Peter Peacock Passes

By Dr James T. Baker

Peter Peacock Passes proves the commonly held perception that for Preachers the pursuit of God and Sex are twin obsessions. Master story teller James Baker has captured with the most vivid prose the pitfalls and pratfalls of a young Texan who feels equally the desire to fulfill his Divine Vocation and his Natural Urge to find a mate. In his quest Petie Peacock struggles to survive the seductions of a college beauty queen, a delectable farmer's daughter, a high school cheerleader with Italianate mammary endowments, and a strange pair of twins named Golda and Silvia before at last he finds his Mary Sontag. He participates in the annihilation of a Homecoming float, pranks that result in blood, and the destruction of a prominent Baptist minister when pornographic pictures end up in his slide show of the Holy Land. He is humiliated in Indiana, abandoned in Chicago, and deluged in Texas before he discovers in his tumescence a way to face this brave new world. Share the fun.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grave Distractions Publications
• Release date: Jul 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452489841

Dr James T. Baker

James Baker developed his passion for history and religion while in high school, during his days as a Bulldog. He is a graduate of Baylor and Florida State Universities and has for many years taught at Western Kentucky University. Throughout his career he has been a prolific writer, authoring 22 books and over 60 articles. His articles have appeared in such places as Christian Century, Commonweal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The American Benedictine Review. His creative talents and his unique points of view and insights have also made him a highly sought after speaker. He has delivered addresses and papers in the United States, Italy, Korea, Taiwan, China, and other Asian countries. He often appears in a one person show-presentation of industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. In addition to his teaching duties, James directs the Canadian Parliamentary Internship Program.

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Smashword eBook Peter Peacock Passes

Peter Peacock Passes

Green Hills Press

Nashville, Tennessee

© 2010 James T. Baker

ISBN: 9781452489841

Smashwords eBook Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published with the services of Grave Distractions Publications www.gravedistractions.com

Cover and Interior Layout: Brian Kannard; Grave Distractions Publications

Table of Contents

Pippa

-1-

-2-

-3-

-4-

-5-

Pearl

-1-

-2-

Peril

-1-

-2-

-3-

-4-

Parish

-1-

-2-

-3-

-4-

-5-

Purdue

-1-

-2-

-3-

-4-

-5-

-6-

Peace

-1-

-2-

-3-

-4-

-5-

About the Author

Pippa

-1-

The Central Texas city of Waco---whose hot moist womb baked Baptist preachers by the Baker’s Dozens---lay prone, gasping for breath, like a long distance runner struck down in mid-race, on the late August afternoon of 1959 when Peter Peacock hit town to begin his senior year at Baylor University, known broadly as Bethlehem on the Brazos.

Squinting through rays of heat rising from potholed asphalt streets, Petie made his way around five different road construction projects before at long last he pulled his red and white 1957 Chevrolet---his first car, two years old, previously owned, reconditioned at his dad’s expense---into the driveway beside Gray House, directly across the street from the freshman girl’s dormitory. Gray House, named for the paint that covered most of its frame and not for any family who once owned it, was to be his home for the next nine months, or so he planned.

A big angry sun had been at the business of blistering streets and sidewalks and what was left at summer’s end of grass and trees since 7:00 that morning. Around noon, four hours before Petie arrived, a blanket of humidity from the Gulf of Mexico had settled in, coating the heat with a sticky glaze, driving human life indoors. By 4:00 all Petie saw outside Gray House were a few glistening, golden brown Mexican kids roasting over a game of sidewalk marbles.

Petie was not surprised. He had watched televised weather reports for several days, and they had warned that Waco would have high temperatures and humidity for the foreseeable future. He had decided to come on down from Dallas anyway because he felt he needed a few days alone to sort himself out before plunging into his last year of college. He had told his dad he would work until August 25, he had written to his landlady in Waco to expect him the next day, and it was now August 26, and he was here.

Only after another week, at registration time, would the temperature and humidity drop to tolerable levels, both in the high 90s; but Petie needed a few days of solitude, and Baylor in late summer, because it was too hot and damp for most students, meant solitude. There would be no students, no faculty, and even the football team lived on the other side of campus and practiced at the stadium across town. He would be very much alone.

The only trouble was, it was even hotter and damper than he had expected. He had spent the summer working in his dad’s hardware store, and he had lived in his parents’ house, both air-conditioned. The only time he had spent outside was when he sat by the lawn sprinkler in the back yard, and that was always after dark. Those numbers on the television screen weather map looked a lot less menacing than they now felt. In his red topped Chevy, which was not air-conditioning, he found himself gasping for breath. As he located his landlady, who sat before her television set engaged in a debate with soap opera villains, and persuaded her to get his key; as he lugged bags of clothes and boxes of books and a menagerie of electrical gadgets up the rickety, winding stairs to the third floor and Room 333; as he pushed open the door to the sweltering little cell he would share with a fellow named Bob White---he began to wonder whether his early arrival had been such a good idea.

