Being a Papa...

I was without my people this past Sunday, which was Father's Day. I wasn't thinking about this on-purpose because it was Father's Day. I just happened to be missing my people in general and my little dudes specifically and I discovered, quite by accident, the core of what it means to be a Papa. I'd always been aware that the emotions connected to becoming a parent weren't just joyful (when the kids are being cute) or a nuisance (when the kids are unplugging my computer). It isn't just love, either, anymore than a poem is about spelling. I've been aware, from the beginning, shortly after my little boy was born, that there is something enormous and scary underneath the love and the joy and occasional annoyance and the laughter. There is something down deep, in the bedrock of my immovable core. The feeling is really, really hard to describe. It's as if the most numbing fear and the most iron-clad courage could be smelted into an emotion so gigantic that it is hard to see, the way a climber can't really see the mountain he is scaling.

Anyway, I figured out what it is. Becoming a Papa means suddenly having something in your life that you would die for. Without question or the slightest hesitation.

Up until that little baby man was born, the idea of dying for something was nebulous and challenging. I hoped I'd be able to die for my faith, if called to do so, but I had my doubts. I assumed that was the sort of commitment you'd only know you could make when and if the moment came. I wanted to believe I would die for a cause. But the truth of the matter was I never expected that to happen. And deep down, I was pretty comfortable with that expectation.

Having little people changes that. I'd die for them without the slightest second thought. I'd do it gladly, if it meant saving them, protecting them. When they were born, the whole question of whether there was something in life I'd die for stopped being a question. As unlikely and remote as that event might be (and it's pretty remote, thankfully), it's still a reality that is a part, a conscious part, of my every day. That's the explanation for that gigantic, dark undercurrent beneath the joy and the annoyance and the pleasure and the frustration of parenting. And I don't expect it'll ever go away.

Heavy, eh?

Majority Blues

This is just a short little word balloon that I've occasionally found dangling over my head. I hate being the majority. I am as hopelessly majority as you can possibly imagine. I am a white, middle-aged male. I am a Christian AND a Republican. I live in America. I have no disability. I was born of relatively successful parents and I am, curently, relatively successful. My vision is slightly better than 20/20. I am a little over six feet tall. I'm not overweight. I don't smoke, I'm not an alcoholic, I don't have any native American, African, or latino in my bloodline. I can't even claim to have dyslexia or ADD.

OK, so maybe being me ain't all that bad. But still.

You wanna know what being the majority means? It means being the only ethnic, racial or religious group that anyone, anywhere can mock and ridicule and give hate speeches about without any fear of lawsuits or even contradiction. In fact, most of us in the majority are so filled with inane, pointless guilt about being the majority that we'll agree whole heartedly with the worst things said about us on the off-chance that all those in the minority might like us a little better. We're like the pathetically mis-guided geek in my junior highschool who thought he could cut out the middleman and curry favor with the rest of us by walking up to classmates, grinning and saying "I'm stupid." The worst crime anyone in the majority can do is to have the temerity to defend one's self.

For instance, to the argument in favor of reparations for African Americans because of slavery, I wish to say I agree whole-heartedly. In fact, I am in favor of even more than the traditional two-hundred acres and a mule. Any ex-slaves should be paid in full, in today's dollars, for every hour they worked and be given control of a proper percentage of their former slaveholder's estate, with interest. They should then sue the slaveholder for wrongful imprisonment, and the slaveholder should be jailed and/or given the death penalty, depending on the severity of said imprisonment, as well as the number and treatment of those slaves. I've read Frederick Douglass's biography, and I have, if anything, an overdeveloped sense of vengeance. The problem is finding any living ex-slaves. Right? I mean, it would make as much sense for anyone living today to collect or pay reparations for crimes last committed in the 1860s as it would for the great-grandson of a dead murderer to go to the electric chair, with the grandchildren of the victim cheering on.

But imagine anyone in the majority making that argument. Sure, they might do it, but they'd be resigning themselves to being purely and seamlessly hated, reviled and possibly audited by the pooled resources of the IRS and the Rainbow Push Coalition. Even more than they already are.

Being in the majority means not being allowed to have a meaningful opinion on much of anything. I am not allowed to have an opinion about abortion (how dare a MAN have an opinion about something as feminine as pregnancy!?), or gay rights (easy for YOU to say that marriage is between a man and a woman, having been BORN STRAIGHT!), or Affirmative Action (what's a WHITE GUY know about the oppression of other races, apart from being the oppressor!?), or a multitude of other topics. The logic of this seems to me (in my majority arrogance, no doubt) to be somewhat like a jury being told they have no basis to judge a serial killer because, not being either serial killers themselves or a serial killer's victims, they can have no experiential perspective to judge from. (serial killer's bumper sticker: Keep Your Laws Off My Victim's Body!)

I suspect that the jealousy of the majority to be in the minority, with all the protections and benefits thereof, is the explanation for so many new diseases and genetic ailments. One isn't an alcoholic anymore, one is born with the "alcohol gene". Fat people aren't gluttons, they are the victims of "Big Fast Food". Smokers are beleagured dupes of the tobacco industry. From Repetitive Stress to Restless Leg, there's a Syndrome for everybody. Why? So we can claim our own little minority and feel a little better. I may be a white anglo-saxon censervative male, but I've got Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, dammit. I go to support group. I feel the pain of the people. Peace, brother. Stick it to the Man.

(Sigh) Ohh, to be in the minority. To have a pack of lawyer sharks ready to nastily devour anyone who dared make a joke about my beliefs or the shape of my nose or my tendency to forget where I put my car keys. To be given special business opportunities and loans and college admittance just because of my genetics or my gender. To be revered for my perseverence and grit, called a hero, even if all I did was slink illegally across the border to get a job laying bricks. To finally, finally, have a socio-political-racial group I can blame all my problems on! With the full support and slavering indignance of at least one major political party, of course.

It could happen, you know. Us white Christian middle-aged Republican males could be overtaken by another group, probably liberal-leaning Mexican former-illegal-aliens. Contrary to popular belief, I'd be all for it. They may want to be the majority now, but they'll live to regret it, methinks. Just wait until they are sitting in their golf carts with their poverty-stricken white teenage caddy listening to some talk show host denouncing the "brown Democrat Catholic old-boys network". Then it'll be cool to be a complaining white Christian Republican, because we won't be the majority anymore.

Mixed blessings are the best we in the majority can hope for.

On Being a Closet Republican

I am a Republican.

There. I said it. And it was hard. You wanna know why? There's a lot of reasons.

First: I am, by profession and by natural inclination, an artist. Try being an artist and a conservative at the same time. It isn't that there aren't any other Republicans in the creative arts, it's just that they are so out-numbered and out-diatribed by their uber-left-wing brethren that if they so much as blink Republican they'll get verbally eviscerated. It isn't just that the creative arts industry is more-or-less lockstep liberal; it is the unspoken, ironclad assumption that everyone in the industry shares exactly the same liberal philosophies and utter hatred of Republicans and conservatism in general. No artist ever asks another artist "So whaddaya think of George Bush?" It is a matter of course that any other artist agrees that Mr. Bush is a homophobic, war-mongering, brain-dead hater of the poor who should be impeached, flogged, spat on, and either hung or made to go live in a spider hole.

On election day a few years back, I was working away in the animators pen when one of the owners of the studio came in and asked us all point blank who we'd voted for. I avoided answering, pretending to be too absorbed in my work to respond. She rounded on me, noting my silence, and said "Well I hope you at least voted democrat." That was the year of the whole Gore/Bush debacle, where for weeks no one really knew who'd won. There was an actual pall of terror over the entire office. One of my co-workers told me that if Bush actually won, rapists would not be punished and the environment would be "destroyed". I smiled, knowing she was being amusingly hyperbolic.

She wasn't. She stared at me as if she was marking the enemy, as if she dearly wished there was a Thought Police she could report me to.

I am an adjunct professor at a local college, in the art department. Walking through the offices, I am inundated with the most anti-Bush, anti-Republican, hate-filled posters and signs I've ever seen. Imagine trying to be comfortable with people who have a sign on their wall declaring (not in so many words, but in essence) that they'd despise you if they knew you were a Republican?

Second: I am a Christian. That may seem like a surprising reason for it to be hard to admit being a Republican, considering the well known stereotype that all Christians are Republicans (as well as homophobic, war-mongering, brain-dead haters of the poor). It would come as a great surprise to many, of course, to learn that there are in fact (gasp!) many Democrats and even liberals in the church. Political affiliation does not necessarily dictate religious beliefs (or lack thereof). I do believe that there are probably more conservatives than liberals in the church walls, but I can testify for a fact that some of my best and most respected Christian friends are Dems (and they aren't even in the creative industry!)

