Oh! Can we go to Red Lobster? Can we? It’s my favorite!” she implores, batting those pig-bristle eyelashes that make me want to buff my shoes and/or get my car washed. “She” in this case is the former Tammy Faye Bakker (now married to one Roe Messner), and I have followed her to a book signing for her autobiography, Telling It My Way, in her natural habitat of pool- supply stores and outlet malls. “Surely, darlin’,” I say, “I will fulfill your culinary fantasies,” wanting her to feel comfortable in this white-trash Virginia milieu so I can execute my elegantly simple plan: to impale her over lunch.
Though I loathe “civic journalism,” I am not opposed to occasionally slipping into the less sententious role of God’s Avenger. Sure, He’s already chastised Tammy Faye plenty: her ex-husband’s imprisonment, her Lucille Ball voice, and the brief stint on a daily talk show co-starring the insufferable Jim (yes, Jim) J. Bullock. But I have come to finish the job, because not since Emperor Nero has anyone dissuaded so many people from Christianity — people whose only religious dalliance might have come through the murky prism of fallible televangelists.
“Typical Baptist,” huffs her defensive husband Roe Messner (a former PTL Club contractor who stole her from an incarcerated Jim), as I ask prickly questions over Red Lobster’s patented cheese bread. He’s referring to the historic rivalry between the Baptists (me) and Assemblies of God (them) — KingJames-punching Tub-Thumpers and Glossolalial Pew-Jumpers respectively. But Tammy remains unflustered, suckling her beer-battered shrimp. “Oooh, this is awesome! Now what were you saying, hon?”
I was saying, Doesn’t she feel any remorse for cheapening the faith with over-the-top extravagances: getting gullible biddies to raid their savings to fund grand hotels and waterslides for the-Holy-Ghost-comes-to-Branson-style variety shows, while she and Jim were collecting million-dollar salaries and air-conditioned doghouses (she claims it was only heated) and paying hush money to paramours and taking 25-city “Farewell For Now” tours complete with full orchestra and inspirational dancing waters?
“All we wanted was to minister,” she says in between slurps of white- cheddar mashed potatoes, “and give Christians a place where they could come and feel they had something as good as Las Vegas.” But what about the his-and- hers Rolls Royces?
She removes a lemon-pepper-shrimp shell from her teeth. “Mine was a Mercedes,” she corrects me, “and I drove one simply for protection. It was a heavy car.”
“Did you ever maybe consider . . . a Buick?” I rejoin. But I’m losing my edge, partly out of pity (when I questioned whether their ministry was completely altruistic, she asked, “What does that word mean?”) and partly because she’s still such a peach in those T.J. Maxx zebra prints and see- through plastic chukkas with that pancake-batter foundation and ice-cream- dipper rouge. “The make-up only takes five minutes to put on,” she says, and I’m inclined to believe her, since it doesn’t appear to be applied with much precision.
Of the stacks of books she signed at the empty Super Crown, she says, ” Nobody will buy them. People are sick of me.” And now I start feeling guilty for judging somebody so gloriously obtuse. After 10 years on the losing side of punchlines and resigned to her fate as an iconic cliche, all she can do now is construct counterfeit realities (she blames “Jerry Foulwell” for most of the PTL sordidness) and anesthetize herself with discount pleasures: like hawking her new wig line, or Fashion Bug shopping sprees, or eating at Red Lobster on a surly reporter’s expense account. Perhaps if redemption is unattainable, one must take solace in the $ 7.99 Mix & Match Shrimp Combo.
She can feel me going maudlin on her when she tries to pick me up. “You’re a smartass, Matt — I like you,” she says. “But I love all things chocolate.” So it was one Fudge Overboard and two spoons as Tammy let me tug on her wig while she catalogued where she purchased all her fake jewelry. She tells me she never talks to Jim anymore. “I feel sad that he’s been treated so wrong. He’s a very lonely man, and I feel sorry for him.”
She’s seceded from the Bakker legacy on paper, if not in the public’s consciousness. But deep down she knows that they share an insoluble bond through their love of the ministry, their love of duplicity, and now, through the seafood-lover within.
As Jim writes of his first post-slammer meal in his new hardcover mea culpa, I Was Wrong: They “took me to a Red Lobster restaurant. . . . I knew I was in trouble. The menu was so big! . . . There were just too many choices. Tears welled up in my eyes. . . . I ordered a seafood platter with a little bit of everything on it. Wow!”
MATT LABASH
