by Brett Lott
I played with an old set of clubs borrowed from Greg's uncle; Greg taught me to grip the club with my thumbs down, to square my shoulders with my hips, my hips with the ball, and to return to this routine each and every time I stepped up to hit. One deviation and the ball went into the water or the trees, or into the grape vineyard beyond the course's perimeter. We ate lunch at the turn, two gigantic cheeseburgers spilling with lettuce and shredded carrots, and potato chips, and a dill spear that stained the paper plate green. Crop full and warm, Greg leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, his spiked shoes crossed one over the other, his fingers interlaced across the stomach of his powder-blue golf shirt. I had seen him sleep this way in the library and in the Basilica, our study commons, and even seated at his desk in our dorm room. His sleep, even at night, appeared like a brief interlude between two greater, more consequential thoughts. I putted on the practice green while I waited for him to wake up.
The shoulder beside the car was six feet wide and covered in weedy grass. Greg chopped at it with the head of his club in high strokes like a reaper until he cleared a small patch of dirt. He dropped two balls in the grass and pulled one back toward him with his club head, then squared up, dug his shoes into the dirt, and did that thing that always made me laugh, no matter how many times I saw it: the little waggle of his butt that made him look like a duck. "Quack, quack," I said.
"Quiet." He kept his eyes fixed on the ball, then wound back and crushed it. The ball swam upward in the mist and carried forward against the stretched, blue horizon, a white speck that I lost for a moment in the sun and found again in time to watch it splash. The water near the shore was green-blue and full of rocks, fallen chunks of the cliff deposited by earlier landslides. I wondered how many God had placed there Himself when He created the earth, and on which day, and it gave me pause to think of the care that God took with each miniscule detail. Greg's ball landed in the dark blue. "Nice shot," I said.
"See the spot you want to hit before you even swing. Make the ball go where you tell it." He pushed the second ball my way. "Let's see what you've got."
"Haven't I seen this in a movie? Two guys hitting golf balls into the ocean?"
"It's a beer commercial," he said. "The guys are in business suits, playing hooky from work, or something like that. 'One more for old times,' is the slogan." He lifted an invisible beer in his cupped hand, and I did the same. We mimed the clink and swig. Then I tried to mime what I had seen him do only a minute before, the grip, the stance, even the waggle. I kept my head down and swung. The club nicked the top of the ball and sent it bouncing over the edge of the cliff. Greg fished another ball out of the sack, completely devoid of scorn or sarcasm. "Take a mulligan," he said. "That one never happened."
The mulligan was my favorite thing about golf. It was the perfect example of the first two verses of Psalm 32: "Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him." Greg and I were seniors at Southland Pacific University, a Christian college perched on a hill on the south side of Los Angeles. Southland Pacific was an innocuous name for a conspicuous place. There wasn't a corner of the campus that lacked Christian intent or import. A wealthy judge had donated the land seventy years before to establish a school that would be "a light to the world"; our chapel was, in fact, shaped like a lighthouse. We joked that the water fountains were clean enough for baptism, and we had a thousand meanings for the initials SPU: Student Pastors' University, Sowing and Planting University, Savior's Pride University, Start Packing University (as almost every student spent time in the mission field). The list was practically endless, though most of us just called it SPEW, for more than Math, which was Greg's major, or History, which was mine, or any other discipline, we were taught the gospel, how to memorize whole New Testament books verse by verse, mnemonic exercises to help us quote it on command, ways to link the fifty major Messianic Old Testament prophecies to Jesus, techniques for sharing Jesus with everyone we met. Professor Tulliver ended each Pagan Psychology class with the admonition: "Love your neighbor, share your faith." While other college kids went to Santa Monica or to Tiájuana to drink and score, we went to witness. Our scores were measured not in phone numbers or drinks, but in souls, the tally of those I saved recorded on a sheet of paper taped to my closet door. One of my best lines was, "Heaven is like a party. God hands out invitations years in advance, and all you have to do is RSVP." It worked more times than you may think. I had a way with analogies, and anecdotes, though back then I didn't call them anecdotes. Back then I called them parables.
