Wherever I Wind Up (6 page)

I spend the whole day in urine-soaked pants.

It’s not that big a deal,
I tell myself.
They’ll get cleaned up the next time my mother goes to the Laundromat.

WHEN I TURN THIRTEEN
, I am on the move again, in more ways than one. I have been admitted to a prestigious all-boys school, Montgomery Bell Academy, or MBA, as everybody around Nashville calls it. My uncle Ricky went to MBA and it changed his life. My parents don’t have all that much communication with each other, but they both want my life to change, too, so, one year removed from wetting myself and being a low-level troublemaker, I find myself taking a long and intensive MBA entrance exam. I don’t make the cut. A year later I take the test again and this time I do make the cut. When MBA generously offers me a full package of financial aid and my parents agree with the school’s plan for me to repeat seventh grade, the deal is sealed.

MBA was founded in 1867 and ever since has been educating Nashville’s elite, a demographic group I know nothing about. Many MBA students have parents who set them up with six-figure trust funds. I have parents who smuggle flatware from Western Sizzlin. It’s not a great socioeconomic fit. I may not be the only kid from the other side of the proverbial tracks, but we’re not exactly taking over the school, either.

By the time I hit my new, hoity-toity hallways, most everybody I know is calling me R.A. It stands for Robert Allen. I was Robert for most of my life, but people in the family call Granddaddy R.G., for Robert Green, and now they’ve taken to calling me by my initials too. The only person who continues to call me Robert is my mother, though it’s remarkable she’s not calling me much worse.

I am giving my mother a hard time—about everything. I’m an adolescent brat running amok. Cleaning up my room, hanging up my coat, taking out the trash—I battle her over the most mundane of household tasks, and work hard every day to find new ways to be defiant and beat her down with my unruliness. As my time at MBA approaches, I go for the jugular.

I’m going to go live with Dad, I tell her. I don’t ask her permission. I tell her this is how it’s going to be.

My mother is sitting in her blue La-Z-Boy recliner. She couldn’t have been more stunned if I’d told her I was quitting sports to take up the cello.

What’s wrong with living here with me, where you’ve always lived?

Nothing, I just want to live with Dad.

I have custody of you, Robert. You can’t just decide you are living with your father.

I’m going to live with him. That’s what I want. I want to do the things I used to do with him. He only lives ten minutes away, so it’s not like it’s that big a deal.

She tells me that it’s not my choice, but I don’t hear her; I’ve already turned and left the room. I don’t know why my mother doesn’t just bring down the hammer and tell me that it’s not my decision and I’m not going anywhere. My mother is a functioning alcoholic, but her drinking is getting worse and she’s down a lot and probably ashamed that her life hasn’t turned out differently. She probably doesn’t feel entitled to stand up for herself.

I see an opening and seize it.

A couple of weeks later, moving day arrives. I pack up a duffel bag and head downstairs. My mother is again in the blue recliner. I hear my father’s car pull up. I don’t hug my mother or kiss her or thank her for everything she has done over the first twelve years of my life. I behave, quite honestly, like a completely self-involved teenage punk. I just walk out the door and get into my father’s car. The last sound I hear when I walk out of 247 Timmons is my mother sobbing. They are the big, heaving, gasping-for-air kind of sobs. I can still hear her out in the driveway.

I’m a child of divorce who is learning on the fly how not to feel pain—or anything else. It’s been that way since the babysitter and the kid behind the garage.

I can’t believe how little my mother’s sobs bother me.

All I am fixated on is getting close with my dad again. That’s the whole point of my power play. It’s not about getting away from my mother’s drinking or about the towels she wants me to pick up. It’s not about having more independence. It’s driven entirely by this yearning to be back at the Green Hills Family YMCA and chase foul balls at Sounds games again and drive a golf cart next to my father, hoping to play thirty-six holes.

That’s what I want to do with my dad. That’s what I want more than anything in my life. I want to hear him call me Little Horsey and have everything be the way it was before he left, before the divorce and all the instability.

It’ll be great, Dad, don’t you think?
That’s what I want to say to my father, but I never do.

