During spring of 1964, while Bob Williams and I worked and bummed our way across the country and back, boys our age were landing in Vietnam. Some of them were draftees. In May, the month we returned from Florida, the draft board wrote that they were lifting my 2A deferment, as I no longer attended college. Having missed only one semester, I petitioned the college to reinstate me, though the deadline had passed, and appealed to the draft board.

Cliff Torrey, 1963

Cliff, my best friend over the year and a half since Eric had died, was working at Coffee Dan’s as the night cook and graveyard-shift janitor. I hung around with Cliff and his family and worked part-time for his dad, demonstrating and selling a tire-repair device to gas stations. It plugged holes from the outside, even in sidewalls. I got to stab the tires with an ice pick. The meager commissions paid for beer and occasional poker.

Unleashing the Hound of Heaven. There was a marathon poker game at the little house Bob Williams had rented near 70th Street and El Cajon Boulevard. A few of us were still playing at 9:00 a.m. Saturday. Cliff had worked all night and joined us soon after dawn. We needed more liquor, and Cliff volunteered to fetch it. He didn’t have a car, so he borrowed my ’50 Chevy with roofing nails in the fenders, which had carried Bob and me home from Florida. He set off for Coffee Dan’s, where Reba the waitress would buy us liquor from Longs Drugs next door.

Cliff parked out front, walked in, and found Reba. He was slipping money to her when people in the nearest booth turned to look out the window. Cliff followed their lead and saw my Chevy rolling. Backward. Picking up speed.

The parking lot was large, with a gentle slope toward the southwest corner, where a shiny new Lincoln Continental sat. No doubt the owner had stashed it there to protect against dents and dings. Clifford sprinted across the lot. I wouldn’t have reached the halfway point before the Chevy broadsided the Lincoln, but Clifford had been a cross-country star. He almost saved the Continental.

Realizing neither he nor the Chevy carried insurance, his thinking skewed by a double shift at work followed by a six-pack, he jumped into the Chevy and sped away as best one could in a ’50 Chevy automatic.

The story of his accident killed our poker game. Driving the Chevy on the least-traveled streets, I stashed it in a garage where it would gradually disappear, part by part.

Cliff and I spent the next couple of weeks fretting that the police would suddenly arrive. The night before the day that would chart the course of my life, we drove to La Jolla and sat on high cliffs while I babbled to Cliff that the notion of jumping to oblivion appealed to me. The deaths of my father and Eric had paralyzed a portion of my heart. The meanness I had witnessed while out in the real world had polluted my idealism. Since the night in Chicago when I would have killed a guy if my friend hadn’t stopped me, I realized my own wickedness. “What’s left?” I asked. “Don’t ask me.” “Do you think we ought to jump?”

Droll as always, Cliff said, “Naw, let’s wait, get drafted, and let some Vietcong do the job for us.”

On the morning of the big day, I went to bum a few dollars off Cliff and joined him for a break in Coffee Dan’s employees’ lounge.

Hilda tagged along. She was a waitress, about 30 years old, with soft green eyes and a German accent. After studying us a minute, she asked,

“What’s the matter, boys?”

“Nothing,” we grumbled in harmony.

She sat across from us and offered, “God will forgive you for wrecking the cars.... Are you going to see Billy Graham?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, what you’ll miss then. I will be there every night, if Mr. Saska will let me off work. It will be such a blessing. Mr. Graham is anointed of God and a great man too. On Friday, his message will be especially for young people. I pray every day that you will go, Clifford.” She watched him a moment, then grimaced at her rudeness in not asking me, turned and patted my arm. “You too, Ken. It’s free. And that night the crusade will be broadcast on television, all over the country. Imagine.”

Friday was Cliff’s payday. He’d worked 70 hours during the week. Almost $100 he earned. He, Bob, and I intended to celebrate in Tijuana. But the crusade was free, and Balboa Stadium was hardly out of our way, since in those days the main road to Tijuana was old 101, which we could take out of downtown San Diego. Besides, Tijuana saloons stayed open all night.

Bob had proclaimed many times that religion was all that kept his mom tied to her second husband, a wino and two-time jailbird for bum checks. So he lobbied against the crusade. I argued that we might meet three girls willing to backslide and escort them to Tijuana. Cliff seconded.

