win a trip to heaven (details inside)

WIN A TRIP TO HEAVEN (DETAILS INSIDE)Author(s): Chauna CraigSource: Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 75-84Published by: Michigan State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41938847 .

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WIN A TRIP TO HEAVEN

(DETAILS INSIDE)

I

No kitchen one else

table believed

fastidiously in us. While

hand-printing I sat at

my my grandparents'

grandfathers round name, kitchen table fastidiously hand-printing my grandfathers name,

address, and phone number in black ink on a 3x5 card, my aunt's mocking voice bleated from somewhere behind me. "And what are we going to win this time?"

I studied the sheet beside me and read my answer in a rapid mumble: "With Contest News and just a few stamps you could . . .Win big cash jack- pots to spend as you please! Win a fantastic cruise vacation! Win fabulous jewelry! Drive away in a brand new car, truck, or van! Get surprise pack- ages in your mailbox all year long! And start smilin' with our THOU- SANDS of winning subscribers!"

Then I glanced scornfully at my aunt - she was only ten years older than me and I could get away with this - and bent low over the paper so my hair hung down in a frizzy curtain separating believers from unbelievers, wheat from chaff, sheep from ordinary, garbage-eating goats.

We were going to be rich, my grandfather and I. He'd recently sub- scribed to Contest News , a monthly mailing that detailed all the current marketing contests and sweepstakes, their prizes, deadlines, and even the odds of winning. Sometimes, when I looked at those seemingly algebraic formulas - 1:63, 452 - I had my doubts. I'd look over at my grandfather seated in his lounge chair watching professional bowling tournaments those Saturday afternoons, and I'd think maybe I should just go to the mall with Betsy instead. The odds I'd turn a junior high boy's head before she did were slim to none, but surely, I thought, surely they were better than 63, 452 to 1.

But Grandpa had been a salesman in his time. Textbooks, cuts of meat from his first job with a butcher, life insurance just before his retirement.

75



76 Fourth Genre

He was good at convincing me that somebody had to win those contests. It was illegal otherwise, he said. Somebody had to win, why not us? If we sent out enough 3x5 cards, the odds would eventually be in our favor. If we worked hard enough, we would be rewarded. Most people were too lazy to go that extra step, he insisted, flipping through channels with his new remote control. But not us.

That was the selling point for me. All through elementary school and now in the eighth grade, I'd been an extra-stepper, not necessarily to gain anything or to win approval. My parents replied with an earnesdy bland "good job" to anything I achieved. No, it was just part of my character. I loved the way my mental muscles felt stretching a litde higher, trying to bring the stars to my level. It was like my seventh grade art teacher s classroom poster said, "If you reach for the moon, you may reach an eagle. If you reach for the stars, you may touch the moon." Or something like that. The point is I liked reaching for moons, eagles, and stars, my fingertips flailing for something to hang onto. And the fact that my grandfather was willing to split all our profits 50/50 helped too. What would I do with my half of the $10,000 Pepsi was giving away in every state? I imagined the Normandee Rose and Gloria Vanderbilt jeans I'd buy, litde thread roses and swans tattooed to my backside, my mod- est attempts not to brag as I fingered the springs of a new spiral perm that lay so perfecdy on my 50-dollar Esprit sweatshirt.

My mind should have been on heavenly rewards; I knew that well enough. The rich man didn't get through the eye of the needle, the camel had a better chance at heaven. Poor odds indeed. Still, I'd been baptized in water at First Baptist Church when I was 6 and then in the spirit at age 12 when we switched congregations and joined Calvary Victory Center. I was set when it came to the afterlife. Now I wanted to win my ticket to the gold-paved streets of the secular world. And here was my grandfather, handing me a roll of first-class stamps like raffle tickets.

He made a believer out of me.

Four months passed. Four months of licking the sour glue of stamps and printing GUY W. CONNOLLY, JR. in a variety of ways, and no surprises arrived in the mailbox except more fliers from the guy in Kentucky who coordinated the contest newsletter. It turned out he had other newsletters we could subscribe to for the low cost of $14.95/year. The Best Investments E. F. Hutton Never Listened To. The Secrets to Becoming a Billionaire. God Wants You to Be Filthy Rich. This last one disturbed me. God and filthy in the same sentence seemed blasphemous.



