by Rae Spoon
The traditional service took place on Sunday mornings. The pastor’s wife alternately played the piano and the organ. We sang from the hymn books in the pews in front of us. I hated the music but loved to follow the notes and in doing so learned to harmonize out of boredom. I felt awkward in my Sunday clothes, which usually meant a dress, a skirt, or a pair of skorts. I felt like a cat in a T-shirt, but at least when I was singing my voice could blend in, and I felt that I belonged. The sermons were long and seemed to get more urgent when coupled with the intense hunger that would build inside me. No matter how much cereal I ate for breakfast, I always felt like I was going to pass out from hunger at least half an hour before the sermon ended. Sunday mornings were a true test of faith.
On Sunday nights was Sunday school, which was divided into different age groups. Our group met in the youth pastor’s office to study specific passages in the Bible. This one-on-one version of church was where I was able to truly speak out when the cracks started to form in my faith. I flickered between being disengaged to unleashing my frustration on my peers. It helped that I would bring Ritalin that a boy with ADD gave me at school. I’d hole up in a stall in the church washroom and snort it off my religious books, then waltz back into Sunday school and proceed to break down what I saw as the flaws in the church’s views as articulately as I could while high as a kite. The Ritalin gave me the courage to speak out against the church. I have a vivid memory of yelling, “You’re all indoctrinated!” at my youth pastor when he was trying to reason me back toward Jesus. I even threw a boy I knew into a bookcase for touching my hat. I had a lot of rage and nowhere to put it.
The last time I went to the church of my childhood was a Saturday night. I was visiting my mother right after my father had moved out of the house. My sister and I had pre-mixed vodka into a bottle of Mountain Dew and were half-way to drunk by the time we stepped out of the car in the church parking lot. We polished it off in the bathroom and decided it would be wise to sit away from our mother during the service. That night in church I felt a warmth that I hadn’t felt in a really long time. The music was beautiful and compelling. Even though I had spent that last year at church with my arms crossed and refusing to sing along, now I poked my sister, giggling, and told her that we should join in. So together we sang in a perfect falsetto at the top of our lungs to every song. I imagine if my mother had noticed us, she would have been pleasantly surprised. It was an outpouring all right, but not the kind of spiritual rebirth that would lead us back to God. It was more like the grand finale in our religious lives. Soon after, my mother switched to my grandmother’s church so she could leave her memories—of my father being a deacon there, and my brother Jack’s funeral—in the past. It’s likely she never found out that we were drunk that night, but I think she knows now that she’ll never hear my sister and me sing at church again.
Becoming Nothing
WHEN I WAS NINE our father moved the family into a huge house in the suburbs because he thought it would make him look rich. It turned out to be more than we could afford, and my mother ended up taking care of several children in order to bring in some cash and keep the consequences of my father’s spending at bay. On any given day, the house was alive with the noise of eight or ten kids in addition to our family.
One day when I was a bit older, though, I arrived home earlier than usual, and the house was hushed. No banging toys. No screaming. John, the baby who was born when I was ten, must have been napping. My other brother and sister would be home later because they went to a different school. I found my mother sitting at the table in the dining room. It was so rare to see her sitting down. She looked up and said, “I had to cancel babysitting today. Your father is in the hospital again. He stopped taking his pills.” She took a breath. “I’m leaving him. I don’t want you kids to have to live like this. It’s not fair.”
I had become used to the stunned feeling that came over me, but that never made it pass any faster. My parents were getting a divorce? I mumbled something to her, grabbed a snack in the kitchen, and floated up to my room. By then, my childhood loyalty to my father was almost gone. His ever-expanding illness was now encroaching on me. He had started to scream directly at me instead of behind a closed door at my mother. In my room, I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. Trying to think made me feel very light.
That night our phone rang many times. It was my aunts, my father’s sisters, calling to tell my mother that they supported her and that they were praying that Jesus would give her the strength to see that their marriage was sacred. They said that my father was just a very sick man. It was her duty as a wife to stick by him. It was all there in the vows she took. My vision of our family’s life without him folded into itself before it could fully form as I sat on the stairs listening to my mother talking to my aunts. She wanted to believe them.
