King of the Mild Frontier (8 page)

My final Red Brick blowout occurred when I was in
junior high school, about a month before I bailed out for good and threw in with the Episcopalians because a certain second baseman who hadn't moved off base to stroke my hair when I was flat on my back next to home plate with my tooth in the bat, bleeding to death, started playing the piano for them.

It was time to fish or cut bait on getting baptized at the Red Brick Church. I'd been avoiding it for what seemed to me a very good reason. Get baptized and be cleansed of your sins. I wanted my money's worth, and the more sins I could get cleansed with one dip, the better I'd feel. Years before, my brother had been tricked into believing he wouldn't
want
to sin after being dunked, and came on a search-and-destroy mission early in the morning on the day of his baptism, intending to whack me around one more time before piety bound his hands. I spent more than three hours hiding in the rafters of the garage and in the fruit-and-preserves pantry in our basement listening for his footsteps. (That afternoon my mother and I accompanied him and the others to Arling Hot Springs for the baptism. Arling was a natural hot springs about seven miles out of town, situated between two large cattle ranches. The cows from both ranches grazed around the hot springs, and often in summertime you had to clear the cowpatties from the surface to
get a good swim. When the Reverend Pardee had covered my brother's face with the holy cloth and immersed him, the vacuum created in the water sucked a perfect face-sized patty right over the spot where his head disappeared beneath the surface, and for one quick moment before Pardee cleared it away, I thought I got a vision of the true face of my brother. That remains, to this day, the best baptism I've ever witnessed.)

At any rate, I was still sneaking into my mother's purse on a daily basis to steal change for candy on the way to school, as well as snagging a couple of free candy bars each time I filled the candy machine at my dad's service station, and baptism was the safety net I had in place to clear me of my sins. I was also cussing like a banned-book writer most of the time and having no luck at my attempts to quit. I wanted all that under control before my baptism, and I didn't feel anywhere close. I already knew that the brain wasn't as easily rinsed off as the body, because it wasn't three hours after my brother's baptism that he'd been stalking me like the pre-Freddy Krueger prototype he was.

“That simply isn't Christian thinking,” Reverend Hannaman said. Reverend Hannaman was the church's new preacher. “You're in junior high school now; most of your friends have already found Jesus. You simply don't manipulate
the Lord so you can commit the optimum number of sins. You think He doesn't see what you're doing?”

“Even if He does,” I said, “He has to go by the rules He made.”

Hannaman was a tall, dark man, and though he wasn't imposing in the traditional sense, he had dark down. He looked even darker now. “Chris, this is not a game. This is life, and it is not to be blasphemed.”

What I wish I'd known then, because I'd have said it, is this: “Oh, yes, it is, Mr. Hannaman. It's very much a game—and a good one—and the people who don't know the rules eat a lot of dark brown smelly stuff.”

So, with the pressure on, I took the bull by the horns and ran for the Episcopalian church like the very devil was chasing me.

Reverend Tate put me directly into confirmation classes. He thought my observation of Jonah's protective gear was funny, and he assured me that dark skin was certainly not the mark of Cain. He was visibly angry at Mr. Robinson for saying so and warned me that people's interpretation of the Bible could be downright dangerous. I brought up several other questions that had come up over the years, such as what kind of God would pile the bad news up on a guy like Job just to see if he'd crack, or trick a guy like Abraham into
thinking he had to make a human sacrifice of his own son just to see if he'd do it.

Reverend Tate stayed right with me. He said, “Chris, what was your all-time favorite children's book?”

I said
Horton Hatches the Egg.

He said, “What was it about?”

I said it was about an elephant that took over hatching an egg for a lazy bird named Mayzie that didn't have the patience to sit there until the egg hatched.

“Was there a lesson?”

I said the lesson came at the bottom of almost every page. He meant what he said and said what he meant—and was one hundred percent faithful.

“And was Horton rewarded for his faithfulness?”

He was. The animal that came out of the egg was a tiny elephant with wings.

“Do you believe an elephant could hatch an egg?”

Of course I didn't.

