FOR THE LOVE OF WHATEVER YOU HOLD
SACRED, DO NOT END UP IN CLEVELAND, TENNESSEE.
I ended up there as a result of
needing gas on a
return trip from a
family vacation. It is
right off of I-75, so
watch out.
Sunday, noon. The
place resembles a
small suburb, except that right now it's a
ghost town and I feel like I'm in
Salem's Lot.
Everything is
closed, and there are
no cars, not on the road, not in front of
houses, not anywhere.
The
gas station is closed. The
sign reads:
"We are worshipping Our Lord. You should be too." Fear
strikes the hearts of my family and I,
four people well used to
fanatics and
running like mad from them. We decide, as a
family, to run like mad.
But we
run into a problem. Attempting to
get back to 75, we
drive down a street and stop,
lost for words. It is a
still-life traffic jam reminiscent of
The Stand. Every
car in
town, several
hundred at least, is parked
in and around the Church--I mean,
right in the middle of the streets and everything; the
assumption, I guess, being that "
Nobody needs to travel while there's church going on!" We
get out of our car, looking for an
open path back to the
freeway.
My
mom,
dad,
brother and
I all saw
The Sign at once. It's a
big freeway billboard, on the
side of the freeway like most of them, except this one
faces the town and not the
passing cars. It says
approximately this:
JOHNSTON'S HOLISTIC APPLIANCE REPAIR
Let Our Faith Heal Your Fridge!
We stood in
amazed terror a moment more, staring
helplessly in the bright sun at the
stylized washing-machine with a
halo on it, before
screaming out of town at over
eighty miles per hour. To this day, any
one in my
family or
close circle of friends will
cringe visibly if you mention Cleveland, Tennessee.
That's right,
FUQ that place.