A knock on the door, take 1

I didn't want to answer because I was sick. Instead I got a surprise healing.

I was lying on the couch, sweating. It must have been right around dinner time. Neither of my roommates had come home from work yet.

I had recently quit my job at The Coca-Cola Company, where I worked exactly one year from the day I got hired. Needed to downsize to save money so I moved in with my college friends Brady and Sille, who were renting the upstairs unit in this little brick apartment building on the back side of Marietta Square.

(This was the place where we lived before moving into the house on Robin Lane that I mentioned in my Pilgrimage series.)

This place was a dump. Permanently smelled like cooking grease, landlord didn’t give a shit about fixing anything up, roaches all over the place. But it was cheap and no one was stomping around on the ceiling or banging on the walls. It was also right next door to where Brady worked at the time and within walking distance of Marietta Square.

Marietta Square is now all nice and bougie but back then it was just in the process of beginning to think about maybe eventually getting gentrified. But it had a good coffee shop and a couple of divey bars and a lot of Civil War historical ambience. Fun fact — one of the first gigs Brady and my band played was at an old theater on the square that had sat empty for a long time but was taken over by a would-be music promoter who named it The Hanger. You know, like the places they park airplanes at night. Anyway…

Brady and Sille, as the OG occupants, had the two bedrooms. I slept on the couch in the living room. The living room was small. Basically room for a full-size couch, a loveseat, a floor lamp in the corner between the two sofas, and about five feet of dirty carpet between the couch and the wall.

My couch/bed was hard up against the outer wall of the apartment, under the windows, so when I was lying in bed, my head was a couple feet from the door.

That afternoon, I’d suddenly taken ill. It felt like I was coming down with bronchitis or some other respiratory thing. I got bronchitis a lot in my 20s — probably as a result of smoking way too hard, drinking way too much, and being an empath who didn’t know what being an empath meant, or that such a condition even existed. I was carrying around a seemingly permanent load of sorrow, grief and shame but I didn’t know how to get rid of any of that.

I’m lying there, sweating through this sudden-onset fever, my nose is running, my throat is tickling, and I hear feet coming up the metal steps. They didn’t sound like the footfalls of either of my roommates. I probably groaned, at least inwardly — the last thing I wanted to do was to have to interact with someone.

There was a light rap on the door. “Matt? Josh?”

It was our downstairs neighbor, Walker.

Walker was probably a little older than me, mid-thirties, maybe. He lived in the unit under ours with his wife and I want to say five kids. I think he did construction work and his wife stayed home with the kids and kept the house. We didn’t hang out with them, but they were always super kind and friendly. Walker was a big Christian, but not a fake-ass one. I say he was black, because that’s what everyone said back then, but he really was kind of golden-colored. And he had so much light.

I know they weren’t rich, because there’s no way they’d be living with a bunch of kids in that shithole apartment. Maybe they were making economies and saving money so they could buy a nice house in the suburbs in a couple years, who knows? But Walker would always be willing to help out if he saw you were struggling with something: car broke down, need to move a piece of furniture.

I was still in my rebellion-against-my-fundamentalist-upbringing stage and I tended to avoid self-professed “Christians” whenever possible, but it was impossible not to resonate with Walker’s innate kindness.

“Hey, Walker,” I rasped out from the couch.

“O hey, brother, how are you?” Walker replied, looking in through the screen door. “I wanted to see if I could borrow a stick of butter from you all. My wife is cooking dinner and…”

“Come on in, man,” I said.

Walker opened the door and walked in.

“I don’t know if we have butter,” I said. “But if there’s some in the fridge, take however much you need.”

“Are you sure,” he asked. “I’ll bring you some after I get off work tomorrow.”

He stopped and looked down at me.

“You look like you’re not feeling well.”

“Yeah, man, I just started feeling sick this afternoon. I feel pretty awful.”

Walker stood next to the couch for a moment.

“Can I pray for you?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

I might have waved off the offer from some other so-called Christian, but with Walker, I was thinking it couldn’t hurt.

“Brother Dee,” he said. “May I lay hands on you and ask the Lord for a healing?”

This was getting weird fast. But, again, how could I say no to this gentle man?

“OK,” I said.

Walker stood at the end of the couch, reached over my head and placed his golden hands lightly on my chest.

He knew I was a drinker and a smoker but he didn’t care nearly as much as I did about that.

“Lord Jesus,” he said, “We ask for healing for our brother who is suffering with this fever and sickness.”

I don’t remember the whole prayer. It was pretty short and sweet.

“You’re going to feel better soon,” he said.

“Thank you, Walker,” I said.

I heard the door close and his footfalls on the metal steps. I felt a sense of relief, and then I was sleeping. I woke up an hour later when Sille got home from work.

“Still sleeping at 6 pm,” he said. “Eye of the tiger!”

Sille loved cracking on me for being a drunk and living life in my own weird, passionate way, but he also secretly loved it.

I started to ask Sille if we had any butter, but as I sat up and swung my legs over onto the carpeting, I realized all of the hot, heavy pressure was gone from my chest. My nose was clear. I stood up and I felt absolutely fine.

“Sille, you’re never gonna believe this,” I said. “I just got a faith healing!”