(DISCARDED DRAFT) DIARY OF A COFFIN DODGER CHAPTER D

UND PIPPA TANZT (AND PIPPA DANCES) (1924)

Nothing about the shed looked appealing. The paint was peeling from the wooden walls and brown stripes, like streak marks on a pair of undies, scarred the corrugated iron roof.

There were no widows along the wall on the side facing the Reverend’s former palace of pornography. This wall was about two metres tall. The wall on the other side was a couple of metres taller, with the back wall about five metres from the entrance. The roof sloped down towards the house to allow drainage from the roof.

The gutters, like the Reverend, had given up the ghost.

Tall thistles and other weeds proliferated underneath rusty gaps in these dilapidated structures.

Law enforcement officers had completed their investigations. Therefore, they had notified the family twenty-four hours before I visited the shed that we could return to the property.

They told us within hours of the Reverend S.B.’s death, we could not enter the property until they had completed their search of the house.

Law enforcement confiscated phones, computers, electronic storage devices, sex dolls, lubricants, and sex toys. They also discovered a studio in the basement of the Reverend’s house, complete with video and sound recording equipment. Equipment which law enforcement had also removed.

They had seen the shed from the back verandah. There were no other buildings on the back paddock or on the adjourning bramble and weed infested blocks.

Law enforcement officers said they didn't need to check the shed when they visited my sister's house to tell the family they could re-enter the property.

According to them, nothing in the shed could contribute to what they knew about the Reverend from other sources. Therefore, law enforcement officers had not entered the shed.

Neither had I until now.

Even when the Reverend was alive, I had never been near the shed. I never visited him at his poxy house.

I was not interested in spending time with the Reverend.

Growing up, I was nothing more than a decoration in his life, making him look good to his male Christian mates.

The mates, when I was younger than ten, who would drop into the Reverend’s house when it was time to bathe young children.

Bath time with me, my siblings (the ones who were younger than me), and young cousins if they happened to be staying at my place for a few days.

My friends whispered to me during Sunday School classes that the mates also showed up during the evening when my friends had their baths.

The mates who never kept their hands on top of the towels they helped dry the children with.

After a mate securely wrapped a towel around a child, his hands moved meticulously underneath the cloth. His fingers took their time moving over and, where they could, into the body of the quivering child, their voices stilled by whispered threats.

My shoulders tensed when I saw the mates waiting in the hallway as we kids stepped out of the bath, through the open doorway and started our dripping, shivering naked walk towards the Reverend’s mates.

Mates who stared at us, but not at our faces. Not knowing why, we shivered and shielded our bodies with our small hands and thin arms.

When my mother supervised bath time, the mates never showed up.

With Mum in the bathroom supervising, the bathroom door was closed until all kids were out of the bath, dried and dressed.

Dressed in pyjamas, with long pants and long-sleeved tops, with all the buttons done up. In winter, we donned slippers and snugly wrapped dressing gowns. Even when the Reverend S.B. gave the girls frilly nighties as birthday presents, Mum ensured they never wore them.

Now I realise why mum got rid of the nighties and why she dressed us the way she did, before she would open the bathroom door and allow us kids out.

The Reverend, however, would be in the bathroom, supervising bath time in the evenings when his predatory mates showed up.

The mates whose stinky breath was a mix of tobacco, alcohol, peppermint, and something I now recognise as male hormones and adrenaline.

The scariest part of them was the look in the Reverend’s mates’ eyes.

A freaky look I did not have the words to describe as a child.

As an adolescent, I figured out words to describe it.

It was a hungry, devouring look in a bloke’s eyes when he moved in on a woman or girl and consumed their body, spirit and soul, with a cock-focused, boundary-breaking, disgusting, sordid act of violence.

Given the Reverend's enabling of his mates' predatory behaviour, why should I waste my adult life in the Reverend's immoral company?

Or spend any time in his house or on his property?

The spokesperson for the family, my eldest sister, had given me the task twenty-fours before I visited the shed, of seeing what was in it and, if need be, cleaning it out.

