gladys, yelling some pretty crude stuff because Walt comes from a pretty crude family. So that was the end of her social experiment.
For a while, she started drinking lots of cheap vodka. She was working two jobs and taking care of that baby she called Darryl , named after her uncle Darryl who was her favorite before he rolled his Dodge Ram on the levee road and was decapitated. They tried to fix his head back on at Maynard Utley’s Funeral Emporium, but somehow it didn’t seem to fit just right. I would have just had a closed casket, but you know how the Holiness are.
We knew Gladys was drinking vodka because Rena Swartz worked at the Rite Aid part time and she kept selling Gladys those big cheap half gallon 80 proof plastic bottles that might as well have liver disease stamped across the top. One night, she got drunk and took off her clothes and ran up and down the street, yelling that the Devil was in her brain and she intended to kill herself and the baby and anyone who got in her way.
Deputy Jimbo Reeves came out and tackled her and she kept fighting and he said she nearly beat him to death before he got the cuffs on her. Several of us asked if he saw the third nipple, and he said he was too busy fighting to even notice the first and the second nipple even though they were pounding against the side of his face.
The other deputies seemed disappointed because most of them heard about the third nipple and they had several conversations trying to speculate about its physical qualities but Jimbo could not help them. He said that she smelled like vodka and cheap perfume and was busy trying to guard his testicles because she kept kicking at them as though they were part of the problem.
After her drunken naked ramble down Main Street, her mother took in Darryl while Gladys went off to Hopkinsville to dry out. When she came back, she had lost thirty pounds and seemed stoned most of the time, although she said it was just “her beatific view of the universe, that we are all love’s embodiment and God’s yearning for fulfillment.” When she told me that at the Dairy Queen over a chicken strip dinner, all I could think to say was, “Well, ain’t that nice?” And then I tried to get out of there real fast. Her cousin said it was just her meds.
It was not two weeks later that Gladys’ mother came leading her into the Sunlight Baptist Church one Sunday morning with Darryl. They sat up front like a proud family. Me and my friends sat in the back and copied each other’s homework for a couple of classes out at the community college where three of us were working on our LPN certification. I was personally glad to see Gladys come back to the bloody feet of Jesus and making things right with the Lord. I have always said that “Nothin’ is too big for God.” I knew God could work everything out, but I guess I never knew it would play out exactly how it did.
Gladys came to church three times a week, sitting up front with her mother, her eyes uplifted like she had rode out the longest, hardest waves, had been slashed and crashed and throwed across the floor, and now she wanted to forget all that bad stuff and just concentrate on Jesus and following the Ten Commandments or as many as she could remember when she was taking all those meds.
Everybody tried to make her feel welcome, although we did not have a lot in common with her. I went up every church service and talked to little Darryl and asked Gladys how things were going at Woolworth’s. She was a little snippy, but I let that slide, figuring that she might not be completely back in the graces of the Lord and was still having some vodka withdrawal which I have heard will make you snappish.
It went on like that for several months. Three of us got our LPNs, and our friend Marvella moved off to Birmingham to marry a longshoresman named Earl. I worked at the Heartcrest Nursing Home and began work on my RN degree. My mother had a heart attack but got better. The Reverend Bobby Reardon got a new job at a saw mill in North Carolina, and the Reverend Donnie Williams took his place and started letting people play drums during the worship service. A couple of older people quit but a couple of other people who liked drums a lot joined the congregation, and we just kept praying and singing and doing what we could to praise the Lord. I dated two different men, but both of them turned out to be drinkers and the last one named Remus Allen wanted me to perform unnatural acts, so I give up men for a while and started working double shifts so I could buy a condo.
It was the year that Gladys’ baby Darryl was in the fifth grade that Gladys commenced to make a spectacle of herself. She was feeling pretty good about herself since she was now the manager at Woolworth’s and Darryl was probably the smartest kid in the fifth grade if you could believe Patsy Dove, that cross-eyed girl who was the principal at Shade Tree Elementary. Patsy Dove moved here from New Jersey and she drove a Volvo which is made in Sweden, so she is not exactly one of us. But she told any number of people that Darryl had an IQ of 139.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
It was the second week in February that Gladys had her first fit. I call it a fit because that is what I always think of it, although Gladys talks about her speaking in tongues as a “gift.”