Downtown looked like a fashion show for uniforms, mostly Navy. Bob suggested we forget the crusade and follow the swabbies to the Hollywood Burlesque. Cliff asked, “Why bother with the Hollywood when in TJ they show it all off?”

To assure an easy escape, we parked near the Pepper Grove across from the Naval hospital. On the sidewalk along Park Boulevard, people fell in line. I thought it looked like a procession of pilgrims, or, Bob remarked, “like captives marching to a prison camp.”

The evening mist turned to drizzle as we crossed the parking lot and entered Balboa Stadium. At the foot of the steps, Cliff stopped and held up a finger as though to preface, “Hold on, what are we doing here? Let’s run before it’s too late.” But a plump woman with steel gray eyes smiled and nudged him onward.

As we climbed the steps, following the ushers who welcomed us too earnestly for comfort, the choir of 2000 voices sang, “He lives, He lives, I know He lives... You ask me how I know He lives — He lives within my heart.”

I insisted on an aisle seat, the better to escape. We found one high at the 50-yard line. The platform was beyond the southern end zone, near the tunnel to the dressing rooms. I knew the layout of the place from a high school football game, when our team had played a championship there. Billy Graham drew a crowd about 100 times what we had. Between songs, the choir leader, Cliff Barrows, estimated attendance at 19,000. Half of us were very young, the majority female, wearing drab or soft colors, dresses or skirts hemmed below the knees, and loose sweaters or coats. Of the young men, only a handful of us had failed to wear uniforms, ties, or at least sport coats. I wore a beard, Bob a mustache and longish unkempt hair. Although nearly everybody was white, I felt as conspicuous as if we’d just wandered into Nairobi.

I scanned the nearby seats for beautiful girls. There were plenty, but I couldn’t draw a double take or a smile. Nobody looked very comfortable. Most of them sat with parents who’d probably lured or commanded them to the crusade so Billy Graham could fill them with a dedication to virginity. Even the girls who appeared to have come on their own looked skittish, as if they realized the principal had them under surveillance.

A big, hearty man called George Beverly Shea came forward and sang “... From sinking sand, He lifted me... Oh, praise His name, He lifted me.” His deep voice echoed off the hills.

Cliff Barrows returned and gave a pitch for Halley’s Bible Handbook. He impressed me as Mr. Shea had. Both were pushing 50, yet they looked strong, bright, and healthy. Their eyes were beams that probed through the distance and drizzle.

The choir sang “The Old Rugged Cross,” which stirred something in my belly as though the song were a lost anthem of my early childhood. Though the drizzle made it hard to tell, I think my eyes watered at the lyric, “...and I love that old cross where the dearest and best, for a world of lost sinners was slain.” I sat mortified — a guy who had seen through religion, who at 16 had chosen to follow Bertrand Russell’s pragmatic atheism and Friedrich Nietzsche’s quest for the superman inside us, but three years later appeared in danger of whimpering like a church mouse.

While Mr. Shea sang, he appeared to study us, to scan the crowd then stop for an instant as though recognizing somebody or glimpsing the condition of a particular soul. Across the aisle and up a few rows, a blonde about 16 perched on the edge of her seat, her feet on the ground as if to push off for a sprint should Mr. Shea’s gaze light on her. Her eyes bugged. Her hands gripped her knees. I wondered what could be her dark secret.

As Billy Graham stepped forward, nobody cheered or murmured. Twenty thousand of us, even Bob, sat in rapt expectation.

Mr. Graham was big and handsome even from yards away. There was an assurance to his posture and bold humility in his gaze. In a voice both mild and stern, he directed us to bow our heads in prayer. “Our Father and our God, we pray that tonight... many will turn from a path of selfishness and sin to Jesus Christ and the joy and pleasure and thrill that He can give....”

