## Notes The arc is how this experience happened, and then how I reacted to it. * house church normally a good time * my mother led one service and it was really disturbing * i was disgusted and ashamed by it all, but i knew i was stuck there * at my completely separate life at the magnet school across town, those kids didn't know me. i kept all the church stuff a secret. i didn't invite kids to bible study like other kids at my church did. * i became two or even three people. one person at school. one person when with other kids at my church. and a third person at home. each group had secrets from the other. who was "going with" who was a secret that us church kids kept from our parents. i lied to my mother about where i went every day after school, about grades, about anything else that would get her to leave me alone. i learned as a younger boy she would use things i said i was sad about later to hurt me. she would get angry (which is just a weird thing to imagine) i lied to kids at school about where i was from, because i didn't want them to make fun of me about living in a shitty part of town, in a shitty house. So, yahh, the house church chapter could be like ### Scene One: After School * scene one getting off bus, walking home, going on bike ride to gas station, go inside, make some food, find mother on phone, hand her a note saying "can I go for a bike ride? (no video games)". then I go play video games, read swimsuit magazines, steal some candy bars, ride around aimlessly listening to music, then home and make some food. ### Scene Two: House Church * scene two is house church, so i go, and i eat a lot. then the first prayer, then song, then reading, then another prayer, another song, another reading, then a mini sermon to the young kids, then we all left to hang in other room. ### Scene Three: the hallway at the rusts when i watch * scene three is me getting out to go to bathroom, hearing them all crying. i maybe watched it in disgust and horror for a while. this is when i realized my mother is so crazy that her craziness is becoming contagious. I didn't have the words, but i was watching her emotionally upset these people to the point of it becoming vicarious trauma. Somehow the idea was that what sins that they had done were causing the different wounds on Jesus's body. Like some sin would be part of the crown of thorns on his head. Others would be like whipping Jesus. Yahh, me staring and watching kinda horrified me. my church was so weird but i knew better than to speak up. my crazy mother was dangerous when angry. It was like i was my mother cast a spell on these people and make them so upset that they cried, and somehow, that made my mother feel good. Like, that's what she chose to do -- make a bible study that would emotionally devastate everyone. I suppose she could have played a really horrifying movie and that would have had a similar effect. (side note: is this why Tabitha's recorded talk about the Edmund Fitzgerald kinda grossed me out? Is it that I think there's something weird about telling sad stories in public? It brings down the mood!) ### Scene Four: riding the bus to school * scene four is me riding the bus in school, replaying parts of the night before in my head. Me noticing the fact that my neighborhood is full of boarded up houses, broken down cars, raunchy murals on spanish bars, etc. then some black kids that get on the bus next and they live in a nicer area. they're wearing nice clothes, too. then we go to a worse area, and it's more black kids. maya and phillis and some others. maya told me once i had pretty eyes. i sit behind her and listen to her and phillis talk. Its like they live on a different planet. i didn't have a tv at home. my mother wanted to take it out to a field and shoot it because of its influence on the family. they're talking about the plotline on a soap opera. I never did my homework. I have it in my lap, but i'd rather listen to them, so i do that. then we pick up some white kids in the west university area, then we get to the montrose neighborhood, and i love looking at all the posters of bands coming to town and i love seeing just the craziness of the neighborhood. Everything looked cool. The people walking around looked cool. the cars were cool too. these white kids that get on the bus are everything i wish i was. they had cool clothes, they knew about cool music, they were physically beautiful and athletic all of them. i was skinny and not tall and dressed entirely in hand me downs, and never got regular haircuts or trips to the dentist. neglected kid, generally. but i didn't know it at the time! the white kids -- they were happy and they were really fuckin smart. like they programmed computers at home. i tried to teach myself. i typed in programs into my c64 and played little games, but never got that into it. mostly i played games like GORF on it. there was a girl, Kim, and she liked me, and she would talk to me, and mostly i would listen, and let her talk about her life. ### Scene Five: lunch at school * scene five is later at lunch, me explaining to freddie how i won't take erin taylor to the dance because i can't go. because my mother won't let me. i tell the kid "cuz she's super religious." I don't know about the arc of this scene. ### Scene Six: off the bus, i find the coat * scene six could be a few weeks later when i find that black coat when i get off the bus going home. it's in the middle of the road. i like how it looks. I describe how house church usually was. Nice meal, social time, boring church stuff. Better than a night home. Mom in a better mood usually. But this night was weird and bad. I felt ashamed and disgusted by it. At my school across town, the kids didn't know where I lived or anything about my family or my church. So I hid it all. I lied about where I lived, what my parents did for a living, (my dad didn't have a job for a while, my mother worked at the church day care), anything else. I went to a magnet school in a different neighborhood. In 2nd grade or so, my mother complained to the school about how halloween was demonic, and I think she maybe got the school halloween day canceled. That was embarrassing. Side note: it's weird to think she was so pushy about it that she wanted to stop other families from having a party. She didn't have to go. But she wanted