Cornerstone Church

Sunday, July 28 - Fresno

Bucky: Is there a church around here?

Would-Be Helpful Stranger: What are you looking for? Catholic? Methodist?

Bucky: Oh, whatever. I just wanna hear a sermon.

Would-Be Helpful Stranger:  

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It's hard, I found out, to work into a casual conversation that you're on the road making a conscious imitation of Steinbeck and therefore you're making it your business to attend a representative American church that you don't have any philosophical allegiance to just like Steinbeck went and attended a representative American church with which he had no affiliation as an exercise in projecting a lot of sociological ruminations onto whatever corresponds to your prefabricated opinions about the emotional value of religion all as an excuse to show off your practiced pseudo-intellectual detachment.

And by "you" I mean "me."

And really, slipping that into a brief exchange with a complete stranger in Fresno, a town where nobody smiles, is quite beyond my social dexterity. But I digress. My real point is that Fresno is a town where nobody knows how to give directions.

I puttered about downtown Fresno in search of a church, asking here and there about where one might be, do you know where, how many blocks is it... I received a charming medley of noncorresponding and geographically ignorant advice about a few blocks there or two more blocks that way and at least three outright lies of how you can't miss it in an Oddyssean saga of zigzagging that will go unrecorded in this space, if only to spare you the trauma of enduring what I went through. I will only tell you the moral of this story and that is this: if you need to ask for directions, do not go to Fresno.

Eventually I found The Downtown Church: A Church Aflame. But this being Fresno, they were shut down and boarded up. So eventually I found right across the street the Cornerstone Church (in the Historic Wilson Theatre) with Pastor Jim Franklin.

The historic Wilson Theatre is a gorgeous art deco cinema house from the 20s or 30s. I was a little underdressed for church—the good jeans and black shirt I'd worn since LA—but so were a number of other church goers. The parishioners' attire ranged from yardwork casual to Sunday best. The church ladies working the theatre lobby tended to more garish ensembles. Think "Mrs a-Whiggins" from the Carol Burnett Show. It was an elegant lobby, with the popcorn stand refurbished to a reception desk facing the the wide glass doors and on either side two swirling conch shell staircases that spiraled up the balcony. If the ornate rug wasn't the original from the Wilson's heyday, it was a suitable replica.

From behind the popcorn counter, a thirtyish church secretary directed the two welcoming church ladies and the two black-tied male ushers to guide traffic. When I made for the theatre doors to go in to the service, the secretary came from behind her popcorn stand.

"You can't go in yet. He's in the middle of a prayer."

From the window in the door, I could see Pastor Jim Franklin walking back and forth on stage like a moving target. He wore a stage mic on his head and was brandishing a sword over his head and talking to the congregation. No, you didn't read that wrong. He clutched a bible to his ribs with the other hand. He didn't look like he was praying. I do not judge, however.

"I think he's finished praying. This is the part I wanted to catch."

"Sir, you'll have to wait for the 11 o'clock show."

"You mean the 11 o'clock service?"

"That's what I said, the 11 o'clock service."

It was 10:40am. I had time to check out the bathrooms. I'm fascinated with bathrooms. The Wilson Theatre had the original decorative tile and quite old toilets. I doubt they dated to the 1930s, but the technology and commode architecture was definitely pre-1960. Commodes were thrones back then; commodes worthy of a great industrial empire, when America straddled the world and California was fresh and new.

When they let us into the theatre for the 11 o'clock showverce, I found myself in a traditional theatre auditorium. Big jumbo monitors hung on either side of the stage and an even larger one hung above center stage. The stage had stark props, an extended hardwood floor, colored studio spotlights against black out curtains, and a rock band set up situated upstage from the pastor's promenading zone. Pastor Jim Franklin was nowhere about. Soothing yet peppy background music backfiltered through the hub-bub of crowd conversations. Singles, couples, and a few families milled about and slowly found their seats. I sat fourth row center and surreptitiously snapped away.

