Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  I wasted many a hard-won three francs. After all that effort, I never once managed to do what so many other boys I met at the Grenier casually bragged (lied?) about, take a girl someplace and have sex with her after meeting her on the dance floor. All my successful conquests were in L’Abri, not out in the worldly “scene.” It was a bit ironic. I got laid in the Lord’s work; but in the immoral secular world, the girls weren’t so easy.

  I was fifteen or sixteen when I also started going to the Strobe Club in Montreux. This was a huge disco right in front of the Montreux Palace Hotel. It took me two hours to get there on my moped. It was in the lavish Victorian pavilion across the street from the huge hotel. It had a gigantic light show, a huge sound system, and drug-taking French hippies who lived in the basement running the place. Pot was smoked openly, and the average age of the clients was probably thirty. There were plenty of middle-aged men cruising for the young baby dolls.

  I’d park my moped on the main street. It kept company with Ferraris, Alfas, and Maseratis. Nabokov was living in the Montreux Palace. Sometimes I’d see him or Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, or other gods at the Strobe. And when the Montreux Jazz Festival was in full swing, B. B. King might come in for a drink after playing at the Montreux casino, where the festival took place.

  The girls were way too old, rich, and sophisticated. The drinks were five francs, too expensive. But after the French guys got to know me, I’d head right for the booth and climb into the trailer-sized enclosure (raised about five feet off the dance floor).

  I soon became part of the crew. The guys that ran the show and spun the records let me hang around in the booth. We projected bits of Super-8 film, including several of my shorts, and used three overhead projectors to concoct the light-show effects. These effects were created by placing large glass salad bowls one inside another on the overhead projectors. We’d mix oil and colored water in the bowls, then press down and turn them, creating streams of colored bubbles out of the oil, water, and air trapped between the bowls. The overhead projectors bathed the dancers in our light show and made them appear as if they were deep under water thrashing around in some multicolored foaming sea. Cartoons, softcore porn, and pictures of rock stars were also projected. The strobes and black lights were on all the time. The sound system was so loud, it seemed to bypass my ears altogether and throb in my lungs, knocking the air out of me.

  The Strobe connection led to my first paying job. I was part of the crew when we were hired to do some lighting at the Montreux Festival for Led Zeppelin. I got to “hang out” with the band.

  My big moment came when Robert Plant (Zeppelin’s lead singer) called out to me from across the bar in the casino, “Frankie boy!” For a golden moment I was mistaken for “someone” by several beautiful women. They actually looked in my direction.

  I also got invited along to several after-disco parties in villas in Montreux and Clarens and other wealthy enclaves where English, sometimes titled, young men and women, French hippies, Swiss businessmen, minor royalty from Monaco, and lots of overdressed beautiful women hung out. This was much the same world that I got to know, or at least got to envy, in Portofino. Conversation was about movies, where everyone was going to spend the summer, travel, sex, music, where one lived, and who one knew.

  I met Claude Nobs at one after-disco party. We were eating French onion soup at five in the morning, following a night of drinking. Claude was the founder and producer of the Montreux Jazz Festival and knew all about my family. For several years, he had been on a spiritual search and had attended several Bible classes Dad taught in Montreux. I was shocked. To be hanging around in this worldly company and to have to answer questions about my parents was unsettling.

  The idea that these worlds could mix seemed crazy. I wanted to be cool; and now the most cool person I met at the most cool club in the world, a place that made the poor little old Grenier look like a peasant’s kitchen, well later that night, this person was shouting over the music in the luxurious living room of a huge villa and asking me how my father was and if he was still teaching Bible classes in Mr. Halbritter’s house above Montreux! And there I was trying to send signals that Dad was nothing to do with me, that I was not part of some ministry, a Peter denying Christ before the cock crowed three times if there ever was one.

  I was propositioned by some smooth old homosexuals several times, not verbally but with hands laid in a friendly casual manner on my thigh or crotch, that I would brush away. They never persisted. That had happened when I was twelve and in Portofino with my painter friend Lino, or rather a friend of his. Late one afternoon, I’d been walking around the cobblestone piazza watching fishermen repair their nets, when Lino waved his languid manicured hand in my direction and called me over to join them.

