They watched, and they saw that Jim was different from the typical new boy in town. He’d been shuttled off to new schools enough times that he wasn’t particularly anxious about whether or not he made a good impression. He was comfortable in his own skin. His calm sincerity should have assured his classmates that he was exactly as he appeared, a boy they could accept into the fold immediately—were it not for the reputation of his parents as two of the most demanding and no-nonsense teachers at MCC.
They wouldn’t experience the Keenans until they were in high school the next year, but they’d heard horror stories from older brothers and sisters about Jan’s strictness in her Spanish and English classes and of Mike’s humorless, hard-work approach as science teacher and wrestling coach. And this new boy was their son, someone best kept at arm’s length until they were sure he was on their side.
Jim at first gravitated toward the unruly group that gathered with Camels and Salems around the trash barrel at the end of the sidewalk—the corner just past the high school known to generations as Burnout Corner. They liked Alice Cooper and tattered jeans and seemed likely companions, but their rebelliousness often led to trouble a son of Mike and Jan must avoid. The girls in his class seemed a safer choice. Their friendship was a haven from which he could observe and gauge his classmates’ reactions when he hummed the songs he loved or gave in to the humorous streak that came so naturally to him.
He noticed which of them rolled their eyes and complained to the teacher when he inserted an n after the first letter of every word. “Wnhy dnoes thnis bnother ynou?” he asked evenly, and paid attention to which of them doubled over their desks in giggles. They were on his side and just might prove to be friends.
But despite his well-honed surveillance skills, there were some mysteries even Jim couldn’t solve. No one batted an eye when the blond boy a few rows over unwrapped a sleeve of graham crackers in the middle of reading class. It seemed to Jim as if he were looking into a kind of fun-house mirror that distorted his every assumption about honesty and consequences. For as long as he could remember, he’d been punished and paddled for wrongs he’d never committed, and here was a boy breaking rules in plain sight and getting away with it.
“He’s diabetic,” one of his classmates whispered when he noticed Jim’s stare. Jim didn’t believe it for a second. He felt a twinge of envy—and a certain admiration for someone clever enough to manipulate teachers into letting him eat whenever he had the notion.
The boy kept his eye on Jim, too, noticed his quiet intensity, the confident way he spoke when he did speak, the often snide and humorous comments he made under his breath, as if he saw analogies and connections and twists of meaning the others missed.
And he admired the ceramic likeness Jim created as his final project in art class, a project he’d labored over all spring and that far surpassed the simple ashtrays and lopsided teacups the other students produced. The clay face captured perfectly the features of Gene Simmons, tipped up at an angle to reveal a flawless Simmons tongue and meticulously painted in full Kiss makeup.
As Jim grew more comfortable with his classmates, he teased them for their uncool wardrobes or inane jokes—but only those who should have known better. The privileged, popular, all-A students were fair game. But the timid ones, the weak and powerless whose talents and confidence were regularly snuffed at home with beatings and ridicule—and worse—were off-limits. “I looked at those guys and felt like that was me back in Ohio,” he would explain. “You don’t have a clique, so you get singled out. You’re like a wounded antelope.”
Making sense of the tacit laws of the classroom was one thing, but adapting to the habits of the Keenan household was another matter. The room at the top of the open stairway would be all his, to decorate as he pleased, so long as its paneling remained pristine. He spent his first drizzly weekend there unpacking pens and sketch pads and modeling clay from the black trunk while Mike sat at the edge of his bed and asked about things he thought a dad should ask about: friends and how he was doing in math and whether he’d considered joining the wrestling team next year. Jim answered in monosyllables, unsure of what was expected of him.
He tentatively brought out his folder of drawings and fanned them out across his bedspread. Mike gasped. Here were pen-and-ink portraits of Kiss band members Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley and Peter Criss, the likenesses sure, the perspective and shading controlled. “His drawings were way beyond what I could even imagine,” Mike would remember. “You could just see the talent.” Maybe his son’s creativity could be put to use in the gardens come summer, the extensive perennial plots in which Mike took such pride. Before Jim had arrived, he’d already begun to clear away last year’s fallen leaves, and maybe in a month or two, they could work together tending the lemon balm and echinacea and flowering shrubs that lined the meandering pathways. They could dig and plant and prune and talk, creating the bond he fancied his students had with their dads.
Jan imagined such things, too, and plotted the household regime that would create order from the chaos. Jim would receive an allowance, yes, but he must work for it. He’d make sure the woodpile was stocked and he’d bring logs inside to feed the woodstoves. And every Saturday, he’d vacuum, dust, and scour the bathrooms in exchange for his $10—or $8 if the job wasn’t done to her satisfaction. She was of the everything-in-its-proper-place school of housekeeping, and she’d impress upon Jim the importance of the house remaining as tidy as it had been before he’d arrived.
And if they repeated the routine enough times, they’d come together as a real family over Sunday drives and visits with neighbors and meals together every evening as she suspected all happy moms and dads and sons did.