He asked us to turn to John, chapter 8. A man in the row behind us tapped Cliffs shoulder and loaned us a Bible. While Cliff searched for the page, Mr. Graham began reading, “Jesus went unto the Mount of Olives, and...the scribes and pharisees brought unto Him a woman taken in immorality. And...they said unto Him, ‘Master, this woman was taken in immorality. In the very act. Now Moses and the law commanded us that such should be stoned, but what sayest thou?’ This they said tempting Him, that they might have cause to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down, and with His finger wrote on the ground as though He heard them not. So when they continued asking them, He lifted up Himself and said unto them, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast the stone at her.’ And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. And they heard it and, being convicted of their own conscience, went out one by one.... And Jesus was left alone and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up Himself and saw the woman, He said unto her, ‘Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?’ And she said, ‘No man, Lord.’ And He said, ‘Neither do I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more.' ”

The pharisees attempted to snag Jesus on the horns of a dilemma, between compassion and the Mosaic law. But, Mr. Graham declared, nobody outsmarts Jesus, who has the answers we so desperately need.

“In our times, the sins of the fathers are being visited upon the children. The moral and spiritual decadence of adults is being reflected in an intensified departure from moral and spiritual values, by young people who have no moral norm for their actions.

“The older generation prints and sells the pornographic literature. The older generation makes the lewd and salacious films. The older generation imports and sells the dope. If the older generation that is setting a poor example, not only sexual morality, but lying and cheating, in every area of our life, until chiseling and cheating and shortcuts are taken everywhere, and our young people see their fathers and mothers, and they throw up their hands and say, ‘If they can do it, so can we.’ ”

The older people around either hung their heads, nodded in shameful recognition, or scowled as though to exclaim, “Now, wait just a minute.... ”

Mr. Graham contended that a growing number of college students viewed premarital sex as appropriate, natural affection and a valuable growth experience and that teenagers were listening intently to these ideas. Teenagers want to know what’s right and wrong, he said. They want somebody to stand up and answer the question, “How far can I go?” But adults, even church people, were turning their backs on morality.

“What does the Bible have to say about this? The seventh commandment says, ‘Thou shalt not commit immorality’ God put a safeguard around marriage...but outside of marriage the Bible teaches that this sin is one of the worst, the most heinous and deadly of sins.” When I glanced at Bob, he rolled his eyes. Cliff glared straight ahead, squinting, his lips clenched. A man in the row ahead turned and shot me a look that meant, “This is for you, kid.” Across the aisle, a pair of young girls burst into giggles, while others rubbed their eyes, and a tiny blonde rocked on the edge of her seat.

“The Bible teaches that this sin causes a person to steal. You steal something that doesn’t belong to you, from another person.... The Bible teaches that this sin hardens the heart more than any other. This sin becomes master in your life. Jesus talks about being a servant to sin, and many of you are servants of sin. You’ve committed this sin so often that the keen edge is gone, but you find yourself in bondage, you’re captured by the lustful thinking, you’re captured by the evil daydreaming, or by some affair. You find yourself a servant, and you’d like to break the chains and fetters that bind you, but you can’t do it.... But David committed this sin and repented and God forgave him. Mary Magdalene repented and God forgave her. He can do the same for you. There is no sin in the Bible that God dealt so tenderly with as He did this sin. He was kind and loving and merciful to all those who were willing to turn from it, and He’ll do the same for you.

“ ‘Well, Bill,’ you say, ‘I’m a young person. I have got all this drive and energy. What am I to do? How can I face this temptation?’

“Now, I want you to remember this — temptation is not sin. You can be tempted, but that’s not a sin. Satan does the tempting. God never tempts anybody. All of us are tempted. The Bible says that Jesus was tempted in every point. You say, ‘Do you think Jesus was. tempted along this line?’ The Bible says He was tempted in every point, just as we are, but without sin. He showed us how it is possible to resist these temptations.”

Billy Graham coached us on how to substitute good thoughts for evil ones, to avoid the wrong company and disallow our eyes the second look; to remove from our repertoire profanity, innuendoes and all. To let Christ chaperon our hearts. To dress modestly, choose prudently the films we watch, the music we play, the books. “You say, ‘I don’t have the power to do all of these things.’ You don’t. But Christ will help you, if you let Him. He gives you power to live the Christian life and to keep busy doing good. A follower of Jesus Christ never knows boredom. In Christ, there’s always something to do. A neighbor to visit. A hospital call to make that would cheer up somebody; there’s a person of another race that you can go out of your way to be a friend to. There are a thousand things....”

