Coffin Nails and Faith Healing

Photo by Scot Sothern

Brad Pitt and Bass Pro Shops are two of Springfield, Missouri’s claims to fame. Others include John Ashcroft, the Assemblies of God Church HQ, and the time in 1865 when Wild Bill Hickok shot and killed a guy in the town square. In 1967 my friend Danny was arrested and quoted on the front page of the local newspaper as saying: “There’s nothing else to do after midnight in Springfield except burn barns.”

On a short visit to the old homestead, on a breezy October afternoon, I borrow my mother’s car and drive to Bass Pro Shops, a local success story about a country boy tying fishing flies to sell in his father’s liquor store and turning it into a national chain of massive sporting goods emporiums. The flagship store, this one, takes up a couple of blocks of Ozarkian real estate. I remember this plot of land in 1965 when the faith healer Reverend Leroy Jenkins came to town and set up a canvas tent and a couple hundred folding chairs. He started off by telling the congregation they all had cancer but if they threw their packs of cigarettes up on the stage, and they loved Jesus, the cancer would go away. He scored a month’s worth of butts.

Later, with great dramatic flair, he yelled DO YOU BELIEVE and smacked an old gal in the forehead with the heel of his palm. She staggered backward a few steps, then forward to where she started, and thank God in heaven she was healed of whatever her affliction had been. It was a fucking miracle. Leroy had a Brylcreem doo with a curly forelock and he was looking sharp in a sparkly blue sharkskin suit. He zapped good God almighty into a guy with a bad leg and the guy danced a holy fit in the isle. He passed a collection plate with a deep bottom and reminded us that Lord Jesus said: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” When the plate came my way it was heavy with coins and I tried to nab a 50-cent piece but got spotted by one of Leroy’s boys who suggested I leave now before he shows me what for. Looking back inside at the hillbillies through the tent-flap entrance I wondered if this was to be my life.

Now as I walk into the Bass Pro Shops it seems this plot of sacred land has evolved into a great cathedral, but looking around it seems the people are pretty much the same as they were 50 years ago.

Photo by Scot Sothern

A group of marines are greeting people just inside the door. They stand straight in dress uniforms and I’ve got a little Lumix camera with a zoom and I’m looking for pictures. I feel like a spy in an enemy camp. The place is 500,000 square feet and without a single item I would ever want. Huge dioramas and stuffed dead animals are frozen in action. Restaurants and aquariums, boats and all terrain vehicles, guns and hunting knives and bows and arrows and hatchets and axes and nunchucks and machetes and power saws. In the clothing section I can’t decide between a Duck Dynasty and aSecond Amendment t-shirt.

Forty-nine years after seeing the Reverend Leroy Jenkins I google him. He’s got a Facebook page and he sells little bottles of miracle water online. In 1960 Leroy’s right arm was severed through the bone by a broken shard of glass. He was a goner for sure and doctors were ready to amputate when God intervened. God mended and brought life back to Leroy’s arm with the wink of an eye and from that very moment Leroy’s been doing God’s work. He did do some jail time for arson a while back and he had some trouble that involved an older widow woman who won the state lottery and accepted his proposal of marriage two weeks after her husband died. Man of Faith, the movie, AKA The Calling, the story of Leroy’s life starring Robert Wagner and Faye Dunaway, was released in 2002. I wonder if Bass Pro Shops sells the DVD.

Photo by Scot Sothern

Walking around the shop I spy a staircase, the bannisters made of rifles, going up to double doors leading into the NRA National Sporting Arms Museum. I figure this is an opportunity to make the kind of pop liberal pictures that make the photographer look like the smartest person in the room. Fat kids and butt-cracks, mullet-headed teens with confederate flag tattoos, men in overalls with unkempt beards and cheeks full of chaws, overripe adolescent girls with soiled babies of their own, women in clown makeup, jiggles of flab and pierced navels and tight cropped tank tops.

Photo by Scot Sothern

Inside, more dioramas and a shitload of guns. The natives, here to gather culture, talk in whispers like it’s hallowed ground. They are friendly, which I find irritating. Nobody gives me a hard time about taking pictures. Everyone is polite and soft spoken. A couple of guys say “hey” and a woman with a toddler asleep in her arms smiles at me. I make a few exposures and decide this part of the story is over except to say no good has ever come from a gun.

When I was 14, after getting ejected from the Leroy Jenkins Crusade, I wanted a smoke. Across a weedy field from the tent was a liquor store where cigarettes were 25 cents a pack, which was more than I had. I wondered where the tent-show staff had stashed the cigarette donations. It wouldn’t hurt to walk around back of the tent while the show was still going on and snoop around. I walked around the parked cars, trucks, and tractors, through the dirt and weeds, chiggers, and mosquitoes. The night would have been quiet except for the generators huffing away, powering the crisscrossing strings of buzzy bulbs inside the big top.

I was about three yards away from a guy sitting on the hood of a Chevy Bel Air before I noticed. I jumped and screamed a little and he laughed out loud. He was a few years older than I. He tapped a coffin nail from a square pack, lit it with a Zippo, and blew the smoke from his nose. He wore a fedora and a suit with a black tie and tight pants. He didn’t look like any kid I ever knew—he was way too slick. “What are you doing here, queer bait? This is private property,” he told me.

“I’m not doing fuckin’ anything,” I told him, and scratched my eyebrow with my middle finger.

He laughed again, called me “tough kid” and asked if I was a JD. I told him maybe I was and could he spare a fag. He gave me an unfiltered Kool and I lit the fuse with a match. I took a drag and the menthol kicked me in the chest and Kools became my brand for the next 35 years. I asked him if he really believed that Leroy Jenkins could heal people and he said sure, why not? He asked me if I’d ever had my peter sucked and I told him yeah, no, I mean sorta, maybe a couple of times, but not yet by a girl. He tossed me the half-empty pack of Kools and told me the show was about over and I shouldn’t be here. I said thanks and I’ll see you around and he told me not likely.

Photo by Scot Sothern