By Don Jolly

It’s just a short walk from the campus of Baylor University to the Waco Hilton, but in Texas, in the summer, even ten minutes in the sun can leave you with a sweat-soaked shirt. When the white bearded man offered me a ride, I took it.

This was last summer, and I was away from New York to give a paper on Marty Rathbun, Scientology’s Martin Luther, at CESNUR – the annual conference given by the Center for Studies on New Religions and the International Society for the Study of New Religions. The attendees were, as per usual, an eclectic mix of scholars, adherents of new religions and miscellaneous eccentrics. The man with the white beard who offered me a lift fell solidly into the third category. He’d been wandering from session to session all morning, passing out photocopied leaflets containing the “truth” about the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. He wasn’t a typical Moonie –nor was he an anti-cult crusader. As his rental S.U.V. swung beneath Interstate Highway 35, he explained his mission.

Moon’s Unification Church was, he said, in trouble. Its present leadership was spiritually dangerous — and it was all Korea’s fault.

Koreans, he continued, were uniquely unsuited for leadership. In the literature he handed me, page after page of tight-packed printing explained that members of the Church must abandoned the hierarchical “LEADER-CENTERED UC/UM” (the “UM” standing for “Unification Movement”) and “DEMAND and FACILITATE the creation of a 100%-MEMBER-CENTERED UC/UM[.]” In other words, he was another Luther – or at least another Lutheran. The theses he handed me concluded with a two-page coda about how Korean men have the smallest penises in the world.

“I remember an American brother who worked with me at the News World newspaper in the late 1970s,” he wrote, proving he was with the Unification Church during its moneyed heyday at the close of the last century, when their holdings in publication and real estate were fast expanding. This colleague, the pamphlet said, “strongly suspected his Korean wife was having a lesbian sex, since she’d inexplicably, essentially abandoned him, supposedly to do ‘UC-work’ in Korea.” Lesbianism was common in Korean women, the text said, because Korean men could offer only meager sexual satisfaction. “The desperate Korean reality is that they can get blessed relief from scissoring that’s woefully absent from their matrimonial duty of pygmy-penile coitus,” it concluded.

When we arrived at the hotel, I thanked my new companion for the lift, and asked him for a card – some way to contact him. He explained that he was under constant surveillance, and laid out a complicated scheme for getting in touch that I have since forgotten. I liked the guy, and admired his willingness to disparage an entire nation’s genitals in service of his cause. We shook hands, and I went inside to get cleaned up before the barbeque reception scheduled for that evening. When I got out of the shower, my column on Salem Kirban’s Guide to Survival was live on the Revealer website.

I’ve been writing The Last Twentieth Century Book Club for two years. Starting in September, I’ll be writing something else. For its readers, I suppose, the Club must read like a series of enthusiastic book reports. I hope that, without having said it outright, it’s clear that the books and records and videos covered by this column aren’t just a matter of scholarly interest for me. I love them all and, like every great affection, it’s gotten me in trouble.

Many of these columns have been written on the road. Almost all of them (this one included) have assumed their final shape far past the deadline set by my indefatigable editor, Kali Handelman. For this penultimate entry, she has agreed to let me ruminate on the last few years as I have seen them.

I wrote my first piece on Salem Kirban in the lobby of the Waco Hilton, waiting for my room to become available. The second one, I hacked together in a rental car, driving from LosAngeles to San Diego, with a stopover for serious revisions in San Clemente. I was travelling with my brother Max, taking in the religious sights of the American West: Cliven Bundy’s embattled Nevada ranch, the abandoned pleasure grounds outside Las Vegas where Barack Obama prepped for his televised debates against Mitt Romney, the supposed grave of Billy the Kid and, of course, the Yorba Linda Water District. My interviews with Kirban’s children were conducted in a heroin hotel in Hollywood, an unairconditioned box where Max lay, sweating, trying to avoid the junky who’d passed out on the stairs outside our door.

I remember sitting on the edge of the bed in that room, with the window open, watching the sun go down across a tangled sprawl of roofs and palm trees. There, holding the phone between my ear and shoulder, I met Dawn Frick – one of Kirban’s daughters. She lives north of Spokane.

Her father was a kind of popular prophet, a novelist and pamphleteer of the rapture. In the early 1970s, his novel, 666 was something of a bestseller within the Christian marketplace. Later rapture novels, notably the Left Behind series, owe a lot to him. As the sun sank lower and lower, I asked Dawn about her father’s theology, and about the various ways he marketed and sold his books. I asked her about her childhood fear of the coming rapture, and the reign of the Anti-Christ, and she answered capably. But she told me more than that – more than I’ve printed.

Salem Kirban’s childhood had a lonely streak, she told me. His father died when the boy was two. As a result, Kirban spent some time at a “home for fatherless boys” before heading off to boarding school. Throughout, however, he remained close to his mother. “He was her little boy,” Dawn told me. “She used to sing to him: You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”

This instilled a fierce love of family in the young author. Later, that same love would propel him to Vietnam at the height of its midcentury conflict and, ultimately, convince him that the end of time was fast approaching. By that impulse he would win his fame. But the way Dawn put it still sticks with me. I hear it every time I hear the tune.

