I’m afraid that a four-year-old Christian does not know much about being a Christian, but I knew that I was a Christian, and if nothing else, I was curious about what that meant, so at somewhere around 12 years of age, I told my parents that I thought we should go to church, and you can imagine my surprise when my parents agreed.

Last week I wrote about becoming a Christian in an atheist household, at four years of age. If you read last week’s post, you can also guess the church my parents picked: People’s Church.

I’m going to rip on People’s Church pretty hard, so before I do, allow me to say that I am discussing People’s Church as I experienced it more than thirty years ago. Everything I am going to say about the People’s Church from my youth is 100% true, but I do not want want to give the impression that my experience with People’s Church thirty-some-odd years ago is reflective of what people experience in People’s Church today, or in other Unitarian Universalist churches around the country. I know nothing about the Unitarian Universalist church other than what I experienced, but my sister (who was an active member of People’s Church until her family moved to Australia – just recently) tells me People’s Church is much less extreme than it used to be.

People’s Church was pretty extreme 30 years ago.

The first thing I remember about People’s Church was that it was not a church. There was no discussion about God beyond that there was none. The church was sometimes referred to as the Church of Man, and as a youth I only attended the actual service a few times a year, such as at Christmas, when we sang Christmas Carols that were devoid of God.

If anyone is wondering how one sings Christmas Carols without mentioning God, it’s really not that hard – the church had all the carols rewritten to remove any reference to God. Instead of singing, ‘O little town of Bethlehem,’ we sang, ‘O little town of Washington.’ Instead of ‘Silent Night / Holy Night,’ we sang, ‘Silent Night / Quiet Night,’ and so on. All Christmas songs were scrubbed of any reference to God, or to Jesus, or to anything else resembling religion.

As a youth member, I went to a young adult group every Sunday to learn such important topics as that a pregnant teen should be able to get an abortion, but that a pregnant girl should not tell her parents she is pregnant, lest her parents try to stop her from getting an abortion. She should tell the youth leaders, and then the church would help her kill her baby. That message was given quite literally on day one of my time at People’s Church.

My grandmother on my mother’s side used to tell my mother that People’s Church is round so that the devil can’t corner you. My dad used to tell me People’s Church was more of a political club than a church (I would have called it a ‘political cult’ myself).

We went to People’s Church for several years. I participated in sleep overs, church camps – all of the things normal churches do for children – but all of them had a liberal, political spin. God did not venture into any of it. Abortion, lying to parents about things like abortion, the joys of underage sex (with a condom of course) – this was the youth-gospel of the church.

The last time we went to People’s Church I would have been around 15. My youth group was tasked with writing letters of apology to the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I sat with my pencil on the table, writing nothing. After about 20 minutes one of the youth leaders approached me.

“Wally – Aren’t you going to write an apology to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for dropping atomic bombs on those cities?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

The youth leader pressed. Apparently he was very sorry that the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki long before he was born. He told me he would tell my parents if I did not participate, and I reiterated that I had no intention of participating.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because Japan should have thought about getting its butt kicked before it bombed Pearl Harbor,” was my reply. I had a sneaky suspicion my father would agree with me, and relished watching a number of other children put their pencils down upon hearing my reasoning.

True to his word, the youth leader ratted me out to my father (getting an abortion was not something to tell someone’s parents, but not apologizing for winning a war we did not start – that was sacrilige), and as I suspected my father was on my side. He thought writing apologies to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard, and we stopped going to People’s Church immediately after that.

My dad was a character. I remember one day it was too cold to have children waiting for buses, so school was canceled. My dad needed to go to the school administration office and took me with him. As we were leaving, he told me, “You know what we need to do?  We have a real problem with people buying yachts – really big ones they can live on – with loans, and then leaving the country and not paying for them. We need to tell the navy when it sees one of those yachts, to sink it.”

I don’t know that the country really had a massive problem with people essentially stealing yachts, nor what brought this idea suddenly into my father’s head, but such outbursts were not uncommon. On another occasion he told me that the government needed to buy a bunch of illegal narcotics and lace them with poison. We should tell everyone we are doing it, my dad said, and then release the laced drugs back into the streets to kill all the drug users. I remember thinking, “This is not the kind of thing a typical Democrat says.”

Those are not the kinds of things a Republican says either. Those are not the kinds of things anyone says, but my dad said them and though my dad was not crazy enough to believe we really should do those things, at the time he said them he was sincere.

My dad could also be very much a liberal. We went to the Michigan Democratic Caucus in 1976, when Jimmy Carter was running against Gerald Ford. I was five. I remember meeting Jimmy Carter, getting a bbq chicken quarter (which was WAY too much food for a five year-old), and playing softball.

