Faith Healers Dime Story

My mom’s friend, named Gina, freaked out. We were watching Benny Hinn the faith healer in the trailer she shared with her mother. I was a teenager. Mom told me later that Gina went to a faith healer, a dwarf who rode on a skateboard, and was cured of her stuttering. “I'm anxious. I'm anxious,” she said while we were watching Benny Hinn. My mother used Jesus to calm her down. I used to have a friend whose mother would comfort his schizophrenic older brother using Bible verses. He remembered that as traumatic as well. At least Gina wasn't a sibling, only a family friend. I told another friend about Gina's seizures and stuttering, and she said, “Poor thing.” She had empathy for her, but she hadn't been subjected to her directly. From being exposed to Gina, I learned what grand maul seizures were. I wonder what ailment caused Gina's severe chronic stuttering. The stuttering I believe was a neurological or physiological handicap. It went beyond nervousness: it had to do with the connection of neurons between her brain and the muscles that moved her jaw. I watched her struggle to complete sentences, fighting the structure of her bones, tendons, muscles, ligaments, and epithelial tissue to get words out. Anything she said would have to be Very Important to be worth the effort.

God was Worth the Effort to Speak. “I have to go to the Bathroom!” was not Worth the Effort.” Neither was, “I'm bored!” “The Kids Don't Like Me!” “Why do we live in a trailer, mom?” “Why’s Minnie Mouse acting strange again?” (Minnie Mouse was a chihuahua with epilepsy, just like her owners.) “Why did Dad leave?” “I r-r-r-r-re-j-j-j-joiced on that day!” she said, showing me an article about a court ruling allowing prayer in public schools. School prayer was important enough for her to try to speak about.         

I theorized that God Gives Poor People Problems they can't solve so they aren't too Upset about Living in a Trailer. If you have to overcome a Speech Impediment, are you going to Waste that Time on Complaining? You either pray to be healed, or pray for a better life in Heaven.

Benny Hinn the Faith Healer provided background noise and atmosphere for the trailer home where one mother and daughter set their scene of neurological dysfunction, which leads to family dysfunction and economic dysfunction. Nothing is solved. It made Renae Meade and her Mother whose Name I Can't Remember Happy to watch Benny Hinn on TV. I used to envy Renae because she was Thin. Her husband was Obese. He sat on my mother's wicker couch and Broke It. If I'd said, “Whatever, mother,” and not let it Bother Me So Much that I couldn't have a Normal Family, it might have been one more factor that could have let me keep my job. If I hadn't gotten Upset when I heard that Renae and her Husband didn't have a refrigerator or a stove where they lived in Roswell. I saw how close to the brink I was. I didn't want to go there. But God wouldn't let me be better than them.

Gina never went to college, I think. What I mean by getting a college education is getting  well-rounded liberal arts education, the type of education where you’re exposed to things like sociology, literature, and comparative religions. Gina saw the faith healer with the skateboard at a hellfire and brimstone church. What bothers me about Renae was that she never got the kind of education where she’d look askance at that type of fundamentalist religion. Also Gina wouldn’t believe in equal rights for gays and lesbians. And I do. They’re one thing I think is worth the effort to speak. I was reading a library book about the gay revolution that said it helped everybody, the way they went from marginalized to mainstream. Renae wouldn’t listen to shows like “This Way Out” on KUNM like I do. When I was doing worse mentally, I thought that God was punishing me for listening to programs like that, and for believing in gay rights. Really I was just punishing myself.

My mother was friends to the “village idiots”. Another friend, Claire, called her every day asking for rides to Wal-Mart. Claire was developmentally disabled. She went to psychosocial rehab. She’d walk around saying Wesley Snipes was her boyfriend. I know… combine Claire with Gina in some way. Such as make it so her husband gives her beatings with his cane. And I threatened to call adult protective services about that when my mom was visiting me once. (Fiction)

I read this at Dime Stories, a three-minute prose open mike. I don’t like it, though, and it wouldn’t win, because it doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end. There was a featured performer who also was part of the OutSpoken queer poetry slam. She didn’t worry as much as I do about what her family thinks of her. She doesn’t live in a stupid community for the mentally ill either. When she found herself jobless in the bay area, she advertised on Craigslist as an energy healer. She learned to do things like make “yummy noises.” She said “yummy noises” were like what you’d make if you were trying to seduce a fortysomething guy with chest hair coming out of his shirt, or were trying to get a baby to eat vegetable flavored baby food. She became a faith healer, but a different kind that the faith healer I wrote about in my story. I wonder how I can break into this market, how I can make my story about the faith healer sound as compelling.

There was also a young Hispanic guy with a detailed tattoo portrait of Charles Darwin on his arm. He wrote about his grandfather who has Alzheimer’s. His grandfather thinks that all people in their thirties are his grandchildren. Two men in their thirties tried to rob him. He saw them in their ski masks and made a comment about youth fashion today. “You look like you’re going to rob the place,” he said. He told them to get him a beer. After that, they left. He won, he outsmarted them without knowing it, because of his Alzheimer’s. My story about Gina doesn’t have a positive twist like that story does. I don’t know how to give it one.

I do remember that they laughed at the part when I said that God gives poor people problems so they can’t complain. So that’s the type of thing I need to do more of. One problem is that I don’t like Gina as a character. I’m still angry at her. I am angry because thinking about her makes me think it's not okay to be me. It makes me think that just because she was conservative, I have to be conservative. It's hard to be liberal when I equate liberalism with coolness and popularity, two things I write about ad nauseum.

I need to think about what I think is Worth The Effort to speak. Maybe I don't think anything is Worth The Effort. And that's not a good place to be in.