Connie Frisbee Unvarnished

Note: the following excerpt is from a 7-25-05 interview between Connie (Bremer-Murray)

and Mark Ellis following the release of David Di Sabatino’s documentary, Frisbee:The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher

I’m 57. I responded pretty good (to the documentary). The guy has gotten it pretty close. All in all, it’s very accurate. We separated in 1973. I actually filed for divorce but never finished it. He finished it some years later. I think it became official about 1975. Lonnie died in 1993.

When we got saved and started reading the Bible, we just believed everything we read. When you’re younger you remember everything you read. We took (seriously) ‘you become a new creature and the old man passes away.’

Neither of us really realized how much our past would play into our present relationship. We were young. I was 19 and he was 18 when we got married.

Lonnie never looked at himself as being a homosexual. He did answer all my questions, because I had questions. Evidently Chuck Smith Jr. doesn’t believe (it) or said he didn’t hear it.

The first night Lonnie and I spoke at Calvary Chapel together was…Lonnie came down to Calvary before me to make sure there was a house ready and things were ready to go. I came down a month or six weeks after him.  When we went to the church and we gave our testimonies, that night Lonnie told me, and we had a strong conversation. Both of us had strong feelings.

He said, “I’m not going to tell anybody that I came out of a homosexual lifestyle anymore in my testimony because the reaction from some of the people.” I didn’t hear things people said to him. I don’t think Chuck Smith Jr. would have heard.

My stance was I don’t think that’s a good idea. Why would you want to give up that part of your testimony? You could help so many people. It is really quite wonderful. I think I was right on about that, beyond my years or my maturity level. Had Lonnie kept that a part of his testimony it would not have been so easy for him to slip back into it. If you walk in the light…

Lonnie and I left Calvary Chapel and went to Florida with Bob Mumford. (I don’t like in the film how David portrays Bob Mumford). I don’t like how people who didn’t know him very well think of him as a control freak. He saw that these kids need some growing up and discipling and more interactive things. I think it became a movement and got out of his control.

When we were at Calvary Chapel…the atmosphere of the old church, there was a time when even at Calvary Chapel, I had to ask permission to go to the corner to mail a letter. Lonnie wouldn’t allow me to listen to certain music. It was horrible actually for me because we were living with Christians…a lot of it really was love-based. If there was something making anyone uncomfortable it was discussed in the light of the Word of God and we would all try to figure it out.

We left this wonderful experience of literally living the Book of Acts (in northern California) and moved down to Calvary Chapel and immediately they started putting rules and regulations on us. The mentality was very much the guys run the show and the girls do all the work.

The one thing I wish he (the filmmaker) would have put differently…he makes it sound like when Bob Mumford ordered Lonnie to quit the ministry; it wasn’t like that at all…I was sitting there when it happened…he strongly suggested it…telling him that he had to step out of the ministry several times to keep his family in order and to keep things going smoothly, and how important it was. It was just a very loving conversation.

If Lonnie would step out of the ministry for one year and knit a relationship with his wife (Connie) that he could step back into the ministry and it would be ten times better than it was before, but Lonnie had already gotten used to the accolades from the crowd and the admiration that comes with being in a position. We were way over our heads for our ages in the position that we were in.

Chuck Smith wasn’t much of a guiding light as you can tell by the documentary, telling Lonnie that his marriage wasn’t important, and (we were not) the only couples that he told that to…and we weren’t the only ones to get a divorce over it. Chuck gave (other couples) exactly the same advice.

It’s hard to believe today because now that whole mentality has been reversed in 30 years. It is taught as part of the doctrine. Still at Calvary Chapel is that sort of old school attitude.

I think Chuck Smith was portrayed accurately.

When Lonnie and I moved down to Southern California we didn’t have a car. I was homeless, eating out of a garbage can to stay alive when I got saved. I didn’t become a hippie because I thought that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. I became a hippie because I was in juvenile hall and I was in a home where my father was very violent and my mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict.

It was a ‘Leave it to Beaver’ looking family on the outside and completely horrible to live this life. My mother beat me naked in front of my stepfather at 13. It was horrendous the kind of stuff I went through. So I would run away from home because literally my mother was trying to kill me. When the beatings got so bad or the torture got bad I would leave. From 13 on I was in some pretty harrowing situations. I was riding with motorcycle gangs and then I would be in Juvenile Hall and then I would be back at home with this woman who was completely out of her mind.

