‘What we had was unspoken: a richer bond, exponentially greater than the sum of our parts. … Arms around each other, we peered heavenward and wondered what it was all about.’
Like a Baptist Cassandra—nerves fraught, voice gravely—my mother proclaimed that the end of the world was nigh.
Aged 13, I was sitting in the passenger seat in our butter-colored Pontiac, parked outside the Red Food Store on Ringgold Road in Chattanooga. It was twilight. I was still sweaty and cleated from soccer practice. My mother had just strapped herself behind the steering wheel, her hair teased to a halo of Streisand-like curls. She’d flipped on the radio for the six o’ clock news. A skinny, pimpled bag boy ferried paper sacks onto the rear floorboard. A violet light played across the dashboard, easing in a somber, contemplative mood.
(Crown, April 2011)
The news did not seem dire. Egypt’s leader, Anwar Sadat, has agreed to travel to Jerusalem to address the Knesset, the newscaster intoned, an overture to Israel that could lead to a normalization of diplomatic relations.
My mother rapped her fist on the wheel. “Don’t you see, Sugar,” she said, her eyes wild. “He’s the Anti-Christ! Just as the Bible prophesied!”
“Who?” I asked, feeling a wave of dread coming off her.
“Sadat!” Her voice was a hushed scream. “What does Revelation say about the Anti-Christ? That he will be a so-called peacemaker? All of the other signs have been fulfilled.”
I tapped the heels of my cleats together, discomfited less by her vision of the End Times and more by the mania in her voice. As far as I was concerned, the world might end tomorrow, or it might not. The back door slammed shut as she twisted the key in the ignition. We coasted backward and then lurched into drive, buoyed by the torque of her reverie.
“I bet you if you lifted the lock of his hair you’d find ‘666’ etched into his forehead.”
“But Mom, I’ve seen Sadat on television—he’s bald.”
♦◊♦
In 1977, the world was crashing around my parents: hijackings, terrorist plots, witchcraft in high schools, free love, be-ins, bras torched by bands of harpies called “feminists.” A society taxed by threats at home and an erosion of trust in its elected leaders. A surge of talk about the End Times, pastors thundering about the imminent Rapture from their pulpits, books and television shows and films opining on the tribulations at hand, geared to the faithful who swarmed into churches in advance of the approaching apocalypse.
Like their fellow Baptists, they prayed and prepared. They attended study groups in the sanctuary. They dutifully read and re-read the Book of Revelations, attempting to discern its opaque prophesies. The establishment of Israel? Check. The European common market? Check. And the bit about Babylon? Clearly a reference to the Soviet Union. The only unfulfilled sign, as my mother scribbled in the margin of her Bible, was the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The Bible’s satin ribbon would flutter across the pew’s plush cushion as she made notes.
The faithful knew what to do. They devised rituals to keep their kids away from pool halls and pinball arcades. Brother Odie, the youth minister, furnished a dank room beneath the church gymnasium, fitting it out with donated couches, fabric ripped and leaking foam rubber, a bean bag chair and a vintage highboy table. A Coke machine stood along one wall. As a seventh-grader, I was allowed free use of the Youth Lounge. My friends and I would fidget on one of the couches while Renee Sanders, a junior, would pick a guitar, fretting the chords of “I Wish We’d All Been Ready,” the theme song from the classic Rapture film A Thief in the Night, which I’d seen as a child.
Life was filled with guns and war,
and everyone got trampled on the floor,
I wish we’d all been ready …
This song gave a creepy thrill at the end. We’d all croon the final chorus until, on cue, we’d break off in mid-syllable:
You’ve been left behind
You’ve been left behind
You’ve been left be—
We’d stare bug-eyed around the silent room, lost in the fantasy, as Renee would slowly lower the guitar into its case.
♦◊♦
The rituals were many, but few offered pleasure. The one notable exception was the annual summer Retreat, when the youth group, grades seven through 12, laden with knapsacks and sleeping bags, headed out of town en masse to a campground a couple of hours away.