I practiced my parables on the youth at Fisher's Church, just down the hill from SPEW, where I interned my senior year. The name came from Pastor Dale Fisher, who founded the church in his living room, but also from Mark 1:17, when Jesus tells Simon and Andrew, "Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." Fisher's was a church for the unchurched, an antidote to the hymn-bloated, wood-pew, fire-and-brimstone services that most pagans associated with religion. As Pastor Dale said, and which I have said many times myself, we weren't religious, we were relational. We came to church to be with Jesus. We didn't sing hymns; we sang praise songs, led by a band instead of a choir. Fisher's was already one of the largest churches in California, though in my lifetime I would see it become one of the largest in the country, and the complex that seemed so expansive to me then would become too small for Sundays.
Youth activities happened in a series of trailers on the northeast side of the church property, a square encampment that included several classrooms, an all-purpose room filled with sagging second-hand sofas and out-of-date movie posters, and a worship room where we held something of a pseudoservice during the second hour. I was focused and enthusiastic. Each week I regaled the youth with stories of God's presence revealed in daily life. I told the story of my neighbor in Escondido who scraped and saved to afford a hot tub so he could relax after work, and when it at last arrived, he gave it to his aunt who'd recently had hip surgery. It wasn't exactly true—my neighbor had plenty of money and in fact owned the house his aunt lived in—but as a story, it worked. Kids could be so consumed with themselves, with their hair and shoes and that month's brand of blue jeans, that a little airbrushing of the details could be justified if it led them to sacrifice for others as Christ sacrificed for us. Everyone understands that Jesus' parables were intended for this purpose, not as record of historical facts, as is true with the rest of the Bible. I spent the entire year looking for stories that I could shape into parables, watching the sun rise and set from the edge of SPEW Hill, watching students talk outside the library, watching hour after hour of television reruns for some plot line, some scene that would strike a relevant chord. I wrote everything down in a five-subject spiral notebook.
My internship ended with the completion of my degree and as a graduation gift, Pastor Dale had asked me to preach that Sunday at the ten o'clock service. Maybe it comes from living just south of Hollywood, but I felt that tomorrow would be my big break as a preacher, a giant leap in my pastoral career. I could just feel the Holy Spirit pointing me down my triumphant path. I told Greg that I should find a way to work this into my sermon.
"What's that?" He kept his eyes on the ball. The wind lifted the hair from his forehead.
"This," I said. "All of this." I waved the club handle at the sky and the sea, like Moses extending his staff. "Sometimes God blocks our paths to force us to wait on Him. Usually it means we have a lesson to learn, and until we learn it, we can't go forward. Sometimes that lesson is patience itself. If you hadn't taken that catnap at lunch, we could have been one more mile down the road. We should give thanks and praise for God's perfect timing."
"Sounds good," he said. He blinked, lost his concentration, and straightened his back. "Do you know why golf balls are dimpled?"
I shrugged, "So they'll sit on the tee?"
"They create Magnus lift, which keeps the ball aloft during the initial part of its
flight." He picked up the ball. "Driven balls have backspin; Magnus force relates to the drag on the top and bottom parts of the ball."
"Balls have tops and bottoms?" I said, playing along. Greg was full of stuff like this. "They're round."
"At any one point in time, there is a top and a bottom. The top moves slowly and produces less drag. The bottom moves fast and produces more. This force creates lift. You've seen a golf ball fly upward, or slice to the side? That's Magnus."
"Something new everyday," I said, and spread my arms. "Our blemishes propel us toward God. Perfect." Unaware of anything I just said, he drew the iron up and over his head and swung hard, turning his hips when he made contact with the ball. A tuft of grass and earth flew up and disappeared off the side of the road, and Greg tapped the grass around the divot with the club head.
Greg was the only person I knew at SPEW who studied a science. I mean, the college had all the science majors, including chemistry, physics, biology, and several brands of engineering, but the vast majority who took those degrees did so to work in the mission field—either as teachers at missionary schools or else as missionary doctors. Karl Beckman studied biology in order to prove "evolution a crock," and spent most of his time reading books that declared Darwin an apostate. Greg studied math for math's sake, which didn't always go over well. Everything is for God's glory, we were told, not man's. What's more, the Math Department was conjoined with the Physics Department, and even though our professors were Christians, everyone knew that most physicists were atheists. Greg said that Einstein believed in a divine being, but Einstein was no Christian. Anyone could look at the starry sky and feel the echo of creation, but no one comes to the Father except through the Son. Worse was the fact that Greg studied abstract, difficult subjects that seemed to lead nowhere near Jesus, and worse, led no one else to Jesus. Students, in my time at SPEW, were known to shout out, "What does this have to do with Jesus?" in the middle of a lecture, and to tell one another before going out on weekend nights, "Think of Jesus." This was before those purple bracelets and bumper stickers became so popular and we thought ourselves both original and righteous, holding one another to a higher standard.