Chauna Craig 77

"Are we ever going to win?" I moaned one afternoon when he handed me the newest issue of Contest News. All those fabulous prizes were begin- ning to seem truly beyond my reach, especially because my fingers were cramped and curled in on themselves from all the hand printing. Reach for an eagle and you just might touch its nest. Reach for a nest and you'll get a handful of feathers, bone scraps, and bird poop.

"We already have," Grandpa answered calmly as he microwaved a cup of peppermint tea, warm-up to the scotch or wine he was saving until he'd earned it by surviving most of the day.

"Really?" I envisioned tickets to a cruise in the Caribbean, and of course just Grandpa and I would go. My scoffing aunt and mother and my grandmother, who said the most by saying nothing, would stand on the shore waving as we left the dock. And then, I thought, it would rain. For 40 days and 40 nights.

"Yes," Grandpa responded. "We've won each other's trust and confidence. I see what a truly good worker you are." The microwave bell pinged like on those TV game shows when the contestant gets the right answer, but it's only the first round, nothing to get excited about yet.

"Oh." I didn't think I needed writer's cramp for that. "What?" He squinted at me. My grandfather's eyes were so small that he

always seemed to be looking into the sun, half-blinded. "Trust is worth more than a pub in Ireland."

He knew that was the prize I'd set my heart on, from one of the few contests that was an actual contest requiring creativity and thought. Most of the entries in the newsletter were technically sweepstakes and were accompanied by the words "This is a random drawing, not a contest." In other words, you have no control over the outcome. But in this one, entrants had to write the limerick that best expressed why they should own the pub. There was actual hard work and imagination involved, and that's something I enjoyed. Recently I'd struggled for days to come up with a bumper sticker slogan for the county-wide alcohol awareness campaign. The contest, for seventh and eighth graders, was sponsored by MADD and promised a 50-dollar check to the winner. The previous year's winner had been the son of my seventh-grade art teacher, the man with the inspira- tional eagle poster, for his catchy phrase "When you're on the throttle, stay off the bottle." I'd finally settled on "Boozing and Cruising: Someone Ends up Losing." After turning in my entry to the guidance counselor, I noticed that Craig Bartow had written "You Booze, You Cruise, You Lose!" and I felt deflated and entirely unoriginal. This limerick contest was the chance



78 Fourth Genre

to redeem myself in my own eyes, and I set to work winning a pub with more zeal than I'd invested in stopping people from drinking.

Since the sponsor was a brewing company and I only 13, I had to, as with almost all the contests, pretend to be my grandfather:

There once was a Guy from Great Falls Who felt confined by his walls. He flew to the island Of dear ole Ire-land For the thrill of those crazy pub brawls.

The rhythm could have been better, the rhyme raunchier (only much later did I recognize how I might have been daring enough to incorporate "balls"), but I was proud of my effort, and my grandfather seemed to be too. He tried to be stern at first when I read him the poem, in case my grandmother found out he was encouraging me to write about booze, but he'd already opened the jug of Gallo red, and he ended up laughing. "Oh, that's a winner, that one. Guaranteed." He's the only person I've known who pronounced it "GAR-un-TEED." And because he'd always said a man's word was his guarantee, I was sure we'd win that pub.

Now that he'd claimed it wasn't worth that much, I had to refute him. "The Irish drink a lot," I said, replete with 13-year-old wisdom. "That pub will make us a lot of money."

"For sure, for sure. These contests will pay off. I have confidence in you," he said, as if I could do something to make our 3x5 cards leap from the barrels and into the judges' hands. This is a random drawing. Maybe, I thought, I should try writing his name without the "Jr." on the end.

Betsy called one Saturday morning, insisting we go to the mall. In the spirit of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," I'd submitted to an uneasy friendship with the girl who sang Amy Grant, hoping that some of her spiritual charm would rub off on me. "There's a new store there that sells frozen yogurt ," she said.