Other family members were not speaking to me since the funeral and the wake. The reason for the closure of the coffin before the service started could have something to do with this silence. Or it could be the brief time visitors spent at the wake. My family well knew my creativity with flatulence.

I now stood at the front door of the shed for the first time.

This chapter and the next will narrate what I found in that shed. I will also discuss the slicing and dicing the Jesus Crew did, again, to the life of Mary. A victim/survivor who, along with Joseph and Jesus, worshipped the God with no name, not the God of the Christians.

A God of male-centric values who condones male violence towards girls and women. The Christian’s God who considers women and girls to be chattels of men. The God who supports the ownership of women and girls’ fertility rights by the Christian churches the women and girls attend.

The God worshipped by the Reverend S.B. and, for a time, by me.

Looking at the shed door held fast by a latch and padlock, I wondered what the shed might contain regarding Reverend S.B.’s journey with the God of the Christians.

However, to gain access, I needed the key to the padlock.

I, therefore, returned to the house along the track, which reeked like a toilet that needed a clean, hoping to find the key in the Reverend S.B’s. former study.

However, as I drew closer to the house, I saw an axe resting against the wood heap stacked near the verandah steps.

'That's better than any key,' I muttered.

I picked up the axe, slung it over my shoulder, and returned to the shed.

I enjoyed whacking the door with the axe.

After the door succumbed to my cascading blows, I dropped the axe onto the ground and stepped over the remains of the door into the shed. 

I grimaced as I looked along the bench that ran along one unlined, windowless side wall at the dissolute detritus of a fucked up life. 

A life lived by a Christian minister and a Gospel preacher. The evidence of that life mixed with garbage revealing a mind fucking wallowing in the pits of human depravity.

Porno magazines and videos, children’s toys, video cameras and flashguns, videocassettes, empty wine bottles, soft drink cans, packets of Viagra and boxes of a wide variety of condoms were mixed in with newspapers, church newsletters, ring binders, photo albums and documents.

I wanted to puke when I looked down at the grime encrusted floor boards and saw two dead rats near the doorway.

My gaze moved from the floor to the roof, where thin fingers of sunlight beamed through rusty pin-holes scattered across the length of the roof.

The sunlight shone on the thick layers of dust covering the two windows on the unlined wall opposite the bench. These windows’ lower edges were level with the top of the bench but were about two metres away from it. The widows’ upper edges disappeared into the cobwebs festooning the underside of the roof.

Set into the end wall, another window spanned the gap from the edge of the bench to the wall opposite.

Though I kept my queasy stomach in check, I was struggling to contain my rage, like dark clouds gathering before a storm,

as I looked in horror at the many church calendars taped to the walls.

All these dust and cobweb-free calendars flaunted pictures of young girls with as much flesh exposed as the law would permit.

Just enough not to have the churches, named on the calendars, being busted for owning and displaying child pornography.

My anger raged when I thought of the motel room and the distressed, weeping, scared young girl and the gross, decency-defiling violations the Reverend had inflicted on her and others.

I swore and howled as I ripped the calendars from the walls and tore them into shreds.

With tears running down my cheeks, I smashed the windows with a hammer I picked up from the bench top while screaming at the Reverend S.B.,

'You bastard. You fucking slimy prick. Will you men never stop?'

Frustrated at men’s unwillingness to change, I banged my head on a wall.

If I didn’t believe that the God of no name offered men a chance to change from a cesspit of malice towards women and girls into the man Joseph became, I would have had myself committed or taken myself out of this world.

The thought that somewhere in the world, that change happens, though it never wholly quells the boiling, steaming anger inside me, lights a lamp of hope and makes my life liveable.

I hurled the hammer through the one remaining window, a skylight set into the roof about halfway along the length of the shed.

Shattered glass cascaded onto the floor as the hammer crashed through the skylight.

As the sound of the hammer’s violent landing on the metal roof boomed around the shed, I sank onto the floor beside the bench, sobbing, as my rage subsided.

Time passed as I sat on the floor until a salty mixture of tears and blood running over my lips focused my mind on cuts and the throbbing power of a friggin’ awful headache.