At breakfast and dinner, we usually sat at the bar in the kitchen, just like we sat in the truck with me straddling the gearshift. We were three people sitting elbow-to-elbow in a line and not facing each other. The mission at hand was finishing the meal or getting to town.
That arrangement doesn’t help much with intimacy.
And once the dinner dishes were cleared, they went their separate ways, Jim behind his closed door with his stereo and clay and pen and paper, Mike and Jan to the living room to grade homework. They’d never replaced the television set destroyed in a lightning storm some years before, and in the long evenings, when those other families tuned in to M*A*S*H and Fantasy Island and The Incredible Hulk, the Keenan house was quiet, the silence a chasm none of them knew quite how to bridge.
Rainy April made way for sunny May, and anxiously determined to be the relaxed, involved stepparent she’d read about in women’s magazines, Jan invited Jim to join her in the kitchen one Saturday after he’d completed his chores. She brought out flour and vanilla and eggs and chocolate chips and showed him how to chop and measure a cupful of walnuts. She asked him how he was getting along in school, if he missed his friends back in Ohio, what music he was listening to these days.
“This isn’t the way my mom makes cookies,” he said.
The Sugar Ridge Church of the Brethren stood surrounded by bean fields and cornfields, its windows looking out over gently rolling hills and the narrow dirt road. Its steeple had over time fallen into disrepair, and the carpenters among its members had mounted the bell in a triangular frame set on the front lawn where the congregation would pass it when they came to church on Sunday mornings.
Soon after arriving in Scottville, Jim joined a handful of classmates who attended services there, diligent, industrious students who would become class presidents, graduate with honors, and continue their good-natured competition for high achievement even after they reached college and the corporate world. These were peers Jim might emulate—and who were, in the eyes of Mike and Jan, unlikely candidates for pilfering from the corner store, raiding their parents’ liquor cabinets, or frequenting Burnout Corner.
Presided over by the Reverend Paul Grout, an antiwar activist and former art teacher, the congr
egants were among the most intellectual of the county’s citizenry, parishioners focused on social justice and the peace movement.
Paul showed me that there’s a difference between following the road and following the map. He taught me that when you focus on the teller of the tale or the hand pointing to an idea, you miss the whole point.
I really didn’t want to go to church, because it seemed like it was all about maps, and flawed maps, instead of being about the road. But the Church of the Brethren was different. They weren’t idol worshippers.
The church welcomed Jim as its newest choir member. His strong young voice added refreshing harmonies to “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy” and “I’ll Count My Blessings” as he stood at the little altar holding his worn copy of the Brethren hymnal.
At home, he turned to the music he more closely identified with: the hard-rock theatricality of Kiss. The band’s studded black leather costumes, teetering platform shoes, and white face paint intrigued him, and the driving dark rhythms drew him into the mystery of what the group might be all about.
He turned his stereo up loud. Jan passed his open door and watched him mime Simmons’s guitar licks, lost in fantasy and frenzy. She held her tongue, but her disapproving silence was audible above the music. If Jim noticed her before she turned away, he answered with a silence deeper still.
His seeming obsession left Jan and Mike concerned about the influence of a band whose name they’d heard was an acronym for Knights in Satan’s Service. “We thought he was some kind of degenerate,” Jan would recall. “From a teacher’s perspective, he was going down the tubes.”
No one quite remembers whether they suggested Pastor Grout talk with the boy or whether Jim approached him in search of a listening ear. What is certain is the meeting that took place following the service one Sunday.
Pastor Grout led Jim up the narrow staircase, motioned him toward a comfortable chair in his office, and closed the door. “So tell me about these guys,” he invited. Over the next hour, Jim explained Kiss as best he could. He told of their fire-breathing, blood-spitting performances, the smoking guitars, and the makeup that concealed their offstage identities. He told of their comic book character personas and their lyrics of love stolen and dreamed of, hard luck women, and rocking all day and rolling all night.
Far from worried, Grout became fascinated. Decades later, he would recall his reaction to the things Jim had told him. “I was more interested in what he was finding in the music than alarmed by his interest in Kiss,” he explained in a 2013 interview. “I wasn’t concerned about him, just the opposite. Jim was interesting and funny and comfortable to be with. And he had such a creative edge.”
When Jim had finished his narrative, Grout reassured him, pointing out aspects of Kiss beyond their music. “They sound like interesting characters telling an interesting story,” he said. “Don’t worry about anyone judging you about this. Focus on what you like about it and what resonates with you.”
As summer approached, Jim found himself looking forward to the annual campout of Brethren youth from across the district. The highlight of his last Ohio summers had been the respite of 4-H camp, a week of canoeing, singing, and sharing s’mores. Every evening, the older children had stood in formation, holding aloft blazing torches to light the path to the campfire. Though one of the youngest, Jim had been named Camper of the Year after his second summer and given the ceremonial duty of carrying the flame—a lighted roll of toilet paper skewered to one end of a long stick.
