Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  I went on raiding parties, cutting through the new students like a particularly hungry tuna through a school of sardines. First and foremost, my target was girls. If one was pretty, I would plot to be near her, see what I could get going. Sometimes I’d find a temporary patron, someone to buy a painting or to introduce me to a gallery owner, or read some of the play I was writing or watch one of my Super-8 movies on the little editing console I set up in my studio.

  Lady Edward Montague was one visitor who became a patron. A year or two later, she introduced me to the Frisch Gallery in New York. Later still, Audrey Jadden, who lived down by Lake Geneva with her husband Bill, two of the best and kindest people I have ever known, introduced me to Mr. Chante Pierre of the Chante Pierre Gallery in Aubonne, outside Geneva. Another set of lifelong and lovely L’Abri friends, John and Sandra Bazlinton, organized a show in London for me.

  Of all my shows, the one at the Chante Pierre Gallery was best. It was a serious gallery, and my work was shown alongside paintings by Miro and Picasso. At the well-attended opening, I almost threw up with nervousness and was also thrilled. It was a wonderful and terrible thing to see my paintings hanging in a real gallery.

  At the opening, Chante Pierre introduced me as a young, new, and talented painter, and I watched as “real” (non-L’Abri people), actual art collectors looked at my work. As if by some miracle, several little red dots appeared on the catalogue price list, indicating sales. The feeling I got was like looking over a precipice, thrilled and frightened. And somewhere in my brain, a little explosion went off. It was if I had just heard a whispered message: “You can escape the madness!”

  It was the first time that I felt I might have a future, with or without any college degree, with or without a normal childhood. I was going to soon forget that hopeful moment and plunge into my dad’s ministry with a vengeance. But the message of freedom-through-art stuck in my brain someplace. And years later, when I hit rock bottom, that voice reminded me that there are possibilities beyond one’s background. When I would feel most trapped, it would “speak” of freedom.

  Some of the workers became my friends, at least for a while. Thirty-year-old English L’Abri worker Os Guinness, for instance, compared notes with me on which girls we thought were the prettiest, which ones I was going to “have a go at,” and which ones he “fancied.” If he spoke up for one, I’d honor our friendship by not flirting with her, and vice versa. I always envied him. He seemed to get so much further with the girls most of the time, which, given that he was a thirty-year-old eligible bachelor, makes sense now, but didn’t then.

  Sometimes I’d mine the students to find companions for little adventures, like sledding. Every year there was a night when the snow was perfect, packed, icy, and smooth—this was before the days of sand and salt on the road—and I’d take my group with me to Chésières using someone’s car, usually one of the workers, to ferry us back and forth with our old-fashioned wood sleds with steel runners. (We Schaeffers still didn’t have a car, but many of the workers did by this time.)

  I’d been sledding since I was barely a toddler, and many of the students had never even seen snow. We would head down the road on some night filled with starlight that made the snow shine. The sleds were designed for one to sit on and steer with your heels. But I lay head-first and steered by leaning this way and that and touching the ground with my hands as rudders. You had to judge the corners right, fly through at the right speed, or pay the price.

  We’d have a few girls in the sledding party, and none of the young men wanted to appear slow or inept. So every year there was usually somebody from someplace without mountains who would be showing off, hitting the corners too fast, and we’d have accidents. On three occasions, these were serious. The fact that it was dangerous made the adventure all the more wonderful; not to mention the clear air, the velvet blanket of snow so thick that all the contours of the mountainside, trees, even the thickly covered chalet roofs looked soft and rounded.

  The mountains across the valley would be bright, snow clinging and making everything look huge and close in the starlight, even lovelier if there was a moon. There were so many stars visible and the air was clear, light pollution so low, that even without a moon the snow was bright. When you looked up, it seemed as if there were more sharp glittering stars than gaps between them. The universe seemed friendly and near. Girls looked wonderful, their frosty breaths blooming from red lips, frost-touched cheeks, and wisps of hair peeking from under wool caps, eyes reflecting sparks of starlight.