When I came to Calvary Chapel…when I came to the big house in Novato, everything I owned was in a small backpack, the backpack I found in Big Sur laying on a rock. The clothes I put in the backpack were discarded by the kids coming from all over the United States and dropping their clothes in this huge pile in Big Sur.  And I just went through and gathered up some stuff. This was all I had when I came to Southern California. I was wearing Lonnie’s tennis shoes and his jeans.

I remember one time one of the women in the church said why don’t you wear a dress? I said, “You know what, if I had a sewing machine I would make myself a dress.” She bought me a $50 sewing machine, which was very generous of her and I made myself some clothes.

I don’t think that Chuck Smith took care of us very well. I wasn’t thinking that at the time. Because I was doing what I was doing before I even went to the commune in northern California. Because from the minute I got saved I was preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I didn’t have a Bible and people would ask me questions.

I left Tahquitz waterfalls and went on to Joshua Tree where the people I had been living with in Mt. Shasta in a teepee had moved for the winter and I hitchhiked down. It took me and two guys three weeks to make it from Mt. Shasta to Joshua Tree. Going through Haight Ashbury Lonnie saw me and recognized me because he used to come up and buy marijuana and LSD in our commune I lived in. That wasn’t a Christian commune in Silverado Canyon, when I lived with the Brotherhood.

He immediately began to witness to me and said he was going to hitchhike with us. Once we got hooked up with Lonnie we started getting rides right away.

I spent the night and met his mom and spent the night on his lawn outside that house in Newport Beach and then we went on down to Tahquitz waterfalls. Then I went back to the group that I was living in and then because the persecution got so bad I went back to Orange County and Lonnie miraculously had left word for me at my mother’s house and wanted to know if she knew where I was…it was the day I got there. So that’s how I met the people in northern California.

There were some magazine articles being written about us at that time. We were running a storefront in the Haight on Page and the Panhandle, one block down from Haight Street. It was called the Living Room. David Wilkerson’s group was there and they hated us because we didn’t shave our beards and cut our hair and wear continental black pants with white shirts and black ties like his group did. So there was some conflict going, some jealousy stuff going on there.

But we were just caught up in things the enemy was doing and preaching the gospel on the streets and stuff and preaching in Golden Gate Park. Sometimes we went down to Market Street and even hit the dirty bookstores at that end of town.

As time wore on I saw how hard the women were working and although I was single at the time I quit going into the city almost completely to stay home and watch the seven children, to help cook and clean, to lighten the burden. We had all kinds of characters come through there. The soup that we made, the biggest pot you could possibly imagine, it would be made throughout the afternoon and evening. It would be made for the men to take to the city the next day for their lunch. They would invite people to partake with them. They would fill the three cars and take three cars into the city and would bring as many people back as we could.

Many people think this is where the explosion happened. Let me tell you I find this story about these four couples as big as the story about Lonnie, because these people were in their thirties and they had jobs. They had lives that were already moving in a direction. It would be like coming to me after I worked at UPS for 10 years and had kids and all and saying quit your job, take your kids and move in with these other four couples, sell everything you have and just keep what you need to function as one unit. That was an enormous sacrifice.

Lonnie and I gave up nothing. I had nothing when I came to the Lord.

This was Ted and Elizabeth Wise and Sandi and Steve Heefner. His radio name on KFRC was Steve O’Shea. Jim and Judy Doop and Danny and Sandy Sands. This was the four couples that met each other in an unusual set of circumstances outside the organized church and decided to live like the Book of Acts. When I got there they had been living that way for some months.

There was a basket and in this basket was all the bills these married couples had. And in the basket was all the money for the household. I knew where the basket was and I was allowed to take out anything and put in anything. Like Ted says, we had hundreds of problems to solve every day. We had runaways. People would send us letters.

They wrote a couple articles about our thing and people were sending us pictures of their kids from all over the country. There were on a wall in the basement all these kids’ pictures.

Once in a while God would send us one of these kids and we would recognize them and we would ask them to call their parents. We would usually be able to get them to do that. Most of them went back home…these were kids that were under 18 from Nebraska or New York and ended up in the Haight. This was 1967 and ’68, at the very peak of the hippie movement. Jesus Freaks had not even been thought of.