Yet after he had plugged in and turned on his exhaust fan, stored his gear, chosen and made up the more comfortable of the two beds, and stripped down to his shorts, he was glad he had come. Except for the landlady downstairs absorbed in her soaps, the house was his alone. Free of roommate complaints, free of classes and their requirements, free of sexual temptations from coeds who were known as the sexiest missionary volunteers in America, Baylor was for a few precious days his and his alone.

It was still 103 degrees with 92% humidity at 5:00 when Petie fell asleep on his new green and gold striped bedspread. It was still 94 degrees with 87% humidity at 7:00 when a noise woke him. For several long moments he lay in the wet spot his body had made on the spread, looking at the blood-shot western sky through the bare branches of the giant Oak tree outside his window. The noise sounded vaguely familiar to his sweat soaked brain. It had something to do with him. He sat up and dropped his bare feet to the floor and sat listening. At last it came to him. It was his car horn.

Oh, Lord, he sighed, wiping his forehead. It’s stuck again. It always seemed to stick when he was asleep, usually in the middle of the night. Many nights through the summer he had had to jump up and run outside to pound on it until it stopped before it roused the whole neighborhood. But as he found his pants and pulled them on, partially covering the green and gold stripes that had bled from his new bedspread onto his sweaty back, he realized that what he heard was not the dismal wail of a horn shorted out but the blatt, blatt, blattttt, blatttttttttt, blattttttttttttttt of a horn being deliberately honked. Someone was honking his horn. He had left the windows down, to keep the car from exploding in the heat; and someone was in it, honking, blowing like Gabriel on Judgment Day.

Kids! he mumbled as he jammed on his glasses and stumbled to the window. Green and gold ran in slow sweaty rivulets down his back onto his trousers. He blinked away the sun spots and focused on his car. He was wrong. It was not kids, not the little Mexicans he had seen when he came in; it was an old woman in a faded flowered smock, leaning into his Chevy as far as her taut, thin arm would reach, her face as red as his paint job, pressing on the middle of his steering wheel with all her might.

Oh, Lord, Pete whispered, it’s Mizz Kokernot. He fumbled the latch open and threw up the window. Hold on, ma’am, he shouted to her. Be right down. Leaving his shirt and shoes behind, he bounded down the stairs, shaking his head, wishing that all he had to face out there was a faulty horn. Horns he could bang on and fix---Mizz Kokernot he could not.

The front door was stuck, and he almost cracked its glass as he forced it open. He went tearing down the uneven front steps, barely avoiding a fall, and scurried around the corner of the house. The old lady extracted herself from the car and stood waiting for him, hands on hips, a look of contempt, disgust, and Christian longsuffering on her pinched red face. She held up a hand and stopped Pete dead in his tracks. He stood there, the molten gravel burning his feet, as she came around behind the car toward him and began to screech. Young man, she howled, emphasizing the word young, making it sound like an insult, who gave you the right to park on my property? Don’t you have any respect? This side of the driveway is mine, my property. You could’ve parked on the other side, or in that parking lot up the street, anywhere but here. This---is---mine! Pete was transfixed by her icy blue eyes. Well? she snarled, what do you have to say for yourself?

Pete wanted to say how sorry he was, how he meant no offense or disrespect, how he didn’t know it was her property and that had he known he would never have parked there, how it would never, ever happen again; but he couldn’t say a word. Thoughts darted through his brain and past his frozen tongue out his mouth, where they dissolved in the hot air. In her presence he was struck stone dumb. This was Mizz Kokernot.

Her dearly departed husband, Maurice Kokernot, immortal professor of Baptist Bible Scholarship for fifty years, had bestowed his name on the liberal arts classroom building. Every year Mizz Kokernot was honored, on Founders Day, along with a half dozen other old ladies, all widows of immortal professors, in a special chapel service. For three years Pete and his classmates had watched her totter up and across the big stage, impressed by her frail, regal bearing, as she acknowledged the applause of faculty and students. It made no difference that she was Professor Kokernot’s second wife, by all reports a fairly poor substitute for the first one, the one who had written novels about women in the Civil War; or that she had lived with him only eight of his seventy-eight years, during which time he never taught a class; or that she never varied the faded pink suit she wore or the perfume that smelled like fermenting swamp flowers; or that the son she bore him in his old age, unlike the first wife’s son, now a physician in Houston, collected laundry in the men’s dormitory for $1.25 an hour. She was still, despite it all, Mizz Kokernot.

