12

A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.

—ARNOLD H. GLASOW

Tyler did talk to me. Many of my friends knew that my father was an alcoholic, but Tyler knew details. I’d even told him about Dad and the intelligence services. I trusted Tyler with my life.

He called me one Saturday afternoon in January and asked if we could hang out. It was freezing, so sitting at our favorite spot on the docks at Riverside Yacht Club wasn’t an option. Tyler suggested we go to the barn where Young Life meetings were held. The people who owned it usually kept it locked, but sometimes they forgot. Tyler turned the knob and pushed on the door, and it opened. “Sweet,” he said to no one in particular.

While Tyler turned on the gas heater, I looked around for a place to sit. There was old furniture everywhere, so I randomly picked a green couch to sit on. It was riddled with holes, stuffing pouring from every gash in the upholstery. I perched myself on the arm, and Tyler sat on the opposite one so he could face me.

He took a deep breath. “Ian, you’re my best friend, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So I can shoot straight with you?”

I shrugged. “Sure,” I said, my stomach turning.

“You haven’t had it easy with your dad. I’ve seen how he can act when he’s loaded, so I know.”

Tyler was the only friend I would let come to my house when my father had been drinking. My father could be charming when friends were around. By my senior year, he even let us drink and smoke with him while he held court. But Tyler had seen the dark side once or twice, and it was hard to forget.

He took another deep breath and went on. “Even with all the crap you’ve had to deal with, you’ve gotten solid grades, played guitar in a cool band, starred in a few musicals, and held it together. That’s amazing.”

This wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d figured Tyler was going to ream me out for what happened the night of the Steve Miller concert. But instead of letting me have it, he was saying things no one had ever told me before. Not a soul had ever said to me that they knew what I was going through and admired me for not just holding on for dear life, but for making life work in spite of it.

“The night we went to the Steve Miller concert was the first time I watched you party when I wasn’t doing it with you, and I saw something . . .” He paused and looked away. I sensed that he was deciding whether to say what was on his mind or not. I wanted to tell him it was okay to tell me, but I was afraid.

He turned back and looked me squarely in the eye. “You turn into your dad when you’re drunk.”

My back straightened and I started to protest, but he held up his hand. “Let me finish,” he said. “You get the same creepy look in your eyes. You talk too much. You treat people like you’re more important than they are. You lie about things to make yourself look cool. You even hold your cigarettes and walk like him.” Tyler shook his head. “Ian, don’t become your dad. You’re way too good for that. ”

I stopped breathing. I stared at Tyler and he at me. A gust of January wind put its shoulder to the side of the barn and tried to push it down. Instead, it found a crack in a beam and settled for making it whistle. There was no other sound—until I bowed my head and cried.

There are acts of love so subtle and delicate that the sweep of their beauty goes unseen. I know of none more miraculous and brave than that of a seventeen-year-old boy coming to his friend’s side to take his tear-soaked face to his breast.

Three days later Tyler picked me up and took me to Young Life. It was dumber than I’d thought it would be. Despite my efforts to not look amused, the ridiculous stuff going on up front made me smile from time to time. I’d forgotten the goodness of laughter when it wasn’t tethered to cynicism.

What brought me back to Young Life every Tuesday were Mike and Derek. Mike was the full-time Young Life area director. Derek was a carpenter by day to support his work as a Young Life volunteer. Mike was the definition of stud. He was an All-American lacrosse player, good-looking, and hilarious. When he visited the student center, he’d be mobbed by throngs of kids like he was a rock star. Derek’s appeal was more subtle: his gentle humility and his ability to be fully present to whomever he was with drew kids to him right away. I couldn’t wait to see the two of them every week because they made me feel as if they couldn’t wait to see me. In a room filled with a hundred kids, one or both of them sought me out. It was intoxicating to have two older men see me—I mean really see me. If they’d just left out the talks about Jesus, Club would’ve been perfect.

Since my car was history, I had to rely on Derek or Tyler to get me to Club and back home. Some nights, Derek and I would sit in his car in my driveway and I would talk about my dad or about anything going on in my life. If empathy had a face, it was his. I wanted to tell him every story and every hurt feeling I’d ever had in one shot. Some nights he’d even drive me around until 10 p.m., when I knew my dad would be asleep. And then he would wait in the driveway with his lights off until he saw my bedroom light go on, the signal that all was well inside.

