An Outlaw's Prayer

In the ancient past when I was stationed at Fort Drum all that was needed to cross into Canada was a driver’s license and either a weekend pass or youthful optimism that nothing could ever go wrong and you’d easily be back in the barracks by Sunday evening. Night life on Fort Drum and in adjacent Watertown New York was…subpar by any standard, doubly so considering I’d just completed a tour in Hawaii, so there was always a temptation to drive north. Most guys went to Ottawa. The brave went to Toronto or Quebec. Me being me, I went to Kingston because it was rumored, correctly, to have a bad ass cowboy bar.

We’d head up on Saturday afternoons, cross the boarder on I-81 then turn West on Canada 401E. Being soldiers we could easily read the distances in kilometers. Being Americans we struggled to match the posted 65 kilometer per hour speed limit. We’d stop at one of the shady money changing places and turn American dollars into Loonies and Toonies, then we’d get a room in the least shady motel closest to the bar. I don’t remember the brand name but the building was L shaped, old, and painted a sickly yellow color with threadbare, out of date carpets and rooms that were surprisingly clean. Not that we’d spend much time there.

Our next stop was the province run beer store where we paid the Canadian government for a case of Coors Light. Then food and sometimes shopping. I bought a pair of brown, pointed toe, cowboy boots on a whim in a shop in Kingston. It was a Canadian brand that I can’t remember and one of the most comfortable pair of boots I’ve ever owned. I wore them until there were quarter sized holes in the soles and my mom and girlfriend conspired to throw them out. After food and shopping, when the sun started to set, it was back to the hotel to change into our “good” clothes and off to the bar.

I can’t remember the name of the club we frequented and I can’t find it on Google maps. I remember it being huge. There were two levels with a bar, stage and dance floor on the top floor and pool tables and an auxiliary bar in the basement. The bands were Canadian, but pretty good, though Shania Twain was dominant and Canadian cover bands seemed to be chasing a top forty sound that I’ve never been a fan of. The beer was plentiful and cheap. The girls were plentiful and pretty and yet I still struck out every night but one. The vibe was laid back and relaxed.

We didn’t know at the time that American soldiers were barred from entering. Because we had nothing better to do we showed up early, right after the doors opened but before the security staff were checking IDs and just assumed that there weren’t bouncers working the door. It wasn’t until our fifth or sixth trip North of the border that we showed up late enough that “Eric” the bouncer checked our IDs and told us about the ban. By then we were almost regulars, regular enough to know the door man by the name, so he made us a deal. If we put our military IDs back in our wallets and showed him our state IDs from that day forward no one would ask any questions. True to his word we never had a problem getting in, though we were the only American soldiers who didn’t, which in retrospect may be why the place was so great.

We danced. We smoked Canadian cigarettes. I argued with a Canadian lesbian who was insistent, angrily so, that Coors Light was a Canadian beer despite the fact that “brewed in Golden, Colorado” was written on the can. We drank so many beers that when we covered the top of the whiskey barrel shaped tables we’d simply abandon it and move to the next one. None of us got laid. I have nothing but fond memories of Saturday nights in Kingston Ontario.

I don’t recall sleeping too much in those motel beds. I have the vague, drunken memory of saying goodbye to a Canadian girl in the parking lot in the early morning chill the day before Canadian Thanksgiving. She wrote her number on a slip of cardboard torn from a Players cigarette package, but she must’ve had regrets and I didn’t have a phone in my barracks, and Canada is a different country. I called twice and left messages that were never returned and we never saw each other again.

Every Sunday morning I spent in Canada is shrouded in that hangover fog. I remember being hungover and finding out the hard way that Canadian McDonalds slathered their hamburgers in mayonnaise, my already churning stomach revolting at the unpleasant surprise. I remember they served French fries at Canadian Taco Bell. I remember that it was an hour and fifteen minute drive from Kingston back to Fort Drum, depending on how the boarder crossing went. Summer mornings with their clear blue skies and bright sun were miserable with a hangover. I much preferred the dreary, gray, foggy mornings of late autumn when the leaves were off the trees and it was already threatening snow. It wasn’t much to look at, but the dim, gray, chill was easier on a raging hangover.

I don’t recall the hours or the call letters, but there was a Canadian FM Country station that played “Country Gold” every Sunday morning. It was a mix of American Country classics and Canadian artists I’d never heard of and it was vastly superior to the Clear Channel, Froggy FM, top forty bullshit that played on New York stations so that’s what we listened too when I drove home. They’d play artists I knew like Ann Murray and Gordon Lightfoot and artists I’d never heard of like Stompin' Tom Connors. They played the original version of “Someday Soon” by Ian and Sylvia. The signal would fade once we crossed the border. It would die before we reached Fort Drum but in the last minutes before it faded out completely that Canadian DJ would play Johnny Paycheck’s “Outlaws Prayer”.

