!I for Indiana
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agk's diary
07 October 2022 @ 06:26 UTC
---
written on GPD Win 1
after teething baby cried me awake for the day
---
Something happened in the church. My dad had to
find a new place to preach and minister. We moved
to southern Indiana when I was 14 I guess.
Right away it was clear these high Germans looked
down on us low Germans, contaminants from beyond
the midwest. Prejudice disguised the conflict to
which we'd been called. Some in the church, notably
a doctor and the owner of the furniture factory,
wanted a prestige church. Others wanted a mission
church.
I put my foot right in it. I printed my third 'zine
on the church's risograph machine. I'd finished
paste-up before we moved. Here into the German-
American silence and judgment amid which suicide,
alcoholism, meth use, and denial thrived, I dropped
a dozen youth and young-adult contributors discuss-
ing self-injuring: what we did (cut, burn, pierce,
blunt trauma, etc.), the phenomenology of the act,
the story of stopping by those who stopped. I
stopped by making the 'zine.
From my 'zine was forged a weapon against dad.
Church factions fought him in place of their subst-
antive issues. This served silence well. New pastor
was now father of a "satanist" who circulated "100
ways to kill yourself for kids." Nevermind there're
only three, well known to their kids already (fire-
arm, strangulation, poisoning).
My brother was bullied in middle school with ammun-
ition I provided, and mom at work. Under duress of
the anti-dad faction I shredded the remaining print
run, destroying evidence the rumors were false. It
was more like "10 ways to live through hard stuff."
Every day when he would have visited the sick and
old, angry people were in dad's office about my
'zine. He invited them to talk to me. Only one did;
the doctor's 15-year-old son.
The doctor's son joined my writing club, which I
organized to meet other teens (with a GED, I took
college classes with adults). We wrote freestyle,
"Writing down the bones" style. We wrote what we
liked at little tables in the Mennonite health food
store coffeeshop in an Indiana town where silence
was golden, suicide preferred to disclosure.
We wrote weekly from prompts pulled from randomly-
opened books. We wrote nonsense, poems, short fict-
ion, creative nonfiction. Whatever came out in each
round of 30 mins or an hour was usually read aloud
to the group. Four of us were regulars, one the
doctor's son, the other two sent over by the high
school English teacher. We wrote sweetness, viol-
ence, beauty, smut, anger, faith, and absurdity.
The conflict in the church intensified. Dad talked
to me every night while we walked the dog to the
Catholic grotto. It was pretty much the closest
we'd ever been, other than in the woods. There were
emergency meetings with known supporters in our
living room with the lights out, telephoned death
threats, frightening headlights on the front yard,
my brother suspended from school.
A vote of the congregation. Furniture plant workers
made furtive calls: "I had to vote against you or
he said I'd lose my job." Members with advanced
dementia in the sanctuary for the first time in
years. Even the dead voted. Up front sat mom,
brother, me. The doctor's son came in almost late,
after everyone else was seated, walked the center
aisle past the pew where his family sat, and sat
with me in front of everyone.
My sweetie took me to a Hell House at the Assembly
of God church, where the gates of hell opened to
the tunes of White Zombie's Astrocreep 2000 (one of
the few CDs I owned) each time an unredeemed sinner
died. This one sinned with internet pornography,
that one sinned by killing a child in a hit and run
accident, the third was an abortionist. I orgasmed
for the first time with a crush under the bleachers
at the high school football field.
The Assembly of God church was gross and manipulat-
ive to us youth. I stopped going with my sweetie.
Instead of church, dad, brother, and I met farmers,
truck-drivers, insurance agents, and home health
aides at McDonalds before dawn Sundays, drove to
little-known caves, got muddy wriggling through
earth's cold dark stone bowels for hours.
I got Cs in inorganic, organic, and biochemistry at
college, but my professor showed me a whole new way
of thinking. She was a bridge between that teenage
writer and the adult health worker I became. One or
two of our writing group went to college. When my
dad lost his job and we moved out of Indiana I was
penpals with one member of the writing club her
freshman year at Indiana University.
I think I turned 16 in a cave, one passage flooded
completely. Deep breath, swim thru panic: hold
faith everyone hadn't drowned, airspace was ahead,
breath would hold out. We weren't in Indiana any-
more when I turned 17.
I liked southern Indiana. I met good people there.