Retreat followed the same daily pattern: after a breakfast of French toast in the rec center’s main room, we’d gather with our Bibles and Bic pens while Brother Odie droned on about some passage from Ephesians or Galatians. We’d mumble the obligatory answers to his questions—nothing but the grace of God, not my will but His be done—but our thoughts were careening in anticipation of the afternoon: water balloon fights; arts and crafts class; a 10-minute bus ride to the park’s spring-fed swimming pool, where Tad Swope would cannonball his 6′ 2″ frame off the high dive, spraying Barb Draper and Nikki Carson (known as “Boom Boom Barb” and “Foxy Nikki” to the pimpled set), as they primped on the pool’s edge, ravishing in their string bikinis.
Retreat was celebrated for another, titillating reason: for a whole week we were free. Our parents were 50 miles away, down a mountain’s crooked highway, stewing in the valley’s soupy air, their preoccupation with a dystopian future. We could sneak off to indulge in some rebellious behavior. Beau Clayton had smuggled a stash of nickel bags in the flannel lining of his sleeping bag; after lights-out he’d hole up a bathroom stall, rolling joints. Denny Ledford had brought his eight-track player and vinyl case with the complete oeuvres of Led Zeppelin and Lyrnyrd Skynyrd. A couple of eighth graders once kicked a soccer ball into an upper window, shattering it over one of the hapless Sanders girls and necessitating a tearful trip to the Pikeville clinic for stitches.
There were hints of darker, more enticing transgressions. The minister of music’s daughter, sinewy as a ballerina, taught us the Hustle. Cherie Fiske, the youth group’s bad girl, would get into trouble for showing up to breakfast in a halter top. Each evening at least one couple, usually Cherie and her latest conquest, would traipse from the woods, clothes disheveled. From the older guys you’d hear rumors: a sixer of Pabst hidden beneath the rec center’s foundation, a fifth of Jack Daniels stowed in someone’s foot locker. You’d be inclined to dismiss the rumors until you’d notice the guys at Bible Study the next morning, red-eyed, dozing off.
♦◊♦
I wasn’t sure what I thought about all these teenage libidos in close quarters. I wasn’t feeling their frenzy … yet. But I was bored with the same old, same old, as the lessons from that August—the Fall of Man, the wages of sin is death—flitted through my mind like a mountain vapor. Each evening after a dinner of baked chicken and potato salad, we’d sit cross-legged outside in the courtyard, grouped around the barbecue pit. We’d sing “Pass It On,” marshmallows browning on wire coat hangers:
You share His love with everyone
You want to pass it on …
The last afternoon we hiked to see Fall Creek Falls, one of the highest waterfalls in the eastern United States. The path tracked down into a gorge fleeced with kudzu and the whisper of rushing water. Single-file we descended beneath outcroppings of sandstone, fiddlehead ferns. One of the pious sophomore girls mentioned how God must have gently tapped his finger here, creating this beautiful place.
Close to the falls, the path grew boggy, stones slicked with mist. We clambered toward a jet of water, over 200 feet high, sluiced into shadows, dousing our Adidas shirts and Topsiders. The path horseshoed behind the falls. A couple of senior boys led us forward. Shivering, we yelled to each other over the roar but couldn’t quite communicate.
What we had, though, was unspoken: a richer bond, exponentially greater than the sum of our parts, a ragtag line of teenagers in damp T-shirts and cut-off shorts, shaggy sideburns and Charlie’s Angels haircuts. Arms around each other, we peered heavenward through a crystalline veil and wondered what it was all about.
♦◊♦
Now, 30 years later, my wife, the vegetarian Jew from California, is curious. “I’ve Netflixed Jesus Camp for the weekend,” she tells me on her afternoon check-in call from work. “I want to know more about your tribe.”
Whoa. In all our years together—the childless idyll spent in bars in the East Village, sipping vodka gimlets; the tortured odyssey of our son Owen’s first year, hospitalized for months after he’d been diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease; the birth of the twins, columns in the foundation of our mature married life—she’s never expressed an interest in the Baptists. But children—the sheer fact you’ve passed along your DNA to these beguiling creatures—can tickle awake those latent tribal cells. Their kicks and smells and babble can catapult you toward traditions you’d sworn to bury years ago.
