The Discomfort Zone

THEN JOY BREAKS THROUGH

WE MET ON Sundays at five-thirty. We chose partners and blindfolded them and led them down empty corridors at break-neck speeds, as an experiment in trust. We made collages about protecting the environment. We did skits about navigating the emotional crises of seventh and eighth grade. We sang along while advisors played songs by Cat Stevens. We wrote haikus on the theme of friendship and read them aloud:

A friend stands by you

Even when you’re in trouble

So it’s not so bad.

A friend is a person

You think you can depend on

And usually trust.

My own contribution to this exercise—

You get a haircut

Ordinary people laugh

Do friends? No, they don’t.

— referred to certain realities at my junior high, not in the group. People in the group, even the people I didn’t consider friends, weren’t allowed to laugh at you that way. This was one reason I’d joined in the first place.

The group was called Fellowship — no definite article, no modifier — and it was sponsored by the First Congregational Church, with some help from the Evangelical United Church of Christ down the street. Most of the kids in seventh- and eighth-grade Fellowship had come up together through Sunday school at First Congregational and knew each other in almost cousinlike ways. We’d seen each other in miniature sport coats and clip-on ties or in plaid jumpers with velveteen bows, and we’d spent long minutes sitting in pews and staring at each other’s defenseless parents while they worshipped, and one morning in the church basement, during a spirited singing of “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” we’d all watched a little girl in white tights wet herself dramatically. Having been through these experiences together, we’d moved on into Fellowship with minimal social trauma.

The trouble began in ninth grade. Ninth-graders had their own separate Fellowship group, as if in recognition of the particular toxicity of ninth-grade adolescence, and the first few ninth-grade meetings, in September 1973, attracted rafts of newcomers who looked cooler and tougher and more experienced than most of us Congregational kids. There were girls with mouth-watering names like Julie Wolfrum and Brenda Pahmeier. There were guys with incipient beards and foot-long hair. There was a statuesque blond girl who incessantly practiced the guitar part to “The Needle and the Damage Done.” All these kids raised their hands when our advisors asked who was planning to participate in the group’s first weekend country retreat, in October.

I raised my hand, too. I was a Fellowship veteran and I liked retreats. But I was small and squeaky and a lot more articulate than I was mature, and from this stressful vantage the upcoming retreat looked less like a Fellowship event than like the kind of party I was ordinarily not invited to.

Luckily, my parents were out of the country. They were in the middle of their second trip to Europe, letting themselves be entertained by their Austrian business friends, at Austrian expense. I was spending the last three weeks of October as the ward of various neighbors, and it fell to one of them, Celeste Schwilck, to drive me down to First Congregational late on a Friday afternoon. In the passenger seat of the Schwilcks’ burgundy Oldsmobile, I opened a letter that my mother had sent to me from London. The letter began with the word “Dearest,” which my mother never seemed to realize was a more invasive and less endearing word than “Dear.” Even if I’d been inclined to miss her, which I wasn’t, the “Dearest” would have reminded me why I shouldn’t. I put the letter, unread, into a paper bag with the dinner that Mrs. Schwilck had made me.

I was wearing my jeans and desert boots and wind-breaker, my antianxiety ensemble. In the church parking lot, thirty-five kids in denim were throwing Frisbees and tuning guitars, smoking cigarettes, swapping desserts, and jockeying for rides in cars driven by the more glamorous young advisors. We were going to Shannondale, a camp in the Ozarks three hours south of St. Louis. For a ride this long, it was imperative to avoid the car of Social Death, which was typically filled with girls in shapeless slacks and boys whose sense of humor was substandard. I had nothing against these kids except a desperate fear of being taken for one of them. I dropped my bags on a pile of luggage and ran to secure a place in a safe car with a mustached seminarian and some smart, quiet Congregationalists who liked to play Ghost.

It was the season in Missouri when dusk crept up on you. Returning for my bags, I couldn’t find my dinner. Car doors were slamming, engines starting. I ran around canvassing the people who hadn’t left yet. Had anybody seen my paper bag? Five minutes into the retreat, I was already losing my cool. And this wasn’t even the worst of it, because it was possible that, even now, in one of the glamorous cars, somebody was reading my mother’s letter. I felt like an Air Force officer who’d let a nuclear warhead go missing.

I ran back to my chosen car and reported, with ornate self-disgust, that I’d lost my dinner. But the mustached seminarian almost welcomed my loss. He said that each person in the car could give me a small piece of dinner, and nobody would be hungry, and everybody would be fed. In the gathering dark, as we drove south out of the city, girls kept handing me food. I could feel their fingers as I took it.

On my only Boy Scout weekend, two years earlier, the leaders of the Bison Patrol had left us Tenderfeet to pitch our tents in steady rain. The leaders hung out with their friends in better-organized patrols who had brought along steaks and sodas and paraffin fire starters and great quantities of dry, seasoned firewood. When we young Bisons stopped by to warm ourselves, our leaders ordered us back to our sodden campsite. Late in the evening, the Scoutmaster consoled us with Silly Sally jokes that the older Scouts didn’t want to listen to anymore. (“One time when Silly Sally was in the woods, an old man said to her, ‘Silly Sally, I want you to take off all your clothes!’ and Silly Sally said, ‘Why, that’s silly, because I’m sure they won’t fit you!’”) I came home from the weekend wet, hungry, tired, dirty, and furious. My father, hating all things military, was happy to excuse me from the Scouts, but he insisted that I participate in some activity, and my mother suggested Fellowship.

At Fellowship camps there were girls in halter tops and cutoffs. Each June, the seventh-and-eighth-grade group went down to Shannondale for five days and did maintenance for the church there, using scythes and paint rollers. The camp was near the Current River, a spring-fed, gravel-bottomed stream on which we took a float trip every year. My first summer, after the social discouragements of seventh grade, I wanted to toughen up my image and make myself more stupid, and I was trying to do this by continually exclaiming, “Son of a bitch!” Floating on the Current, I marveled at every green vista: “Son of a bitch!” This irritated my canoe mate, who, with each repetition, responded no less mechanically, “Yes, you certainly are one.”

