Night Church

The evening of December 7, 1980 I was sitting in an uncomfortable pew, sweating like a hooker in Church, and waiting for Ronald Reagan to end the world. Back then Pluto was still a planet, 8-Tracks were fading, and Mikhail Gorbachev was clearly the Antichrist because of that thing on his head. Still, I would have welcomed the whole Apocalypse thing if it meant not having to go to Night Church anymore.

Perhaps I should explain.

We went to a pretty conservative Church that spent most of its time exercising crowd control and emphasizing the importance of not listening to music with a syncopated beat, or voting for the wrong candidate, like that war-monger Reagan. I really didn’t mind it that much during a Sunday morning, in spite of the collared shirt and dress shoes I was forced to wear. The shoes were slick and uncomfortable, which made horsing around almost impossible, but all the other kids had to wear similar attire because it was important to bring God our best, out of respect. In spite of that, I liked Sunday School because there was always a fun macaroni craft and for some reason, I kicked ass at Bible Trivia.

The main service was a bit dull, but I was allowed to sit with my friend’s family and his mom always had paper for us to draw on, except during the prayer when we had to keep our eyes closed, again out of respect. She usually had some candy, too, which was frowned upon in my house. We were never bribed into good behavior; you toed the line out of obedience and integrity. Or some shit like that.

But going to Church in the evenings was a whole other animal. There were two evening services per week, one on Sunday night and one on Wednesday night, and they were interminable. Technically, they were of shorter duration than a standard Sunday morning service, but seemed much longer. There was less singing, and the pastor’s prayer time went on much longer, which would often put me to sleep. 

And there was just something about the sanctuary at night that bothered me. The cheery stained glass windows that lit so prettily during the day depicting different images of Jesus as shepherd, martyr, and risen savior took on a different tone at night. There were lights outside the sanctuary in the hedges that bordered the windows which shone on the glass tableaus to light them for the service, but they had a hard yellow tint to them that filtered through the heavy leaden glass like gaslight and cast Jesus in a sallow pallor which was far from comforting. 

Night Church was what separated the faithful from the dilettantes. Any Good-Time-Charlie can swing in to Church to launder their karma on the way to Sunday brunch, but only a true devotee would be in Church during Prime Time television. Which, honestly, was my biggest problem with night Church. Sure, I hated the pews, which doubled as a means of keeping you awake as the pastor droned on and as a torture device to help you do your penance for a week’s worth of sinnin'. And yes, I hated the Wednesday night Thunderdome of Christian Cadets, a variant on Boy Scouts taught by a three retired Marines determined to make men out of us. But the thing that really upset me about night Church was that both sessions conflicted with something awesome on TV. 

Sunday nights I missed out on CHiPs and Wednesday night it was Battlestar Galactica. This seemed like the paramount injustice in all of human history, which generated a loathing in me that persists to this day, even though I have Netflixed those shows and am well aware that they suck. Imagine my confusion back then when I came home a little early one Wednesday night to discover that Starbuck and Apollo had found Earth! When did that happen? While I was doing pushups for the fascists… uh, I mean Cadet leaders…  as punishment for forgetting to wear my neckerchief as part of my Cadet uniform, no doubt.

Calvinist Cadets.

So the service was actually shorter, and casual dress was allowed because apparently it’s not disrespectful to the Almighty to wear sneakers to Church at night, but none of that made up for the sense of cultural deprivation and forever being left out conversations about those shows the following day at school with my nerd friends.

There were a few times when we missed going to night Church over the years, which occasions felt like some kind of national holiday and always inspired me to create scenarios wherein we wouldn’t have to go on a given night. I probably faked sick more to get out of night Church than for all the times I tried to get away with that on a school day and with equal amount of success, which was virtually none. But on December 7, 1980 I wasn’t faking it. 

Pale, sweaty and laying there all listless and limp as a ragdoll on that medieval pew, my Mom could tell this was no ruse. They whisked me out of the service early and straight home, where they discovered I was running a fever of 103, which is a personal best, even to this day. Turns out I had my first case of strep throat. Swollen, bleeding tonsils, aches and pains, and a persistent fever requiring dreaded antibiotic pills the size of a brick to be shoved down my gullet at regular intervals for days on end. All of which I still found preferable to night Church, so I counted it as a win.

For reasons that escape me now, Mom and Dad had to leave me with neighbors for that first day of the next three that I spent in bed. The following two days one of them stayed home to attend to my medication schedule and bring me ice cream, but that Monday morning, December 8, 1980 I was left in the care of our neighbors two doors down, Herb and Mary Grund.

Herb and Mary were in their seventies, and had adopted me almost immediately upon our arrival in Long Beach. They were first generation, meat and potatoes immigrants of scandahoovian origins who always had a slice of pie, a piece of hard candy, or a little chore for a kid my age. I probably made a buck or two a week from them crushing soda cans and stacking milk crates; a king’s ransom for an eight or nine year old, which I mostly spent on pewter Dungeons & Dragons figurines at the Sprouse-Reitz five and dime.

Herb was a fine figure of a man, even at his advanced age; a Teutonic frame barely beginning to bend, with a thicket of silver hair that hadn’t thinned at all. He was always puttering about in the hedges with hand shears, sanding something in his garage shop, or tending the giant ecosystem he’d made for his Koi. They were monstrous in size, and he’d often have me feed them if he and Mary were going to be out of town for the weekend. Herb had a catch-phrase that he would always ask me, “Get the picture? Is it in focus?” To which I always nodded and smiled, even though it usually wasn't true.

