There we are, all together with our thick hands swollen around our bottles, the knuckles purple and white and brown like the rutabagas we sometimes gather from the ShopRite dumpster for making the rotgut that we don’t prefer but will on occasion settle into when all else is out of reach and one of us has found a place to set up a still.
We call ourselves “The Fellowship Of Christian Drunks.” It amuses us, as most of us have only a couple of uses for the Bible.
Our motto is “When Hell starts freezing over, we’ll be the ones gathered around that last flame.”
Our first use for the Bible:
We seek certain Bibles in old flophouses and churches, in thrift stores. Not the new editions, and no Gideons, but the good old King James and Douay versions with those thin, thickly-inked leaves…Tear a section from a page, stuff it with tobacco. Spark it, inhale, exhale. I have always found the Old Testament burns more slowly than the New.
People love our windy pronouncements, our crusty prophetic faces, our beards full of crumbs…They keep their distance because of our rutabaga hands, potato noses. No one likes their vegetables.
Our second use for the Bible:
Our name amuses us because it promises redemption, but the truth is, we don’t know from redemption…truth is, most of us like having that Bible close at hand for its potential. If Hell ever does freeze over, we’ll tear the pages from the bindings and start that last fire from the last embers of the Inferno…what pages we have, that is. Most of us burned through Leviticus long ago; some of us have only Revelation left because we groove on the metaphors.
The Fellowship Of Christian Drunks! Is there any other kind? We don’t trust a non-Christian drunk, never let one in; how can you sink into vice without a ballast of guilt to make yourself heavy?
Rutabaga hands, potato noses, and in our chests the last beets of hope. The ruby flesh, the pure blood of what once was healthy and growing…When Hell finally freezes, we’ll be gathered ’round that barrel full of quick-burning visions, rapt in our ragged hymns, sucking down the dregs of the poisons we’ve lived by.
At the finale, you will at last love us, if only for the sound of our singing as we fade into the ruins of the only warm place we were ever permitted to live.