Our canoe was a thigh-fryer, an aluminum reflector oven. The day after the float trip, I was redder than the red-haired seventh-grader Bean but not quite as red as the most popular eighth-grade boy, Peppel, onto whose atrociously sunburned back Bean spilled an entire bowl of chicken-noodle soup that had just come off the boil. It was Bean’s fate to make mistakes like this. He had a squawky voice and slide-rule sensibilities and an all-around rough time in Fellowship, where the prevailing ethic of honesty and personal growth licensed kids like Peppel to shout, “Jesus Christ! You’re not just clumsy physically, you’re clumsy with other people’s feelings! You’ve got to learn how to watch out for other people!”

Bean, who was also in Boy Scouts, quit Fellowship soon after this, leaving me and my own clumsiness to become inviting targets for other people’s honesty. In Shannondale the next summer, I was playing cards with the seventh-grader MacDonald, a feline-mannered girl whose granny glasses and Carole King frizz both attracted me and made me nervous, and in a moment of Beanish inspiration I decided it would be a funny joke to steal a look at MacDonald’s cards while she was in the bathroom. But MacDonald failed to see the humor. Her skin was so clear that every emotion she experienced, no matter how mild, registered as some variety of blush. She began to call me “Cheater” even as I insisted, with a guilty smirk, that I hadn’t seen her cards. She called me “Cheater” for the remainder of the trip. Leaving Shannondale, we all wrote farewell notes to each other, and MacDonald’s note to me began Dear Cheater and concluded I hope someday you’ll learn there’s more to life than cheating.

Four months later, I certainly hadn’t learned this lesson. The well-being I felt in returning to Shannondale as a ninth-grader, in wearing jeans and racing through the woods at night, was acquired mainly by fraud. I had to pretend to be a kid who naturally said “shit” a lot, a kid who hadn’t written a book-length report on plant physiology, a kid who didn’t enjoy calculating absolute stellar magnitudes on his new six-function Texas Instruments calculator, or else I might find myself exposed the way I’d been exposed not long ago in English class, where an athlete had accused me of preferring the dictionary to any other book, and my old friend Manley, whom I’d turned to for refutation of this devastating slander, had smiled at me and quietly confirmed, “He’s right, Jon.” Storming into the Shannondale boys’ barn, identifying luggage from the Social Death car and claiming a bunk as far as I could get from it, I relied on the fact that my Fellowship friends went to different junior high schools and didn’t know that I was Social Death myself.

Outside, I could hear tight cliques in desert boots crunching along on the Ozark flint gravel. Up by the Shannondale community center, in a cluster of Fellowship girls with wavy album-art hair and personalities that were sweet the way bruises on a peach are sweet, two unfamiliar tough guys in army jackets were calling and responding in high, femmy voices. One guy had lank hair and sufficient hormones for a downy Fu Manchu. He called out, “Dearest Jonathan!” The other guy, who was so fair he seemed not to have eyebrows or eyelashes, responded, “Oh, dearest Jonathan!”

“Heh heh heh. Dearest Jonathan.”

“Dearest Jonathan!”

I turned on my heel and ran back into the woods, veered off into tree litter, and cowered in the dark. The retreat was now officially a disaster. It was some consolation, however, that people in Fellowship called me Jon, never Jonathan. As far as the tough guys knew, Dearest Jonathan might be anybody. Dearest Jonathan might still be up in Webster Groves, looking for his paper bag. If I could somehow avoid the two thieves all weekend, they might never figure out whose dinner they’d eaten.

The thieves made my task a little easier, as the group assembled in the community center, by sticking together and sitting down outside the Fellowship circle. I entered the room late, with my head low, and crowded into the antipodal portion of the circle, where I had friends.

“If you want to be part of this group,” the youth minister, Bob Mutton, told the thieves, “join the circle.”

Mutton was unafraid of tough guys. He wore an army jacket and talked like a pissed-off tough guy himself. You made yourself look childish, not cool, if you defied him. Mutton oversaw the entire Fellowship operation, with its 250 kids and several dozen advisors, and he looked rather scarily like Jesus — not the Renaissance Jesus, with the long Hellenic nose, but the more tormented Jesus of the northern Gothic. Mutton’s eyes were blue and set close together below mournfully knitted eyebrows. He had coarse tangles of chestnut hair that hung over his collar and fell across his forehead in a canted mass; his goatee was a thick reddish bush into which he liked to insert Hauptmann’s cigars. When he wasn’t smoking or chewing on a Hauptmann’s, he held a rolled-up magazine or a fireplace tool or a stick or a pointer and slapped his opposite palm with it. Talking to him, you could never be sure if he was going to laugh and nod and agree with you, or whether he was going to nail you with his favorite judgment: “That is…such bullshit.”

Since every word out of my mouth was arguably bullshit, I was trying to steer clear of Mutton. Fellowship was a class I was never going to be the best student in; I was content to pull down B’s and C’s in honesty and openness. For the night’s first exercise, in which each of us divulged how we hoped to grow on this retreat, I offered the bland goal of “developing new relationships.” (My actual goal was to avoid certain new relationships.) Then the group split into a series of dyads and small groups for sensitivity training. The advisors tried to shuffle us, to break down cliques and force new interactions, but I was practiced at picking out and quickly nabbing partners who were neither Deathly nor good friends, and I brought my techniques to bear on the task of avoiding the thieves. I sat facing a schoolteacher’s kid, a nice boy with an unfortunate penchant for talking about Gandalf, and closed my eyes and felt his face with my fingertips and let him feel mine. We formed five-person groups and inter-locked our bodies to create machines. We regrouped as a plenum and lay down in a zigzagging circle, our heads on our neighbors’ bellies, and laughed collectively.

I was relieved to see the thieves participating in these exercises. Once you let a stranger palpate your face, even if you did it with a smirk or a sneer, you became implicated in the group and were less likely to ridicule it on Monday. I had an inkling, too, that the exercises cost the thieves more than they cost me: that people who stole sack dinners were in a far unhappier place than I was. Although they were obviously my enemies, I envied them their long hair and their rebellious clothes, which I wasn’t allowed to have, and I half admired the purity of their adolescent anger, which contrasted with my own muddle of self-consciousness and silliness and posturing. Part of why kids like this scared me was that they seemed authentic.

“Just a reminder,” Mutton said before we dispersed for the night. “The three rules around here are no booze. No sex. And no drugs. Also, if you find out that somebody else has broken a rule, you have to come and tell me or tell one of the advisors. Otherwise it’s the same as if you broke the rule yourself.”

Mutton cast a glowering eye around the circle. The dinner thieves seemed greatly amused.

