I Am Superman . . . And I Can Do Anything

In the spring of my Freshman year I was cast as Lemuel T. Thwackbusher in O. Henry’s The Cop and the Anthem.  Apparently this part was a big inspiration for Red Skelton.  However, I didn’t get it.  I couldn’t draw a bead on the character.  Mr. C wanted me to play it as W.C. Fields.  I was familiar with Fields as a cultural reference, but I couldn’t do a decent impression to save my life.  The closest I’d come to the legacy of W.C. Fields was a giant headed statuette behind my stepfather’s bar back in Illinois. 

I became frustrated with my inability to grasp the part.  Yes, I know how that sounds.  I was 14 and this was just a school play, not summer stock.  At the time it felt important.  Plus I was feeling Mr. C’s frustration as well.  He always said “even though this is high school drama, I don’t ever want it to look like high school drama!”  I took that to heart.  We all did.  And since I was fucking it up, I finally just bailed.  We had an in-service day off one Friday but Mr. Campbell insisted we all come for rehearsals that afternoon.  I just didn’t go.  When I walked in the school doors Monday, Mr. Campbell was waiting for me.  I could see he was pissed.  I told him I couldn’t get a ride.  He asked why I hadn’t called him – he would’ve picked me up.  I tried to think up another excuse but he finally just asked, “are you in this show, or aren’t you?”

I don’t even remember what I said exactly.  I might have said nothing.  But I vividly remember him simply saying “that’s all I needed to know.”  And he walked away. 

It seemed pretty apparent my days on the school stage were over.  I’d shot myself in the foot.  I acted like I didn’t care, as people tend to do when they realize they just fucked themselves.  Inside I felt like an enormous horse’s ass.  And I was.  But as I’ve already said, I was in 7 shows. 

The following fall, the sign went up for auditions.  This time the show was Our Miss Brooks.  I didn’t even consider trying out.  That ship had sailed when I pissed all over the bow.  And I felt the anchor in my gut.  I wanted to act again so badly.  So imagine the day before the audition when, as the bell rang and I followed the heard filing out of Mr. C’s biology class (don’t think for a moment he made being in his class any bit comfortable) he called out for me to stay.  That heavy object in my stomach was about to find its way into my underpants.

“Are you going to be at the audition tomorrow?” he asked after the room emptied.

“The dog ate it . . . wait, what?” 

I hadn’t expected that.  I didn’t even know how to respond.  Was he fucking with me?  Was he rubbing it in? 

“I didn’t really think I could,” I said.

“If you get a part,” he said, “will you be committed this time?  Or will you drop out again when things get too tough?”

“I, uh, I will be committed,” I answered.  “I won’t quit.”

“Good,” he said.  “See you tomorrow.” 

And that was it.  It never came up again.  Maybe he just needed guys for the cast, as is often the case.  Maybe, just maybe he actually thought I had talent.  I didn’t care.  The slate was wiped.  The next day all was forgiven, and I got the part of the school principal, Mr. Wadsworth.  It was the third male lead, but honestly the best part.  After all, he was the closest thing to a villain the show had.  He got all the best laughs, even if at his own expense.  I did stick it out.  The show was another school hit.  Admittedly the character was easier for me, as he’s just angry all the time.  Something I was good at, naturally. 

That show helped me find a scrap of self-confidence in other ways as well.  Even though I’d had a girlfriend since the year before, I always felt I was a shlub with no game.  She was away and things were rocky and I was thinking if it ended, I’d be a lonely loser.  That’s when I met Jackie.  She was a mousey, pale skinned brunette with beautiful blue eyes.  She was a glorified extra in the show, but she had taken to always being around me backstage.  Every rehearsal she’d be right next to me, talking to me in the wings, laughing at anything I said or did.  One night just before I had to rush out on stage I realized we were just staring at each other.  It was the first time I felt that feeling.  The one that just lets you know it’s okay.  You can go for it.  Fortune favors the bold.  I pulled her to me and pressed my mouth against hers.  We stood there in the shadows, behind the heavy merlot curtain, making out.  As I was kissing her, I heard my cue and pushed off right into the stage lights.  And I’m pretty sure I rocked it out there, new found mojo coursing through my veins. 