One Tuesday night, Derek and I arrived at my house to find my brother Phillip’s red Toyota Corolla in the driveway, its exhaust concealing his left taillight. These visits from Phillip were becoming a regular event. My mother would call home from wherever she happened to be on business and talk to my dad. If he sounded nutty or belligerent, she would call Phillip to drive over and intercept me before I went into the house. He would drop me off at Nanny’s, which meant a long walk to school the next day.

Nanny would be hospitable, but I would have to listen to her enumerate every one of my father’s sins and faults while she made up a bed for me on her inexpensive green plaid couch, which even with a sheet was scratchy and smelled like Scotchgard.

“You going to be all right?” Derek asked, eyeballing my brother’s Toyota.

“Yeah,” I said, reaching for my book bag in his backseat.

“You sure?” he said. “I can take you someplace else.”

I sighed. “Derek, this is business as usual,” I said, opening the door.

Derek leaned toward me as I stood beside his car. “Let’s talk tomorrow,” he said.

“Okay,” I answered and walked to my brother’s car.

My brother’s window was open. “What’s up?” I said, though I knew the answer.

“Same old. Get in and I’ll take you to Nanny’s,” he said, looking straight ahead. He wasn’t happy about being enlisted to pick me up.

I looked back at Derek, who was still waiting for me, and gave him a thumbs-up sign. He blinked his high beams at me and left.

I looked at the house. It was pitch-black. “How long ago did Mom call?” I asked.

He looked at the clock on his dashboard. “I don’t know, maybe two hours ago,” he said.

“Phillip, I can’t spend the night at Nanny’s again. The house looks quiet. I bet he’s gone to bed or he’s sleeping in his chair. Let me go in. If you see my bedroom light go on, it means everything’s cool.”

“Forget it,” Phillip said. “Mom wanted you—”

“I know. But you have no idea what a drag it is spending the night at Nanny’s.”

My brother was quiet. He ducked and leaned over his steering wheel to cast an eye up at the house. “Okay,” he said after a few seconds. “It’s your life.”

I crept into the house, closed the door, and listened. If I’d heard so much as a floorboard creak, I would have hightailed it to my brother’s car and gone to Nanny’s. But the house was still. In the hours since my mother had called, my father must have crashed—just as I’d suspected. I tiptoed up the stairs, avoiding the ones I knew creaked, went down the hallway, and slipped into my room. I turned on the light, opened my curtain, waved at my brother, and heard the sound of his tires crunching loose stone and gravel as he backed out, and finally the acceleration of his engine as he pulled away.

My room looked like JC Penney after a Black Friday stampede. I trudged through a debris field of dirty clothes to grab my toiletry kit. Halfway to my dresser it hit me that I couldn’t brush my teeth. The bathroom was down the hall, and the sound of running water might wake my father.

“This is so screwed up,” I said to myself. It was the little indignities that were hardest to forgive.

I took off my clothes, scootched between the sheets, and turned off the lamp on my bedside table. Before I was too comfortable, I remembered the hook-and-eye lock I had put on my door a few days earlier. It was more symbolic than anything else. I was seventeen; I wanted a space I could claim as my own. I got up and carefully negotiated my way to the door. It was dark, but I groped around the doorframe till I found the hook and placed it into the eye as stealthily as a bomb squad expert defusing a bomb.

Lying in bed, the afterglow of being at Young Life and my time with Derek returned. I hadn’t even taken offense when he questioned me about my continuing to party, or when he pressed me to come to a small-group Bible study for guys he led before school once a week. A trustworthy and predictable man valued and perhaps even treasured me, and that covered a multitude of sins.

I never had trouble falling asleep, and once enwrapped in slumber, it was hard to pull me from its arms. But the sound of someone battering my bedroom door ripped me awake. I sat up straight, begging my mind to awaken fully so I could get my bearings. I groped for them like a man with poor vision searches for his glasses. In between thumps, I heard the old brass knob on my door being yanked and shaken. It was a miracle that it held together, given its age and flimsiness.