We had bulgur wheat to eat for breakfast. Most of the time God provided very well for us. We had a huge long table that would feed almost 20 people in the big house.

Every night there was a meal laid out of homemade breads and chicken enchiladas and vegetables we grew. We brought as many people to the house as we could and witness to them. We would sit around and play conga drums, beat on books or maracas and worship the Lord that way. There wasn’t a set pattern. It wasn’t like every Sunday we do this. It wasn’t like that. It was really moving in the Spirit. We saw so many miracles and so many coincidences. We just knew God was doing stuff in our lives all the time. All of us have continued to live our lives that way.

So Lonnie though, he just did it more. Lonnie was such a risk taker. He had this childlike quality about him that was almost a God-given thing. It wasn’t something he worked to acquire into his personality or anything. It was just the way he was.

Before I knew him as a born again Christian, when he came up to the commune to buy LSD and stuff, everybody thought Lonnie was really a square.

Chuck Jr. looked at him as this off the wall hippie type. If we were going to use a word the kids use today we would call him a poser. But he didn’t think he was.

One time we all used to go to Tahquitz waterfalls. We would leave Silverado Canyon and drive out to Palm Springs at maybe one or two o’clock in the morning. We would hike to the first 70-foot waterfall in the dark. We knew the way so well. Then we would unroll our sleeping bags, drop our LSD, wait until we woke up, and then we would just be on for a new day. We would climb up the 70-foot waterfall and drop down with ropes on the other side and it was just one waterfall after another.

We were hiking in and Lonnie was lagging behind. The spiritual leader of this group kept saying, “Where’s Lonnie? What’s taking him so long?”

I didn’t really know Lonnie (then). We had never sat down and had a conversation. He just came up. Because he was construed as being not hip I kept my distance, because I wanted to be hip.

Finally, he caught up to me and he had this duffel bag. It was like an Army duffel bag and he put it over his shoulder. He has a small frame so the duffel bag is almost as big as him. We all just had sleeping bags – that’s it. I remember the guy said, “What have you got in there?”

“I have a couple bottles of wine and some French bread…and a microscope,” he said. (When you’re on LSD you can look at your hands and see right through your hands and see the blood going through the veins.)

I know that at some point in his life he stepped off into water to see if he could walk on water. That’s the kind of person he was. Lonnie saw himself as hip. His whole perception of when he got saved…he fell so in love with God. So did I.

That’s why Lonnie came back to marry me. When he led me to the Lord my experience was so over the top. I was crying. I had a vision. He baptized me in water and I came up out of the water and got baptized in the Holy Spirit. I could not stop crying for the first 24 hours. I was on LSD when I got saved, but I was on LSD a lot. I knew what LSD felt like and this was different. It had to be or my life wouldn’t have changed. That’s what blew him away. He was attracted to me spiritually and I became attracted to Lonnie spiritually. I began to see him in a completely different light after I was able to see through my spiritual eyes. Everything changed that day. The way I perceived the world changed. I didn’t see one ugly person from that moment on. I perceived people differently. Everything was different.

Lonnie fell so in love with the Lord. He read something in the Bible and Lonnie could not read. He could not read or write until the day he died. He could hardly write. He learned to read by reading the Bible. He was not literate. He was not eloquent in any way, in any of his speaking.

I would think where is he coming up with this stuff? But God loved Lonnie and there was something about him…God just got a kick out of him.

Lonnie would pour oil all over his head and he would go out into the desert or a remote place and stack up rocks and he would have prepared to bring big, huge rocks of frankincense and myrrh the size of your fist to put on this rock and light a flame and have this wonderful smelling frankincense and myrrh, and Lonnie would worship God that way. He wasn’t doing it to impress anybody. There wasn’t anybody there. It was just him. He fell in love with God. There wasn’t anything Lonnie wanted more to do than love God back. That’s why God blessed Lonnie the way he did. He was literally a fool for God. He was really an unusual person. He was very hard to live with in some ways. In other ways he had these wonderful endearing qualities everyone speaks about.

I have the video of his funeral that would be worth your viewing. There was one man from Africa who came.

People said he was hard to live with. It was hard to be his friend at times. But there was a side of Lonnie that was like being on the E ride at Disneyland. You had a whole book full of E tickets when you were with Lonnie. There was one happening after another. I wanted to have a family and have a relationship…Lonnie was very caught up into being led by the Lord and stuff.

