I had never heard the Grateful Dead before.  I had merely heard of them — usually in the context of “Devil Rock that will eat your brain and soul,” but I had never actually heard any of their music.  I listened for a minute to see if I actually like them.  It didn’t move me, but these guys were too cool to blow off.  I don’t know why I wanted to impress them, but I did.

While listening to the music, I looked at their room.  A wreath of barbed wire hung on the wall, encircling a strange blue and red scull icon.  Right in the middle of the floor, on a dirty woven cloth rug, sat a VW engine.  Chris’s brother, Bob, sat hunched over the greasy mess with a box-ended wrench in his hand.  He had blond hair, too, wavy, and he wore little, round-lens glasses like John Lenin.

You’re taking too long to reply. Quick, think of something snappy, I told myself.

“As long as they stay that way?” I responded.

Bob looked up, chuckled, and went back to his engineering.

“Right on, man,” Chris said.  He slapped me on the shoulder and then zoomed off down the hall.

I went back to my dorm room, unable to imagine the places that engine would take me in the future.

I wrote this at the pinnacle of my evangelical days.  I basically considered myself a missionary to Almaty at the time, as I was preaching at the only English-speaking church in town — in the whole country, as far as I knew — and was leading a youth group and taking the kids from the church on outings.  I fully believed that I would end up back in Almaty one day, teaching English and preaching to the inhabitants.  Obviously, that did not happen, as I sit here, 12 years later, back in the States.  But I still treasure the time I spent in Almaty, and I was grateful to run across these memories again.

I call it the land of “Make-Shift and Bump-Your-Head.”  It’s the land where babooshkas mop the floors with old shirts, where everyman is his own mechanic, plumber, electrician — where a lad a foot taller than the general population can bruise his bald head most anywhere.

When we first arrived, the snowy streets scantly filled with chilled inhabitants clad in greatcoats reminded me of the cover picture of my copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  And — reflecting how in communist times, the traditions of Christmas were transferred to New Years so as to have all the fun of the holiday without the pesky interference of the holiness that makes a holiday more than just a party — I decided that Almaty and Narnia are one: where it’s always winter and never Christmas.

But now snow remains only on the mountains that shelter the south end of the city.  (The mountains themselves, as my brother Arthur pointed out, must be Aslan’s country, rising sheer up to the sky as they do.)  Spring has finally come to Almaty  The glory that visits Arkansas in February delayed its coming to Almaty until the end of April.  And not far from my little friend Masha’s house, the tulips in front of a store called “Sunrise” fill the air with the perfume of God’s own breath.  The life-green light, streaming filtered through elm leaves, falls on my eyes with a dancing joy that melts my heart.

Almaty is such a historic land: a point on the Great Silk Road, conquered by Gengis Khan, ruled by Abylai Khan, joined to the Russians for protection from China, communized in ways both good and bad,  now left to stand on its own wobbly nationalistic legs.  But more than the history, more than the steeped culture, more than the bitter lingering embers of Lenin and Stalin’s reigns, more than all these, the thing that has affected me most is the people.  To have the honor to preach to a people confused by the jumble of religious ideas that flooded in with their religious freedom the same way that Snickers and Tide flooded in with their economic freedom.  To teach the Sermon on the Mount (with its fearful command to turn the other cheek) to a high school girl named Tanya who refused to let herself get beat up — who later (on my very birthday) asked God for the ability to forgive her enemies.  Now Tanya sings the song my friend Chad wrote: “Lord, I give my life to You, O Lord.  Please let me live for You.”  And she sings it from a sincere heart.

And every day when I come home from the Institute or when I come home of an evening after one of the youth clubs, I’m greeted by a chorus of heavily accented Hellos, and little children of races Kazakh, Russian, Chechen, and Ukranian rush up to meet me.  Just yesterday I helped two little Kazakh boys build a pretend airplane from broken furniture parts, a radiator and some copper wire.

