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11/29/2022 0 Comments Rocky
Rocky also had some kooky ideas kicking around in his head if you got to know him – and I’ve always had a soft spot for free-thinkers. For instance, he had it figured that dinosaurs were fake. According to Rocky, the T-Rex and Brontosaurus never walked the earth. Whenever I asked him how he could believe such a thing, all he’d say was, “I have my reasons,” with a mysterious twinkle in his eye. Good stuff. I could respect that. Adding icing to the cake, Rocky had a groovy walk-in finished basement at his house that had a couple of couches, a TV, and ice-cold A/C – it was the perfect place to cool off on a hot summer day, and it was a favorite hang-out for most of the guys in the neighborhood. In short, Rocky was my friend. But all that changed when he found out that I hadn't been “saved.” You see, Rocky was the first of many religious nut-jobs that I bumped into in this lifetime – so I never saw it coming. “It” being him going ballistic nuthatch on me when he found out that I thought the world might be more than a couple thousand years old, and then him dedicating himself for the remainder of the time that I knew him to trying to save me from eternal damnation. * * * Here’s how it all went down: Rocky and I were hanging out in his basement one fine summer day, eating ice cream sandwiches and watching an episode of Fantasy Island on the tube. One of the guys on the show must have had an archaeologist fantasy or something, because there was this scene where the guy found an old skeleton in a cave. If you’ve never seen Fantasy Island, it was a show where people would travel to a tropical island and pay big bucks to live out one of their fantasies. Beauty, right? I tell you: television just ain’t what it used to be. Sigh. Anyway ... when I saw that skeleton, I made the mistake of mentioning Lucy. It turned out to be the conversational hand grenade that ended our friendship. “Hey, Rocky. Have you ever heard about Lucy?” I asked innocently. “Who’s that?” Rocky asked. “Is that Marty’s sister?” “No – Marty's sister is Lydia. I’m talkin’ about this old skeleton they found in Africa. We’ve been talking about it in school. It’s like six million years old or something, and it’s the earliest known human. Well, ancestor of a human, I mean. It was this little ape-like creature. Anyway, the guy who discovered it named it after that Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with…” Before I could finish, Rocky sprang up off the couch like he’d hit the emergency ejector seat button and started yelling, “That’s a blaspheme! That’s a blaspheme!” I had no idea what was happening. Quick as a ninja, Rocky flashed himself over to the bottom of the stairs, and amongst continued cries of blasphemy, he started injecting yells for his mom to come downstairs, pronto. “That’s a blaspheme! Mom! A blaspheme! Mom, get down here quick! That’s a blaspheme! Mom!” He kept jerking his head back and forth, looking up to the door at the top of the stairs and then back over at yours truly. He was feeling compelled to keep an eye on me. I heard the door open and then I heard Rocky’s mom get an earful about how I was blaspheming about the world being millions of years old and about how she had to come downstairs and set me straight. “Wait right there, Rocky. I’ll get the Bible,” I heard her say. * * * For the next hour or so, I got my ears chewed off by Rocky's mom about how all of creation was only 4,326 years, 6 months and 17 days old, or some such thing. She had it nailed down to an exact number like that, but I don’t remember the actual number. My head was swimming. She told me all about how schools had been taken over by the Devil – especially when it comes to teaching fake history, and she told me about how shaking up an aquarium and then looking at the layers of sand in the bottom proves that Planet Earth is a wide-eyed pink newborn instead of a seasoned old Buddha, and she told me … well, I don’t remember what all. It was a lot to take in. There was no opportunity for me to speak or ask questions, mind you. I was simply there to listen to her lecture and to watch poor Rocky nod his head and mumble “Amen” every now and again. At one point, Rocky’s mom read out loud to me from the Bible. She read the whole beginning of the Book of Matthew where it talks about the lineage of Jesus. Who begat who and so on. Her voice trembled with excitement as she got closer and closer to reading the name, Jesus, the climax of all the biblical begetting. She said that it didn’t take a rocket scientist to do simple arithmetic, to count up