Well. . .I’m waiting. . . her voice grated on the hot air. Hate oozed from her every pore of her thin body. What d’ya have t’say for ya’self, young man?

Uh, nothing, ma’am, Pete was finally able to muster. Suddenly aware that his feet were on fire, he gave a yelp and rushed past her to the car door.

Well, I can tell you, you’d better watch it, she screamed as she turned to watch him climb in. Pete nodded as he got in and slammed the door, but still she pursued him. You’d better learn some respect for other people’s property, or you’ll end up in jail. She stopped her harangue only when she gave way to coughing as Pete cranked his engine and blew exhaust and dust into her face. Once she had cleared her craw, she came toward him stronger than before. Was a time, students had respect. Used t’be good Christian boys and girls at Baylor. I don’t know where they all went to. Ones we got now. . .

Despite the exhaust and dust, she was still standing behind the car, talking to the sky, when Pete let out his emergency brake. His slippery first gear jumped to reverse, and the car sprang backward, almost hitting her before he could slam on the brakes. She screamed and threw up her arms. Pete saw a small fist appear in front of her contorted face in his rear view mirror. I’ll report you for this, you can bet on that, you disrespectful little good for nothing. . . He tried for first gear again, finally hit it, and went tearing down the alley and around the back corner of Gray House, leaving Mizz Kokernot shouting from a dark swirl of debris.

He made an eight block circle of the house and parked in the big lot next to the freshman girls’ dorm across the street. He sat in his car for a time, sweating, crying, vowing never again to go near that awful old lady, never to let her see him. There was no telling what misery she might cause him. He just hoped she had not taken down his license tag number. As he finally got out of his car and sneaked across the darkening street and up the front steps of Gray House, he could see her still in the driveway shaking her fist at the place she had last seen his car driving away; and from his third storey window he could hear her going on at the top of her voice about her property rights.

He sat on his bed, with its green and gold, body shaped faded spot, and waited for her voice to grow silent and his heart to stop pounding. After a long time, he was able to smile with grim amusement. His senior year of college was starting out in typical fashion.

-2-

Petie waited for darkness to cover the city, for the temperature in his room to drop below 85 degrees, and then he went down the hall to shower and shave and brush his teeth. He dressed in loose clothes and sneaked back across the street and down to his Chevy, careful not to let Mizz Kokernot spot him. For all he knew she might be peeking through the pink part of her stained glass front door. He dreaded living next to her all year because he knew she would never forget or forgive him; but he was glad to be living in Gray House. It was where a lot of Big Bears On Campus lived, and Petie had always secretly wanted to be one of them. Gray House always had a waiting list for its tiny little rooms, partly because of the BBOCs who lived there and partly because it lay directly across the street from the six storey building where the freshmen girls dressed and undressed without always pulling their shades closed. A pair of army binoculars sat on the table in front of the large, upstairs hall window for easy viewing.

Other than getting to hobnob with the elite, the view was about the only pleasure the old house provided. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It was always cluttered and dirty because there was no maid service and the boys who lived there were after all still boys who never swept or carried out refuse. Its faucets leaked, its drains were always clogged, its paper thin walls made it noisy, and the landlady who had her apartment on the first floor entertained strange guests at night. Yet Gray House, conveniently located, without rules, was a den for campus leaders who needed freedom from university inspection, intrusion, and interrogation. A guy could get away with almost anything there, and that’s what it took to be a campus leader. Petie’s roommate-to-be, Bob White, would be president of the senior class; and down the hall would live the president of the junior class and three of Baylor’s six yell leaders. On the second floor would be the president of the Baptist Student Union and the president of Student Congress. On the first floor, but up near the front door, away from the landlady and her nocturnal visitors, would live the executive chairman of the University Baptist Church’s Youth Council and the moderator of the Baylor Student Ministerial Alliance. All those luminaries under one roof, Petie’s roof; it made his head swim just to think about it.

He was honored and just a bit surprised to be living there. He had applied for a room on a whim, not believing for a moment he would be accepted. He had sent in the application just six weeks before, just after the dramatic change in his life, when he was still aglow with resolve to come back in September and compensate for his first three lost years of college. He still blushed to think of the time and money he had wasted on those three years. Now that he had a calling, a vocation, a real reason for going to a school like Baylor, he wanted to be the best person he could be, he wanted to make good grades, he wanted to contribute to the welfare of his school, he wanted to be a somebody, a BBOC; he wanted to live in Gray House.