We all wanted to believe that he was just sick and that God had a plan for us. Believing this would make my father’s illness the monster that had done all the things I hadn’t even begun to remember; the things that hung like a thick blanket over me and made me feel like I was the ugliest person who had ever lived. But after hearing my aunts’ advice repeated by her friends at church, my mother crumbled. My father came home from the hospital just like he had the time before.
That’s when I stopped eating. I never made a conscious decision to do so. I just opened up my lunch one day at school and thought, I wonder if I could go without eating this? The challenge stretched on for weeks. I would try to eat the absolute minimum amount of food without getting caught. At dinner, I took as little food as I could and pushed it around my plate to make it look like I ate more than I did. It excited me that I could decide something for myself; it was a secret mission that no one knew about and no one could stop. Sometimes I fantasized about everyone finding out and eventually I’d get to be a guest on Oprah. I would tell her the story about my dad and she would listen carefully and with great sympathy.
But that never happened and soon starving myself wasn’t enough for me. I couldn’t feel anything anymore, and started cutting up my arms and legs, challenging my body to feel something. I wore long sleeves and pants to cover up the neatly organized scars all over my body. This left me vulnerable, because it proved that I was as unstable as my father said I was.
Soon after, I met the boy at junior high who had been diagnosed with ADD. He had a crush on me, and used to follow me around at lunch hour. I gave him the cold shoulder until one day he handed me a folded-up piece of paper. The Ritalin was inside it. “I haven’t been taking it so I can be more fun,” he said. “You should crush it up and snort it.”
And so I did: back in my room at home, I crushed up one of the the pills with my piggy bank and clumsily snorted it through rolled-up paper for the first time. At the dinner table that night, my mind was buzzing. I did my usual routine of eating a tiny bit and then pushing the rest of my food around on the plate. I could barely sit still through our father’s Bible reading, and as soon as he was finished, I raced back to my room.
I crushed and snorted another pill and then wrote a song. The song was good. Ritalin had made me a genius. I could see things so clearly; it allowed me to draw huge pictures and write long poems. I could feel things. I became friends with the boy who gave me the pills, and told him that I liked the comics he would draw for me of people with swords through their bodies and heads, and he kept handing me folded-up pieces of paper. We went on to attend the same high school together, where our routine continued.
I couldn’t run away from home in a city that was so expansive and cold. You could run for half an hour and not even get to the end of your own neighbourhood, and all of the neighbourhoods looked the same, so it didn’t really feel like escaping at all. Instead I was trying hard to become nothing, eating only a granola bar during the day and then hardly anything for dinner. I would crush up Ritalin at school to write music and tests, and then get the shakes when I came down or ran out. Once, thinking I was cold, all of my new
high school friends piled their jackets on top of me as I shook uncontrollably on the lawn outside McDonald’s. When I was on the wrestling team, I managed to drop a weight class by eating nothing but iceberg lettuce for two weeks and then on the day of the weigh-ins, jogging for ten kilometres with a garbage bag tied over my torso to make me sweat more. But I knew that losing that weight wouldn’t help me wrestle. I never won a match, although I enjoyed the self-control it took to drop down to ninety-five pounds.
When my mother let me move to my grandmother’s, I started trying to eat food again, if only because my grandmother had worked so hard to prepare it. At dinner she went out of her way to cook things she knew I liked, and then she and I would sit at the table alone while my uncle ate in his room so he could watch TV. She also packed me huge lunches that I found hard to throw out. Being taken care of made me feel better, but I discovered that I had established a pattern of behaviour that would be difficult to break. Every day was a fight to eat anything at all. Before I moved in with my grandmother, I thought that all I had to do was get away from my father and then everything would be perfect. The truth, however, was that once he receded from my life, I continued to want to disappear because I felt like he was still close at hand.