Discovering this, wise churches have begun distancing themselves from assumptions of political homogeny, making every attempt to welcome and embrace those of any political bent. It has almost become cool for a church to boast a rainbow of idealogical/political representatives. Fine. But the result is that I, at least, have found it difficult to admit being the typical Christian conservative for fear of being labeled an intolerant right-winger. If politics is even mentioned in a Christian setting, it is pretty much only in terms of "there is no right and wrong view and we love everybody and if you are a Democrat then good for you because we aren't even remotely like those twits in the Moral Majority." In the modern church environment, it has actually become rather taboo for anyone to admit to being a Republican. Modern Christians feel vaguely embarrassed by it, the way modern Italians might feel embarrassed by that Uncle who admits he is in the Mob.

Third: Watch TV a little. For anyone who watches any TV, or listens to the kind of music I happen to like (modern rock), or absorbs any form of popular culture at all, it is instantly apparent that Republicans are more or less the source of all evil, dorkiness and self-rightousness in the world. I want to be cool. I can't help it. And it is apparently impossible to be cool and a Republican at the same time. Period.

But I am ready to admit it. I am a Republican. Not just a conservative (that's quite a bit easier to say), but a true Republican. I resign myself to being uncool. To being a pariah amongst my co-workers. To being a bit of an anachronism among my Christian friends.

This is not to say I agree with everything Republicans say or do. Far, far from it. Today's Republicans, for the most part, represent true conservatism about as much as a lightning bug represents lightning.

I can explain why I am a Republican by explaining, in a ridiculously brief analogy, what I believe is the primary, elemental difference between Democratic and Republican idealogy. At it's core, it has nothing to do with abortion, or gay rights, or school vouchers. It has everything to do with perspectives on money and wealth.

Imagine a mountain with a plataeu on the top. The mountain represents financial success.

Republicans believe the mountain is scalable. It is steep, difficult, and you have to choose the route up carefully. Not everyone makes it; some get stuck under an overhang or lost in a crevasse, but scaling it, making it to the plateau of financial independence on top, is possible. Anyone can do it. It is merely a matter of planning, perseverence, education and yes, a little luck. But anyone, anyone at all, regardless of your background, your skin color, your upbringing, your neighborhood, your handicaps or even your general intellect, can make it to the top.

Democrats believe the mountain is unscalable. You are simply born somewhere on that mountain, and wherever you are born, you stay. Sure, plenty of people struggle to get a little further up the mountain, and a few lucky ones make some progress, but that is extremely rare and not to be depended on. Position on the mountain is a matter of pure luck and happenstance, with those on the top being the fortunate bastards and those on the bottom the unfortunate victims.

Further: Republicans believe that those that reach the top of the plateau are inclined to help those who are still struggling to climb. Republicans believe it is the responsibility and the desire of those on the top of the mountain to throw down ropes to pull more people to the top. Even more, they believe it is the natural result of success that more people make it to the top, both by helping and encouraging those that are struggling to climb.

Democrats believe those that reach the top are disinclined to help anyone else get there. Democrats believe, in fact, that those on the top grind their heels on the fingers of those still climbing, and kick off those that are getting close to the top, so as to preserve their exclusivity. To be sure, Democrats believe that those on the top should be pulled down from the top, so as to equalize society and lessen the disparity between the the lucky bastards on the top and the unfortunate victims at the bottom. After all, if it is impossible for those near the bottom to climb to the top, the only way to alleviate their awareness of being at the bottom is to pull everyone else as close to the bottom as possible. What Republicans think of as encouragement to climb, Democrats hear as taunting. What Democrats call equalizing society Republicans hear as making sure everyone is poor.

Considering that analogy, I am my own example of why I am a Republican. I believe the mountain is scalable. And while I myself have not reached the top, I have thrown ropes out behind me and I am trying, clumsily but steadfastly, to help some of my friends and family climb up along with me. I've done well. I do what I love, and I make pretty good money at it. I see the potential for me to do even better, not because I primarily want to be wealthy, but because people just tend to pay those that do what I do really well. I like the view from here, and I really, really want others to get here, too. And even higher. Whenever and wherever I can, I throw down ropes to try to pull somebody else a little further up the mountain. I can't haul them up by main force, but if they want to make the effort to climb, I'll show them the way I came and try to give them a helpful yank. And if I ever reach the top, you can bet that there will be a whole gaggle of my friends and family and even just some hangers-on who'll get there right along with me.

And if we do get there, we'll turn around and try to help some more people up, too. Not exactly because it's the moral thing to do, but because the view from the top just feels like it'll be better if it's shared. I am certain that not everyone agrees with me. Perhaps there are some people who are driven to make the climb to the top only to step on the fingers of everybody else. But I really don't think they are the majority. And I'll tell you one more thing:

If I find people like that up there when I get there, I might reconsider kicking people off the top.

How I Almost Didn't Survive Bible College...

(WARNING: This is one of those long ones, although I've broken it up into convenient little chapters. If you get bored with it, you can always just scan through, find the headings and see if they strike your little fancy. The one called "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" is probably the most important chapter. The one called "The Four Young Turks" is kinda funny.)


My Mom had this idea that I’d make a good preacher. She had, I suspect, the same sorts of visions and dreams for her son as do most Christian Mamas. She imagined me, as only a wistfully proud Mama can imagine, before an enormous, responsive crowd, dynamic, spirited, full of that perfect charismatic balance of strength and compassion, hellfire and grace.

So I thought: what the hell. I ain’t doing anything else with my life at the moment.

I was in my early twenties at the time. I’d already had two misadventures with two different colleges, a semester each. One of those colleges had been Liberty University, home of Jerry Falwell (as discussed elsewhere). The other was Terra Technical College, where I haphazardly pursued something called Commercial Art. I do believe (and I think my parents can back me up on this) that I more-or-less flunked out.

Not because I couldn’t make the grade, mind you. I was never what anyone would call slow. I did, however, apparently suffer from a terrible deficiency of give-a-damn. I just couldn’t seem to make myself care about grades, or my future career, or getting all my financial aid papers filled out so I didn’t actually get the boot before I had the chance to by-gosh flunk out. I think I know now why. I had always been (and am to this day) one of those individuals others call a People Pleaser.* One of the problems of being a People Pleaser is that one is always stretched between the vagueries of their own desires and the insistent, doglike need to be what others want one to be. In my young-adult years, it was hard enough to know what I myself wanted to do (other than draw pictures and kiss girls), so I often ended up following the course of least resistance, attempting, albeit half-heartedly, to do what my Mom seemed to wish I would do. She never actually pressured me. That’s the curse of living with a lifelong People Pleaser: you can manipulate them without even trying, without even knowing you are doing it. If Mom didn’t actually tell me what she thought I should do with my life, I tried to divine her wishes from vague comments and discussions. Then I’d go at it. Sorta. Just enough to make Mom, well, pleased. For a time. The end result, of course, was that my heart was never really in it, and in the end I never truly did what I wanted or what Mom wanted.

And in this mode, I decided it was a good idea to go to Bible School.

Before I actually get to Zion, however, a little background.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I graduated from a private Baptist high school whilst attending a Pentecostal, even teasingly Charismatic, church on Sundays. It may come as a surprise to non-churched types, but this was akin to having Ted Kennedy for a Dad and dating Anne Coulter. I spent most of my time defending the one to the other, while all the time knowing that apart from the niggling details of their doctrines, they were basically the flip-sides of the same coin.

Friends from high school had gone on to some of the well known Baptist colleges, including Pensacola Bible College and even the infamous Bob Jones University (where, apparently, girls and boys had to walk on separate, color-coded sidewalks, even "Christian" rock music was considered of-the-Devil, and the chancellor, Bob Jones Sr. the third, was not-so-affectionately referred to by some of the students as "triple-sticks"). I strongly suspected that the Baptist college atmosphere wouldn’t be good for my art (or my desire to kiss girls), so I met with the assistant Pastor at Faith Memorial Church in Sandusky, Ohio, my Assemblies of God weekend church.

Zion Bible College, in Rhode Island, was what we discussed. It was the alma mater of said Pastor, an Assemblies-affiliated Bible college. It was small. It wasn’t all stuffy and legalistic like those Baptist colleges, and perhaps most importantly of all, it was what my Pastor called a "Faith College". I cottoned quick to what that meant: it meant that there was no tuition, per se. You paid what your faith led you to pay, and they operated that way on… well, faith.