AS AN ADULT, when I say the words “Webster Groves” to people I’ve just met, I’m often informed that I grew up in a suffocatingly wealthy, insular, conformist town with a punitive social hierarchy. The twenty-odd people who have told me this over the years have collectively spent, by my estimate, about twenty minutes in Webster Groves, but each of them went to college in the seventies and eighties, and a fixture of sociology curricula in that era was a 1966 CBS documentary called 16 in Webster Groves. The film, an early experiment in hour-long prime-time sociology, reported on the attitudes of suburban sixteen-year-olds. I’ve tried to explain that the Webster Groves depicted in it bears minimal resemblance to the friendly, unpretentious town I knew when I was growing up. But it’s useless to contradict TV; people look at me with suspicion, or hostility, or pity, as if I’m deeply in denial.

According to the documentary’s host, Charles Kuralt, Webster Groves High School was ruled by a tiny elite of “soshies” who made life gray and marginal for the great majority of students who weren’t “football captains,” “cheer-leaders,” or “dance queens.” Interviews with these all-powerful soshies revealed a student body obsessed with grades, cars, and money. CBS repeatedly flashed images of the largest houses in Webster Groves; of the town’s several thousand small and medium-sized houses there were no shots at all. For no apparent reason but the sheer visual grotesqueness of it, the filmmakers included nearly a minute of footage of grownups in tuxedos and cocktail dresses rock-and-roll dancing at a social club. In a disappointed tone, as if to suggest just how oppressive the town was, Kuralt reported that the number of tough kids and drinkers at the high school was “very low,” and although he allowed that a “minority twenty percent” of sixteen-year-olds did place high value on intelligence, he was quick to inject a note of Orwellian portent: “That kind of thinking can imperil your social standing at Webster High.”

The film wasn’t entirely wrong about Webster High in the mid-sixties. My brother Tom, though not one of the film’s 688 eponymous sixteen-year-olds (he was born a year late), remembers little about his high-school years besides accumulating good grades and drifting in social backwaters with all the other nonsoshies; his main recreation was bombing around with friends who had cars. Nor was the film wrong about the town’s prevailing conservatism: Barry Goldwater had carried Webster Groves in 1964.

The problem with 16 was tonal. When Kuralt, with a desperate grin, asked a group of Webster Groves parents whether a civil rights march wouldn’t maybe “sort of inject some life into things around here,” the parents recoiled from him as if he were insane; and the filmmakers, unable to imagine that you could be a nice person and still not want your sixteen-year-old in a civil rights march, cast Webster Groves as a nightmare of mind control and soulless materialism. “Youth dreams, we had believed, of adventure,” Kuralt voice-overed. “But three-quarters of these teenagers listed as their main goal in life a good-paying job, money, success. And we had thought that, at sixteen, you are filled with yearning and dissatisfaction. But ninety percent say they like it in Webster Groves. Nearly half said they wouldn’t mind staying here for the rest of their lives.” Kuralt laid ominous emphasis on this final fact. The most obvious explanation for it — that CBS had stumbled onto an unusually congenial community — seemed not to have crossed his mind.

The film’s broadcast, on February 25, 1966, drew so many angry phone calls and letters from Webster Groves that the network put together an extraordinary hour-long follow-up, Webster Groves Revisited, and aired it two months later. Here Kuralt came as close to apologizing as he could without using the word “sorry.” He offered conciliatory footage of soshies watching the February broadcast and clutching their heads at the pompous things they’d said on camera; he conceded that children who grew up in safe environments might still become adventurers as adults.

The core value in Webster Groves, the value whose absence in 16 most enraged its citizens, was a kind of apolitical niceness. The membership of First Congregational may have been largely Republican, but it consistently chose liberal pastors. The church’s minister in the 1920s had informed the congregation that his job was “clinical,” not personal. (“The successful minister is a psychoanalyst,” he said. “If that thought shocks you, let me tell you that Jesus was the master psychoanalyst of all time. Can a minister do better than follow Him?”) In the 1930s, the lead pastor was a fervid socialist who wore a beret and smoked cigarettes while riding to and from the church on a bicycle. He was succeeded by an Army combat veteran, Ervine Inglis, who preached pacifism throughout the Second World War.

Bob Roessel, the son of a local Republican lawyer, grew up going to the church under its socialist pastor and spent his summers with an uncle in New Mexico who administered the Federal Writers’ Project in the state for the Works Projects Administration. Traveling around the Southwest, Roessel fell in love with Navajo culture and decided to become a missionary — an ambition that survived until he went to seminary and met actual working missionaries, who spoke of leading savages from darkness into light. Roessel went and asked Ervine Inglis, whose proclivities were Unitarian (he didn’t believe in the effectiveness of prayer, for example), if a person could be both Christian and Navajo. Inglis said yes. Abandoning the seminary, Roessel married the daughter of a Navajo medicine man and dedicated his life to serving his adoptive people. On visits to Webster Groves to see his mother, he set up a table at First Congregational and sold blankets and silver jewelry to raise money for the tribe. He gave barn-burning speeches on the greatness of the Navajos, telling church members that their Midwestern world, their shady lawns and good schools and middle-management jobs at Monsanto, would be heaven to his other people. “The Navajos,” he said, “have nothing. They live in the desert with nothing. And yet the Navajos have something you don’t have: the Navajos believe in God.”

In the fall of 1967, the church’s new associate minister, Duane Estes, gathered together sixteen teenagers and one seminary student and made a proposition: How would they like to form a group to raise money to go to Arizona over spring vacation to help the Navajos? Out in the town of Rough Rock, Bob Roessel was starting a “demonstration school,” the first Indian school in the country for which the Bureau of Indian Affairs would be ceding control to a local Indian school board, and he needed volunteers to work in the community. First Congregational’s old senior-high group, Pilgrim Fellowship, had lately fallen on hard times (this may have had something to do with the black Pilgrim hats its members were expected to wear at meetings). Estes, a former prep-school chaplain and football coach, jettisoned the word “Pilgrim” (also the hats) and proposed a different kind of pilgrimage, a football coach’s pilgrimage: Let’s go out in the world and hit somebody! He’d anticipated that a couple of station wagons would suffice for the Arizona trip, but by the time the group left for Rough Rock, a day after the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr., it filled a chartered bus.