  I found myself sitting next to Lino at one of the little tables covered with a ubiquitous pink linen tablecloth. Lino’s friend was quite frank and polite as he asked “Do you like this?” while he stroked my thigh. I said no, and he took his hand away and we resumed discussing a painting of mine I had brought them the day before. Later Lino’s friend said “I hope you don’t mind, but some boys like this, and if you were that kind it would be a pity to waste the opportunity.” He added “Please do not tell your father, I do not think he would understand.”

  I took that as a compliment. I knew they knew that my parents were in religious work. But they always treated me as if I wasn’t, as if I was an artist, and that the brotherhood of art transcended whatever circumstances I might be in now. How I knew this, I don’t know, but I did.

  38

  In October 1969, I met Regina Ann Walsh, Genie, object of thirty-seven years of passion and devotion, daughter of a self-made Irish lawyer, granddaughter of an Irish blacksmith, daughter of a mother whose ancestor was a signatory to the United States Constitution, hippie princess, the most beautiful girl I have ever seen, my final and best defense against meaninglessness, my other eyes, this woman, this girl, this goddess, ineffably patient, screaming warrior who won’t-take-shit-pasta-certain-point, absolute center of the universe, oasis of calm, final arbiter, she who does the taxes.

  Strange to think that Genie carried in her the potential that was Jessica, Francis, and John before she was born, before we met, before we became a country of two. Did I exist before we met? Did she?

  Genie says she did. She says she played and flirted on Half Moon Bay near her home in San Mateo, California. She necked in cars, smoked pot, went to Catholic school, lost her faith and insisted on transferring to public school, watched her upstanding kindly father grill London Broil and drink scotch, grew up in a home right out of a 1950s TV show: her sweet mom played bridge; her parents mixed cocktails; both had served in World War II; Betty, Genie’s mom, in the FBI; Stan, her father, in the Coast Guard.

  Genie was a middle child, dropped acid, saw the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in concert—twice! hung out with the drummer from Jeff Beck’s band—and all along was carrying our future within her.

  When Genie first walked into Chalet Les Mélèzes with her sister Pam, she wore impossibly tight dark brown wool pin-striped slacks and an olive green shawl and a white blouse. They were traveling around Europe—as Pam’s graduation present from Berkeley, and Genie’s graduation present from high school. Genie was supposed to start college that fall. Their trip was supposed to be for a few weeks, not months, not a year, not a lifetime.

  Genie didn’t come to L’Abri on purpose and wasn’t looking for God—just for Pam’s best friend. By that time, I never ate in the Chalet Les Mélèzes dining room. I’d grab food from the kitchen and head for my studio, not willing to sit through more discussion with Dad holding forth answering the same questions again, as we sat jammed, back-to-back, shoulder-to-shoulder eating meatloaf—again—with stewed tomatoes—again—while Dad talked—again—about why Camus couldn’t live logically by his philosophical presuppositions.

  But that night, by God’s grace, I was there, sitting by the door to the front hall. So wh
en I heard the door open and poked my head around the corner, there she was, standing under the old, spiky, Venetian wrought-iron-and-glass lantern, eyes literally sparkling, long auburn hair down to her waist, points of pelvic bone defining her hips, belly tight under those second-skin slacks, high glossy boots up to her knees, full breasts, and that face! High cheekbones, lips so red and full I wanted to bite them, hazel eyes, almost Asian, slightly slanted at the corners, almond-shaped. A glittering white smile, tall, absolutely carefree, straightforward . . . and wanting to hear Abbey Road, the new Beatles album that I just happened to have downstairs in my studio.

  My life began from the moment Genie walked downstairs after dinner to listen to Abbey Road. I was in love from that moment, was from the minute she opened the door, really, really in love or in something, in delirious, in a state where my brain stopped working and some prophetic instinct took over, my future as yet unwritten reaching back to make that stupid boy take steps to seize a life he could know nothing about. And all the other girls, those shadow women, those posers, pretenders, just faded away and my life became about Genie, and only one question remained: How do I keep her here?