I applied. I packed. I kissed Jenna goodbye (also discussed elsewhere, and if you’ve read that, you’ll know that said kiss produced a mixed emotional response, to say the least), and my parents drove me to Rhode Island.
Zion was indeed small. It was outside of town, a cluster of non-descript buildings, of varying styles and sizes, at the end of a long road, surrounded by woodlands. The chapel and assembly building was new, neatly bricked with a glassed in breezeway and modern swoops and peaks. Other buildings were smaller, obviously refitted for use as classrooms and offices, and not very expertly so. The dorms were old and crotchety, fusty, with threadbare carpets in the halls and tiny, milky windows. There was a gatehouse at the only entrance. The cumulative effect was of a very carefully discreet, low-budget insane asylum.

Mom and Dad stayed with me while I checked in. We waited in lines with other apparently fervent and hopeful Bible students. We paid our first tuition installment. I bought and collected my uniform. Uniforms were for real at Zion. Mine, like all the mens’, was a white shirt, red tie, navy farrah slacks, and a gray blazer. The girls’ was more or less the same, but with a skirt instead of pants, and one of those little red floppy bow-tie kinda things instead of a tie, of course**. It was a little unnerving how much the uniform of this spiritually progressive, Spirit-led, Pentecostal Bible college looked like an even cheaper version of the uniforms I’d seen my high school friends wearing at the legalistic, Bible-thumping Baptist Universities, but I quickly put that out of my head. This was a Faith School, dammit!

Then, after an unnervingly meager dinner in the college cafeteria, Mom and Dad left.

I was alone there, in a strange dorm room, in a strange place, in a strange state, surrounded by total and perfect strangers. I was, to my great shock and dismay, so utterly lonely and heartsick that it was a deep ache. I couldn’t stay there, I knew. It was preposterous that I should. Alone there, for the first time, my connection to home driving serenely away and getting further away every minute, I felt like I was drowning. I wanted to do something desperate to call the whole thing off. And I would have if I could have thought of a way. Today, in the age of cell phones and the Internet, I could have done it. I could have called Mom and Dad back, told them I couldn’t do it, couldn’t stay in this cheap, plywood anthill full of over-zealous charismatic twits (which was how I suddenly, shockingly saw them all). Or I could have chosen not to call, and found strength in that decision—the comforting knowledge that I could call it off, but wasn’t going to, was choosing not to. I could have gotten online on my computer, from the stark strangeness of that dorm-room, and messaged friends back home, created a little bubble of comfort, connecting with them, and sharing the fear and loneliness, spreading it thin to make it more bearable. But this was the early nineties. I’d never heard of the Internet, and cell phones (car phones, we called them back then) were a rarity, a completely unthought-of and nonexistent part of my little mid-western life. I was utterly alone, as disconnected from everything familiar and comfortable as I had ever been.

My only option was to mince down the long, threateningly foreign-looking hallway to the pay-phone in its decrepit, ancient wooden booth, use precious minutes of my calling card, and call Jenna. Even her voice was such a comfort I struggled to hold back tears as I talked to her. We talked for a few minutes, which was about all I could afford. Then I went back to my room. My room-mate, who I dreaded meeting, hadn’t arrived yet. Most of the dorm rooms were, in fact, empty, as I had arrived a day or so before everyone else would. I unpacked, spreading a tiny, ephemeral bubble of familiarity – the toe-nail clippers grandma Haubert had bought for me, the shampoo Mom had provided, my CD collection and stereo – around the room.

That night, I slept without a fan for the first time in a long, long time. The absence of its comfortable hum, what I’d come to think of as my audio blanket, made the room seem huge and cold, full of tiny noises, creaks, empty spaces spreading off into the dark corners of the big, mostly empty building. I lay there and I hated that place.

The next day my room-mate arrived. He was about twenty-one going-on fifty. He apparently, by all observations, thought humor was a sin. I was surprised that he didn’t actually unpack a whip for repentant self flagellations, perhaps offering to let me borrow it whenever I might feel the need.

Fast forward.

Fortunately, Zion did not turn out to be entirely and seamlessly as bad as that first night. I put on my uniform, I began going to my classes. I ignored, as politely but as totally as I could, my room-mate. People began to sift into my life. Here are a few snapshots.

The Humorless Joker

I met him at dinner in the cafeteria, that first week. Where does one sit when one knows nobody in a semi-crowded cafeteria? Is there a handbook for this? There is that terrible awkwardness of joining a populated table, where conversations are clacking along just fine without you, and where your presence might not be perfectly welcomed, or (much worse) even noticed. On other hand, you hate the idea of sitting alone, hate the idea of missing out on those subtle first steps of the social dance, where friendships are seeded and sifted, because later, when the dance has picked up and everybody has settled on their varieties of partners, you find the steps are too thick and fast and you end up sitting along the wall holding a cup of punch in front of you like a shield, watching everyone else while trying desperately to avoid eye-contact with any individual person.

I sat down at a table with one other guy. It seemed safe, since there was no previous conversation to interrupt, but the possibility that I might be the ingredient to cause one to happen. His name was Nick. He was a skinny guy, latino, with lank dark hair like raven wings, always flopping over his brow and causing him to tilt and jerk his head, flipping the hair back into place. Nick was from Nebraska. He told me about his home, the farm he’d grown up on. His eyes were grave as he spoke, never leaving mine, studying me. I nodded and ate. He didn’t seem to need me to respond, so I didn’t. At the end, he asked me, his expression not changing, his eyes not leaving mine, if I believed him. It seemed like a weird question, but I was in a weird place. Maybe it was a Bible School Christian thing. We were, after all, supposed to be all about beliefs. I told him, in what I thought was a reassuring and meaningful voice, carefully tailored to contain no great emphasis, but just a statement of fact, that I believed him.

He scoffed at me, mirthlessly. He told me he was actually from New York City and that he’d been joking. His face still didn’t smile, his eyes were still locked on me. He apparently found it irresistibly gullible and ridiculous that anyway could seriously have believed he was from anyplace other than New York City, and especially not from anyplace as hopelessly backwards and un-hip as Nebraska. I, myself, grew up in Ohio. I don’t think I brought that up.

The English Twit

Another dinner, a week or so later. I had begun to meet more people, but we were all still inter-mingling, kicking each other’s social tires. I found myself at a table one evening surrounded by a new group containing several international students. One of them was this little English guy, who I found interesting, mainly, because he had that English accent. Here, I told myself, was part of the reason one went to college: to mingle with those of different cultures and backgrounds. I was enthralled. He chatted, in that natty little accent, with the entire group about serious spiritual issues, points of doctrine, differences in international church structure. I congratulated myself on being so urbane, on becoming acquainted, possibly even friends, with someone so… so… well, someone so English-sounding.

There was a six-inch rule at Zion. This meant that boys weren’t allowed to get within six inches of girls. No hand-holding. No arms around shoulders. No friendly hugs. And heaven forbid, no kissing, for God’s sake. (I’ll come back to the English twit in a moment, don’t worry.)

As I began to make friends at Zion, a few of those friends turned out to be girls. I wasn’t "interested" in them, per se. I have, however, always found it easy to befriend females, often easier than with those of my own gender. I was with a group of those new friends one evening, killing time, wandering the campus bookstore, trying not to spend my last four or five dollars. One of my female friends, Jill, was leaning over, looking at some backpacks, talking about something or other. Standing behind her, I spontaneously drummed lightly on her back with the sides of my hands, like a cartoon masseuse, making her voice vibrate. She smiled, amused, speaking with exaggerated slowness. We all laughed. It was silly and totally forgettable, just a bored bit of physical humor.

Someone called out, their voice piercing through the babble of the bookstore. It was the English twit, halfway across the store. His eyes were dreadful, serious, admonishing, and, so it seemed to me, grimly triumphant. "Six inches, Brother!" He called urgently. "Six inches!" And he watched, to make sure I’d stop violating the rule, possibly even drop to my knees in repentance on the spot.

In my mind, I strode over to him and without a word punched him in the neck, as hard as I could. He went down like a house of cards. Then I went back to my new friends and we didn’t even deign to mention the affair. Only in my mind, though.

Chris, the Little Rocker (and Friends)

I met Chris while standing in line for something, I can’t remember what. There we were, dozens of us, in the common room, all looking nearly identical in our grays and blues and red ties. Chris was ahead of me. He was little, almost rodent-like, but there was something I liked about him. There was something about him that didn’t fit in with the typical goddy little cookie-cutter personalities of the Zion devout. There was a patch sewn onto his backpack. It bore the name of some Christian rock group or other. I was, at the time, a great devotee of Christian rock music (maybe I’ll write about that later. But that’s a big maybe). I seized on that, having come to the very unpleasant realization that most Zion types, like my room-mate, listened pretty much exclusively to (shudder!) Praise Music. They sang along when they listened to it, as if they actually liked it. And they got … emotional… about it. I felt a little like Winston, in George Orwell’s 1984, daring to make contact with someone who might, might, share my unorthodox predilections, terrified to be found-out, but desperate for a confidant.

