I swear I only pulled off the highway to look at a map. I drove there pure of heart and clean of thought and then there I was, sucked in by the gravity of sin. I knew I was in trouble at once.

The store was called “The Vice Shack” or “The Vice Hut,” a place that flaunted its wares with well-placed signs announcing low, low prices. It was a long, low building with discount booze at one end, cheap smokes at the other. A person seeking treats for his lungs and liver could also find adult movies somewhere near the middle. Pick your poison and swipe your ATM card.

I fled the lot in a scream of road rubber, splashing myself with holy water as I went. But the drive to redemption was one fraught with wickedness and temptation. There. A block away was a tawdry neon sign announcing the finest “Girls, Girls, Girls” in the South. Across the street, a warehouse where you could buy fireworks that bang, boom and blaze, presumably to unwind after all that drinking, smoking and porn.

On a quieter end of the avenue, heading out of the city, more signs teased the soul-threatened traveler with enticements. Tucked between billboards reminding that Jesus Died For Your Sins or announcing the Great Southern Opry, were the towering forms of seductive women directing me to a place that offered private exotic dances.

I wanted to shield my eyes but that would have been irresponsible driving. I only slowed when I passed the dancing business so I could gather details to report to my He Who Is Without Sin group back at home. It was merely coincidence that the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” groaned from the radio.

Rattled, I wheeled in to a corner store, looking for some bottled salvation. There, a clerk with an easy drawl advised me that in this area of the South, a man could buy beer at any time of day. “No last call for y’all,” he said, with the syrupy twang of a racing announcer.

I dashed back to the car where George Thorogood was instructing that “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” was just the thing. Off in the distance, a sign warned that I’d be an absolute fool not to stop in and check out the neon flashing café where the waitresses dare to be bare.

It was Easter Sunday in Myrtle Beach, S.C., my first day there and I marveled at the juxtaposition. Preconceived ideas had led me to believe that this area, though not technically the Bible Belt, was at least one of the loops, one just east of the JESUS loves NASCAR buckle.

And it was true that religion was advertised on towering billboards on all sides of the highway. This particular sect wanted to help show you the way. That one warned that an angry God was waiting for you to repent.

But those advertisements were equaled if not outnumbered by the more brazen, more brightly lit signs steering the traveler on to sin. Strippers, dancers, a Hooters on every corner. Cigarettes sold at prices not seen in the North since 1990 and great deals on domestic beers. A giant billboard rising high over restaurants and theaters advises where to get the best deal on adult toys and novelties 24 hours a day.

The so-called vices in the South are not only abundant and tolerated, they are pushed. And yet among the throngs that crowded the highways and swarmed to the strips I saw fewer reeling drunks than I see on an average Monday back home. I encountered not a single leering lecher pulling open his overcoat to reveal winter-white nastiness within.

If anything, the people of the South were better-behaved and far more disciplined than those I meet back in the socially conservative North. It’s as though they have succumbed to a sort of hypnotic moderation by all the blinking messages suggesting that overindulgence is the way to bliss.

You can lead a horse to water, I suppose, but you can’t make him look at naked women and buy cigarettes by the carton.

By the third day in Myrtle Beach I stopped noticing the lascivious signs and paid attention only to what I needed. The novelty had worn off. When I pulled into the crowded lot at “Naked, Naked, Naked,” it was only because I needed to check the map again to get to a more wholesome destination. And unless you can prove otherwise, Mister, I’ll ask you to mind your business.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].