Greg's textbooks had queer titles like First Course in Morular Forms, Calculus of Variation and Homogenization, Methods for Structural Optimization, Applied Complex Variables, and Asymptotic Methods. I remember the titles because I remember leafing through the books, page after page filled with an alien typography. I know math is pure logic to those who practice it, but without the presence of a number, I failed to see the sense in any of it. Even stranger was watching Greg do his homework. He worked out problems on graph paper, his writing geometrical in its movements, boxy and square, but illegible on the whole, the kind of writing practiced by government code breakers and spies, at least in the way I imagine both. Ethan Prufer, one of the guys in our small-group Bible study, saw a sheet of Greg's on his desk and said it looked demonic. I said I thought it looked more like Aramaic, and told Ethan to be careful about accusing other Christians of demonism. Ethan apologized. He's not a bad guy.
More than one of our friends, and more than one of Greg's professors, suggested that he would have been better suited for an institution like CalTech. But like many of us, he had only attended Christian schools and his parents insisted that he remain close to the body of Christ when he went to college. They understood that college was a dangerous stop on the road of a Christian pilgrim. We all had friends who had lost their faiths at the public schools. And Greg did not dislike SPEW; in fact just the opposite was true. His senior year he rarely left campus. He did almost all of his coursework by independent study; he checked in with his professors once a week and spent the rest of his time in the Basilica. I always knew where to find him, and when I saw him there, he would be surrounded by pencil shavings and eraser bits, his hands sweaty and often in his hair, pages of graph paper stacked just beyond the bend of his right elbow, always in the same spot. He also began to write on himself, his skin merging with his paper as he moved across the page, just as one form of mathematics merged with another. There were nights when he came back to the dorm with bloody hands and knuckles, crimson rings in the cuticles of his fingernails, and pink streaks on his forehead and in his hair, which in the right light had a translucent quality. I used to joke that math gave him stigmata, which neither he nor I believed in. I saw the marks on his skin merely as the passion of a mathematician, a passion I have seen elsewhere only among missionaries who, in their resolve to reach the world for Christ, bought one-way passages abroad and took their coffins with them. Had Greg desired the missionary life, he would have probably had a lot more dates. Many women at SPEW were eager to marry, and to become, missionaries.
SPEW made it easy to set your thoughts on the noble, the right, the pure, and the lovely, as Paul tells us to do in Philippians. Stumble in your faith, someone was there to pick you up. Sin, and you had your Bible study to hold you accountable. No women in the men's dorms, no R-rated movies, no Rolling Stone or GQ or Cosmopolitan magazines with their lustful advertisements and perverted sex quizzes. Virginity is not so hard to keep if everyone agrees to it going in. We signed an honor code first day of freshman year, agreeing, among other things, to abide by 1 Thessalonians 4:3, to control our bodies in a way both holy and honorable. Love was a serious, grave matter and we knew not to fool with it. If two people were in love, it was best to get married, lest one begins to act improperly toward the other. That's Paul again, in 1 Corinthians, though I am paraphrasing a bit.
We all knew we couldn't stay at SPEW forever. We knew we'd have to descend the hill for good and live among the pagans, which nobody wanted to do alone. Senior year felt a little like the last call at a bar, when people scramble to pair up, wincing and dazed as the lights come back on and the jukebox shuts off. I saw this in a movie; I myself have never shut down a bar. There were a lot of engagements senior year, women hugging and crying after chapel, guys staying up late to talk about what it would be like to finally "get some." It was, as I have already said, a wedding that brought us to the landslide: Josh Rapenburg and Crystal McKnutt, whom everyone called McNuts, which made us all laugh, every time. Crystal didn't want to graduate an unmarried woman. She wanted her diploma printed with her married name, by which she would be known for the rest of her life—not an entirely unreasonable want. The wedding took place two days after classes ended, three days before finals week was to begin, at a un-air-conditioned, flat-roofed church in Bakersfield. Crystal's sister sang while her brother played the guitar, both off key. Greg and I wore jackets and ties, but not tuxedoes, and stood arranged by height on the steps leading from the floor to the pulpit. The ceremony included a sermon about Jesus' power to save; it lasted forty-five minutes and ended in an altar call. I stood the entire time, thinking about Kenna Stites.
