Crazy for God Read Online Free

parents had been “so working class.”
    My mother became the basis of “Elsa,” the mother in my first novel, Portofino, and the rest of the Calvin Becker Trilogy (Zermatt and Saving Grandma). And I still see the world through her eyes. She was there at every stage, including mop-ping up my vomit—without recrimination—when I took some bad peyote buds after smoking pot when I was fifteen.
    Whatever I believe, or say I believe now, the shape of my life is defined by my mother’s prayers—whether these have actually been answered or whether the force of her personality was enough to make it so. In that quietest inner place, my mother is still young, beautiful, and present, leaning forward listening with rapt attention at a concert, or with a book on her lap, eyes sparkling and opening up the universe of Treasure Island, or as poor Oliver picks his way though the harsh Victorian urban underworld.

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    I f Dad had been an actor, he might have been cast to play James Cagney’s little brother, maybe in some 1930s movie set down by the docks. But by the time I was a teenager, a lifetime of intellectual work had given Dad a craggy, bags-under-the-eyes Einstein look and softened his face.
    My father was my mother’s opposite. Born and raised in Germantown, Philadelphia, he grew up hard, in hard times. Dad was short and stocky. He had thick leg muscles and heavy forearms with strong wide-palmed hands. His legs just kept getting thicker as he hiked all over the Alps. His Moods—they deserve a capital letter—dictated everything about our daily lives. Dad suffered from bouts of fury punctuated by depression. All Mom needed to say was “Fran is in a Mood,” and we crept around trying to stay out of sight till Mom gave the all-clear.
    Dad’s brooding face reflected his early life as a working-class son of poor parents. He had a little scar on his cheek where he’d been stabbed in a street fight when he was delivering ice off a horse-drawn cart. When I was ten or eleven, Dad taught me to fight. He was very matter-of-fact and said: “You need to know how to defend yourself.” Dad’s idea of fighting was this: just get in close, break something, and run.
    While Mom was being served breakfast in bed by her Chinese
servants, then later by her genteel parents, who cut her toast into buttered “ladyfingers” and boiled her “a perfect three-and-a-half-minute soft-boiled egg each morning,” Dad was eating corned beef hash warmed over, being beaten with a strap by his mother, and selling ice from the time he was ten or eleven off a wagon.
    Dad’s father ran away from his home when he was twelve years old. My grandfather served in the Navy in the Spanish-American War, when, as he told Dad, “The ships were made of wood but the men made of iron.” And while raising Dad, his father worked as a “stationary engineer” in a large office building maintaining the heating and electrical plant. He got this job even though he only had a third-grade education. Dad told me about getting into the huge boilers and chipping out the lime deposits with his father.
    My father heard his first classical music when the Boy Scouts took his troop to a concert. He loved it, and from then on Dad would argue with his mother to let him listen to broadcasts of symphonies when she wanted to hear popular music, played on the old crystal set Dad’s father built.
    Dad got “saved” in 1929 in a tent revival; he was seventeen. This was after reading the Bible. Sometimes Dad said he got saved “just reading the Bible.” Other times he said it was in that tent revival. Other times he would explain to the students that it was while he was studying Greek philosophy and at the same time giving the Bible a “last chance” by reading it, and that it occurred to him that the Bible answered the philosophical questions raised by the Greeks.
    About two years after Dad got saved, he met Mom when he stood up in a church meeting to challenge a “liberal”