The lone seminary student, Bob Mutton, was there on the bus with all the clean-cut suburban kids, sporting big sideburns and wearing his outsider’s glower. Mutton had grown up in a blue-collar town outside Buffalo. He’d been a bad boy in high school, a pursuer of girls in the hulking ’49 Buick convertible that he and his father, a machinist, had fixed up. It happened that one girl whom Mutton was particularly chasing belonged to a local church group, and the group’s leader took an interest in him, urging him to apply to college. He ended up at Elmhurst College, a church-affiliated school outside Chicago. For a couple of years, he kept up his antisocial pursuits; he hung out with bad boys and he liked them. Then, in his fourth year of immersion in Elmhurst, he announced to his parents that he was going to marry a classmate, a working-class Chicago girl, and go to seminary. His father didn’t like the seminary idea — couldn’t a person be a Christian and still go to law school? — but Mutton felt he had a calling, and he enrolled at Eden Theological Seminary, in Webster Groves, in the fall of 1966.

It was a time when schools like Eden were attracting students who coveted the military draft classification, IV-D, which was given to seminarians. Mutton and his first-year friends had rowdy parties in the dorm and laughed in the faces of the pious upperclassmen who complained about the noise. The longer Mutton and his wife stayed in Webster Groves, though, the less social life they had. Webster Groves wasn’t a town of blue bloods, but it was full of upward middle-class striving, and the Muttons seldom met young couples they felt comfortable with. Mutton ate with his fork in his fist, like a shovel. He drove a car that burned almost as much oil as gas. He paid his school bills by working as a tile layer. When the time came to choose his fieldwork, in his second year at Eden, he was one of only two people in his class to sign up for youth ministry. He’d become aware of a huge submerged population of lost teenagers, some of them good students, some of them roughnecks, some of them just misfits, all of them undernourished by the values of their parents, and, unlike CBS, he gave them full credit for yearning and dissatisfaction. He’d been a kid like this himself. Still was one, basically.

In churches the size of First Congregational, senior-high groups typically have thirty or forty members — the number that Fellowship had attracted in its first year. By June 1970, when First Congregational hired Mutton to replace Duane Estes, the group’s membership had doubled to eighty, and in the first two years of Mutton’s ministry, at the historical apex of American disenchantment with institutional authority, it doubled again. Every weekday after school, church elders had to pick their way through teenage feet in sandals, Keds, and work boots. There was a clutch of adoring girls who practically lived in Mutton’s office, vying for space on his beat-up sofa, beneath his psychedelic Jesus poster. Between this office and the church’s meeting hall, dozens of other kids in embroidered smocks and denim shirts were playing guitars in competing keys while cigarette smoke whitely filled the long-necked soda bottles into which everyone persisted in dropping butts despite complaints from the vending-machine company.

“I’ll ask the youth minister to ask them again not to do that,” the infinitely patient church secretary kept promising the company.

Kids from other churches joined the group for the romance of Arizona, for the twenty-hour marathons of live music that the bus rides in both directions quickly became, and for the good-looking crowds that came to the acoustic and electric concerts that Fellowship musicians held in the church on Friday nights. The biggest draw, though, was Mutton himself. As the overplayed song then had it, “To sing the blues / You’ve got to live the dues,” and Mutton’s blue-collar background and his violent allergy to piousness made him a beacon of authenticity to the well-groomed kids of Webster Groves. Working with adolescents was notoriously time-consuming, but Mutton, lacking a social life, had time for it. In his simmering and strutting and cursing, he stood for the adolescent alienation that nobody else over twenty in Webster Groves seemed to understand.

Mutton on a basketball court was a maniac with blazing eyes and a soaking-wet T-shirt. He whipped the ball to weak players at the same finger-breaking velocity as he did to strong ones; if you didn’t get your feet planted when he was taking the ball to the basket, he knocked you down and ran right over you. If you were a Navajo elder and you saw a busload of middle-class white kids arriving on your land with guitars and paintbrushes, and if you went to Mutton and asked him why the group had come, he gave you the only right answer: “We came here mostly for ourselves.” If you were a Fellowship member and you happened to be riding in his car when he stopped to buy Communion supplies, he turned to you like a peer and asked for your help: “What kind of wine should I be looking for?” He talked about sex the same way. He wondered what you thought of the European idea that Americans were passive in bed, and whether you knew the joke about the Frenchman who found a woman lying on a beach and started having sex with her, and his friends pointed out that she was dead (“Oh, sorry, I thought she was American”). He seemed ready to be guided by your judgment when he asked you what you made of certain New Testament miracles, like the loaves and the fishes. What did you think really happened there? And maybe you ventured the guess that some of the five thousand people who came to hear Jesus had had provisions hidden in their robes, and Jesus’ message of brotherhood moved them to share their privately hoarded food, and giving begat giving, and this was how the five thousand were fed. “So a kind of miracle of socialism?” Mutton said. “That would be miracle enough for me.”

“Parents complaining because their high-school youngster spends too much time at church!” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat exclaimed in a full-page article about Fellowship in November 1972. “Parents forbidding a high schooler to go to church as a punishment!” Some parents, both inside and outside First Congregational, thought that Fellowship might even be a cult. Mutton in poor light was mistakable for Charles Manson, and it was unsettling how much the kids looked forward to Sunday nights, saving their favorite, most worn-out clothes for the occasion and throwing fits if they missed even one meeting. But most parents recognized that, given the state of intergenerational relations in the early seventies, things could have been a whole lot worse. Mutton had the trust of the church’s senior minister, Paul Davis, and key support from several leading church elders who had gone on early Arizona trips and come home sold on Fellowship. A few conservative congregants complained to Davis about Mutton’s style, his cigars and his obscenities, and Davis listened to the complaints with active sympathy, nodding and amiably wincing and repeating, in his extraordinarily soothing voice, that he understood their concerns and was really grateful that they had gone to the trouble of sharing them with him. Then he closed his office door and took no action of any kind.