The weirdest thing was, we never discussed it.  It went on throughout the rest of the production.  Every night, when the coast was clear Jackie and I were backstage, tongues intertwined, my hands planted firmly on her ass.  We never acknowledged outside of that theater.  Never even considered taking it to the next level.  Maybe I was her dirty little secret.  I was okay with that!  Strangely enough, even with her in my arms, my eyes were watching someone else.  That play was also where I first met Trina.  She was this goofy, beautiful freshman with think, tendrils of brown hair and giant, mischievous eyes.  Her mother was actually my favorite substitute.  She’d been in real show business once, as a cast member on Hee Haw.  She worked alongside Roy Clark and Richard Dean Anderson (that one really blew me away – she knew MacGuyver!) 

But I was more fascinated with her enigmatic daughter who captured my heart and imagination all at once.  Trina was loud, sarcastic, athletic and at once self-assured yet a little awkward (which made her even more attractive.)  I would pine for that girl for the next 3 years.   But as much as I loved her, I was terrified of her.  She was sharp in with and tongue and could cut anyone down in an instant.  That mojo I had with Jackie evaporated the minute I was anywhere near Trina.  I convinced myself if I dared reveal my feelings, she’d not only throw up in her own mouth, she would surely proceed to torture me publicly the rest of my high school career.  To Jackie’s benefit I suppose, as I began inching us closer to view some nights when Trina was on stage, in some twisted hope she’d see and find herself strangely jealous.  Don’t think she ever saw, and I’m pretty sure she never was.  Of course at the ass-end of my senior year, literally days before graduation, I was talking to Trina’s mom.  I decided to just put it on Front Street and I told her how I felt about Trina.  Her response was something to the effect of “you dummy.  You should have told her.  She would have said yes!”  I’m not entirely sure that was true, but I did feel like a jackass.  As usual, my neurosis sabotaged me.       

Earlier I said Mr. C never brought up my dropping out again.  That isn’t entirely true.  He referenced it one more time during the four short years we were in each others’ lives.  I graduated in the spring of 1993, and there were five of us who had been in that first play as freshman who walked that gymnasium together.  Five very different people, and I the only guy.  But we were bonded as our own little team, having fought side-by-side for four years.  And before I left that school for good, Mr. Campbell called me to his classroom and gave me something.  It was the poster of our last play, The Miracle Worker.  He’d laminated it, but not before writing a message on the back:

Bart,

It has been a real pleasure watching you grow.  From the days of “Blazing Guns”, to your good attitude after being kicked out, to your final (and without a doubt your best) play as Capt. Keller, you have grown tremendously. 

Your example and leadership on stage helped a lot as others saw what good acting was to be.

I know that if you put the effort into other areas of your life that you put into acting you will always succeed.  Please do so!  I want to be able to say “I knew him when . . . “

Remember always do it for the Lord and you will never fail.

                                                            In Jesus

                                                                        Mr. C

Ok, so while I believe he has the facts about my departure from that show wrong, I’ll let it slide.  It wouldn’t be the last time in my life there was a question as to whether I quit or was fired!  Regardless, even reading that again as I write this, I am moved and amazed by that man and the impact he had on my young life.  There are many areas where I disagree with Mr. C but they’re insignificant.  He’s a hero to me.  Always will be.  And while he could be a stern task master who could sniff out bullshit in an instant (usually my greatest weapon), he was in many ways what I think of when I hear the term Christ-like.  

Yes, this is supposed to be about my time at a Christian liberal arts college (such a contradiction!)  But without Mr. C and my time on the HCHS drama club instilling in me a belief that I was actually good at something, I might never have found myself part of the incoming freshman class at Euphegenia College in the fall of 1993.  That and a fateful friendship I would strike up during one high school production.         

I Was Brain-Dead, Locked Out, Numb, Not Up to Speed

 

I could probably write a book just on my four years at Highland, but that’s not what this book is about.  I have very mixed feelings about my High School career there.  I loved that time in some ways.  It was small which made it easy to be a rabble rouser and I got to be kind of a black sheep without doing much.  There was an immediate fascination with me, at least by some, simply because I was from Chicago.  Those on the two coasts of this nation may not realize this, but there is a strange misconception I learned that many people still think Al Capone runs Chicago.  Even in 1989, I was fielding questions about the mob, what it was like being Italian (which I’m not), and the dangerous life of living in the Windy City.  There’s a reason Milwaukee is the butt of many jokes, and Laverne & Shirley isn’t it.  It looks like a major metropolitan area, but believe me, it’s still full of hill jacks. 

