The Cult, I mean club

Have you ever been a part of a club? It’s great, especially once you are in – an insider. There are special favors for the special ones and punishments for the ones who aren’t as precious. We had a club. We were also religious and in my experience religion and clubs can be a terrible mix. We had some very important rules like no smoking, unless it was grass or maple leaves rolled in brown paper and we were all in it together. No lying, no filthy stories or jokes and no swearing.

Now swearing was the worst offence. Swearing was like, well it was like matches to gasoline. We were Christians - from birth - and as such never heard a fowl word come out of our mothers or fathers mouths. They were saints of the most High God. I used to think they didn’t know any swear words until the day we came home from school and were coughing into our hands “Kuhn, Kuhn, snicker, snicker”. My mother, who wore her hair in a bun and had a very meek and mild temperament, understood what we were trying to say and immediately put a stop to it. Surprise! Surprise! Of course, we had no idea what we were trying to say. She had to let us in on it. We learned that day that we Christians, never swore!

Our friend from out in the country had a swearing problem and yet really wanted to be a part of our cult, I mean club. We did some pretty cool things like float rafts down the Thames river in flood stage, and put firecrackers in frogs mouths, and build forts, and go carts, and have camp fires with great story telling. His parents were alcoholics and swore like bloody what do you call its. The rule was that if you swore we would pull down your pants and brand your bum. Needless to say some where in the country is a guy about my age with a big red scar on his behind. He swore that day like a bloody …sailor and then was excommunicated . We weren’t having any of that in our club. We were a Christian club with rules

Now some times Playboy magazines appeared suspiciously in our club and that was always by some kind of miracle. They had the most beautiful pictures in them that could be imagined. Actually very little was left to the imagination. Little by little the tenants of faith were being watered down and corruption was setting in. We would find extreme pleasure in the little things of life like hiding in the bushes and waiting for the car brakes to squeal as hand full’s of stones would be thrown in the air and come pelting down across the hoods of the cars. I remember the pleasure we found in sitting high up in our perch in the dormer of our attic shooting kids in the bum with our bb guns as they walked past the front of our house. Or the BB gun fights we would have in the fields behind our house. We knew all of the bible stories, but some how the fact that we were Christians didn’t seem to impact many of our decisions. Or maybe we liked some of those bible stories too much and we were game for a reenactment.

One day on our way home from church Bob and I decided to climb up on the roof of the store fronts on Main St over looking the sidewalk below. It was great fun as we rolled up large snowballs and lobbed them onto the heads of unsuspecting window shoppers. We heard a noise and decided we needed to call it a day but on our way to the back alley below a man who lived up in the apartments above the stores caught me by the arm as I was making my exit. Bob had escaped and was now yelling at me “Lloyd, don’t look him in the eye”: Hide your face” I had no idea why that was important. He told me later it was so the man could not give a description of us to the police. Bob was my bigger brother and he was looking out for me. I was able to shake free and while we ran home, the man ran to the police department. We hid in the bushes all the way home as the police cars went up and down the streets shining their spotlights.