The Delmar Youth Center

Or: What God Wants, God Gets, God Help Us All

A recent Sunday night brought a spiteful spring wind, which arrived like a passive-aggressive coworker, slamming around, waiting to be asked what’s wrong before replying, “Nothing. I’m the wind, I blow. What’s your problem?”

It rattled the thick poly sheeting over the pair of western-facing side screens. Decades ago, I’d been grateful to get seven massive double-paned windows for free without considering that they were literally an irreplaceable gift.

Still, over the last few years since I’d lost the two western-facing panes, the thrum-thrum of the plastic always sounded weather-appropriate, breathing like a massive kite. Just like the train at the end of my street, it’s part of how my life sounds.

I’ve cut way back on drinking, treating myself to one glass of whisky for each weekend day. On this March Sunday, I’d treated myself to a cigar and a second tumbler of Auchentoshan while I tinkered with stories and watched the wind blow the dusk away for the night.

Someone was hitching up the far side of the street bound for the house across from mine. Their bearing suggested salesperson; the time and day said they were probably selling Jesus.

The figure jounced up the steps, harmless, a guy with a question who needs but a second of your time. My neighbor opened the door and I saw the solicitor in relief, waving a folded document like he was hailing a cab. He was granted access, and the porch went dark.

It’s funny how we judge our neighbors without knowing it. The guy across the street didn’t seem the type who’d be open to religious conversion at 6 p.m. on a Sunday. In fact, the missionary was in there long enough that I figured they had an appointment and turned back to my work, tinkering between puffs on my cigar until movement drew my eye as the figure made his way down the stairs and toward the street.

I was warm from whisky and relished a confrontation. If you knock on my door after 6 p.m. on a Sunday to sell me something, you’ve relinquished your personhood. Whatever I say to you, you deserve.

Then I remembered how I looked.

I have cigar clothes, an old sweater that I wear over a defunct, gray felt robe with one third of the left pocket hanging free. The loops are gone, which is just as well because there’s no belt to thread through them. Throw in a pair of sweatpants and a bleach-ruined baggy sweater and it’s the height of post-apocalyptic leisure wear.

In my defense, they’re for wearing when I’m smoking a cigar on my porch, not meeting the Queen.

Still, I knew anyone desperate enough to be selling door-to-door on a Sunday night would do their best to overlook my appearance. Hell, if he was hawking Jesus, I’d look like his target demographic: someone who’d surrendered to vice and sloth.

While the notion gave me a chuckle, I also remembered my dress limited my options. When you’re dressed like a mental patient and have booze on your breath, it’s best not to make sudden moves or vague threats.

When I’m dressed like a grown person, I can say pretty much what I please. I might come off as a jerk, but not as a danger to myself and others. The clothes make the man, after all.

I looked at my cigar and contemplated abandoning it and hiding like some Halloween grouch until he’d gone away, but demurred. It was little more than a stub, but that, along with the final two ounces of Scotch, represented the last of my weekly ration. Instead, I’d be curt with a side of slightly drunk, talking without taking the cigar from my mouth, and send him on his way, maybe threaten to set the dog on him. The plan hadn’t solidified in my head when I saw him making his way across the street.

“No sudden moves; they hate that,” sprang to my head and I giggled to myself. Then he was at the screen door, all jocularity and want. The window plastic thrummed harder, so he was fairly shouting against the rising gale to be let in.

I pressed my hands to my knees, cigar poking between the fingers in my right hand and hefted myself up, put on my old man gait, and shuffled, mutteringly, toward the door.

“What do you want?” I hadn’t heard him clearly, but before he could speak, I saw the whole picture. It was one of the town councilmen. He was here to pitch his rape factory.

A Town Lost

The reason I started trying to write my bagel manifesto was that I wanted to try and come to terms with losing the culture war. So many people have their bagels toasted here that (back when I used to buy bagels on Delmarva) I had to watch its preparation so I could stop them when they inevitably tried to toast mine. No amount of emphatic ordering helped. If you sell bagels here, you’re in auto-toast mode, a nightmare from which you cannot wake.

