Read The Dirty Parts of the Bible for Free Online Page A

with their starched white collars and black dresses that touched
the floor. You couldn’t even see their forms. Aside from their hands and faces, you wouldn’t know they had bodies at all.
    My waitress looked and talked like a prissy school marm. I always figured I was damned to wind up with a girl like that—mousy, pious, with thin lips, pencil-drawn eyebrows, and granny glasses. That was the only sort of girl who’d ever want to marry a preacher’s boy. She wouldn’t give me so much as a kiss before we were married. And after were got hitched, she’d undress in the dark so I’d never get to see her naked.
    The acme of femininity? Those Harvey Girls were straight out of my worst nightmares. I chowed down my hamburger and got the hell out of there.
    Unlike Chicago Union Station, they had bathrooms in St. Louis. In fact, they had two different kinds: White and Colored. It took me a minute to figure out that Colored didn’t mean red and blue toilets. In Remus, nobody was scared to use the same john as a black man. I knew from experience: white shit doesn’t look any different from colored.
    Remus had quite a few Negroes, known as the Old Settlers. Nobody knew how they got there—maybe the Underground Railroad—but they’d been there as long as anyone could remember. My best friend at school, Sammy Swisher, was one of them.
    Walking to school together one winter morning, Sammy and I found a dead skunk, frozen stiff. The whole rest of the way, we played skunk hockey, kicking it back and forth over the ice. When we got to school, there was a note on the door: no class—Ms. Steinke was home sick. That gave Sammy an idea.
    We went inside and propped the skunk up in her chair. I found a pair of Ms. Steinke’s wire glasses in the desk drawer, and set them on its nose. To top it all off—Sammy wrote “Ms. Stinky” in huge letters across the blackboard.
    Mrs. Steinke never lived it down. Neither did she ever catch the culprits. She suspected Sammy, but he had a perfect alibi: he’d been with the preacher’s son all day.
     
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    My experiment in doing whatever I wanted was off to a poor start, but the possibilities before me were endless. First thing, I left the station and walked until I came to the Fox Theater. When I saw the sign out front, I couldn’t believe my luck: Modern Times was playing—Charlie Chaplin’s new movie.
    In Remus, the “theater” was a converted storage room in Bob’s Barber Shop, with a wobbly projector in back and a white sheet up front. The film reels were old and grainy, with no sound other than old Bob’s coughing and wheezing. I didn’t mind too much, though—for a penny I could see Chaplin in The Circus , or Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Junior , or Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last .
    Inside, the Fox didn’t look like a theater at all. It was more like a temple to the God of Cinema. Everything was decked out in red and gold; satyrs and nymphs cavorted along the walls, and Oriental warriors stood watch from their pedestals high above. The ceiling of the auditorium was as wide as the night sky, painted deep blue with blinking lights for stars, with a chandelier as big as the moon in the center.
    My favorite part of the movie was when they hooked Charlie up to the Billows Feeding Machine—“A practical device to feed your men while they work.” The machine short circuits and dumps hot soup down Charlie’s shirt, splats a pie in his face, shoves a metal bolt in his mouth, and slaps him silly with a sponge.
    My other favorite part was Charlie’s sidekick, played by Paulette Goddard. The title card called her “The Gamin, a child of the waterfront.” Long, graceful legs, black hair wet with sea mist, strong cheekbones, cunning eyes, a tight-fitting dress torn at the bottom . . . For a child, Paulette Goddard sure was well-developed.
    It was past 8 o’clock when the show let out, though you wouldn’t have known for all the city lights. After the train ride, dinner, and food,