“But the value is still in the story, right?”

I said, right.

“The important thing about the Bible is the message,” Reverend Tate told me. “Some people believe every story is true; other people believe some and don't believe others. There are those who believe the entire book is meant to get
a message across, that asking whether this thing or that thing really happened is of no consequence. It's just one of those things you'll have to decide.”

He went on to tell me that finding my spirituality was a lifelong task, that there was no number of stories I was required to believe, that there was a difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament, but even so, it was my job to discover what I
really
believed. I could be confirmed and baptized in his church for simply making the attempt to discover that about myself. And nobody expected me to be perfect after my baptism. Life was a learning process, and we learned by making mistakes. The baptism didn't have to take place in a dung-filled hot springs, but rather right there in church, and I didn't have to really get wet. That Paula Whitson would be playing the piano that day sealed the deal.

Back in fifth grade, to kill time waiting for our parents to come set up our Christmas party, our teacher told us to write down all the words we could find from the letters in “Merry Christmas.” The first word I saw was Chris and the second was Christ, and I put them down in that order. She was walking up one aisle and down the other, making sure we were on task. She stopped at my desk, pointed to my first two words, and told me to reverse their order. When I
balked, she told the class I thought I was more important than Christ. I was embarrassed and humiliated for being “too big for my britches,” and all in all it turned out to be a pretty shitty Christmas party. Forty-five years later I named a character in
Whale Talk
Chris just so I could retell that moment in fiction, because what I didn't consider then, but wholly believe now, was that Jesus would have been more than happy to let me put my name ahead of His,
particularly
if it would have made me feel big enough to fill my britches.

Anyone who reads my stories today knows I often throw a religious theme into the conflict; in a significant way in stories like
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes
and
Running Loose,
and through smart-ass side comments by characters in most of the others, so it is not surprising that students around the country often ask if I'm a Christian. I'm not, and it isn't because a few semiliterate mentors in my history were unable to explain Bible stories to me. Most of the reasons I won't go into here, but I will say it started when I realized the God who allowed me to get into my bed to converse with Him rather than kneel on the cold hardwood floor was a lot closer to the God in whose image I was supposed to be created than the one the Red Brick Church tried to use to frighten me into good behavior. The scientist in me refuses to let me believe that biology was altered for a brief moment
a little over two thousand years ago to make way for a virgin birth. I think Jesus would have laughed at that notion (it wasn't His, by the way), so while I have no problem believing He was one wise and spiritually connected fellow and no problem capitalizing His pronoun, I don't subscribe to many of the stories and thoughts that have sprung up around Him.

As a child abuse and neglect therapist I do battle daily with Christians enamored of the Old Testament phrase “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” No matter how far I stretch my imagination, it does not stretch far enough to include the image of a cool dude like Jesus taking a rod to a kid. I believe there was a big bang and that because of that we are all connected into infinity, and I know very little having to do with human beings that doesn't also have to do with connection. We want to be noticed, we want to be good enough, we want friends, and we want to be loved. We want our place to stand. I believe that spiritual men and women throughout history felt and feel these things at some core level, and the statement that we are created in the image of God is a
Duh!
because we are products of the universal flow of energy emanating from that bang. And that's a lot of bang for our buck. I say all that because when I answer no to the question “Are you a Christian?” there is
always a certain sense of discomfort in the room, because it's nearly always a Christian who asks.

I look back to those nights in my bed, praying/talking with an intimate God who understood what I meant even when I couldn't articulate it; a God interested in my life and willing to let me have my dreams, willing to let me fail, patient enough to give me as many tries as it took to find a graceful way through all the scary stuff, a God eager and willing to forgive me when I couldn't find that grace.

Recently in an interview I was asked if I thought life is fair. Because the lives of many of my characters are so hard, the interviewer expected me to say that life is certainly and obviously not fair. But life is exactly fair. It has order and randomness and it moves through the universe without prejudice or passion.
People
aren't always fair, and it seems the less we know the more unfair we are, but I think that a big part of the business of religion should be to understand that
nothing
is fairer than life and that mysterious ways are mostly mysterious because of our ignorance.