Chris, unlike me, was unapologetic about his musical preferences. We loved many of the same bands. He was passionate about music, partly because he himself had been the lead-singer for a Christian rock band back in his hometown. Not a famous band (even by Christian rock standards), but he was fiercely proud of this fact nonetheless. He came back with me to my dorm room, looked over my CDs. I had steadfastly refused to display them openly, lest my room-mate denounce me. And here we both were, in his presence, discussing bands with names like Bloodgood, and Tourniquet, and Barren Cross. Not just Christian rock bands, but Christian heavy metal bands. I watched my room-mate out of the corner of my eye. He never said anything. I felt very slightly, very cautiously, emboldened.

Chris introduced me to a small (I have to resist the urge to call them "rag-tag") group of similar-minded guys. There was Russ, the extremely amiable, slightly shy guy who’d been a paintball freak in his previous life (he had brought his paintball magazines with him, and the incredible depth and dedication of the tiny but busy world they represented shocked and amused me endlessly). There was Ben, one of the most "normal" guys there, slight, affable, a closet chess-player with a wonderfully expressive and sharp mind. There was Kevin, who insisted he had been the youngest guy to be a cop back in his hometown in Florida (Doogie Houser of the cop-field, we called him), whose ridiculous self-importance as such was perfectly off-set by his boyish, almost childish silliness and inane wit. There was Joe, who’d been a skater before getting God and coming to Zion, and whose loveable guilelessness and lack of demands on life was as sweet as a nut. Joe had a dozen or more slang terms for testicles, and he employed them in variations of the following sentence: "How about I kick you in the cluster‡ about ten times?" Roughly translated, this meant something like "that’s a dopey idea, smart-guy", or "I’ll learn you good". For example:

Me: "Hey Joe, can I drink one of your Cokes?"

Joe: "How about I kick you in the nads about ten times?"

It wasn’t so much the words, but the gentle smile and hopeful tone of voice he’d always say it with, as if he genuinely hoped you’d agree to it. I once told him kicking people’s units must be his spiritual gift. I drew a caricature of him with his foot hoiked back and a huge grin on his face. It was a poster for his ministry. He’s coming to your town to kick YOUR unit! The caption read.

Shortly after befriending this group, I learned a wonderful and liberating truth. Apparently my dorm was the serious dorm: the dorm where only the grimmest and most joyless students of God’s Word went. I was able to arrange to move out of that dorm and into the dorm occupied by my new group of friends. This made a huge difference in my overall attitude.

Christie and Sara

I apparently fall in love fairly easily. I only know this now, at this moment, as I am beginning to write about Christie and Sara, because I am recalling writing, elsewhere in this journal, about at least three other lost loves, and as I think on it, I can think of at least one more worth writing about. Hmmm. That seems, at least to me, to diminish the overall impact of the following story, and maybe that’s OK, because I don’t think I was technically in love this time. Still, it was a near thing.

I met Christie (the one I was smitten by) first, but I got to know Sara (the sister-like friend) a lot better. Ironically, they were room-mates. They shared a room in that forbidden Neverland known as the Girls’ Dorm. I think I set foot in there once, on a special cleaning duty or something, and I felt like a penitent taking a tour of Shangri-la. Anyway, I had seen Christie around campus several times before I met her. She was, to my peculiar and complicated tastes, the female equivalent of one of those desserts you find on the menu in a ridiculously expensive French restaurant, the kind of dessert with lots of curli-cues around it and a price that requires a downpayment and collateral, and a name like "Decadent Chocolate Cream-filled Suicide with Buttercream Demiglaze Wake".

She was tall (being tall myself, I’d always been oddly attracted to girls that were "built to scale"), with dark wavy hair and huge, brown eyes. She was breath-taking, meaning that, when I was looking at her, there would come a moment when I’d have to remind my brain to tell my lungs to breath, or else I’d rather embarrassingly faint. My other loves, looking back on them, were quite a bit more holistic, but I think most men (and maybe some women) would understand the ecstatic, drunken captivation of loving a creature of plain physical beauty, beauty of so many facets that it filled-in (at least for a while) those spaces that were normally reserved for intelligence, personality, similar tastes in movies, shared appreciation of Indian food, etc. It wasn’t that Christie lacked in any of those other areas. It was just that, for me, any other considerations were drowned out, for those couple of months, by the glare of her ethereal, uniquely perfect (by my standards) beauty.

I saw her for the first time in the commons. She was sitting at a little table with another guy (it was Tony, a guy from my dorm, dark, confident, just the sort of guy, I told myself, girls like Christie were normally seen with) and when I noticed her, I stopped. She glanced up, at almost the exact same moment I saw her, and our eyes met. Normally, when that happened, I’d jerk my eyes away, subtly but quickly. Don’t mind me, I wasn’t looking at you, my expression was carefully tailored to say. I was just glancing around the room, and I happened to look in your direction. I’ve forgotten you already. Carry on. This time, however, I forgot to look away. Part of my mind set off alarm bells that I was actually staring at this girl, but the alarms were distant, tinkling. Because, as another part of my mind chimed in with a secret, giddy whisper, she was staring back. Her expression didn’t change, but she was definitely looking at me, her eyes on mine. She didn’t smile, or frown, or raise her eyebrows. She just looked at me looking at her. Two seconds, maybe three, went by (but slowly), and then I finally broke my eyes away, did my glancing-idly-around-the-room trick. But the effect was spoiled, I knew. My heart pounded. I knew it wasn’t what it seemed like. She’d been looking toward me, not at me. There was probably a clock directly behind my head and she was trying to read the time, waiting for the gangly clod with the vacant expression to step aside. Maybe she was near-sighted and had forgotten her glasses, and what I thought was a long, meaningful look was actually just a bored stare at a tall, blurry shape. It was probably that. Had to be that.

It happened two other times before I ever actually spoke to her. It became hard to keep coming up with innocuous explanations for those looks, but I managed. I have a good imagination.

Sara, on the other hand, was cute. She wasn’t breath-taking, but she was cute. The best part of that was that I wasn’t afraid to talk to her. She had a delightfully bizarre wit and a quick mind. I think it started one day in class, when we were sitting near one another. I wrote a silly poem, something inane and goofy, called "The Tinsel Teacher" (if I can find it, I’ll include it here, at the end). She, being equally bored, read it over my shoulder. She told me she liked it, in a ridiculously dramatic and meaningful tone of voice, and I told her she could have it, matching her mock-graveness. She covered her heart with her hand, biting her lip as if she’d just been given the blessing of the Pope. The next day, she gave me a poem of her own, written in another class. It was called "Brother Pierce’s Tie". It was funny. We amused each other in the weeks to come with passing these ridiculous little short poems and free-verse inanities to each other, secretly handing them off like love letters as we passed in the halls between classes. I vaguely suspected that this was more than just an amusing diversion for Sara, but I didn’t pay any attention to that, even when she passed me the one with the title "I Love Ewe" and a little drawing of a sheep on the top. The first lines were, "I love ewe. Ewe are nice." I considered it, a little, then dismissed it. She probably didn’t really mean anything by that.

It occurs to me, again, this very moment, that my insecurities sabotaged me a quite a lot in the world of dating women.†

Christie and I finally met and talked one evening at dinner. We were at a table with at least a dozen other people, but she ended up sitting across from me. We talked, fairly innocuously, but we clicked enough to become what I was willing to call, very guardedly, friends. She became a part of my circle. We all went to the beach once, carpooling together in a gigantic 1972 Cutlass belonging to one of the guys in my dorm, laughing, running around, climbing rocks, and then, finally, as the sun burned low into the waves, collapsing on the hill overlooking the water and engaging in the sorts of long, meaningful discussions that belong only to Bible students and NOW members. On an evening a week or so later, I asked her to come along with Ben and another girl to go get donuts and coffee (which was the Zion equivalent of a night on the town). It happened before I even realized I was doing it. She said yes. It was the closest I ever came to asking her out. It wasn’t cheating on Jenna, I told myself, because there was no way in Gehenna that Christie was interested in going on a date with me. She was just going out with friends. There was no romantic intention or expectation. Surely not. Of course not.

Oh God, oh God, please, I prayed, please prove me wrong…!

I never did find out.

But speaking of which:

Russ’s Sister

I didn’t intend to cheat on Jenna (who ever does?). I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t even cheating. Every pleasure was a guilty pleasure at Zion – eating a donut, seeing a movie, listening to the new CD from a beloved band—so it is hard, even in retrospect, to know what was really and actually a sin and what wasn’t. Russ’s sister came to visit him one weekend. She was also cute and also not breath-taking (but she had a blonde coyness that I, personally, found distracting). We all went to see a movie. She sat next to me. At some point, she said she was cold. I gave her my coat, a gigantic down-filled affair, to cover with. Eventually, somehow, as these things happen, we ended up shnuggled-up under that coat somewhat more than could be explained by being cold. We held hands most of the movie.

