Pulphead: Essays (3 page)

We were walking past a row of portable toilets, by the food stands. As we came around the corner, I saw the stage, from off to the side. And the crowd on the hill that faced the stage. Their bodies rose till they merged with the dark. “Holy crap,” I said.

Ritter waved his arm like an impresario. He said, “This, my friend, is Creation.”

*   *   *

For their encore, Jars of Clay did a cover of U2’s “All I Want Is You.” It was bluesy.

That’s the last thing I’ll be saying about the bands.

Or, no, wait, there’s this: the fact that I didn’t hear a single interesting bar of music from the forty or so acts I caught or overheard at Creation shouldn’t be read as a knock against the acts themselves, much less as contempt for the underlying notion of Christians playing rock. These were not Christian bands, you see; these were Christian-rock bands. The key to digging this scene lies in that one-syllable distinction. Christian rock is a genre that exists to edify and make money off evangelical Christians. It’s message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what’s more, it operates under a perceived responsibility—one the artists embrace—to “reach people.” As such, it rewards both obviousness and maximum palatability (the artists would say clarity), which in turn means parasitism. Remember those perfume dispensers they used to have in pharmacies—“If you like Drakkar Noir, you’ll love Sexy Musk”? Well, Christian rock works like that. Every successful crappy secular group has its Christian off brand, and that’s proper, because culturally speaking, it’s supposed to serve as a stand-in for, not an alternative to or an improvement on, those very groups. In this it succeeds wonderfully. If you think it profoundly sucks, that’s because your priorities are not its priorities; you want to hear something cool and new, it needs to play something proven to please … while praising Jesus Christ. That’s Christian rock. A Christian band, on the other hand, is just a band that has more than one Christian in it. U2 is the exemplar, held aloft by believers and nonbelievers alike, but there have been others through the years, bands about which people would say, “Did you know those guys were Christians? I know—it’s freaky. They’re still fuckin’ good, though.” The Call was like that; Lone Justice was like that. These days you hear it about indie acts like Pedro the Lion and Damien Jurado (or people I’ve never heard of). In most cases, bands like these make a very, very careful effort not to be seen as playing “Christian rock.” It’s largely a matter of phrasing: don’t tell the interviewer you’re born-again; say faith is a very important part of your life. And here, if I can drop the open-minded pretense real quick, is where the stickier problem of actually being any good comes in, because a question that must be asked is whether a hard-core Christian who turns nineteen and finds he or she can write first-rate songs (someone like Damien Jurado) would ever have anything whatsoever to do with Christian rock. Talent tends to come hand in hand with a certain base level of subtlety. And believe it or not, the Christian-rock establishment sometimes expresses a kind of resigned approval of the way groups like U2 or Switchfoot (who played Creation while I was there and had a monster secular-radio hit at the time with “Meant to Live” but whose management wouldn’t allow them to be photographed onstage) take quiet pains to distance themselves from any unambiguous Jesus-loving, recognizing that to avoid this is the surest way to connect with the world (you know that’s how they refer to us, right? We’re “of the world”). So it’s possible—and indeed seems likely—that Christian rock is a musical genre, the only one I can think of, that has excellence-proofed itself.

*   *   *

It was late, and the Jews had sown discord. What Bub had said was true: there were Jews at Creation. These were Jews for Jesus, it emerged, two startlingly pretty high school girls from Richmond. They’d been sitting by the fire—one of them mingling fingers with Pee Wee—when Bub and Ritter and I returned from seeing Jars of Clay. Pee Wee was younger than the other guys, and skinny and cute, and he gazed at the girls admiringly when they spoke. At a certain point, they mentioned to Ritter that he would writhe in hell for having tattoos (he had a couple); it was what their people believed. Ritter had not taken the news all that well. He was fairly confident about his position among the elect. There was debate; Pee Wee was forced to escort the girls back to their tents, while Darius worked to calm Ritter. “They may have weird ideas,” he said, “but we worship the same God.”