Even in my own apartment, my host mother reads the Russian volume of the Chronicles of Narnia that I found at the used book store on Karl Marx street to her 6 year-old daughter Nadia.  And Nadia (which being translated means “hope”) jumps up and down on the bed in excitement as she tells me about how the Lion, Aslan, was killed, but he rose from the dead “just like God did.”  And then she crawls under the bed to show me the two little puppies that were born less than a week ago.

Aside from all the joys that I just mentioned, though, there are deep pains in my soul as well.  Tanya’s faith and Nadia’s excitement are very rare here.  Generally, in the land of “Make-Shift and Bump-Your-Head,” only children are happy, and only babooshkas believe in the God of Christmas and Easter.  Sorrow is far more stable than the national currency, and no matter what the exchange rate, vodka is always far too cheap and abundant.

But just like Aslan’s arrival in Narnia melted the snow and defeated the evil White Witch, so even can the God who created the mountains to the south melt the people’s frozen hearts.  And I look at the leaves and flowers along the streets on the way to school every day and pray that God’s love will bloom in people’s hearts here even as the oak and elm leaves have sprung forth from seemingly dead, scraggly branches.  And even though my three year-old friend Dinara and I couldn’t find any dandelions last night, I saw how they had sprung up new this morning.  In the same way, the mercies of the Lord are “new every morning.”

The fax also included some instructions to Trey Berry, the Director of International Studies and a follow up contingency plan for my friend Chad which mentions the name of a `zine that we had hoped to publish during our college years and never did.

Trey, if it’s too late for this to make The Signal, please just pass it along to Chad.  By the way, call us soon.  We need to talk to you about our tickets home.

Chad, if this doesn’t make The Signal, (and it probably won’t) then I have a favor to ask.  Could you (see if Guy, Jim, etc. can pitch in to help) have copies made and ask Walt if you can pass them out in the cafeteria during finals (maybe even Walt would chip in.  By the way, greet everybody there at the cafeteria for me.)  I kind of feel like this is an “Ichthus Arise” of sorts and would like for others to read it.  If there’s no way you can do it, then don’t worry about it, but if there is any way, please try.  I love you, boy.  See you soon.  P.S. Congrats on Chapel preaching.  Long to hear about it.

Check out Jim’s photo compilation of the event for some real photography.

photo by Jim Yates and text by Chad Pollock

photo by Jim Yates and text by Chad Pollock

photo by Jim Yates and text by Chad Pollock

In the spirit of the Ouachita Memory Project, we announce a new writing project: The Red Van Lounge Logs.  Luke announced the project some time back:

Over winter break, Jim & I (the people, not the constellation) discussed a book we could make, but it will take all of us. In this book, photos of the Red Van Lounge will accompany stories of the adventures that surround it. Jim has plenty of images, as you can imagine. What we need are stories.

In its heyday, Jim drove that van across the country & as far north as Chicago and south at least to Dallas. He served us tea and freeze dried stew in Arkadelphia. I was there some of the time, so high I can’t remember.

So, in the spirit of the Ouachita Memorial Freewrite, I’m asking for your stories, anything you remember about Jim & the Red Van Lounge. Enough time has passed for him to assume I’ve forgotten all about it. That suits me.

If you have something you would like to contribute, you can either leave a comment here and Rix will email you get your submission.  Or you can go to the contact page and drop us a line that way.

So it’s a head change. What the hell. Cough syrup goes down, four ounces apiece. It’s supposed to take about an hour to set in, but things get patchy fast. We’re in a car, headed somewhere to watch people do something. Rob’s asking the driver to pull over. He pukes red.

“Does that mean it won’t work?” I want to know.

“Hard to say. It’s been forever since I did this.”

At the club, she ditches us to find real men. We gesticulate on the dance floor, two awkward wrong-eyed loners. It’s not working, so we find a booth wherein to sit and smoke. Somehow the table is at dance floor level, which puts us in our seats below sea level. It all gets visceral, women with peculiar shapes, waitresses with trays of drinks—No I couldn’t possibly—men with obscene pectorals all waft by in the green undercurrent. Lights and smoke and the overarching drumbeat twist our nerves. Finally she returns and we ride back in silence, ears ringing.