I struggled to my feet and steadied myself by placing a hand on the bench. I shivered and took a deep breath before stumbling out of the shed, back along the track, and into the Reverend’s former temple of paedophilia.

I made my way to the bathroom, not giving a shit about the trail of blood splatters I left on the hallway carpet. I heard my three sisters laughing and braying inside the house, two who followed a German thinker and one who hung out with an arm-waving nonsense-babbling crowd.

I ignored them and entered the bathroom, washed my face in the washbasin, and dried my face on a towel hanging on a rail.

Attached to the wall above the washbasin was a metal cabinet. I opened the cabinet door and found painkillers and sticking plaster on a shelf.

I took some painkillers, put a sticking plaster on my wounds, and went back to the shed to clean it out.

Broken glass crunched under my sneakers as I stepped inside the shed.

While I chewed over the task ahead, I kicked an empty rum bottle out of the way and booted the rat carcasses towards the back wall. I then opened a can of cola I found on the bench.

A blood-red, three-ring binder with the company logo on the front cover lay alongside the can.

As cleaning out the shed would be monumental, I procrastinated and read the folder while I drank the soft drink.

I shook rat shit off the three-ring binder as I picked it up.

While doing so, several postcards, business cards and Polaroid snapshots spilled out and drifted onto the floor.

The business cards were formatted using the pictures on the postcards.

The snapshots were pictures of the penis-bulged Reverend S.B., shirtless, dressed in swimming trunks, posing with semi-naked young women.

The postcards, business cards and snapshots were as good explanation as any for the stained crusty nature of the white cloth lying under the folder.

I shook my head in disgust as I looked down at this further evidence of the the Reverend's depraved life. I don't know whether any of those items related to the Reverend’s indiscretion that had him thrown out of the company. Neither did I care.

I left the items on the floor and thought about Bonfire Night as a valuable cover for burning down the shed and its contents as I sipped the can of drink and took the folder back to a chair I saw when I entered the shed. The remains of the door spread across the chair.

I tipped the chair up and shook off pieces of timber and metal before placing the chair just inside the shed doorway.

Once I sat on the chair, I drank the soft drink and read the folder.

The initial sections were about the business practices of the company the Reverend S.B. preached for, which I wrote about in the previous chapter.

Business practices which revealed the opaqueness men indulge in when they enable and perpetrate violence against girls and women.

A depraved, duplicitous opaqueness was revealed as I read the latter sections of the folder. The sections that spelled out the horror of the mission young women and girls were called upon to undertake to spread the Christian Christ’s word. 

However, they could only witness if they and their families had let Christ into their hearts and committed themselves to adhering to the company’s doctrines and practices as the way to lead a Christ-filled life.

Committed their lives to the Christian’s Christ usually during one of those starry-eyed, godawful, emotionally saturated services in the auditorium like the ones the Reverend S.B. was a master facilitator of.

This role girls and young women were called to undertake by the company was a sexualised one - a calling via the company’s CEO,

a divine vessel into which the God of the Christians had poured spiritual insights including how these young women were to express that calling.

I was itching to punch someone’s lights out as I thought about the number of sound studios in the Reverend’s former car park cathedral and every other car park cathedral operated by the company.

The studios ostensibly granted young women a chance to enhance their singing skills.

However, the company provided the studios for a sinister, duplicitous purpose.

By encouraging young women to practice their singing skills, the company gave young women an opportunity to stand on the preacher's platform at the front of the auditorium and belt out a Jesus song.

Therefore, young women would be the focus of attention for the throng of happy clappers in the auditorium.

This gave the older guys in the audience time to run their seedy Christ blessed eyes over a young woman's body.

It took me a while to figure out what the hell that was about.

Then it clicked.

These older blokes have the usual fucked-up heterosexual pornified male mind that flicks into flights of sleazy fantasy whenever those men look at younger women.

Therefore, these older blokes, AKA a grandfather or an elderly uncle, had an opportunity to park a lingering gaze on any aspect of a young woman’s physicality on which they wanted to feast their lascivious, sanctified eyes.