The first time I came up to bat, someone yelled, “Little Kid – Move Up,” and the outfield moved into the infield. I hit the ball well over everyone’s head and probably would have had a home run had I been older/taller/faster. Even with a five year-old’s legs, I delighted my dad with a triple. The next time I came up to bat the outfield stayed put.

I could out-hit a democrat even at five!

My first political memory came from the Carter/Ford election. I was sitting in my parent’s room while they were watching the news, and the news people were talking about the election. They had pictures of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford on the television, so I told my parents, ‘I hope Ford wins.’  My dad asked why. “Because Ford has hair,” I said. My dad told me Ford was the bald guy – Jimmy Carter had hair. “I want Carter to win,” I replied.

This led to a fairly long lecture from my father about how, since women earned the right to vote, that was exactly how a lot of them voted. “Kennedy would never have been elected had he not been good looking,” my dad said.

Four years later my elementary school had a mock election and I voted for Carter over Ronald Reagan. It was likely the only election Jimmy Carter won that year, and it was the only time in my life I voted primarily Democrat.

My dad also used to say things that fit in very well with the Democratic Party. He saw the parties through the eyes of a union member, and it pained him a great deal that so many people in the working and middle classes ‘voted against their own interests’ by voting for Republicans. To my dad, the Democrats were the party of the working person, and the Republicans were the party of big business. Only the rich should have been Republicans, as the Republicans existed to screw over the American people out of greed and malice.

I very well might have stayed a Democrat had my parents never taken me to People’s Church – People’s Church was so liberal it made me a Republican. I also think, looking back, that the lack of religion in People’s Church only heightened my curiosity about the God I worshiped but did not yet understand.

Sometime either while we were going to People’s Church or shortly after we stopped, I became interested in the occult. I think it started at an Explorer Scout winter ‘freeze out’ camping trip someone had brought a ouija board to. An older Explorer who was also a friend of my sister pulled me aside and told me not to use a ouija board – those boards he said are used to communicate with the devil. They will lie to you and tell you that you are talking to a dead person, but really it’s a demon!

I wasn’t attracted to the occult to talk to dead people, or to talk to demons. I was however fascinated by the possibility the occult seemed to have to prove, to me at least, of something outside the physical universe. If I could prove the existence of something supernatural – something completely outside the realm of physical science – it would also prove the existence of a spirit that exists beyond the confines of the body. My belief in God seemed but a small leap of faith after that.

I’m going to take some heat for admitting to trying to prove the existence of God through the occult, but I ask the reader to understand that I was a teenager, and that though the phase lasted a number of years, it did end. And this really happened – right, wrong, or indifferent, this a part of my story.

I also acquired my first Bible at 14 from my Dutch Reformed Grandmother, and began reading it, which I’ll discuss more in future blog entries.

While I was fiddling around with the occult (and reading the Bible), I got a job at McDonalds, and on my first day of work I fell in love with a girl named Loretta. Everyone has heard of love at first sight, but I have to tell you, I came into the store in my McDonald’s uniform for my very first shift, and as a manager took me past the fry area on the way to the break room (and the VCR with the training tapes), Loretta was working fries. Our eyes met and my heart leapt into my throat. I was absolutely smitten.

Later that same shift Loretta and I were on break at the same time, and I got to speak to her for a half hour. Loretta was a year older than me, but in terms of experience she might as well have been ten years older.

Loretta and I had a long and stormy relationship. She smoked, and at least partially to impress her I took up smoking too. We dated off and on for years but she could not get past my parents hating her, and that fact always got in the way whenever we tried to become a couple.

Coinciding with my falling in love with Loretta, my parents put me on Accutane, which was at the time a brand new acne medication. It was literally a magic bullet. I did not get acne very badly on my face, but I got big boils on my back and shoulders. The Accutane cleared it up almost immediately.

Accutane was so new that nobody knew the side effects. Today it’s a tightly controlled drug that causes erratic mood swings and depression. The depression can get so bad that it often leads to suicide.

When I was on Accutane, it still caused those things but nobody knew that and as a result it was not very tightly controlled. I was on a high dose.

My parents were high school teachers, so they knew what to look for to see when children are using drugs – mood swings and depression being at the top of the list. To make matters worse, I would sneak out to smoke a cigarette sometimes at night, which my parents also looked at as the kind of behavior that could indicate drug use.

Nobody knew that Accutane caused the same behavioral changes parents are supposed to look for to see if their children are using drugs, and in fact my parents continued to believe I had been using drugs as a teenager (with Loretta as my dealer) right up until my sister, Nicky, drew the connection to Accutane. Over the years after Nicky drew that connection, I think my parents began to accept that they’d been wrong, and had perhaps overreacted as a result.

My parents became convinced that I was doing drugs, and when they looked at what had changed in my life and who I was hanging out with that might have encouraged me to start using drugs, what had changed was that I had met Loretta.