An airliner roared overhead. The drizzle had given way to big drops. We who hadn’t brought hats or bandannas hoisted the collars of our jackets up over our heads.

“Jesus looked up and said, ‘Woman, where are those thine accusers? Has no man condemned you?’ Now, this woman was guilty. According to the law of Moses she was condemned to die. But Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more.’ I don’t think there are any more beautiful words in the Bible or all the languages of men than those. ‘Go, and sin no more.’ Your sins are forgiven. Think what that meant to the woman. The sentence of death was removed; in that moment she became as pure as though she had never committed a sin.... And what a glorious thing it is to know that your sins are forgiven.

“ ‘But Billy,’ you say, ‘what do I have to do?’ Jesus said, ‘Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?’ And she answered Jesus and said, ‘No man, Lord.’ In that moment, when she called Him Lord, she made public her decision for Christ. She had chosen to make Jesus her savior, lord, and master. And Jesus said, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’

“I’m asking you tonight to receive Christ as your lord and master and your savior. You say, ‘Well, how?’ First you must be willing to repent of your sins. How do you repent? The Bible says you must be willing to acknowledge your sins. And the Bible says you must be willing to turn from your sins. I know it’s raining. But I read in the Bible that when Christ was dying for your sins, on that day there was an earthquake, and the heavens turned black, but Christ didn’t leave that cross, though He could’ve. But He stayed there for you.”

The rain kept pummeling harder and faster, yet Mr. Graham wasn’t going to relent. Lightning could have struck him to no effect, I imagined. Cliff’s knees twitched against mine. He pounded his knuckles together. A shudder passed through me. It could have been nerves more than anything that made me stand, and I tried to cover the move by stretching and yawning. Bob sat still, his nose wrinkled against the rain. Then Cliff was standing beside me. Oh no, I thought, I’m sinking.

“Going down?” Cliff asked.

“You want to?” I mumbled

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘Yeah, might as well.’ ”

Hearing a muted squeal from behind us, I turned and noticed a couple and their two adolescent kids clutching and rubbing their hands together in delight, grinning and nodding us on.

We were among the first wave to reach the field, which was a maze of puddles and soggy enough that we made deep footprints in the sod. By squirming between earlier arrivals, we closed to within a few feet of the stage, where I hoped to judge if Mr. Graham were a real human or some descendant of Paul Bunyan. The rain streaming off his hair and shoulders, he kept inviting, and people kept descending. Toward the end of the procession and while the last of us arrived and settled in, before he guided us through the sinners’ prayer, he told the story of his experience in the same place, when at 17 years old he accepted Christ as his savior. After the story, seconds before I dedicated my life to Jesus, I thought — Imagine, this great, confident, powerful man used to be a lost kid like me.

Bob objected when I aimed my car back toward La Mesa instead of continuing on to Tijuana. To appease him and celebrate, we stopped for wine. An hour after Cliff and I accepted Christ as our savior, we sat on the living room floor of Bob’s house. Bob, Cliff, Kenny Niedermeyer, and I shared a gallon of Carlo Rossi’s Red Mountain Vin Rose. Neither Cliff nor I. wanted to discuss the crusade, but Bob and Kenny wouldn’t leave it alone.

“What’d it feel like, up there?”

Cliff mumbled, “Wet.”

“When you prayed that prayer...how’d it go?”

I said, “About I’m a sinner and I’m sorry for it and promising to leave all that behind me, and I want Christ to be my lord and savior.”

“So, did you say all that, out loud?”

Cliff mumbled, “Yeah.”

I nodded.

“So how’d it feel?” “Good.”

Cliff added, “Kind of warm. Like when you blush.”

“Maybe that’s because you were blushing.”

“Aren’t you supposed to feel like a new creation?” Bob asked wryly. “You’re supposed to look around and everything’s different. That’s what I heard on the radio and from the Youth for Christ geeks.”

I shrugged.

Kenny asked, “So what’d the preacher tell you about sex?”

“He thinks it’s bad news,” Bob said. “The worst. Once you’ve got laid you’re hooked.”

“Amen,” Kenny cheered. “And check this out — he said once you’ve got laid you never quit feeling guilty. Do you feel guilty?”