“Do you have a lock on this door?” the attacker yelled. I couldn’t even be sure it was my father. It wasn’t his voice. It was someone or something I didn’t recognize.

“Answer me! Do you have a lock on this door?” he roared. Now he was kicking the bottom of the door.

On the other side of the door lay uncertainty. I now knew it was my father, but also not my father. It was a menacing variant. Nothing in me was willing to go toward the door.

“It’s just a latch!” I yelled. “A stupid latch.” My shout left a burning patch on the wall of my dry throat.

“In my house? You put a lock on a door in my house!?”

“Dad, I’ll take it off in the morning,” I pleaded.

There was a final blow, and the molding around the door cracked with a sound like a gunshot. The small eye I’d screwed into the wood shot across the room. The door flew open. I threw myself back into the space between the bed and the wall. “Get out!” I yelled.

He said nothing. Guided by the hall light now dimly illuminating my room through the open door, he stormed my bed and loomed over me and grabbed my shoulder with one hand. Then he alternately punched me with a closed fist or thrashed me with an open hand. I was tucked far enough away into the corner that he couldn’t land a blow to my head or face, but everything else was fair game. I blindly tried to block the attack with my hands and arms while turning my face toward the corner in the wall to protect it. If he said anything, I don’t remember it. I only recall the noise of his labored breathing, interrupted by staccato grunts that accompanied each strike of his hand. When it was over, he turned and left the room, slamming my door behind him. He said nothing on his way out. He’d said what he’d come to say; anything else would be editorial.

How long I remained balled up in the corner next to my bed, I don’t know. Like a sonar man listens for the ping of an enemy sub, I strained to hear the possible sound of returning footsteps. My stomach ached as if I’d performed a thousand situps. My sheets were damp from sweat, but I was too chilled to take them off.

At first my heart was pounding in terror and shock. But eventually, with time, a warm calm crept over me. I was no longer listening for approaching footsteps. It was the sound of wind ruffling the top of the giant oak on our front yard that captured my attention. Now and then its leafy branches passed in front of the streetlight that stood across the road. The dappling light trembled on my bedroom wall. I listened to the wind and gazed at the light show until I surrendered to their invitation to sleep.

In the early 1970s, a religious revival broke out at a small Episcopal church in the hyper-affluent community of Darien, Connecticut.

Even God was surprised.

Lots of kids from Young Life were regulars at the Sunday evening service at St. Paul’s, and Tyler called one Sunday afternoon to see if I wanted to join them. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t been inside a church in a long time and didn’t know if I ever wanted to again. Derek had, a bunch of times, “shared the gospel” and asked if I wanted to pray to receive Jesus into my heart. I had finally asked him to stop. I liked him, I liked Club, but I didn’t like Jesus.

With the exception of Tyler, I knew that some of the other Young Life kids didn’t think of me as a friend as much as a challenging evangelism project. They knew getting me to become a born-again Christian would be like the CIA successfully recruiting Soviet Premier Brezhnev to work as a double agent for our side.

Going to Young Life hadn’t stopped me from partying. Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch was my beverage of choice. When I arrived at a big party, kids would chant, “Red! Red! Red!” until I pulled a bottle of it out of a bag and held it high in the air like it was the Stanley Cup trophy. There were other drinks I liked more, but Johnnie Walker had the cool, Striding Man logo that gave off an air of sophistication. Only in Greenwich, Connecticut, could a seventeen-year-old build his social brand around drinking expensive whiskey, but that’s what I’d done. If I became a Christian, it would be a big win for the Jesus camp.

You’d think that being treated like a project versus just one of the crowd would’ve bummed me out, but it didn’t. I enjoyed the attention my heathen celebrity afforded me, but I knew it wouldn’t last long. I wasn’t a kid who had read a Sartre novel in Honors English and decided it would be hip to become an atheist. I believed that God had betrayed me, that our estrangement was his fault. As a child I’d loved God not because I’d wanted things from him; I’d loved him just for who he was. My affection was disinterested. Despite that unqualified love, he’d abandoned me. It was Jesus who deserved to hear the cock crow three times, not me.