I won’t get into a long discussion about Loretta. Suffice it to say that she was the most important thing in the world to me at that time, and that she was also the biggest bone of contention between my father and I. To me, Loretta was that which the sun and stars revolved around, and the center of my universe. To my parents she was my dealer, and keeping me away from her was their most important job as parents.

Ironically, Loretta hated drugs.

Loretta and I would sometimes play with ouija boards. Both of us being adventurous, we would even play with ouija boards in cemeteries after dark.

Sometimes Loretta’s younger sister Carol would join us. Loretta was a year older than me Carol was a year younger, and though when Loretta and I were on the ouija board together the placenta (the piece that moved around the board to point to letters) would move pretty well, when Carol and I were on the board together it absolutely flew. With Loretta, I might have believed we were pushing the board subconsciously (which is how ouija boards supposedly work), but with Carol it flew around the board with a speed and precision that even today is difficult to believe.

I know what you are thinking. Loretta and I were far better at being best friends than at being boyfriend/girlfriend, and you are probably wondering whether or not I ever dated her sister. Yes – I did, and I liked Carol almost as much as I liked Loretta. I might even have liked Carol more. But I was in love with Loretta, and when I dated her sister Loretta went ballistic, so I found a lame excuse and broke up with Carol. 

Loretta and I remained thick as thieves for a couple of years after that, but we never tried dating again. Loretta even told me that though she could not date me, her sister was too close to home so she could not sit by and watch me date her sister.

I also used ouija boards with other people. Usually there would be a group of us, and two people would be on the board at a time. Sometimes I’d be one of those people but other times I would just watch and help ask questions.

I did not use ouija boards to talk to spirits or demons, or anything like that. I was there to prove, to myself at least, that the board was doing things nobody could do without supernatural help.

Sometimes the board would claim to have a spirit on – the ghost of some such person. Other times the board would claim to be taken over by a demon, and we got to know the demons by the signs they would draw between questions. Legion moved the placenta around in a circle. Beezlebub moved it in a sideways figure-eight (the sign of infinity). There were other demons, but those are the ones I remember, and particularly Legion. Legion was on the most often.

I found the ouija board pretty boring when we had a spirit on, but when we had a demon on I would try to piss the demon off. I would taunt it. I would tell it that its power was finite and inconsequential compared to the power of God.

The board would get mad and move faster. I would taunt more and the board would move even faster. Sometimes the board would move even faster than it did when Carol and I were on together.

You can imagine how much fun all of this was to a teenager. Not only was I having a great time seeing what the board could do, but I was also scaring the holy hell out of all of my friends, many of whom expected the board to go flying around the room.

I was relentless. Often the board would become threatening, telling us how powerful the demon was. “Kill me then,” I would say, “if you have the power to do so. I have God on my side so I do not believe you can do anything but move a stupid piece of plastic on a table. You are a board game. We play with you for fun. You are nothing,” I would tell it.

I’m still alive, so obviously nothing ever happened. None of my friends were injured in any way, but the experiences were thrilling, scary, and, frankly, fun.

I was also interested in seances, though I never saw anything in a seance that impressed me.

There is a story I need to share that does not directly forward the plot, or maybe it does and I just don’t see it that way. I find that often things I don’t think are relevant, other people who did not live those things find are very relevant. Whatever the case, it is important to me that I not sound like I am vilifying my parents – parents who loved me very much and who did the best they could raising a difficult, stubborn son.

I worked all kinds of shifts at McDonalds. Sometimes I’d open, and sometimes I’d close. Sometimes I’d work shifts in between. As a general rule, if you were opening you’d open a lot, and if you were closing, you’d close a lot. You did not generally open and close within the same general time frame. I worked for McDonalds for six and a half years and became a trusted employee who sometimes did open and close within close proximity, but that was rare.

Sometimes when I was opening I’d stay up all night – that was how early we had to show up – and then I’d sleep for a few hours after work. One night, I was staying up before opening, and everyone was asleep except me. I was bored, and I’ve never been very good with being bored, even today. On this particular night, I knew my father had some Irish whiskey that was supposed to be very good, and I’d never had more than a 40 ounce beer at a party with Loretta before so I did not really know what it was like to be drunk. I decided to find out.

Not knowing anything about alcohol, I poured a bunch of whisky – I’m going to estimate about 15 shots – into a ‘big gulp’ size glass. I took a sip and found it disgusting. It was completely undrinkable, so I filled the glass the rest of the way with Dr. Pepper, and guzzled it down all at once.

I felt nothing, but I’d drank far more of the whiskey than I thought I could get away with without my father noticing, so I moved on to white wine. My mother drank two glasses of white wine before bed (never more and never less), and had a bladder in a box in the refrigerator. I drank a glass. I still felt nothing, so I drank another.