I MENTIONED BEFORE THAT PERTY GIRLS
were my downfall, and at the onset of puberty, which didn't diminish that truth one bit, I focused in on Paula Whitson (good bat, great field) like a kid setting fire to an ant with a magnifying glass. I began finding things on the floor; pencils or pens, notebooks, money, and handing them to her saying I thought she had dropped them. She would let me know the article wasn't hers, smile politely, and say thanks anyway, probably wondering if she should run down to the county courthouse at lunchtime to swear out the early sixties version of a restraining order. On summer evenings
her parents would take an after-dinner drive south toward Clear Creek Station and Smith's Ferry. To get to those exotic resort spots you had to pass the Crutchers' well-manicured lawn on your way out of town, and on each and every one of those evenings, between six-thirty and eight, on the off chance that Paula might be with them, I could be found on my front lawn, very close to Main Street, pretending to do push-ups and sit-ups in preparation for the upcoming football season, raking the lawn, brushing our dog, or performing some other activity you couldn't normally get me to do without a branding iron.

If for some reason her parents decided not to take that trip, I was held a prisoner of anticipation in my front yard until the sun settled atop West Mountain, growing goose bumps the size I wished for my biceps. The number of times a day a phantom crisis required me to rush past her house on some mission of mercy—on my feet in the early days and, after my fourteenth birthday, in my dad's '41 gray Chevy pickup—would make a lie of the laws of probability even if she had lived next door to an ER. That behavior today might well fall under stalker laws. Paula Whitson had plenty of chances to see me in action, but she must not have possessed the foresight to predict that my late-night talks with my mother about her continuing battle with alcohol had turned
me into the go-to guy for dumping your troubles, because whatever there might have been about Paula Whitson that needed fixed, she wasn't bringing it to
this
Mr. Goodwrench.

About two months before the high-school White Christmas Ball during my sophomore year, my brother finally got tired of listening to me declaring my intentions and undying love for Paula, always followed by no action. A lot of guys wanted to take her out, he said while he held me on the couch in a headlock (and my sister ran around in circles yelling, “Lever has a girlfriend, Lever has a girlfriend”), but none of them would even be thinking about the White Christmas Ball yet. (Strategywise it was the romantic equivalent of fast breaking when your team is twenty points ahead with less than two minutes to go.) Why didn't I go in there and call her and get a date and then shut the hell up?

“I can't,” I said. “What if she answered?”

“You would ask her to the dance,” he said.

The very thought tangled my wiring.

“Go in there and call her,” he said, “or I'm going to call her for you.”

“Yeah, right. What would you say?”

“I'd say, ‘Paula, this is John Crutcher. If you'll go to the White Christmas Ball with my brother, I'll put your first child through college.”

“Funny. You're not going to call her.”

He walked toward the phone.

My brother was not someone you wanted to dare. “Wait!” I said. “Okay, I'll do it. Just give me a minute.”

He looked at his watch and started counting seconds.

The telephone was mounted on the wall just around the corner from the door leading to the basement. I stared at it. It looked unusable.

“You or me,” my brother said. “Before we go to bed tonight, this is going to be done.”

“Okay, tell you what. I'll dial all the numbers but the last one, then I'll stretch the cord around the corner into the basement stairway and close the door. When I yell, you dial the last number.” It was the closest I could get to calling from under the covers.

My brother said, “Esus.”

“Come on. It's the only way I can do this.”

He shook his head. “Okay, you little dork. I'll do anything to get this over with.”

I dialed the first numbers, then disappeared into the stairwell. I hyperventilated. I prayed. What if she said no? What if she said
yes?

From the other side of the door, “Are you ready?”

Another deep breath.

“I'm dialing.”

I heard the dialer whiz, kicked the door open, and slammed down the receiver.
“Man,
you gotta wait till I say ‘Dial.'”

“Shit, I thought you fell asleep down there.”

“I was just getting ready.”

“Well, get ready quicker this time. I've got a homework date.”