I finally talked to him one time at the show, in line at the Lido Theater and he was witnessing to the people in line behind us, we hadn’t even gotten our tickets. He witnessed to the people in front of us. The people behind us got saved. We were in the lobby buying popcorn and Lonnie was laying hands on this guy, baptizing him in the Holy Spirit.

It didn’t matter to him if he was in a crowd. It was all about God’s business. He was completely oblivious to what was going on around him. He was an artist so he had all that stuff that artists have, and that’s probably where some of the difficulty came.

Q: Did Lonnie view himself as homosexual?

No, Lonnie never perceived himself that way. He thought he was saved out of that. In speaking to me about it, he said that because homosexuals can’t procreate, they have to recruit other people to be homosexuals. That’s what he told me, that he was recruited.

There became a time after Chuck Smith told Lonnie that his marriage wasn’t important. You can understand being raised and the way I was and abused the way I was, I was really looking for love. I was devastated. I was looking at a marriage with someone who doesn’t really want to spend that much time with me. I was in agony and in pain during that time.

I remember walking in the Blue Top apartment, the third commune that I helped Lonnie set up at Calvary Chapel. I went to the one in Riverside and worked cleaning and painting and there was another one I didn’t live in we called the Green House. I remember walking past a mirror and seeing the look on my face and it shocked me. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. It shook me.

From that moment to the next two weeks this thought kept running through my head…strive to enter into my rest. I was pretty exhausted. I had been at this for several years; It’s been a 24-7 deal, with people knocking on the door at 3:00 in the morning, people living in the room next to us. We never had a honeymoon. We had a honeymoon in a tent in his parents’ backyard. We never spent any time together.

If I got him to go to the show it wasn’t about going to the show. How can you begrudge somebody’s salvation? There was a battle going inside; I was fighting God for my husband’s attention.

After about two weeks this pissed me off, this thing kept going through my head. I wasn’t mature enough to go and ask somebody what do you think this means?  I finally stopped in my tracks one day and said, “I can’t work any harder.”

I didn’t get that God was saying: Work hard Connie to believe me.

Because I didn’t get that…and this is drug-free now, for quite a while. I was in the kitchen of the Blue Top Motel and there are a lot of windows that let in light, but it went as black as the Carlsbad Caverns, so black you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I could feel rocks at my toes, a cliff. I knew God had taken me someplace or it was a vision, I knew that death was imminent. I was looking straight down and that I would die if I moved. My heart was pounding 90 miles an hour. My adrenaline was…I was keen…my perceptions were keen.

The Lord said jump and I laughed out loud like Sarah. I literally laughed out loud and said you’ve got to be kidding. That was my response to him. Jump and I will catch you.

Before it even came out of his mouth. I said, “I don’t believe you.”

Then bam I’m back in the kitchen and completely forget the vision. I never told Lonnie or anybody because it went out of my head and I forgot about it.

Sometime later I fell into sin. When I came out…I lost 12 years of walking with the Lord. When I came back I was sliding down in my shower here at this house I live in right now.

I was divorced from Lonnie and in another marriage that was horrifically bad, as bad as marrying my mother, almost even worse. I had only been married to this man for about a year and a half and I slid down in the shower and begged God…I can’t even repent. I’m begging you to come and get me. Give me a repentant heart. I’m begging you to come and get me. From that moment on it was like I came out of this fog. God sent me some Christians right away.

The first thing I asked them was, “What happened?”

They looked like deer in the headlights and said, “What do you mean, what happened?”

I told them I committed adultery. But that wasn’t it because I wasn’t lusting after anybody. I hadn’t thought about it. I wasn’t looking at other men.

After a couple months of being back walking with the Lord, all the wonderful things, the magic of being in harmony with him and seeing your prayers answered, I mean it was just great and I still had this pressing question, and it was a huge one. I was almost panicked about it.

Every Christian I ran into that I thought was a spiritual person who I thought had been walking with the Lord for a while, I would lay it out on the table, unashamedly. I had to find out what I did wrong because I didn’t want to do it again and I’m walking in this kitchen and bam, the lights go out.

The Lord said, Do you remember this?

Yes, Lord, I remember this.

He showed me the whole vision again.  When you said, I don’t believe you, that’s the moment you backslid.

