Dave

Yesterday I was talking to Jon Taylor because he used to live in Florida and I was wondering if he had any suggestions for the Keys, which Rae and I are going to go visit for the first time. We’ll take a plane to Miami and rent a car and do the drive down slow. My hope was that Jon Taylor could help me figure out what to absolutely stop and see. But Jon Taylor had no suggestions for the Florida Keys. All he said was, Man, I don’t know about Florida, when I lived there it was the early 90s and I just loved death metal and I worked in this grocery store with this guy Dave who drove me crazy. And Dave was a born again Christian and I didn’t want to talk to Dave but I had to talk to Dave, you couldn’t just ignore him for eight hours even though you wanted to, even though he was just trying to save your soul the whole time. This one day I had off but I had been sick and I hadn’t gotten my paycheck so I walked over to the grocery store to get my paycheck and I was wearing this t-shirt divided into four squares and each square on the shirt was one of the guys from Van Halen, their face, but as a skull—one with sunglasses, one smoking a cigarette, one with long blonde hair, and one just plain-dead-guy skull—so I walk into the grocery store and Dave is there and he sees me and he loses his mind—What is that! He’s pointing at my shirt and yelling, That tells me something! That right there tells me something! I say, What Dave, what does it tell you? And he says he’s just been told that all he had done to try and save my soul was a waste of time and he should have known better. I just took my check and said, Whatever Dave, and left the store. I’d been being as polite as I could stomach to Dave for many months as he casually tried to talk me onto some righteous path against my hidden will but after that he didn’t waste a second of his time talking to me, which was fine. Our checkout lines were right next to each other, now when there was a lull in customers, I could read a magazine rather than get sold Jesus. But Dave kept getting worse and worse after that. I never saw him talk to men anymore, not a word, if a man was in his line, he’d just point to the price on the register and give change. But Dave began to tell women who came to his checkout line that he was a faith healer. One of them actually let him put his hands on her and she came back the next day and claimed her cold had gone away. Dave would say, Paper or plastic or faith healing? Another woman he touched, a really troubled woman, he found her coughing by the seafood section. She said sure, please cure my chronic cough—he put his hands on her and they began to move together down the aisle chanting and then Dave started spitting and convulsing and then she did too and this happened right in front of the mangos and cherries and the manager told Dave that he could not do that kind of thing at the grocery store ever again. After that, Dave never did any faith healings, for the general public, in the grocery store, while on the clock. But Debra came down with the flu and couldn’t afford to miss work and Dave put his hands on her in the break room to try to heal her and the flu went away two days later and Dave got more confident with the faith healing. The faith healing, always with women, the faith healing. So then Dave gets this girlfriend somehow and he’s so confident in his ever-more-powerful healing abilities that he forbids his girlfriend to seek any medical attention for anything whatsoever because he is the healer and God is helping him heal all the ladies. All right, so the girlfriend listens, deals with a tooth ache for a couple months. Then she gets pink eye. Then it all gets really bad. She’s got a fever and a red rash over most of her body and she’s puking. I overhear Dave telling women in his checkout line about this, how his girlfriend would get better if she just believed in him, and maybe he might break up with her. My line gets longer as they begin to avoid Dave. At home Dave’s been telling his girlfriend the reason she isn’t getting better is because she doesn’t believe enough in, he, Dave, meaning she doesn’t believe in God. Well the girlfriend is dying from some ‘feminine problem’ that Dave doesn’t know about, septic shock, that’s what’s happening—and she would have died under Dave’s faith healing but this other woman we were all working with at the grocery store, the wise Clara, tells Dave, Your girlfriend can’t be helped by medicine, you are exactly right, she can only be helped by praying to God, but the problem is she and YOU don’t know exactly what to pray for God to cure, so you should leave work right now and take her to my doctor and my doctor will tell you what is wrong with her and you will be able to pray to God for God to cure that specific problem and God will hear it and she will live. So Dave leaves the register immediately and takes his girlfriend to the doctor and the doctor calls an ambulance and they save her life in the ER, back there behind the white curtains, with all that beautiful science, and after that, Dave the faith healer goes back to being Dave the guy at the grocery store.