  I’d always be way ahead of the pack and head off with a “Follow me!” that I knew was an idle challenge since no one could. I never crashed, never fell, hardly slowed down for the curves, could hit the curve inside and feel myself slashing over the ice as I slid across the road to the outside while cutting the straightest line through the bend. There were straight sections where I would be going so fast that the snowbank and trees seemed to turn into one long white flickering ribbon streaking past in my peripheral vision while the road flew under me like a rushing river. The least touch of one hand to the ground was enough to turn. And my “brakes” were my toes, hanging over the end of the sled, providing drag when the corners were sharp but held off the road the rest of the time so nothing would slow my headlong careening race to the valley.

  You could smell the snow. The cold pinched your nose and had a whiff of fresh-picked cucumber, maybe a touch of frosty lemon, distant, hard to pin down, but cold and clean as if it came from inside a crystal. If it was snowing, we’d sled while squinting through eyelashes crusted with flakes, and seeing the road was impossible. You steered by looking for the faint outline of the hillside rising on one side and falling away to dark nothingness on the other.

  Jan Van Loon, a hulking Dutchman, all 230 pounds or so of him practically crushing the little wood sled he was hanging over at both ends like a big hot dog laid over an undersized bun, shot down the road at breakneck speed. We were on the Panex road to Ollon, a road that led to the valley from the little village of Panex a couple of miles from ours; unlike our road that cut mainly through fields, the Panex road went down through forest the whole way. Even in winter, when the leaves were off the beech trees, the pines were as dark as ever and covered up the stars or cast patchwork shadows, turning the moonlight into a confusing crisscross pattern of light and dark. But because it was so steep, steep enough that cars had to stay in low gear when driving up it even in summer, the ride was fantastic . . . if you could steer.

  Jan Van Loon hadn’t ever been on a sled before, but he was a showoff. He was a loud bearded artist who chain-smoked, drank in the village pub, and always had the more arty girls clinging to him. At the start of the run, he talked about it as if it was a race that he planned to win. On the first long straight section of road, Jan passed me. He hadn’t had to negotiate a corner yet. The first hairpin bend doubled back on itself as tightly as a corkscrew. Below it, the forest clung to a mountainside so steep that you looked out through treetops growing below the road. Jan hit the first corner, crashed through the hedge, and left no tracks.

  We only noticed he was missing about eight minutes later when we got to Ollon. It took us half an hour to get Claire Olson, a single worker with a VW bug, rousted out of bed, and another half hour before she got to Ollon and we drove slowly back up the road, with chains on her tires, looking for our missing Dutchman. We stopped at the corners and called. At last we got to the place Jan had gone off the road and saw the gap in the hedge where he’d smashed through. His sled’s tracks ended abruptly.

  The moon was out, so we could see the mountainside below between the stripes of shadow, but there was no sign of him, just sled tracks and then unbroken snow. Then we heard singing. Jan’s sled lay smashed at the foot of the trunk of an enormous beech tree fifty feet below the road. From there, footprints led a little way to where Jan sat, head bleeding and face steaming, singing in a slurred voice. He had hit the tree about fifteen or so feet above the ground, having flo
wn from the edge of the road through the air and smashed into the trunk high above the mountain’s side, which fell away beneath him almost vertically.

  Jan was heavy. He laughed, raved, and sang like some cartoon caricature of a drunken pirate. It took five of us to hoist, pull, push, and drag Jan back up to the road, using the undergrowth poking through the snow for handholds. He was cheerfully out of his mind, had no idea he was hurt, let alone that his beard was crusted with blood. It took us the better part of an hour to rescue him. He was in the Aigle hospital for a month.

  36

  I got to know Priscilla well only after she moved back to L’Abri when I was ten. She came home with John and their firstborn, Elizabeth. Priscilla became my best friend and was soon mother to three remarkable children, Elizabeth, Rebecca, and Giandy. All of them remain close friends of mine to this day.

  By the time Priscilla moved back, she had analyzed a lot of what her own childhood had been about. She had become this sweet libertarian, someone who still was a believing evangelical but who was also literally allergic to the strict pietism of her childhood, as well as to theology in general. And she hated the fact that Mom and Dad were more or less worshipped by some people.