Later, in the dark, before curfew, we all went to a local park. I found, inexplicably, a bright yellow teddy bear lying in the grass near a stand of bushes. It was headless. I jokingly presented it to Russ’s sister (was her name Linda? I can’t recall), and to my surprise, she accepted it as if I’d somehow arranged for it to be there, just for her. She hugged it, smiling a funny, ironic smile.

I found out a couple of weeks later that she’d kept that headless bear. She washed it, somehow, and slept with it. This gave me a bizarre mixture of feelings. I never pursued it, though.

Brother Pat

Brother Pat was the headmaster of Zion. We were encouraged to call all the teachers, and yes, even each other, by the terms of endearment "Brother" and "Sister". We didn’t do this with each other, but we never failed to call Brother Pat "Brother" Pat. It fit, somehow, in his case. And not for the reason you’d probably think. Brother Pat was huge, fat in that round, roly-poly way that is more beach-ball than giant. He was in his late-forties, I’d guess, with grey hair and a grey beard, and we were all, every one of us, convinced beyond a question of a doubt that he was gay. It wasn’t just that he was un-married, and showed no apparent interest in finding any female companionship (not that we’d have known it anyway, of course). It wasn’t just that everything about his personality exuded a vaguely disconcerting sort of mooshiness. It was those things, and a hundred other tells, but mostly, enormously, it was his voice.

Brother Pat had that kind of high, lisping, ingratiating voice that is as quintessentially gay as pink triangles and good fashion sense. Is it homophobic, technically, to find such a voice vaguely repulsive? Maybe. That’s another blog (written, I might add, by another blogger). We didn’t dislike Brother Pat because he seemed to be gay. We disliked Brother Pat because he was (at least to us, and I’ll admit, perhaps unfairly) just one of those people who are by their nature really easy to dislike.

Once, my room-mate (the good room-mate, a guy named Tom) spontaneously concocted a song about Brother Pat, with accompaniment on his guitar. Tom was a good-natured guy, but because of some sudden and dramatic changes in the "Faith" financial policies of Zion during our time there, Tom got kicked out of school by Brother Pat. The apparent unjustness of it rankled us all immensely, stoking our already healthy dislike of the headmaster into a blazing furnace of righteous indignance. The song, which we recorded in its virgin spontanaeity, was fairly raw and superficial in its assessment of old Brother Pat. But damn weren’t it funny! A lyric excerpt:

(gentle melodic interlude)
All I can say is, Lord, please, grant me some napalm,
To put in their stuffing some day.
All I know is that He’s beyond the usual,
And what I’ve learned Is, Brother Pat, (dramatic pause)
You are a homosexual. (resume with increased tempo, rallying, building)
Oh, Brother PAT you are a big fat homosexual,
And I know that you really (indistinct, but sounds like "oughtta suck swine")
All I can say is that someday God will venerate
So go please stick up your butt a big fat grenade.
Thank you.

We played it over and over that day. Once we played it for a guy on our floor who, while we all loved him, was one of those guys that took it upon himself to occasionally tell the "hard truth" about the sins of his friends. His name was Dave, and while he was listening, he had that look on his face. Before the tune was finished, Tom looked Dave carefully in the eye and said "We know it’s wrong, Dave."

I know it was wrong for us to dislike old Brother Pat so much. We all knew it then. I think Brother Pat simply summed up everything about our experience at Zion, which, for us, was mostly not so great, in a neat, chubby, lisping, grey-bearded ball.

For me, Brother Pat came to represent everything I hated about Zion during a chapel service one day.

He was standing up there at the podium, after the service. We were all singing worship songs. I’ve never liked worship music, and I’ve always, especially since my days at Zion, been suspicious of people who really, really get into worship music. Worship music, it seems to me, is supposed to be for God’s benefit, not mine. I don’t like it, quite. It’s all just a little too schmaltzy for me. Too nice. Too… tame. Worship music at Zion, well, it was not something you laughed at or dismissed. Regardless of what denominational name Zion went by, in its zealous heart, Zion was that most misunderstood and legendary type of religious organization known simply by the word Charismatic. Not just a little bit, either. Zion was Glory-hallelujah, slain-in-the-spirit, Holy-rollin’, let-the-spirit-lead, prophesyin’ and speakin’ in the tongues of angels Charismatic. I’ll explain more about that later. For now, back to Brother Pat.

He stood there as we all sang the worship songs, me hankering to go get some lunch (or what commonly passed for it at Zion) but evidently the only individual there with such pedestrian and ungodly concerns. Brother Pat swayed. He had his head thrown back, his eyes shut, deep in the throes of worshipful ecstasy, singing and singing, his high tenor voice ringing out over the speakers, leading us through the choruses again and again. There was no end in sight. Presently, I stopped singing. I was getting angry. It was a cold, resigned anger, something I realized had been stewing in me for a long time. It was like a noise that doesn’t register to your ear at first, but then when you do notice it, you realize has been droning on for a long time.

For the first time, I dropped the pretense of like-minded, soulful rapture. I just couldn’t hold it up anymore. My hypocrisy muscles were exhausted. The anger, the hate, was crowding out my normal instinct to fit in and be like folks. I stared- no, I glared at Brother Pat, my arms dangling straight at my sides. There were no words to that anger, just raw sensations and instincts. There were a lot of angles and facets to my anger, but at that moment it was all about the way Brother Pat told us the words to each line of the choruses before we sung them, leading us along the way he’d undoubtedly heard the worship leaders on all those beloved Hosanna Praise albums. Surely he hadn’t forgotten that the chorus words were projected onto the wall behind him, as they always were, in letters a foot tall. Or that, for pretty much all of us, we’d sung these same choruses at least ten thousand times before. No, he did it because that was part of the stir, part of the massage. He did it because those were the cues to get the crowd whipped into a goddy, ecstatic froth. And there were lots and lots of people at Zion who positively lived for that froth, flung themselves into it desperately and passionately, tears streaming down their faces, blubbering, swaying, sweating.

Raise your hands, Brother Pat told us in his ingratiating, wheedling voice. All around the room, hands shot up. No one withheld. I didn’t withhold. My hands went up, too, and I hated myself for it, for mocking God and myself with a mere mimicry, a mere doglike obedience. I looked through a forest of arms and hands, most flung upwards with breathless abandon, some, at least, raised because this was the game, this was the way to prove holiness and penitence and closeness to God, and at least a tiny few, like my own, raised simply so as not to be found out, not to be pointed at and decried as unworthy, unbelieving, unbelonging. But I only raised my hands. I didn’t blubber, I didn’t sing. I stared straight ahead, through that forest of arms and hands, and my eyes were locked on Brother Pat.

Now waaaaaaaave your hands, Brother Pat cried over the music and the wailing, gibbering crowd. Waaaaaave your hands. Let’s all offer to God a waaaaaaaaaaave offering….!!!

I couldn’t. I didn’t. My façade fully crumbled. I dropped my arms to my sides. I gathered my books and I left.

And that was when my hate of Zion Bible College, for hate was what it was, poured into the convenient figurehead of Brother Pat. It was the moment when I stopped going along with the ridiculous displays of religious fervor because of my fear of being found out, when I realized I was now going along because I was actually being commanded, myself and everyone in that room, despite what might actually be happening in our hearts, to perform orgiastic displays of mutual, "corporate" worshipful ecstasy.

A fucking wave offering.

The Day of the Earth Stood Stupid

Chapel at Zion was deadly serious business. There were assigned seats. I honestly don’t know what the official purpose for that was, but I know that the end result was that I couldn’t sit with any of my like-minded friends and find some solace in their shared disdain and suspicion of the sorts of things that most often occurred during chapel (and it occurs to me that that very well might have been the official reason for assigned seating). All the men sat on one side of the chapel auditorium, all the women on the other. We all sat in the same seat every time. Mine was smack dab in the middle of a gaggle of guys from my original dorm—the serious dorm, if you recall. The looks on their faces as they filed into their seats, Bibles in hands, was grave and solemn, but also disquietingly intent. Hungry. They’d sit. They’d stare straight ahead. There was very little chatting or movement among them. They weren’t here for conversation. They were here to meet Gaaaaawd.