Reverend Donnie Williams was nearly finished with the altar call, and Nona May was winding down on her invitational hymn “Just As I Am” when, all of sudden, Gladys jumps to her feet and starts caterwauling, reaching her arms up and saying things that sounded like “Dwa-do-may-lozz-reek-zorn” and a lot of stuff after that which made just as little sense. Then she started doing something which looked like the Watsui, jumping and whooping like some crazy thing from Borneo. It scared Mrs. Ethel Stanley so bad that she fell out of her wheelchair, and it woke up her husband Doke who dove under the seats, thinking he was back at the Battle of the Bulge where the Germans threw rockets at his division for sixty four hours in a row. But it was just Gladys yipping and shouting, and by now she was out in the aisle, walking up toward the altar and getting louder as she went. The minister came on down with her and put his hand on her, maybe to sympathize with her religious experience or maybe just to tackle her so they could get the straitjacket on her, I didn’t know which. Toady Meeks, who was sitting next to me, thought maybe she was having a stroke.
“Strokes destroy part of your brain. My granny sat around farting and squawking like a duck for six months right up until she died,” he told me.
The whole church was absolutely frozen in place. You could tell some of the older ladies wanted to go up and pray for her, but first they wanted to make sure she was not just going crazy over vodka and Darryl and her third nipple.
After about two minutes, she calmed down and hugged Reverend Donnie Williams. Then she turned around and faced the congregation.
“I always heard of speaking in tongues,” she said with that Prozac smile on her face. “But it never come over me like it did tonight. I want y’all to thank the Lord for this gift and God’s workings in me.”
Several people said, “Thank you, Lord.”
I said, “Good God, she is crazy as a loon.”
Gladys looked over the church as though she was sorry we had not learned our lines.
“Thank you, Jesus!” she said loudly and thrust her arms into the air again.
“Thank you, Jesus!” said the Reverend Donnie Williams and four old men up in the Amen Corner.
Now Gladys got a hurt look on her face.
“I know you look down on me,” she said, “and I know that you talk behind my back. But I thought you would be glad for me that I have found a gift from the Lord!”
I was struggling to figure out what the gift was, the Watusi or Darryl.
She reached toward the ceiling one more time, and everybody sounded off right behind her.
“Thank you, Jesus!” the congregation chorused.
She bowed as though she had just finished her lounge act and walked back to sit down. The Reverend Donnie Williams stood there a moment as though he did not know what came next. Then he took the bull by the horns.
“This is a miracle from heaven,” he told us. “We never know how God is going to manifest himself. Remember, brothers and sisters, ‘judge not that ye be not judged.’”
“Amen,” said a half dozen older women.
Then we prayed and went home.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
The next morning, it was the talk of the town. Gladys must have known that she had stirred the pot, but when I went to Woolworth’s to get some bobby pins and a pack of breath mints, she acted just as normal as you please.
She asked about my Mama’s asthma and I asked about her Mama’s bad kidneys. I was already at the door when she called out to me.
“I hope you are happy for me,” she said. “It was the grandest experience of my life speaking in tongues. God came down like a thunderbolt and took over my body and spoke through me.
I nodded and smiled.
“It was real nice,” I told her.
Then I left really quick before I had to lie some more. At the Clugg City Community Hospital, three of us sat in the cafetorium and ate cheeseburgers and talked about Gladys’ “gift.”
“Maybe it is some kind of spasm,” Sue Ellen said. “Maybe she won’t do it again.”
Someone mentioned Toady’s theory about having mini-strokes.
I chimed right in and set them straight.
“I think it is the most excitement she has had in her life since Manuel fell in love with her for fifteen minutes. I think she will do it again because it makes her the center of attention.”
There did not seem to be many people my age who bought Gladys’s theory that speaking in tongues was a gift, although my mother told me that many of the older people were starting to talk about her like she was some kind of miracle of Christ. That God was manifesting himself in our world through Gladys. I started to tell her that if I was God, I would have picked somebody other than a fat girl with a third nipple, but it came to me that was not a Christian thing to say.
It turns out that we were not the only ones who wondered if Gladys would repeat her performance. Because on Wednesday night for prayer meeting, when the crowd tends to average about thirty five or forty, there must have been over eighty people at the church.
The Reverend Donnie Williams presided over the services, smiling “like a possum eating shit” as my Daddy use to say.
“Well, it is good to have our numbers increased on Wednesday night,” he said, looking over the congregation. “There are some Sunday morning Christians in the world, but let me tell you a secret…”
Then he paused like he was about to reinvent the Ten Commandments.
“…God never takes a day off!”
He got a few chuckles on that one and a few “Amens” and his face turned red with pleasure, or at least redder than usual. We sang a few old hymns, and Natalie Dawler read the announcements about the Cemetery Clean Up on the next Saturday and about the bonfire Saturday Night where kids were going to get together and burn Beatles albums. There was also a mention that the Women’s Missionary Society would meet on Thursday when a speaker from South Korea would speak and have a slide show.