We went through the ritual three more times until John dialed the last number and held the door shut. The first words Paula's dad heard when he picked up the handset were, “You son-of-a-bitch, lemme outta here!”

“Is that you, Chris Crutcher?”

“Uh, yeah. Uh, Mr. Whit—I mean, Les, is Paula there?”

“She has a cheerleaders' meeting at school. She'll be back about nine thirty. I'll tell her you called.”

“Okay.” I gritted my teeth. If she knows I called, she'll expect me to call back. “That would be great.”

He hung up and I pushed on the door, but my brother was still leaning against it.

“Let me out. She isn't home.”

“Liar.”

I put the handset against the door and let him hear that her father had hung up, and he backed away.

We went through the entire procedure again from nine-thirty to about ten-fifteen. Paula answered the phone and said sure, she'd love to go with me, and was I calling from down in a well somewhere?

I said nope, just right here in the kitchen, then tried to find out what she'd be wearing because I wanted to get her a really nice corsage and I'd be there right on time as soon as we figured out what right on time was and she didn't have to worry about me honking because I'd come right to the door and she said, “Uh, it's two months away, we could talk about it at school.”

I said okay, but in fact she would be very lucky (or unlucky, depending on your perspective) to see me at school for the next two months, because my mother would regale her mother with every detail of my suave phone manner on this night, and my brother would probably write an article for the school newspaper about what a hopeless dork his adopted brother was.

What happened next had to be the slow act of an angry God who punishes you for things you haven't even done yet, because unbeknownst to me there began growing, deep inside my brain stem, the Pimple That Would Be Stotan. This was not some molehill, or some prevolcanic rise, or even a small-to-medium Appalachian peak. This pimple
would have its own spread in
National Geographic.
It was snow capped. It had climbing space for Sherpas.

And it reached its maximum height and breadth two days before the White Christmas Ball.

But I was lucky in those days to be intimately acquainted with one Ron Boyd, quarterback, point guard, and first-rate dermatologist who would later be the hand behind the power that made me spit my teeth out in front of Gerry Greene, who had a quick remedy for my leprous condition.

“Coke bottle treatment,” he said.

“What do you want me to do, beat it to death?”

He looked more closely at the throbbing pustule. “You'd need something a lot bigger than a Coke bottle to kill that thing,” he said. He rolled up his pant leg, pointing to a slight discoloration on his calf. “Big ol' ass boil on here just two days ago,” he said, and he outlined the prescribed treatment.

That night as my parents lay sleeping, dreaming of their three children safe in their beds, I crept into the kitchen, quietly dropped a Coke bottle into a water-filled pan on the stove, and placed a wet washrag into the freezer. When the water came to a rolling boil and the rag was nearly stiff, I lifted the bottle out with tongs, wrapped it in the freezing washrag, and placed the mouth of the bottle over the mountainous zit, the idea being that as the air inside the bottle
cooled and contracted, it would suck the core of the Vesuvian blemish,
whappo!,
into the bottle, rendering it harmless.

It did not come off as advertised.

As the air inside the bottle cooled and contracted, my forehead grew tighter and tighter. My eyes bulged. The pimple didn't pop, simply extended farther and farther into the bottleneck.
It wasn't working!
I pulled hard on the bottle to remove it, but it was sucking my face off my head. Man, I am going to the White Christmas Ball wearing a Coke bottle on my forehead! With that horrifying fate in mind, I gripped the bottle with both hands, gritted my teeth, and yanked. It popped free with the sound of two anteaters kissing in an echo chamber. Tremendous relief washed over me as I sank to the kitchen floor. Given the alternative, I was more than happy to escort the throbbing pustule to the Christmas dance. But later, when I gazed into the bathroom mirror, I changed my mind. The bottle had left a deep purple ring around the grossly offending blemish, forming a perfect three-dimensional bull's-eye right in the middle of my head.

Paula didn't say much when I showed up at her door in my brown blazer, slacks, white socks, and a stocking cap pulled low on my head, but later, as we moved across the dimly lit dance floor beneath fake cotton clouds and dangling
paper snowflakes, two jerky steps forward, one jerky step back, at arm's length, she peered deeply into my eyes. “Nice of you to take off the hat,” she said; then, looking closer, “Is that a corn plaster on your forehead?”