all the people’s ages from Adam to the birth of Jesus on December 25th in the Year Zero, and then add 1,983 years and a bit to that number to come up with 4,326 years, 6 months and 17 days. Eventually, she started winding down her spiel. “So, you see,” I recall her saying with a forced smile, somewhere in the midst of her closing remarks, “when you come into our home and speak falsehoods, we’re gonna have a little something to say about it. Me and Jesus, that is. Praised be His name.” This got another Amen out of Rocky. I couldn’t help but notice that during her lecture, she and Rocky had somehow inched their way over to a place where they were standing between me and the sliding glass door, thus body-blocking my escape route. I felt a little nervous. Maybe I was a prisoner. It was a blazing hot day outside, but I was definitely ready to take leave of Rocky’s A/C. “Listen,” I said, “I wasn’t trying to upset anybody. I was just casually mentioning something we’re talking about in school. I was just making conversation. I didn’t know it was such a sore spot.” “What you need is some Sunday school instead of that blasphemous Mountain Ridge Elementary School,” Rocky’s mom put in snarkily. “I do go to Sunday school. Every Sunday,” I declared. “Oh, you do, do you?” Rocky’s mom tilted her head with a measure of genuine curiosity. “Where do you go? I bet if you asked your Sunday school teacher, she’d back up everything I’ve just told you. Every last word of it. It might be a good idea for you to ask her.” “I go to Saint Francis.” I was eye-balling the stairs. I was thinking that I could maybe make a run at them, hurl myself upstairs, and then high-tail it right out the front door. “Oh, you’re Catholic?!” She made a funny face when she said that. “Well, that means you're not saved. Catholic isn't Christian.” “The fuck it isn’t,” I said. And then I made my move. As I went blasting out through the front door of Rocky’s house, out into the hellfire and damnation, so to speak, I could hear both Rocky and his mom yelping at the top of their lungs as they clambered up the stairs in a futile attempt to catch me. Their shouts were a two-track mix, but I could somehow hear each of their voices clearly and independently. Rocky was shouting about how he was going to pray for me and about how his mission going forward would be to save me. Rocky’s mom was screaming about how I was a filthy-mouthed little rat blasphemer and how I would never be allowed to set foot in their house again. Good cop, bad cop. * * * In order to make sense of the Rocky situation, I figured I would consult two experts: Eric Bailey and my mom. Eric was a good friend of mine who also knew Rocky. Eric was twelve like me, but he was wise beyond his years on account of having two older brothers, one of whom was a senior with his own car. My mom was a devout Catholic who knew more about religion than anyone I knew. As a kid, she went to Catholic school, for chrissakes, where she was force-fed all sorts of church intel by real-life nuns. * * * “So, Eric,” I asked, “Whad'ya think about Rocky going all nuthatch on me like that?” I had just given him the scoop on my weird encounter with Rocky and his mom. “I coulda predicted that whole thing, dumbass.” Eric was never one to mince words. “Rocky’s a weirdo, through and through. Haven’t you ever noticed how he never swears, and how he gets all twitchy whenever anybody says fuck or shit?” I admitted that I had never noticed those things. “It’s true!” Eric continued. “Remember last week when old Milty got clobbered and got that nosebleed and started yelling goddammit all over the place?” “Yeah, I remember.” “Well, your old buddy Rocky just about had a stroke,” Eric declared. “I was watchin’ him the whole time. I saw him moving his lips too, but not sayin’ nuthin.’ I think he was prayin'. Pretty wacko, if you ask me.” Eric paused for a reply or an acknowledgement, but I didn’t say anything. “He does that kinda shit all the time, if you watch him close.” “I wonder if I ever said anything before that offended him. Before the Lucy thing, I mean.” I was saying that out loud more to myself than to Eric. “Ah, who cares?” Eric shrugged. “Yer better off knowin’ where ya stand with a guy like that.” I thought Eric was probably right. “You know what else?” “What?” I asked. “I caught him staring at Lydia Duncan’s tits on the bus just before break. “No kiddin’?” “Yeah, he was locked in on 'em like a perv.” I knew Eric was probably staring at Lydia’s tits too, and that's how he discovered that he’d crossed laser beams with Rocky. “I mean, to act all religious and high and mighty like that, and then