Christ taught his followers to be ‘in the world but not of it’. My father emphasized the former and, moreover, he argued for total immersion, and it wasn’t all Bach. He took me to see A Clockwork Orange and Deliverance when I was twelve. The good Presbyterians of Willow Grove still remember when their church sign announced:
Sunday Services 9 & 11 am This Sunday: God’s Eternal Grace Next Sunday: Rosemary’s Baby
The deacons protested and Julian asked us over to dinner. After grace and the passing of pot roast, Reverend Alexander allowed that the sign had spiked interest. ‘We’ve been getting calls, Richard. Are you aware that the film is a horror film? An R-rated horror film?’
‘Yes. Have you seen it?’
‘Certainly not. I understand it involves Satan.’
‘Absolutely. It is Satanic,’ my father enthusiastically concurred. He helped himself to seconds. ‘It emphasizes how counterfeit spiritualities promise heaven without a real Christ.’
‘Look, Richard. I’m not sure I can help you if you go through with this. I’m not convinced a sermon on Rosemary’s Baby is a good idea.’ Julian chuckled in spite of himself. ‘You know, they might riot.’
‘Julian, I would not recommend this film without a good reason, without a real message.’
Julian remained sceptical. ‘That’s all well and good, Richard. But I don’t think it –’ A thought struck him. He put down his water glass. ‘Richard, you don’t plan to show the film, do you? I cannot allow it. We don’t have a projector.’ He winced. ‘Do we?’
‘No, no. Of course not.’ My father laughed. ‘It’s a good movie – I loved it – but I’m not going to show it. It’s just a sermon illustration, that’s all it is.’
Julian smiled in spite of himself. ‘A pornographic sermon illustration?’
‘The film is about modern witchcraft. There’s some sexual magic, I suppose – offscreen. It’s not pornographic. I wouldn’t recommend it if it didn’t have redeeming social values.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as witchcraft is bad news.’
Julian relented and the Rosemary sermon was a huge success. People poured in that Sunday to see what rough beast was lurching towards them. It was standing-room-only and my father made them stand in a church a little bit larger, a little more open to the world. Excepting the witches, of course; they had to stand outside.
Meanwhile I roamed with a band of neighbourhood boys through frog ponds and waste ground. We were all seven, eight, or nine, busy testing the boundaries of backyards and parents and school. I was the minister’s kid; I pushed harder than the rest because I had much more to push – all the weight of my sin, my father’s congregation and all the heavenly host. I couldn’t listen anymore. My kindergarten teacher dragged me by my ear to the office. By second grade I was sneaking out after dark to soap cars and egg houses. I stole copies of Mad magazine. When we went to the circus I convinced my parents to buy me a real leather whip. I terrorized church picnics and flunked out of Sunday school. I was not a bad child, simply my father’s. It’s kid stuff, but ministers’ children must run amok. They maintain the cosmic balance.
One Saturday morning, the neighbourhood bully, a large dimwitted boy named Eric, began taunting my band of friends. My whip had been confiscated by then but I still had my slingshot. Eric said I was a lousy shot, that I couldn’t hit a barn, and then the rock hit his forehead. He stood there, stunned, until blood covered his face. Everyone scattered. I ran home, hid in my closet, and cried for twenty minutes until I heard Eric’s mother arrive. I crept into the hall and listened.
‘Your son,’ began Eric’s mother, ‘is out of control. My boy could have very easily lost his eye.’
‘I’m terribly sorry. I’m sure David didn’t mean to hit him.’
‘He didn’t, did he? Where did he get that slingshot, that weapon?’
‘I’m afraid I bought it for him. After he lost his whip.’ Mom suspects she’s guilty of everything and confesses at every opportunity.
‘Does his father know this? Does the church know about your son?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
‘You will punish him. He can’t just roam the streets with weapons.’ I heard a chair scrape and ran for my room. ‘I’ll be leaving now, Mrs Lovelace –’
‘Please, Betty Lee.’
‘I hope your son understands what he’s done.’
She left and I crept down to the kitchen. My mother sat very still and I thought she would cry. I crawled up into her lap and she kissed my streaked face, pushed back my hair, and just held me.
By now my father was attending Princeton, working towards his doctorate in church history. Julian and he had long since agreed that my father’s strengths lay with academia. He couldn’t run a church. He was, as my dad puts it, ‘administratively incompetent’. In 1968 he published his thesis as The American Pietism of Cotton Mather. I remember his doctoral thesis in piles – three-by-four note cards stacked on the cold linoleum of his church basement office. And I remember standing with my father in the church office, helping as he mimeographed and collated late into the night, meeting his doctoral deadline by the hour.
It was clear to the deacons that my father possessed negligible management skills and found discipline tedious. But it was his eccentricities, the ones Willow Grove’s teenagers found so cool, that alarmed the church as a whole. It was widely rumoured my father closed his eyes in prayer while driving the church kids to camp. He let the teenagers listen to ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. He rode around on a Japanese motorcycle far too small for his frame and, worse, he regularly perched me on the bike’s gas tank, stuck a peewee football helmet on my head, and cruised the streets. By the end of summer the church officially forbade dangerous spectacles involving six-year-olds. They put my dad on a short leash.
It wasn’t simple culture shock. Beyond the ridiculously small motorcycle, the rock and roll, the salacious sermons and Mahler blasting from his church office, my father had one other consuming interest, one that clinched his suspect identity at the church: snakes. Mostly snakes, and also some lizards. He had never kicked the reptile-hunting habits of his desert boyhood. Claiming he was allergic to any common, domesticated pet, he spent large sums on reptiles. He began haunting exotic pet stores in the city, rank basements lit only by heat lamps and run by unshaven snake enthusiasts with names like Sal or Jerry.
If my father had left his pets to their reptilian stupors, safe in their terrarium homes, his collection would have remained no more than an eccentric’s hobby, harmless. Instead, he insisted on taking one or two of the animals to his church office daily, barricading the door with his thesis draft, turning the thermostat up to eighty and blasting his music. He flaunted the snakes. The habits of the hognose, in particular, provided my father with colourful sermon illustrations and he spent an inordinate amount of pulpit time exculpating common, garden-variety snakes from the sins of Eden’s symbolic dark serpent.
As my father completed his doctorate, a general and inevitable consensus formed. My father was, in a word, ill-suited for the ministry. My mother was unstable, a poor choice. A growing chorus of alarmed parishioners brought a wide range of Lovelace anecdotes to the church deacons. Their youth pastor had allied with the scourge, the unwashed, the counterculture. Church members wanted my father dismissed. At the deacons’ meeting, a phalanx of balding, relatively unimaginative midlevel managers found my father deeply strange but all agreed he was doctrinally sound and appreciated his affinity with the church teenagers. My father’s eccentricities were duly noted and discussions ensued, but no disciplinary action was taken.
Their mood darkened considerably, however, when Willow Grove’s cleaning woman quit abruptly after encountering a small alligator