Atticus   

My friends and I try to keep her from getting into her car. She’s doing a pretty good job of prevention herself, swaying and balancing as if she were atop a surfboard while again and again she misses the lock in the driver’s door with her key.

She’s in her mid-40s, and she needs to get back to Fort Collins. She also is staggering drunk.

Suddenly she embraces me, much like someone who’s been rescued from a four-alarm high-rise fire rather than what we actually are – two people who have crossed paths in a parking lot after watching Crowded House perform at The Fillmore.

“The oceans are all fucked up,” she tells us. “You know about what they do with the trawlers? Yeah? There aren’t any fish left.”

For another five minutes she laments over the state of our seas before offering one final statement of consolation. “We’re at the end times, man,” she says.

“But bands like Crowded House – they get it.”

Granted, lead singer Neil Finn is, in my opinion, one of the more underappreciated songwriters of his generation. Yet I can’t say I’ve ever regarded him as any more prophetic or aware of our impending doom than any of the rest of us without a clue about what the future actually holds.

Frankly, I’m tired of hearing declarations of Armageddon. I’ve been subjected to them regularly ever since I sat in the pew of a small Southern Baptist Church in rural Alabama as a child and watched a movie intended to literally scare the hell out of anyone who watched it.

People who know me can attest that I become so engrossed in a movie that, in some way, my mind assumes it’s my temporary reality. When I sat in a sold-out theater in Midtown Atlanta for Saving Private Ryan, I was crouched low as if I were in those bombed-out buildings, awaiting the arrival of the Germans.

So it should come as no surprise that, while I don’t remember the name of the film, much of the imagery about the end of the world was seared into my young mind. It probably didn’t help that the main character’s name was Steve.

Our pastor at the time was among the ever-growing numbers of fundamentalist Christians of the early 1980s preoccupied with only the evils of rock music, godless liberals and homosexuals more than the topic of the Rapture.

Already most of us in my generation lived with the fear of a nuclear holocaust in the back of our minds. I once looked at a map and reassured myself that my family and I would survive a bomb blast in Atlanta, in my naivety not realizing that nearby Huntsville, Ala., would be a target and the level of radioactivity resulting from blasts around the globe would likely poison any and all food and water.

Now Bro. Gore was giving us one more reason to worry about our future.

In this film, Steve was a guy who refused the message of the Gospel from all fronts. One day at work, what appeared to be an earthquake took place and, suddenly, select co-workers were gone. No one could explain why cars lost their drivers, children vanished into thin air and people once standing nearby were nowhere to be found.

Steve had his suspicions. He rushed to the cemetery where his grandparents were buried. It was peppered with huge rectangular holes revealing empty caskets.

He put it together. Steve had been left behind.

He chose to stay out of work and spend every waking moment studying the Bible to determine whether he had any options. Soon he was professing Jesus as his Savior.

In a later scene, we find Steve sprinting through the woods as officials pursue him for refusing the tattoo of the mark of The Beast.

Suddenly he’s knocked to the ground and encircled by masked gunmen with their weapons pointed only inches from his face. Someone in the group instructs Steve to renounce God. He refuses and then braces himself to be shot to death.

But the gunmen remove their masks and offer him a hand to get to his feet. Someone smiles and says, “Welcome, brother.” Steve has stumbled across a group of converts.

They band together and wait for the great battle to come, when they too will be rescued and taken to Heaven.

I was mortified.

That pastor of mine who screened the film had predicted Christ would return in 1988, my senior year of high school.

I now have my own prediction. I predict that every evangelical fundamentalist pastor will become preoccupied with the end times at roughly the same time he becomes aware of his own mortality. Because surely the world will end before they will be taken to Heaven to meet with God. Surely they will be present for Earth’s second-greatest event.

The world around us tends to seem bleaker when we’re battling our own demons and the prospect of our own end times.

My inebriated friend back in the parking lot should thank my friends and me, as we prevented her from drawing closer to her own. The police car we summoned made sure of that.