“Yeah,” I said in my best John Wayne. “I was showing some of the freshman football players how to do a head spear in P.E. the other day and drove a loose rivet in the helmet I was using into my forehead. It's no big thing.”

“That must have hurt,” she said. “It got you right on that monstrous pimple.”

It's hard to say whether it was the pimple or my primitive social graces (singing Christmas carols while gargling punch may have put her off), but when the Sadie Hawkins dance rolled around that next February, Paula Whitson treated herself to a date with a guy from her own class, both scholastically and maturationally. The fact that he was a
good-looking
guy, as well as a jock, may have had something to do with the fact that I went home and sailed my forty-five single of “Hey, Paula” by one-hit wonders Paul and Paula (a song, I believed up until I discovered she had gone elsewhere for companionship to the Sadie Hawkins dance, that was recorded with me in mind) into the vacant lot across the yard from my bedroom window.

 

My further actions in response to all that nearly got me thrown out of school and put off my chances of getting close to something soft and warm until after high-school graduation.

If the really popular girls couldn't see what a nice guy they were getting in me, or if they, in fact,
didn't want a nice guy,
which a number of astonishingly socially conscious pump jockeys who worked at my dad's service station were quick to tell me, maybe they liked being treated rough. At least that is the thinking that led me to place probably the most magnificent scab cultivated to that date in our hemisphere on Bonnie Heavrin's desk.

It was early spring of my sophomore year, only weeks after I had driven with a few select friends to the McCall Bowling Alley on the night of the Sadie Hawkins dance. (The selection of those friends was done by the girls of Cascade, Idaho, not asking them to the dance.) At any rate, basketball season was finished and preseason workouts for track had begun. Cascade is situated in a high mountain valley nearly a mile above sea level, so in a normal year there are still snowbanks piled higher than your little sister well into the spring, and the high-school track remains covered in white. Early track practices are held on the soggy, potholed back roads of town. That year Ron Nakatani, our high jumper, practiced his form wearing a
rubber suit, bar-rolling into a snowbank.

At the end of the regular workout, Buzzy Estell and I were practicing baton exchanges for the second-string 400-yard relay. Okay, the third-string 400-yard relay. In those days the runner who was to receive the baton would extend his left arm straight to his side, fingers curled and touching the outer thigh. The runner passing the baton would slap it into the receiver's cupped fingers; the receiver would clutch it and run like hell.

On our first attempt Buzzy tried to slap the baton into my hand, stepped in a pothole, and missed, firing it onto the road directly in front of me, and I stepped on the baton at the same moment he stepped on the back of my track shoe. My right elbow was the first part of my body to hit the ground, and a huge strawberry, close to two-and-a-half inches in diameter, blossomed like the corsage I would have bought for Paula Whitson had she asked me to the Sadie Hawkins dance.

A week and a half later, I carefully peeled the gauze bandage off to reveal the beginnings of what would turn into a truly remarkable clot. The dark red base was marbled much as I believe Mars would look if yellow rivers fanned out over its surface. It stood a good quarter-inch high, and if I could re-create the exact mix of body fluids, I would sell
it to the Hair Club, because what had been, before the accident, fine light peach fuzz had been fertilized into a bouquet of thick dark hairs that looked like rebars protruding from a broken concrete wall.

This was a truly awesome structure, and nurturing it must have been sucking needed blood and oxygen from my brain, because in that diminished state I convinced myself that if you could make a girl laugh or scream, she would be yours.

I protected the scab like a prematurely born puppy for nearly two months until, late one night, just before bedtime, I lifted one side, then the other, slowly, meticulously loosening it bit by bit all the way around until finally I removed it intact and undamaged. I dug through my storage closet to retrieve a small, expensive-looking box from a shelf of treasured mementos, removed my glow-in-the-dark ESUS SAVES, and laid the hairy scarab on the soft white cotton.