THERE ISN’T ANY
part of MBA that I’m not intimidated by in the beginning. I don’t know the buildings, the teachers, or where the bathrooms are. Everywhere I look I see kids wearing their collared Ralph Lauren Polo shirts, with the familiar logo of a man on a horse with a polo mallet. We can’t afford them, so I dress in the knock-off Knights of the Round Table shirts, with a less familiar logo of a man on a horse with a flag. It doesn’t bother me, and nobody mocks me for my clothes, but I am in a whole different orbit, and it’s strange. I’ve never heard of a school having a motto (“Gentleman, Scholar, Athlete”), and I’ve never heard of having to adhereto an academic honor code, either. Every time I submit an assignment or paper, or take a test, I write these words and sign my name beneath them:
On my honor as a gentleman, I have neither given nor received aid on this work.

But the biggest difference is the splendor of the place itself: the columned brick buildings and towering trees and wide porches, and old stone walls that seem to go on forever, low gray guardians of Southern gentility. In the main courtyard are two Civil War cannons. Not facsimile cannons: real Civil War cannons. They have authentic history at MBA, and I’ve parachuted right into the rock-ribbed thick of it, leaving grit for grandeur, beaten-up linoleum for buffed marble. I feel like a Wookiee at a White House dinner, without question, and yet there’s something that warms me about MBA, no matter how much social climbing I do to get there. I like the order, the discipline, the nurturing. I feel cared for there. I complain about the rules, but privately I relish them. People pay attention to me and listen to me and are trying to help me. That doesn’t happen in all that many places. Not in the same way. I know my mother loves me, but she has problems now. My stepmother, Susan, is awfully nice to me and drives me all over Nashville, to this practice and that game, but she is not my mother and I don’t let her forget that. I feel adrift, torn between two parental poles and not getting what I need from either. I feel alone at home. I don’t feel quite so alone at MBA.

As the first days of the seventh grade turn into weeks, I get to know an eighth grader named Bo Bartholomew. I am not one who makes friends easily. I am much more comfortable sitting in the back, observing, calculating and measuring my options, a kid who has a hard time with trust. A kid who has secrets. What terrifies me more than anything is that those secrets could somehow be uncovered.

But something about Bo feels different, safer. He is a big blond-haired guy who plays on the school football team with me and wrestles in the winter, and one look at his muscular torso makes me hope that MBA kids don’t fight the way we did on the other side of town. Smart and strong and handsome, Bo has a perfect smile above a perfect chin, and looks as if he stepped right out of a J. Crew catalog. You look at a guy like Bo Bartholomew and you think you might as well give up because you’ll never be as gifted or as good-looking.

Bo turns out to be much different than other kids I’ve been around. He is kind, generous, and concerned with the welfare of others. He treats me as a complete equal. He invites me over to his sprawling colonial on a dead-end street in Belle Meade, the swankiest part of Nashville, and the first person I meet is his mother, Vicki Bartholomew. She was Miss Tennessee in 1966, the runner-up to Miss America, and she looks it even now, twenty-two years later, a pretty, slender woman with blond hair and a welcoming spirit. She offers us a snack and we head upstairs to play Duck Hunt on Bo’s Nintendo. I have never seen a Nintendo. I could get used to it. We play Duck Hunt for an hour and then decide to go out to throw the football, and as we turn the corner into the den to head outside, I am startled.

I am captivated.

It is my first memory of ever being captivated.

On the couch, curled up with her homework, is Bo’s younger sister, Anne. She has thick, blond hair, with curls and waves, something approaching a lion’s mane. She has a green sweater on over a white collared shirt. She has green eyes and she is beautiful.

Bo introduces me.

Nice to meet you, says Anne, a seventh grader at the Ensworth School.

You too.

The words have barely left my mouth when I start beating myself up.

That is the best you can do?
You too?

Bo and I go toss the football, but all I can think about is Anne and how ridiculous I must’ve come across with my caveman vocabulary.

Hanging out in school the next day, I want to talk to Bo about his sister and Bo wants to talk to me about a meeting. It’s on Thursday night, a group called the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He invites me to join him.

I’m a three-sport athlete—football, basketball, and baseball—and anything to do with sports I’ll try at least once.