The camera and lights crew wore black collared tee-shirts and khaki pants. They moved around, setting up equipment, testing sound, adjusting light mounts, and positioning cameras. They moved with the all-business detachment of stage techies, undistracted by the lights and the music and the building mood and all the other showbiz elements. The gathering congregation had an enviable variety of people—all races, all ages, all income levels judging from the clothes. I finally put it together. Despite the size—the theatre would only have seated 400 people tops—the Cornerstone Church was a megachurch, a mini-megachurch. I wasn't going to get my sermon today at all. I was going to get a pep talk.

Suddenly the lights dimmed. The jumbo monitors on the sides went black. The music swelled. Then up on the widescreen above center stage a commercial came on. It was a commercial for the Cornerstone Church. Pastor Jim looked out from the widescreen and told us about the love of God and the inner power of the light. He didn't say anything I could've disagreed with. The commercial closed with a sincere good-bye from Pastor Jim, followed by a montage of generic slogans about joy and belonging. Everyone in the theatre seemed to feel the joy and belonging. The stage lights rose up, revealing a choir and small rock upstage and a row of pretty, sharply groomed lead singers downstage. A keyboardist, Pastor Jim's wife I figured later, led the celebratory music from stage left and a pretty blonde saxophonist jazzed up the flashy ensemble from stage right. The music swelled.

The six lead singers sang about what a friend they had in the Lord. They summoned us all to our feet. The beat was jazzy, percussive, at times almost surf-guitar in its drive. Pastor Jim's wife raised one hand, the saxophonist wailed, and the music shifted tone to a rock power ballad. It was another song, but with a lot of the same lyrics. One of the leads stepped forward and had a solo. The Lord guided him, he sang. His song repeated some of the slogans from Pastor Jim's opening commercial. He was strikingly effeminate. My instinct was to snicker at this, a suppressed gay guy singing lead at a Christian church. But I was the asshole; I was the hypocrite. I saw nothing the whole service to suggest the Cornerstone Church was down on gays. They didn't seem to hate anybody. They didn't seem to condemn anything. It was all just love, love, and more love all service long. The Lord gives me this, the Lord saves me from that. They never even mentioned Jesus. It could have been any Lord. A Jew, a Buddhist, a fifth-level magic user with a Spell of Belonging could have sat through this showverce, clapping along with the joy, and not been offended.

There were more pop songs about God and the spirit and everybody's life making sense. There were duets and trios and more solos from the lead singers. They finished with a song about armor, based on the "Armor of God" verses from Ephesians. It was the first hint of any Bible quoting I'd seen all service. One guy sang about the Belt of Truth and strapped a gaudy gold belt around the blonde woman standing center stage. The other woman singer sang about the Breastplate of Righteousness and slipped a fake chainmail vest over the blonde's head onto her shoulders. There were verses about the Shield of Faith and the Helmet of Salvation, each with the singer similarly adorning the blonde model up front, each made from cheap cloth or cardboard and emblazoned with cheap gold-colored foil. Then one of the ushers came out with a sword, a real saber with visibly sharpened edges. Instead of handing it to the blonde woman up front while the choir sang about the Sword of the Spirit, the usher raised up the sword and then chunked it, Excalibre-like, into the solid wood floor. A splinter flew up. He'd thrust it hard enough for the sword to stand alone, statue still, gashing into floor of the Church. No one sang a joyous verse about the Vandalism of Entertainment, but the Lord protected them with this just as well.

Now the Pastor's wife stilled the singing and the joying from her keyboard and, at last, Pastor Jim came out. He gave a quick little prayer about God opening our hearts. Then he set into the sermon. But as I feared, it was just a pep talk. He made all the moves of an inspirational speaker. He was good at his job. He warned us against fear and against worry and about the need to bring God into our hearts. He yanked the sword from it hardwood and swung the sword over his head. He earned a murmur of praises and amens when he called it the Sword of the Spirit.

He wanted each of us, each one of us here today, to make a commitment to the Lord and sing his praise. I kept waiting for a hint about what the commitment was for. But this God wasn't for anything. And apart from evil and worry, this God wasn't against anything either. He called for anyone in the congregation who felt so moved to come forward now and make a commitment to the Lord. Come on, come on, I know there's more of you, yes, God was out there in the audience right now, touching someone's heart, calling them down. A dozen or so people came down, sons and sisters and husbands, and bowed their heads in the well of the theatre, and asked God into their hearts. This Lord just wanted me in Heaven and didn't seem to ask much from me in return, not even gratitude. But give a God some credit, he and Pastor Jim at least got Fresno to smile.

