New Year's Eve on the Strip, and a very drunk, strangely smelly Bradley Sales of Wausau, Wisconsin, wanted his photo taken with a very sober, strangely upbeat Robert Ephrata of Bellingham, Washington. Sales tossed his arm over Ephrata's willing shoulder and they both smiled broadly. In Sales' other hand was a long-neck beer bottle. In Ephrata's other hand was a sign with the Word of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior. Or some variation thereof.
That Ephrata continued to keep that bemused smile plastered across his oval, bearded face is nothing short of, well, a miracle, what with the abuse he and his pious posse were taking for their colorful warnings of hell on pickets and portable public address systems. He was comforted, as revelers engaging in as many deadly sins as are simultaneously possible screamed vulgarisms that would make Eminem cringe, by the knowledge that he's en route to a cushy, cloudy afterlife perch somewhere over the rainbow while those who mock him will descend to the bowels of the planet where exists an eternal Abu Ghraib. Hey, it's right there in that Book.
"Those pictures those people take of us, you know they're making fun of us, but what they don't realize is that they're helping us spread the word," said a placid Ephrata, a professional street preacher who bops from one target of divine wrath to the next, preaching a brand of fundamentalism so fundamental that he accuses other fundamentalists of watering down the message. "You know how many of their friends they'll show that picture to? Some of them will consider repentance."
Indeed, the modern Jesus freak is media savvy. Ephrata deliberately forced Kendall Tenney and Beth Fisher, too, to be inadvertent missionaries by camping out right in front of the KVBC Channel 3 platform above the sidewalk outside Caesars Palace. Even a nutcase from Bellingham knows that nobody watches Paula Francis anymore.
Ephrata insisted his kook club didn't just target Vegas because it's the symbol of American hedonism, although he did take a moment to point out that "sin" is at the center of "casino." "Oh, we go to lots of events around the country," said Ephrata, who pays the bills as a part-time carpenter—just like you-know-who! "Mardi Gras is always a good one. So are those gay parades. We go where the people—the sinners—are. And the sinners are everywhere. We're equal-opportunity preachers. Tomorrow we'll be at the Rose Bowl Parade."
What's neat about Ephrata is how sure he is of everything and how he can say cruel, outrageous comments but then—just like Dr. Laura!—make a virtue out of his willingness to be straight-shooting and "honest." How Christian of him, for instance, to somberly note that the killer Indian Ocean tsunami was proof of God's anger at the Southeast Asians for their moon worship. Before you Judeo-Christian red-staters think you're off the hook, though, beware: "Our nation is going to implode. 9/11 was the warning from God of that." See, and we all thought it was the work of some wacko religious kooks similar to Ephrata but who were angrier, much poorer and Starbucks-deprived.
After a while, there was only so much of this silliness a gay Jew like me could grin through before I needed to excuse myself to bust out laughing. I try to keep it straight when I'm interviewing someone, so Ephrata probably thought I was listening carefully and open-mindedly to his screed. And that's why I caught the look of real disappointment out of the corner of my eye as I kissed my boyfriend at midnight not far from Ephrata. He had caught me. He shook his head. "You're going to hell," he seemed to imply. "See you there," I wanted to answer.