A feast designed to give these gentlemen an erection without Viagra.

The older guys had the big bucks; ergo,

a decent view of a bit of eye candy during a hellfire or Jesus service would help open the older blokes’ wallets.

I looked down at what I had just read in the folder resting in my lap with tears in my eyes and thought, I don’t want to wait for November 5th. If I can think of a clever way to torch the shed without being caught, its contents and the Reverend’s bloody house, I will.

Men’s multiple Janus-faced tactics to manipulate women into having cock-focused sex often leaves me struggling to describe the duplicity and the sheer bastardry involved.

But this, this use of young women and girls as a particular form of eye candy as set out in the binder … I have run out of words.

I doubted whether another dose of the painkillers I had found in the bathroom would relieve my headache if I did a further round of head-banging.

All the shed windows were shattered.

I swore at the depraved, duplicitous, hypocritical bastards who thought that what was in that folder could connect with Jesus Christ and the God he worshipped, the God with no name.

I stood up and hurled the folder and the can of drink towards the shed’s back wall.

As the can slammed into a wall, I staggered outside and spewed my guts up.

When I felt sure my stomach had stopped heaving, I went back into the shed to find a can of soft drink to rinse out my mouth.

Alongside the can I picked up was a sheaf of documents marked, ‘Sermon on the Magnificat.’

I opened the can and took a couple of sips.

As I swilled the syrupy sweetness around my mouth, I looked at the papers and thought, ‘What the hell is the Magnificat?’

I had never heard the Reverend mention anything like this in the services he orchestrated in the car park cathedral.

I would do nothing clever if it was like what I had read in the duplicitous, stomach-churning, blood-red three-ring binder I had hurled at the shed's back wall.

I would not hesitate in setting set fire to the shed before running into the house yelling at my sisters too, ‘Get the fuck out of the house, now!’ as I poured the rest of a can of mower fuel I found in the shed onto the living room floor, underneath the curtains. 

I had a lighter in the pocket of my jeans because I was in the cigarette-smoking phase of my life. However, I stayed put while I finished the soft drink.

I wanted to read the document and discover what further fucked-up depravity and duplicity the Reverend was up to. That would put the icing on the cake of reasons I needed to torch the place.

Therefore, I sprayed the contents of my mouth onto a shed wall, picked up the sheaf of papers, shook off the cockroach poo spread across the top sheet and returned to the seat by the door.

I sat down and started reading the sheaf of papers.

I was floored by what I realised after only reading a few pages of the sermon.

The Reverend Sadistic Bastard was on the same wavelength as me.

Up to a point.

About twelve months before the Reverend S.B.’s funeral, I was in the Newspaper section of the local library. I picked up a broadsheet newspaper from the rack of papers, put the paper on a table and sat down.

I opened the paper to the non-fiction book review section and read a review of a book that asked, ‘Who was Jesus Christ?’

Amongst the claims in the book, the reviewer of the book mentioned a statement by the book’s author that the Christmas star that shone over Bethlehem was a fabrication.

I muttered, ‘What a load of fucking bullshit!’

When I read that review, I held to the belief that the Reverend drummed into me as a child, that the Bible was the literal word of God.

But, as I read that review, I felt a sense of peace.

Which was weird as the feeling came not from inside me.

As I sat feeling as calm as I have ever felt, a voice whispered, ‘What if that claim is correct?’ I have no other way of explaining how such a fundamental change of gears in my worldview occurred.

My mind moved to a spiritually disturbing consideration because I did not block out the line of thinking which followed.

Creeping stealthily through my mind, bringing with it a light whose source I could not explain, came the urgent suggestion, ‘Well, if that text is a fabrication, what other texts are in the same boat? And if so, is the Bible the Literal Word of God?’

That spiritually rock-solid belief in the Bible as the literal Word of God was reinforced by my attendance at the Reverend’s hellfire or Jesus performances in the auditorium.