"What? Why would anyone freeze yogurt?" I hated the regular stuff. My mom fed it to me every time I had an upset stomach, insisting the "live yogurt cultures" were good for digestion. She only bought plain yogurt and only when someone was sick, so I associated that sour flavor and snot-like consistency with cramps and diarrhea.

"Fewer calories. You can substitute it for ice cream."



Chauna Craig 79

"Why would anyone do that?" I was thin at the time with narrow hips and boyish torso. I didn't think about calories, wasn't even sure what they were since I had yet to take ninth-grade pre-chemistry where the lab was all about measuring and burning different kinds of food. Betsy was roundly feminine, healthy like all the models in YM and Seventeen at the time, but her mother told her over and over that she was too fat, that she wouldn't get a boyfriend. Sometimes she cried when she repeated this, panicky that she would be an old maid. All I could do was cluck my tongue and feign sympathy.

"Let's just go. My mom can pick us up if you can get a ride over." She lived just a few blocks from Holiday Village Shopping Center.

"I'm going to my grandparents' house." "Great! You can just walk over then." "No, to work on our project." I thought the whole contest thing

sounded more glamorous or at least academic as a project, but Betsy saw through that.

"Are you still trying to win money?" Her tone said everything her words didn't: you are so dumb and weird that

I sometimes can}t believe I hang out with you. In another year, she wouldn't. She'd find someone else to turn the pages when she sang at church. She'd try out for cheerleading, leaving me behind to "strut, pout, and put it out" with the dopey drill team and their Sheena Easton pom-pom routine. She went after and got Troy Voeller as soon as I said I liked him. And finally, in the deathblow to our friendship, she went back on her agreement to try out with me to be stepsisters in the school's musical performance of Cinderella. Instead, she became the star she'd always wanted to be, and I took special rel- ish in throwing piles of laundry at her and ordering her to shine my shoes.

"It's about spending family time together," I said, feeling guilty for being so dumb and weird.

"Well, walk over and meet me at Claire s Boutique when you're done."

The kitchen table was already set with a stack of index cards and presized slips of paper for the companies that didn't want cards, two black felt-tip pens, envelopes, the newsletter (marked with a line where I'd last left ofi), and of course the roll of stamps, wagging its red, white, and blue tongue from the end of the dispenser. My grandfather wasn't up from his afternoon nap, and my grandmother was in the kitchen, finishing the dishes from lunch. I watched her try to carry a small saucepot to the cupboard; it wavered wildly in her hand like a panicked animal.



80 Fourth Genre

"Are you okay?" I asked, seeing her clutch her spastic arm with the steady one as she pushed the clattering pot into its place and slammed the cupboard quickly as though it might escape. It was something I would become used to seeing, my grandmother's right arm shaking and stuttering up as if about to fly away, her left arm the predator latching on, trying to sever the nerves and stop the twitching.

"I'm just tired." She rinsed out the sink and grumbled at Boogie, the toy poodle with its spooky Jack Elam eyes, for being underfoot. "It's me who should be taking the nap. Cookie?"

She was one of those grandmothers. Sweets tucked everywhere. I took one of her sugar cookies decorated with green sprinkles for St. Patrick s Day. I chewed slowly and, tired of printing letters, picked up a different newsletter on the table, the Salem Kirban End Times Digest.

I'd read things by Salem Kirban before; on Sunday afternoons, after pot roast and potatoes, when everyone but me was watching the Denver Broncos (now with renewed enthusiasm after the recruitment of John Elway), I sneaked down to my grandfathers office. I was an avid reader, but Grandpa had no novels or magazines, just books and newsletters on investments and Armageddon. The latter were of greatest interest to me, because everything, it seemed, was a sign that the Antichrist was coming or, the bolder prophets would declare, already here and living in Vatican City.