The service was over. We all walked out into the sunlight. The sky was a perfect blue overhead. The storefronts of Fresno were still boarded up. But my spirits were up and my step was light. I'd killed an hour and the good mood lasted for at least an hour after that. There wasn't any hypocrisy and there wasn't any con job going on. This was not a bait and switch. Pastor Jim Franklin was selling God, pure and simple, and it wasn't weighed down with anything like an ethical code to live by or a hint of something sinister dragging me into the sin the world. I could go on drinkin' and whorin' and writin' unrhymed poetry and this God still wanted me up in Heaven. I went ahead and dropped a few coins in the collection plate. The Cornerstone Church had earned my business.

Homeless in Fresno

Sunday, July 28 - Fresno

I got into Fresno absurdly early. It was 6am. I had a seven hour layover. It was empty. Heavens to Mergatroid it was empty. It was like an episode from one of those "The World Without People" shows that were such a big fad a couple of years ago. National Geographic did one. BBC America did another. The Discovery Channel did one, too. Even the History Channel got in on the act, albeit with really cheap CGI effects.

I never quite got the lure of all that. What was the didactic purpose of this kind of show? Was it a gentle reminder that all human beings shouldn't just up and leave the planet and our pets behind one day? Was it a warning to God not to rapture off the lot of us without first bestowing toolmaking skills and opposable thumbs onto the housecats? I never considered the spontaneous removal of 7 billion people to be much of a realistic concern. But at least I do know now that, if all human beings up and vanished one fine Sunday morning, the Earth would look a lot like Fresno.

Life has not been kind to Fresno. The people at the station seemed sad all the time; no one smiled. None of them cared to engage in a conversation, assuming they possessed the skills to do so. Fresno is where boring people come, or at least where interesting people get away from. In addition to being utterly bereft of the cultural distinctiveness that the rest of California displays, the economy is, apparently, utterly down the tubes. Many of the storefronts downtown were shuttered. Sometimes whole buildings appeared abandoned. And for a small city, Fresno seemed to have an unusually large number of homeless people—exclusively homeless men—waking up in the park and milling about.

The first guy I saw showed every sign of having died. He laid face flat on a grass island in downtown's open air mall. He didn't seem to breathe. A bird landed near him and flitted away, as if repulsed. Nearby homeless guys who looked new to the roofless life, judging by their grooming, ignored their prostrate compatriot. Only the faintest flicker of his lips up close revealed him to be a heavy sleeper. He smelled of stale Mad Dog, not death. Later in the morning a city grounds crew showed up to operate loud machinery next to him. They ignored him, as if he were a fixture in the mall. He never stirred from his coma.

The other homeless men were awake by 8am. Like California, they lacked any ethnic majority. Most were cleanish, considering their circumstances. Two huddled over a weak drinking fountain and scraped safety razors across their stubble. It was Sunday; gotta look your best. They sat in a semi circle, talked small, and watched the sunlight creep down along the few tall buildings. These were the first people in town to give me actual smiles when I offered them my signature Buckaroo "Howdy®."

(NB: It is delivered with a nonchalant earnestness, an imperceptible bob of the head, and a subtle crinkling of the lower lip, as if to indicate equal parts engagement and detachment. Although its etymology runs from the "How'd'ye do" noted by Frederick Law Olmstead in his 19th Century travel journals through Texas prior to the Civil War, the Buckaroo "Howdy" is discernibly a salutation only, and not an invitation to expound upon just how well you are doing. The homeless men of Fresno seemed instinctively to get that, or at least didn't want to talk to me.)