There were three elements to every chapel service (and we had chapel every weekday, at eleven AM). There was worship, then the message, then worship, always accompanied by an altar call. Like I mentioned earlier, at Zion, worship was serious business. Divine business. It started innocuously enough; choruses, always projected onto the walls; old standards that ninety-nine percent of us, having grown up in like-minded churches, had sung hundreds, thousands of times before. But the choruses were a cue. The choruses were when the devout really, really got God. There was no mistaking it. Getting God wasn’t a quiet, personal, intimate experience. It was loud. It was demonstrative. It was varied. For some, like the two Asian guys that always sat side-by-side front row center, it meant dropping onto their knees on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably, tears and snot running freely down their faces, repeatedly bowing full-length on the floor, flinging themselves forward and popping back up again, arms high, in what looked to me for all the world like a cartoon "Oh great swami! We’re not worthy!" caricature. For others, it meant hopping, two-footed, boinging up and down as high as they could go, their ties flopping and flailing around their heads. Then there were the gigglers. The guys in the row in front of me, from the serious dorm, ironically enough, were apparently going through a great giggling phase. They called it (I kid you not) laughing in the spirit. They’d end up collapsed on the floor, lying between pews or in the aisles (which, in a world of perpetually skirted females, sorta explains why they had the girls in the other half of the room), cackling, giggling, guffawing, breathless, helpless with an inane, directionless, delirious mirth that I found, more than the rest, positively creepy.

As I mentioned, Zion, being Charismatic, believed strongly in "letting the spirit lead". This meant that one never knew, precisely, when a chapel service might be over. No one ever complained about this, because we all understood that concerns as earthly and petty as lunch (especially lunch at Zion) were laughably trivial compared to the ecstatic, exhausting rapture of worshipping God for an hour or two. There was rarely an official ending to chapel. It just sort of petered out, the unwashed, such as myself, trickling out early to go eat. The truly righteous and devout remaining, remaining, until there were only a few left, congratulating each other silently and solemnly on being so perfectly united with God.

One day, though, things were different. Brother Pat led the worship service. It all started more or less as usual. Choruses on the wall. Brother Pat’s piercing voice reciting the lyrics to us as we sung them, enraptured, trembling. There were the sobbing penitents, the boinging, flailing dancers, the cackling laughers in the spirit crowding the aisles. But then, somebody got slain in the spirit.

If you’ve never seen anyone slain in the spirit, this is how it goes. One person is being prayed for, invariably up in front of a huge crowd of worshippers. This person is almost always being prayed for by a church leader, a pastor, a preacher, a prophet. The prayee is emotional, sometimes trembling, sometimes sobbing. The prayer is loud, commanding, and, incidentally, usually has a southern accent+. The emotion between prayer and prayee builds, builds, and then—WHAMMO! The prayer touches the prayee’s head (or, in some cases, whallops it) with the palm of their hand, and the prayee crumples to the ground as dead. This, apparently, is a sign of unusual, advanced goddiness, and is revered in Charismatic circles as the ultimate display of divine power through a minister. If Jimmy Swaggart is any indication, apparently it is also a great way to get goddy babes.

That day at Zion, during that chapel, somebody rediscovered Slaying in the Spirit. It happened down front, right before the huge, thronging, babbling crowd. There was a slow, vast movement as the prayee went down, a sort of slow-motion wave and a sudden quiet rippled over the crowd. It was as if the entire crowd shuddered, shivered. There was a moment of uncertainty, of awed wonder. It was a sign of God’s presence, certainly. But it was also a break in the typical corporate emotional coitus of worship. People blinked, looked around, waiting to see what everyone else would do.

Brother Pat arose from his seat on the stage, where he’d been calmly, proudly (though vaguely half-liddedly) watching the proceedings. He moved to the podium. He raised his hands. Then, after a long, pregnant pause, he began to moan.

The crowd, relieved, responded immediately. There was a vast, shuddering moan from the room as every eye watched, enthralled. Brother Pat moaned again, swaying slowly. He did it rhythmically, the high tone of his voice slightly breathless and trembling, vibrating. He didn’t say anything. He just led them in… in a moan offering, I suppose. And the crowd, eager and overcome, followed along, the emotion of the room rising, rising, tremulous, like an ocean wave cresting, curling, preparing to crash forward.

And then it did crash. The room exploded in a mutual climax of superheated emotional gratification. The laughers screamed, cackled, rolled on the floor clutching themselves. The dancers writhed, flailed, racked with spasms of delight. The tongue speakers babbled, the runners bounded, the kneelers flung themselves, leaving dark streaks of snot and tears on the nappy carpet. More were slain in the spirit. I saw the Prayers. They stalked around the room with purposeful strides, their eyes roaming the crowd, their right hands raised in preparation, palm out. The anointing was on these few, and boy did they know it. They merely touched the screamers, the babblers, the laughers, and down they’d go like bags of bricks. They lay everywhere. The dancers leaped over them, the Prayers stepped over them gingerly, delicately, never looking down, their eyes wide, full of fire, terrifying.
This went on first for a half hour past our normal lunch time. Then a full hour.

Brother Pat was alternately leaning on the podium, head bowed, one arm raised high over the thronging crowd, or he was seated on the stage, in his chair along the back of the platform, head bowed, nodding, arms raised. To my eyes, he seemed to approach the podium every time the crowd seemed to be settling ever so slightly. He’d approach and moan some more, apparently too enraptured to form words. The crowd would explode again.

By the time this had been going on for an hour and a half past lunchtime, I gave up. I gathered my things, climbed in shame and embarrassment over the bodies of the gigglers, the slain, threaded my way to the door. There was Ben, standing by the exit, arms crossed, his face blank, just watching. Russ was behind him, in the shadow of the alcove. I knew the look on his face. Russ wanted it, but he couldn’t seem to get it. He wanted to speak in tongues, and feel the gigantic electric God-surge of being slain. Russ desperately wanted to get close to God like all those others were, but he couldn’t. Russ didn’t think any of it was fake, or put on. He believed in it, and believed that God was singling him out as unworthy. I saw that look on Russ’s face, of misery and desire and pure and simple woe, and I wanted to climb onto the stage, bury my hands in Brother Pat’s fat, mooshy neck, and strangle the moans out of him.

Part of that rage was for Russ’s broken heart, but part of it, I know now, was for my own. Because deep down, I believed the same thing as Russ, feared the same thing. Deep down was the terrible fear that they were meeting God in that messy, cacophonous crowd, and that I was wrong, unworthy, rejected.

I came closer at Zion Bible College to abandoning my faith than I ever had before. Not because I was afraid God didn’t exist, but because I was afraid God just didn’t want me, didn’t see me as worth a laughing fit, or an emotional rapture. How could I be of God if I didn’t feel that trembling ecstasy of worship? How could God desire me, or I know him, if I was actually freaked-out by the fiery eyes of the Prayers, with their out-stretched, slaying hands. Obviously, one of two things was true: Either God was not the God I thought I’d known and longed for, or God Himself had turned me away, shut off His spirit from me whilst pouring it all over the hundreds of others in that room. Both thoughts were dreadful.

The few of us that ate lunch that day did so in a sullen, rejected silence. It was miserable.

I walked past the chapel building that day at about four-thirty. I could still hear the worship music echoing out, muffled by distance. I could still, faintly, hear the rapturous sounds of the gigglers, the dancers, the babblers, the prayers. I didn’t know, in that moment, who I hated more: them, God, or myself.

Fire and Desire

The Slain-in-the-Spirit fervor on campus lasted a few weeks. I dreaded chapel. On one hand, I was certain that the entire display was a self-generated farce, a religious/emotional gang masturbation designed to create a standard for judging who was the holiest one of all, simply by making it a matter of who could jump the highest, cackle the loudest, babble the tongues-iest, stay the longest, and most important of all, slay the most. After all, it’s a hell of a lot easier to judge those things than to measure the content of another’s heart.

On the other hand, I was equally certain that it was me that was wrong. They were communing with God in some way as deep, as inexplicable to me as the English language is inexplicable to a mosquito. I prayed to feel what they felt, I begged and pleaded that God would lay it on me as He obviously did to the rest of the masses at Zion. I tried desperately to prepare my heart for Him, to get it right, to guard my thoughts and sweep up the dust of my soul, to make myself worthy of God’s full expression and presence. Nothing worked. I tried to let my emotions go, tried to catch the wave as it passed over the crowd in chapel, but it always drifted right over me, skipping me. God was neglecting me, rejecting me, dismissing me, pouring Himself on everyone else around me, apparently indiscriminately, but always, always bypassing me. As if He didn’t know me. Or worse, knew me and decided He didn’t like me.

In the middle of this, Ben, Chris, Russ and the rest of our gang huddled like refugees. We didn’t talk about it much. Each of us, by degrees, was struggling with the same internal tug-of-war. We satisfied ourselves with silly rebellions, meaningless little bold stands.