My favorite time of year was November, because that’s when deer hunting season began and my classes would be half-empty.  It was accepted that parents were justified pulling their kids out of school to stalk and slay Bambi.  I’m not making any statements about hunting.  I’m not a hypocrite.  I eat and enjoy meat.  I just think many of these inbred knuckleheads needed to be in school during the week and hunting on the weekends.  If you met a lot of them, you’d understand, and agree.  Plus, I fucking hate venison.  Have you tried it?  They can tell me a million times how I just haven’t had it prepared properly.  Bullshit!  All deer tastes like wild fucking beast to me.  I like my meat to taste like the cold loving arms of processed factory slaughtered beef, complete with excrement, entrails, and possibly the random digit of an illegal migrant worker, just as nature intended!  

I will take the piss right away.  I was a terrible student.  I hated homework.  I’m naturally ungifted in the subject of math.  I can add, subtract, and do my “guzintas,” etc.  But the minute they started throwing letters into my math problems, I was hopelessly lost.  Even when I tried to apply myself and worked side-by-side with teachers, I couldn’t get it.  The numbers, letters, and symbols just all blurred together.  I firmly believe if there’s a form of dyslexia that affects your perception of numbers, rather than words, I have it.  So that’s my excuse for math.  As for the rest of my classes, especially the ones like English and History, which I should have aced, it was simply that I’m a lazy-ass. 

The only thing to which I ever really applied myself was the dramatic arts.  As far back as 5 or 6 years old, I remember wanting to act.  When I was in First Grade, my school put on a little play about our school mascot, Lucky the lion.  I desperately wanted to be in it, but was shamefully relegated to being a background monkey.  No lines.  All I had to do was run around and squawk a few times.  It might have turned me off to the whole process, had fortune not smiled on me the day before the big performance.  I’m a little hazy on the particulars, but for whatever reason the master thespian cast as Alligator King had suddenly bowed out.  The whole production was in jeopardy.  Until my first grade teacher, Ms. Biancalana made the boldest casting choice in the history of elementary theater.  She handed me the alligator mask crafted skillfully from a paper grocery bag and construction paper and gave me the nod.  This would be my moment.  The gist of the story was a couple of adventurers on a journey through the jungle find Lucky, our young lion cub mascot.  It was my job to convince them that my minions and I had not devoured the cub.  The whole thing was dark and complex and masterfully written.  I believe my big line was something to the affect of: “We would never eat Lucky, would we?” 

To which a Greek chorus of gators answered “Noooooo!” 

I wish I had saved the press clippings.  Alright, so maybe it wasn’t that great, but the audience was our parents so they were going to love it regardless.  Plus I got to keep my costume!  All I knew was I was hooked.  I loved it.  A few years later my mom remarried and we moved to another suburb and school.  I found myself tackling an iconic role when I was cast as Frankenstein in the 4^th grade production of The Beast Things in Life.  This Frankenstein was a little closer to an adolescent Herman Munster.  I mostly just laughed like a lobotomy patient and carried a teddy bear the whole time.  However, I did have my own musical number, backed up by a bevy of 9 year old dancing girls.  Nice work if you can get it. 

So when shortly after I started at HCHS a posting went up about auditions for the Fall Play, I resolved that I was going to do it.  This would prove an interesting and perhaps pivotal decision in my young life.  See, our gym teacher, also the soccer coach had pulled all the boys aside and let us know they were desperate for Junior Varsity players.  I liked Coach Lindstrom, plus I’d played soccer as a kid, sort of.  My mom tried a few times to get me to play soccer on a park district league, but I spent more time digging in the dirt and eating orange slices.  But I figured what the heck?  He said experience wasn’t even necessary so I was already ahead of the game, so-to speak.  At least I’d worn shin guards before. 

As I remember it (and let’s get it clear now, I’ve killed a lot of brain cells in the decades since) the soccer practice began a few days after the play auditions.  I recall entering some strange basement room of the school with a small stage recessed into the wall.  The floors were yellowed linoleum, laid a hundred years prior.  It was a subterranean classroom with thin unreachable rectangular windows along the ceiling that didn’t even open.  Timidly I skulked in and slid into a desk at the back of the room.  There a couple of girls all flocked around another who was sitting.  I noticed her leg was in a cast or brace or something.  She was very pretty, but in a very conservative manner.  A future preacher’s wife in the making.  I listened to their chatter and noticed quickly that her voice lilted angelically over the others in a sing-song manner.  Her name I later learned was Karin.  She was a Senior.  She had been the star of the Highland Christian stage for three years running and this was to be her final and featured year to tread the boards and soak in the adulation.  Turns out the year before, they’d changed the title of Twelve Angry Men to Twelve Angry Jurors, just to afford her the starring role. 