At the last Missionary Society meeting, a woman missionary from China told about living in a small hut in a village in the mountains where the people ate all the cats. Myrna Sue Hartwell threw up right on the new carpeting since she had just lost her cat Puffy the week before when her brother got drunk and backed over him with a Windstar van.
Mrs. Lydia Dawkins was the prayer meeting leader for the night. She was a little shy and had accepted the prayer leadership for one night because she expected thirty or forty people. The number of people looking at her with their hungry eyes completely discombobulated her, and she fumbled around through her Bible and cleared her throat about twenty five times until it made me so nervous I was ready to scream. She finally got out her theme which was about Job and his trials and how she thought we all have trials along the way. I thought this was probably in reference to her husband Ed who fell off a roof and went on disability and now sits at home eating KFC fried chicken and watching cable TV fourteen hours a day while she works at the junior high cafeteria.
Then it was time for testifying, where everybody stands up and thanks the Lord for his blessings. If you have gone to the same church for twenty five years like I have, you know most of the testimonies by heart. Edgar Lindsay wanted to thank the Lord for his fine Christian mother who raised him right. (Except for the used cars he sells with bad transmissions and the miles rolled back.) Nona Sue Hartley wanted to thank the Lord for her son, Timmy, who was in Bible college at Pikeville. The Reverend Donnie Williams always thanked the Lord for delivering him from the temptation of “strong drink” and the wild years he spent as a bass player in a country and western band. Sometimes he got so carried away with the memories and got so vivid with the details that several of the older women blushed and closed their eyes to pray. That was when the deacon Elmer Cragg shouted “Amen” really loud which was a signal arranged between them so that the preacher would realize he had gone on too long. I always thanked God for my mama and the fact that she read the Bible to me every day.
It was getting on past eight thirty and everyone was just about finished thanking the Lord. We were down to Willard Drell who wanted to thank God for putting a new engine in his Chevy II. A couple of people at the back were putting on their coats, ready for the benediction when Gladys come out of her seat and commenced to jabber and squeal.
“YAWNEE-ZOOKAB-DREMNAUGHT-LOOFAR,” is what that first outburst sounded like. Then it just got more jumbled and she was out dancing in the aisles. In a flat second, Reverend Donnie Williams was down there dancing his ownself. Then Christine Mays jumped up by the piano and started singing “That Old Time Religion” and within three or four minutes, most of the congregation was up there bouncing around and I thought it was starting to look like a re-run of Soul Train.
I sat straight in my seat and closed my eyes so that people would think I was praying. When I opened my eyes, my own mother was up there, shuffling around with her walker and tripping people and they would just laugh and howl and get back up while Gladys carried on like the crazy person that she was. At that point, I slipped out the back door and drove home, wondering what the Doo-Da hell our church was coming to, amazed what a fat girl with a third nipple could do to people who acted sane the rest of the week.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
I did not mention Wednesday night prayer meeting to anyone at the hospital, although one of the older nurses, Leona Simons, who was a Pentacostal, talked to me about it in the elevator.
“I heard your church was jumping Wednesday night. Our prayer meeting was as dull as burnt toast. I think I might get a couple of my friends and visit your congregation on Sunday night.”
She gave me one of those big smiles which implied that we understood each other and that we probably had a lot in common. I smiled and said that the Mt. Holiness welcome mat was out all the time, but the idea of a bunch of Pentecostals really rankled me. I know that we are all children of God, but it one thing to be a child of God and another thing to just be flat out ape shit crazy with eight electric guitars and two sets of drums and so much shouting and dancing that it sounds like a Saturday night strip club. My mother called me that night. She hinted that a number of people saw me slip out of the church before the services were over.
“I sure hope you ain’t backsliding, Sissy,” she said. “We was all in the spirit and you run out like you was ashamed of us.”
She paused for a couple of beats.
“Mama, that is not true. I was ashamed of Gladys and that fakey stuff she is trying to pull. That is no more speaking in tongues than Old Rip, our blood hound, yelping at the moon.”
“God moves in mysterious ways, Daughter. Gladys has found her gift, and you should not shun it. She felt stepped over and passed by, but now she has found her way clear.”
I said something as conciliatory as I could and got off the phone. I was so disturbed by the whole thing that I drove down to the county line to a bar there called Blue Tail and drank boiler makers for two hours. A boy named Marvin asked me out to see his truck and I woke up naked, wedged between Marvin and a tool box, next to a puddle of my own puke. I picked my way out of there and drove home in the early morning, shaking my head.