  I enlisted Mom.

  It would be necessary to get Genie saved. I wanted to marry her. She would have to accept Jesus. I wanted Genie for a life mate, and how could you marry someone who wasn’t saved? I also wanted to have sex with her, and so I didn’t want her too saved, just saved enough.

  I explained to Mom that I was in love! And Mom, a firm believer in St. Paul’s admonition that it is “better to marry than to burn” with lust or in hell, whichever he meant, didn’t laugh and say I was nuts and barely seventeen; she said “maybe Genie is the one God has chosen for you.”

  At first, Genie said she would stay a week. Then she decided to stay another week. I kept proposing marriage, and Genie kept laughing. But she let me kiss her the second day, and after we started having sex, the second week, each day had a shape. There were two parts of the day; before we had sex and after—like flight: takeoff and landing.

  Mom broke all the rules and got Genie into L’Abri, even though there was no room, and Genie didn’t even want to be there, and only stuck around to be with me. This caused problems with some of the workers, many of whom were sick of my shenanigans and figured this was just one more “Frankie episode.” But Mom and Dad liked Genie.

  Soon after Genie showed up, I started to work harder at my painting and my literature tutorials with Donald Drew. In fact (sex aside), I more or less shaped up. I quit smoking cigarettes and pot. I quit going to the Strobe Club. Why bother? I’d only gone there to meet girls, and now I had met the girl! I even attended a few L’Abri lectures and discussions with Genie. The matter of getting her saved had to be attended to.

  Mom declared that Genie was having a good effect on me. Dad was charmed and, after several talks with Genie, declared: “She has really good questions!”

  Genie’s “work,” once Mom made her a L’Abri helper (so Genie could stay longer than the three-month maximum imposed on the students), was hanging out with me. While some other young man or woman got to peel carrots and potatoes in her place, Genie and I took walks, talked, made love, and acted as if we were in some alternative universe.

  Mom and Dad knew! How could they not have known? Dad even walked in on us once. We were on my couch in my studio, naked. I pulled a cover over us. Dad asked me some mundane question and left and never said a word about it.

  After Genie and I were married, I asked Mom why she let us be, even aided and abetted us. “I loved her, that’s why,” Mom answered. And on a recent visit back to Switzerland to visit Mom (age ninety-two), she clasped Genie to her and loudly exclaimed, right out of the blue, “Thank you for marrying him!”—which made us all laugh. The implication was that Mom was grateful that anyone would have bothered, let alone stuck with me.

  Only a few weeks after Genie got to L’Abri, we were practically living together. Since all the dorms were full, Genie was staying in a rented room down in the village. Every morning, she walked up the back road to Chalet Les Mélèzes, cooked bacon and eggs in our kitchen (yet another rule was thus broken), then climbed the stairs to our family apartment, woke me, and we’d have breakfast together.

  When Genie walked to our chalet, if it had been snowing in the night, she sometimes passed the words “I LOVE GENIE” stamped out in giant letters on the fresh snow on the steep hillside above the path. I made those signs by moonlight during my walks home (at two or three in the morning), having spent the better part of the night in Genie’s room.

  Madame Ruchet (the farmer’s wife L’Abri rented Genie’s room from) slept across the hall from Genie, so I couldn’t use the stairs during my visits. Fortunately, Genie’s second-floor window opened over the farm’s backyard. I’d place one of the long pieces of wood the farmer kept there against the wall and climb up.

  After breakfast, we’d hang around my bedroom. Then I’d go to my tutorial with Donald, and Genie went to the L’Abri study center at Farel House, to listen to taped lectures. In the afternoons we hung out in my studio. Sometimes Genie modeled for me while I drew or painted her.

  All those talks about ovaries and missed periods, and the seed and the egg, did no good, because I did get Genie pregnant—but not for a while, not until we were in New York City a year after Genie stumbled onto L’Abri. Genie had been home to California for a short ten days after she had been away at L’Abri for so much longer than planned. Then she disobeyed her parents and came back to me.

