The neighborhood kids I’d gone through elementary school with started going to church.
I held out against it as long as I could, but once the weekends rolled around and all of them were off at church, I didn’t have much of a choice.
So I went.
Church.
There was a pretty girl there.
I kept going.
And that’s how my middle and high school years came down to: church life.
I gave it everything — I wanted to look good, wanted to matter.
I drew the whole church bulletin myself, started playing guitar for the service, and for Christmas and Easter I did the stage decorations, the banners, all of it.
I turned into one of the church’s go-to guys, got folded into it, absorbed into it.
Salvation?
Jesus?
None of that was really the point, honestly.
It was just my first real community, my main stage.
Learning guitar opened up the range of music I was listening to.
I got possessed by Queen.
I fell in love with the Beatles.
Starting from the classics — Sepultura, Slayer, Ozzy Osbourne, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix — and once I found Nirvana, Mudhoney, and Meat Puppets, I started actively hunting down punk.
A whole new world had suddenly cracked open.
There was too much music to listen to, and every new discovery hit like a shockwave — because I was a teenager, and completely empty, ready to take in anything.
Well, along with all that, my ego started swelling too.
Puberty?
I don’t think I really had one of those.
Trouble-making?
Whatever promise I’d made to my dad the night before starting elementary school — that never wavered.
It was Christmas Eve, around when I was 17.
I’d edited together about 25 Christmas carols into a medley, splicing short pieces of each one together, printed up the sheet music — everything was going smoothly.
Then the pastor stepped in.
Cut every carol that mentions Santa, he said.
Okay, so 25 songs becomes 7, and all that’s left are the droopy, slow ones?
I went ahead with my version anyway, and got chewed out for it, and honestly I didn’t even understand why at the time.
Later, when I looked into it, the logic was apparently something like: Santa has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus, so why sing about him at Christmas?
Something like that.
And then that same pastor started trashing Queen.
My Queen.
Called it the devil’s music.
Because Freddie was gay?
Probably.
Made sense, in a way, once I understood this was an organization that judged things by that kind of narrow-minded yardstick — of course Santa got trashed too.
One day I went to the church early in the morning for something, and caught the pastor chasing off a homeless person.
Hm — maybe it was just my ego getting bigger, but I stopped being able to swallow everything at face value, and questions started piling up.
This organization exists for itself.
This is a business too.
I was never interested in Jesus, but I’d at least assumed the church was a place free of prejudice, out in front doing good — and then, in one single moment, everything I’d poured into it through middle and high school just collapsed.
Suddenly the whole institution looked filthy to me — something I couldn’t see while I was still standing at its center.
That’s how my first community disappeared.