As I waited a few more people came in, including three guys.  I was keeping track of many other dicks were in the room.  And what they looked like (not the dicks specifically, the guys attached.)  These were my competition.  Two were thin, and one was particularly tall and a bit gangly but good looking enough.  Having dealt with self-image issues all my life, again I took note.  While I’m often told I’m unfairly hard my own appearance, if asked to describe myself back then, I’d probably say dark (my family is “Black Irish” and Cherokee, plus I spent 5 days a week at the pool in the summer,) husky, and prematurely mustachioed.  I looked Hispanic in some of my school pictures.  The last guy to show up for audition was a kid named Rick, but I later learned his name was Enrique.  He gave me hope.  It didn’t take long to learn in this school, the more you looked like the Master Race, the better your odds always were. 

Turned out I wasn’t going to be the only new face at the auditions that year.  For a couple years now Mr. Guthrie, the History and Sociology teacher had been directing the school plays.  For whatever reason in the fall of ’89, Guthrie  was replaced by Biology and Chemistry teacher Mr. C.  Mr. C would become one of the most influential teachers in my life.  I still hear his voice in my head on many occasions.  While all business in the classroom, and something of a staunch conservative (and devout Creationist) Mr. C was a showman, constantly telling jokes and being silly.  As long as you were on time to rehearsal and knew your lines when you were supposed to, that is.  When things were going well, he was the first guy in the wings trying to crack you up.  Although in many ways to him that was business too.  It was an exercise in maintaining your character, despite any distractions, he’d say.  In truth, he was just screwing off and trying to make you laugh. 

The show was a late-1800’s melodrama entitled Blazing Guns at Roaring Gulch.  The script was awful, written specifically for High School drama and the jokes stale, but I’m sure the royalties were cheap.  And it was about as non-controversial as you could get.  It made Abbot & Costello look risqué.  It sounded fun though and I was definitely hoping for something in it.  I’d have been happy with the bumbling sidekick or the hapless bellman at the hotel.  I certainly didn’t expect the lead.  To be honest I think I gave a pretty flat audition.  We did cold reads out of the script.  I specifically remember that Karin chick giving me notes on my read.  Not sure what annoyed me more, this bitch giving me line reads, or the fact that all the guys had to read with her because it was assumed since she was a senior she already had the female lead.  I’ve always hated bureaucratic bullshit.  I later learned her dad was a hotshot pastor who ran the Baptist church half the teachers and administrators belonged to.  He also wore a toupee that looked like a dead possum run through a spin cycle.  But he was a rock star in this world, and that gave her a lot of pull. 

Figuring my chances were slim I went to the soccer tryout, which was really just a formality.  They didn’t give a shit about the J.V. team.  They just needed enough names on a roster so as not to forfeit.  Junior Varsity was an opening act.  We were roadies for the good players at best.  I sucked, but honestly  I wasn’t the worst player on the field.  It almost felt good to be part of a team.  Especially a sports team.  I’d never been athletic.  I started to think maybe I could be a soccer player.  I could get those blue and white sandals and an Adidas track suit.  This could be a new identity. 

And then the cast list for the play went up. 

Despite my mediocre audition, I got a part.  In fact, I got the part.  I played a dual role; twins separated at birth.  One an educated Pinkerton detective sent to investigate a series of bank robberies, and the other a nasty desperado committing said crimes.  It was High School drama at its purest.  Perhaps best of all, that bitch Karin was shafted with a secondary part.  The female lead, a lady Sheriff was given to Maggie, a Junior and first-time thespian herself!  Karin was so livid, she actually quit after the first rehearsal, citing some bullshit prior commitment she’d forgotten.  Somehow the show went on without her. 

The acting didn’t stretch much beyond those flat line reads in the basement, and believe me I’m talking about myself.  But it didn’t matter.  We all thought we were doing West End level stuff.  And we were getting standing O’s after every performance.  Many people, including other teachers were telling us it was the best produced show in the school’s history.  By October 1989, I was ready to hitchhike all the way to L.A. and kick start my acting career.  Even if I didn’t make it in films, I knew I’d be great on a Soap Opera.  I watched All My Children every summer before I had a driver’s license.  I was especially a fan of James Kiberd who played Detective Trevor Dillon.  He was no living Ken doll like most soap opera actors, he was kind of broad-chested and swarthy, always cracking wise.  Still he was damn popular.  I could have played that part, I was certain.  Even at 14! 