Click to read the signboard

 An itinerant preacher came into the city mall. He took over a concrete platform in the middle of the mainway and put up a video camera before launching into his sermon. No one gathered. He talked about aliens and UFOs. He held up a chart on a signboard that delineated precisely which Caribbean nations corresponded to each of the sons of Isaac ("Simeon = Dominicans; Levi = Haitians; Asher = Uruguayans" et cetera). When I stood in the middle of his nonexistent congregation and aimed my camera at him, he paused from his discourse on chemtrails poisoning the manna from Heaven, broke his gaze from the video camera and huffed, "No pictures." I think the irony of his request escaped him. The dapper homeless guys ignored him. The orange vested city workers gave him wide berth.

As the homed residents of Fresno broke from their slumbers and began to filter into the city, the homeless disappeared, filing off one by one like movie extras. They surrendered their only home to the four-walled Americans. Perhaps their presence offended them, perhaps they were responding to that vestigial migratory call that had rendered them homeless in the first place. We're all the children of nomads, after all. Who's to say being sedentary isn't the aberration? How can we be sure the perversion doesn't lie in having good hygiene and being well rested in the morning?

By 9:30am a smattering of shops we're opening up. The birds left the ground and moved up to the trees and building tops. The pictophobic reverend folded up his camera and tripod and withdrew from the human commerce. Well dressed ladies and gentlemen crossed the mall heading off toward their churches. The last of the homeless men were swept away with the tide of respectability. Only the not dead drunk guy splayed on the grass gave witness to the night's inhabitants.

It was a sunny Sunday morning. It was time for me to find a church.

Things you notice when you're bored

July 26-30 - Bus stations

This journal is supposed to be about the places I go, not the way I get there. Obviously this is an artificial distinction. Getting there is almost half the journey, if you don't count getting back. But I find myself comparing the Greyhounding experiences from town to town.

I started out last week opining how San Antonio's bus station is a police state and El Paso's is a model of customer service. Not being a bus travel aficionado, I'd assumed at that point that I had pretty much run the gamut, from good to bad, in the taste bus stations come in. But nope, there's a Baskin Robbins of bus stations out there in America. Let me give you the scoop. Ha ha, see what I did there?

Well, if San Antonio is 1984 and El Paso is big welcome hug, Phoenix's bus station seemed like a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Refugees scattered about the floor, sleeping, looking befuddled, starving in the night. A few of them were clearly contemplating cannibalism if it came down to survival—perhaps sizing up the old, perhaps sizing up the young. Bands of aggressive youths cruised through like sharks scouring for prey. Officials barked orders at lines of passengers, rearranging them like baggage.

El Paso, with people smiling and offering to watch one another's children when their youngest needed to be taken to the restroom, was a distant memory. In Phoenix moms snapped "Just hold it till you're on the bus" at their bouncing toddlers and clutched their check on baggage in fear. Instead of San Antonio's blaring big brother TVs, all the sets in Phoenix were locked down and broken. No one had gotten around to starting a fire in one yet, but this was the next logical step before people started ripping up the metal benches and sharpening the armrests into shivs.

It was a relief at last to come to Los Angeles. The entertainment capital's bus station was all business, slick, and corporate. It was El Paso without the charm. Customers were serviced without the inefficiency of camaraderie. When my bus was reported running 30 minutes late, the ticket counter lady offered me free food voucher. Her smile was all business, unintrusive. The ubiquitous American TVs were there, but didn't dominate the room. There was plenty of room for thinking, reading, or talking small with a stranger. A conversation ran philosophical and the mom from San Diego was willing to follow along. When she turned the question around and asked me what I thought it meant to be an American, I could only think of positive things to say.

Fresno was an abandoned building, a desolate, hopeless, pre-industrial abandoned building. God help you if you ever get to Fresno.

Hollywood!

Saturday, July 27 - Los Angeles

Hollywood.

It gives me writer's block.

I trundled into town detached, as if traveling along the pilgrimage route to another tribe's holy city. Hollywood, the glamour capital of America, celebrityville, Hollywood, the cultural hearth of post literate western society, home of first name only celebrities. Hard as I try to be above it all, I came to Hollywood and gawked like rube.

I got into Los Angeles and called a cyberfriend, Dennis, who'd graciously volunteered to show me the cultural highlights of his city. We'd never laid eyes on one another so I tried to make myself more identifiable at the bus station.

"I'll be out front," I told him, "I'll be the one wearing a black shirt."

