“Relax, kid,” he says, once again my older brother.
* * *
—
True to her word, Penny has found a safe place, the apartment of a trustworthy church employee. We drive to Chloe’s, and over the next few hours wait for Marshall to rejoin reality. He sits on an overstuffed sofa, and every few minutes he looks up and stares at me intently for long stretches of time. His pupils have dilated, crowding out the brown of his irises. I can’t hold his gaze. As kids we used to have staring contests, and I always lost.
“Would you like something to eat, Marshall?” Chloe asks. “What about a ham sandwich?” He turns his laser stare on her and gives a barely perceptible nod. “Great! Do you like mayonnaise? Mustard? Cheese? What kind of bread do you prefer?” No response.
I brief Chloe on my brother’s food preferences, and she scurries into the kitchen. Both of Marshall’s thumbs are working up and down his curled index fingers. He showed me once that he’s marked out an imaginary keyboard, an octave on each index finger, to practice the music that is always playing in his head.
When Chloe returns with the sandwich, Marshall takes it in one hand and holds it up to a table lamp. He twists it in all directions, studying it, not taking a bite but not setting it down either. He does drink some iced tea, though—one sip at a time, tentatively, as though it might be poisoned.
“Do you know where you are?” I ask him. He turns in my direction, and again I fail to hold his gaze. I explain about Chloe’s apartment that Penny helped line up. “Don’t worry, we’ll drive you home soon.”
Ten minutes later he asks, “Where am I?” and I repeat the explanation.
At last, sometime after midnight, Marshall asks to go home. He seems calmer, more rational, and on the drive he quizzes me on what happened. He can’t remember hitting anyone and doesn’t know how he got to the place where he was arrested, some five miles from where he lives.
Back at his residence, seven friends are still up and waiting, delighted to see us arrive. Marshall and I get hugs all around, and I give them a short account of the day. They respond enthusiastically: “Far out, man—you beat up a cop, and they let you go? You’re the luckiest SOB in the world!” As they laugh and slap his back in congratulation, Marshall visibly relaxes.
Everyone quiets down, and together we try to reconstruct the sequence of events. That afternoon in the living room, Marshall’s friends passed around some LSD tablets. “I don’t know why,” Marshall recalls, “but suddenly I thought you all wanted to kill me.” He ran outside, chased by two of them. When his friends grabbed him, he broke loose, swinging his fists wildly, and started running. They last spotted him racing down the middle of Ponce de Leon Avenue, one of Atlanta’s busiest streets.
Those details trigger something in Marshall’s memory, and he picks up the story. “Sorry, guys. It’s just that I saw danger everywhere. Demons wearing grotesque masks were firing machine guns at me from every car. Houses had bunkers with protruding cannons. I felt a pounding sensation in my chest—a demon had seized my body. I knew I had to keep running, or die…” He pauses, and no one says anything.
“Finally, I did die. I ended up in Hell before a great tribunal court, the council of evil gods. This didn’t feel like a dream. These creatures were real. I could touch them. They demanded that I testify what value my life has been. I had to prove that my life has some worth, some validity, before they’d let me back into reality.”
His voice grows softer, and we have to strain to hear him. “So I’m standing naked before the court, and I have nothing to say. I’m a loser. I can’t connect with anyone. I’m all alone. Then I see a person right in front of me, and I reach out to him. That’s the last thing I remember. Now they tell me that person was an old man who I slugged in the jaw. I guess he’s the one who called the cops.”
Marshall’s friends break into clapping and cheering. It’s the best trip story they’ve ever heard. LSD is a “Heaven and Hell drug”—my brother’s been to Hell and lived to tell it.
* * *
—
Rattled by the experience, Marshall decides to lay off drugs. But the memory of that hallucinatory trip depresses more than sobers him. The judgment of the evil gods has confirmed what an inner voice has told him all along. He’s a failure. He can’t come up with a single valid reason to keep living.
I have never seen Marshall so dejected. Janet and I have scheduled a wedding in June, after which we’ll immediately depart for Wheaton, and it frightens me to think of leaving him in such a state. He won’t commit to attending our wedding, and I have little hope that he’ll show up.
I’m still living at home, and as June approaches Mother sinks into a mood as dark as Marshall’s. I’ve told her nothing about his communal life or the drugs. But she’s seen what happened to one of her sons at Wheaton and can only imagine what will happen to me.
We plan a simple wedding on the cheap, budgeting a total of $300. Janet rents her wedding dress, and our reception consists of snack foods like nuts and mints. We just want to escape my troubled family, get out of town, and start life together. But Mother manages to hijack our celebration with one last scene.
When I open the door of the church, there stands my brother, dressed on one of Atlanta’s hottest days in a three-piece wool suit he found in a thrift store. I fight back the tears, aware of what it means for him to leave his counterculture setting and enter the straight world of a church ceremony, especially knowing our mother will be present.
Our traditional ceremony proceeds, with organ music, a sermonette, and vows that we’ve modernized only slightly. All goes well until the reception in the church basement, when the photographer, a distant relative, gets an idea. “Hey, let’s have all the Yanceys together in a group photo. Come on, everyone whose last name is Yancey.”
