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.
The Jello Mold, part 1
The Jello Mold: I remember Pastor Dave telling a story once in the foggy hour of morning chapel. He told about how, at a picnic with some of the less fortunate members of the congregation, someone had brought jello for the communal dessert. With the wry humor he seemed to radiate, Dave told us how this mold sat to the side, the waiting coup de grace of the afternoon feast.
As the food was devoured and summarily packed away, the jello in its mold was set in the center of the table, waiting the reveal of a delectable finish to an already satisfying feast. However, he told us, there was a flaw that ruined the unveiling moment.
When the mold was removed, masses of pinkish fluid ran out on the table. Puddles of half-set jello lingered behind like some culinary afterbirth, quivering with a quasi life of their own.
The jello had not been given long enough to set, and therefore could not stand on its own.
Dave used this metaphor as the driving vision for the school we attended. HCA was, he explained, our jello mold. It was the confining frame designed to give the unformed minds and hearts of Christian youth an opportunity to grow and “set.” As we firmed up in our beliefs, we would conform to this mold, and when it was lifted we would stand a perfect reflection of our environment.
As simple and understandable as his story was, I now see a fatal flaw in the logic that he used in the tale’s meaning.
Children are, and will be until the end of mankind, their own organic beings. They are not some liquid poured into a mold, but a living breathing being with genetically and environmentally inspired tendencies and drives. Like all living things, tight containment may lead to deformity, illness, and eventual death. To liken them to Jello in a mold, is to betray that one sees them as a commodity, like cattle, to be trained and confined and used as part of some form of commerce (in this case, heavenly.)
I remember several debates, held in my later classes before graduation, that showed I didn’t “take” to the mold in certain ways. Whenever we spoke about alcohol, and alcoholism, most of my peers were adamant to say that they would never allow those cursed liquids to cross the gates of their lips. I sat in silence, wondering what the fuss was about. Everything I had tasted at home seemed horrible, and it seemed that as long as I kept from intoxication, there was no possible contradiction to Godly law.
In fact, God seems in many occasions to condone the act of intoxication. Jesus turned water to wine, and the guests exclaimed how good that wine was. Who has ever heard of good wine, especially for a wedding celebration, that was non-alcoholic? Jesus drank wine as he broke bread at the last supper, and I have had wine with a good meal on many occasions.
We were taught about dating and relationships. The sad thing was that most of our teachers had been in horrifying relationships themselves. Few were qualified to be an example of how to meet, romance, and court a member of the opposite sex. Even though almost none of them met their spouses in church, kept pre-marital sexual purity, or asked their families’ blessings on the union they had all still married and created our generation.
These same people felt free to tell us to refrain from physical contact, to avoid being alone or in compromising situations with members of the opposite sex, to seek our mates within the confines of an accepted church, and to seek that church’s blessing on the union.
During one conversation I remember Mr. Falkenburg asking each of us how we felt about the concept of “dating.”
Having little to no experience with women, I told him what I still maintain to this day: a date is an opportunity to get to know a member of the opposite sex. They very in seriousness as the relationship begins to grow, and once the relationship is committed it becomes “courtship.”
His response was emphatically that he didn’t believe in “dating,” that it was a concept that led to many problems. He explained that all those early interactions should be done in groups, with others present, to prevent temptation.
When the question passed to the girl on my right, Jessie explained that she wasn’t worried about dating or courtship.
“Jesus will come back before then, anyways.”
So I was beginning to see that I didn’t conform exactly to the mold of the school, or perhaps even the church. In the teenage quest for identity, what did that leave me?
Friends. Indeed, “Show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future,” as I heard the teachers say often.
Usually when they said it to me, the phrase was accompanied by a disapproving wag of the head. My friends were notorious troublemakers on some levels: the slick businessman, the artsy son of a homosexual, and the athletic vandal.
We supported each other, though. They encouraged me to draw, which was the only thing that made me happy. I encouraged Spike to write, Dave to skate, and Steve to make the deal of the century. We believed in a kind of future where each of us would be leaders in our field. Spike would write books that kids like us would have to read in school. Steve would be the first African American Donald trump type (alas he was beaten to the punch by Oprah.) Dave would be a pro baseball player and X-Games skater. We had bright futures filled with dreams and fantasies fueled by youth.
And yet, in his Jello lecture, Pastor Dave again had told us part of the truth.
“Some of you,” he said as I nodded my head in disbelief, “will not stand when the mold is removed. Look at the person to your right, now to your left. One of these people will be a drug addict. One of them will have a child outside of marriage. One of them may even be dead in the next ten years.”
To my right and left were Steve and Spike. I was sure I was sitting next to the exceptions that proved the rule.
When we look back at the time that the mold was lifted from us, one summer seems to mark the passing of our solidity. In that single summer, all the dreams of Godly lives and perfect Christian legacies ran out into the leaf-strewn side of a dirt road. Our company of peers and friends split, divided into factions with loyalty for those we felt we must keep as friends, and against those we felt betrayed by. Everything implied or intended by the act of being an HCA student faded into the humid air of the upstate summer.
However, I must tell this story as I heard it, since my promise was to only tell my first hand accounts. I must tell the tale as it happened to me, and let others tell their own story.
It began, for me, at the church parking lot, waiting for our friends…