Dropped off on campus, we wander over to Evans Stupid Center. There’s always something going on, no matter how lame. This time it’s Christmas bullshit, which makes perfectly horrendous sense to us in our receptive state. We glide past off-brand fraternity and sorority groups—Hey wasn’t she at the Odyssey?—and up the stairs. There’s a bridge up there on the third floor, a darkling railed area with great carpet for somersaults. We lie on our backs in the dark, washed by noise from below and insights from beyond. What we need is music, not the tinny trash blaring unholy carols to the decorators. We saunter back outside to see a car parked on the sidewalk. “Have you seen any keys?” someone wonders. We may have, but not the sort of keys he needs.

The stuff wears off hours later, but I’m still awake to everything looks different. We try to figure out exactly how with a session of the thinking game, our name for analysis of situations, characters, possibilities. It’s a strange, private form of public discourse. Years later I will watch Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and wonder if Stoppard stole the idea from us. The thinking game is where Rob and I make decisions to initiate or discontinue lesser games. We give ourselves to experimentation, two souls wandering a while together. It’s just another game, like role-playing Palladium or comic book heroes, like the talking to girls game, or the saddest game of all:

“Wasn’t that one girl supposed to come down?”

Rob looks at me across the living room of his dingy trailer. “Yeah.”

“So we’re playing that one game, where we wait around all day and she never shows.”

“Yeah.”

The pentagram scarred in his chest for protection is the only sign she exists. That and memories, like the time I drove up to North Little Rock one summer and smoked two joints with her and Rob on the roof of a shed. They kept quiet, smoking like professionals, but it was my first time and it hit me like childhood. I kept trying to climb these ridiculous post oaks that had been pruned so they had no real branches below ten feet. The stobs I grabbed broke and eventually Rob called softly, “Hey man, we have neighbors.” I felt like a werewolf, but I climbed back up the shed and sat. The sunrise burned up through a power plant below us, a great red gob of lifeblood fresh from some river somewhere on the rim of the world where all peace prevailed.

She never shows, but once Rob goes up to Little Rock and brings back some potent herb. We smoke it at Iron Mountain with that one girl. First the light goes. The boat ramp, the water, and the trees make a gray study, like some beginner’s exercise in drawing shadow. Then there is no god. Next thing I know, I’m face to face with the generative function of the multiverse. Stuff streams from an undefined center in every direction, shapes, colors, faces, meanings coruscating and expanding. I am nowhere. I wonder what will happen if I run up the road and puke, only to find that is exactly what I have done. It hangs hair over my face.

The thinking game mandates that we work on that one game, talking to girls. So we try to make a party. Unfortunately, predatory males weasel their way into our plotting. We end up out by Degray with three girls and one extra guy. He’s bragging about the weed he scored but there’s only enough for one hit. He takes it and shotguns a reluctant Quisling. She passes the residue to me with more grace. I chortle and pull out a half-gallon of Evan Williams. It makes the rounds of blankets on the sand by the fire burns brighter as light fades from the sky. I am mesmerized by the coals, where elementals writhe: Here is no hell. Then someone jumps me, the priestess as it turns out, knocking me off balance and ripping hairs from my head. She wants me to grapple her, but I think about Buddha under the tree and recompose myself.

“Y’all are the most boring stoners I ever met.” She disappears into the woods.

Skinny-dipping follows. Rob is trying to do something involving a cigarette and water. He has his back to us and Cherie says, “Cute butt, don’t you think?”

“Not as much butt as gut suggests,” I reply.

She looks like she likes him. Then the smoke blows in her face and she says thrice quickly, “I hate white rabbits.” It must be some kind of charm, because the smoke shifts again. No fluke, either. Every time the smoke sought her, she turned it. Later Rob and I realize that Cherie, an Army veteran, is a tenth level fighter and fourth level mage.

We get high after the loser leaves. Trying to be lost in the woods, Rob and I wander into a glade. “This is a sacred place,” I say. “Make this gesture here, and nothing evil can enter.” I show him how. The prietess coming down the path turns another way. She couldn’t possibly have heard us. We have ascertained, through Thinking Game protocols, that she is a major character and we are minor characters.

