Free I Am The Local Atheist by Warwick Stubbs Page B

never held so much appeal for me
before.
    But when they suddenly announced that they were going to go
“beat the crap out of Jason Ball” I began to wonder just how far
their own Christianity extended. Okay, sure, I was never the
perfect Christian myself. I too had sex (long) before marriage –
shit, I’ll take that a step further and say that I had sex for
purely carnal reasons; I also smoked weed every now and then (I had
Christian friends who smoked weed every now!), but I never, never , decided that
somebody was worth beating the crap out of because they were a
loser! ‘He who throws the first stone’ and all that
jazz…
    I had to ask:
“What did this guy do?”
    Lisa took the
initiative to explain the situation: “Oh don’t worry about it
David, he deserves everything he gets – he’s that much of a
dick.”
    If he was that
much of a dick, wouldn’t it be more worthy of your time just to
leave him alone?
    “ He treats people like shit,” Wendy added from the front
seat.
    Oh I see, so it’s about retribution then? “Don’t you think that’s a little bit… non-christian?” I was
highly curious about their motives towards this act.
    “ It sure is,” Claire said. “The Bible says to treat everyone
like your neighbour – he treats people like shit.” A big cheesy
smile crossed her face as she looked at me in the rear-view mirror
and nodded. “We’re doing it for Jesus!”
    Yes, because I seem to remember Jesus going around and
beating the crap out of everyone… I
wondered what version of The Bible they had been reading – the
Anarchist paraphrase? My initial thoughts of them being ‘cool’ were
rapidly dissipating with every word that came out of their
mouths.
    Wendy put her
fist in the air. “We all in?”
    “ Yeah, lets go beat the crap out of him!”
    It was decided
just like that. But with three chicks in the car and one guy (and
no baseball bats), I highly doubted that it would go that far. It
didn’t of course. But I’m sure Lisa was beginning to wonder the
further out of town we got as small quarter sections turned into
half acre sections and we were driving down Jason Ball’s street,
keeping a look out for that ‘wide front lawn of his’.
    “ So are we really going to do this?” she asked. Of all of them,
I thought Lisa was the one that had the most experience fighting –
the other two didn’t look much like they had ever had to fend off
one of their parent’s fists, although Claire certainly had the most
mean-spirited attitude.
    “ We’ll just rip the lawn up a bit,” she said turning the
steering wheel and moving the front of the car onto the lawn. The
girls were getting highly excited and began screaming with joy as
the car was thrown into gear and the tyres spun round furiously. I
looked behind us as grass and dirt spat out into the air. She kept
the car going round in circles until the angle crept a little too
close to the house before straightening the steering wheel and
shooting off back onto the road with the car overshooting, crossing
over onto the lawn on the other side of the road, running over the
neighbour’s garden, smashing through a fake white-picket fence and
then being steered recklessly back onto the road with all three
girls screaming with so much excitement that I thought my ears were
going to start bleeding. All in all, I was savagely reminded of my
own driving abilities.
    Lisa grabbed
my arm. “Oh my god, that was so exciting.” She smiled with glee as
I tried my best to fake my own excitement.
    Wendy hung
over the front seat looking past us towards the damage we had done
to the other garden. “Oh crap, we might have to ditch the car.”
    Claire didn’t
seem to care. “Nah, fuck ‘em. There’s cars like this all over town.
It could’ve been anyone. No one woulda been that quick to get a
number plate reading anyway.”
    “ Sweet as!” Wendy sat back in her seat as they gave each other
a hi-five which caused the car to jerk to the left. They