Word: bebb
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...apartment while Parr lies on the rug listening: "It is this foot that I see most clearly, a rather generous-sized foot in a heelless brocade slipper working up and down on the soft pedal while I lie there on the floor watching it at eye-level. In answering Bebb's ad, I am sure that I was, among other things, hungry for fortissimo...
...Bebb? A sleazy evangelist, the Lord's pitchman, the proprietor of an ordination-by-mail diploma mill. Parr sends Bebb the suggested love offering and becomes an ordained preacher by return post. Bebb himself appears shortly thereafter: fierce and shrewd and seedy, awash in the blood of the lamb-and in plans for beggaring the Internal Revenue Service. He is there, he says, to save Parr's soul and teach him gainful godliness...
Novelist Buechner (A Long Day's Dying) was ordained a Presbyterian minister and served for a time as chaplain of a boys' prep school. It may be that this professionalism allows him his easy way with the rigors of belief. Without satire or solemnity, he describes Bebb's religion-a life force as sleazy as its peddler. Bebb is, among other things, a sexual exhibitionist, and there is a memorable scene at the altar of his cinderblock church in which he restores potency to an oil-rich old Indian by raising up his own loins in thanksgiving...