She turns up at another party. This arose one day in the O when I saw everybody without clothes. It was not prurience or porn that suggested I see this way; simply so, bored in the O, “Nothing to do nowhere to go / I wanna be sedated,” and all of a beautiful sudden, the flesh shines through the garments of all those most holy snobs. I stay recumbent so as not to shake it, but when Russian girls arrive for a cigarette, I spring into action. They like to drink, so I promise them alcohol if they return to the O when it gets dark. Success! I look at Rob, lying with his eyes closed, silent as usual when around idiots. He smiles. The rest of the day I tell everyone who approaches me about the party. This is the best game ever. They all want to be there. Rob thinks I shouldn’t tell guys, but it turns out all right because today the O works to keep fools from speaking to me.

Tussined, stoned, and drunk that night, Rob and I sit outside the party house. Half of those who said they would be there actually are. Laughter drifts out to us, alone on the lawn. We’re having a cigarette, since there’s no smoking inside.

“What’s going on here?” Rob asks.

“Rix is playing the guitar to the Russian girls.”

“That’s a given.”

“Right. The rednecks are hitting on the priestess.”

“Anyone else?”

“We’re playing the thinking game,” I say.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Habit.”

“Let me get this straight,” says Rob. “We finally organized a party, the best place to meet girls, and there are girls at the party, and we’re sitting outside.”

“That’s about it.”

“I don’t think we’ll play the thinking game anymore.”

We go inside. Rix becomes a god. Rob and the priestess turn into a stained glass window. And we never play the thinking game again.

What Luke brought me was pure, unmitigated, earthy fun, a physical outlet for creativity, and the Ouachita was the perfect setting for this. In the early days, we took no drugs, drank no alcohol, and smoked no cigarettes, ye we found ecstasy in Nature. If previously the Nature had been my hermitage, now it was my playground. WE climbed trees; we swam naked,; we found every available nook and cranny and used it in a poetic game of hide and seek. God was no longer my judge. He was my playmate.

I remember Luke reading Melville on the top of the old ROTC repelling tower. I remember talking about similarities between Melville and John Irving, a thought that had been planted in Luke’s head by Tom Greer. It was at this time that the Calvinist debate was raging in my head. Luke and I discussed predestination through the lens of Melville, and I began to grasp a wisdom greater than the Bible, or at least its rival. The wisdom of humanity passed down through her artists.

I went to see Tom Greer shortly after that to put to quell the Calvinist debate once and for all. We chatted. I revealed to him the great torment of my soul. “If God predestines us, then He must decide that some are going to heaven and some to hell. I can’t accept that, but is it the truth?” Greer didn’t pay much attention to my question. He talked about John Updike. He told me about when he lived in Southern Indiana where I was from, and then he said, “You know, I don’t like Calvinists because they’re so mean.” That was my “AhHa” moment. Theology, I realized, was as much a personal and experiential endeavor after truth as it was a statement of Truth. That was the end of my tumult over the question, and it was the beginning of a new love for literature.

I decided to start studying English then, and I signed up for Johnny Wink’s British Literature class.

Reading Henry IV and the Faery Queen

What was so special about this time? It was constant Spring. My life seemed full to the bursting with Joy. What was there to be sad about? I had the distinct feeling that everything, everything, was full of goodness. I did not know hurt. I did not know deprivation. It seemed like an eternal sunshine.

By revival I meant a massive, miraculous undertaking of the spirit of god that would transform the world. I read books on the subject. I studied the history of the Great Awakenings. I read the sermons of those who had precipitated American revivals. Charles Finney was my favorite. By day I escaped to the woods to read his sermons, to read the Bible, to play, and to meditate. I sometimes took a companion. Often it was Rix. In my morning prayers, which were becoming longer and longer, I wandered about the OBU campus and into the city of Arkadelphia and I called forth prayers. I felt the need to make myself subject, to make myself into nothing, yet in attempting to do so, I was making more of myself than I ever could. I was addicted to religious power, and I was under a stressful messiah complex, for I truly believed that my efforts would save the world and that by doing so I would have to be destroyed. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if…” My life hung on that “if.” All else seemed meaningless.