I have no idea how much white wine I drank, but I drank a lot, and between the white wine and the whiskey I drank it all over the course of just a few minutes. I knew at some point I’d get drunk, and would just have to wait for what I’d already consumed to kick in, so I decided to drive up to Sweetwater’s Donut Mill where my best friend Tim worked, to drink coffee and maybe have a donut while I sobered up for work.

My sister woke up to see me trying to get into her red Ford Escort with the key for my gold Chevy Malibu (it was not really mine – it had belonged to our Grandmother and was the “kid’s car” for the family). She woke my parents up, and my parents brought me back into the house, where I promptly began to throw up.

I won’t get into all the details, as I don’t remember the rest to know for sure what really happened and what I remember happening in a drunken stupor that did not really happen at all. I know my parents brought me to the emergency room and I remember thinking I might die if I passed out. I also remember drinking charcoal and throwing up even more.

Suffice it to say that I was a difficult and stubborn teenager, and that whatever mistakes my parents may have made, I would not want to wish raising me on anyone. I was a difficult teenager.

It is also important to me to stress that if my parents told the same story, they would invariably focus on different events and different details to come up with an equally true, but very different narrative. When you hear me talking about my relationship with my parents over the years, understand that everything I say is true, but if it sounds at times like I had bad parents that’s just not the case. My parents loved me, but I was a difficult teenager. My parents did the best they could.

Sometimes hard times just happen…

Anyway, sometime around my 17th birthday my parents caught me smoking. They’d known I was smoking for some time, but one evening I snuck out of the house for a cigarette and a neighbor called. I came in through the front door, having been caught in the act, and my father was so angry he laid me out with a pretty good roundhouse to my jaw. 

My punishment was severe. The door was taken off my bedroom, I was not allowed to leave the house without one of my parents, and was not allowed to stay home without at least one of my parents. For a few days I had to go to school with my father and sit through all of his school classes. That was a bit embarrassing as though my dad taught in the other Kalamazoo High School (Loy Norrix – my mother by this time taught at Kalamazoo Central, where I went to school), I still knew some of those kids. I had to sleep in my parents room for the first few nights. I even had to quit my job.

And for about four months, I had to take a weekly drug test and see a drug counselor.

After about four months, the counselor called a meeting with me and my parents, and told my parents that I was not doing drugs and that they should be proud of me. I was the captain of the High School Debate Team she said, and not a druggie.

My dad told the counselor that I was a master manipulator, and that she’d bought into my lies. I stopped seeing the counselor, but my father still did not trust me.

I was not on drugs, and in fact had become good friends with the guy who had tried to take the ouija board away the first time I ever saw one (his name was Kevin). Kevin had an apartment with four other people, all of whom were recovering addicts who stayed as far away from drugs and alcohol as humanly possible, and though I was not an addict I hung out with them often enough that I was kind of the Narcotics Anonymous mascot for the group. I was quite a bit younger than everyone else so it was a bit like being everyone’s younger brother.

One day, months after all of this, when the door was back on my bedroom and I was working at McDonald’s again (after a brief stint as a bag boy – my parents did not really want me back at McDonalds), Loretta called. She’d called a number of times (and I’d called her a number of times – our friendship had continued through all of this). As the call ended and I hung up the phone, my dad came running out of his bedroom screaming, “That had better not have been that God Damned Loretta!” He had his fists clenched with the same look on his face he’d had when he laid me out with a punch.

“Dad, if you hit me again, this time I’m hitting you back,” I said.

Threatening to hit my dad back stopped him in his tracks and calmed him down some, but he told me he thought it best if I leave.

I agreed, packed up some clothes, and left, moving in with Kevin and the other people living in an apartment with him. There were six of us, in a three bedroom apartment.

Thus began the lowest period of my life. How low was it? Here is a poem I wrote sometime later while remembering my first night in that apartment, sitting alone in the living room. I think it shows how low I felt more clearly than I can otherwise describe:

The Blade

I see the blade on the table,
Staring at me with its cold steel eyes.
It glistens in the glare from my cigarette,
Making me wonder how it would feel.

I picture the blade between my fingers,
The razor moving in long lines up my wrist.
The blade blinks at me without caring,
Knowing nothing but how to cut.

If morning comes to find me,
It will not be from a lack of strength.
Stroking my wrist is but a motion,
And the blade is too cold not to score.

After a minute of staring,
I walk away from the blade.
It’s not a fear of the blade that saves me.
It’s just that I didn’t pick it up.

And thus ends this episode! In the next episode I’ll talk about the apartment with Kevin and our other roommates. One of those roomates – I think his name was Charlie –  was a gay 30 something grifter who built what he called ‘wheels’ out of rocks, and then using what he called an ‘ancient indian technique’, he would have people ‘channel spirits.’ Charlie paid no rent – his rent was acting as a spiritual guide.

I’ve only just started to give my story. Stay tuned – there is more to come.