A Jesus Explosion In the Garden

What Don promises is a warm spot in Heaven come coronation time, once you surrender to Jesus and renounce sin, quit smoking and drinking and fornicating and coveting thy neighbor’s wife and dancing to worldly music and just generally heading fullspeed into the eternal fires of Hell. God’s Action For Your Miracle, it said on the buses all over New York weeks prior to the night, with a photo of Don gazing up into the heavens for a sign, looking like Conway Twitty in a faraway trance.

Don is actually a chubby dumpling from nowhere, Arizona, who spent a lot of his wayward youth in small town cathouses and big city bars before he got stung one night at one of A. A.’s revivals in Phoenix. “Turned on to Jesus,” he says. After that he did about ten years preaching under his own small tent on the Pentecostal grits circuit and filling in for A. A. in his later years.

He was among the first few apostolic pioneers who pitched camp and started a lost community in the wilderness on 2500 acres near the Mexican border south of Tucson, donated by a rancher to A. A. Miracle Valley, it was called, and today they’ve got a Bible school there, the crusade administration, their own printing plant publishing Miracle magazine with circulation over a million, their own record-pressing plant and a flock of about 500 Christian Soldiers living for the Lord in small frame houses and trailers. (Except for A. A.’s place, which is fit for a King or at least a retired Shepherd, with indoor gardens and waterfalls and that sort of thing.)

Since A. A.’s death and his own ascension, Don’s fast becoming the hottest gospeler on the trail, he’s been raising up Jesus in huge tumults in Chicago and all over the south, even in England. He’s been zapping sinners and harvesting souls and performing … miracles.

Mostly it’s a matter of giving the old folks enough of a buzz to toss off their phantom arthritis and lumbago and get up out of their wheelchairs and take a few tottering steps. But at the Garden there was a nine-year-old who’d had TB and Don had prayed him clean. And there was a whole contingent of former junkies he’d cured in a night: “I believe Jesus is going to send a sword, the Sword of His Spirit, His Holy Word, into her veins tonight!” And then there was a man who had a heart attack under Don’s tent somewhere in the Midwest and the nurse had pronounced him dead and sent for an ambulance and Don had laid hands on him and prayed and … raised … him … from … the … dead.

In his Nashville fashions and hair-spray. Don doesn’t look like much of a shaker at first. He waddles a bit when he comes to The Cross with Kathy and their two miracle children (because Kathy was never supposed to have kids at all, so they came on a prayer: she was supposed to go blind, too, but, miraculously, she’s 20/20 today; and what’s more she looks like Miss America judged by pastors and nuns — impossibly demure). By the time Don arrives, the Explosion’s already peaked about two dozen times. Ted Beckett’s shouting and stomping and slapping me on the knee and all over the Garden the saints are dancing in the Spirit.

All of a sudden, in the middle of a 1000-voice choir leading the whole 20,000 singing “I’m Saved Saved Saved,” with old Kent Rogers, A. A.’s co-evangelist, up at the mike in his silver tux doing this highstepping godly dance and screaming I’m Jesus’ Fan! and Hallelujah! and Somebody Amen!, all of a sudden one of the black mamas gets stung and goes into a holy convulsion, a heavenly seizure, writhing and jerking and speaking in tongues which is like yelping and groaning — God’s Epilepsy! — and some of the kids get into a weird motivatin’ boogie, their eyes rolled way back in their heads — Hallelujah! Thank you Jesus! — and now they’re all waving white handkerchiefs and Kleenex, 20,000 white fluttering handkerchiefs in the dark, so that it looks like the Garden’s been invaded by a multitude of moths.

After that, three platinum honeys called the Sunshine Singers — who look like they got saved going down in a bad lounge in Reno — are singing snappy hymns, and then one 200-pound grandmother is singing better than Mahalis Jackson even, and then there’s the Reverend Eugene Martin. He’s an anointed preacher, another Georgia genius like Little Richard and Otis, and when he gets going, scooting up and down The Cross strutting his stuff and pretending to bathe his feet in a collection pail and leading the saints in a long gospel call and response — I just want to testify! — the whole revival’s got the same kind of threatening ecstasy that a very few good rock and roll bands manage on their best nights.