What is it? I ask.

It’s just what the name says. It’s a fellowship of guys who are honest with each other and care about each other, and get together to share about their faith in God.

But I don’t know much about God. The only times I’ve been to church, really, have been with my grandmother, and that hasn’t been very often.

Bo assures me that there are no entrance exams or prerequisites. It is simply a time to be around people who care. I have some big doubts about it, but I tell Bo I’ll give it a try.

I get to the meeting early. It’s in the Roberts Room, right off the gymnasium. I grab a seat in the back. I have a good bit of courage as I enter the room, but it dissipates rapidly with every new face that comes through the door. There are at least thirty boys here.

What if they ask me to pray or to share about myself? What do I say? What if they throw me out for being an impostor?

If they could see under my jacket, it would look like I’ve just gone swimming—that’s how much I am sweating. How did I let Bo talk me into this? Is getting to know his sister really worth all this?

I take three deep breaths and the meeting starts. It opens with a prayer and with guys talking about their lives and their struggles and how a relationship with God through Jesus Christ has been a pillar of peace and stability for them. I listen to those words and find myself somehow drawn to them, warmed by them.

Peace and stability.

They sound noble. They sound nice. They sound like something I want.

The meeting goes for about ninety minutes, and I enjoy it. I go back to more meetings, and my self-consciousness abates and I begin to get a greater sense of who Christ is, and what a relationship with Him would be like. I continue to observe the people in the room, and Bo too. There really does seem to be a difference in their behavior, the way they treat people, and the way they deal with adversity, owning up to their mistakes and not looking around for someone to blame.

One Friday afternoon, Bo invites me to spend the night at his house. I eagerly accept, hoping to ask him more questions about his faith and maybe to see Anne again.

When we get there after football practice, we play outside for a while before we move upstairs for more Duck Hunt.

I have a few questions for you, Bo, I say.

Sure.

It’s about becoming a Christian.

Shoot.

How do you do it? Where do you start? I don’t even have any idea how to do it.

Well, it’s nothing more complicated than asking.

What do you mean, “asking”?

When you feel you are ready, you just invite Him into your life. You are basically saying with that invitation that you believe Jesus Christ is the son of God and that He ultimately died for you on the cross and rose again so that you can have eternal life with Him.

It’s a lot to take in. I’m trying. I hear Mrs. Bartholomew coming up the stairs. She overhears Bo’s answer to my question. I’m uneasy at first, because I don’t know her very well yet, but it’s clear that she wants to guide me and reassure me.

God cares about you and God loves you, R.A., she says. So much so that He wants to have a very personal and intimate relationship with you, and that is why He sent His son Jesus to Earth.

This is all so new and uncharted for me. Over the past few weeks, I have heard words that speak to my core, but that I have no personal connection with: “Peace.” “Stability.” “Intimacy.” “Forgiveness.” They sound good, but they seem totally beyond me, as if I’m trying to hold the ocean in two cupped hands. How am I supposed to do that?

I don’t know. But when Mrs. Bartholomew finishes talking, I want to try. I am beyond my doubts. I clasp my hands and look up and clumsily blurt out:

I want a relationship with Jesus Christ.

So on a fall Friday in an upstairs bedroom on Walnut Drive in Nashville, Tennessee, I get on my knees with Bo and his mom and ask Christ to come into my life. I tell Him that I believe He is the son of God, and I want to trust Him with my life. I secretly ask for forgiveness for what seems like a galaxy of sins and guilt and shame.

When I am done speaking, the room is completely still. I feel relief. A lightness. It’s not the sky opening up, or angels singing, or lightning bolts striking the big magnolia in the front yard. Nothing grand and God-like. It’s much more subtle, like the best deep breath you could ever take.

What do I do now? I ask.

You learn, Bo says. You study. You read the Bible and try to soak in every word. Remember, you’re going to make mistakes. Being a Christian doesn’t mean that you all of a sudden stop making mistakes, or that your problems magically disappear. It’s actually the opposite. You are admitting that you are not perfect. You can never be perfect. That is why you need a perfect savior, and you trust that what Christ did on the cross for you is enough.