This applies across culture. It’s why we get superhero movies and sequels and why religious mania runs amok. It’s too exhausting and inconvenient to object in a world where everyone else seems fine with institutional mediocrity. It’s one reason I stopped writing about Delmar.

After the constant ranting, the research, the time and effort invested, I finally realized that while I was screaming, “We’re handing our town over to religious maniacs and thieves,” my neighbors were saying, “Yes, we know, and we’re cool with it as long as the garbage gets picked up.”

Although I wear it well, I never wanted to be a crank. The people who show up at town council meetings as if the fix weren’t already in to make their “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” speeches are somehow pitiable in my eyes. I left off covering or thinking about Delmar because I had other things to write that I hoped might be meaningful. Also, I’m an American and there’s no money in it.

You’re welcome to go back through all the stories, but for context: a group of anonymous (cowardly?) local businesspersons bought the town council for a trio of, let’s say, incurious men. We openly prize faith over book-learnin’ on Delmarva, no matter how many statutory rapes we have to overlook. Don’t even get me started on the religious sadism camp and thrift store in nearby Seaford, Delaware.

One of the then-candidate slate’s big ideas was to use state matching funds to turn the former police station into a youth center. The councilpersons, some of whom are builders, recognize the need to spend money on real work, but childcare isn’t real work because you can do it in your spare time. It’s the Christian thing to do.

There’s a necessary gullibility tied to religious faith, which isn’t to say all the faithful are gullible. Instead, faith gives more weight to the absurd or improbable and demands more of human consistency than is reasonable. Faith in a higher power despite the world’s horrors takes forbearance, separating what you want from what God wants takes fortitude.

For some people, it’s just easier to let your credulity muscles atrophy. Humanitarian horrors are either the devil’s work or a long-overdue smiting. If you’re truly one with God then his wants and your wants are the same. It’s a worldview that’s a lot less taxing.

Cynical as I am, I don’t believe anyone running the show in Delmar wants to endanger children. What’s concerning is the 91% of child abuse perpetrators the CDC attributes to family members and trusted adults, like pastors for example.

There is a local street preacher who has come to symbolize Delmarva for me. He’s a reformed heroin addict who, after getting clean thanks to Jesus, is desperate for others to ask Jesus to relieve them of personal responsibility and cure their addiction to reality.

He came to my attention when he solicited an amen from the assembled at a town meeting. He didn’t live in Delmar, Md. but as any religious nut ball will tell you, God’s truth makes human laws meaningless. Whether it’s shooting physicians, beating homosexuals, or taking over a town meeting, it’s all the same. God’s will is not about reason, it’s beyond it. That (as they will tell you) is the very point of faith.

Anyway, it wasn’t long after God told this man to proclaim the need for a shepherd in Delmar that the then-candidate slate began beating the youth-center drum. Correlation is not causation, but sometimes it’s too much fun to ignore. I decided then and there that the new kings of Delmar would put this low-rent John the Baptist in charge of the youth center. I have no reason to believe this, but reason and belief (apparently) have nothing to do with one another.

Were I a parent of young Delmartians, it would bother me how comfortable these guys are with putting felons in a position of power.

Sticky Fingers

Before the last election, as if not having a volunteer-run youth center wasn’t bad enough, Delmar was paying a Black woman $95,000 a year to be town manager. I don’t have access to the hyperbole needed to relate the level of vitriol this number caused. The upshot of the election was that the new council would fix both of these abominations and 126 of the 200 or so residents who voted agreed. The other 4,800 townspeople didn’t care one way or the other.

The town manager didn’t last a year and was replaced by Jeff Fleetwood, who looks like a town manager was supposed to look, tall and formerly fit, with salt and pepper hair and an appropriate, patrician complexion.

Also, he was being investigated for felony embezzlement after bilking the Town of Berlin out of nearly $20,000 as a secret parting gift to himself. Fortunately, Delmar has a liberal work-from-home policy and the judge sentenced him to house arrest.

