- Hell was funny my freshman year
Wearing the brown-plaid skirt, panty hose, sensible loafers, and cream-colored short-sleeved sweater appropriate to her position as a 1980s Christian college librarian, Mrs. Karen Peterson beckoned me into her office. Our first academic assignment at North Park College and Theological Seminary, to introduce us to the rigors of college-level research, was to prepare a bibliography for a paper we might eventually write, then present said bibliography to a reference librarian. I had dutifully scoured the card catalog, the musty shelves of the third floor seminary library, and now handed her my neatly-typed single page with the required ten references.
“Hell”, I said, stretching out the el’s just a bit and pausing, enjoying that I had found a way to say something like a swear word to this comely young librarian. “My bibliography is on Hell: Its Nature and Theological Significance”. Mrs. Peterson looked up from my typed paper to see me looking at her as rakishly as an eighteen-year-old virgin wearing bright-striped shorts, an old ill-fitting Oxford and red white & blue Chuck Taylors without socks could possibly manage. And she did blush.
For Mrs. Karen Peterson knew what I knew. We knew that Hell was not just a neat theological category to manage justice for an omnipotent deity. It was not just a comical backdrop for Far Side devils with horns and tails. Hell was real. Hell was as real as a bar we knew, just blocks off-campus where even now, with the late afternoon sunlight illuminating the dust in the air, Mrs. Karen Peterson could walk in and an old man (looking suspiciously like the drunk on the album cover of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung), smelling of stale beer and cigarettes, slightly gasping, could stagger over to her, leer, and then gently run the back of his fingers down her cheek and neck tending toward her full breasts beneath her cream-colored top. Hell was sexy as hell.
Mrs. Karen Peterson interrupted my adolescent reverie, handing my bibliography back to me, some editorial marks in red ballpoint pen. “Also,” she noted, “there should be a colon here before ‘Eternal Conscious Torment’.”
- North Park College and Theological Seminary
We were sitting where we always sat: in the beige booths of George’s Family Restaurant looking through the plate glass windows across Foster Avenue to the North Park College campus. We were doing what we always did: judging others.
“North Park College,” started one of us, wistfully, “Where Faith and Learning Meet,” repeating the official school motto.
“ Where Faith and Learning Collide’s more like it” said another.
“North Park College: Where Faith and Learning Pass Like Two Ships in the Night.”
“No, no, wait, I got it. North Park College: Where Faith gets hammered one night with her friends, sneaks into the shuttered library with Learning, makes out with him between the stacks, but then the next day keeps her eyes turned down discretely as she passes him on her way to Chapel.”
From our booths at George’s Restaurant we socially engineered the campus. There were perhaps 500 students living on the Chicago campus my freshman year, most all of us raised in the sponsoring denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Church of America. We broke the student body up into three distinct groups, each with their corresponding dorm.
The first dorm would be called The College Life Dorm for the evangelical group that sponsored Sunday night worship on the campus. Some students did not get enough Jesus during the twice-a-week college chapel, their Biblical & Theological Studies classes, their small group Bible studies, Youth Ministry work, and prayer groups so on Sunday, after dressing up for a service in the morning they dressed down (but not too down) for another praisier, hipper service Sunday night. This dorm would be safely divided into a women’s half and a men’s half but the women would be allowed in the men’s half in December to decorate their dorm rooms for Christmas. The College Lifers would meet for dates in the lobby until graduation when they would faithfully marry and produce the next generation of College Lifers.
Dorm #2, the Rockery Dorm, would be named for the Rush Street bar that offered free beer to North Parkers from 9-11 pm on Thursday nights. The Rockery Dorm would have no rules around cohabitation, but would have regular crews that came by to clean up the misdirected vomit or urine, and a counseling staff on site to deal with the pregnancy scares. But the Rockers, the imagined inhabitants of the Rockery Dorm, were quite similar to the College Lifers underneath. No matter how wasted they got Saturday night, they too got dressed and made it church Sunday morning. They too would end up marrying and returning to the Church. It was just that the Rockers had made a deal with God, that if He allotted them a specified time of partying, they would return to Him superb Christian behavior beginning on a mutually agreed-upon date.
We didn’t even have a name for the third dorm: the dorm for us, the intelligentsia. There were maybe a dozen of us, tops. Perhaps we could fit into the apartment above George’s Restaurant. We were English majors who were not going to teach English; Math majors who thought of Math as art; Philosophy majors not angling for law school; Biology majors without plans for medical careers. That Art History majors were allowed in went without saying. Business and Youth Ministry majors need not apply.