He hadn’t really expected to get in, but to his amazement he got a prompt reply to his application. He could live in Room 333 Gray House with Bob White. The landlady wrote that Bob’s roommate, Cleve Sheets, who was himself treasurer of the Student Ministerial Alliance, would not be returning for the fall semester. Pete learned later, after Bob White returned, that Cleve had come to summer school, to catch up on his hours so he could graduate on schedule the next spring. It was unbelievably hot, his classes were boring, and one night in June he was arrested by city police and charged with rape. A horror movie was showing downtown, and for three nights Cleve hid under the bridge over Waco Creek, with a stocking over his head, waited for Baylor girls to return from the show, and innocently jumped out to scare them and watch them run to the dormitory. On the third night, the police were waiting for him. At first he was charged with simple harassment, but then one of the girls he had chased on the second night swore before the dean, the judge, and God himself that Cleve had grabbed her arm. Statutory rape! Cleve was sent into exile for a year.

Poor old Cleve, Pete thought as he looked through the darkness at the vague outline of Gray House. Cleve Sheets, the Hunchback of Waco Creek. Cleve was a sacrificial lamb, offered on the altar of Baylor Hypocrisy, so that Pete Peacock could take his place among the pantheon of campus celebrities. Yet it was oddly appropriate. Cleve’s troubles were so much like the kind Pete had known for three years. Cleve had become Pete so that Pete could become Cleve.

Pete eased out into the street and headed for his favorite restaurant, a barbeque and beans place that featured spice and smoke. There he had a slow, pleasant, unhealthy dinner. After that he went to see a Walt Disney film about a family on the Alaskan frontier, a typical night of entertainment for a Baylor boy. When he got back to the parking lot, the temperature was below 80, and he decided to take a walk.

He walked up Straight Street, which ran between women’s dormitories on one side and turn of the century rooming houses on the other. At its end he turned left into the main campus thoroughfare, where campus office seekers spent long afternoons shaking hands with students coming from classes. In a half block he was to the steps of Waco Hall, the auditorium where he had seen first opera and heard the first symphony of his life. There he found a green and gold striped bench where he thought he would rest and think. He had a lot on his mind, things he couldn’t share with anyone else. He was so deep in thought that he failed to see the WET PAINT sign before he sat or notice the sticky feeling of the bench after he did; and it was only when he began to undress back in his room that he noticed the green and gold stripes on his pants and shirt. They matched the ones from his bedspread on his bare back and legs. He was a Baylor man, green and gold, both clothed and naked.

Behind him as he sat soaking up new paint lay the granite building the city of Waco had built to keep Baylor from moving to Dallas thirty years earlier. It was an impressive erection, in size if not in architectural design, so immense and forbidding that with its marble cloak it looked as cool as a tomb even on that hot, humid night. There Petie had endured three years of chapel services; there he had managed to pass his music appreciation course by throwing a fit of weeping when he visited his fat teacher’s office to get his final grade; and there he had stolen his first Baylor kiss during intermission the night Baylor gave Van Cliburn an honorary degree. In that building he had almost fallen to his death as he tried to stuff a thousand balloons, decorated with claims of superiority for the Class of ‘61, through a window in the 150 foot ceiling, down onto a chapel service below. There every Wednesday night he had attending the interesting phenomenon known as Baylor Religious Hour.

Petie had decided to be a ministerial student only six weeks earlier, but he had been a religious person all through college; and at Baylor being religious meant you attended the weekly inspirational Hour faithfully. Every Wednesday, rain or shine, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, he had hurried back to his room after his evening meal at the cafeteria to spruce up---which meant a shave and a clean shirt---to join the crowd moving toward Waco Hall for the Hour, where he was inspired to deeper religious commitment by music and sermons from the seemingly bottomless Baptist bag.

Just at 7:30 each Wednesday night a hush fell over the audience of three thousand righteous young people as a red curtain slowly lifted to spotlight, in blue, a fifty voice choir and a row of campus leaders and honored guests, all of whom in one way or another were ready to give testimony to the salutary effects that Jesus Christ and His Baylor had exerted on their spiritual, professional, and social lives. Football stars told what it felt like to score touchdowns for Jesus. Beauty queens expanded on the joys of walking the winner’s ramp for Christ. Businessmen explained how their successes in oil, cotton, machinery, and aeronautics began at Calvary. All presided over by the president of the Baptist Student Union, always a clear eyed young man of outstanding religious and scholastic acclaim, like last year’s president Bobby Bacon.

