Satellite Savior

It was a week before what would have been my grandfather’s eightieth birthday, and he was finally up at the pulpit. A somber delegation of a few hundred people occupied the pews in front of him. His entire family sat in a special section off to the side with pages open to verse in our laps. The ceremony would have run its course seamlessly had we not created the spectacle of howling like a pack of irreverent dimwits before Pa was even in the ground. Bemused mourners looked from their hands to my grandfather’s corpse to the television screen behind the casket, indecisive as to where their gazes belonged. Certainly not on us. Tears collected in the creases of four generations of crow’s feet and dripped onto our fingers as we unsuccessfully tried to use them to mask our smiles. Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 was lost in an indistinguishable chorus of sniffles, giggles and gasps. The time to weep and the time to laugh had collided in a post-mortem flux, characteristically commemorating the life of Cecil Burl Grist.

For the first seventy-four-plus years of his existence, Pa would not be caught dead in a place of worship. Fortunately for us, he had resolved this issue somewhere around his 75th birthday. I remember calling my grandfather to ask him if three-quarters of a century felt old. He responded by asking me if I had ever climbed into bed with the devil. I waited for the punch line. He repeated his question. Maybe he wanted me to guess first. I decided to take a stab. Had someone in the family warned me that Pa had found a new passion for old time religion, perhaps I would not have replied: “I don’t know, Pa. What does the devil look like?”

The man who sounded suspiciously like my grandfather told me I was going to hell and punctuated his statement by hanging up on me. I referenced my cell phone to see if I had dialed the right number.

The grandfather I was familiar with once gave his entire family Playboy Bunny-shaped toothbrushes for Christmas while dressed up as Santa Claus (and yes, he did get an extra special kick out of being able to say, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” while he handed them out). I think this was the same holiday season that he came in the front door with his bag full of toys and apologized for being late by blaming it on “Goddamn Rudolph and his diarrhea.”

That Rudolph was always doing something to piss Santa off. On Christmas Eve, thirty or forty family members would squeeze intimately into my grandparent’s tiny living room just to hear Santa’s latest rendition of the “Dad blasted Reindeer” saga. My cousins and I simply accepted the fact that Santa knew a lot of dirty words and would sometimes hand out underwear along with our toys. It seems that “Goddamn Rudolph,” (apparently his full name) kept steering the sleigh through clotheslines on the way to Grandmother’s house. This was all just part of our holiday cheer: cousin Jeremy would get a BB Gun, I would get a unicycle, and Great Grandmother Lorraine would get a size 78 triple-Z brassiere that had reportedly been hanging up to dry in her yard. It was the little things that made Pa chuckle. Except now he was telling me to repent for my sins and come to the Lord.

It was only after the birthday-wishes-gone-horribly-wrong phone call that my grandmother bothered to inform me that Pa had discovered God’s Word Via Satellite through a televangelist preacher out of Benton County, Arkansas. One glorious day Pa had tuned in to find out that television was his stairway to heaven and a remote control was all he needed to open and close the Pearly Gates. For some reason this divine portal was only accessible between the broadcasting hours of four-thirty and five o’ clock in the morning, but for Pa, these were prime viewing hours. He had gotten up at four o’ clock every morning of his life to milk the cows. When the cows retired, Pa had found someone else who needed his attention at this ungodly hour: God.

Pa’s God provided us all with juxtaposed amusement. If Jerry Falwell and Larry the Cable Guy had ever engaged in a drunken threesome with Tammy Fay Baker, then Pa’s God would have been their collective schizophrenic brainchild. Pa would shower us with fire and brimstone, being sure to include a special sermon for my Aunt Chandra, who is Catholic (apparently, all Catholics are slated for a special concentration camp in hell run by bloodthirsty idolatrous saints). This would be followed by an encore performance of his famous, “I Gotta Scratch My Yahtzee” comedy routine whereby he would recall the good old days of yore. Like the time he handed out invitations to a party bearing the caption, “Why I don’t wear shorts.” The inside of these cards were illustrated with a cartoon version of a rather generously endowed gentleman supporting his—premise. God love him. If he wasn’t damning the cat to hell, he was renaming it “question mark” because the poor creature’s tail always curved to one side like the crook of a cane with an anatomical query.

It was Aunt Chandra’s idea to make Pa’s funeral a multimedia event. We have a special Grist family video that is actually a sort of scrapbook which catalogues about fifty years of photographs. Everyone gets a chance to play themselves from childhood to adult. The soundtrack includes hits like “The Rose” and “Wind Beneath My Wings,” orchestrated to turn even the most stoic of family members into sappy puddles of loving catharsis. There is only one attribute which makes this mall-kiosk-produced emotional molestation acceptable; the sequence which pays homage to my grandfather’s legacy. The public debut of this material was perhaps either the crowning or condemning moment at Pa’s service, depending on which manifestation of his God was tuned in to the proceedings.

Pa's pious estimation rested peacefully in a polished white casket at the front of the sanctuary. The undertakers had provided him with a look of eerie glee not entirely unbefitting of his character, but with an added strangely synthetic twist which was accented by the first suit I think I had ever seen him wear. His special televangelist’s bible lay open against the inside of the coffin’s lid, creating the illusion that Pa might just jump up and warn us sinners of the dangers of his personal savior’s wrath. It was knowing he wouldn’t that made the scene frightening. I suddenly painfully missed being told that I was going to hell if I didn’t change my ways. I looked around at the expressions of my family members and could tell that we all shared the same nostalgia for such threats of eternal damnation.

In a moment of remote intervention, our family video began to roll on the screen behind Pa’s casket. From the omniscient lens of the almighty television, Pa posthumously followed his final sermon with traditional comic reprieve. Overlooking his congregation from the banks of Shoal Creek, serenaded by the soundtrack—"If you want my body/ and you think I’m sexy/ come on baby let me know"—there was Pa, wearing nothing but a pair of Christmas boxer shorts and an ecstatic smile.

If dying had been one last cheap shot at saving our souls, then this absurd resurrection served as our filament of faith in Pa’s Satellite Savior. Baptized by profane tears which purified even the dimples in our cheeks, we laughed our way through the rest of the service and out past the waiting hearse. I’m sure this is a recessional that went down in the history books of Roller Funeral Home—my Aunt Lori even want so far as to ask if we could get a discount for lightening the mood.

If I could call my grandfather right now, he’d probably still assure me that my ticket to Satan’s cellar was non-transferable, but somehow, I’m not overly concerned by his prophecy. After all, my whole family will be there and thanks to Pa, we all know exactly what to expect. I’m fairly certain that if Pa’s funeral could summon up the level of divine comedy necessary to make us laugh, then Pa’s hell must repeatedly kill the eternally damned with a scorching wit.