The Preacher's Mom Drank Rum & Coke
During my last six months in Coos Bay, I got a part-time job at the world’s smallest Macy’s. My AmeriCorps gig was over, and I didn’t have any job prospects back in Colorado. I was milking my solitude on the coast, uneager to jump into some fresh new attempt at a career. I loved moving through the silence of the three-bedroom house I rented for almost nothing, smoking on the porch before falling asleep to the melancholy bleats of foghorns and mournful (maybe horny?) sea lions.
One morning I had to call a taxi to get to work. I don’t remember why. My car must have been busted or left at a bar the night before. Uber hadn’t yet reached the tiny spot on the map that was Coos Bay—a place where, upon driving through the main downtown strip in hopes of a fun pit-stop, coastal travelers would say with equal measure amazement and annoyance, “So this is the largest town on the Oregon Coast.”
I sat quietly in the backseat of the taxi, eating a bowl of rice and beans and cheese. It was my favorite staple to power me through the next six hours of watching teen girls ditch school to yank dresses off their hangars and throw them in the aisle. I’d trail the girls like a boring ghost, picking up the dresses and sighing, telling them their only way out is through their education. They’d stare at me with mild disgust and pity before scuttling away, sometimes shoving a plastic headband or pair of socks down their pants before stealing outside and jumping into an unattractive older boy’s car.
My taxi driver was a chipper middle-aged white guy. I drew myself out cautiously, generally having a hard time talking to people in Coos Bay. The low-hanging cloud of defeatism and conservative thinking that skulked through town had, over the last year, turned me into someone I didn’t recognize—the quiet girl at the bar.
Taxi said he used to be a preacher in the Appalachian Mountains, and had grown up in Oregon with his hippy mother.
“But Appalachia man...if you think Oregon is back country...” he said, then pretended to pick the well-worn banjo tune from Deliverance on his fingers, steering with his elbows. I smiled.
He said he got his Master of Divinity in Arlington, Kentucky. I told him that’s close to where my dad grew up, and confirmed it was indeed the dark wet butthole of the nation. His mother moved down to Appalachia with him, and ended up falling ill a few years later. He decided to make her favorite drink to help ease the pain—a rum and coke. The next day, another pastor approached him and said,
“Preacher, I saw your car in the parking lot of the liquor store when I drove by last night. Were you getting your watch battery fixed?”
Taxi had explained he was buying rum and coke for his sick mother. The pastor pushed,
“And did you save any for drinking?”
Taxi laughed, “We were all 21 before we graduated with our bachelor’s, and if anyone went up to our dorms and opened our fridge, we would have been expelled. We all had beer, but it was a dry campus.”
The second Taxi graduated, a close classmate of his came out of the closet. That would certainly have gotten him expelled even if, Taxi said wryly, the revelation of the student’s sexuality was really no surprise to anyone.
We talked missionary work and its historical effect on non-Christian communities. Taxi said one of his big falling out points with the Lutheran community in the Bible Belt was their black-and-white intolerant view about the world. I shared my own distaste for missionary work. I said I didn’t care what the intention is, the reality was missionaries have done egregious damage to non-Christian people. Centuries of violence, racism, and control have been enacted on Native people in the name of a Christian God, and tribes are still reeling from the damage that white Christianity has done to their people. (I like blindsiding other white people with this kind of truth-reckoning. Actually, I still do.)
Taxi said he believes that missionary work, when done right, should share the beliefs of a faith to any interested party, and that you should mind your own business if the interest is not there. I asked him if he’d ever seen missionary work happen in its idealized form.
Suddenly, with dominating and pointed silences, he dove into a booming sermon—
“If the Kingdom of God were upon us today, do you know that you would be right with God? If you want to come forward and open your heart to Jesus, and be baptized today, we will do that for you.”
He went on further, his fervor filling up the cab. I shrank into the backseat, silent and crestfallen. Had I pulled the wrong wire? Was he short circuiting, reverting to an outdated version of himself? Was he really trying to save my soul right now? (Good luck.)
“And that,” Taxi said breathlessly, “is the sermon I had to give every day for years, and it still makes me cringe thinking about it.”
I smiled, my relief palpable. Thank Satan.
He went on to tell me about the “Liberal Lutheran” church community he was part of in Coos Bay.
“Well, we’re actually an Evangelical-Lutheran church, but we really don’t act Evangelical at all!” He laughed like we shared an inside joke, relishing the remark with a wink.
As we pulled up in front of Macy’s, he said how much happier he was to be back in Oregon. His wife was an atheist, and his daughter was a Wiccan.
“And a lesbian!” he exclaimed proudly.
The taxi pulled to a stop and I groped through my purse, eager to find a decent tip despite my dismal income. I was invigorated by the interaction, driven to write it down in my notebook once I got inside. I fished out a ten-dollar bill and put it in his hand, thanking him and waving blithely as he drove away. It was once I was shoving my purse and coat into my breakroom locker that I remembered my dirty lunch bowl resting in the floorboard of his backseat.