Mutton was like a bass lure cast into a pond that hadn’t been fished in thirty years. No sooner had he taken over Fellowship than he was mobbed by troubled kids who couldn’t tolerate their parents but still needed an adult in their lives. Kids came and told him, as they’d never told anyone else, that their fathers got drunk and hit them. They brought him dreams for his interpretation. They queued up outside his office door, waiting for individual conferences, suffering for not being the lucky person alone with him behind his closed door, and feeling that not even the joy of finally getting into the office could compensate for the pain of waiting. Everybody and his brother were doing drugs. Kids were watering the family Gilbey’s and dropping acid in school bathrooms, smoking specially adulterated banana peels, popping parental antihistamines and grandparental nitroglycerin, consuming nutmeg in vomitous quantities, filling empty milk cartons with beer and drinking in public, exhaling pot smoke into stove hoods or the absorbant insulation of basement ceilings, and then heading on down to church. Three boys from good families were caught toking in the First Congregational sanctuary itself. Mutton sat for hours trying to follow the words of a founding member of Fellowship lately released from the mental hospital where a lysergic brain-scrambling had landed him. When a Fellowship girl informed Mutton that she’d got drunk at a party and had had sex with three Fellowship boys in rapid succession, Mutton brought all four kids together in his office and, asserting a kind of patriarchal prerogative, made each boy apologize. A different girl, whose parents had confronted her with contraceptives that they’d found in her bedroom, refused to speak to them unless Mutton was summoned as a mediator. He was part Godfather and part Sorcerer’s Apprentice, implicated in the lives of more and more families.

In September 1973, the month before the ninth-grade retreat at Shannondale, a gifted seventeen-year-old boy named MacDonald came to Mutton’s office and told him there were no more challenges in his life. MacDonald was the older brother of the girl who’d been so disappointed in my cheating at cards. He was about to start college, and Mutton didn’t follow up on the conversation; and a few weeks later MacDonald hanged himself. Mutton was devastated. He felt, at twenty-nine, overwhelmed and underprepared. He decided that he needed training as a therapist, and a parishioner at First Congregational kindly lent him five thousand dollars so that he could study with a prominent local Christian shrink.

IT WAS YEARS—decades — before I found out about any of this. I was a latecomer to Fellowship in the same way I was a latecomer to my own family. When need-to-know lists were being made up, I was always left off them. It was as if I went through life wearing a sign that said KEEP HIM IN THE DARK.

When my friend Weidman and I were discussing what a girl did when she masturbated, I thought I was holding up my side of the conversation rather well, but I must have said something wrong, because Weidman asked me, in the tone of a friendly professor, “You know what masturbation is, don’t you?” I replied that, yes, of course, it was the bleeding, and the period, and so forth. In speech class, I failed to foresee the social penalties that a person might pay for bringing in his stuffed Kanga and Roo toys to illustrate his speech about Australian wildlife. Regarding drugs, I couldn’t help noticing that a lot of kids at school were getting high to fortify themselves for classes. Missouri schoolyard pot in 1973 was a weak, seedy product, and users had to take so many hits that they came inside reeking of smoke, the way the physical-science room reeked once a year, after the Distillation of Wood. But I was not a worldly fourteen-year-old. I didn’t even know what to call the stuff that kids were smoking. The word “pot” to me had the quotation-marked ring of moms and teachers trying to sound hipper than they really were, which was unpleasantly close to a description of myself. I was determined to say “dope” instead, because that was what my friend Manley said, but this word, too, had a way of losing its cool on my tongue; I wasn’t one hundred percent sure that actual pot-smokers called marijuana “dope,” and the long “o” shriveled in my mouth like a raisin, and the word came out sounding more like “duip.”

So if it had been me who crossed the Shannondale parking lot on Saturday night and smelled burning hemp, I would have kept my mouth shut. The weekend was proving less disastrous than I’d feared. The two dinner thieves had made themselves scarce to the point of actually skipping mandatory activities, and I’d grown so bold as to involve my old Sunday-school friends in a game of Four Square, using a basketball. (At school, the year before, Manley and I had instigated a semi-ironic revival of Four Square at lunch hour, reconceiving it as a game of speed and English, and though Manley was too good an athlete to be sneered at, my own blithe advocacy of a grade-school girls’ game was probably one reason my lab partner Lunte had been asked if I was a contemptible faggot and beaten up when he said no.) I’d sat in Ozark sunshine with my pretty, poetic friend Hoener and talked about Gregor Mendel and e. e. cummings. Late in the evening, I’d played Spades with an advisor I had a crush on, a high-school girl named Kortenhof, while somebody else crossed the parking lot and smelled the smoke.

The next morning, when we convened in the community center for what should have been a short, music-driven, Jesus-free Sunday service, the advisors all showed up together in a grim-faced phalanx. Mutton, who turned pale when he was angry, was practically blue-lipped.

“Last night,” he said in a chalky voice, “some people broke the rules. Some people used drugs. And they know who they are, and they’ve got things to say to us. If you were one of those people, or if you knew about it and you didn’t say anything, I want you to stand up now and tell us what happened.”

Mutton took a step back, like a theatrical presenter, and six offenders rose. There were two girls, Hellman and Yanczer, with swollen, tear-stained faces; a peripheral Fellowship boy named Magner; the two thieves, the fair-haired one and the tough guy with the Fu Manchu; and a snide girl in tight clothes who seemed attached to them. The thieves looked at once miserable and defiant. They said they mumble mumble mumble.

“What? I didn’t hear you,” Mutton said.

“I said I got high in the parking lot and broke the rules,” spat Fu Manchu.

A physical gap had opened between the rest of us and the delinquents, who stood ranged against one wall of the community center, some glaring, others crying, their thumbs all hooked on the pockets of their jeans. I felt like a little child who’d spent the weekend doing silly feckless things (Four Square!) while serious grownup shit was going down elsewhere.

The girl Hellman was the most upset. Even under normal circumstances, her eyes glistened and protruded a little, as if with the pressure of pent-up emotion, and now her whole face was glistening. “I’m so sorry!” she wailed to Mutton. Pressurized tears came spurting from her eyes, and she turned to face the rest of us. “I’m so sorry!”

Yanczer was a small, round-faced girl who tended to talk over her shoulder, leaning away from you, as if you’d temporarily changed her mind about leaving. She had her shoulder to the wall now. “I’m sorry, too,” she said, looking at us sideways. “Although, at the same time I feel, like, what’s the big deal?”

“We’re a community here, that’s the big deal,” Mutton said. “We’re allowed to do neat stuff because parents trust us. When people break the rules and undermine that trust, it hurts everyone in the community. It’s possible that this could be the end of the group. This weekend.”

The thieves were passing a smile back and forth.

“What are you two smiling at?” Mutton barked. “You think this is funny?”