A commotion breaks out on the other side of the room, and then I hear Mother’s loud voice. “I’ll not be in any picture with that so-called son of mine!” she announces. She stalks out of the reception hall, which grows as quiet as the empty sanctuary upstairs.
Marshall wears an expression somewhere between pain and embarrassment, and I hurry over to apologize for what has just happened. “What’d you expect?” he says. “I never should have come.”
* * *
—
The next day Janet and I begin the drive toward Chicago, a poor couple’s honeymoon. At first the scene in the church basement hangs over us like a cloud. Janet is understandably bitter. I’m more concerned about my brother’s mental state. After a day or so, however, a sense of freedom blows in. We make our leisurely way north, enjoying whatever there is to enjoy between Atlanta and Chicago, and begin planning our new life, far from the family turmoil.
After arriving and settling into our one-room Wheaton apartment, I call Marshall, only to find him more despondent than ever. He dismisses my concern about the wedding and talks instead about committing suicide. “I have to follow what I believe,” he says. “My life has no meaning. Camus said suicide is the only truly serious philosophical problem. He’s right. But it’s only a problem if you don’t act on it.”
He tells me of his scheme. He’ll drive across the country, recording his impressions on a cassette tape, then jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, leaving the cassette recorder behind as his parting gift to me. “Maybe you can find something in it to write about someday.”
His somber tone convinces me this is no idle threat. Keep him talking, I tell myself, recalling a news story about suicide hotlines. I can’t let him sense the panic I feel. So I calmly ask him to choose a route through Chicago, figuring I can get psychiatric help if he still seems intent on killing himself. “Sure,” he promises. “I’ll stop over to say goodbye.”
Over the next few weeks, Marshall signs up for all the free credit-card offers that come in the mail and buys gifts for his friends, including expensive stereo sets. He
schedules a final farewell party to thank them for their friendship and to present the gifts he’s bought them. A few who know of his plan try their best to dissuade him, to no avail. He is determined to die.
The night of the farewell party, loud music is playing, couples are dancing, drugs and alcohol are flowing freely. One of Marshall’s friends sidles up to him: “Hey, man, wanna drop some acid?”
“Nah, I don’t do that anymore. I had a really bad trip.”
“Ah, come on, just for old times’ sake. One pill won’t hurt you. I’ve got this great album called Tommy, by The Who. It’s a rock opera—they played it at Woodstock—and I think you’ll love it.”
Marshall demurs, but when he sees all his friends doing drugs, he decides to join them. He swallows the LSD tablet and sits in front of the stereo speakers waiting for it to take effect. As he reads the liner notes and focuses on the music, he sees in Tommy a hallucinogenic mirror of his own life. Tommy was a freakish kid, “deaf, dumb, and blind,” whose senses were shut down by his brainwashing mother. After a life of abuse, he takes a magic pill from “The Acid Queen,” and eventually finds spiritual liberation and recovers his senses.
Once again for Marshall, music and drugs open the gate to another dimension. His soul floats up somewhere above his body. Every few minutes he feels himself about to slip into another reality, and he struggles mightily to will himself back to earth.
The next morning, when my brother wakes up, some part of his brain has chemically rearranged itself. Suicide?! Why would anyone want to commit suicide? Green grass, blue sky, groovy friends—life is beautiful. In an instant he abandons the plan he’s been working toward for weeks.
He calls me the next day. “I won’t be going to California after all,” he says. “I’ve got some big debts to cover. I guess I’d better find a second job.”
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
CHAPTER 23
THE CURSE
After I leave for Wheaton, my life takes a radically different path from Marshall’s. Although we are both recovering from the toxic effects of our childhood, we react in opposite ways. Marshall becomes a proud atheist, shunning all religion. I accept a job with a Christian magazine, Campus Life.
Looking back, it seems inevitable that I would find a career in writing. Marks on a page are less overbearing than the shrill voices I heard in church revival meetings and in Bible college. They give me a quiet space in which to make up my own mind, to decide what should be salvaged and what jettisoned.
For almost ten years I collaborate on books with Dr. Paul Brand, a saintly surgeon who devoted his life to some of the lowliest people on the planet, leprosy-afflicted patients in India. Through him I meet other sterling Christians, such as the founder of the modern hospice movement, and the director of Kew Gardens in London. Such interview subjects help my faith settle on a solid foundation, and the wounds of the past gradually heal.
Finally, I sense the time has come for me to explore my own faith, not just piggyback on someone else’s. The titles of my books give a clue to my first tentative steps, beginning with Where Is God When It Hurts? and Disappointment with God. Years will pass before I tackle more central issues, and even these I usually frame with a question, such as Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? and Church: Why Bother?
Whenever I write, my brother sits like a mocking dybbuk upon my shoulder. “Do you really believe that,” he asks, “or are you just spouting platitudes and propaganda?” When I’m tempted to cover the church’s blemishes with verbal makeup, Marshall keeps me honest. What is real, and what is fake? he has asked me more than once, a question I circle around in all my books. I bend over backward to honor the stance of a skeptic, for I remember how I was treated at the Bible college.