  Priscilla became this wonderful bohemian, full of ineffable kindness, as well as a refreshing nonconformist. She was an anti-Christian Christian. And the students, like everyone, adored her and of course loved her husband John Sandri, too.

  Even before L’Abri’s evolution in the late sixties, Priscilla and John’s little home, Chalet Tzi-No, was the place I could go to hear rock music, listen to the BBC, hear about the profane modern novels Priscilla was reading, hear stories about the bad old days and just how lucky I was to be raised by Mom and Dad now, not then.

  Priscilla rebelled against my mother’s excruciatingly fancy ways. Where Mom had a closet full of fabulous clothes, Priscilla prided herself on never dressing up and on always wearing the same clothes until they fell off her. And she refused to alter anything in her tiny chalet. It had only cold water in the kitchen. There was no living room, just the little kitchen, red checked curtains, a few antique kitchen implements hanging on the walls, a simple wood-burning stove, and no central heat. Priscilla and John’s chalet became my favorite destination. It became everyone’s favorite destination.

  All the little children at L’Abri, including my children after I got married and was still living in Huémoz and then nearby in Chésières, went to Priscilla’s play school. They grew up loving her passionately. My sister was like some good witch down a mysterious forest path, a woman who provided endless sympathy and, like her husband John, never judged you, had a house so simple that you could not do anything to hurt it and could be utterly free therein.

  It was a land of finger paints, cheerful music, stories read out loud as beautifully as they would have been read by Meryl Streep. It was also a place that became off-limits when my sister had her big breakdowns, a virtual hermit’s cell where John sat with her for months at a time protecting her from the fear, anxiety, and depression that left my sister numb, unable to cope with even the simplest daily routines. John nursed Priscilla as she’d crawl back from the brink of mental collapse, thoughts of suicide, and being unable to see even her closest family members, let alone L’Abri students. John helped her adjust to a regime of antidepressant medications that could keep the demons at bay. Whatever else the reasons were for my sister’s problems, she was paying a heavy price for simply being a Schaeffer daughter, for having lived in a fishbowl, having a mother who let everyone know that she could out-work, outpray, and spiritually outshine everyone else, including her daughters.

  When Debby moved back, I’d visit her, too. She and I also became best friends. My sisters, perhaps remembering how trapped they had felt in our home before there were other chalets and families in the work to escape to, kept an open door to their wayward little brother. I spent hours sitting in Debby’s kitchen in Chalet Les Sapins. Her husband Udo was a lot more serious than John but was also extremely kind and welcoming. And given that I was a demanding, attention-grabbing pain in the ass, often pretending to be a lot older and more sophisticated than I was, I must have been insufferable. But Udo treated me with dignity and respect and would discuss seriously when we argued about philosophical ideas or art, as if I actually was saying something worth listening to, which I am sure I wasn’t!

  I could tell Debby anything. When I started having sex, it was Debby I told, and she asked me if I had intercourse or was “just fooling around.” I wasn’t embarrassed to tell her the truth. I knew that no matter what she thought of my actions, Debby wouldn’t tell on me. I also had always known that she loved me, and that she was on my side come hell or high water, a certain knowledge that persisted through life, even when Debby, some years later, was upset after my novel Portofino was published. I knew it was temporary and that we would soon be friends again.

  37

  Time stumps me. When I begin a sentence “I always used to go up to Villars any way I could, hitchhike, walk, catch the bus, all for the purpose of being at the Grenier Discothèque. . . ,” it sounds as if I’m describing something I did every day for years. But it was most likely for a summer.

  In any case, by the summer of 1968 I was “always” going up to Villars to the Grenier. I’d dress carefully. Should it be the turquoise scarf tied like a cravat, the tight T-shirt, the velvet jeans, the leather jacket, or the smelly Afghan coat? Should I wear my blue sunglasses?