As well as my attendance at the bible classes led by creepy, handsy youth leaders appointed by the cathedral elders to spearhead the company’s mission to teenagers and bring them to the Christians Christ via a hellfire or Christ performance in the auditorium.

Services of worship orchestrated by the Reverend or through an intense nonsense-babbling, arm-waving service facilitated by a specialist youth pastor appointed by the company.

Though those shakedowns would not get much coinage from the kids attending those performances, that was not the point of them. It was adult family members, particularly older male relatives, the kids would be encouraged to bring to the auditorium, who were the proper focus of the services.

However, my attendance at services after the Reverend got booted out of the company and stopped preaching in the auditorium of the car park cathedral was sporadic.

He preached for a while in another hellfire or come-to-Jesus set-up, but it was more sedate than the operations run by the company.

There was the occasional worshipper at one or other of the services who closed their eyes, raised their arms towards heaven and sprouted lines of gibberish, but that was never the focus of the services.

As well, the services were held in a simple, unadorned building where the Reverend would be lucky to get more than a couple of dozen older people at each service.

Though I still clung to the belief that the Bible was the literal word of God, a point of view from which the Reverend continued to preach, I found the services boring and eventually stopped going.

By the time the Reverend had left the sedate set-up, a few years after starting there, and began preaching at a mainstream Protestant church, I had left the family home and did not attend any of his services.

My belief in the Bible as the literal Word of God, though, remained a bulwark against life’s ambiguities.

A bulwark I was prepared to defend, as attested to by many fiery arguments, over the years, with house-mates who, I felt sure, were on a one-way ticket to hell with the innumerable blasphemies and heresies they sprouted as they attacked my spiritual barricade.

A spirituality I joyfully displayed as I read the Bible in the living rooms of the houses I shared with them while they smoked joints and read mind-corrupting, Marxist-ungodly inspired texts allegedly needed for the studies they were undertaking or the lectures they were preparing.

Though I could not consistently attend church because I was working shift work, I kept the lamp of Christ’s forgiveness burning brightly in my soul by whistling Gospel songs as I went about the house chores assigned to me. Whistling that led to bevies of insults. Abuse, which I prayerfully and gladly accepted as I regarded it as martyrdom for Christ’s sacrifice for me.

However, that change of gears in my mind as I sat reading that newspaper book review in the library shook my thinking.

I blew that bulwark of the Bible, being the literal word of God, to smithereens. I rejected my former Christian ideas on Jesus Christ and God entirely.

A new chapter in my life opened up as I began a faith journey with the Jesus Christ, who broke bread with women and men in Galilee and the God he worshipped, the God of no name.

A journey of exploration as I critically appraised the texts of the Bible—a spiritual journey throughout the twelve months before the Reverend S.B.’s funeral, and one that continues.

After the Reverend’s funeral, as I now sat inside his shed, with shattered glass decorating the piles of puke-inducing porno material on the bench, I sipped the cola drink, stared into space and pondered what I had read in the Reverend’s sermon that I had placed on the bench.

I had stopped reading the sermon in a state of shock.

The Reverend had apparently also moved into a position where he was critically appraising the Bible’s texts and not considering the Bible as the literal word of God.

In the pages of the sermon I had read, the Reverend used biblical texts, with all their beauty and ambiguity, as the basis of his sermon.

Further, not once had he used the phrase, ‘The Bible says,’ to provide those texts with an imprimatur of male authority.

A far cry from how mantra figured in the Reverend’s sermons he preached in the car park cathedral’s auditorium when he would proclaim,

‘The gutters reek with the sins of the iniquities you are breeding in your beds. Turn or burn. Listen to the Word of God. The Bible says all ye who….’

And endless variations thereof he thundered in the hellfire or Jesus shakedowns that were a hallmark of his preaching style.

That style of preaching was so far removed from what he had written in the sermon I had been reading and, presumably, a sermon he preached, going by the date at the top of the sermon, in the mainstream Protestant church, which never conducted turn or burn performances, I thought, what the fuck is going on?

