Candace was cooking something and Marcus and I were smoking dope and playing records when there was a loud knock on the door. Candace opened the door.
"DAD!"
Framed in the doorway was the biggest man I've ever seen: he was six and a half feet tall and weighed at least three hundred pounds; I think it was Sunday night, because he was wearing his Sunday-go-to-meetin' suit and a fire and brimstone scowl to match. Here's the situation as I saw it: Here is a (huge) man of the cloth, knocking on his single (white) daughter's apartment door which he probably pays the rent on, and finds his daughter cooking supper for a Black Panther and a hippie; moreover, there is loud rock and roll and the sharp smell of marijuana smoke hanging in the air. I figured the options were that the man would size up the situation and charge in like a bull or he might smell the tell- tale smoke and go fetch a cop, who knew?
Candace pulled it together enough to introduce us to her father and I got the impression that she wanted her old man to think we were both just visiting. I jumped up and shook hands, introducing myself in my best ex-Baptist preacher demeanor. I hoped to defuse the potentially explosive situation I felt might arise if the Reverend Morton were to surmise that the black guy, who really only looked like a black militant, was living with hisdaughter, who still went home on Sundays to play the organ in her dad's church.
"Good to meet you, sir--I understand you are a minister?" His attention was wanted elsewhere, but he snapped out of it and focused on me. I asked him what denomination.
"Uh, Church of the Brethren," he said, finally taking a seat on the end of the sofa. I followed him over and sat beside him. He still wanted to look at Marcus, but I wasn't letting go.
"I majored in Bible," I said, and sensing his complete surprise, I hurried on, "as a matter of fact, I was ordained about seven years ago--but now I have decided to teachEnglish."
Now he was genuinely interested. He forgot about whatever he had thought he was seeing and focused on our conversation, which consisted of questions from him andanswers from me: why did I quit preaching; what did I now believe; what did I think of the youth movement on college campuses, what was my theology, and on and on.
We became so engrossed in our conversation that an hour went by in a flash. Everybody was relaxed. Finally, Marc and I left after a warm invitation to visit the Reverend's church.
We quickly forgot about Reverend Morton. We were on an all nighter. I had never had a black friend, not a best friend, and I guess maybe it was the same for Marc; we spent two or three days and nights with no sleep and nothing to eat and mostly just had joints interspersed with coffee or beer. Austin was like that in those days.
At that time, I had never done LSD, and unknown to me, Marc had dropped some acid that very night. I later attributed some of the events of that night to the phenomenon called a "contact high."
That night we ended up at the Methodist Student Center's "Listening Ear" for coffee at about five a.m.. We were drinking black coffee, deeply engrossed in our conversation.I sat at the end of a table and he sat at the corner, and as we leaned close, laughing, the strangest thing happened, a thing I will never be able to explain as long as I live.
It was not an out of body experience, but an exchanging bodies experience--I was suddenly looking into Marc's face, but it was my face, only black, and as he told me, he saw his face in mine, only white. We both had a look of instant surprise and we whooped, laughing and grabbing each other by the shoulders. We fled the place into the gray dawn and the new Austin day, arm in arm, walking down the street, a black guy and a white guy, almost thirty, feeling like kids.A few weeks later, I was surprised to receive a call from Reverend Morton. There was to be a three-day church conference, a retreat on a Central Texas ranch, an ecumenical conference, and he was inviting me and another friend of Candace' to be guests of his church at the conference. He was going to try to get us a spot on the program as representatives of the "Underground Church." After making sure the reverend understood that there was no such institution, or if there was, I didn't know about it, for some reason I said I would go. I learned that Bennie Luck, a red-haired Jesus look-alike and my regular dope dealer, was the other guy going to the conference. Bennie's message was that he was a devout Catholic, but believed LSD should become a church sacrament. I had no message, but I was stocked up on pre-rolled joints and I expected to get my inspiration there.
Bennie rode to the conference with me, but that was actually the last time we saw each other until the last night, which I will get to later.
We registered and got name tags. Mine had my name and "Baptist" printed on it, so I added "ex-" in front of it, because at that time I felt no affinity for, and little connection to, any particular denomination. That river baptism of long ago and even the ordination service seemed to have happened to someone else.
Throughout the conference people would approach me with a puzzled look and say, "What's an Ex-Baptist?" and I would say, "Me."