We in the intelligentsia dorm suffered not from a lack of belief, but from a surfeit of it. Every day brought a new credo, a new defiant manifesto, to be replaced by another more defiant manifesto the following day. We lacked not a moral code. With our collapse of God into Beauty into Truth into Good, everything became a moral decision: what you put in your coffee, if and how you cleaned your bathroom, which device if any you used to highlight text you books, all of these decisions confronted us with the forces of good and the forces of evil.
The relationship between Faith and Learning at NPC was indeed at times tense and awkward, and sometimes full-on, drag-out fights ensued. But then they always came back together, Faith and Learning, for the kids, for the graduation ceremonies. We read Feuerbach and Nietzsche in philosophy classes alongside Augustine and Aquinas. In English we read D.H. Lawrence as well as Flannery O’Connor. Darwinian evolution was covered in biology with little controversy. When Scorcese’s The Temptation of Christ came to town, a Biblical & Theological Studies professor opposed it vehemently, but because he thought it inaccurately represented first century Palestinian culture, not because reinterpreting Christ’s life in art was a sin. There was a quiet confidence, amongst faculty at least, that there was but one God and one Truth and to such Truth all genuine inquirers must eventually arrive. So read what thou wilt.
The relationship between Faith and Living though was less flexible. We could think what we wanted about texts in classrooms, but how we acted with our bodies in our dorm rooms was not open to debate. No smoking was allowed in the dorms. No alcohol on campus. No visitation in the dorms of the opposite sex between midnight and noon. These were not mere administrative rules for they had the power of God’s Truth behind them. North Parkers had been raised in a streamlined Christianity that had done away with a complicated list of sins but these three remained: smoking, drinking, and fucking. But the greatest of these was fucking.
- Fall Quarter: Smoking
In the beginning, I smoked in secret. After the library closed, I would put a pack of Camel Lights into the pocket of my baggy jeans jacket, grab my backpack full of 1950s hardbacks from the seminary library, and walk the mile down Foster Avenue to the 24-hour Bowmanville Cafe. I believed it was just far enough away from campus where I’d be unlikely to encounter any North Parkers. But just to be safe, I set myself in the booth farthest in the back, away from any windows, before lighting up a Camel. The Korean staff generously refilled my coffee and emptied my ashtray as I read my books and wrote my papers and thought my important thoughts.
But one night about 2 am, I looked up as the glass Bowmanville Cafe entrance door squeaked open and saw Denny, a North Parker I knew but not well. He looked around the restaurant and stuffed his hands into his leather jacket. I thought I had hidden my dirty habit in a dirty cafe where no North Parkers would ever tread. But Denny had seen me. He had seen me and I froze. He was coming right towards me and there was no escape. Before I could hide my full ashtray and my open pack of Camel Lights, Denny plopped himself down in the booth seat across from me, pulled out a pack of Marlboro Reds, and lit one up. “How is it going?” he asked as he casually ashed.
Now, there is no biblical injunction–Old Testament or New–on the use of tobacco products. Cigarettes were never the subject of a sermon, or Sunday School lesson. No parent or relative ever said anything about it, but none of them ever smoked, either. It was clear to me that smoking was something people like us just didn’t do. (But which people like us? Middle class suburbanites? Evangelical Covenanteers? Protestants? Christians? Catholics? Does Jesus let Catholics smoke?) I light up my own cigarette. It was okay. It was just Denny. Denny and me at 2 am in a restaurant far far away. Who would ever know? We ended up sharing the booth and the ashtray and our thoughts about God, justice and the North Park way.
…
Late the next morning, I heard a knock on my dorm door. “Let’s go have a smoke, “ Denny said. Lingering in my doorway, still in his leather jacket, Denny’s offer felt somewhere in between an invitation and a threat. I knew there was a group of smokers who gathered on the front steps of our dorm. But I was trapped by Denny’s casualness. If smoking was no big deal, something only the uptightest Mormon would stress about, why not go and have a smoke with my new friend? If it was a big deal and I said it was wrong, what was that saying about my new friend Denny’s smoking, about my smoking?
We sat on the front steps of the dorm with the small group of chatty smokers already assembled. Non-smoking North Parkers passed us coming out of the dorm and on the sidewalk below. With jittery hands, I struck a match. I lit my cigarette. I inhaled. And then something remarkable, almost miraculous happened: nothing. No campus police came to arrest me. My parents did not cut off the payments for my tuition. The Dean of Students did not call me into his office. No lightning formed in the sky. One non-smoking acquaintance passed by, looked up and briefly noted, “hmm, didn’t know you were a smoker.”