  I was in New York City having my first American art show (at the Frisch Gallery). Genie came to the opening in a short white dress. She told me that she had found nothing to keep her at home. That she didn’t feel close to her old friends and wanted to be with me and to return to L’Abri. With Genie beside me, I barely noticed anyone else, though the opening was rather successful. Mrs. David Rockefeller bought a painting.

  Genie called her friend Denise and asked her to sneak into her bedroom and get her passport and send it to New York. And ten days later, and against her parents’ wishes (they wanted her to come home and start school), Genie, aided and abetted by my parents—GOD BLESS THEM!—got on the SS Leonardo da Vinci of the Italia Line. We sailed out of New York after my show’s opening and headed back to Europe.

  During the seven-day voyage, Genie discovered that her period was late. So actually I must have gotten her pregnant before she left Europe, about a month before, and she went home, then came back to me unknowingly carrying our child.

  A day later, I told Mom and she told Dad. He was furious, but only for a day. Years later, Mom said she had told Dad “It could have been me!” then added, “And that shut Fran up, because he hadn’t waited either!”

  When we disembarked at Genoa, we found that there was an Italian train workers’ strike. Mom decided that given “the situation”—as she summed up Genie’s pregnancy, Dad’s grim Mood, and the lack of transport—we needed an impromptu vacation to “use this time.” Mom booked us all into the Hotel Nazionale in Portofino. (Portofino is an hour’s bus ride from Genoa.)

  Dad relaxed. Mom prayed. And Genie and I took a long walk down the familiar path to Paraggi.

  I showed Genie my old childhood haunts, the spectacular cove, the turquoise water, the beach where my happiest childhood memories are locked. And on the walk back to Portofino, we stopped to sit on a sun-warmed wall overlooking the bay.

  I asked Genie—for the hundredth time—to marry me. She said yes.

  That morning, Mom took off her mother’s engagement ring and gave it to me, the one my grandfather Seville had given his future wife when they were missionaries in China. I had told my mother that I intended to ask Genie to marry me that day. Genie slipped on the ring.

  I don’t know if Genie said yes because she was pregnant or because she loved me. My mind was blank, as if the circuits had overloaded. What I felt was apprehension. Genie cried for a moment. I stared at the bay and the anchored yachts. We held each othe
r for a long time and said nothing.

  Three days later Genie called her parents from Switzerland, and they said that she certainly didn’t have to marry me but could come home and have the baby and have it adopted, or keep it, either way getting on with her life. But Genie told them she loved me.

  Genie still loves me, even though she knows me now. And thirty-seven years later, we have no idea what those children had in mind or who they were. And when Genie takes a trip alone, say to visit her mom, or the time she went with my mother to China for five weeks, to take Mom back to where she was born, my life stops. When Genie comes home, life starts again. I cook for Genie. We drink wine every day at five. And standing in the kitchen together is the best part of any day. And it is hard to believe that someday one of us will die and leave the other alone.

  39

  I hover over mother and child. Genie’s eyes are exhausted, dazed. Genie’s face is puffy. My neck is scarlet, chafed from wearing the surgical mask too tight. I’m afraid to ask the Swiss nurse how to adjust it. I see her looks, know the nurses and doctors think I’m just a child, pathetic, stupid, only “the boy that got this poor girl pregnant.”

  Jessica stayed in the hospital in Vevey, Switzerland, for a month after she was born. She wasn’t gaining weight. The Swiss wanted to add something to her milk, thicken it, keep her sitting up while the sphincter of her esophagus finished forming, or something like that. It did, and she came home. But those first days were all about worry, sadness she wasn’t with us, a young couple at the mercy of doctors who didn’t take them seriously.

  Genie pumped milk. So much for glamour and teen sex! We carried the little refrigerated bottles to the hospital each day, taking the bus to Aigle, then the train to Vevey. Some days, we stayed down in the valley at my parents’ hideaway apartment. (They had recently rented it, to get away from L’Abri once in a while.)