The fire had burned to glowing coals, and now it was just we men, sitting on coolers, talking late-night hermeneutics blues. Bub didn’t see how God could change His mind, how He could say all that crazy shit in the Old Testament—like don’t get tattoos and don’t look at your uncle naked—then take it back in the New.

“Think about it this way,” I said. “If you do something that really makes Darius mad, and he’s pissed at you, but then you do something to make it up to him, and he forgives you, that isn’t him changing his mind. The situation has changed. It’s the same with the old and new covenants, except Jesus did the making up.”

Bub seemed pleased with this explanation. “I never heard anyone say it like that,” he said. But Darius stared at me gimlet-eyed across the fire. He knew my gloss was theologically sound, and he wondered where I’d gotten it. The guys had been gracefully dancing around the question of what I believed—“where my walk was at,” as they would have put it—all night.

We knew one another fairly well by now. Once Pee Wee had returned, they’d eagerly showed me around their camp. Most of their tents were back in the forest, where they weren’t supposed to be; the air was cooler there. Darius had located a small stream about thirty yards away and, using his hands, dug out a basin. This was supplying their drinking water.

It came out that these guys spent much if not most of each year in the woods. They lived off game—as folks do, they said, in their section of Braxton County. They knew all the plants of the forest, which were edible, which cured what. Darius pulled out a large piece of cardboard folded in half. He opened it under my face: a mess of sassafras roots. He wafted their scent of black licorice into my face and made me eat one.

Then he remarked that he bet I liked weed. I allowed as how I might not not like it. “I used to love that stuff,” he told me. Seeing that I was taken aback, he said, “Man, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t even convicted about it. But it’s socially unacceptable, and that was getting in the way of my Christian growth.”

The guys had put together what I did for a living—though, to their credit, they didn’t seem to take this as a reasonable explanation for my being there—and they gradually got the sense that I found them exotic (though it was more than that). Slowly, their talk became an ecstasy of self-definition. They were passionate to make me see what kind of guys they were. This might have grown tedious, had they been any old kind of guys. But they were the kind of guys who believed that God had personally interceded and made it possible for four of them to fit into Ritter’s silver Chevrolet Cavalier for the trip to Creation.

“Look,” Bub said, “I’m a pretty big boy, right? I mean, I’m stout. And Darius is a big boy”—here Darius broke in and made me look at his calves, which were muscled to a degree that hinted at deformity; “I’m a freak,” he said; Bub sighed and went on without breaking eye contact—“and you know Ritter is a big boy. Plus we had two coolers, guitars, an electric piano, our tents and stuff, all”—he turned and pointed, turned back, paused—“in that Chevy.” He had the same look in his eyes as earlier, when he’d told me there were Jews. “I think that might be a miracle,” he said.

In their lives, they had known terrific violence. Ritter and Darius met, in fact, when each was beating the shit out of the other in middle-school math class. Who won? Ritter looked at Darius, as if to clear his answer, and said, “Nobody.” Jake once took a fishing pole that Darius had accidentally stepped on and broken and beat him to the ground with it. “I told him, ‘Well, watch where you’re stepping,’” Jake said. (This memory made Darius laugh so hard he removed his glasses.) Half of their childhood friends had been murdered—shot or stabbed over drugs or nothing. Others had killed themselves. Darius’s grandfather, great-uncle, and onetime best friend had all committed suicide. When Darius was growing up, his father was in and out of jail; at least once, his father had done hard time. In Ohio he stabbed a man in the chest (the man had refused to stop “pounding on” Darius’s grandfather). Darius caught a lot of grief—“Your daddy’s a jailbird!”—during those years. He’d carried a chip on his shoulder from that. “You came up pretty rough,” I said.

“Not really,” Darius said. “Some people ain’t got hands and feet.” He talked about how much he loved his father. “With all my heart—he’s the best. He’s brought me up the way that I am.

“And anyway,” he added, “I gave all that to God—all that anger and stuff. He took it away.”

God in His wisdom had left him enough to get by on. Earlier in the evening, the guys had roughed up Pee Wee a little and tied him to a tree with ratchet straps. Some other Christians must have reported his screams to the staff, because a guy in an orange vest came stomping up the hill. Pee Wee hadn’t been hurt much, but he put on a show of tears, to be funny. “They always do me like that,” he said. “Save me, mister!”