I kept on witnessing for the Lord. I kept on leading people to the Lord. I was still going to Calvary Chapel. Lonnie and I were still married. It was huge revelation.

He showed me how simple it was that you’re in and out of the Kingdom of God all day long. If you are believing him, you’re walking in the Kingdom and if you’re not believing him you’re not walking in the Kingdom. The only way to please God is to trust him. It’s a simple thing that goes on.

You can be preaching, or you can be Chuck Smith and never have any outward sign of being backslidden.

When you go back out to the life away from God and try to find your own happiness…that’s exactly what I did…God wasn’t doing what I wanted him to do fast enough. He needed me to trust him. He told me to hang and I didn’t.

When the enemy laid a snare before me and caught me up in it, I wasn’t going to go back. I went back to my same vomit. So why are people so blown away that Lonnie…if he was to have that same experience that I had and I know we go through this throughout our walk. Maybe we don’t all go back to our vomit, but we definitely don’t exhibit the fruits of the spirit.

Lonnie had some time that he fell back into this. Everybody that was close to him, even a guy on the documentary, that spent years being Lonnie’s roommate and traveling with him said he never saw any sign of Lonnie’s homosexual activity. But when Lonnie had those times…I don’t know…one time…two times.

When Lonnie and I finally broke up he stepped out of the ministry — or made all the outward moves to do that — after Bob Mumford gave us that talk, but he never stopped doing it.

Toward the end he brought this woman into our house we had led to the Lord. Her parents (were) in Florida and they had moved to Colorado. We got a phone call at the house in Mountain View near Palo Alto and she had left her husband (Lonnie married them) and she was living with a guy who was a self-proclaimed warlock…It was a wonderful family, a great family. I begged him not to go. I didn’t think he was going to bring her back to the house. She did come back and she was not happy to be there and she was not happy about anything and she was very mean and cruel. That was like the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Lonnie was staying out late and I asked Lonnie why he was coming home late. Lonnie would come home late, but never consistently at the same time, which was about 2:30 in the morning after the bars close and he told me, “I’ve been hanging out at some gay bars.” That was in 1973.

It was not long after he told me that that I fell into an affair. It was just like the lights went out. I knew. I don’t know why I didn’t repent. I don’t know why to this day. Everything looked dulled down. Nothing looked green. Blue didn’t look like the same blue. Everything looked different looking up at the sky.

I moved up to Meadow Vista. He moved out of the house and took what he wanted. I stayed there for about four months. I moved out with this guy and came farther up north.

I wasn’t going to go back. Lonnie literally came to this guy’s house and drug me down the stairs. My heart wasn’t to stay and Lonnie knew it.

Q – Did homosexuality have anything to do with it?

I was so naïve…I’m not sure…I could be a complete blithering idiot but I don’t think it was anything more at that time than Lonnie hanging out in gay bars. Only God really knows, but I’m sure that it did because he was my covering and my covers were pulled, which left me more vulnerable out there.

I don’t blame Lonnie, though. I blame the fact that God made it very clear to me that he wanted me to trust him, not Lonnie, he wanted me to trust him – and I chose not to. Whatever Lonnie’s sin was, God knows, I know that it had to because I know the Word of God and that it had to play into it. We both blew it. At that time, I didn’t believe that Lonnie was having a homosexual affair.

Q – So that was not the dominant thing that drove you apart?

My train of thinking would have been Lonnie’s witnessing. Now, in retrospect, I don’t think Lonnie had any business being there (in gay bars). I think he was probably toying with it. I don’t in my heart believe he had gone back at that time, but that’s my own gut feeling. It may have nothing to do with what reality might be.

It was because I was so unhappy and because I wanted to be with Lonnie. He never stopped ministering. We started a church in Santa Cruz that is still active to this day. We started this Bible study and I played the harp and led singing and it grew into a church.

There was only one pornography store in Santa Cruz. He told everybody in the Bible study that on Saturday, we’re going to meet at the porn shop and we’re going to march around it a certain number of times like Joshua did around the city and then we’re going to all yell with all our might, and we’re going to bring (it) down.