The acting bug had bit me square in the ass.  And even though I’d forgotten all about soccer,   I was now part of a different sort of team.  In the four years I attended Highland Christian, I was in 7 (and a half) plays, all directed by Mr. C and with roughly 90% of the same cast.  As for the half, well, I wouldn’t even bring it up except it illustrates two things.  The first, that I’m a quitter.  It’s a common theme in my life.  And the second, well, the second is an example of grace.  True grace, a theme that hasn’t been and won’t be common throughout this story.  Especially in dealing with people who take their title from the ultimate symbol of Grace, Jesus Christ. 

I'm Pushing An Elephant Up The Stairs

Perhaps it’s a sad commentary on my own character that I so effortlessly passed between lives.  It was nothing for me to make the switch.  It happened in the time it took to pass through a car door.  When I climbed into my dad’s car every other Friday night, I instantly became this model Christian child.  What probably helped was listening to two hours of Christian rock on the trip to Milwaukee.  I know to some Christian rock is a contradiction in terms.  I was actually huge fan of it.  Even when I was home in Chicago, playing Nintendo and jerking off to the lingerie section of the J.C. Penny catalog I listened to gospel pop.  One particular favorite was an artist named Steve Taylor.  He was a former Denver youth pastor turned new wave / rock guy.  Taylor was this lanky, nerdy looking cat in a white suit and thin tie with spiky blonde hair.  He looked like the love child of Billy Idol and Ichabod Crane.  A Christian artist but he wrote songs like I Want to be a Clone and Sin for Season that challenged the accepted behaviors and hypocrisies of the Evangelical community. 

And I have clear memories of an interview of Taylor telling Pat Boone his biggest influence was The Clash.  It’s no wonder I quickly found myself a fan. 

Sunday afternoons were depressing for me.  We’d go to church, eat lunch, and then load up into Dad’s car to head back to Illinois.  I would generally just try to fall asleep and not think about it.  As I’ve said, despite any estrangement as an adult (we’ll get there) I loved my Dad.  I loved every moment we spent together.  And as I’ll probably have to say numerous times throughout this tome, I still do. 

Inevitably we’d get to my mom’s house and sadly I’d lean forward and give the old man a kiss and tell him I loved him.  I was usually suppressing tears when I did.  He never got out of the car, unless it was when he had a two-door and had to push the seat forward.  My mom and dad were divorced in 1980.  If you were in a room with the both of them right now, you’d think they split up five minutes ago.  The wounds are somehow still fresh, 30 years later.  The bitterness, anger, and hurt are still palpable.  It’s tragic.  And as an aside to any parents out there considering divorce, consider this.  How you handle yourselves in those proceedings and for years after will profoundly affect your children.  Don’t kid yourselves.  Divorce will hurt your children.  Hurt them irreparably.  Hurt them permanently.  No matter what you do or say, nothing will change that.  But you can still decide if that hurt is a scrape, a bruise, or a complete fucking massacre.

I learned early on not to stand and watch him drive away.  It upset my mom to see me upset, but not for the right reasons.  She rarely asked how the weekend went.  And I didn’t offer.  In fact, if we’d been flown to Walt Disney World on Air Force One with the President, Michael Jackson, and Jesus H. Christ himself, and each gave me a million dollars to spend, I wouldn’t have told her.  I always downplayed, regardless of what had happened.  If I told her I’d had fun, it would just piss her off, and I’d pay for it emotionally.  In my mother’s defense, she had me during the week and dealt with the real life shit.  Feeding us, clothing us, taking calls from school when we fucked up.  Especially me.  Dad got to take me to the zoo, the museum, concerts, movies, etc.  And for the most part, he really only had to deal with me.  Mom had my brother and me.  Two completely different but equally fucked up kids.      

Finally in the summer of 1989 I went to my dad’s for what was only supposed to be a month, and I never went back.  Dad had been asking me to move in with him and my stepmother for years.  When I was with them I always said sure, but then I got home to mom and buckled.  I couldn’t abandon her like that.  Even though she was often unhappy and lashed out at us kids, she was my mom.  I loved her too.  I knew how much it would hurt her if I told her I wanted to leave.  So inevitably I’d say no.  This time however, still on a high of being out with my friends up there, and away from home just long enough to forget, I didn’t say no.  I didn’t say much of anything. 

