"I’m the president of IBD," my fare told me.

"What’s IBD?" I asked.

"The International Brotherhood of Dagon."

I looked at the 300-pound behemoth sitting next to me and thought, Here’s another nut case that I get to drive. He was in his thirties, well over six feet tall, and looked like he needed to join Tattoos Anonymous. I had heard the name Dagon before. Dagon was the half fish/half man god of the Philistines, the Israelites’ main adversary in the pivotal period when the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron. It’s something I learned after I fried my brain on LSD for a few years. It wasn’t the LSD that taught me about Dagon, but the direction that it led me in. After I stripped away my ego and flew as free as a bird within the cage of my own mind, I realized that I needed to get back in touch with reality, so I turned to religion. Religion is the opiate of the masses, Marx said, so I decided to try a different high.

"So where do you want to go?" I asked.

"I understand that there is a club called Sixes," he said.

"Yeah, it’s downtown," I told him.

"Take me there," said the prez.

After I wrote it down and called it in, we left the motel parking lot and started to drive. My passenger was wearing a tailored black suit and cape, with a black shirt and matching string tie, held by a silver goat’s head clasp. He had a black skull cap that covered the entire top of his head, like a Roman Catholic Bishop, but his shoulder-length black hair overflowed it like Niagara Falls escaping Lake Erie. He walked with a cane that was made of dark brown wood, with a silver handle, shaped like a ram’s head.

He was reeking with some unfamiliar cologne that smelled like pine musk, but his most distinguishing feature was his face, mainly because it was covered with tattoos and metal. A two-headed snake was coiled across his forehead in luminescent green, yellow, red and purple, with drops of ruby red blood dripping out of their mouths and down his cheeks. The blood nourished a white peyote cactus flower, connected to a green stem on his chin that may have continued under his shirt and down his chest. A thin black-and-white spider’s web emanated from the bridge of his nose and covered the rest of his face.

Dozens of piercings further decorated his head, but the thing that made me squeamish about them were the two chains that were attached to the ruby red stud in his tongue. Those chains ran through rings on his lip, nose and both his eyebrows, where they split and then traveled through golden hoops piercing his earlobes, before they were attached to small hoops attached to his neck, just above his shirt collar.

"My wife and four-year-old son were murdered by Christians up in Washington four months ago," he angrily told me.

I decided not to tell him that I was an ordained minister. After all, I hadn’t renewed my license since 1984.

“Man, that’s horrible,” I said. “Why did they do that?"

"Because they were serving their blood-thirsty God!" He almost screamed it out, and I nearly drove off the road. "They threw us all off a bridge in this little town we were driving through. I was able to escape, after dragging their bodies out of the river. That’s why I have to use this fucking cane!"

I was wondering whether I should pull over and ask him to get out of the cab, give the dispatcher the emergency call number, or just keep driving. I chose the latter, since it was a slow night and I didn’t want to lose the fare. But I decided to change the subject to something less emotional.

“What does being the president of IBD involve?"

"I teach proselytes and recruit new members," he told me. "We use the internet as our classroom, but Christian hackers have crashed the website twice so far. We’re looking for a secure server so we can get our site back up."

I let him talk, and he kept up a constant diatribe about everything from the economy to the "War on Terror," and then just as suddenly he changed the subject. "The witch wars of 2001 and 2006 were when gychem, the Wiccans, Satan worshippers, pagans and other members of the ancient faith fought with each other instead of uniting. Vgem dzgdmn chmgza. They let the established religions, like Christianity and Islam, continue on their murderous paths. Christianity is the bloodiest chachzm vrogzm."

He kept peppering his speech with incoherent guttural sounds, as he explained his hieros logos. "Lucifer was never kicked out of heaven. Achembha hgun brachine. He led a rebellion against God, who was corrupted and involved in evil. Whvwra hacheem drovya. He was the savior of heaven. Then after God somehow convinced two thirds of the angels to monchn skapena support him, he drove Lucifer and his army of angels out of heaven, which initiated what scientists call the ‘Big Bang Brychunga.’"