Today, that Bible study holds church in that pornography shop. When Lonnie had his memorial service in northern California it was held in that pornography shop. The porn shop had been a theater before it was a porn shop so it was perfect for a church and it is still to this day. Those kind of things happened with Lonnie all the time. Like Ken Gullickson said, the Norwegian guy who helped start the Vineyard, he said being with Lonnie was scary, it was like walking in the Bible.

I believe it is possible (to be more like the book of Acts) but we have gotten way off line as believers. In the Book of Acts, there is no one person up there teaching. There is a group of people who are serving the body. These are the people who have to have their lives in order and their children in line to be a servant.

We have mega churches thinking if we entertain them…It was half way through Calvary Chapel that I figured out I was being a dancing bear. They didn’t really want to know anything about me. They just wanted to hear the horror stories about life before I got saved because it was entertaining for them. It pissed me off.

You don’t see a whole lot of pictures of me with Lonnie at Calvary Chapel on the video because I couldn’t sit up there and participate in this. I already felt it was getting skewed.

Lonnie was figuring it out behind me when the church got big enough and the coffers got full…There was a lady named Ginger and she got saved because Lonnie led her to the Lord. Ginger worked in the bank where they deposited the checks from the offering and that’s when we found out how much money Calvary Chapel was making.

We built it up with our own hands and we didn’t think they had lots of money. We were kids; we weren’t even thinking money. I remember when they hired Romaine full-time and Lonnie came home to the Blue Top Motel and he was upset about it because we weren’t being paid anything. They paid our rent of $150 a month, but that wasn’t anything compared to the food I had to fix for the people that were coming to the apartment.

There was ministry going on; there was no lackadaisical thing. Before that, when we were a commune of apartments (that’s what the Blue Top Motel was) I got up at 5:30 or 6 to prepare breakfast and went to bed at 11:00 at night and tried to read the Bible before I went to sleep. Lonnie would be out until 11 or 12 or 1 in the morning and he would sleep until 10.

I was making breakfast for 70 people. It wasn’t just the people living in the apartment; it was also people dropping by who sometimes didn’t leave. These were the communes we had. I understand they closed all the communes down in the ‘80s.

What I’m saying brother, is that people are crazy if they don’t think this can’t happen today. God wants this to happen today. How do we get it to happen? It’s so simple. The world gets a clue and they call it acts of kindness. God wants us to give 10% not because he needs our money but because he wants us to trust him. It’s hard to give up 10%, not that we live under the law. I don’t believe we do. But there are times when giving is a huge part of Christians’ walk, not just giving money but giving of your time.

If you have two coats and you see your brother in need, give them one. This is what we would tell these people. They would come from all over the world to find out what was going on and Lonnie and I would tell them: “When was the last time you saw somebody cold and you gave them your coat? When was the last time you had a homeless person to dinner? When was the last time you went and told your neighbor next door the Gospel about Jesus?”

They would leave and we would giggle and laugh because these people traveled from Europe to talk to two kids about how they could get it to happen there.

I believe God loved what these four couples did (in northern California). They sheltered us and they gave to us not just their love, but literally, they nurtured us in the Word of God, and cared for us in such a way that neither Lonnie or I had ever experienced in life.

We left there to duplicate what we learned there. I never knew how many people were going to be for dinner or where the food was going to come from. Sometimes when we had the Santa Ana house I would just take off walking. There were some big stores and a couple of canneries within walking distance and I would go begging for food. I would go ask them for dented cans and tell them what we were doing.

TreeSweet gave us tons of dented juice cans. We would go behind the supermarkets and glean out of the dumpsters the produce and stuff they threw away.

I told David that Kay Smith and I shopped at the same store. She went in through the front door and I went to the back where the dumpsters were. This was when Calvary was making plenty of money, so brother, you tell me if David isn’t portraying it correctly.

There has to be something wrong with a man who proclaimed from the pulpit…from the first time I met him – and I admired Chuck Smith – I had no ill feelings toward him. I wasn’t bitter that we weren’t getting money, God was providing for us. (He was providing for us in northern California.) We were looking to God to be our provider.

But when they hired Romaine and put him on salary and didn’t put Lonnie on salary, that affected Lonnie a lot more than it did me. It devastated him. When they told Lonnie when the church was full and we know they had lots of money…I’m still walking to the supermarket, brother, I was riding a bicycle when I could borrow a bicycle from somebody in the commune who had one to go to the grocery store. They were letting their son come and pick Lonnie up in the car to take him places.

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