Dad asked once again, and told me I could go to the Christian high school with my church friends, including the Pastor’s daughter Carrie who I was infatuated with.  On top of it he told me I wouldn’t have to face my mom.  He would talk to her and take care of everything.  I was 14 years old.  This was the perfect solution.  Of course I said yes.  Not really considering the turmoil it would cause back home.  What I didn’t know was dad wasn’t going to talk to my mom.  Instead he talked to a lawyer, who in turn talked to the Sherriff, who showed up at my mother’s house on a Friday night letting her know my dad was suing for custody, and I wasn’t coming back as scheduled at the end of the summer. 

I recall the phone ringing the next day, and my dad answering it, and within a few short moments I knew who was on the other end.  And I began to quickly put things together.  Finally she wanted to talk to me.  I ranto the bathroom saying I had to go, just to avoid talking on the phone.  Dad finally made me take it.  It was ugly.  I knew I’d caused her an unforgivable amount of pain, and that sits even now like a rock in my gut.  But I was too selfish at the time to consider it.  As a grown man, I now see how that may have been the single biggest mistake of my life.  However that could take up a whole other chapter and we need to get to the part about how I got to Christian college.  Just suffice to say, we’ll get there.   

Regardless of how it happened and the pain it caused, I was finally living with my father.  A dream come true, as far as I knew.  At that moment it was like someone said “You no longer have to visit Six Flags.  You get to live there!”   

I officially lived in their little house in Milwaukee where I had my own waterbed (it was still the 80’s people, waterbeds were dope!)  All my coolest toys were there (despite the fact I was about to start High School.)  I was turning 14 and finally lived with my daddy for the first time since I was five.  It also helped my emotional high that the aforementioned Pastor’s daughter and I were kind of dating.  We had gone to approximately three whole movies, including Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Weekend at Bernie’s, during the latter of which we held hands.  And I’m fairly certain I’d gotten some (by some I mean kissed her on the cheek!)  In fact there’d even been some hot tub action.  I’d sat next to her in a hot tube and put my hand right against hers as it was pressed flat against the bench we sitting on.  Deep beneath the bubbles where no one could see, of course.  I believe it was on that very trip that she looked deep into my eyes when we were alone and said those words of love, “when we start school, you can’t tell anyone we dated!”   

Still, things felt like they were going great.  Sure I’d broken my mother’s heart, and not too mention abandoned my best childhood friends, but when you’re 14 years old, your vision is narrow and immediate.  Those out of sight are very easily placed out of mind.  A lesson that later in life, I’d learn is just as easy for some adults.  To top it all off, I’d been accepted to Highland Christian High School.  Good old HCHS was the school that most of the kids in our church went to.  I didn’t know quite what to expect.  Initially I’d had visions of Jake and Elwood being beaten by the Penguin with a yardstick but I’d been assured by friends that it was nothing like that.  No uniforms, just collars for boys and skirts for girls.  Teachers weren’t allowed to use corporal punishment.  Not any more anyway.  In fact all I’d heard were amazing stories about cool people and fun times.  Oh and there were no race riots as I’d been led to believe were a daily occurrence at the Milwaukee public schools.  What that really meant was the ratio of black to white students was almost even in a few, as opposed to the 8 black kids at Highland.     

Choosing My Confessions: Pt. 2

 

Let me back up to explain that, along with every other weekend, I would spend holidays and a couple weeks each summer with my father.  I loved my pop.  Let me be clear, I love my dad.  I love him terribly, even now as we have almost no contact.  But in those days I psychotically loved him.  I worshipped the ground he walked on.  Even after he left.  There were many mornings while getting ready for school I would just cry uncontrollably in my room.  When my mom left, I’d go straight for the phone and make a collect call to my dad at work in Milwaukee.  Hearing his voice was the only way I felt I could pull it together to face another day.  I craved every moment I could be with him, and spent my weeks just living for the moment when I’d transition from my mother’s car to his on those magical Friday nights.  So I was already predisposed to accepting whatever belief system he told me I should.  On extended visits (and later when I lived with him) I’d find myself in church a minimum of four times a week. 

Sunday morning we had Sunday school at 9, and then the main service began at 10:00 and ran till noon (if we were lucky.)  Our pastor loved to preach and to his credit he was pretty damn good at it.  Although I confess, I often zoned out, daydreaming and drawing cartoons on the back of the bulletin when my parents weren’t watching.  Then we’d go eat lunch, often with other church friends.  The best Sundays were those where lunch would be at Ponderosa.  I loved me some Ponderosa sirs!   Home for a nap or to watch the tube, then back again at 6:00 pm for Sunday evening service.  Then of course Wednesday night service.  And lastly Youth Group on Thursday nights.  Not too mention it was almost a guarantee the youth group would all be hanging out at least once during the weekends. 

