In the Shadow of Fundamentalism

The Jello Mold, part 2

The Jello Mold


“What do you mean they might not be coming?” I was pissed. We had been planning this trip to Darien Lake for a while, and it was hard to get the time off from Blockbuster for something so trivial. I was, of course, the six time consecutive employee of the month, employees of the month don’t go to amusement parks and inconvenience their co-workers.
“Yeah,” Johnny looked off into the trees at the edge of the parking lot, “not sure I want to talk about that right now.”
“I don’t know that it’ll be a problem,” Steve smiled a nervous smile. “Everything is okay, right?”
“What are you guys talking about? C’mon, just tell me what happened.” I was out of the loop again. Living at the edge of nowhere and not having a car was keeping me from the little outings Steve and Johnny often had with Spike. They would come back with inside jokes, new friends, half-told stories. It was starting to frustrate me.
Suddenly a car rolled up. In it were several of our friends from Bath, a rural area about a half hour outside of Corning. Steve got out of the car, and walked over to convene with the other driver.
“C’mon Johnny, I know something happened,” how come he could always get secrets out of me, but he was more tightly sealed than a virgin’s knees on this one?
He leaned his head back against the head rest in front of me and seemed to nap. Whatever had happened the night before must’ve been good. He was exhausted.
Momentarily Steve returned, shaking his head.
“I think it’s off for today,” he said as if it were no big deal.
“Aw, man… what a waste of a day off.” I was more pissed about being out of the loop.
“Even if we started driving now,” Johnny looked at his watch or the car clock, “we’d be too late to beat the lines for most of the good rides.”

As we rode home from the church, they began to pour the narrative to me in bits and pieces, chronologically disjointed like a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Jill had a car accident. We hung out at the pond. Spike asked Shannon to marry her. Johnny drove his dad’s truck through the back roads at four in the morning. Shannon drank a whole bottle of Boone’s Farm wine. Spike has condoms in his glove compartment.
None of these facts by themselves seemed to have any place in reality, and yet they somehow tied into a story that took me days to sort out.
It began, as many summer evenings did that year, at The Pond.
Spike’s Hemmingway-esque uncle owned a property in the back woods with several cabins (unfinished) and a half-built house surrounding a large manmade pond. Cut off from the world and self supporting, this spot was a place where we often spent time fishing, talking, playing cards, and ducking the larger world outside our door.
We could drink alcohol there, although I still hated beer. We could swear, although I sounded like “the way a character in a Kung Fu movie forces the curse word,” as Spike observed. We could lay hold of that sense of freedom that meant adulthood at The Pond. And in the course of grasping it, we lost our childhood.
As I watched some inconsequential movie with my parents, isolated from transportation and youthful abandon, Steve and Johnny had helped coordinate a small gathering at the pond. They were there with Spike, Jill, Shannon, and a few bottles of cheap wine to liven up the evening.
From the tale, Shannon drank the wine fairly quickly. She had a lot to run from, as I would later understand when I did my own running. Somewhere in the course of the evening, they had braved the abandoned dirt roads under Jill’s urging, to leave the pond for a more comfortable setting.
It was unknown to me, from mixed accounts, why they left The Pond. It was unknown if Jill had been drinking or not. What was known was that, during a poorly executed turn on a gravel surface, her Neon had run off the road into the woods at its edge. A vast boulder of a rock tore up the underside of her car, leaving it to die in a puddle of fluids and steam in the darkened wood.
Uniting as only teenagers who have done something monumentally stupid can, they broke into groups. Jonathan returned to his parents house to get his father’s truck. He returned after an hour’s drive with chains to tow Jill’s deceased car to her home.
They spent the night in fear, in grief, in worry that all our parents would feel betrayed and label them as un-conformed; unfinished mistakes of the HCA system.

The next day our world changed.

What was Jill to tell her parents? How was she to face two prominent members of the congregation with a story of drunken debauchery in the woods? She would lose her freedom, whatever remained of her honor, her social standing in the church. Having been cast out by the school once, she must’ve feared a second shunning.
What were the rest of us to say, that were her friends. “Sorry you screwed up?” We promised, I promised, to help and stand by her.
“When your parents come home, we will all chip in to fix the car,” as if fixing the car would somehow fix the relationship that had granted her the car, and every other freedom and benefit that framed her life.
And so the entire group fractured like a piece of sunlit ice, slowly drifting on the frigid seas to disperse and be separated by tide and time.

My parents were called, informed by Jill’s outraged mother of how delinquent my friends were. Fortunate for me, on some level, to have been home with them instead of standing on the side of that road wondering how to make things go back.
I had already beaten that phone call, by telling them both what I knew of the story only hours earlier. I knew that I could earn their trust, and confirm the relationship I was trying to build as an adult by doing so. Unfortunately this also meant that my Mom liked Steve and Johnny even less for several years.
This event presaged a cascade of changes that seemed to confirm the jello sermon. Some of us were having premarital sex, one of the seniors that summer was pregnant, several people began to experiment with drugs and alcohol. I flunked out of college.
We seemed to be the disintegrating jello foretold by Pastor Dave. We had lost integrity, and no longer reflected our Mold, our origin in Christian school.

posted by NY Monk @ 3:50 PM