“Like, what about my tribe?”
“Like, are they as meshugana as the rest of the country thinks?”
“Do you really think you’ll find out from a documentary?” I say.
“Well …” she says.
On Saturday afternoon, as a chilly rain drizzles the skeletal elms outside our apartment building in Brooklyn, she slips the DVD into the player and we huddle with our twins. A bean-bag chair cradles Owen, our 5-year-old, his hips and legs buttressed by pillows. Jesus Camp tells the story of a woman evangelical from Missouri and the camp she runs in North Dakota, called “Children On Fire,” where she trains a new generation of Scripture-quoting warriors determined to take back America for Christians. Some of the details strike a chord: the bus ride to a rustic setting, the good-natured joshing, adults hovering over the young flock, the desultory call-and-response of daily Bible study. But some of the scenes jump out at me as extreme: the speaking in tongues, a life-size cut-out of George W. Bush, a prayer service centered on abortion. The leaching away of joy.
The credits roll. My wife presses the remote and glares at me, eyebrows arched, an accusation.
“Um, well, it really wasn’t like that …” I stammer, my voice betraying a sudden defensiveness.
Or had it been like that?
In fact, my congregation had specifically rejected the notion of speaking in tongues. I’d gotten so much more out of it than a steely-eyed hatred of people who think differently than me, who might pray to another god. I’d gotten so much more than a near-feral desire to scare children into denouncing even other Protestant faiths as inauthentic.
But what, exactly, had I gotten out of it?
♦◊♦
Owen relies on various machines to monitor his breathing, the milk that drips, ounce by ounce, through a slit in the wall of his body, but there are no devices to scratch out my internal fluctuations, no pacemaker of the soul. Over the years I’ve gravitated toward a different kind of Jesus camp, the sugar rush of the city boosting my spirits the way the pulsing ribbon of Fall Creek Falls elevated them years ago. In a near ecstatic state I’ve given myself over to a Picasso retrospective at the Metropolitan museum; an Annie Proulx or Jhumpa Lahiri story in the New Yorker; Ellen’s Saturday brunches, ciabatta sliced and dipped in egg yolk and baked in the oven, served with French butter and raspberries from the farmers’ market at Grand Army Plaza. Ardent husband-and-wife debates on a gamut of topics: ornery doctors, brands of baby food, Park Slope restaurants, evil Republicans, Franzen or Diaz? Ten minutes of transcendence, spliced sporadically into each week, each month, each year. A faith in these things, however provisional.
But it’s not a clean trade-off.
Ellen lifts one of the twins from her lap, stands and follows him as he toddles into the kitchen. A moment later I hear her at the counter, humming a Jam song as she dices garlic for our dinner pasta.
I suck in a deep breath. All this endless talk about the End Times was the familiar background music of my adolescence, a jarring if faint melody that played in my head as I learned to spike a volleyball, to glide a razor across a stubbled chin, on those Retreats. Most of all, I’d discovered a sense of spiritual uplift, of oneness with others, by chance on a hike through a gorge, mist on the cheeks, a rainbow shimmering in the humid Tennessee air.
♦◊♦
I’m now the same age as my mother was that year Sadat flew to Jerusalem, when she stood rigid and frowning in the church parking lot as I stepped sunburnt and weary from the bus, home from Fall Creek Falls, literally a happy camper. I obsess, as she did, about my children’s safety, though without her religious certitude. And in many ways, the song’s the same: political scandals, the drum beat of war, a chronic dread itching beneath the skin. Most days, the cynic in me prevails. I shake my head when an acquaintance mentions Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” series, or when I hear someone on television preaching about the Second Coming.
But here’s the part I don’t tell my wife: I still feel that old foreboding. It surfaces in nightmares, the images serrated, sinister. An empty, menacing subway platform at night. A gang of thugs pursuing me through a charred, abandoned city. The whine of hijacked planes as they slam into sleek skyscrapers, a stream of flame and ash falling, falling toward me.
—Photo Monica’s Dad/Flickr