The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

  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 F
irst 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?