to cancel it for everyone. Also now i remember how she wouldn't let me go to the first dance in 6th grade, and she didn't say i couldn't until after i had told her i had a date, erin taylor. wow. maybe that could be a thread in this story. me explaining to freddie at school how my mother won't let me go to the dance, in response to him asking me if i'm taking erin taylor. weird to remember this now. this has gotta be the beginning of the era of sneaking around. like, she's gonna ruin your life if you don't break the rules, and that meant sneaking around. There is the moment when I realized that this church was allowing my crazy mother too much influence. I recoiled in disgust and shame. At first, this was overwhelming. Then I adapted. I became two people (or more). I was one person when around church people. I played along. Then at school, I was somebody else. ## House Church Memory from good friday (I think) For a few years, I want to say from when I was ten until I was 14 or so, we had "house church" on Thursday nights. It was something our church organized. Other people went to different house churches. I was a kid at the time. I don't know how it got set up or how families were organized into. For us, we went to a family's house a few blocks away. David and Eugenia Rust. They were both retired. Maybe they were in their sixties or seventies. They also had a roommate, a woman with white hair named Audrey, that lived with them. I didn't realize at the time that people outside of our church didn't do that commonly -- have other non-family members living in their house. There was about three or four other families. I remember the Eggerts. Husband was a mail carrier. They had two young children. David Rust would jog around the neighborhood and sometimes we would see him when we were out playing football outside and he would stop and talk to us. I was felt happy when he was around. I think he was a retired engineer or something like that. He had positive grandpa vibes. He had lived in the neighborhood since it was a mostly white neighborhood. Anyhow, house church was a thing that everyone at our church was encouraged to do. Families would host a pot luck dinner, which was great for me, because anybody else's food was always delicious. I didn't figure it out at the time, but my mother was a terrible cook. I knew I liked other people's food more, but I imagined my mother's cooking was "average" and everyone else was somehow much better. When I back on these memories with adult eyes, I realize that my mother was just a terrible cook. She wouldn't follow recipes. She would burn things, or do weird substitutions, and then yell at us or cry when we didn't like it. Anyhow, house church was a break from that. It meant going to some other house. There would be a prayer, a meal, a bible reading, somebody might lead through something, then a few songs, and a few more prayers, and then we could go home. It was like a church service, but held in somebody's house. The food was good, and the Rusts had a nice hom. I got bored and spaced out a lot during a lot of it, but had to act as if I was still listening and involved. My childhood involved a lot of inventing mental games to keep myself entertained. my mother wanted to lead one of the house church sessions. She prepared a whole bunch for it. She said it wasn't going to be appropriate for children. another family had young kids and me and my two younger sisters and the other kids went to the other room, to play with old toys the Rusts had, like Lincoln Logs and Bristle Blocks. I remember going to the bathroom maybe so I left the bedroom where the kids were, and I walked past the living room and all the adults were crying it seemed, maybe because they were focusing on the suffering of jesus. I think my mom did something about jesus being crucified and she focused on all the suffering and had brought little toys like plastic army men to use somehow. I also remember seeing a mother, I don't remember her name now, but she was the mom of some of the kids I was playing with, and she got up and walked past me, and she was sobbing. She was clearly overwhelmed emotionally and trying to get to the bathroom. I remember me made eye contact, and that's when I realized how my mother had probably done this on purpose -- try to invent some thing that would cause everyone to feel horrible about themselves, and this poor lady was just no match for the amount of psychosis that my mother was packing. I felt ashamed cuz it was my crazy mother that had reduced this woman to such a state of crying and tears. I wondered why the hell did our church encourage this. I thought about how the kids at my magnet junior high across town would eat me alive if they knew about this weirdness. ## Other memories I remember blowing some gigantic horn they had to begin. I remember praying for rain so I could wear my new trenchcoat that I was so fond of. ## House Church Memory of that dude that was a marine? I don't remember his name. I'll call him John. He joined the church. Single dude. I think he was some sort of sailor. Like I think he worked on freighters or something to do with the ship channel. He helped us move, I remember, when we moved moved out of Eastwood. I remember more than one night of him crying loudly at house church. I don't know if he was crying about sad things that had happened to him, or if he was crying because of things that he regretted doing, or what. I just remember feeling very uncomfortable with watching this adult guy that I barely knew sobbing. I was maybe 10 or 11 or 12 or so at the time. Grown-up me now looks back on a lot of that stuff and just recoils in disgust. That wasn't a good environment for me to be in. These weren't positive role models. I was getting really awful ideas about what adult life was about from these people. ## Next at school I think I remember a few days later, a girl I liked said her friends were going to a movie, and her dad could come pick me up and take me to the movie. I was HORRIFIED by the idea of these kids at school knowing where I lived. And I was horrified imagining my mother talking to them. She'd probably start telling them her life story at the drop of a hat, starting with the most disturbing parts at the front. So I lied about where I lived. I said I'd get a ride on my own. I remember.