The night that my mother and my brothers and sister showed up at my grandmother’s house, they had escaped my father for the last time. That evening, my mother and I had a conversation in the dark. “When I told him I was leaving, your father said that Uncle Mike abused him,” she said.
“Oh …” I trailed off without really responding. Abuse? I thought. Even if he was lying about it, does that mean he could be capable of abusing people himself?
And then it all washed over me. The memories that I had crumpled up and stuffed far from my waking thoughts. Pieces of them crawled back under my skin and filled me with terror. Maybe he had abused me? I turned into stone.
The next thing I remember, I was standing behind my grandmother’s garage and smoking, not thinking about getting caught. I was trying to put myself back together. How could I have not thought of this until now? I had felt it without knowing it. Was this the reason why I had wanted to die since I was eleven, why I couldn’t eat or feel? It was like suddenly looking down at myself and noticing all of the painful injuries that I had been too shaken, too unwilling to see. They covered my entire body. They lived inside every bone and vein.
I called Rena, who had recently agreed to be my girlfriend, and told her.
“Are you going to tell your mother?” she asked.
“No. She’s been through too much already,” I replied. “What are people supposed to do when they figure this kind of thing out?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But whatever you decide to do, I’ll be there with you.”
I had grown up and around everything that had happened and now there was no way to separate myself from it, but I felt a resolve growing inside of me. I didn’t want to turn into nothing now that I knew why I felt that way. I had refused to live in a house with my father and now I was willing to do anything to get my body back. No matter how long it took.
Music Saves
WHEN I WAS FIVE, I started piano lessons with a woman named Belinda who discovered that I had double-jointed thumbs. She noticed that when I tried to reach certain keys, I would pull my thumb out of its socket. I don’t remember learning to read music, just as I don’t remember learning to speak. I enjoyed playing the piano, but I was not a protégé by any means.
I played a song called “The Sewing Machine” with both hands at my first recital. My mother had put me in a black dress with white leotards and black patent leather shoes. Before it was my turn, I watched the other students perform their songs. Some of them were much older than me, and much better at playing the piano. My entire family was there to see me. When they called my name I stood up, but my knees were shaking. As I crossed the stage, one of my shoes slipped and I did the classic slapstick fall. Some of the children in the audience, and even some of the parents, couldn’t help but laugh. Belinda rushed over and helped me up. I tried to hold in my tears and limped over to the piano bench, mortified. Staring down at the white and black keys, I started playing. Luckily I had memorized the song, so when tears began to fall down my face I kept going, even though I couldn’t see the music anymore. The song was less than two minutes long, but I kept repeating to myself over and over: “I will never play music in front of people again.”
Still, once I learned to read music, there was no stopping its presence in my life. When my grade three teacher, Mrs. Crown, found out that I could read music, she recruited me to play the hand bells. I felt a lot more comfortable performing when there were eight of us in a row, gripping the bells with our tiny white-gloved hands. I didn’t really have to read music because I only had two notes, one in each hand. Mine were the high F# and G on the treble clef. All I had to do was count the notes that the others played and confidently swish my bells out with my arm and then back to my body whenever I saw one of my notes circled in red on the sheet in front of me.
When I was nine, a woman named Karen Spencer took over our church children’s choir. She seemed to have two goals in mind: to cast her own children as leads, and to put on the most intricate musicals our church had ever seen. Being in the children’s choir was mandatory. I enjoyed singing but would have preferred to retire from acting after I played the Virgin Mary in a church play as a toddler. Anyway, I never sang loud enough in public for anyone to hear, and spent choir practices mouthing the words and staring down at my feet. For her first production, Karen chose a musical whose lead character was named Psalty the Singing Songbook. It took the audience through three Bible stories to find the meaning of love, which was of course Jesus dying on the cross. There were so many songs in the musical that Karen had to look outside of her immediate family to fill all of the solos. By default, she gave one to me. It was a verse in a song that was set to the tune of “Louie, Louie,” to be performed during the story about Moses. At home, I would sit cross-legged in my room, look down at the music sheet, and practice: “Pharaoh, Pharaoh, ooh baby, let my people go.”