“Now, Ian, this might be different for you,” Tyler said, draping his arm around my shoulder as we walked through the parking lot. Everywhere I looked there were packs of people speed-walking toward the church. I guessed they were hoping to get the last seat or maybe a space along the sanctuary wall to lean against. There were lines of cars still coming up and down the street, policemen directing traffic with lit yellow batons. There were even tour buses filled with people who’d traveled from hours away to see “the miracle in Darien.”

“What do you mean different?” I asked.

A girl named Melissa I’d met earlier that night came alongside me and threaded her arm through mine, bookending me between Tyler and herself. I liked how outgoing she was. “The worship is hard to describe,” she said. “You just have to . . . go with it.”

Melissa looked like Linda Blair, the teenage actor from the film The Exorcist. Despite projectile vomiting and making her head do 360s in the movie, Linda Blair was incredibly hot. I would’ve followed Melissa into the church if she’d said the service involved sacrificing puppies while singing “Amazing Grace.”

We weren’t in the foyer more than a minute before it was clear that we would not make it into the sanctuary. It was wall-to-wall people. In the distance I could hear the sound of a worship band and people singing. But Tyler, Melissa, and the two other kids with us were not to be thwarted. They were determined to get me into that church to hear Terry Fullam and to experience for myself what they’d been talking about. Tyler was built like a refrigerator, so he was able to clear a path for us by elbowing and shoving his way through the crowd, saying, “Coming through, praise the Lord.”

The service had already started when we got into the sanctuary. I was there all of five minutes before I realized that Tyler’s explanation about this experience being different was grossly understated. Episcopalians pride themselves on restraint and single-digit golf handicaps. They don’t jump, sing, and wave their hands over their heads unless they’re being electrocuted or thrown from a plane. Neither do Episcopalians frolic around sanctuaries, brandishing on raised poles big banners with tongues of fire and doves embroidered on them. Their services don’t include generously proportioned middle-aged women leaping like impalas down the aisles, trailing colored streamers in their wake (“dancing in the Spirit,” as Tyler called it). I saw investment bankers speaking in tongues and women dressed in boiled wool suits who resembled Barbara Bush being “slain in the Spirit.” It looked to me like a mob of well-sugared five-year-olds dancing the hokey-pokey, only less organized.

When Father Fullam got up to speak, the place went quiet. I’d expected a slick and handsome priest, but Father Fullam looked like one of the physics teachers at Greenwich High, not a man some people had traveled hours to hear. He was slightly overweight and wore thick glasses but spoke with the confidence and eloquence of the Harvard-educated, former college philosophy professor he was. He wasn’t halfway through his first sentence before I knew he was special. Knowing nothing about the Bible, I didn’t understand half of what he said, but I could tell the guy packed a big gun intellectually. At St. Mary’s, half the men snuck outside to smoke during the homily while kids and moms stayed behind to make sure old people didn’t keel over and hit their heads on the marble floor when the colorless drone of the priest’s voice lulled them to sleep. The music at St. Paul’s won me over as well. I’d never been in a church where people sang with so much enthusiasm. Catholics don’t sing—we murmur, then look surprised if a melody emerges.

All was well until Father Fullam invited people who felt moved to stand and give brief “testimonies.” Tyler leaned over and explained to me that giving a testimony meant sharing what God had done in your life, not confessing prosecutable crimes. Person after person stood and spoke about physical healings, being given a new gift of the Spirit, and announcing how members of their families had dedicated their lives to Christ that week. People cried, clapped, or whispered prayers of thanks with heads bowed and eyes closed. I think these testimonies were intended to encourage the faithful and to inspire unbelievers to give their lives to Jesus. But I thought I’d gag if I had to hear one more story of how Jesus answered someone’s prayers. I wanted to jump to my feet and say, “Hi, everyone. My name is Ian. When I was a boy I loved Jesus, but I begged him to help me a million times and he never showed up. I prayed that my father would stop drinking, but that didn’t happen either. If you were God and a kid asked you for that, wouldn’t you give it to him? So you can sing another chorus of ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ but you’re complete morons if you think it’s true.”

I breathed a sigh of relief when the testimonies were finished. But then Father Fullam donned his chasuble and went behind the altar to begin the liturgy for the Eucharist. I put my hands on the pew in front of me and rested my forehead on them.