If you can imagine, driving South on I-81 on a cold, October Sunday morning. The trees are gray and leafless. The ground covered in brown fallen leaves and dying grass. Snow from the previous nights flurries is starting to pile up in the shadows and soon the ground will be covered. You’ve got a splitting headache and Canadian mayonnaise rumbling in a stomach that’s had nothing but Labatt Blue and well bourbon shots for the past twelve hours. You’re smoking a cigarette because your stomach is too bad for a dip of snuff. The window’s down and the wind is cold. Your buddy’s snoring in the passenger seat. There’s a new pair of cowboy boots on your feet and a Canadian girls phone number scrawled on the inside of a cigarette pack in the breast pocket of your Wrangler shirt. The radio is fading slowly to static as you inch closer to Fort Drum, Monday Morning, and the Army you’re learning to hate, when a hymn like organ begins to play and Johnny Paycheck begins to sing.

It's weird how much I miss mornings like that.

My maternal grandfather was a preacher’s son. He grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, met his wife at a Baptist college, settled down and raised five kids. He and my Memaw taught Sunday School and Vacation Bible School, hosted missionaries and scholars and sang together in the choir. They, and the children they raised, were devout, non-dancing, non-drinking, Baptists and my mama took us kids to church every Wednesday night and most Sunday mornings.

My paternal grandfather was born in the logging camps of North Louisiana, the son of an orphan and ex-cowboy who ran mule teams for the timber companies and moonshine for himself. They moved to town, and after the Marine Corps he became a postal carrier and it was there on his postal route that he first saw my Granny, sitting on the front porch of her brother’s house. Sometime in the 1960s a Baptist pastor said something to my Granny that made her mad and I don’t think she stepped foot in a church again except for funeral’s and weddings. When she died we had to find a random pastor to say some words because she didn’t have one of her own.

That’s probably why my dad didn’t go to church with the rest of us. He didn’t have the habit. So every Sunday morning my mom would wake up early, get us up and fed and dressed while putting on her makeup and her Sunday best. Dad would sleep in while she carted us off to Brookwood Baptist Church from 8am to noon, depending on whether the benediction ran long. We’d go to Sunday School then children’s church until we were too old. As pre-teens we’d sit in the sanctuary and pretend to pay attention, knowing full well Memaw and Papa could and would see us from the choir if we fucked off. Then once the last hymn was played and the altar call was over, after we’d shook hands with the deacons and fought our way through the traffic, we’d drive home where dad would be cooking Sunday dinner. I can remember pulling into the carport and he’d have Kris Kristofferson playing on the stereo so loud I could hear it through the walls.

I realize now, looking back with an old man’s eyes, that my dad was wrong for that. It was important to mama that we went to church, so he should have gotten up and gotten dressed and gone with us. I doubt things would have turned out much different if he had. I doubt I would have changed at all, but I realize now how fucked up it was of him to let mama do all that work while he slept in. I see how he let her be the bad guy. Mama made us comb our hair, put on a collared shirt and marched us into Sunday School. Daddy let us go hunting and fishing and drink RC Cola by the campfire. Mama made us sit up straight and listen to the sermon. Daddy let me listen to “Stagger Mountain Tragedy” loud enough that the neighbors could hear it.

That’s not the sole reason why religion didn’t “take” for me but it didn’t help.

Maybe it would have been different if the kids at my church came from the same neighborhood that we did. It may have been different if they’d gone to the same school or had the same economic status, but they didn’t. We went to the church my Memaw and Papa joined when they moved to town twenty years before. We went to the church our mama had attended most of her life. We went to a church where the adults in our family were known and accepted, but we, us kids, we were the outsiders. We went to different schools and had different friends and the kids we saw for two hours a week in Sunday School may as well have been strangers. They damn sure treated us like we were. I was probably never going to be religious, but I might have faked it longer if I were in the in crowd. Sunday School, youth choir, vacation bible school, and mission trips, we did it all and I always felt like an outsider.

So I pulled away.

By middle school I was skipping Wednesday night youth group to walk to the corner store and buy candy and sodas then I’d break the glass bottles against the wall in the alley behind the gym. I got in a fist fight with my mom’s best friend’s nephew on a church bus on the way home from a mission trip. Things didn’t get better when we moved. If Shreveport was bad, Covington was worse. It was a smaller, richer, more provincial town where everyone in the youth group knew each other and had gone to school together since Kindergarten and I was an awkward, 14 year old outsider. Moving to Bogalusa, a much smaller, much more provincial, town only made it worse. First Baptist Bogalusa was where I stopped pretending. I learned to smoke cigarettes and dip snuff behind the gym there. I got in a fist fight with a kid who hit my brother with a basketball. I started coming to Sunday School hungover from the night before.