“No,” the fair one said, tossing his nearly white locks. “But this does seem a little extreme.”

“Nobody’s making you stay in this room. You can walk out the door any time you want. In fact, why don’t you just leave? Both of you. You’ve been smirking the whole weekend. I’m sick of it.”

The thieves exchanged corroborating looks and headed for the door, followed by the snide girl. This left Hellman, Yanczer, and Magner. The question was whether to banish them, too.

“If this is the way you treat the group,” Mutton said, “if this is the kind of trust level here, why should we want to see you next week? We need to hear why you think you should still be allowed to be part of this group.”

Hellman looked around at us, wide-eyed, beseeching. She said we couldn’t banish her. She loved Fellowship! We’d practically saved her life! She cared about the group more than anything.

A pixie in faded coveralls countered, “If you care about the group, then why’d you bring these freakheads into it and get us all in trouble?”

“I wanted them to know what Fellowship was like,” Hellman said, wringing her hands. “I thought we’d be good for them! I’m sorry!”

“Look, you can’t control what your friends do,” Mutton said. “You’re only responsible for you.”

“But I fucked up, too!” Hellman wailed.

“Right, and you’re taking responsibility for it.”

“But she fucked up!” the pixie in coveralls pointed out. “How is she ‘taking responsibility’ for it?”

“By standing up here and facing you guys,” Mutton answered. “That is a very hard thing to do. That takes guts. No matter what you all decide to do, I want you to think about the guts these guys are showing, just by staying in this room with us.”

There ensued an hour-long excruciation in which, one by one, we addressed the three miscreants and told them how we felt. Girls rubbed ashes into denim and fidgeted with their Winston hard packs. Kids broke out in sobs at the thought of the group’s being disbanded. Outside, crunching around on gravel, were the parents who’d driven down to give us rides home, but it was Fellowship procedure to confront crises without delay, and so we kept sitting there. Hellman and Yanczer and Magner alternately apologized and lashed out at us: What about forgiveness? Hadn’t we ever broken rules ourselves?

I found the whole scene confusing. Hellman’s confession had stamped her, in my mind, as a scary outcast stoner, the kind of marginal person I was afraid of and disdained at school, and yet she was acting as if she’d die if she couldn’t come to Fellowship. I liked the group, too, or at least I had until this morning; but I certainly couldn’t see myself dying without it. Hellman seemed to be having a more central and authentic Fellowship experience than the rules-abiding members she’d betrayed. Here was Mutton talking about how brave she was! When my turn came to speak, I said I was afraid my parents wouldn’t let me go to Fellowship anymore, because they were so anti-drug, but I didn’t think that anybody should be suspended.

It was past noon when we emerged from the community center, blinking in the strong light. The banished thieves were down by the picnic tables, tossing a Nerf football and laughing. We had decided to give Hellman and Yanczer and Magner a second chance, but the really important thing, Mutton said, was to go straight home and tell our parents what had happened. Each one of us had to take full responsibility for the group.

This was probably hardest for Hellman, who loved Fellowship in proportion to her father’s unkindness to her at home, and for Yanczer. When Yanczer’s mother was given the news, she threatened to call the police unless Yanczer went to her junior-high principal and narked out the friend who supplied her with drugs; this friend was Magner. It was a week of gruesome scenes, and yet somehow all three kids dragged themselves to Fellowship the following Sunday.

Only I still had a problem. The problem was my parents. Of the many things I was afraid of in those days — spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive — I was probably most afraid of my parents. My father had almost never spanked me, but his anger had been Jehovan when he did. My mother possessed claws with which, when I was three or four years old and neighbor kids had filled my hair with Vaseline to achieve a kind of Baby Greaser effect, she’d repeatedly attacked my scalp between dousings of scalding-hot water. Her opinions were even sharper than her claws. You just didn’t want to mess with her. I never would have dared, for example, to take advantage of her absence from the country and break her rules and wear jeans to school, because what if she found out?

Had I been able to talk to my parents right away, the retreat’s momentum might have carried me. But they were still in Europe, and I daily became more convinced that they would forbid me to go to Fellowship — not only this, but they would yell at me, and not only this, but they would force me to hate the group — until I landed in a state of full-bore dread, as if I were the one who’d broken the rules. Before long, I was more afraid of confessing to the group’s collective crime than I’d ever been of anything.

In Paris, my mother had her hair done at Elizabeth Arden and chatted with the widow of Pie Traynor, the Hall of Fame third baseman. In Madrid, she ate suckling pig at Casa Botín among crowds of Americans whose ugliness depressed her, but then she ran into the married couple who owned the hardware store in Webster Groves and who were also on vacation, and she felt better. The twenty-eighth of October she spent with my father in a first-class train compartment, traveling to Lisbon, and noted in her travel diary: Nice 29th anniversary — being together all day. In Lisbon, she received an airmail letter in which I didn’t say a word about the Fellowship retreat.

My brother Bob and I were waiting at the airport in St. Louis on Halloween. Coming off the plane, my parents looked amazingly fit and cosmopolitan and lovable. I found myself smiling uncontrollably. This was supposed to have been the evening for my confession, but it seemed potentially awkward to involve Bob in it, and not until he’d returned to his apartment in the city did I understand how much harder it would be to face my parents without him. Since Bob usually came to dinner on Sunday nights, and since Sunday was only four days away, I decided to delay my disclosure until he came back. Hadn’t I already delayed two weeks?

On Sunday morning, my mother mentioned that Bob had other plans and wasn’t coming to dinner.

I considered never saying anything at all. But I didn’t see how I could go back and face the group. The anguish in Shannondale had had the mysterious effect of making me feel more intimately committed to Fellowship, rather than less, as if we were all now bound together by shame, the way strangers who’d slept together might wake up feeling compassion for each other’s embarrassment and fall in love on that basis. To my surprise, I found that I, too, like Hellman, loved the group.

At dinner that afternoon, I sat between my parents and didn’t eat.

“Do you not feel well?” my mother finally said.

“I’m supposed to tell you about something that happened at Fellowship,” I said, keeping my eyes on my plate. “On the retreat. Six kids on the retreat — smuiked some duip.”

“Did what?”

“‘Duip’? What?”

“Smuiked marijuana,” I said.

My mother frowned. “Who was it? Any of your friends?”

“No, mostly new kids.”

