We did not drink at my small, quite conservative Christian college. Well, quite conservative for anyone else’s college experience. And the truth is that some people did drink, loads of alcohol, but the point is that it was frowned upon. That was the drinking crew. I wasn’t a part of it. I was good. (Here I mean good in the context of someone who has been going to chapel three times a week and learning Christian Doctrine and belonging to prayer groups and the like. Don’t get it twisted and start finger wagging). Onward.
In 2001, Ethan Hawke is starring in Training Day alongside the, Denzel Washington, so I’d imagine he had a good year. Even if we can never see inside the lives of others and maybe he had a God-awful year. In fact, Ethan Hawke had a three-year-old that year, and I can tell you that having had a three-year-old myself it’s not real walking the park and Ethan Hawke might have been pretty worn out, amazing career experience or no.
But I digress. The year I turned twenty-one I worked as a hospital chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital. And I can even excerpt bits from one of the first essays I published, which was about this particular year, the failures, the heartbreak, the falling in love. I was twenty-one after all, and I should tell you this is the first essay I ever wrote. Excerpt below:
I was twenty-one years old when I became a hospital chaplain, a junior at a fairly conservative Christian college, and still learning about the world. I remember Beth vividly because she was the first patient I visited alone. I remember the surge of excitement coupled with confusion as I exited the room, the reality of her living body in place of an abstraction: a woman that liked women. To Beth—shaved head, prosthetic legs—propped up on her elbows, waiting for her mother to come. Maybe she was waiting for something else, for the light to shift through the curtains, for its warmth to spread on the remains of her legs, waiting for her girlfriend to appear in the doorway, waiting like me, for some long silent voice to return.
I arrived in San Francisco in the front seat of a maroon Chevy Sundance, self-consciously wearing a red Arizona Cardinals bandana. My dad was driving slowly, per usual, five miles below the speed limit while my mother complained about the degree of air flow reaching the backseat. We drove past Golden Gate Park—joggers, dogs on leashes, sand dunes, wind-blasted trees, a McDonald’s bag drifting along the sidewalk. The car climbed up Nineteenth Avenue, past chic pastel townhouses with large street-facing windows and ornate latticework.
But anyhow, that essay is now lost to time. I suppose you can still buy it from Amazon or something but that journal is long gone, and I doubt anyone will ever reprint the essay in a book because it’s about a person I used to be and not the person I’ve become. The climactic moment, I’ll just share it here, is when one of the adminstators from our school came on the final days of the program and started talking about Westmont, about God, about heaven, all the usual stuff. And I, who was unusually shy all those years, scared of authority, interrupted to say that they probably had the theology wrong. I just couldn’t fathom that they’d constructed a place that barred the sort of people I’d met strictly based on their sexual preference. It was tense.
But I don’t like singular versions of stories. In this one, I’m a sort of hero speaking out to a professor at my college and correcting his theology, so maybe it’s best to include the final passage from my essay. The part where I drive away from the person I’d fallen in love with, the men and women I’d talked to, prayed with, watched wither way in the hospital and never talked to any of them again. And there so many versions of the story of the months I spent in the hospital that it’s actually the first essay I ever wrote. I’m not three books in and two of them have been essays, so this is my bedrock story, the beginning of becoming a non-fiction writer. And even now, my God, more than two decades from the experience and almost two decades from writing this first essay, my heart is still pounding, time disappearing, as mist in the light.
In this version of the story, I’m a failure, and I spent all summer getting drunk two to three times a week and dancing in bars, kissing girls who’d once thought my shyness meant something was off about me. In this version, I’m as flawed as I’ve always been. Excerpt.
I left San Francisco and the hospital that May, an old man of twenty one. I drove away from the house that day, missed my turn-off north of the bay and drove for hours in the April sunshine glad to be free. I had pictured myself a hero, a changer of lives, ah life what a pile of shit. I saved no one from death, gave some small bit of comfort a time or two but not enough. I called my friend Ernest once to see how his hip replacement had gone. He was staying in a house that he had been granted for a month while he recovered. He didn’t know what he was going to do next. I never found out what happened to Ernest, to Gordon, to anyone. I left it all behind, besides the occasional prayer for well-being, which too eventually faded. I would have liked to have stayed, to have helped them back on their feet, to have fell in love with a woman who was not for me, but I couldn’t bear the weight, in fact, I could bear none at all.