Now that he’s free, the town fathers want to put him in charge of something approaching a $2 million kitty to pay builders and engineers for their youth center. After all, Jesus said if a man steals from your neighbor, put him in a position to steal from you, too.

Plus, as we all know, white-collar felons don’t post the same danger to society as, say, some junkie who hasn’t yet found Jesus. Yet.

Now that the council has hired a reformed embezzler to run its finances, how can they object to putting a reformed sex offender in charge of their youth program? Especially from someone reformed by faith.

As it stands, Fleetwood’s not in a position to raise objections about malfeasance. After all, let ye among you without sin cast the first stone. White, corrupt, and desperate to stay employed is how we like our town managers. As a matter of fact, I’ll bet he didn’t even balk at the cost of the lettermen’s jackets.

Back at the Door

Corey Schaefer looked adorable in his “Delmar Councilman” letterman jacket, and I honestly could see the appeal. He went from work-a-day schmo to co-captain of team Delmar with his two best buddies, probably just as he had dreamed back in history class.

I’m grateful he was wearing the jacket because I wouldn’t have recognized him otherwise. When covering the council, I listened to the meetings remotely. I couldn’t pick any of the new councilpersons out of a police lineup.

As I touched the door handle to let him in, Corey said a word that wasn’t “Youth Center” but something more funding friendly, enrichment? education? I have to be honest, I was so joyfully baffled by the visit that I had a hard time focusing. Everything you’ve read so far appeared in my head at once. It didn’t help that I wasn’t dressed for discussion, I was dressed for forced medication.

“No,” I said as he asked to come in and tell me about the enrichment/education center. “I know all about it. You’re gonna put the heroin guy in charge.”

I wish I could do the timbre of his response justice, but I’m not skilled enough.

Did you ever mean to speak to yourself but spoke aloud instead? It’s still only you in the room, but the fact that you spoke would have given anyone who heard you the impression you were addressing them. It was kind of like that. His voice didn’t crack, but the tone was so utterly perplexed that it might as well have.

“Heroin guy?” he asked as I turned and shuffled back to my chair.

Unfazed on his errand to spread the good news, he made his way back to the sidewalk and slantwise across the street to the next house, where gained entry and resumed evangelizing.

Still, eventually, there will be a ribbon cutting, followed by the logistical and financial realities concomitant with running a youth facility. Those weren’t on the builder’s plans Corey was hawking because they take more effort than drawing some boxes on architectural paper.

You get the government you deserve. I’m just here for my grandkids and whatever cancer I get from our failing water plant. I’ll update you after the first volunteer is arrested.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

PostScript

I got a note from the town today. They’re asking people to self-report whether they have lead pipes. That’s a weird way to find out you might have lead pipes. I’ve never been so happy to have had a recent plumbing crisis in my life.

Here’s a link to all my Delmar stories, in case you’re captivated by this ongoing saga.

PPS

A small disclaimer:

Here’s the thing. There’s no mention of a proposed youth center anywhere on the town website. It is not a topic listed for discussion, and although the incurious slate ran on full transparency, there are no meeting minutes available. I was looking for a link. I hope it’s their incompetence and not my deafness, but it’s something I should consider: maybe I’m way off here.

I may have re-read this story too many times, and I have to admit it’s possible I didn’t hear right. He could have been hawking Jesus, such is my level of mistrust. In fact, it’s only now as this story enters (hopefully) its final edit that it even occurred to me it could have been anything other than the promised youth center.

Hell, I’ve told this story ten times. The wind, the enthusiasm, the jacket, the folded paper, the hearing something that wasn’t “youth.” The feeling of certainty hasn’t left my breast, but the fear of being wrong has wrangled a little headspace. I think it’s because I have a stake in being wrong. It’s the best-case scenario.

If I misheard him and they’re wasting a ton of money on something that’s not likely to endanger kids or unduly burden the tax base of the future, I would be thrilled. I rarely want so desperately to be mistaken. If I am I’ll let you know.

TR