I was in church or around people from the church more than I wasn’t.  And I liked it.  Although I must confess, even then I enjoyed some degree of mystery and separation even when in the crowd.  On the weekends and vacations I was up there, you could almost say I held some degree of celebrity status.  They knew me and knew I lived somewhere else, but they didn’t really know me.  And I think it made me a sort of a fascination.

On one particular Sunday night I was up on an extended stay and it just so happened there was to be special treat.  I don’t quite remember if our pastor was on vacation but for some reason they were going to show a movie.  The film (I use the term loosely) was called A Distant Thunder.  No, not the low-budget sci-fi flick where Edward Burns goes back in time and steps on a butterfly thereby altering the course of evolution and time and space, creating giant mutant baboons (although that would have been sweet!)  This Thunder was the second installment of the Thief in the Night series of Christian end-times propaganda movies made in the late 70’s and 80’s.  They’re low on budget and high on bad acting, but the main idea is simply to fill sinners with paranoia and fear of losing your head, literally.  The main thread in all the flicks is that after the Rapture, when God whips out his Dyson and all the Christians get sucked into Heaven, the Anti-Christ will seize power over the whole world and force everyone to take the mark of the Beast.  That essentially being your permanent membership card into Club Satan. 

According to this flick if you don’t take the mark, which was literally a barcode tattooed to your arm or forehead, you wouldn’t be allowed to buy groceries, receive medical care, and would essentially lose every civil right known to man.  The biggest question for me was who the fuck would take it on the forehead when the wrist was an acceptable alternative???  I half-wondered if taking the mark on the head would actually be a crude strategy.  As if even Satan would look at you and think “this one’s a little crazy even for me.” 

According to the flick the army of the Antichrist begins to round everyone up who doesn’t bear the mark and starts lopping off heads in the town square.  In this movie set in some not-to-distant future, it was literally a town square in what I imagine was a quaint little suburb of Toronto.  Even the Lord loves a tax incentive! 

Just as Scared Straight intended to keep troubled kids on the straight and narrow with the threat of violent sodomy, the Thief  series had only one true purpose.  To scare sinners to Jesus.  There was no love.  No grace.  Just fear.  I was around 9 years old and it certainly scared the ever-living shit out of me.  When the movie was over, one of the deacons picked up a mic and said “if you haven’t accepted Christ, this is your fate.  It’s not too late to avoid it.  Come down to the altar and be saved.”

I ran, dare I say like a bat out of Hell to the front of that church!  I accepted Jesus as my savior that night.  And they made it so easy.  It’s more complicated to join a health club than to make your eternal reservation in Heaven.  They told me exactly what to say.  I don’t remember the words verbatim, but I know it was a short and simple prayer.  Something to affect of “Lord Jesus, I know that I’m a sinner and that without you my soul is bound for Hell.  I know you came to Earth as a man to die for me.  I ask you to come into my heart today, forgive me of my sins, and be my savior.”   

I remember kneeling on that altar with a few others, and I was crying.  And my dad came up behind me and put his arms around me, so proud I’d joined the club.  That night I remember other men in the church congratulating my dad.  It made me feel self-conscious.  I felt strangely exposed, like I’d just been deflowered in front of an audience.  This was supposed to be some personal thing and all these people were up in my business, shaking my hand, touching me, practically patting me on the head. 

Once we left the church not much was said.  I remember my dad and stepmom asking me if I understood what had happened and I just shrugged and said I did.  I guessed I did.  I suddenly didn’t want to talk about it and they didn’t press me.  In their defense, I never wanted to talk about anything too personal with any of my parents.  We went back to their place and the same deacon who’d made the altar call who was also a friend stopped by.  I remember lying on my favorite vinyl green beanbag (make note of this beanbag) watching cartoons while dad and John (the deacon) sat in the kitchen discussing how to further my religious development.  All I knew was if I did happen to get my head cut off, at least I was going to Heaven now.  And as I heard said many times after that night, it don’t matter how you get there, as long as you get there. 

From that night forward, I lived a double-life.  On my visits to Wisconsin, I spent all my time as a devout born-again Christian, with my Christian parents and Christian friends.  Walking the walk, externally, and when pressed talking the talk.  The rest of my days I was living my real life in the suburbs of Chicago with my mom, brother, and a couple stepdads (and near-stepdads.)  I went to public school, hung out on the fringe with my gaggle of weird friends, wearing black t-shirts and camouflage pants, listening to Anthrax and imagining what it was like to touch a girl inappropriately.   

