When I was 17 I used to date this Mormon broad. It went fine for awhile. Her father was some type of brain doctor and she rode horses in competitions and had walls covered with long blue ribbons and enormous trophies falling off every surface in her room. I never really looked at what the trophies said but it seems like if you’re a 17 year old girl and you ride horses at shows, you end up getting some type of ribbon or statue or accolade. Just getting up on that animal and looking good in those riding britches is some type of miracle. She used to bomb around in an old Toyota, and I don’t know if we ever learned anything from each other. The relationship was ultimately terminated under pretense of irreconcilable religious differences though looking back it may have been doomed on more general grounds.
Seventeen was an odd year for me in the house of Lar. It was a year of self-disciplined religion. I read my Bible daily and talked to God like we went to kindergarten together back in the 80’s. I was the junior class president at Mount Anthony Union. The homecoming crown was collecting dust in my closet, and I was playing varsity basketball. I talked to God about all these things. It was a tough year physically though, I began to get splitting, monster truck migraine headaches around that time, which usually left me in a dark room wishing for death for 8 hours or so, generally building in violent agony to a spine-snapping climax of vomiting stomach bile 10 or 15 times into a trashcan by my bed. I also developed a strange circulation problem where my hands would turn ghost white and grow numb in 40 degree weather. It could’ve been bad luck, but looking back I’d sooner attribute it to my manic anorexia at the time. A strange thing, that. at 6′6" I weighed 165 pounds and thought of it as ‘progress.’ Why not 160, I thought, it might be possible if I could get a handle on my ‘diet.’ Watch out for 170 though, or you’ll start looking a little too…………American.
I talked to God about my weight ambitions too. After school I stumbled and gasped through a 2 hour basketball practice on a bag of broccoli, and then went home and sank into the chair and drank a cup of tea (no milk no sugar) and said, God, I’m so tired and weak and hungry and it’s making me dizzy, but please help me out with the discipline to not eat. I’m trying to maintain a healthy weight here Christ. And he uh………’answered’ that prayer too.
I got what I wanted when I was 17. It was midnight, and I was on my knees talking to God in the garden of virtue and self-destruction. Seventeen was an odd year, and maybe a good one. The last year before the world came and the ignorance of youth crumbled into the rubble of general manic confusion. And in the years between then and yesterday I been around the planet and seen the the world’s biggest buddha and sat in the temple and tried to feel something but got too distracted worrying about maintaining a position of sufficient respect (Never point your toes at the buddha). I saw Westminster and stood at the tombs of kings and tried to feel something but the dodgy old British men shadowing me to make sure my camera stayed in the bag sort of killed the God buzz. I saw one guy snapping clandestine shots of a tomb in some dim annex. Good luck in Hell, I thought.
Now it’s autumn in New York City, mostly overcast in Sheepshead Bay. The hookah coals are on a slow burn to ash and the air smells of sweet apples. Nate just left for work and the place is mostly quiet. I’ve been reading this latest exchange between Lar and Andy and Nick and I’ve been trying to make some sense what it means to be a Christian.
I met a guy named Eric who drives a problematic purple Vespa, and he was a bit of a lighthouse. He’s an older fellow, slim, maybe around 60 or so, with a full white beard and a reassuring sort of soul sparkle. Whenever a Vespa breaks down some angry beaver calls the shop and I have to fire up the van and go pick it up. I’ve had to pick up old Eric’s rig at least three times and the hell of it is, it’s a brand new rig, 2006 model, and he only bought it a few months ago and the thing breaks down all over the place. So by the third time I felt real bad about it, and it was getting sort of awkward to show up week after week to bring his maimed animal back to the shop, so I’d offer him a ride in the van to wherever he was going, and we got to talking, and I asked him what he did for a living. Well, he said, I’m an ordained minister, and I also am a psychologist. It took me off guard, but explained a lot of things too. I told him that it all made more sense now, because it would take a man of God to not drive that thing into the Hudson and then wave a middle finger as it bubbled to the bottom. Eric’s paradigm helped a little in understanding what it means to live like a Christian.
It seems Lar comes to the table with a deep evangelical Christianity and an academic interest in anything other than that. Andy and Nick come with a hardened atheism, and an academic interest in understanding the Christian mind. But the academic facade has long blown away, and now it seems we have Lar unapologetically trying to win souls for Christ through the long arm of the internet, and Andy and Nick bent on proving to Lar that God is man’s invented crutch. After both sides have made all their points, where else is there to go?
What does it mean when the untimely tragic death of a man will turn a mother towards God and make a cousin forsake God entirely?
I am Joe C. I don’t understand God and I don’t understand women. All I know is if you twist the throttle you move towards some things and away from others, and if I met Christ at a bar I’d buy him a wine and ask, how’s your father. Also, I cannot stop listening to Purple Rain.
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