The guy was unamused. “It’s not them you got to worry about,” he said. “It’s me.”

Those were such foolish words! Darius came forward like some hideously fast-moving lizard on a nature show. “I’d watch it, man,” he said. “You don’t know who you’re talking to. This’n here’s as like to shoot you as shake your hand.”

The guy somehow appeared to move back without actually taking a step. “You’re not allowed to have weapons,” he said.

“Is that right?” Darius said. “We got a conceal ’n’ carry right there in the glove box. Mister, I’m from West Virginia—I know the law.”

“I think you’re lying,” said the guy. His voice had gone a bit warbly.

Darius leaned forward, as if to hear better. His eyes were leaving his skull. “How would you know that?” he said. “Are you a prophet?”

“I’m Creation staff!” the guy said.

Jake stood up—he’d been watching this scene from his seat by the fire. The fixed polite smile on his face was indistinguishable from a leer.

“Well,” he said, “why don’t you go somewhere and
create
your own problems?”

I admit that these tales of the West Virginia guys’ occasional truculence might appear to gainsay what I claimed earlier about “not one word spoken in anger,” et cetera. But it was playful. Darius, at least, seemed to be performing a bit for me. And if you take into account what the guys have to be on guard for all the time back home, the notable thing becomes how successfully they checked their instincts at Creation.

Whatever the case, we operated with more or less perfect impunity from then on. This included a lot of very loud, live music between two and three o’clock in the morning. The guys were running their large PA off the battery in Jake’s truck. Ritter and Darius had a band of their own back home, First Verse. They were responsible for the music at their church. Ritter had an angelic tenor that seemed to be coming out of a body other than his own. And Josh was a good guitar player; he had a Les Paul and an effects board. We passed around the acoustic. I had to dig to come up with Christian tunes. I did “Jesus,” by Lou Reed, which they liked okay. But they really enjoyed Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” When I finished, Bub said, “Man, that’s really Christian. It really is.” Darius made me teach it to him; he said he would take it home and “do it at worship.”

Then he jumped up and jogged to the electric piano, which was on a stand ten feet away. He closed his eyes and began to play. I know enough piano to know what good technique sounds like, and Darius played very, very well. He improvised for an hour. At one point, Bub went and stood beside him with his hands in his pockets, facing the rest of us, as if guarding his friend while the latter was in this vulnerable trance state. Ritter whispered to me that Darius had been offered a music scholarship to a college in West Virginia; he went to visit a friend, and a professor heard him messing around on the school’s piano. The dude offered him a full ride then and there. Ritter couldn’t really explain why Darius had turned it down. “He’s kind of our Rain Man,” Ritter said.

At some juncture, I must have taken up my lantern and crept back down the hill, since I sat up straight the next morning, fully dressed in the twenty-nine-footer. The sound that woke me was a barbaric moan, like that of an army about to charge. Early mornings at Creation were about Praise and Worship, a new form of Christian rock in which the band and the audience sing, all together, as loud as they can, directly to God. It gets rather intense.

The guys had told me they meant to spend most of today at the main stage, checking out bands. But I’d already checked out a band. My task was to stay in this trailer, jotting impressions.

It was hot, though. As it got hotter, the light brown carpet started to give off fumes from under its plastic hide. I somewhat light-headedly tumbled out the side hatch and went looking for Darius, Ritter, and Bub.

In the light of day, one could see there were pretty accomplished freaks at this thing: a guy in a skirt wearing lace on his arms; a strange little androgynous creature dressed in full cardboard armor, carrying a sword. They knew they were in a safe place, I guess.

The guys left me standing in line at a lemonade booth; they didn’t want to miss Skillet, one of Ritter’s favorite bands. I got my drink and drifted slowly toward where I thought they’d be standing. Lack of food, my filthiness, impending sunstroke: these were ganging up on me. Plus the air down here smelled faintly of poo. There were a lot of blazing-hot portable toilets wafting miasma whenever the doors were opened.