…
I returned to the smokers’ steps with Denny, then with others. Some of us smokers became friends and we took our Camels and Marlboros to the George’s Restaurant booths where we openly smoked and drank coffee and critiqued the ways of our peers.
- Winter Quarter: Drinking
I recognized most everyone in the bare-walled living room as I entered on a cold Saturday afternoon. Denny–this was his apartment–sat on the couch with his coke bottle glasses and leather jacket giving off a confidence that combined the Fonz with Stephen Hawking. Denny had changed his major from Math to English–certainly not due to job prospects–but because he eventually found poetry more beautiful than proofs. Sitting next to Denny on the couch was his roommate Kevin. That Kevin was majoring in French somehow forgave his Newport (menthol!) cigarettes and the fact that his sweaters looked like they came off the set of the Cosby Show. I knew Betsy, a strawberry blonde lounging on a Papa-San chair, from my childhood Covenant church. Betsy was undecided but was considering the new Women’s Studies major. She and I would argue about who had followed who to North Park, but there was photographic evidence demonstrating that Betsy had agreed to be my embarrassed senior high school prom date the Spring before. Byron sat on a stiff-backed chair pulled in from the kitchen with Krista at his feet. (Byron claimed to study Computer Science for the formal beauty of the code, but we should have known better.) Krista, an Art & Art History major, had once spilled India ink all over her jeans jacket, but she declared it a happy artistic accident and wore the jacket all the time. That she and Byron had been dating for a couple of months without becoming grossly romantic, gave me hope for the human race.
But then there was a guy with a faded green army jacket, and shaggy hair that I did not recognize at all. And then I realized that I didn’t quite recognize anyone. Although everyone was wearing what they were always wore, it felt like I had come to a Halloween party without a costume. Everything seemed out of tune.
Denny gestured toward the stranger. “This is Bruce, my Spanish and International Relations major friend from Beloit College. He brought us some al-co-hol.” said Denny, stretching out the word “alcohol” as if it was some foreign 3-word phrase and presenting a bottle of Southern Comfort sitting on a side table. I felt my back stiffen. I suddenly realized that everyone was drunk.
“Uh, I need to study,” I said and scurried back to a back bedroom in the apartment. I pulled out my paperback copy of Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing by Soren Kierkegaard out of my backpack and started to read.
One dare not say of repentance and remorse that it has its time; that there is a time to be carefree and a time to be prostrated in repentance. Such talk would be: to the anxious urgency of repentance–unpardonably slow; to the grieving after God–sacrilege; to what should be done this very day, in this instant, in this moment of danger–senseless delay. For there is indeed danger. There is a danger that is called delusion. It is unable to check itself. It goes on and on; then it is called perdition.
…
A little later, Denny and Krista came in.
“Hey are you okay, man?”, Denny asked.
“Yeah, I just need to do some reading for my Existentialism & Pragmatism class” Reading philosophy on Saturday nights used to be completely cool for us intellectuals.
“But you seem like weirded out,” Denny said.
“Um, I guess I just thought you guys were just smarter than that,”I continued. “I mean, I’ve had alcohol before. I’ve even been drunk before. But it was, like, sort of, on accident….with people I didn’t know that well. To drink on purpose, with the purpose of getting drunk, with people I know…it’s like different than sinning. It’s like saying it’s not even a sin. Like it’s okay. That it’s no big deal. That it doesn’t really matter to God if you do or don’t get drunk.”
“I mean Jesus did turn water into wine, “ Denny quipped.
“But not Southern Comfort,” . No one responded to my attempt at levity. “I don’t know, I just don’t want to be stupid drunk.”
“I get it,” Denny said. “It’s cool. You don’t have to drink. Just come and hang out with us.”
Krista and Denny each pulled one of my hands to get me out of my chair, like I was the drunk one, and we returned to the large open living room space. They continued drinking their Southern Comfort and orange juice and talking about dumb stuff. I smoked and scowled and thought about Kierkegaard.
…
As the evening progressed, Krista, Denny & Kevin came to sit on the couch in front of me as I was on the kitchen chair facing them squarely. Krista laughed and said, “we must look ridiculous to you. Us all drunk and you all sober. We’re like that three monkey sculpture: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” And then they all did the monkey pose and they laughed and laughed and laughed.
“Fuck it,” I said, “give me a Southern Comfort and orange juice.”
The last thing I remember was Kevin and I dancing in front of the window facing Foster Avenue below as we put on a CD from R.E.M.