“Oh, uh-huh.”

And this was the extent of their response: inattention and approval. I felt too elated to stop and wonder why. It was possible that bad stuff had happened with my brothers and drugs in the sixties, stuff beside which my own secondhand offenses might have seemed ridiculously unworrisome to my parents. But nobody had told me anything. After dinner, buoyant with relief, I floated into Fellowship and learned that I’d been given the lead in the three-act farce Mumbo-Jumbo that was going to be the group’s big winter money-maker. Hellman was playing a demure young woman who turns out to be a strangler; Magner was playing the evil swami Omahandra; and I was the callow, bossy, anxious college student Dick.

THE MAN WHO trained Mutton as a therapist, George Benson, was Fellowship’s hidden theoretician. In his book Then Joy Breaks Through (Seabury Press, 1972), Benson ridiculed the notion that spiritual rebirth was “simply a beautiful miracle for righteous people.” He insisted that “personal growth” was the “only frame of reference from which Christian faith makes sense in our modern world.” To survive in an age of anxiety and skepticism, Christianity had to reclaim the radicalism of Jesus’ ministry, and the central message of the Gospels, in Benson’s reading of them, was the importance of honesty and confrontation and struggle. Jesus’ relationship with Peter in particular looked a lot like the psychoanalytic relationship:

Insight is not good enough. The assurances of others are not good enough. Acceptance within a continuing relationship which denies reassurance (it’s usually false anyway) and thereby brings the sufferer to an awareness of his need to evaluate and accept himself — this brings change.

Benson recounted his treatment of a young woman with severe symptoms of hippiedom — drug abuse, promiscuity, sensationally bad personal hygiene (at one point, roaches come swarming out of her purse) — and he compared her progress to that of Peter, who initially resisted Jesus, then monstrously idealized him, then fell into despair at the prospect of termination, and was finally saved by internalizing the relationship.

Mutton had first gone to Benson soon after he became an associate minister. He suddenly had so much influence over the teenagers in his charge that he was afraid he might start acting out, and Benson had told him he was right to be afraid. He made Mutton name aloud the things he was tempted to do, so as to make himself less likely to do them. It was a kind of psychic homeopathy, and Mutton brought the method back to his Fellowship leadership supervisions, where, every week, behind closed doors, in the church parlor, he and the advisors took turns making each other uncomfortable, inoculating themselves against temptations to misuse their power, airing their personal issues so as not to inflict them on the kids. Photocopies of Then Joy Breaks Through began to circulate among Fellowship advisors. The Authentic Relationship, as exemplified by Jesus and Peter, became the group’s Grail — its alternative to the passive complicity of drug-using communities, its rebuke to traditional pastoral notions of “comforting” and “enabling.”

As soon as Mutton entered training with Benson, following MacDonald’s suicide, the spirit of Fellowship began to change. Part of the change was cultural, the waning of a hippie moment; part of it was Mutton’s own growing up, his diminishing need for seventeen-year-old buddies, his increasing involvement with his outside clients. But after the Shannondale debacle there were no more wholesale rule violations, and Fellowship became less of a one-man show, less of an improvised happening, more of a well-oiled machine. By the time I started tenth grade, the senior-high group was paying small monthly salaries to half a dozen young advisors. Their presence made it all the easier for me to steer clear of Mutton, whose habit of calling me “Franzone!” (it rhymed with “trombone”) somehow confirmed that he and I had no real relationship. It no sooner would have occurred to me to go to him with my troubles than to confide in my parents.

The advisors, on the other hand, were like older brothers and sisters. My favorite was Bill Symes, who’d been a founding member of Fellowship in 1967. He was in his early twenties now and studying religion at Webster University. He had shoulders like a two-oxen yoke, a ponytail as thick as a pony’s tail, and feet requiring the largest size of Earth Shoes. He was a good musician, a passionate attacker of steel acoustical guitar strings. He liked to walk into Burger King and loudly order two Whoppers with no meat. If he was losing a Spades game, he would take a card out of his hand, tell the other players, “Play this suit!” and then lick the card and stick it to his forehead facing out. In discussions, he liked to lean into other people’s space and bark at them. He said, “You better deal with that!” He said, “Sounds to me like you’ve got a problem that you’re not talking about!” He said, “You know what? I don’t think you believe one word of what you just said to me!” He said, “Any resistance will be met with an aggressive response!” If you hesitated when he moved to hug you, he backed away and spread his arms wide and goggled at you with raised eyebrows, as if to say, “Hello? Are you going to hug me, or what?” If he wasn’t playing guitar he was reading Jung, and if he wasn’t reading Jung he was birdwatching, and if he wasn’t birdwatching he was practicing tai chi, and if you came up to him during his practice and asked him how he would defend himself if you tried to mug him with a gun, he would demonstrate, in dreamy Eastern motion, how to remove a wallet from a back pocket and hand it over. Listening to the radio in his VW Bug, he might suddenly cry out, “I want to hear…‘La Grange’ by ZZ Top!” and slap the dashboard. The radio would then play “La Grange.”

One weekend in 1975, Mutton and Symes and the other advisors attended a pastoral retreat sponsored by the United Church of Christ. The Fellowship gang rode in like Apaches of confrontation, intending to shock and educate the old-fashioned hand-holders and enablers. They performed a mock supervision, sitting in a tight circle while seventy or eighty ministers sat around them and observed. Inside this fishbowl, Mutton turned to Symes and asked him, “When are you going to cut your hair?”

Symes had known in advance that he was going to be the “volunteer.” But his ponytail was very important to him, and the subject was explosive.

Mutton asked him again, “When are you going to cut your hair?”

“Why should I cut my hair?”

“When are you going to grow up and be a leader?”

While the other advisors kept their heads low and the enabling and comforting older clergy looked on, Mutton began to beat up on Symes. “You’re committed to social justice and personal growth,” he said. “Those are your values.”

Symes made a stupid-face. “Duh! Your values, too.”

“Well, and who are the people who most need to hear your voice? People who look like you, or people who don’t look like you?”

“Both. Everyone.”

“But what if your attachment to your style is becoming a barrier to doing what’s most important to you? What’s the problem with cutting your hair?”

“I don’t want to cut my hair!” Symes said, his voice breaking.