While Marshall reinvents himself every few years in an attempt to flee the past, I have found a career in which to excavate it.
* * *
—
I marvel that two brothers from the same family and same background could have ended up on such divergent paths. As it happened, Marshall’s fixation with suicide soon faded away, replaced by a preoccupation with sex.
On my first visit to Atlanta after the wedding, he describes his odyssey to me in lurid detail. He lost his virginity to a nurse at the hospital where he worked and soon was staging orgies with three or four employees. Next, from the book Group Marriage, he got the idea to found a commune based on free sex.
“So I chose another nurse, Linda, at the hospital,” he says. “She has an attractive face, and she’s always been nice to me. The problem is, she’s overweight and quite ashamed of it. We used to take breaks together, and she confided that she’s never had a date in her life. How criminal is that? Here’s this lovely person, but because America has an inane cult of beauty, she’s branded a loser. I gave it some thought and then on a whim asked her to move in with me. I explained about the group-marriage idea, and she agreed to give it a try.”
We are sitting in their communal home as Marshall tells me this, and I see that Linda has imposed some domestic order on the place. No more empty wine bottles lying around, no more stacks of dirty dishes and piles of clothes, no more nude centerfolds on the walls.
“Who all lives here?” I ask.
“It varies night to night,” he says. “Basically, anybody who needs a place to crash. Right now there’s a dental student from Emory and his girlfriend, who plays the cello and saxophone. Some nights we burn incense, smoke a few joints, and—you’ll like this—we sit up for hours playing hymns. I refuse to play classical music on our clunky piano, and I don’t know any popular music.”
He steps out of the room for a moment, and Linda comes in from the kitchen. “We all get along,” she says. “I must say, though, your brother has a high tolerance for filth, so we’re still working on that. One time I made the mistake of calling him a slob, and he went berserk. I must have set off some memory of your mother.”
At least he’s got some friends and is no longer talking suicide, I think, as I return to Illinois. My brother seems to have calmed down. He has even found a new career, tuning and repairing pianos.
But a year later, when he calls to say he might drop by for a visit on his way to California, I catch my breath. “You…you’re not planning anything like that again, are you?” I ask.
“No, no, I’m not planning to kill myself this time. I just want to start over. Linda doesn’t interest me anymore. I’m bored. I thought I could overlook her fat body, but I was wrong. We’ve had a couple of years together, and that’s enough.”
Late one rainy night, with no advance warning to Linda or his piano-shop employer, and certainly not to his mother, Marshall packs his few possessions into the back of his Fiat and strikes out for California.
Over the next few weeks, I field Linda’s frantic phone calls. “Yes,” I tell her, “he came through here two days after he left you.” And, “No, I don’t know how to reach him. I think he was headed to the San Francisco area.”
* * *
—
Several months later, Marshall and I reconnect. Having escaped the Bible Belt, he is thriving in live-and-let-live California. He plays for a local opera company and has bought the practice of a retiring piano tuner. Baldwin, a major piano manufacturer, even hires him for special Bay Area events. “I recently got called to tune the pianos of two famous people,” he boasts, “and you’ll never guess them in a million years.” I try every name I can think of, and miss both answers: Liberace and the pope.
Women are the center of Marshall’s life in California. He meets a musician at the opera company and promptly moves in with her. They split up after a year, but he talks her into continuing a purely sexual relationship, which lasts another year. When they part, he goes into a tailspin, talking again of suicide.
Soon, though, he find
s another partner and his spirits lift. I schedule a trip out West a few months later, and he excitedly fills me in. At a local club he met Andrea, a waitress of Italian descent, who shared his free-love ideas and proposed a relationship centered on sex. She introduced him to dominance-and-submission, and the two signed a contract spelling out their roles. Marshall agreed to serve as her slave, doing whatever she commanded.
“I can’t explain it, but there’s something very rewarding in serving someone else,” he says with obvious enthusiasm, a tone I haven’t heard from him in years. “It’s like she’s living through me. She makes all the decisions, I just have to carry them out. It’s liberating, in an odd sort of way. I’ve never been happier.”
I’ve learned not to be surprised by any of Marshall’s choices, but this is pressing the limits. “Help me understand, Marshall,” I say hesitantly. “All your life you’ve been trying to get away from a domineering mother. Now you’re using the same words that appear in the Victorious Christian Life books, only this time you’re applying them to a woman, not to God—”
“I know, I know,” he interrupts. “Believe me, I’ve thought about that. I guess something in my personality pushes me to submit to someone. I was brought up to be a complete slave to God, whatever that means. I never managed it, at least not without playacting. Now I have the same opportunity, only with a woman. Somehow it fits my psychological makeup.”
Andrea orders him to rise early, brew the coffee, and meet her after her morning shower with a clean towel and a cup of steaming coffee. She determines whether or not he can drink wine each night, when he can go to the bathroom, and when they might—or might not—have sex.
Where the Light Fell Page 27