It’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
- Spring Quarter: Fucking
As the glacial Chicago climate began its slow climb into Spring, we began to seek expanses broader than the one-mile stretch along Foster Avenue between the North Park campus and the Bowmanville Cafe. One Sunday afternoon Krista, Kevin and I decided to check out this hip coffee house in Rogers Park that Betsy had told us about. But as always, cash was in short supply. We had just enough spare change between us to buy one pack of cigarettes, three bottomless cups of coffee and one CTA ticket. To get all three of us on the train with one fare we sinfully passed a paper transfer through the exit turnstile.
…
With its floor to ceiling windows in front and black interior walls, the No Exit Coffeehouse in Rogers Park was seemingly light and dark at the same time, exposed and intimate. Krista, Kevin and I sat around a corner table near the front, drinking our coffees, sharing our one pack of Camel Lights.
While trying to hide it, we all watched a young couple a few tables away. The eager young man leaning forward and talking animatedly was barely being acknowledged by the woman across from him turned at an angle.
Kevin turned his gaze away from the awkward couple back to Krista and me. “He’s not getting any.” he said. And then, trying to be funny, Kevin asked ”so, how are your love lives?”
Kevin, whether knowingly or not, had broken the fourth wall separating our lives from literature. While we could speak with great authority about the appropriateness of Sarte & de Beavouir’s open relationship, or about de Sade’s exploits, we did not ever discuss our actual sexual experiences.
“Well actually, Betsy and I have been, um, kind of making out.” I broke through the wall if only because I desperately wanted perspective on my romantic life from someone who was not a deceased existentialist.
“I didn’t even know the two of you were dating, ” said Kevin.
“Well, um, we’re not, I guess. I mean, we were just hanging out and I started tickling her and I discovered she was especially ticklish if I squeezed the back of her thigh. So I would squeeze her thigh and she would laugh and, we ended up, um, kissing. So now, she’ll come to my dorm room some times and we will start, um, tickling, then we kind of wrestle and then we start making out. But, you know, um, we never talk about it.”
I didn’t know how my sharing might be taken, but then Krista blew the whole wall off. I hadn’t really known much about their relationship, beyond the fact that they managed to date without being cute about it.
“Byron and I broke up,” Krista related. “There was this one night, just after we had had sex, and he just got mad at me. He pushed me out the door of his apartment and locked me out. I was totally naked on the front porch of his apartment and it was really cold…”
She might have gone on, I don’t know. My mind froze up as soon as I heard “had sex”. I often had this fantasy that Betsy and I would “accidentally” end up having sex one night after tickling. And then in my fantasy, I would just go. I would just go away. I would just go away into the woods and never come back. And that was the extent of my planning.
I stood up and stumbled away from our table. Kevin & Krista looked up at me as I strangely awkwardly headed toward the bathroom, but then moved to go out the door. I had our paper transfer so I could get back on the CTA train. As the train pulled out of the station, the bright late afternoon sun suddenly streamed into the El car and I just stared into the sun and felt its warmth and stopped thinking of anything at all.
—-
Krista found me back on the bottom bunk in my North Park dorm room. I was slouching against the concrete brick wall against by bed so I could kind of sit up to read Purity without hitting my head on the top bunk.
If there were no punishment or if indeed there was a man who could convince him[self] that eternity’s punishment was a fantasy…Look at the double-mindedness!…If one were briefly to characterize double-mindedness by a single appropriate expression, what would be more characteristic than that– “if”, “in case that”! For when the will in man gets command so that he keeps on willing the Good and in truth willing only that one thing, then there is no “in case that”
Krista came in. Her hands on her hips and she seemed to be upset. “What the fuck? You took the transfer and we had to walk nearly 5 miles back to campus.”
“I…I…I mean Byron…I mean it was all just so sordid.”
“Yes, Byron was horrible to me, but look, it’s over. People have sex. It’s not always what we planned. But,it’s not that big a deal. I don’t get what’s going on with you. Did I violate some…some Christian virtue of yours? “
“I mean you were so innocent and young”
Well, I am still young…”
“Look, Krista,” I told her. And then I got mad. I got terribly mad.
“ I don’t give a fuck about Christianity. I don’t believe in God the shithead maker of heaven and earth. I don’t give a shit about Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. Born of a supposed virgin, saying he’s come to judge the living and the dead.
I don’t believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints. I don’t believe in getting all weepy when we light each other’s candles and sing Silent Night on Christmas Eve. You can take your fucking Easter where we put on our blazers and Laura Ashley dresses and tell each other that He is risen, He is risen indeed. I don’t give a fuck about the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body or the life everlasting, Krista. But I believe in Hell, Krista, damnit. I believe in Hell.