Kenny wagged his head.

“How’s Billy Graham know what it feels like? Did he get any before he was married?”

Bob and Kenny traded speculations and rumors about preachers, priests, nuns, and sex, while Cliff nibbled beer nuts, one at a time, and I sat recalling a street evangelist’s line that we were either in Christ or against Him, which disturbed me. I was analyzing that notion when Bob cut to the heart of the matter.

“So now you guys are saved,” he asked, “what’re you going to do about it?” Raising his eyebrows, gazing from Cliff to me and back, he filled our plastic tumblers with wine. Kenny stared shyly as if we were all standing at a urinal. I waited for Cliff to answer first and wished the question would evaporate, that somebody might walk in and change the subject or the phone would ring.

At last, Cliff said, “Wait and see.”

I nodded.

“We’ll be watching,” Bob said. “Hey, what’d those counselor guys tell you?”

Before retiring from the platform, Billy Graham had turned us over to helpers. The ones who had cornered Cliff and me were boys a year or two younger than ourselves, one gangly, with a trembling Adam’s apple. The other had buck teeth. They weren’t Billy Graham, Cliff Barrows, George Beverly Shea, or anybody I wanted to become. After all, I had read philosophy, survived the deaths of a dozen friends and relatives including my father and Eric. I had lived on my own and bummed across the continent and back. Expert temptresses had propositioned me. To Billy Graham I might listen, but these guys? What on earth had they overcome? Besides, in the group next to ours was a pair of legs to which my eyes and attention kept drifting. Atop the legs rested....

I didn’t feel saved from anything. The world looked like the same damned place as before.

“Did they invite you to church?” Bob asked.

“Yep.”

“So?”

“Maybe we’ll go,” Cliff said. “Maybe not.”

“Are you giving up on pussy?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Bob and Kenny stared at each other a moment, laughed, then stared at Cliff and me. Bob slapped his leg and laughed again. Kenny wrinkled his nose and said, “Naw. Never happen.” And, I thought, it won’t just be them laughing at us. Everybody will. Even my mom would chuckle if I followed this Christ routine.

I — who had traipsed through New Orleans’ black neighborhoods after the witching hour, ridden in a gunslinger’s convertible, nearly executed a guy in Chicago, who might very soon have to mix it up with the Vietcong— didn’t have the guts to face ridicule.

To prove that we hadn’t become churchmice, to declare ourselves free men, to escape Bob and Kenny, I drove Cliff and myself to Tijuana.

As usual, we started in the Long Bar, a loud saloon that specialized in pitchers of greenish beer, where fraternities and baseball teams gathered and the lock to the women’s restroom was broken so one girl had to stand guard for another. We drank tequila, then staggered down foggy Avenida Revolution, tripping over the legs of beggars, allowing ourselves to get pulled by the barkers into stinking bars where sailors lay sprawled in booths while women picked their pockets and their shipmates yowled at the bartenders about watery bourbon and zombies with too much grenadine and too little rum.

We landed in a small basement cantina a block from the Palacio Jai Alai. At a table where several Marines sat cussing their losses, their commanding officers, and that the Marines had promised to make them into men but had made them into goats, I begged an old prostitute wearing a chartreuse bow in her hair to tell me what she believed about God. While waiting for her answer, I swallowed the climactic shot of tequila.

Rain bonged off the roof of my ’58 Ford, which had sat without a radiator for a year until Cliff broadsided the Lincoln and my ’50 Chevy got cannibalized. The windows were streaming and fogged inside yet slightly translucent. Dawn had arrived. My head, heart, and soul throbbed. My shoulder was wedged under the steering wheel. In back, Cliff snored and gnashed his teeth.

I pushed myself up and managed to roll down the window a crack, just enough to recognize that we were parked beneath the bridge, about 200 yards south of the border, near a shantytown on the flood-plain of the muddy, trickling Tia Juana River, which doubled as a sewer.

A dog howled. Between howls, it barked plaintively. Not a single dog answered, yet I was so young, ignorant, and lost, I didn’t catch the symbolism and realize that last night, while the visible part of me knelt at the altar, a spirit had gotten loose and blasted off, and even now it was zooming through the air on its way to unleash the Hound of Heaven.