“Dear God,” I thought to myself. “What have I allowed Gladys to do to my life?”
For two weeks, I pleaded laryngitis to my mother, but she called me regularly to give me a running account of Gladys and the Reverend Donnie Williams and the crowds which swelled the church to the point that they were sitting out extra chairs from the basement. She thought it was the most exciting thing that had happened since the faith healer in ‘56. Finally, I decided that I needed to go back. I was not going to let Gladys run me off from my own church just because she was a pea brain who wanted lots of attention.
Sunday morning, I slipped in just one minute before the bell rang. I sat beside old Mrs. Latham Heppler and her husband Leonard. He reached across behind his wife to rub my shoulders and give me a wink that made my skin crawl. Gladys was now sitting right up on the front pew next to the piano player and she amenned everything that was said as though everyone was waiting for her to give her approval.
I started grinding my teeth and closed my eyes and began to pray. Mr. Heppler kept rubbing my shoulders. His wife kept patting my knee.
“Just wait until Gladys gets started,” she said. “That is when the real service begins.”
Gladys’s son Darryl was sitting beside his mother in a new white suit. He kept turning around and smiling at everyone as though he was a celebrity himself. Six or eight Pentecostals were sitting right behind Gladys, clapping their hands with the songs, something I had never seen in my church before.
I reached the point where I was just waiting for a prayer and everyone’s head bowed so I could slip out and go home. This was no longer the church of my childhood, and I guess I had to accept that. Everything changes, so I was just going to have to find myself another church and let Gladys run this one into the ground.
Then, right in the middle of the second hymn, “Go Into the Fields,” Gladys jumped up and launched into her act. It sounded like she had spent the week on the internet looking up some Cherokee, a little bit of German and a couple of stray lines that she had lifted from “In A Gadda-Da-Vita.” She was prancing and yelping out gibberish, and the Pentecostals were up doing a chorus line. The Reverend Donnie Williams fell down on the floor and seemed to be doing some kind of break dancing. That was when I snapped.
Before anyone could stop me or I could stop myself, I sprinted up that aisle and smacked Gladys across the face. She came out of her religious spell in a hurry and it was not to turn the other cheek.
“You hussy bitch!” she yelled and hit me with an upper cut.
I found myself on the floor but I latched onto her ankle with my teeth and she screamed like an old Blood Hound in a trap. The dancing ground to a halt.
“Dear God, be with us,” Donnie Williams cried out.
“Get this crazy woman off of me before I get rabies!” Gladys said.
I turned loose of her and bounced up to look at the congregation. They were absolutely transfixed like people had got loose from the Jerry Springer Show and descended upon their church.
“This woman is a faker!” I shouted.
Their mouths were agape. They were waiting for the next act.
Gladys looked at me and then back toward the congregation. She rolled her eyes back into her head like she was going into a religious trance and started making burbling noises down in her throat as if she were priming up some more foreign tongues.
“Save this church, God!” I said loudly, raising my hands toward the ceiling.
Gladys hit me high, and Darryl hit me low, just like the Tennessee Titans. I was messing up their act. But as I was going down, I told the truth and dared the devil.
“Gladys has got a third nipple!” I screamed.
Gladys turned loose of me and started crying. Darryl turned loose of me and rushed into his mother’s arms.
While everyone was in shock, looking around for their next clue, I hit the door. By 6 o’clock, I was crossing the border into Florida. Two days later, I was employed as a nurse for a bunch of old Jewish men at a rest home called Dear Hearts. A week later, I dropped my mother a post card when I saw the police report had listed me as missing and possibly suicidal.
It took me some shopping around, but I finally settled on a nice quiet church. It is Presbyterian, and everybody in it talks in quiet tones. Even the minister never raises his voice. Best I can tell, they are all going to hell, but there is not a one of them who will ever jump up and start gibbering in nonsense and call it a “gift of tongues.” You could take a nap during the sermon and not miss a thing.
The only thing that is important is that God knows my heart.
People who don’t understand can just go to hell and see how they like it.
It has been a terrible ordeal, but what does not kill us makes us stronger, I guess.
I feel like I am dead about half the time, and I am waiting for the stronger part, but I am not holding my breath. I have learned a few things about myself, and if I ever figure out what they are, I intend to write a book about it and go on Oprah and when I do, the last thing I will say before Oprah hugs me and they roll the credits is that “Gladys is as crazy as a shit house bug, and you can take that to the bank.” I hope it don’t kill Oprah because I like her and do not want to be the cause of her pain the way Gladys has been the cause of my downfall and disgrace.
They say everything comes to him who waits.
I am waiting.