He was preoccupied now, trying to make sure he got it right: "Our entire universe was created by Lucifer and his army. He gave all his generals nocheem avendhe galaxies to rule, and all the lower-ranking officers got solar systems, while the enlisted angels got planets. Brchezbho gonka kimba. Since there weren’t that many planets with life on them, some of the enlisted angels started to gyvdne chrgm gravitate towards the ones with life, like what we now call Earth."

I was hoping he would keep talking all the way to the club, and it was looking good: "The most successful enlisted angels on Earth were Aphrodite, Astaroth, Baal, Beelzebub, bydnacham, Dagon, Demiurge, Janus, Jupiter, Odin, Ochganda, Ra, Shiva, Yahweh and Zeus, to name some. Over the multi-eons prehmphavaghondha territories were staked out, but when the human vachindha phrandha populations that owed allegiance to each angel started to increase, they began infringing on each other’s territory, which led to war, at the end of the Matriarchal Age. The first Patriarchal War Dherghatum began ten thousand years ago, and hasn’t stopped since, except to retool and update its technology."

Suddenly he changed the subject and began to talk about how he was adopted, but that his adoptive parents never told him this until he was 18. He said that his father was a member of the Masons, and that his adoption was just an experiment that they did. He talked about how the Masons, the Illuminati and the Tri-lateral Commission were all part of the worldwide conspiracy, using religions as their tools.

When we got to Sixes, it was closed, so we tried another similar club, but in a city like Salem on a Monday night, not much is available to a sophisticate like my passenger.
“How about Silverado’s?” I suggested, since it was across the street from his motel.
“I went there last night,” he told me. “They wouldn’t quit staring at me. They acted like I was some kind of freak. I’d never go in there again. Just take me back to my room.”
Now he was angry again. He kept complaining about needing to relax because he was grieving for his dead wife and child. It was Yellow Cab’s fault that this happened. He was wasting all his money for nothing. We passed a purple building called The Pit, and it was open, and I started to hope the president of the IBD would just tell me to stop there. He did ask me what it was and I told him it was a strip club. Did he want me to stop?

“Many of the members of IBD are exotic dancers. They’re friends of mine. But right now I’m grieving the death of my wife and son, so this isn’t my scene, dig?”

“Yeah, I dig,” I said.

As we pulled up at the motel, I called in the route change, and for some reason Jules the jolly dispatcher laughed over the radio. This pissed my passenger off. Jules was probably just watching some TV show, but Dagon’s high priest took it personally, and now he started complaining again that this was a wasted trip and it was the taxi company’s fault.

“I’m grieving the death of my wife and son, and Christian scum are trying to kill me. I need to relax and not be tormented by ignorant and superstitious followers of the established religions. Now I have to go back to my room, where there are people bothering me, violating my privacy.”

He said that the dispatcher was supposed to call the bar for him to make sure that it was open. This is ridiculous, because the dispatcher never does this.

“There are cheap women at this motel,” he said. “They are throwing themselves at me, in front of their men. I find this disgusting. They don’t even respect their relationships to each other.”

I waited for a lull in his ranting and then told him that the fare was twenty-two-sixty. He handed me a fifty dollar bill, and I checked the water mark against my dome light. As I gave him his change I apologized for the wasted trip, but he said that he wouldn’t accept the apology, because the way that he had been treated by Yellow Cab was inexcusable. He didn’t give me a tip, and he slammed the door as he got out.

Editor’s note: Veteran Door writer Bob Gersztyn is a cab driver in Salem, Oregon, who keeps a small stack of Chick Tracts on the back seat of his taxi, a portable tape recorder on the front seat, and sometimes engages his passengers in discussions that tend toward the theological. Starting on Monday, he’ll become the Door’s newest blogger, writing a first-person you-were-there column called “Taxicab Theology.”