On the night of the performance, all of us were dressed in our parents’ interpretation of Old Testament garb. We had bare feet, bathrobes, and towels tied with ropes around our heads. My mother had made sure that I wore leotards just in case part of my legs showed from under my bathrobe. Karen’s teenaged son played Psalty and was costumed as a huge songbook with his face painted blue. During most of the show I was part of the chorus and followed obediently as Karen directed us. Under the hot lights I grew warmer, and my legs started to sweat, then itch, in my leotards. I tried discreetly to scratch them, but that only made me want to scratch them more. By the time my solo came, my legs were on fire. I tried to get through it without scratching, but I couldn’t. I watched myself on videotape later, struggling to get the notes out in a wavering voice, and reaching down to scratch between every line. That was the first and last solo Karen ever gave me.
In grade eight, I started my first guitar class. There were thirty of us students sitting in rows with nylon string guitars. The teacher was the same one I had for junior high band, where I had spent the whole previous year playing trumpet on Bryan Adams songs and the theme to Jurassic Park. Somehow thirty guitarists all playing at the same time produced a more cacophonous sound than the brass section in band. Muddled versions of “Ode to Joy” rang through the hallways as we struggled to learn our first tunes. They included cool new songs I had never heard of before, like “Let It Be” and “Imagine.” I would go home after school and practice our guitar assignments for two or three hours every night so I could play them well the following day. I found playing guitar absorbing; I would forget about everything else around me as I practiced the songs over and over again. One day, I decided to try to sing “Stand by Me” and play guitar at the same time. My voice started out weak and my guitar sounded clunky, but by the end of the song it was recognizable. I started over and played
it again. Elated that I could play a song, I decided to write my own.
At that time, I was still a Christian. The only record I’d ever seen my parents buy was Amy Grant at the Christian bookstore downtown, when I was still too short to reach the vinyl stacks in the music section. I listened to Christian teen heartthrob Michael W. Smith, and my cousins and I did the running man to Christian rap group DC Talk. So it’s not surprising that the subject of most of my early songs involved Jesus. He was all I knew. When my youth pastor discovered that I played guitar, he invited me to play in the rock band at Friday night youth group. I learned how to jam along by ear and play bar chords. We played pop songs, but adapted the lyrics for the Lord’s purposes. Our version of “Surfin’ Safari” went, “Come on baby, Surfin’ the Lord. Come on baby, Surfin’ the Lord.”
It was around this time that I met Carla, the youth group leader whom I had a crush on. Each week I would write a new spiritual song and play it for her on Friday. I would always perform in one of the back rooms of the church, and I discovered that if I played songs about Jesus, the other teenagers would circle around me and listen. This was the first form of popularity that I ever experienced. I bought my first tape recorder with money I made from babysitting when I was twelve, and I’d make Carla tapes of the songs I wrote, recorded in my room. Soon others started requesting copies, so I made more and started selling them at church, hand-drawing cross designs on the covers and writing out the song titles with different coloured ballpoint pens.
My tape recorder was not only a spiritual tool. While I used it to record my own Christian contemporary songs, it also had a radio, and I discovered secular music by quietly playing the rock stations with my ear next to the speaker. I often fell asleep spooning it in my arms. There was a world beyond junior high school, church, and my house, and it began to transport itself into my room through the radio. A new picture of reality was beginning to emerge in my head, and it grew with every new song I heard on the radio. There was something in secular music that made it sound better than anything I had ever heard before. The wild and driving howls of the devil’s music were far more compelling than the repetitive electric pianos in songs about abstinence. I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend eternity in hell, but it didn’t take me long to decide that I wanted to spend my teenage years with the devil. I would wait until my favourite songs came on—like Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” and Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy”—and tape them, often missing the opening chords or running out of tape and having only half the songs to listen to, over and over.