By the time I was finished with my interview, the streetlights were humming and the sky above Los Angeles was a starless black. Max took the single bed, while I stretched out on the floor. The junky on the stairs was snoring. The day’s incidents began to fade, as I eyeballed the speckled ceiling. Like cold water, my own loneliness seeped in.

The next day, Max and I went South, and I tried to write something comprehensible about the end of the world, Salem Kirban and the melancholy of an old folk song. I wasn’t sure if I was saving something beautiful or destroying it. Thankfully, however, I was also far enough past deadline that there was little point in settling the matter. When it was done, I swam in the Pacific – and got sunburned so bad that I couldn’t lie down comfortably for a week.

For scholars, “religion” is by and large a term of art. It can refer to certain definitive rituals and group affiliations, of course – but at its edge, in religion’s generative spaces, the category becomes hopelessly tangled with the private impulses and eccentricities of genius. Kirban ended up clipping prophetic items from newspapers, making holy writ out of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Christian pop-star Carman imagined a world where secular success and evangelical righteousness were the same thing, to somewhat incoherent result. The works featured in the Book Club, I’ve come to realize, are often models of reality accepted (either fervently, unconsciously or both) by only a few. Sometimes these models simply become out of date: “Speak Out” is a curiosity, for instance, because its model of the “teenager” is no longer widely accepted by American culture at large. Sometimes, as in the case of Kirban and the white bearded man with the Korean penis obsession, the world they offer is simply too idiosyncratic to spread far. This literature has loneliness at its core.

I spent a few days last November in Bloomington, Indiana. There, paralyzed by the pain of broken tooth whose injury had hit the nerve, I dragged myself from my hotel room to the special collections department of Indiana University’s library to sift through the private correspondence of Orson Welles. I was trying to piece together all the information I could on a biography of Christ he never put to film, in preparation for last December’s column.

Welles died in the same year I was born. I knew him, then, from a few histories, a few books of interviews – and, of course, his films. The University’s collection of ephemera was something else entirely – it was life, in all its chaos, its important unimportance, or at least a record closer to it than any I had seen before. In those memos and notes and affectionate bills you could see money, and boredom, and family and work all wound together and sloppily compiled. From that, I produced my summary. From the life of Welles emerged the story of Welles – from his notes on Christ, I constructed a conception of my own.

The whole twentieth century is now being streamlined and explained, its thorny patches smoothed to narrative. Most of the subjects of the Book Club, having achieved only modest success, are on the point of disappearing. There will be new Martin Luthers, and new Catholics too, as our great and terrible century invents itself. I realize that this is all within the accepted mechanism of history, of course. Still, to me, this course of life seems dreadfully sad. Very few people achieve the fame required for a Midwestern library to save their trash.

I spent my nights in Indiana watching the snow, and listening to Bob Lazar explain the method by which flying saucers fly. When I first got started as a writer, I figured I’d make my mark in science fiction. This was around 2003, I think – I was in high school, and most of my SF reading was confined to the years before I was born: Herbert, Edgar Pangborn, et cetera.

I wrote my first full-length story a few weeks after my fifteenth birthday. The plot, as I recall, concerned the crew of a rocket ship who discovered the rotten and impossibly dense body of God floating somewhere between Saturn and Neptune. I no longer know what the astronauts did with it, or how the corpse was described. I do remember that my stern and unflappable protagonists recognized the deity immediately, and with a certainty that seemed, to them, indistinguishable from madness. These spacemen were, like myself at the time, nominal and uncritical atheists, defined by their intense addiction to a slightly science fictionalized version of Internet porn. In the end, they were so unnerved by their unwelcome faith that they made a kamikaze run on God, sacrificing themselves and their rocket in an attempt to blow apart divinity. It was a real piece of shit, and I loved it.

With great ceremony, I packed the 12 typewritten pages of my story in a manila envelope and dispatched it to the Hoboken, New Jersey P.O. box belonging to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. About two weeks later, I received my first rejection letter. Shortly thereafter, I wrote a second science fiction story, about a tasteless and functionally illiterate magazine editor who I allowed to live for about three pages before cracking the Earth in half with an arbitrary comet. From there, my course was set. I was first published a year later, when one of my Dungeons & Dragons traps was printed in the back matter of an unpopular comic book.

Last month, Penthouse magazine ran one of my stories, making me exactly as successful an author as Kilgore Trout, the Cigarette Smoking Man from the X-Files – and, in my head at least, most of the subjects I’ve discussed in The Last Twentieth Century Book Club.

I’m pretty sure I know what happens next.

But that doesn’t mean I’m particularly happy about it.

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You can read earlier installments of The Last Twentieth Century Book Club here:

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Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.