  Many fashion decisions were inspired by album covers. Hendrix was wearing tight white pants on one. Of course, the Beatles had set a high standard with the jacket photo of “Sgt. Pepper.” I’d go for the cobalt blue shirt, pink waistcoat, white suede shoes, the long scarf, the bell-bottom green pants, and the three-inch-wide belt. Once “dressed,” I’d have to figure out how lazy I was feeling. Walk to Villars about three miles up the mountain, or hitchhike? That was the question. Then I got a moped.

  I had wheels, albeit slow wheels: max speed thirty kilometers per hour on the flat, sixty to eighty kilometers per hour when freewheeling down the mountainside. (I learned the hard way to always ride with my leather jacket on and to watch out for huge wet cow pies on sharp corners! I also learned, as I slid across the road, to try to distribute my weight evenly between my elbows and chest so that the gravel would be more evenly distributed under my skin, rather than allowing all the pressure and sanding-off, gravel-embedding effect to concentrate in one place—say, the palm of one hand—while thumb-sized chunks of flesh got torn off.)

  I would order a coke or beer, and pay my three francs (a hefty price). I’d hope that Mickey Barilon, the son of the Hotel Curling owner, would be there. Usually he was. Mickey’s mother was English. We were best friends, both displaced foreigners who could talk about “the Swiss” and their narrow foolish ways and feel superior to them, yet fit in when we had to. There were other international kids at the Grenier Discothèque, too, mostly older boys at the private high schools of Aiglon and Beau Soleil. We’d sit, nursing our drinks, never buying more than one (the three francs had to be stretched), and waiting for other kids to show up, hoping that they would include unaccompanied girls. The big problem was my age. Mickey and I were fifteen. The girls were looking for twenty-year-olds.

  How could I convince the girls that I was old enough to pay any attention to? The key was to not get greedy and go for the prettiest girl in the knot of sweet-smelling females that might walk in, but to ask the slightly more homely girl to dance, once some twenty-year-old Italian from Aiglon had grabbed the one everyone was really looking at. If you were lucky, one of the lesser girls would dance with you. By then, the rich-looking Italian from Aiglon (who really was twenty, having been kicked out of several other private Swiss high schools and who was repeating twelfth grade for the third time) was already in a dark corner necking. He would be with the really stunning girl from Paris in the miniskirt, while I would sit awkwardly at a table with the two remaining girls and Mickey, and we’d beg
in to chat them up while jealously eyeing the Italian Don Juan.

  Of course our “conversations” were really nothing more than perfunctory questions shouted over the blasting sound system. Where did they live? What were they doing in Villars? What music did they like?

  I’d shout that I was in school in England, or that I was going to Portofino the next week, or that I thought I’d seen the girl I was trying to hold hands with under the table in London once, anything to make it seem as if I was older, more worldly than they thought I was. Then if the actual question came up, I’d push my luck and say “seventeen” when asked the inevitable “how old are you?” Sometimes they believed me or pretended to.

  At a certain point I’d try a kiss. Sometimes they would go for it. Sometimes we’d neck between sets, or at least I would get to slow dance with one of the girls. I was a horrible dancer, but so were they; in fact, horrible writhing, and/or bouncing, was all “dancing” was, post-Twist.

  Anyway, dancing was beside the point. The agenda was the most coveted of coveted destinations so maddeningly just out of sight under the hem of her excruciatingly minuscule miniskirt that would—please God—show everything if she so much as bent to itch her knee. And then there were the black lights that made bras show up under blouses and our flesh look roasted.

  The best way to break the ice was to ask for, or offer, a cigarette. Everyone smoked. I chose my brands carefully. American cigarettes were cool; so were the English luxury brands like Rothmans Gold. We avoided Gauloises or the bitter and even stronger crap-tasting Gitanes.

  By midnight, the place was so thick with smoke, I’d feel sick. Between the smoke, bopping up and down, the intense longing for what was only inches above that hemline but a million miles away, or folded into a neat little V under skintight jeans, on most nights when, at last, they played the last song at about three AM and kicked us out, I’d step into the crisp mountain air gasping and nauseated.