Petie winced when he thought of Bobby. Alas, a tragic figure. At the start of the previous year Bobby was highly respected and admired. He seemed perfectly equipped to fill his high office. But the higher the level of veneration at Baylor, the farther the fall if and when it came, the more disastrous the consequences. Bobby had risen high, he had fallen far. Some blamed it on his wife Betty because it was Betty who actually committed the holy faux pas. Others said Bobby had chosen to marry her and that he had to bear the responsibility. Bobby was elected president of the B.S.U. in the spring of his junior year, when he was single, and he had married Betty in July, back in their home town in Georgia, just before his senior year. Betty saw Baylor for the first time when she arrived as his bride in September. A simple girl just out of junior college, she had never been farther from home than holidays with her family in Florida and North Carolina, and she had no idea what faced her as wife of the B.S.U. president at Baylor University. Pete sort of agreed with those who said that Bobby really should have prepared her better for her role, that it was his fault as much as hers that her boo boo cost him his job and made a shambles of his triumphant senior year.

The fall term went well enough, with Bobby reaping the rewards of his first three years of outstanding Christian service. The egregious error came as the young couple returned to Georgia for Christmas holidays. To that point Betty had been more or less anonymous on campus, a cheerful face standing beside Bobby in receiving lines, sitting next to him during the Wednesday night Hour, acting out her role as his modest ministerial helpmate. That image changed overnight. Bobby and his bachelor Georgia buddies, who for three years had shared a car and gas expenses on the seventeen hour trip from Texas home and back, had long used a verbal signal---Johnny Appleseed---to announce that one of them needed to fart. One of them would yell Johnny Appleseed, they would roll down all the windows, the flatulent one would relieve himself, and they would roll them back up once the air cleared. It has always worked perfectly well---until Bobby brought Betty along that Christmas and forgot to warn her about the meaning of the signal.

Less than an hour out of Waco, still in the swampy east Texas lowlands that surround the Trinity River, before the sun set that Friday evening, one of the boys needed to pass wind, called out Johnny Appleseed, they rolled down the windows, then rolled them back up. Everyone laughed, including Betty who didn’t know what had happened, and they all forgot about it, all but Betty. An hour later, after a dinner break, it happened again, and Betty found it very amusing. She thought it was just a way to relieve boredom. An hour after that, somewhere in deepest, darkest Louisiana, as two of the guys dozed, Betty called out Johnny Appleseed. Surprised but well conditioned, the boys roused and rolled down windows and had a big laughed at her expense. About midnight she did it again. And all through the night, through Mississippi, Alabama, and into Georgia, before they mercifully arrived home, she did it again and again, thinking it was the neatest little game she had ever discovered.

When during the holidays at home Bobby finally explained to her what she had done, she was mortified. Those boys had thought she was farting all night? She wanted to die. Bobby told her they would just think it was something she ate. She went to her room and cried the rest of that day, and at the end of the holidays she refused to return with Bobby to Texas. The boys of course spread the story on campus, and Bobby was humiliated. Not only did he have a crude wife with a gas problem, but she had refused to return to school with him and for all they knew might sue for divorce, something that just simply could not happen to the president of the Baylor Baptist Student Union. Bobby was scorned, he was ridiculed, and a month before his successor was to take office, he was forced to resign. He did not attend graduation ceremonies, and he cancelled his application to the seminary. It was reported that he might attend law school in Georgia. It was reported that he was seeing a psychiatrist.

Petie tried to put Bobby out of his mind. He preferred to think of the sweet religious music, the expensive stage settings, and the provocative, challenging sermons of those Wednesday nights. Except for the annual spring campus revival meetings, when up to a quarter of the student body gave up serious sex for a month, the Baylor Religious Hour in Waco Hall was the most impressive spiritual experience of the college year. Petie didn’t want to spoil those memories by dwelling on the tragedy of Bobby Bacon and his flatulent wife. Tonight in particular he needed to pursue positive thoughts.

The street in front of him was as quiet and empty as an alley in Pompeii. Next to Waco Hall, to his right up the street, was the tall Bible Building, where religion was taught; and beyond that there was a commercial corner: a book shop, a post office, a drug store. Looking down that way did little to inspire him. His academic record in the Bible Building was none to strong; and the stores on the corner were so scandalously dirty, with sticky floors and vermin running into cracks, that just thinking about them made him queasy. The university was trying to buy the corner, as much for the guarantee of sanitation as for additional building space.

Across the street lay the Old Quad, the university’s oldest section, three ancient residence halls, two classroom buildings, and a library. It was the library that he could see most clearly through the muggy air. It had once been a chapel, then a classroom building, and only for a decade