Camp Brethren Heights was only an hour’s drive from Scottville, but to Jim and his fellow campers, it seemed a universe all its own. The week at camp was a vacation from family and day-to-day cares and a chance to test their self-reliance and interdependence, to live in heightened awareness of birdsong and weather, the taste of breakfast cooked over an open fire, chilly lake water against their sun-splashed skin.
They turned up their noses when gas bubbles rose from the marshy muck, skimmed the curious duckweed from the lake’s surface, examined the delicate purple flowers of the loosestrife. They watched the leaves of the maples on the hill above the campground turn against the approaching rainstorm and kept watch for the skunk and bobcat rumored to live nearby. In the morning, they identified fresh deer tracks along the shore, sharp and distinct as their own attentiveness. Together, they discovered talents they’d never known they had: an ability to harmonize, skip stones across the lake’s surface, comfort the lonesome bunkmate who’d never been away from home before.
In the evening, they brought branches from the woods to feed the fire, a chorus of bullfrogs calling from the gathering dusk. They talked then, celebrating one another’s triumphs and gently exploring their worries. They took turns telling their own stories and stories from the Bible, stories that seemed to Jim less about the wages of sin than dilemmas of real people just like him.
The fire cast the profiles of his friends to bright crescents against the night. He watched the flames spew crimson sparks into the darkening sky, up, up into the starry night where the orange moon floated fat and full.
Pastor Grout understood the double-edged sword of their experience. The Sunday after camp week, Jim and his friends took their places in the pews beside the adults, smiling furtively at each other across the aisle as if sharing some great secret.
“Moses cannot truly express what he saw on the mountain,” Grout told his congregation. “He goes up, he sees a miracle, he’s given his instructions, and when he comes back down, there’s no way he can describe to anyone what happened. The people are just going on about their business, worshipping and celebrating in the same way they always have. Of course they are, because they didn’t see what Moses saw. He came down from that mountaintop experience glowing.”
Jim and the other young people exchanged quick, astonished glances, scarcely daring to believe Grout’s sermon was directed at them and not at the adults who listened from the stiff wooden benches.
“Your mountaintop experience is also a lonely experience,” Grout continued, looking from one to another. “You come back with mixed feelings because you’d love to share this wondrous thing, but you realize no one can quite understand what you saw. It resonated with you, and on some level, it changed you. You must embrace that. Resolve to go on, to use this experience in a positive way. Carry this with you and express it in a way that others may have their own experience.”
As he listened, Jim began to suspect that there might be more to the stories he heard in Bible study than just accounts of make-believe people who lived a long time ago. It just could be that the magic of stories lay in making them his own, he thought, until he felt this pitched weightlessness Pastor Grout’s words seemed to trigger. Maybe the stories of Moses and Abraham and his cabinmates at the lake weren’t so different from the stories Kiss sang as he stood alone in his room with his stereo.
Maybe—just maybe—there was only one story, an endless story with infinite variations, but one story all the same, populated with characters in a boundless array of costume and mask whose job it was to recognize and celebrate the mysterious tale they carried deep inside.
When school started again in the fall, Mike, in his hope that Jim begin high school on a positive note, urged him to choose some sport he might excel in.
Eager to please his father, Jim geared up in chin strap and shoulder pads and joined the junior varsity football players on the practice field behind the high school. At only 105 pounds, he quickly realized he was no match for his teammates, the solid, muscular boys who’d grown up hauling bushels of string beans and stacking bales of hay on their fathers’ farms.
“I went to two practices and decided I need to run the fuck away from that,” he would recall. “I just sat on my ass in these shoulder pads that I couldn’t even see over.” He needn’t have worried about his father’s reaction. Before he said a word, Mike suggested that cross country might be worth a try. Jim ag
reed, and what seemed at the time a small decision proved to be a deliverance.
Steve Bishop was the rare teacher who delighted in watching students’ eyes light up when a lesson in American history or social studies sparked their interest. His passion for learning was contagious, and his students ignored the echoes from the overhead air duct in their classroom. They were captivated by Bishop’s seemingly boundless knowledge and his enthusiasm when he led them in discussions of war and economics and the voting process. Almost without realizing it, they learned what no textbook could teach: the confidence to move from adolescent insecurity to a belief that their ideas mattered.
Bishop applied the same methods as coach of MCC’s cross country and track teams. He made it a point to understand his athletes’ strengths and weaknesses, the potential they’d never before considered. The cross country team that fall included some of the best senior runners in the school’s history, but he devoted as much praise and attention to the novices as to the champions.
Early each morning before school started, he accompanied them on distance workouts and training runs along the roads just outside town. Every afternoon, he sprinted with them up hills and jogged along the piney trails of the state park and the dunes above Lake Michigan. He stepped aside only when timekeeping or observing the team was necessary, allowing them the freedom to discover on their own just what their limits might be. And from the first, he recognized Jim as a runner.
Bishop and his wife often joined Mike and Jan for dinner and conversation and swing dance classes in nearby Ludington. But in their five years of friendship, Mike hadn’t once mentioned a son.
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 3