I wanted to be an immortal. Yet my humanity was a glaring reminder that I would never be so. I could not embrace that humanity, though. Not yet.

I found comfort in my academic pursuits. I took to the academic study of religion with great aplomb. I began to out-step my cohorts. They were lazy. They were good people but too earthly minded. They could not focus their attentions on the deeper mysteries, as I could. My teachers took notice of me and began to encourage this pursuit of the mind. Scott Duvall, especially, took a shine to me and I reveled in his praise. Slowly my thoughts began to change. Slowly, I began to realize that the revival I sought was going to take place in me and that it would work its way slowly to the surface as I began to change hearts and minds within the church, or so I thought.

In truth it was a rubric on which to hang my insecurities. It was a way of surviving my late-teens and early twenties. It was all destined to crash, but when?

The folks that I met on this journey became more important than the journey itself.

In those early days, Rix was of prime importance. The cast of characters expanded a bit to include folks like Jenny Ashley, Siobhan and her beaux Perry, Dennis from the Ivory Coast, and the band of freaky believers.

Dennis proposed that we start a weekly Bible study for our male friends. It was to be male dominated simply because it would be held in the dorm room that he shared with Rix and women were not allowed there. The group that gathered there every Tuesday night was the band of freaky believers. Each one of us was marred, flawed, physically and mentally. We were, all of us, true freaks such as Barnum and Bailey would have gladly accepted. There was Tony and Quinton, Dennis and Homer, Curtis and Rix, and of course, myself. We would gather and sing songs; we would usually read a Bible passage and talk about it, and then we would share prayer requests and pray.

It was during one of these Bible studies that I realized how I had come to hang with the lowly. Dennis was from the Ivory Coast and he lacked much of the reserve that I was accustomed to with respect to life and religion. He believed in the curative powers of Vaseline. On this particular night he had liberally applied petroleum jelly to the blemishes all over his face. It was a night time ritual for him, but on this occasion he had done so immediately prior to our Bible study. Homer did not share the same hygienic tastes. His face was a sea of white heads and black heads in various stages of ascendance and decline. He helped them along by picking at them unconsciously, and as we sat for Bible study, he pinched hard at his face, squeezing the white heads dry and then licking the puss from his fingers.

Tony was a big man who liked to go barefoot in the dorms. As was his custom, he came to the freaky believers with no shoes, and this prompted a picking of a different sort. As we all shared our prayer concerns, Tony vehemently decried his lot in life, his need for the Lord’s favor, and his love for the lovely, spunky Anne (Oh, unrequited love, how you dogged our steps through the forests of Blakely Town.). I tried to listen to Tony’s woes, but it was difficult because he was anxiously picking the callouses from his rough feet, and letting them fall to the floor.

Tony had a powerful voice, but Curtis’ was stronger. Curtis was another big fellow with a handsome boyish face. He was freckled, had a round belly, and looked like a model for the old Big Boy statues. His conversation turned at every moment from joyous to somber. If he stopped you on campus to talk, within two minutes he would whisper to you conspiratorially of all the trouble he faced, the torture of being Curtis, and then end with a head splitting laugh before sauntering off. He acted the same at the Freaky Believer’s Bible Study, falling into a pit of prayerful despair but then climbing out with a laugh that reverberated down the halls of Daniel Dormitory.

Clinton was the quietest of the bunch, but his quietude was accented with a cowboy hat covering a bowl cut. He had a way of listening, accepting, and offering no comment like that of priest at confessional. Perhaps this is why, he and Curtis got along so well. Curtis needed someone to listen to his trouble and his laugh, Clinton needed someone to give him a voice.

Looking around at this eclectic group of eccentrics gave me a sense of hope in my early days at OBU. These were the folks on the fringe of the OBU society. Long before the grundge movement swept the nation and eventually OBU, these were the folks that made OBU different. I always asked for prayer for the campus. Revival was my prayer, and I truly believed that amongst these folks, I would see it happen. Until, of course, it didn’t.