“You all right?” Tyler whispered in my ear.

I nodded yes without lifting my head, but something was wrong. Some gland in my body had gone berserk and was shooting adrenaline into my bloodstream. My heart was beating so hard and uncontrollably it hurt my ribs. I couldn’t get enough oxygen to satisfy my lungs. It felt like a dry-cleaner bag had been pulled tight across my face. Was I having a heart attack? Losing my mind? Could this be God’s punishment for blasphemy and my insolence? I waited it out as long as I could, but when the people in my pew pulled down their kneelers and knelt, it was time to make a run for it.

Just as I was about to jump onto the vacant pew and sprint for the door, the panic engulfing me distanced itself and became unimportant. My interest was drawn to the altar where Father Fullam was elevating the Eucharist. He gazed upward at it, then broke the Host in half, saying, “Alleluia. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” Then he held the silver paten filled with consecrated Hosts at eye level while an assisting priest held the matching chalice at the same height. “The gifts of God for the people of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving.”

I closed my eyes and saw a fawn.

The fawn looked at me, head cocked to the side, ears twitching. When he turned and leaped through the undergrowth, his hoof snapped a branch. I saw a small boy standing on a kneeler, watching his family walking down the nave to take Communion, yearning to join them. He danced around a pillar of fire, set up a Communion altar in the woods, and traced the outlines of a water stain on his bedroom ceiling with his index finger.

These visions weren’t moving so much as curious. I remembered my mother’s Brownie Hawkeye. Finally, memories were tumbling out.

But what came next was a voice, not a vision: “Forgive me, Ian,” it said.

The voice was so close and real that I raised my head and looked to either side.

“I’m sorry, Ian. Please forgive me,” I heard the voice repeat.

“Help me, I can’t,” I whispered.

“Will you pardon me, Ian?” the voice repeated.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then we are both forgiven,” the voice replied.

A giant knot made of thick ship’s rope, whose twists had become so complicated that I’d lost hope of ever disentangling it, loosened to the point that I could now see light coming through the gaps. It did not unravel, but it relaxed enough that I believed the work of untying it could now begin.

I knelt beside Tyler, my forehead still resting on the back of my hands on the pew in front of me.

“Are you going up?” Tyler said.

I looked to my left. He and ten other people were waiting for me to stand and get into the line for Communion, or at least move out of their way so they could. I sat back as they squeezed by. Tyler waited at the end of the pew to let the other people from our pew go ahead of him. He was waiting for me.

“Are you coming?” he asked again.

I stood and edged into the aisle to join the line of all the other knotted hearts limping toward the bread of new and unending life.

For many years I puzzled over whose voice I’d heard apologizing to me at that Communion service at St. Paul’s. Was it an imagined conversation between my father and me? An apology I was making to myself? Or did I dare believe what I suspected— that it was Jesus? This was a theological impossibility, wasn’t it? What could a perfect God have to apologize for? I asked a few PhDs what they thought, and I was given a wide range of eloquent opinions, but it was Miss Annie who solved the mystery.

Miss Annie was an elderly black woman we’d met at a church we attended in Denver, where I was in seminary. During services, her large lap was a revolving rest stop for no fewer than three children at a time. Miss Annie and I were standing at a grill, flipping burgers and cooking chicken at an all-church barbecue, when I told her about that night at St. Paul’s.

“Miss Annie, is it wrong for me to believe it was Jesus who asked my forgiveness?” I asked her.

She frowned and shook her head, “Lord, what do they teach you at that school?” she said. Then she faced me head-on. “Did God humble himself by becoming a man?” she asked, every word spoken more loudly than the one before.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I’d never used the word ma’am before, but it seemed an excellent time to start.

“Did he humble himself by dying on the cross to show us how much he loved us?” she asked, waving her spatula at me.

My eyes widened and I nodded, yes.

Miss Annie’s body relaxed, and she put her hand on her hip. “So why wouldn’t Jesus humble himself and tell a boy he was sorry for letting him down if he knew it would heal his heart?” she asked.

“But if Jesus is perfect—”

Miss Annie ambled the five or six feet that separated us and took my hand. “Son,” she said, rubbing my knuckles with her thumb, “love always stoops.”