Grin Again, Gang, Get Gung-Ho About Jesus

North Hollywood, California, was a truly diabolical place in the 1980s. Which is to say that, guided by the loving paranoia of my family and churchmates, I found Satan absolutely everywhere I looked. He was prevalent in popular music, movies, cartoons, and role-playing games. Watching an hour of MTV was a sure ticket to Hell. In fact, Satan was so ubiquitous that I grew to be both terrified of and enthralled by the unholy trickster. I took great pleasure in finding various ways to irritate Satan, which included random acts of kindness (though never directed toward my brother) and engaging in long monologues in which I would tell Satan why his zeal to steal my soul was a lost cause, for I was bathed in the blood of the lamb and could never be tempted to damnation. And as I would say this, I would stamp my feet (to annoy the demons below) and smile as widely as I could, for a song that I had learned in Lutheran school had taught me to “Smile sweetly, sister, so you’ll send Satan sadly away”. The alliteration appealed to me, of course, but so did the idea that I could piss Satan off simply by donning a smart-ass, shit-eating grin. So many days were passed stomping my feet and grinning like a fool, all in the service of Jesus Christ’s army.

(On more than one occasion I was asked what the hell I was doing, stomping my feet and smiling like a damned fool at the ground. “I’m smiling at Satan,” I’d reply. “He doesn’t like that.” Grown-ups would raise their eyebrows. Unbelievers. “Satan doesn’t like it when you smile at him?” I shook my head. “No.” I knew they were ignorant about the ways of Satan, but it wasn’t their fault that they didn’t go to Lutheran school when they were kids and therefore didn’t know about the song, “Grin again gang get gung-ho about Jesus*. If they’d known that song they’d have known all about how turning a frown upside down was the best way to get Satan to crawl away with this tail between his legs.)
But Satan was tricky, and he kept finding ways to wriggle himself into my life. And as hard as I tried, I couldn’t seem to divest myself of his wily charms. One morning on the playground as I was building a sand trap (for unsuspecting kindergarteners to fall into) I was humming softly to myself when my best friend Kimberly sauntered up to me, hands on her hips and said, “You know that Boy George is going straight to Hell, and my mom says I can’t be friends with anyone who listens to Boy George.”

I looked up, puzzled. “Boy George is going to Hell? What for?”

Kimberly flipped her blonde hair and shrugged. “I think for dressing up like a girl. The Bible says that in the end times the men will look like women and the women will look like men, and Boy George dresses like a woman so he’s going to Hell.”

Now, I sure didn’t know what Satan would want with a boy that wore blue eyeshadow, but then I didn’t understand most of Satan’s motivations so I had to take it on faith that Kimberly was right and Boy George was going to Hell. But “Karma Chameleon” was my favorite song in the world that month, and I wasn’t going to give up humming it even for Jesus. I h ad spent many hours sitting on the floor with my telephone hitting redial to call KIIS FM and asking them to please play “Come on, Chameleon”. After all, as far as my little girl self knew, there was no such word as “karma”, and even if there had been, I wouldn’t have known what it meant, and even if I had, well, “Come on, Chameleon” just made more sense anyway.

Mentally, I vowed never to hum Boy George in Kimberly’s presence again, but I still loved the song.

But since I was now harboring a fugitive piece of Satan in my heart, I had to counteract that act of espionage with something truly Christian, something out of the ordinary. Stomping my feet and smiling like a madman wasn’t going to be enough. If I was going to let Satan into my heart via the music of Boy George, I had to find some way to really let Jesus’ light shine through me.

I let the question stew inside me for several days before I gave up. Maybe it wasn’t really that important. After all, I was constantly surrounded by Satan’s temptations and he had thus far failed to capture my soul. Perhaps I was simply immune to Satan’s seductions.

The idea that I might be among the blessed few to be above and beyond Satan’s reach changed my outlook on life. I started doing things I wasn’t supposed to do, like watch the Smurfs on Saturday morning TV. (My mother had heard that the creator of the Smurfs sold his soul to Satan for a hit cartoon show, and that one night, while drawing the tiny blue characters, a Smurf jumped off the page and bit the artist on the arm. As a result, my brother and I were forbidden from watching the Smurfs. It put quite a damper on my ability to contribute to playground conversations.) I snuck in a few minutes of MTV watching. And sometimes, after an especially long day at school, I skipped bedtime prayers and simply went to bed.

I just wasn’t afraid of Satan anymore.

One night, sound asleep in bed (on a prayer-free night, I’m sure) something shook me awake. As I opened my eyes to complain that it was too early to get up, I realized that no one was standing over me, cajoling me to wake up. It wasn’t just me that was shaking—my entire bed was shaking. And it wasn’t shaking slightly, it was rattling, the brass screws coming loose, creaking, cracking, making horrible sounds as it shook. I tried to scream but the sound caught in my throat and it was all I could to hang on to my blankets and sheets lest they tumble to the ground. If I had to get out of bed to retrieve them I would be exposed to whatever evil had shaken me from my sleep, and the thought of baring myself in that way was soul rending. I clutched my blankets to my chest, too paralyzed to scream, to confused to cry. And then, as suddenly as the shaking began, it stopped.

