The Rules of the Road, page 19
Except in my case.
Perhaps I was cracking up. Perhaps I needed to take a break. Perhaps I was at risk of being swallowed up by “The Rules of the Road.” Perhaps it had already happened.
“If the radio signal was coming from a stationary point in a specific location and was continually broadcasting, then the radio direction finder might lead you there.”
“So it won’t work on a signal that’s broadcasting through time and space, potentially another dimension?”
“Do what now?”
“Like this signal I’m looking for has been broadcast in different regions and time periods. We’re talking all across the country.”
“Then, no, I’m afraid it won’t help you. You might have better luck paging Elvis or giving E.T. a ring.”
13
“Losing My Religion”
Timothy Harper had never shared his story with anyone else before. It was a written account compiled from journal entries and writings from his adolescence. The truth he had seen and the truth that was later reported were two different things. He would come to accept the rational explanation while keeping his own truth buried for years.
That is, until he found my website.
I remember the backseat: David and I next to each other amidst piles of luggage, the suitcases and duffels and backpacks forming a shelf behind our headrests where we stashed junk food and bottles of Mountain Dew. Between us on the seat was David’s bright yellow Panasonic Shockwave, the portable CD player that was guaranteed not to skip no matter how rough the terrain was. It was built like a tank. You could flick the thing, like thump it really good, and the song would still play without missing a beat.
David’s dad had acquired this marvel of technology by some sort of Marlboro cigarettes rewards system. You could trade in box tops for points and exchange the points for all sorts of merchandise, like ten points per pack and 150 points for a carton or something like that. This was back when cigarette companies could actually bribe you to smoke with promotions. They hadn’t planned on the craftiness of David’s dad, though. Dude didn’t even smoke but went ham on those things. Cashed in on all his co-workers that smoked like chimneys, bought ‘em from people for quarters, picked up litter.
We each shared the earbud headphones that snaked from the player into a fork into our separate ears. David with the right and me with the left. I think we were listening to blink-182 or some other pop-punk band that played catchy music with power chords and irreverent lyrics about sex and alcohol.
We were headed toward some sort of youth conference put on by the Baptists. I guess that listening to vulgar music with cuss words on a CD player sponsored by Big Tobacco while we rode in the back of a church van seemed a little contradictory, but we rationalized it in the way only good Christians could.
I was a God-fearing kid at that point in my life, an everything-fearing kid, actually. Teachers, my parents, bullies, girls—if it had some sort of power over me, I was afraid of it. It’s not that I walked through those years as a fearful ball of nerves like some sort of quivering chihuahua; I put on a pretty good front. I believed it was important to have a good poker face and keep a low profile. That’s how you kept them from noticing you, from seeing the weakness. But on the inside, I was a giant wuss.
Fifteen hadn’t been a good year for me. I’m sure it’s that way for a lotta folks out there. I mean, what could you possibly have going for you? An awkward body and hormones raging and stupid, impulsive thinking and not knowing who or what you are, and you have these emotional storms and you’re hungry all the time and you don’t even have a driver’s license yet and you still have to do homework.
Maybe it would’ve been different if I was one of the cool kids, a time of great discovery and new experiences. But I wasn’t. I was unathletic as hell and unmotivated to boot, a slacker just trying to get through each school day with good enough grades to make my parents happy and without getting my ass kicked. The high school was big enough to be intimidating to a kid like me but small enough that I couldn’t float through anonymously.
On top of all of this teenage angst and anxiety, I was nursing a devastating and embarrassing lovesickness. To my fifteen-year-old self, it was a turmoil the likes of which I had never known. I carried the pain of this unrequited love longer than I should have. I couldn’t get rid of it, no matter how hard I tried.
Her name was Emily Bruenig, and she was beautiful and smart and funny. I was in love with her. Her eyes were shimmering almonds and her lower lip was as plump as an overstuffed sofa cushion. My daily thoughts settled heavily upon her and her gleaming white smile, the auburn hair cascading down onto her shoulders. I even had dreams of her, dreams where her disembodied voice called me down a long hallway and I followed her and never could quite catch up.
Back in eighth grade, I had my chance. Several times, circumstance would have it we’d be sitting by each other in the bleachers for some school function or another and I would be cutting up and getting her laughing so hard that her mouth would be agape with her teeth shining white. She would lightly touch my arm in an “oh stop” sort of way and my insides would fill with something like warm, bubbly soda.
Toward the end of our eighth-grade year, I got her phone number. I had a string of successful phone calls with her, conversations that stretched long into the night. I would imagine her in her bedroom and how she looked as she sprawled out on her bed, the phone receiver next to her face. There was an intimacy in all of this that threatened to swallow me up. Her voice and breath in my ear, traveling those few miles across town through the landline. And though I desperately wanted to take her out to the movies or something, I could’ve died happy right there in those moments.