According to one of Grandpa's books, the odds that the Apocalypse would happen before the end of the century were 1 :20, this arrived at by some com- plex biblical code I couldn't detangle. The odds that the Apocalypse would actually happen at all? Years later a British scientist would claim a 50-50 chance that an apocalyptic disaster would strike the Earth. But every Christian already knew that was a sure thing. One hundred percent guarantee. We needed no scientists second-guessing the Bible, no newsletters as reminders. But reading the signs was harder to do without guidance. "No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation" (2 Peter 1:20). So I, along with my mother and grandfather, read the eschatologists' pro- nouncements on the Care Bears (Godless, powered by the rainbows and stars on their stomachs instead of by God), on Star Wars (same thing: "May the Force be with you" is too blatantly Taoist). In fact, all of popular culture was some sort of tool of the Antichrist, which again was no surprise to me. I'd been raised on youth group films "exposing" the evil messages of Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne. I even remember, quite distinctly, Bruce Springsteen's "Hungry Heart" presented as evidence of how contempo- rary music celebrated the breakdown of the family. Got a wife and kid in



Chauna Craig 81

Baltimore , Jack. I went out for a ride and I never came back. And still I listened to the radio and joined the whole family for a nightly episode of syndicated Star Trek.

This issue of the End Times Digest started with a verse from 1 Peter 4:7, "But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer." Be ye therefore sober. So much for winning a pub, I thought, stack- ing the newsletter on top of the contest one. Why would I imagine God would reward my diligence in printing out 3x5 cards with a den of drunk- enness? My grandfather held fast to the belief that God helped those who helped themselves, but surely that didn't mean helping yourself to deprav- ity? And with all those people entering sweepstakes, many of them likely to be Christians, why would God choose to give the money to us ?

"Grandma?" She was sitting in her gliding rocker, squeezing a Nerf ball, one of her

exercises for the plastic knuckles that replaced her real joints when they'd become too inflamed and gnarled with arthritis. I rubbed my own hands in sympathy.

"I'm going to meet Betsy at the mall. Tell Grandpa when he wakes that I'll be back later?"

She nodded, lips pressed together against the pain in her fingers. I saw, from the corner of my eye, her arm start to shudder, her hand too tired to stop it.

Odds of developing Parkinson's in your lifetime. 1:59.

Betsy bought a pink sweater at Jay Jacobs and black stirrup pants. I could only watch in envy. My mother had convinced me that I could get more clothes with my paper route money at Kmart and that no one would know the difference. But they did. Julie Mclntyre had snapped her gum and studied my Jaclyn Smith button-up. "What a fancy shirt you've got there," she commented, eliciting snickers from future cheerleaders Tamra Campbell and Kelly Albrecht, who went on to play the Fairy Godmother granting Betsyrella s every prom queen wish.

"Should I get highlights in my hair?" Betsy asked as we walked to the new frozen yogurt stand. I shrugged, watching a big chrome machine chug snowy soft-serve into a cup. The hand-printed sign read "Peach." The flavor beside it was "Mint Chocolate." I watched that nozzle spurt the same thick white goop and decided I wouldn't be trying any frozen yogurt.

"Hello? I'm talking to you?" Betsy rapped lightly on my head, and it struck me that she was a lot like my aunt, trying to make me feel I was



82 Fourth Genre

somehow disconnected from the real world. "What are you obsessing about now?"

"I'm actually wondering when the world will end. Maybe we won't make it to 18."

Betsy laughed. "Of course we will." I watched her flirt with the slouch- ing young guy behind the yogurt counter. He returned her smile, then leapt to get her small cup of peach yogurt.

"How can you be so sure?" "What? Don't you remember?" She lowered her voice so the yogurt guy

wouldn't hear. "Pastor Gary's prophecy? God keeps his word." God's word is his guarantee , I thought, remembering the evening when

handsome Gary Hart (yes, with that unfortunate name in the days of Donna Rice) and his wife, Pam, leaders of the youth group Betsy and I were just old enough to join, cradled their hands around her shoulders and head and prayed. Soon after, Pastor Gary pronounced that my best friend would become the wife of a pastor and "serve well a man of the Lord."