Had the Reverend S.B. stopped being depraved and conniving? Unlike most men, had he removed his mask, and his public persona now reflected underlying values and attitudes that no longer expressed a mindset focused on violence towards women and girls? Had there really been this fundamental shift in his real persona? If so, my knowledge of him would have to be adjusted.

Then the light bulb went on in my mind.

My blood ran cold as the Reverend’s sneakiness and treachery again shone brightly.

There had been no change.

Like most men, the mask was firmly in place, and what lay underneath remained a cesspit of loathing and violence towards women and girls. With the Reverend, this violence expressed itself in terms of sexual depravity.

My arms started shaking.

Frightened I might drop the drink, I put the can on the bench.

Everything fell into place.

I looked around the shed and wondered how on earth I could have thought that the Reverend had changed?

The Reverend, like most men, could not be known and would never be known in terms of the transformation Joseph undertook when he answered the call of the God of no name.

As my gaze wandered over the piles of perverted filth lying on the bench, I could see that the Reverend S.B.’s journey with the God of the Christians in the mainstream Protestant Church continued to be lit by the guiding light that never flickered: access to girls. And, with access gained, to sexually abuse them.

I shook my head and thought the fucked-up Reverend S.B.’s insincerity and hypocrisy knew no limits.

When the company sacked the Reverend S.B., he lost access to the girls who attended the car park cathedral.

His sermon on The Magnificat showed that, by his ordination into the ministry of a mainstream Protestant church, he was prepared to do anything, say anything, believe any church’s protocols and carry out any church’s spiritual rights and practices

if it meant girls were again within his reach in a socially accepted and thus enabled way.

I don’t know why he left his preaching position at the more sedate hellfire or Jesus church.

Maybe the group that ran that church also asked the Reverend to leave.

Or perhaps the girls in that church were too bony, had acne, weren’t the right height, weren’t plump enough, or had moved into an age group where the girls lost their appeal to the Reverend S.B.

The sort of opinions I heard whispered in the conversations I overheard the mates having between themselves as I drew near to them when I was younger than ten.

As a child, I didn’t know what those blokes were talking about as they stood in the hallway outside the bathroom with towels in their hands, ogling the naked children who stepped out of the bathroom.

As the conversations were a puzzle, they stuck in my mind.

As an adolescent, however, I unravelled their sickening meaning.

I don’t know, and I am not looking for, what the Reverend’s foul, girl’s-life-destroying preferences were. Maybe the preaching in the mainstream Protestant church broadened his chances to explore those preferences after he left the more sedate turn-or-burn congregation. 

The few checks and balances put in place in faith-based organisations, companies or cults designed to protect the souls, the spirits, and the well-being of children from sexual exploitation are designed and implemented by men.

Men who will not look into their dark souls and confess to themselves how the throbbing power of their phallus seeds their minds with fantasies when a control-driven lust-drenched opportunity presents itself to abuse their positions of compassion, accountability and trust to access a warm female hole.

Some of these men may resist that power, and some may accede to its dominating demands. But the majority will find it hard to resist the seductive call of that power when their penis’s focus of attention is an opportunity to dance inside a young female’s warm hole.

By not recognising this power, these men look for a cause for the sexual abuse of children beyond themselves and other men. The regulations they, therefore, write, with their 'not me or him' attitude towards this heinous abuse of ecclesiastical authority, are riddled with loopholes. The sort of regulations a truck could be driven through as regards dealing forcefully with the clerical abuse of children.

The inadequacy of these regulations, with their compromised checks and balances, means that the sexual abuse of young women and girls (and others) is quickly started by men, like the Reverend S.B., who will mouth whatever words are necessary to whatever religious leader or congregation in whatever faith-based organisation those men determine will give them faith-based and therefore, society-enabled guaranteed access to girls and women.

A sickening smooth, well-practised over centuries exploitation smeared with the veneer of social prestige that goes with being a cardinal, a bishop, an associate pastor, an apostolate, a preacher, a pastor, a lay preacher, an elder, a seminarian, a brother, a presbyter, a minister, a priest, a monsignor, an abbot, a monk, a deacon, an archbishop or a pope.

__________________________________________________________