Of course, I never asked her out. The anxiety kept me from doing so. It wasn’t fear of rejection that kept me from asking her. Sure, there would be a finality in hearing her say no, but I feel like I could handle that. Anything would’ve beat the zone I currently occupied, the purgatory of “what if she says yes” versus “what if she says no.” I certainly didn’t have her now and that hurt. What kept me from asking her was something more primal. It was abject fear and anxiety. I’d freeze up. My words caught in my throat many times, unable to come out. I was a kid pacing back and forth anxiously in front of a roller coaster before deciding that he’s too much of a chicken to take a seat in the cart.
As the first couple weeks of summer passed, I sensed a shift in my phone conversations with Emily. She seemed distracted. There were long pauses. I think she was getting bored with me and I became self-conscious. I definitely couldn’t ask her out now. She probably liked me less now than she ever did, could barely feign enthusiasm on the phone with me. How could she possibly get excited about going to the movies with me?
“Welp. Guess I’ll see you around this summer,” I remember saying in our final phone conversation, the awkwardness between us a chasm I just couldn’t cross.
“Oh, yeah. Sure. See ya around, Timothy,” she said, her voice suddenly bright once again. Even though the new positive tone in her voice was out of niceness or perhaps a joy that she was finally getting off the phone with me, I hung on for dear life on the way she had said my name. It replayed on a loop in my mind.
See ya around, Timothy.
Timothy.
Timothy.
She wants you to call this summer.
Don’t push your luck. Give her a little space.
She’s bored and at home alone and wants to hang out and do something.
Call her. Ask her. Call her.
I never did.
We were in a caravan with a couple of other church vans and a small shuttle bus. All in all, there were about twenty-four kids and about six chaperones composed of the youth minister, parents, and whatever other volunteers they could muster from the church.
Our destination was Fort Worth, Texas. The Baptists had rented hotel rooms and had purchased tickets for Six Flags in Arlington. David’s the one who had invited me to this whole ordeal. It was his church, after all. We were responsible for paying fifty bucks and whatever extra meals we might need. The church covered the rest. I guess they figured that roping in a few nonbelievers or getting a few converts by way of a flashy youth convention and a day at Six Flags was worth the expense.
Why I was going on this whole trip was not out of obligation or anything like that. I wasn’t even Baptist (I was Methodist). It wasn’t even for the Six Flags trip (I didn’t like roller coasters). It was one reason and one reason only: Emily. She was attending with some of her friends.
It was going to be about eight hours of driving from our sleepy Kansas town. Fine by me. With the CD player at my side and our stash of junk food, let me ride in the back of this van all day (although the constraints of my filled bladder had me rethinking the Mountain Dew). That stretch of road down I-35 wasn’t the most scenic, just flat land and nondescript prairies. It wasn’t even impressive in its flatness. It had enough tree cover and shifts in topography to keep it from being an expanse of limitless horizon, but not enough rolling hills to be interesting. Billboards and semis and fast-food restaurants and piles of red dirt and interstate rolled past.
The van David and I found ourselves in was heavy on dudes. A feisty old guy named Jerry was the driver. He cursed the traffic in a nice Christian way, darns and hecks and all that. The other seats were staggered with some obnoxious younger boys I didn’t really know and a couple of letter-jacket-wearing kids from our class, jocks with crispy gelled hair who mostly ignored me and David.
I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that Emily wasn’t in our vehicle. How could I start up a conversation? What would I say to her? Could I only sit back in jealousy as the Dustins and Harrisons with the bleached tips stole her attention? I needed to psych myself up. Maybe I could find myself in her vehicle for the ride back, break the ice at some point during the trip.
I would be lying if I said I hadn’t obsessed over all of this and had some designs on how I could imagine this trip playing out. Once we had entered high school, I kept tabs on Emily’s relationship status. She dated an upperclassman for a while, Josh Livingston. He was a basketball phenom that was the leading scorer on the team as a Junior. But they had broken up, and she was single now. And maybe somewhere in the back of my mind I had a chance. We would hang out on this trip and have fun and I would make her laugh and then, toward the end of the trip somewhere, I would finally ask her out. I would do it this time for sure.
I even prayed over it, asking God to please grant me the strength to ask her out, bargained with him and told him I would be perfect from now on. Or at least I would try to be.
The caravan convened at a hotel in downtown Ft. Worth, and the kids piled out of their respective vehicles, milled about the parking lot. I could see Emily from afar, amidst a group of girls from our grade: Liz Crenshaw, Stacy Deviney, and Jill Freeman. I tried my best to not obsess over her and instead focus on the present moment. Any sort of desperation at this point would be off-putting. I knew I had to play it cool. As we awaited our room assignments, I watched from afar.
David and I got matched up with a weird younger kid named Billy that had a bowl cut and constantly talked about Pokémon. We had a chaperone named Jay, a deacon of the church, according to David. He was sort of a country cowboy type of dude, sported jeans and boots and a mustache.
“What the hell’s a deacon?” I asked David.
“Don’t really know. They hand out the offering plate and sit in the back of the church.”
This would be the room set up for the rest of the trip. Not just the two nights here in Arlington, but also our final night at a different hotel on our way back home. I got the sense that Jay would’ve been better suited with some different kids, someone he could talk football or hunting with. He wouldn’t find that with us: a couple of scrawny nerds and video game aficionados. And I definitely couldn’t see him striking up a conversation about Pokémon with Billy. At least we’d all be pretty quiet and easy to ignore.
