Jesus Shaves

Bill Berry spent the weekend with me. Not the Bill Berry who used to be the drummer for R.E.M. but the other one. The one that I went to seminary with and have had countless adventures with. There is something about the two of us. Put us together, especially if we are on the road, and it is spontaneous combustion! Stuff happens.

It started in seminary when we were both on fire to change the world at the Jefferson Street Baptist Chapel in Louisville, KY, a sad little inner city church that had lost its mind and hired me as the minister. We were painting the sanctuary one Saturday night and had finished three walls. We were all tired and Bill told us all to go home and rest. He would finish the last wall for us. So we thanked him and left.

On Sunday morning, I stumbled into the sanctuary to find that Bill had painted the words "Jesus Shaves" and the wall and nothing else. He'd left about ten minutes after we did.

I busted out laughing at what was obviously going to be the over ridding message of the morning.

A few years later, the two of us kidnapped a train in Prague and rode it to Krakow, Poland looking for Auschwitz, the infamous concentration camp. The train was a tiny sleeper car with three beds fixed to one wall. Bill pulled out a screw driver and took down the top two beds, meaning we had a sofa. We placed the other two beds in the hall, sat on the sofa and drank Chech beer. When the conductor came to get our tickets he burst out laughing at the crazy Americans.

That night, the border patrol stopped the train and entered into our birth. Two guards demanded to inspect out passports and Bill jumped out of bed in his underwear, handed over his passport and saluted at attention. I covered my head and just stuck my arms out from under the sheet to hand him mine.

Not too long after that we hitched a ride on a British tour bus to the concentration camp and then jumped off, much to the dismay of the tour guide. And we spent a cold snowy day alone in the death camp. We saw no one for ours. As darkness began to fall, we had no idea how we were going to get back to a train station. So we walked the tracks out of the camp and eventually lucked onto one. And we made it back somehow to Prague after another salute to the border patrol.

Then there was the time that we went to Cuba together. We had many adventures there which I cannot tell for fear of reprisal of the Cuban government. I will confess that after I was busted by American Immigration agents when I entered Nassau, Bahamas I called Bill.

"Did we have official U.S. permission to go to Cuba?" I asked.

"Shit!" he said, "I knew I forgot to give you something!"

U. S. Immigration did not seem to care for this explaination.

So those are some of the highlights of things that we have done. There are far more. He is leaving today after a weekend of minor infractions. That is a good thing. Were he staying longer I am certain that we would get in some kind of trouble. And I've had too much of that in my life lately.