“That is such bullshit,” Mutton said. “Where do you want to fight your battles? Do you want to be fighting about your tie-dye T-shirt and your painter’s pants? Or do you want to be fighting over civil rights? Immigrant workers’ rights? Women’s rights? Compassion for the disenfranchised? If these are the battles that matter to you, when are you going to grow up and cut your hair?”

“I don’t know—”

“When are you going to grow up and accept your authority?”

“I don’t know! Bob. I don’t know!”

Mutton could have been asking himself the same questions. Fellowship had been meeting in a Christian church for nearly a decade, whole years had gone by in which no Bible had been seen, “Jesus Christ” was the thing you said when somebody spilled soup on your sunburn, and George Benson, in his supervision of Mutton, wanted to know what the story was. Was this a Christian group or not? Was Mutton willing to stick his neck out and own up to his belief in God and Christ? Was he willing to claim his ministry? Mutton was getting similar questions from some of the advisors. They wanted to know on whose authority honesty and confrontation had become the central values of the group. On Mutton’s authority? Why Mutton’s? Who he? If the group wanted to be about more than Mutton and the group’s adoration of him, then where did the authority reside?

To Mutton the answer was clear. If you took away Christ’s divinity, you were left with “Kum Ba Ya.” You were left with “Let’s hold hands and be nice to each other.” Jesus’ authority as a teacher — and whatever authority Mutton and company had as followers of his teachings — rested on His having had the balls to say, “I am the fulfillment of the prophecies, I am the Jews’ gift to mankind, I am the son of Man,” and to let Himself be nailed to a cross to back it up. If you couldn’t take that step in your own mind, if you couldn’t refer to the Bible and celebrate Communion, how could you call yourself a Christian?

The question, which Mutton raised in supervision, pissed off Symes extravagantly. The group already had its own rituals and liturgies and holy days, its candles, its Joni Mitchell songs, its retreats and spring trips. Symes was amazed that Mutton, with his training in Freud and Jung, wasn’t repelled by the childishness and regression of Christian ceremony. “‘How can we call ourselves Christians?’” he echoed, goggling at Mutton. “Uh, how about by…trying to live like Christ and follow his teachings? What do we need to eat somebody’s blood and body for? That is so unbelievably primitive. When I want to feel close to God, I don’t read Corinthians. I go out and work with poor people. I put myself in loving relationships. Including my relationship with you, Bob.”

This was the classic position of liberal religion, and Symes could afford to take it because he didn’t need to humble himself, because he didn’t have to be the Jesus of Fellowship. Mutton was the bearded young machinist’s son who preached radical stuff to the young and the marginalized, hung out with characters of dubious morality, attracted a cadre of devoted disciples, wrestled with the temptations of ego, and had become, by local standards, wildly popular. Now he was nearing his thirty-second birthday. He would be leaving soon, and he wanted to complete the shift in the group’s focus away from himself and toward religion.

With Symes acting less like a tractable Peter than an obstreperous Jung, it fell to another seminarian, a red-haired former bad boy named Chip Jahn, to stand up at the end of a Sunday-night meeting in 1975 and make a confession. Jahn had been nineteen when Mutton put him in charge of a work camp in Missouri’s southeastern Bootheel. He’d spent a month with kids just two and three years younger than he was, making do with a food budget that was cut in half at the last minute, begging bushels of field corn from local farmers, trying to cook it into casseroles seasoned with strips of bologna from pirated government-issue school lunches. Since then, he’d decided to enter the ministry, but he still had the manner of a pugnacious sailor, leaning against walls with his arms crossed and his sleeves rolled up tightly over his biceps; usually, when he addressed the group, he had trouble keeping his face straight, as if it never ceased to amuse him that he was working in a church. But now, when he stood up to make his confession, he looked weirdly serious.

“I want to talk about something that’s important to me,” he said. He was holding up a book that flopped over like a raw steak. When the group realized that the book was a Bible, an uneasy silence settled on the room. I wouldn’t have been a lot more surprised if he’d been holding up a copy of Penthouse. “This is important to me,” Jahn said.

MY DREAM AS a tenth-grader was to be elected to the Advisory Council, which was the in-crowd of sixteen kids who adjudicated rule violations and helped the advisors run senior-high Fellowship. Twice a year, in what were unabashedly popularity contests, the group elected eight kids to one-year council terms, and it seemed to me that I had some chance of winning in the spring. Somewhat mysteriously — it might simply have been that my face was becoming familiar around church — I no longer felt like potential Social Death. I tried out for the group’s fall play, Any Number Can Die, and was one of only two sophomores to get a part. On Sunday nights, when the big group broke into dyads for certain exercises, Advisory Council members came bounding across the room to partner up with me. They said, “Franzen! I want to get to know you better, because you seem like a really interesting person!” They said, “Franzen, I’m so happy you’re in this group!” They said, “Franzen! I’ve been wanting to be your partner in something for weeks, but man, you’re just too popular!”

It went to my head to feel noticed like this. On the year’s last retreat, I nominated myself for Advisory Council. The full group gathered on Saturday night, after the ballots had been secretly tabulated, and we sat around a single candle. One by one, current members of the Advisory Council took new candles, lit them on the central candle, and moved into the crowd to present them to newly elected members. It was like watching fireworks; the crowd said “Ohhh!” as each winner was revealed. I pasted a smile on my face and pretended to be happy for the winners. But as candles approached me and passed me by and descended—“Ohhh!”—on other lucky souls, it was painfully clear how much more popular and mature than I the winners were. The ones getting the candles were the people who lounged around in semi-reclining, toboggan-style embraces or lay supine and propped their stockinged feet on nearby backs and shoulders, and who spoke as if they were doing genuine work on their relationships. The people who, if a newcomer was looking lost on a Sunday night, would race each other to be the first to introduce themselves. The people who knew how to look a friend in the eye and say, “I love you,” the people who could break down and cry in front of the entire group, the people whom Mutton came up to from behind and put his arms around and nuzzled like a father lion, the people whom Mutton would have to have been Christlike not to favor. It might have struck me as odd that a group offering refuge from the cliquishness of high school, a group devoted to service to the marginalized, made such a huge deal of a ceremony in which precisely the smartest and most confident kids were anointed as leaders; but there were still two candles unaccounted for, and one of them was coming my way now, and this candle, instead of passing me by, was placed in my hands, and as I walked to the front of the room to join the new council in facing out to smile at the Fellowship that had elected us, all I could think of was how happy I was.