"This is L.A., dude. Everyone's wearing a black shirt."

This is the first thing I noticed about Los Angeles: everyone's trying to live up to the stereotype. Rockers in the street dressed completely like rockers—black shirts, shaggy hair, jeans ripped and safety-pinned together. Actors shamelessly mugged in ill-fitting superhero costumes along Hollywood Boulevard. Explosions of community murals and colorful street art and deco-funky buildings and Latino-flavored open air markets that lay out every hue of the Southwestern palette and vintage 30s cars cruising in mint condition and In-and-Out Burger joints and seedy freeway underpasses and puddly concrete reservoir basins from a hundred Hollywood car chase sequences. Every street corner and every camera shot passing view in Los Angeles is an amped up version of exactly what you expect it to be from TV shows, talk show hack jokes, Us Weekly photo spread, and pulp detective novels. City of Angels, City of Paparazis, City of Stars.

The thing is, all the hackneyed pop cultural references made me expect Los Angeles to be a heartless place where the final western progress of American society landed, chewed up culture, and spit out damaged people in search of quick bucks and transitory fame. But on cruising through the city with an instantaneous good friend, I got a wholly different impression. Instead of consuming culture and leaving behind a dry husk of glitter and profits, I found a community so hungry for culture that it was in a constant state of reinvention. Los Angeles is still a fresh college graduate, starting on a new life and maybe even looking for a friend.

Los Angeles, having tired of its reputation as a car-cruising wasteland, has reinvented itself as a mass transit friendly modern city with a state of the art subway system. But it doesn't look inexperienced or utilitarian as you'd expect a new subway system to appear. When LA built its subway, it erected a series of user friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and artistically impressive stations train stations up and down the cultural highlights of the city. From the film noir Modern eloquence of Union Station to the Forbidden Palace arches of Chinatown's station to the retrotech homage of the station that fed us into Hollywood and Vine, the subways were roomy without being cavernous and efficient without being rushed. They were artistic, urban, and clean.

Dennis took real pride in his city, chauffeuring me about through a busy street market full of quick tacos and gaudy souvenirs, past a street festival with Mexican folk dancers regaling a crowd, up and down Hollywood Boulevard as we laughed and pointed at each brass plated movie star's name we recognized, each name a mini shrine to yet another minor saint in the American religion of show biz, each side shop a treasure trove of false relics revering our faith in glamour and fame. Americans grow up expecting to be famous, expecting to be stars one day, just as Medieval serfs grew up in their manorial fiefdoms expecting to go to Heaven once they died. Stardom is our cultural birthright and our salvation. Los Angeles, our Rome, has simply made a working business out of proselytizing this faith; it is as efficient as the Vatican and just as pure in its motives. Hollywood gift shops are simply how we revel in this American faith in show biz: Three Stooges tee shirts, Humphrey Bogart shot glasses, Marilyn Monroe coffee mugs, snow globes incongruously trapping the Hollywoodland sign in the swirl of a violent blizzard. It's only unseemly if you're one of those pagans who don't like summer blockbusters.

A drag queen dressed like Cyd Charisse sashayed onto the subway, nonchalantly gazing about for admirers. Kids rented long stretch limos and cruised up and down the Walk of Fame like movie stars. I only know they were kids because I craned my neck down to look in and see if there was anyone famous in there. Nope, just kids. Musicians walked along swiftly in dark shades as if to avoid their imaginary fans. Ludicrous middle aged businessmen paraded their trophy wives past Grauman's Chinese. Paparazzi set up cameras on tripods in front of the Grauman's, waiting for celebrities who never arrived. Dennis never gets tired of it. The people here live in the art of constant reinvention.

Dennis has worked as a navy seaman, a financial analyst, a noodle chef, a commodities broker. He's tried out for movie parts. Now he's a truck driver. He's reinventing himself, too. It's what people do here. It's what people can do here. It's the land of reinvention. People just become what they want to be. They might spread our culture around, but they don't let the past hold them back. Four hours in the man's company and I feel like I have a lifelong buddy. Perhaps we just wanted that; perhaps we just invented that idea.

It might be L.A., but I really wouldn't call it la-la.