I quit church the second I left home. They gave us the option in Basic Training, we could go to the church services of our choice on Sunday Morning, or we could stay in the barracks and clean the latrines and squad bay until the devout returned. It was rumored they let you sleep in the pews if you went to church. It was rumored that the chaplain handed out cookies. I didn’t care, choosing instead to scrub showers and buff floors with the atheists and heathens. It wasn’t a moral decision. I didn’t care about the racist history of the Southern Baptist Church or the patriarchal nature of American Protestantism and the sexual abuses of the Catholic Church were still well hidden in those days. I was just seventeen and rowdy and for the first time in my life I could say “no” to Sunday Service so I did. Since we're telling painful truths today, I still have fond memories of those Sunday mornings scrubbing toilets in the barracks while the rest of the platoon was away at church.

And the truth is I never really went back. I tried sometimes for my mama and my Memaw and briefly while my fiancee and I were looking for a place to get married but I didn’t try particularly hard. Not counting weddings and funerals I’ve maybe gone to a dozen church services since August of 1996 when I arrived at Fort Benning or Fort Moore or whatever the racist government has ordered the chicken shit Army to call the damn place these days. I later justified it by talking about the hypocrisy I’d witnessed, or the shoddy way that I was treated, but the truth has always been that church was boring and it didn’t resonate with me. I never felt a calling. Honestly, I never felt anything.

I’m the only one.

My mom, my aunt, my cousins, none of them seemed to ever waiver. Those that are still with us still attend to this day and they take obvious comfort in their faith. My uncles all came around as they got older and now attend Sunday services with their wives. My dad made friends with the pastor of First Baptist Bogalusa and they were fishing buddies and pen pals for years. He started attending regularly and studying his bible and I don’t understand it but I’m glad because it made mama happy. Even my baby brother came back around to it, at least a little bit, at least on occasion. To some degree or another every member of my family has religious faith and take comfort in it and I just don’t.

For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me, that the reason I didn’t have faith was because I was bad or broken. I don’t believe that anymore, but I still don’t understand. How is it everyone I love takes comfort in religion and I find none? Out of all of them I'd come closest to the answer to the grand question of what comes after we pass, but there was no bright light when I died. No revelations. Just cold, dark, the smell of latex and the taste of vomit.

There was no comfort in the hundred of thousands of cards and letters and conversations that started with “we prayed for you” as if those prayers had something to do with the winds aloft over Iceland while my heart stopped beating. As if they made up for the neglect that followed when the prayerful discovered I was a living, breathing human man and not some symbol. It’s a hard thing when people tell you you’re a miracle. Harder still when they tell you God saved you for a purpose because in the end I’ll always just be me. I’ll always be aggressively mediocre. I'm still not sure of my purpose. If there was some grand plan I never found it and for a long time it bothered me.

But there were moments when I could see something bigger than myself, something more powerful than humanity. I remember being at the Pohakaloa Training Area on the big island of Hawaii, standing for the first time at the same elevation as the city of Denver with the volcano Moana Kea still towering above me. There wasn’t a man made light for miles and it seemed like the entire universe was lit up in the clear, cold sky above my head. I could lay in my hooch and look up at the stars and it seemed like I could see into the expanse. The universe felt almost close enough to touch and I couldn’t, hell I still can’t, accept something so staggeringly beautiful as just an accident of physics. I’d see the same stars in similar conditions four years and a million miles later as I lay bleeding to death in the Uzbekistan desert and I can still remember being amazed by their indifferent beauty even as I lay dying. In those moments I felt if not God, then god.

I’d feel god again in the small quiet moments, in cold morning woods and the sun rising hot and humid over a Louisiana marsh. I’d see evidence in the laughter of my friends and cherished loved ones. As I grew older I’d see it in the innocence of little children. There's a miracle in a baby's smile. I can feel something lingering in my memories. Sometimes I can feel it stirring when I hear something like a hymn. Not the watered down pop/rock bullshit they play now in “contemporary services” but in the hymns of my youth, the ones kept in a dusty leather bound book with numbered pages, the ones Memaw and Papa sang in the choir.

But, me being what my mama says God made me, I feel it most in the songs written by sinners. As George Jones said, “I can hear it when he sang ‘I Saw the Light’.” I feel it when Jason Boland sings “Backslider Blues.” I believe it when Ashley McBride plays “Gospel Night at the Strip Club.” I can sense it in the faded memory of organs playing on a static filled Canadian FM radio station as Johnny Paycheck starts to sing. There’s this lingering feeling that something out there, something far more powerful than me, is calling me to be better than I am. I don’t remember much about those Sunday School lessons that I ignored, but I remember Jesus spent his time amongst the sinners, the tax collectors, the lepers, the drunkards and the whores and I think a young Infantry Sergeant qualifies on most of those counts.

I wanted a profound ending. I even tried to write one, but in the end I think it works better like this. I still don't have the answer. By the time I do it'll be too late. So here's Johnny Paycheck.

Also Ian and Sylvia because I genuinely love this song though Susie Bogguss' cover is better.