I'd sat in the cold folding chair, watching her joyful tears, wondering if I had a future too. In the three years I went to Wednesday night youth group at Calvary, Gary and Pam - Christian Ken and Barbie as I like to remember them - wandered among the group members, hands reaching out but never landing on me unless I had a cold and needed a quick laying on of hands to hasten my recovery. But they never gave me a future. Later, I would realize what a blessing that was, but then I burned with envy, and, there at the mall, a sense of how unfair it was that the end of the world would be delayed for Betsy's wedding.

By the time I got back to my grandparents' house, I was steeped in cyni- cism about the justice of the universe. Even as a litde kid, I thought it was unfair that God might condemn some person to hell for living in the deepest jungles of Africa. When I asked my mother about that, she insisted that every human on earth had the same chance to hear about Christ, and they chose whether to accept the true Word or not. "Even the kids in Africa?" "That's what missionaries do, they go to Africa." "Even the highest mountains in the world, if people are living there?" "No people are living there." "But if they are?" "Then God's sent someone to let them know." "And if there's an island somewhere that no one's ever heard of?" "God's heard of it." And so this sort of catechism would continue until I asked what was inevitably on my mind at age six: "Will my Barbies go to heaven?" I still remember that my mother said, with enough conviction that I believed her, "Yes."



Chauna Craig 83

So, after returning empty-handed from the mall, I again asked my grandfather, "Are we ever going to win anything?" Winning, I thought, would mean the world was somehow, at its core, fair and just. My grandfather had invested heavily his whole life in the bootstraps philosophy of success, and I wanted to believe, as the Contest News promised, that for the price of a few stamps, we had a real chance to pull ourselves up.

"Well," he said, already a little pink in the cheek from the scotch in his hand, "I was going to save this surprise, but maybe you need some motiva- tion now." He disappeared downstairs to his office and my grandmother, trying not to roll her eyes, opened the Tupperware and offered me another soft and crumbly cookie.

Grandpa returned with a small plastic sack that he ripped open. "We won this," he said proudly, "and I'm giving it to you. I hope it fits."

He shook the contents of the bag into my open palm the way you might give someone a small handful of Cracker Jacks, and the comparison is appropriate, because there was our prize: the gaudiest costume jewelry ring I'd ever seen. A giant pear-shaped faux sapphire set in "gold" that was already flaking off with what may or may not have been a tiny diamond chip (if I'd been able to see it, I might have known what was there in that dimple at the bottom of the setting).

"Wow," I said. "Thanks." I slipped it onto my middle finger and felt a rough spot inside catch and scrape my knuckle. A faint pink line appeared, the tiniest beads of blood. I held my hand out to show my grandmother and she smiled wryly, saying, "Well, it almost fits."

My grandfather nodded, took another sip of scotch, and said, "There s more where that came from."

We survived our losing season. I didn't win an Irish pub, but I won the county's MADD bumper sticker contest that year, earning my picture in the paper, Craig Bartows envy, a fast food lunch with the governor and 30 other kids, and 50 dollars. I spent the money not on a new Esprit sweatshirt, but on books because on some level I was starting to embrace just how dumb and weird I obviously was. My grandfather taped one of the stickers in the back window of his Jeep and told everyone who'd penned the slogan.

He recovered immediately from our failed fortunes, moving onto his next, more sensible money-making scheme, which was to invest in Pepsi- Cola. All of us but my aunt were die-hard Coke drinkers, and my grandfather kept busy trying to push the Pepsi like a drug, pouting when we brought over our own drinks. He even tried his own jingle, leaving a note



84 Fourth Genre

in the fridge that read: Have a Pepsi and a nice day. When you're done , throw the can away. The rhythm could have been better, the rhyme more environ- mentally correct, but something about it made me want to drink a Pepsi now and then.

I still have that sapphire ring, the only thing we won, though I never showed it off as I imagined I would when I finally won something from my faithful hours addressing envelopes and licking stamps. The glitzy, blue, fake jewel fell out, but I saved the ring's skeleton, those three curled prongs like an eagle s talon poised and ready to clutch its prize. 'm'



win a trip to heaven (details inside)

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