Choosing My Confessions . . .

            I am a product of Christian education.  And if that’s not a ringing endorsement for the public school system, I don’t know what is! 

Too be more specific, I am a product of Evangelical Christian education.  Not the sexy Catholic school “naughty girls in plaid skirts” kind.  I mean born-again, turn or burn, reading, writing, and repentance from 8 to 3:30.  I survived four years in a hardcore private Baptist high school, followed by two years at a Christian college before making my escape.  The details of said exit are still a matter of some debate.  To say I got out with my sanity in-tact would be questionable.  To say I got out with my faith in-tact would a lie.  So how did that happen?  How did I go from a crazy kid tightrope walking the margins of suburban public school, listening to metal and smoking cigarettes in the woods with my buddies to walking that razor-thin Bible wire?  It’s sort of a long story, but I’ll try to condense it as best I can. 

            After 13 years as the rope in an endless tug of war game between my divorced parents, I went to live with my father in the great state of Wisconsin.  I say great, as in vast, as in big.  That’s about the best I can say for it.  I now reside south of Wisconsin in Chicago, Illinois.  Or as I call it, civilization.  My dad found Jesus when I was about 6, shortly after he left my mother, brother, and I for the secretary in his office, 11 years his junior.  For some reason, he came out of a pot and Shlitz-enduced haze long enough one evening to read about some huckster evangelist putting on a show in town.  He convinced his new bride, my stepmother to go with him to check it out.  That night they were convinced that Satan had lassoed their souls through the Marshall Tucker Band and Jethro Tull, and they’d better repent while there was still time.  Apparently they went home straight away and chucked out their entire LP collection, turning their lives and their musical choices over to Jesus.  For those under 30, I’ll explain what an LP was at the end of the book.    

            I found out of their conversion experience upon my next bi-weekly visit to Milwaukee with my brother.  This, it turns out, would also prove to be one of my brother’s last bi-weekly visits.  Ironically just as they’d found a new fantasy role-playing lifestyle, my brother, then a lost 12 year-old still reeling from our parents’ divorce, had found comfort in the scaly, leathery wings of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. They brought us to their latest apartment (as over what seems like a period of a couple years, they changed apartments numerous times) and my big brother was bursting to tell my dad about his new obsession.  See, Dad had always been a big fan of The Hobbit and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.  So much so he wore an old totally 70’s tee featuring Bilbo Baggins smoking a pipe every Saturday.  In fact he and his best friend back in Indiana used to call each other Bilbo and Frodo.  (And people are surprised I’m a little weird!)

So when my brother discovered this game featuring dragons, trolls, elves, and rangers, he was certain the old man would muss his hair and say “there’s my chip off the old block.”  Turns out, not so much.  Their anti-rock and roll revival revealed to dad and step-mom not only was secular rock the tool of the Devil, AD&D was a one-way express ticket to Hell and damnation, shat from Beelezebub’s bunghole!  And here I just thought it was lame.  When my brother Tom pulled out his beginners set to show it off, with this look on his face seeking pride and acceptance, they leapt back as if he revealed a cat he’d recently slain.  They immediately began to speak in tongues (don’t get me started on that bullshit) and rebuked him for bringing Satan’s mouse trap into their living room.  This was Friday night. 

As you can imagine, the rest of the weekend didn’t go so well.  My brother was crestfallen.  He thought he’d found a way for him and the old man to repair their bond and enjoy something fun together.  Instead he was vilified, and all weekend told why it was evil and made to feel ashamed.  When my brother got out of the car that Sunday afternoon it would be one of the last times he and dad would see each other for a long while.  A rift was torn that lasts right up to the very moment I type this, nearly 30 years later. 

This blog (started as a book) isn’t necessarily about the destruction of my father and brothers’ relationship, but I feel it is important for it to be known.  As it was only the beginning of what would become a pattern in my life, living among the Christians.

At some point in the mid-Eighties, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.  I find multiple things funny about that statement.  The first that Jesus was my personal savior.  Narcissism just seeps off that sentence.  The second is that I don’t even remember the exact date, or even how old I was when that momentous occasion occurred.  What I can tell you with crystal clear memories is how it happened.  Or more specifically, why it happened.  I wasn’t brought to Jesus, or as they like to say, led to him.  I was scared (and scared shitless) to Jesus.