The darkness around me thickened as the silence settled. There was no sound to hear beyond my own heartbeat. If anyone in my family was disturbed by the phenomenon in my bedroom they didn’t show it. I sat staring into the darkness, waiting for something else to happen—for the roar of demons to descend upon me, for my bed to lift off the ground and start to fly, something. But after an eternity of sitting and waiting, I finally accepted that nothing more was going to happen, and eventually I fell back asleep.

By the next morning I had forgotten all about the incident the night before. One of the magical aspects of daylight is its ability to erase the fear and anxiety that can only exist in the black of night. With the sun overhead, the sound of bacon frying and intermittent notes of some obscure piece of classical music wafting up from downstairs, no such thing as demons or Satan could be a problem. The possibility didn’t exist, therefore there was no reason to remember anything about the night before.

It was Monday morning. I dressed for school, ate breakfast, and went outside to wait for my mom and brother by the car. As I stepped out onto the patio, I noticed a pile of broken ceramic pieces on the ground. I looked up and saw that a planter had fallen and shattered. I knelt down and watched little ants and tiny spiders crawling through the dirt. I probably should have picked up the shards and threw them in the garbage but it never occurred to me. Besides, watching insects was much more interesting. Finally my mother and brother bounded out of the house, backpacks and purses in tow, and we piled into the car for our daily commute. I rode the thirty minutes to school with my nose in a book. I kissed my mom good-bye and dashed out onto the playground, just in time for the bell that called us to line up.

The day went by quickly, or at least nothing memorable happened. We were focused on our lessons, just like every other day. My teacher, Mrs. Kirkpatrick, was in a particularly crabby mood, and every time I tried to pass a note to one of my friends I was scolded, and eventually asked to sit in the corner.

When lunchtime finally came, I gobbled up my food and hurried to the playground. I hadn’t been able to talk to anybody all day and I felt like I was going to explode. My inner chatterbox was bursting to get out. I found my friends sitting under a tree and plopped down next to them dramatically.

“I think someone tried to break into my house last night,” I said. I hadn’t known I was going to say it until the words came out. It wasn’t even true, and I knew it wasn’t true. I just wanted something to talk about. It was a persistent problem I had in those days.

One of the girls, Robin, looked down at me through her long, dark lashes. She seemed to ooze disdain. We were not friends. “Why do you think that?”

I sniffed. “Because,” I said importantly, “one of the planters on our front porch was knocked down and broken. I bet the burgler knocked it over and it made so much noise he got scared and ran away.”

I smiled smugly at Robin, because I knew my logic was infallible. Now everyone would ask me if I was afraid, if we’d get a guard dog, and the next thirty minutes I would be the center of attention, just the way I liked it.

But Robin tossed her hair back and shrugged. “It probably just fell during the earthquake last night, that’s all.”

I frowned, stumped. Earthquake? We’d had an earthquake the night before? Why didn’t anyone mention it? And why hadn’t I felt—

And then I remembered. North Hollywood, California, was certainly a diabolical place. It also happened to sit damn near on top of the San Andreas fault, one of the most active fault lines in the country.

It all came back—the shaking, the rattling, the inability to scream, the soul-deep fear. The certainty that Satan and his minions had come to claim my soul, to put asunder my relationship with the Prince of Peace and Redeemer of Sins once and for all. My body went cold with the memory, and as quickly as realization dawned on me, there was embarrassment not too far behind. I was glad beyond belief that I hadn’t remembered my brush with Satan earlier or I surely would have mentioned my near-possession to my friends and Robin, who would have sneered in that snooty way of hers and informed me that it was probably just an earthquake that had awakened me in the middle of the night and not Satan at all.

It wasn’t Satan that had shaken me out of my bed and scared me out of my wits. It had only been an earthquake. Not the Devil, but an act of God.

Nevertheless, as I sat there wallowing in my shame, I swear I could hear Satan laughing at me, and all the demons in hell howling right along with him. I knew then that my lackadaisical attitude toward Satan had to be retired. The score was obvious: Satan:1, Amber: 0. I resolved to be more ruthless in my attempts to defy and annoy the great UnderLord from there on out, all in the effort to be gung-ho about Jesus.

*Grin again, gang, get gung-ho about Jesus.
Smile sweetly, Sister, so you’ll send Satan sadly away, hey hey!
Buck up, Brother Billy, cuz a bunch of bitter boys become a bunch of better boys behind a big, big smile.
Grin again, gang, get gung-ho about Jesus.

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