The conference was called “Extreme Devotion: Becoming Radical Followers in Christ” and it was being held in this big-ass arena with steep stadium-style seating. It was this whole extreme sports theme. They gave us program booklets with motocross guys plastered on the cover and there were large screens playing footage of skateboarders, skydivers, hang gliders, and bikers. Up on the main stage was a half-pipe and some rails and ramps. To the right of that was a full band set-up. A haze of artificial fog wafted up to our seats in the nosebleed section.
The main speaker was a spiky-haired lad who wore jeans and tennis shoes, played it like he was a hip guy who wasn’t far removed from our current ages and could totally relate to the trials and tribulations of teenagers. Since we were all teens, the talk focused heavily on the things that teens liked to do: sex, drugs, rock and roll. They told us all about how all of those things were bad news and went against how God wanted us to live. They used specific verses from the scripture to back themselves up.
Our body was a temple that drugs and alcohol would only defile. Wasn’t it enough that there was addiction and overdoses and drunk driving accidents? In attempting to banish us from these sins, God was only trying to protect us from terrible outcomes. Or were these simply the punishments he doled out for disobeying him?
As for rock and roll, it only glorified all of which we should abstain from. It was a gateway that led to corrupt thoughts and desires. We were told to be selective about what we let into our minds. Nobody said it was the devil’s music during this conference, but when read between the lines, it was heavily implied.
“Christian rock is definitely okay, though! All in the name of our heavenly Father,” the hip preacher guy said before the band played a few songs, complete with a guitar solo that the lead singer said was heaven sent.
At some point, the talk had moved on to sex. The speaker had a lot to say on that subject. Being as we were an arena full of teenagers and the hormones were dripping off the rafters, he probably felt like he had to address the elephant in the room. It was the usual talk about the preciousness of virginity and the importance of abstinence. Marriage and sex were a sacred covenant between a man and woman, the act of them becoming one flesh.
I couldn’t help but think of Emily during all this sex talk. Was she still a virgin? I sure as hell was. I had never even kissed anyone at this point in my life. What if we could lose our virginity together? Maybe not wait until we were actually married, but had been together a long time, long enough to be in love and love each other? Wasn’t that what was important in the eyes of God? Love?
I looked back to where she was sitting a row behind me. She was with Stacy and Jill. Nearby were Todd Higgins and Ricky Frizzell, a pair of popular upperclassmen. Todd tapped Emily’s shoulder, leaned in close, and told her something. She laughed and said something back. An irrational jealousy surged through me, an urgency that my time was running out.
The hip minister of the thing had now moved on to homosexuality, told us how God had designed men to be with women because he had made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. That was just one of the many zingers he had to share regarding gay people. I had heard about the Baptist obsessions with gays from David, said that it was a topic of many a fiery sermon and the pastor frequently said America was on the brink, in part because of the gays.
There was a break in the action. Lunch at a BBQ place and a quick detour through a shopping mall where David and I bought Surfer Rosa by the Pixies. Coming out of the store, we ran into Emily and Stacy.
“Careful. They say that’s a gateway drug,” Emily said, gesturing at the Sam Goody bag in my hand.
“Oh, this is definitely Christian music,” I said, holding up the CD. It featured a topless lady on the front. I don’t know why I showed her. I think maybe I wanted to impress her? In the album’s background, a crucifix hung on a wall. “See, there’s a cross.”
Emily was unfazed. Kinda raised her eyebrow and made a clicking sound with her mouth. “Are those titties Christian?”
“Hey,” David interjected. “Boobs are proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. I think Ben Franklin said that.”
“Oh my God,” said Stacy.
“Tsk, tsk. Lord’s name in vain,” Emily chided.
At this point—with none of us even realizing it—we were walking and talking with them, strolling through the mall like we were all friends. Our break was running out, and we were supposed to be making our way back to the conference. Across the mezzanine, we could see more members of our youth group making their way to the mall’s exit.
“Hey, look! It’s Adam and Steve!” a voice boomed from behind us. It was Dustin Phillips, an annoying sophomore prick. He was talking about me and David.
“Just ignore him,” Emily told me. “Probably pissed off that there’s no Abercrombie in this mall.”
And then we were exiting the mall and entering the arena and filing down the aisle into our seats. I was sitting by Emily. My luck was actually playing out, and I was filled with both surprise and a belief that this was all destined to be. Sometimes good things did happen to mediocre people. You just had to wait.
We talked and whispered through the remainder of the conference. I cracked jokes and made her laugh. We were sitting close enough in the cramped seats I could smell her perfume or body spray or whatever. I never found out what it was called, but sometimes while walking in public I’ll catch a whiff of it and I can feel my heart sink way down deep into my guts and I get tears in my eyes.
The next morning, I sat in the backseat of the church van alone. I had snuck down to get some time to myself and get a listen to my new CD. We had done an impromptu devotional service in a small conference room at the hotel and everyone else was packing up and clearing out the rooms.