Mary was diminutive, but still held powerful sway in their house. She would generate a honeydoo list to keep Herb busy all day, while she kept the house full of cookies and all her glass figurines dusted and arranged. She had a zany sense of humor and enjoyed playing comedy albums from Bill Cosby and Steve Martin on the record player.

She and Herb spoke with a noticeable Germanic accent, although they'd moved to America as young children and were as patriotic and proud as only an immigrant can be of their adoptive home. Herb had fought the Japanese in the Pacific, while his bride waited for him. She once showed me the box of letters she saved from that time, bundled up in a thick rubber band. 

Sometimes when I was passing their house on my bike I would come up the driveway to see if Herb was messing around with the Koi, because they seemed like primeval cousins of Megalodon and were equally fascinating and terrifying to me when they boiled the water in ravenous frenzy for any food dropped into the network of concrete pools Herb had built for them. Other times Mary would call from the house through the screen door to see if I wanted to listen to Bill Cosby do his impression of Noah being told to build an Ark. Between the two of them it’s a wonder my teeth didn’t rot out of my head; he always had a butterscotch in his pocket and she kept caramels in her purse. They never had kids of their own, so I think they liked having a tyke around to spoil when they could, and since I rarely saw my own grandparents, and had a complicated relationship with both my grandfathers, it was nice to be the object of that kind of affection. Loved for the mere fact of my existence.

So it was alright with me to spend a day on their couch being doted on by Mary, who had a lovely voice as she sang what I think were German folk songs that floated out to me from the kitchen. She wouldn’t hear of me watching TV on the couch all day like my folks would, but brought me crayons, scissors and construction paper and played Neil Diamond records. Herb had a collection of dumb jokes to make a kid laugh which I then shamefully plagiarized to tell to other adults in my life who all groaned or laughed. I took the laugh and the credit every time, even though I was always only pretending to get the jokes when Herb told them. "When is a door, not a door? When it’s ajar." Ba-dump-kssh!

That was as good a day as a kid could have with a high fever and a burning pit of gravel in his throat, being force-fed horsepills every couple of hours. Or it was, right up until Herb came into the house in what seemed like a dazed stupor, appearing confused and disoriented. Today I might have concluded that he was suffering a stroke, but in 1980 I only knew enough to be scared. Mary had one look at him and guided straight him to the kitchen table to sit. I followed, hovering at the kitchen door, sensing that I was an intruder in that moment, but feeling too freaked out to not discover what was going on. Mary cajoled him for a moment, her concern amplifying my own.

Without looking up, he simply said, “John Lennon has been shot.”

I didn’t know who John Lennon was. Really, at 9 years old, I only knew who my parents liked: Barry Manilow, Dionne Warwick, Paul Anka, and The Carpenters. My universe was defined for me by what other people told me was so. Syncopated music was bad, tennis shoes are disrespectful to God during the day, and Ronald Reagan was going to take us to war. So I had no idea why I should care that John Lennon was dead. No sense of the earthshaking legacy he left, the radical notions he promoted, or the legions of souls he inspired. No, I found out about John Lennon the same way Clyde Tambaugh discovered Pluto, by the anomalies created in its invisible passage. 

When Herb—this robust titan of a man, unbowed by war or the weight of decades—found himself barely able to stand, when tears formed in eyes that had only ever laughed before, when the ready jokes were nowhere to be found and the smile ran away from his face, I was introduced to John Lennon. Someone whose absence could so affect a man over thirty years his senior, whose presence I was blissfully unaware of until this day when his passing implied the gravity that could shake such a man as Herb Grund. Which in turn shook me from places of safety and certainty that were so taken for granted that I could have no name for them until they fled for those minutes. 

“Who was John Lennon?” I asked. 

For a moment, I think he must have wondered what was wrong with my parents that they could have a nine year old son who didn’t know who John Lennon was. Perhaps I was intruding on a grief that was private, somehow lessening the passing of Lennon by my ignorance of his existence. But in the next second the kindly giant who had given me my first Swiss Army knife regained a form of composure, recognized a teachable moment in my life, and found a brief respite from grief in opening the eyes of a boy to a larger, more beautiful world. He took me to the living room, pulled a record sleeve from amongst Mary's comedy albums, then dropped the black circle onto their turntable to play “Imagine” for me for the very first time. 

I wish I could say that I instantly got it, that I’d had a transformative moment and my eyes were opened, but I was nine and John was saying that he wished there was no Heaven, which I didn’t want to be true. But I liked that he wanted me to join him in dreaming, and thought that maybe that’s why Herb was so sad. Like maybe a dream he’d been dreaming was over, and he wished it wasn’t. When the song finished Herb asked me if I got the picture. If it was in focus. I said it was, even though it wasn’t, because I wanted it to be true. And because I didn’t want him to look at me like he knew the world I was growing up in wasn’t going to be as good anymore. 

Today I’ve got the picture, and it’s in focus. Sure, sometimes I’ll hear “Imagine” and it will go in one ear and out the other, another in a long cavalcade of dreamy folk songs written by a generation whose revolution was forestalled by running shoes and personal computers. But the other day I heard a cover of it by Eddie Vedder in honor of John's Birthday, and while Eddie is no John Lennon, he is someone who's shouldered the load of heavy burdens with me many times, and I have a life-long affection for him. So him singing “Imagine” in a high, quavering tenor with a slightly out of tune acoustic guitar instantly transported me to the day a nine year old boy watched a giant of a man fold up at his kitchen table like the light had gone from the world. And while I still don’t want to imagine that there’s no Heaven, I’m happy to dream with John and Herb both that there will be nothing to kill or die for, no need for greed or hunger, no religion, too. Just a brotherhood of man. 

One without need for Night Church.