I had a contraband television. Yes, one of the Zion rules was no televisions in your room. I don’t know why. I had a little black and white TV that could fit in my dufflebag. Russ and I were holed up in my room one night watching Total Recall, finding some solace in the mindless, silly violence of it. There was a knock at the door. We jumped up guiltily, turned off the TV, stowed it away somewhere, then I answered the door. It was Nick, the Humorless Jokester, who had sneered at me for believing his "joke" that he’d grown up in Nebraska. He needed to borrow something, I don’t remember what, a tie or a belt or something. He was dressing up to go to a tent meeting somewhere. He had that look in his eye, the one that said I’m King of the Holy Hill, I’m communing with the angels even as we speak, I gots the secret of the universe burnin’ on my tongue and I’m just itchin’ to lay it on somebody, and right now I’m lookin’ at you…

He was freaking me out, with that direct, burning stare. I told him I didn’t have anything like what he was looking for, but he didn’t make to turn away from my door. He just stood there, his face on fire with quiet, intent fervor. I started to close the door on him, slowly. He stopped the door with his hand, his face framed in the crack, then pushed it back open a little. He leaned in, bringing his face close to mine.

"You been slaaaiiiin yet?" He said. His voice was quiet, conspiratorial, almost leering. I was at a total loss to know how to respond. I stared at him. No words came. He didn’t blink. He didn’t move at all. "Fire and desire," he said, lowering his voice even more. "Fire and desire…"

I was sincerely freaked out. How does one respond to such a thing? Part of me wanted to laugh at him, scream at him, yank the door all the way open and ram him against the wall. Another part of me sobbed, if you were the Christian you are supposed to be you’d know what this means! You’d know what to say! You’d get dressed and go along with him, to be slain alongside everybody else, or maybe even to do some slaying! But God doesn’t want you! You aren’t even as good as this humorless asshole in God’s eyes!
On the razor-edge of that struggle, I simply pushed the door shut on Nick, against his gentle but persistent pressure, closing it on his grave, hungry face.

The Refrigerator

As we drifted into the chilly months of Fall in Rhode Island, I became hopelessly broke and consistently hungry (I may have already indicated that the food at Zion was neither good nor plenty). To remedy this, I took a job as a security guard at a hospital in Providence. The most difficult part of the job was getting there, since I didn’t have a vehicle. Fortunately, enough of my friends also worked there that there was usually someone to carpool with. Most of us had the late shift, from three in the afternoon until eleven at night. Apart from staying awake, it was one of the easiest jobs in the world. Each night we simply took a walkie-talkie from the charger in the security office inside the main building, then walked out to one of the several parking lots scattered around the urban center surrounding the hospital. We’d climb a small flight of stairs into a tiny guard shack which overlooked the parking lot. Our primary job, so far as I could tell, was to make sure none of the cars actually drove away by themselves. Or something.

I came to work prepared. In my dufflebag I usually brought the following:

1) Any homework (hah!)
2) A book to read, usually something by Dean Koontz, for whose work I had an inexplicable fascination at the time.
3) My little black and white TV, on which I could watch Batman the Animated Series at six.
4) Foodstuffs and drink, if I could afford them.
5) A radio/CD player with some of my favorite tunes.
6) A small ceramic heater (borrowed)
7) A Sega Gamegear (also borrowed; my favorite game was called "Columns")
8) Drawing and writing paper and pens/pencils.

I have always been pretty comfortable with my own company, so for the most part this was an easy job for me. I wrote stories and silly poems and the occasional letter. I drew lots of pictures. Eventually, two weeks in, I got my first check. It was for just under two hundred dollars.

I thought I was the richest man in the world.

The first thing I did was to bum a ride with a friend to McDonalds. I bought three Big Macs. One I ate in the car on the way back. The other two I ate in my dorm room. I was so stuffed I felt vaguely sick, but I didn’t regret it.

The second thing I did was to get some groceries. No more going to sleep hungry for me, no sir! I went with my friends to the grocery store, and I can’t imagine ever being happier spending money than I was on that day. I bought lunch meat and cheese, condiments, milk, cereal, bags of chips, various munchies. I came back to my dorm with two paper bags stuffed to overflowing. I started to unpack. Most of the goods would be left inside one of the bags, stored in the community refrigerator in the basement commons.

My room-mate, Tom, warned me. Food cannot be left unattended in the refrigerator, he said, and the dead certainty of his voice should have deterred me. It would be stolen, he added, filling in what my blank expression indicated I hadn’t understood. I laughed. Preposterous. I have always been a trusting sort. Come on, I said to him, this is a Bible college! I happily wrote my name on the bag, folded it over and pushed it onto the top shelf in the basement fridge.

It didn’t last even until the next morning.

All my food—my milk, my cheese, my lunch meat—everything I had worked for for two weeks, saved for, dreamed of, and then collected and bought on that joyous day at the Giant Eagle store… gone. They barely left me so much as a slice of cheese. But the bag was still there, of course.

I was enraged. But pointlessly so. What was I to do? I had never, ever, felt so completely disillusioned and forlorn.

I tried again. A week or so later. This time, I thought, I will protect my goods with a shield of conscience. I mean, come on, this is a Bible college! We are students of the Bible! I said this to myself, with great emphasis, as I wrote all over the bag that contained my food. I wrote in giant black magic marker words, covering my bag with references and verses, all of which pertained to thievery. Right along the top, in words two lines thick, I wrote "THOU SHALL NOT STEAL!"

The bag was empty the next morning.

I considered filling the bag again, then lying in wait all through the next night, hidden behind the couch in the commons, ready to jump out and apprehend the thieves. I knew, though, by then, that there was more than one thief. There were probably a dozen. With great sadness and disillusionment, I decided a loaf of bread, some cheese and a pack of Eckrich hard salami wasn’t worth instituting a nightly vigil for. And I gave up believing that my fellow students, who pranced and cackled and slayed with the best of them every chapel afternoon, had enough of a shred of actual active conscience to not steal my lunch.

The next day, in chapel, I watched them, energetically gyrating in all their myriad religious ecstasies, and I wondered which ones were expending energy they’d absorbed from the blissful noshing of my purloined groceries. And my hate of them solidified, hardened, crystallized.

The Four Young Turks

Not every waking moment at Zion was as bad as it would seem. My friendship with Ben, Russ, Kevin (Doogie Houser Cop), Joe (with the unit-kicking ministry), my room-mate Tom and others was sweet as a nut.
Tom liked to play Sonic the Hedgehog on the Gamegear. He was addicted to that game for a while. He’d play silently, intently, curled up on his bed as if ready to physically spring forward if the game suddenly required it. Then, whenever he’d lose a guy, he’d let out a great lurching spasm and a yell. It was always the same yell, and it was vaguely syllabic. It sounded like "SCHVEITZENHEIMEN!!" I am pretty sure that it was something made up, a sort of pig-german. But if it means something horrible, I apologize.

Being a Bible college, there was a strange pre-requisite for musical talent among the students, especially for the guitar. I suspected I was about the only guy in my entire dorm that was not a guitar player or, at that very moment, learning to be a guitar player. Tom was fantastic. Ben was learning. James, the soft-spoken, truly wise Canadian guy€ across the hall was as good as Tom. All over the dorm were guitars. One evening, Tom was idly picking and strumming in a corner of our room as several of us lounged around chatting, looking at comic books, not studying. James came over, brought his own guitar, and somehow, a spontaneous jam session ensued. It weren’t praise music, by Zion standards. It was, in fact, a sudden blending of talents, James’s style and Tom’s style, winding together, complimenting each other, spinning and lofting, like birds circling on higher and higher breezes. It rocked, a little, but mostly it was just a totally free-verse rhythm, joyful and frivolous. It was green sometimes, blue other times. It simultaneously went on for about ten minutes and two weeks, accompanied by low appreciative murmurs and words from the guys assembled. I looked around at those faces I had come to love, saw them smiling, nodding, jiving to the music, saying "yeah!" and "woo!" and for that moment, all the crap at Zion, all the horrible food and thieved salami and cacklers and fire and desire was worth it, just for that ongoing moment of joy, shared as a whole with my favorite people, the people that knew me and loved me, and who I knew and loved. I thanked God for them. To me, just maybe, that was real praise music.

I recorded it. I recorded a lot of spontaneous moments during those months, on a cheap old radio/tape player. I have a tape of it all somewhere. I’m going to find it and I am going to record it onto my computer somehow. If I do, I might link some of the best of it here. I may include a bit of the spontaneous jam session I described above. But I will definitely include the entirety of The Most Annoying Song in the World.

