4 Keeping Track of the Story: The Satan Seller pp. 11-13

 Writing a long narrative is difficult. You have to keep track of many different things, especially when you’re dealing with internal thoughts. I keep a small B5 sized notebook for important notes when I’m writing. It would have served Warnke to do something like this too because chapter 2 has a few contradictions that simple note taking would have resolved.

“California isn’t a state, it’s an experience.” I think Governor Schwarzenegger used this as a slogan, which makes me think that Warnke didn’t come up with it.

Warnke has left the Midwest and is now living in (or near) San Bernadino California with the Papists. The first few pages he’s describing the San Bernadino valley and it’s not a bad job of laying out the environment. I might be overly picky here but I think that this belonged in the chapter where he moved to California. I get that he’s setting the stage for the California bit, it seems like he realized he forgot like a a person telling a joke and then going back “the third guy in the bar is Rabbi.”

In between the picturesque descriptions of the valley we are given comments like this, “Mules – dope pushers – know the inland route to San Diego, as well as the Coastal Highway, which they call the King’s Highway, because South of San Diego is Mexico, and south of the border is the marketplace where marijuana, peyote, and heroin can be purchased.”

Two things: Warnke is writing just about when the US national moral panic is going to be “drugs.” Not anything specific, like the cocaine/crack 80s; just drugs. The counterculture of the 60s was ebbing away but the flagrant drug use was still considered a problem. The point of “The Satan Seller” is to feed “good Americans” sense of outrage and moral superiority so he’s going to pepper in the drugs thing when he can. Secondly, he’s misinformed or lying. A “mule” is not a drug pusher; it’s someone who moves the drugs from one place to another. It’s not as though they have a special sense of the land, they just have a map.

“As I listened to the stories of the purveyors of the flower faith…”

I don’t know what this means. I do know that a slang term for marijuana is “flower” but I’m not entirely sure this is what he means. He could mean the hippie movement considering that this part of the story is taking place in 1959. I’ll settle on that.

Once three pages of setting the place, the place we’ve already been, we get more of Mike. What we discover is that Warnke wasn’t a popular kid. He noticed a girl named Carol who rejects him in favor the football clique; she was the kind of girl that went to the “big dances and parties with the ‘good’ or straight guys.” I know that “straight” here means something else, but it’s just funny to me.

This is where my little notebook would come in handy. Warnke already told us that he was “totally hooking up” with girls and one girl especially…you wouldn’t know her though, she’s from Vancouver. So which is it: was he getting shot down by Carol or was he hitting the back seat with the nameless girl from the last chapter?

The answer doesn’t really matter because in order to stick it to the popular kids Warnke begins drinking and hanging out with the “rougher kids.” Which, fine, he’s one of the outsiders, but this framing is odd. He’s blaming the popular kids for his drinking. Ultimately this book is going to be one of Evangelical Christian Redemption© so we know he’s going to shed his evil ways. Take responsibility for your own behavior Mike.

His drinking problem increases. He begins to neglecting his school work but then quickly graduates from high school. Once free, “I had discovered a whole new world – a world of freedom, lots of girls, plenty of booze, and no more nag, nag, nag, from my parents.”

He begins frequenting coffeehouses where he finds acceptance in the crowds that frequent such places. I, personally, have literally been there. I was a bit of a social outcast coming out of high school and cafés were the place that I found my types of people. Generally free music, books and zines, those free newspapers that used to be everywhere, and girls. I’ve met more women at cafés than I did at bars. Warnke wants us to think that this is bad because it wasn’t church. He has a social circle with the social misfits of the world and the only reason that it doesn’t feel right to him is because there’s no Jesus there.

At this point in the book, everything is bad aside from those two evangelical aunts only Warnke doesn’t know that yet. His foster parents suggest that he go back the Midwest to which he replies, “Why not? I was bored out of my skull as it was, and it would be something to do.”

Again, consult the little notebook Mike because you aren’t bored. You’re going to parties, hooking up with girls, and affecting a fake English accent at the café you like the most. Bored out of his skull doesn’t work here. Perhaps, if I feel like being generous, he could be trying to portray himself as too cool for school; everything is boring because he’s so awesome.

I don’t get that impression though because he does say that one of the benefits of the trip is that it might sober him up a bit. The impression that I do get is that he knows where it ends so he’s got to make everything before being “saved” to be the worst. It doesn’t matter if one portion of his life directly contradicts the other portion of his life. He can’t be at home bored out of his mind while at the same time going to the Penny to party all the time unless none of that actually matters.