Free A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg by Tim Cahill

Hollywood Boulevard as it is every day at six o’clock. On the way a fresh set of Alamo-ites tried to hand me another tract, but I told them I was getting on the bus anyway.
    “Don’t let the Weasel talk you out of it,” another very short Christian told me.
    “The Weasel?”
    “The Devil, the Weasel, the Old Boy. He’s going to sit on your shoulder and tell you to go have some dope instead.”
    “He is?”
    The diminutive evangelist thought it best to walk me the last thirty yards to the bus.
    “Thank you, Jesus,” he said to no one in particular as I stepped aboard. It looked like a school bus, and a capacity crowd of about sixty was aboard. Perhaps fifty were reading Bibles. The other ten were lost sinners, like myself, on their way to the Foundation for the first time. I sat next to one of the few clean-cut Bible readers, a man of about twenty named Hal, who immediately noticed the beer on my breath. “The services aren’t like any you’ve ever seen,” he told me through an obviously forced smile.
“You
 … 
will
 … like them.” He opened his Bible and said no more. IfHal was a hypnotist, he had a serious problem with technique.
    A Christian cheerleader of sorts made his way down the aisle, stopping every five rows or so to break into song.
    My Savior leads the way

My Savior leads the way

My burdens all seem light now

Since Jesus came to stay
.
    The bus, I surmised, was a purchase from the Mexican government. All the exit signs were in Spanish. Someone was reading the Bible verses to the driver and he had to shout them out as the engine labored and the gears rasped on the steep hills of the Golden State Freeway. I caught a startling verse about the “loathsome diseases of the loins,” and simultaneously wished that I had taken the time to relieve myself in the bar. Here I was, I thought, on a Mexican bus, on my way to Heaven, and I had to take a piss.
    I began to chuckle softly, and Hal looked up from his Bible and gave me a severe look, a look that seemed to say, “laughter is the Devil’s tool and no Good can come from it.”
    “Excuse me,” I offered, and Hal, sorry hypnotist that he was, went back to his Bible. I sat with my legs tightly crossed and bit my lip for the next twenty miles.
    The Foundation is a single-story building quartered by a kitchen and a boothed-off dining area where much of the Bible study takes place. The other half of the building might once have been the dance floor and bandstand. It was now a church, set up with a combination of lecture-seat rejects and folding chairs. A crowd of about four hundred were waiting for services to begin and engaging themselves in exalted conversation.
    “Christ is so close to coming. I feel it in every pore.”
    “Amen.”
    “It says so in the Bible.”
    “It’s the Word of God, Brother.”
    “Thank you, Jesus.”
    No one seemed interested in hypnotizing, brainwashing,or even talking to me at this point, so I circulated aimlessly through the well-integrated crowd. Males outnumbered females vastly, and the typical resident might be described as a male longhair, between the ages of twenty and thirty and dressed pretty much like street folk the country over.
    I found myself near a door to the left of the pulpit that said P RAYER R OOM . Inside I could hear people shouting in undifferentiated syllables, without cadence. An occasional man’s voice leather-lunged, “Oh, God, I wanna be ready.” A hand-lettered sign on the door listed three things to pray for: Susie’s health, someone’s sister, who had “a cancer,” and “that God will stop Ted Patrick and all other Devils coming against the Foundation.”
    A young black resident took the pulpit and said, “Let’s hear a mighty Amen!”
    “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-men!” the four hundred shouted.
    This was followed by a prayer, and then the band—a disparate collection of about sixty tubas, trombones, saxophones, flutes, and clarinets dominated by an electric bass, an