The Most Annoying Song in the World was recorded by a group of us that went by the name "The Four Young Turks". Ben, one of the Turks, was being taught to play guitar by Tony, another Turk, who was extremely good. Ben had learned a total of two chords, and he asked Tony if he could play a song using just those two chords. Tony said sure, but it’d be (here we go) The Most Annoying Song in the World. Ben saw this, of course, as a personal challenge. The next day, the song was born. A week later, it was recorded in secret (so to speak) in a disused bathroom next to the commons in the basement. Ben and Tony were on guitars, accompanied by Tom on bass and topped off by a small keyboard/drum machine. It became, in a tiny, underground way, a campus anthem. Copies were passed around as if they were copies of the Bible in communist Russia. The song was beloved by all the Zion outcasts, such as ourselves. It was a brow-knitting puzzle to everybody else, although for the most part, nobody who wasn’t part of "the Underground" ever even heard the song.

Until the Freshman Banquet.

Each class held an annual banquet. These were generally tasteful affairs, with Zion’s equivalent of fine dining and haute couture. All members of that year’s class would attend, along with school leadership, including Brother Pat, of course, and a remarkably intimidating old woman we all knew as Sister Evelyn. Sister Evelyn was that peculiar kind of old that, when she was in good spirits, made you want to find a street you could help her across, and when she was in nasty spirits, made you want to hide behind a bank vault door. She was rarely in what anyone could call good spirits, however. She had the jutting jaw and gigantic, inch-thick glasses of a world-class ear-grabber. She was the Pentecostal equivalent, I suppose, of Mother Superior.

Nobody screwed with Sister Evelyn.

Well, at this year’s Freshman Banquet, somehow, the Four Young Turks had been arranged to play. They were going to feature, of course, The Most Annoying Song in the World, which was, as far as I know, the only song they knew. Nobody quite understood how this came about. I suspect someone on the planning committee who was "in the know" suggested the idea to the rest of the planning committee, who were blissfully ignorant. The end result was that we all knew that when the Turks hit the stage, very few people in the crowd, particularly Brother Pat and Sister Evelyn, were going to know what hit them. None of us knew how they were going to respond. Expulsion, at a school like Zion, was never out of the question. We were pretty sure that wouldn’t actually happen, but only pretty sure. We almost called it off the night before.

Word had gotten around. When we all started setting up, an hour before the Banquet, we realized that there were an awful lot of folks from other classes hanging conspicuously around, grinning in a disquieting way. It was the sort of grin that said "I’d never do this kinda thing myself, but if you’re gonna do it, I sure as heck ain’t gonna miss it."

The Banquets always took place in the cafeteria. A small stage was set up, tablecloths and candles were placed on the tables. Strings of crepes were hung. We set up the stage with microphones and amps. I had written a skit to precede the drama. There was one element I desperately needed for the script, one essential but hard to find item that the script somehow couldn’t work without. Fortunately, there was a big guy in our class who did some handyman work on the side. He told me where I could find what I needed.

The Banquet began with a speech by Brother Pat. It was a standard boilerplate Bible School speech. We all attended with that kind of dazed concentration that belies accomplished attenders of speeches and sermons everywhere, who know how to nod and murmur assent wherever necessary, while letting their minds spin off elsewhere. Down in front of the stage, several rows of folding chairs were set up to accommodate the inexplicable number of sophopmores, juniors and seniors that had shown up to support their freshmen brothers and sisters. They all watched and listened with an unusual amount of polite attention.

Soon it was time for the skit.

We’d set up a dorm bed and a little desk on the stage, scattering the necessary room elements around so that everyone recognized the set as a typical Zion dorm room. Ben was studying at the desk. I came in loudly, slamming the door. Humor ensued. The script was in the classic Saturday Night Live style, taking one basic joke and replaying it in increasing absurdity. Ben was the serious, studying room-mate and I was the obnoxious, noisy room-mate, always promising to be quieter, to finally understand. Oh, yeah! Finals! I’d say, as if the idea had just occurred to me, as if finals was the kind of the thing that happened to other students. I promised to be quiet, assured him I was just going to get something to eat. This meant, of course, wrestling with increasing violence with a cellophane bag of chips, which I finally pulled apart so enthusiastically that they flew everywhere. Ben glared. I apologized, promised to be quiet, and then went on to more ridiculously noisy endeavors. Finally, I vowed that I got it, I understood. Quiet was the key. Mum’s da woid. In a stage-whisper, I told him I was just going to work a bit on that wobbly leg on my bed. I touched the bed as I spoke, demonstrating a very slight wobble. Quiet. Peaceful. Meditative. Ben glared, then finally, turned back to his books.

I pulled an electric circular saw from under the bed. I had been so glad to find a circular saw for this climax! The noise of it filled the cafeteria as I pretended to saw off the bottom of the bed leg. The crowd was perfect, roaring, laughing, hooting.

And that was the cue. Ben stood up, pushing the desk away. He confronted me as the rest of the Turks came onto the stage carrying their instruments. You want noise? Ben called to me. We’ll show you noise! And then they hit that first (of only two, if you recall) chords. It jarred through the room like a rusty saw.

The rows of chairs along the front emptied spontaneously as the song began. The crowd leapt up, laughing, screaming, roaring, delighted, conspiratorial grins on all their faces. The Four Young Turks were all dressed in vaguely Devo-esque black turtlenecks and black jeans. They all had their hair slicked straight back. They danced as they played, bounding and hopping as only white boys that don’t really know anything about how to dance can.

The Most Annoying Song in the World was sort of a punk song. With a few melodic, strangely mellow interludes. Punctuated with primal screams from Bill. It contained lyrics with phrases like "Kick ya in the knees, ohhh, what a bad day!" and "Magnanimous!" and "Just relax, there’s a guitar solo comin’ on!"

Across the cafeteria, behind the waving and shouting upperclassmen, the rest of the freshmen looked by turns confused, or delighted, or offended. Brother Pat stood, his lips pressed into a thin white line. At one point, I saw Sister Evelyn looking around the room for whoever was in charge of the sound, methodically dragging her index finger across her wattled neck in the classic "kill it" gesture. Nobody was in charge of the sound. We’d set it up ourselves.

The song finally reached its rather bizarre, draining climax. There were cheers, there were boos. The lights flashed. The Turks bowed.

And that, fortunately or unfortunately, is where my memory of that night peters out. Nobody got expelled. As far as I know, nothing was ever officially done or said about the appearance and performance of the Four Young Turks at all. After all, we hadn’t broken any actual rules.

But I just bet that a lot more oversight went into deciding on the entertainments for future banquets from then on.

Conclusion

I ended my time at Zion Bible College after one semester. Jenna drove to pick me up in her Dad’s Oldsmobile Delta 88. I didn’t take her on a tour or introduce her to any of my friends (partly because I didn’t really care for any of them to meet her, and partly because I was just so anxious to be shut of the place). I simply piled my things in the trunk, jumped in and left. We were on the road within half an hour of her arrival. We drove through the night.

I didn’t know if I would be going back next semester. I think I expected not.
I was not a great expert at keeping track of long-distance friends, so I have completely lost touch with Ben, Russ, Kevin, Joe, Tom and all the rest. But I do wonder, sometimes. Did they go back? Did they graduate? Did they find a way to mesh their own understanding and love of God with the crazed religious lunacy of the rest of the campus? Or did they drift, as I almost did?
I wish I knew. I wish I’d kept track of them.

There are times in life that are hard, that are full of challenges and conflicts, that, in the moment, seem so hopeless and difficult and aimless that you lose yourself in them, fearing you will never get through them. And then, eventually, you are through them. Time goes by and you look back with wonder on that time, and you say to yourself, "That wasn’t so bad. It had its dark moments, but really, it was kind of exciting. Why, I’d almost like to do that again, if just for one day." There are times in life, that in retrospect, you realize weren’t really as bad as they seemed.

Zion was not one of those times. Zion was exactly as bad as it seemed. I have wondered what became of my little refugee circle of friends. But I’ve never, ever wanted to go back to Zion.

*So far as I have ever observed, I am the only person I have ever known to actually call himself a people pleaser. Although even I don’t do it very openly. The problem is, as a people pleaser, I want people to like me. People like honesty. And yet, people seem to vaguely disdain People Pleasers. You see the conundrum, yes?

** An article of clothing that I am perversely doomed, by too much private Christian school, to think of as bookishly sexy.

‡ or "unit", or "grapes", or "package", etc, etc, etc. But always "about ten times."

† Recall that I was, at this time, carrying on a long-distance relationship with Jenna; a relationship that existed purely as a guilty exercise based on a balance between my belief that I owed her my devotion (because she, apparently, needed it so much) and the haunting, occasional insecurity that she was the best I’d ever be able to get.

+ Often worn just for the occasion.

€ Not that that’s a rarity or anything.