Kenna sang in the praise band at Fisher's Church, and helped out some Sundays with the children. Though she was only nineteen and in school part-time, she seemed to me more mature than the other girls her age, the way she unabashedly filled the miniature chairs in the Sunday School classrooms and worked the tiny, dull-bladed scissors through sheets of construction paper. I liked her broad shoulders and soft chin, though my favorite thing was watching her sing. Her voice was true and clear and seemed to rise with the music; when a song like "Lover of My Soul" or "There is None Like You" would get to its high point, she would close her eyes and point her chin and lift one hand to the ceiling, palm flat and open. I'd watch the vocal cords vibrate in her throat, the quiver in the hand that held the microphone, the soft underside of her arm, which appeared to turn pinker and more flushed as the song built. It sounds like a small thing, and it was, but at twenty-one, it was enough to drive me crazy.
Rather than ask Kenna out on a date, I drove out to her parents' house in Whittier and spoke with her father. I arrived while he was mowing the lawn and waited in the dining room for him to wash his hands and change his shirt. I sat next to the head at one end of the tabl
e and imagined the years to come and the seat that would become mine, and when Mr. Stites came into the room in a flowered Tommy Bahama shirt, his thinning hair slicked back over his ears, I stood up and without any other small talk told him that I had feelings for his daughter. I said I believed she was a right, upstanding Christian woman who would serve a family as she served Jesus, and in due time I wanted to make her my wife. I didn't want to date, I said, as dating was practice for divorce; instead, I was there to ask his permission to court Kenna. Courting was the big thing at SPEW. I told him I would pursue Kenna in group activities that included both her friends and mine, and I planned to ask her to attend a couple's Bible study with me. He asked if I had shared any of this with Kenna, and I said I hadn't yet. I wanted his permission first. Then I promised not to kiss her until the wedding day. I wanted him to be the only man she had ever kissed before she kissed her husband. I said it just like that, to the man's face—I felt righteous in my intentions and spoke without fear. Mr. Stites hiked up his belt and touched the hairless spot on the back of his head, and stuck out his hand. When I shook it he said, "I appreciate you coming, son," which I took to mean that I had done the right thing. I have often told this story as an example for how other young people and couples should conduct themselves in relationships. I have even told it on television. To this day I am thankful that I was able to behave rightly toward women and put first things first in matters of love and marriage.
The arrival of the equipment summoned us back to the landslide. An orange frontloader came first down the road, followed by a yellow backhoe with a shovel attached to a long hinged arm. We hadn't waited long, maybe forty-five minutes. Because of the narrowness of the road, both were driven in, rather than towed in on trailers. A Caltrans crew in orange vests and white hardhats followed behind in the back of a pickup. The backhoe had to work the corners, backing up, inching forward, rolling a tread up on the side of the cliff. We practically walked alongside it. I whistled "Onward Christian Soldiers." The highway patrol had taped off the landslide and the area around it. Across the mound I could see the flashing lights of an ambulance, the bay doors already open, a fire truck behind it. A team of paramedics waited on our side with a gurney, a tackle box, and an oxygen bottle. The highway patrolman spoke with the backhoe driver; the driver nodded and pulled the levers in front of him and the backhoe began to scoop, in its lurching way, shovelfuls of earth from the slide. After each scoop, it backed up and swung its arm to the edge of the road and emptied the shovel over the side. While it did this, the frontloader pushed in and took away its own haul. It wasn't long before the rear fender and taillights of a white Volkswagen Rabbit appeared, like an egg buried in the dirt. At that point the backhoe reversed and the crew moved in, working frantically to knife away the dirt around the car. Greg, with his arms crossed, leaned close to my ear and said, "No way, not a chance." It took a few minutes more before I saw that the Volkswagen was rocked up on its right side. Greg looked at the hills above us, that blond slice grafted right out of the side of the hill, and then at the debris spread over the road, and then at the car. How the slide, with all its sudden force and gravity, did not sweep the little car right off the edge of the road was a mystery. "It's not possible," Greg said. "This thing would have taken a building over the side. I don't see how it didn't toss that car."