be drooling over some chick’s tits on the bus. What a hypochondriac.” “You mean hypocrite,” I corrected. “Huh?” “Never mind,” I said. * * * “So, mom,” I asked, "my friend Rocky and his mom lectured me about how the world is only four thousand years old or something. What’s that all about, anyway?” “Oh dear,” my mom answered as she scanned her internal files for where to begin. “Some Christian fundamentalists believe that that’s true. That the world isn’t very old. Is Rocky’s family religious?” “I guess, so,” I answered, “but I never really picked up on it until yesterday.” “I see. Well, some people take the Bible really literally. I guess that’s one way to say it.” This was my mom trying to be diplomatic. She could never quite bring herself to outright call anyone a crackpot. “I guess that’s the case with Rocky and his family,” I speculated. “Rocky’s mom read this passage from the Bible about the ancestors of Jesus, from Abraham all the way down to Jesus.” “She was reading the Bible out loud to you?” my mom asked with a raised eyebrow, wondering what that might imply. “Yeah, it was a part of this big lecture she was giving me about proving the world isn’t very old.” “I know that passage. It’s the beginning of the Gospel. It’s Matthew. They trace Jesus's lineage from Abraham down through David and Solomon, and then down to Joseph – Jesus’s father.” I could tell my mom was thinking about what Rocky’s mom’s logic might have been. She continued, “You could add up all the ages of those people – or guess how old they were when they had their first-born sons. And then to get the other part of it – the part from Adam – the first man – down through Noah and then David, you’d have to go to the Old Testament. The problem with the Old Testament is that the record-keeping way back then wasn’t the best. I mean, some of the people in the Old Testament were said to have lived for eight or nine hundred years. So, it’s hard to take that literally. I mean, we’re probably not supposed to take all that literally. There’s a lot of symbolism in the Bible. And a lot of numerology too. Like the forty days and forty nights part. The number, forty, represents something esoteric. I just wouldn’t put much stock into anyone accurately calculating the age of the Earth based on anything in the Bible. I mean, the Bible contains lots of important messages, but that’s probably not one of ‘em.” “Interesting,” I said. “Thanks, mom.” My mom knew her stuff. She was a smart cookie. “So, do you think the world is more like millions of years old instead of thousands?” “Billions, probably.” “There’s another thing I just realized, too,” I added. “Oh yeah? What’s that?” “Isn’t that genealogy in Matthew kind of weird?” “What do you mean?” my mom asked. “Well, it’s supposed to be the lineage of kings, right? Like the whole idea is to show that Jesus was descended from David who was descended from Abraham, right?” “Well, yes. Jesus was the Messiah, descended from the Davidic Line. Back then, the House of David was the royal line. The holy bloodline,” my mom said, matter-of-factly. “But, Joseph wasn’t really Jesus’s dad,” I said. “Mary was Jesus’s real mom, alright. But Joseph wasn’t his dad. God was supposed to be Jesus’s dad. Right? So, I’m not seeing the whole royal bloodline thing. I mean, it wouldn’t have really mattered who Joseph was descended from, would it? I mean, as far as Jesus was concerned. The bloodline buck would’ve stopped with Joseph. Unless Joseph had kids of his own.” “Joseph did not have any other kids,” my mom said, a bit too abruptly. Then she quickly course-corrected: “You know, I’ll have to think about that. Maybe it’s more symbolism.” My mom bent down and picked up an invisible crumb off the floor and wondered out loud about where she’d put the broom and dustpan. I could tell she was looking to close the conversation. I had bumped into a perimeter fence. “Maybe you should ask Sister Margaret,” my mom said. Sister Margaret was my Sunday school teacher. * * * Every time I saw Rocky after that day when the shit hit the fan, it was clear that our friendship had been boiled down to salt.
Our post Fantasy Island interactions were reduced to the following ritual: Rocky would ask me if I’d been saved yet. I would answer “No, not by your standards.” Then he would offer to save me, and I would say “No” again, and silently wonder about where he got his authority to save people. Sometimes, if I was feeling extra polite, I’d say “No, thanks” or "Not today." Then Rocky would paint a picture about what lay ahead for me. It was never pretty. – O.M. Kelsey
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