Play the Song Backward

Collection Plates and Distortion Pedals

Privately, quietly, some of the flock would say that Geoff Oakman might have overdone it.

The Oakman Ministry Center dwarfed the entire, formerly quaint downtown, and Duck Ingram wasn’t afraid to say out loud that from some angles it looked more like a NASCAR Superspeedway than a house of the Lord. 

Geoff and Eagle Creek, Indiana’s other problem was that the county road commission had ignored the bombastic preacher and not widened exit 33, so every Sunday there was a fairly sizable jam up on Interstate 92, already resulting in car accidents that claimed two lives.

Demonizing the road commission wasn’t working, because they were all third to eighth-generation locals and Geoff was a failed daytime serial actor from Sherman Oaks, California.

Self-admittedly (in his high school yearbook), Geoff was “an attention-craving madman” and now he needed someone to draw the attention away from him, especially after Duck Ingram said he was thinking of having unsanctioned stock car races around the Petunia Oakman Cathedral, the centerpiece of the complex, named in honor of Geoff’s grandma, whose real name was Edna, and whose Lord and not-so-much-savior had been Johnny Walker Red.

Geoff prayed on it, because Geoff prayed on everything, including which way the toilet paper rolls should hang-paper out or paper under-in the Ministry Center.