The plan that year was to have Easter dinner at the Rathole.
One of a half dozen apartments made out of sheetrock, spit, and drywall inside of a former unitarian church, the Rathole had been handed down from newly graduated Dartmouth alumni to rising seniors inside the Campus Crusade for Christ network for successive rental seasons going back for years. It was just two rooms—three if you counted the kitchen alcove—and a tiny bathroom, just big enough for a sink, toilet and shower stall.
At first, it was just John and Mike living there, and it was tidy and homey and as clean as any old apartment can be. There was a La-Z-Boy recliner, an ancient, but comfortable couch, a floor lamp, a coffee table and, their pride and joy, a large tv. John’s life size poster of John Wayne hung on the wall behind the recliner and his movie poster of “A Fish Called Wanda” hung above the couch. In the bedroom was Mike’s newish futon, which was made up respectably with sheets and blankets and John’s mattress, which he’d found behind the building, made up less respectably with his ROTC poncho liner and sleeping bag.
As their senior year at Dartmouth wore on and the college debt mounted, John and Mike had decided to take on another roommate. They added another mattress to the bedroom, which meant that it was basically just a room lined with mattresses, and invited a guy named Bill to sublet from them. Bill was a known character on campus—a fast-talking Econ major from a large Catholic family in Pennsylvania who earned A-citations in all of his classes and was even more broke than John and Mike. When he moved in, he brought his bicycle, a half-full soap dispenser that he’d pulled from a wall at a gas station, a few clothes and books and not much else. The soap dispenser was immediately put to use in a corner of the shower.
I thought the Rathole was incredibly cool. The movie posters were part of it—they were so much more evolved than the posters of sports cars and supermodels that the freshman guys on my floor had hung in their dorm rooms. Also, the living room was surprisingly homey and pleasant. There was always someone extra hanging around—between them, Mike and John had a lot of friends from different groups: their fraternity, jobs, language study abroad programs, former roommates, former teammates etc. People were always stopping in to watch something, or cook a meal, or to work on a project at the beat up table that divided the living and kitchen areas.
It seemed very grown-up and real-life, to me, how these guys paid all of their own bills and were in charge of their own lives. All three were smart guys from meager to modest/middle backgrounds, who had been at the top of their public high schools, for whom getting into Dartmouth was a game-changer. All three were actively bootstrapping themselves to something better. Nobody knew what an incubator was in those days, but I guess you could say that the Rathole was a 90s era launch pad for Govy/Econ/History majors who would go on to do interesting things in policy, business, and civil service.
*
My memory of the one and only Rathole Easter celebration begins with my friend Barb and I coming through the door of the apartment into that good holiday feeling of a bunch of people wearing their best t-shirt or button down, who are cooking and setting a table and handing beverages around. There was a good smell of something baking and the battered table had been set with the very best of the apartment’s collection of found cutlery and glassware.
Both John and Mike could cook—it was another thing that I liked. In my Wyoming world, men grilled meat, cooked trout over open campfires and, in my dad’s case, Sunday morning breakfast, but not ordinary meals, and definitely not holiday dinner. The original impetus for learning to cook was to save money, I think, but they both had taken to it naturally. As New Englander, Mike was generally more oriented toward fresh vegetables and cooking methods that did not involve frying, which made him different from the people in either my or John’s home towns. John had taken a Collis miniversity cooking class and had a couple of go to recipes from previous girlfriends, which seemed attractive and worldly.
Also there that day was Barb’s boyfriend, Scott, a cross-country runner and history major who, like John had a ROTC scholarship; the new roommate, Bill, who was, as usual, talking animatedly about something esoteric to whomever was in front of him, and Frank, an extremely good-looking English major who lived next door who, like John, hailed from Oklahoma.
It was shaping up to be possibly the best Easter dinner ever.
It was only when John turned from the stove and crossed the room to greet me that I saw the fresh gash and raised bruise in the center of his forehead.
“What happened to you?”
“I offered to put in a couple of stitches,” said Bill, who could—and did—DIY just about everything, in the days before YouTube, when you had to learn stuff by reading about it in books.
“He got hit in the face with a door behind SAE,” volunteered Frank, with a laugh, “you should see the door.”
“It’s not a big deal,” mumbled John, pulling me into a hug, “just an accident.”
“And by “accident” he means that he was too drunk to step away from the door when he went outside to take a piss,” offered Bill.
In the movie version of this scene, the room would have gone silent. Barb and I were both aghast. Scott was probably a little bit aghast. Mike had started concentrating very seriously on the vegetables he was chopping. Frank was giving Bill the snake eye. Bill was already moving on to the next most interesting thing.
I pulled out of the hug and found my words. “You were wasted and peeing on the lawn outside of a frat on Holy Saturday?” John gave me a look that was both rebellious and chagrined.
“Why is getting drunk on the night before Easter any worse than any other night?”
Again, the room went silent.
We were all practicing evangelical Christians (the three Catholics to an only slightly lesser degree), and though going out “to the frats,” as it was called, was something that John did pretty regularly, he usually took care to tread the fine line between ‘drinking’ and ‘getting drunk’ so as to be technically within our social group’s accepted interpretation of Biblical guidelines. We evangelicals pretty much agreed on all of the big rules, reserving our exegetical debates for esoteric questions of predestination versus free will or whether or not women should be allowed to pastor a church. No one was perfect, obviously, but we always confessed it to our accountability partners when we failed, and we tried and prayed to do better with our Christian walk. Mostly, we were sincere about this, or believed we were.
So when John defended himself, I was horrified.
It was partly because I didn’t actually know the answer to his question. Why was it worse to get drunk the night before Easter?
It was mostly because he was defiant about it. We didn’t have a phrase for it in those days, but he was saying the quiet part out loud.
*
From the beginning I knew that John had reputation amongst Dartmouth Christians as a bad boy—someone who ‘strayed from the walk’ sometimes. When I was first starting to date him, a couple of students from the Navigators, which was the other Christian organization on campus, took me aside and warned me that he might ‘cause me to stumble,’ which had the exact opposite effect that they intended. There were rumors of partying-related events that had happened in Mexico and at ROTC advance camp. There were two ex-girlfriends, who were both very pretty and also very not Christian. Also, he was in a co-ed fraternity, drove a motorcycle, and had a tattoo. He had a way of carrying himself that was assertive—almost a strut—that was slightly antithetical to the more passive, almost submissive way that other campus Christians might have held themselves. It had to do with the fact that if you’re continuously on the look out for ways to ‘share the gospel,’ you don’t want to walk around like an alpha—you want to be welcoming and approachable.
He was also a committed, born-again Christian who believed in the teachings of Jesus as revealed in the New Testament. His family was Christian, he went to church, he read his Bible, and he held sincere, deep-seated Christian values.
All of these things were true about John at the same time.
It was why I liked him.
With John, the world was wider and more interesting than it was in the more narrowly drawn Christian circles I was used to, but yet not a repudiation of values that were important to me. He was thoughtful and well-read, and if we talked about the Bible, it wasn’t just the same old platitudes—he could dig in and do close reading of a text with the best of us English majors. He was interested in other things, too. He was a Govy major for whom math and language study came easily and who had a keen interest in American military history. He loved old movies and listened to 1970s era music: Gordon Lightfoot, the Little River Band, the Eagles—bands that reminded him of his older siblings.
He had two different jobs—as a bartender and as the student center supervisor—in addition to his ROTC commitment. Even so, he still had college loans. He wasn’t doing voluntary poverty in order to follow Jesus—he couldn’t afford to do voluntary poverty. He was trying to get through college without burying himself or his parents in even more student loans. Bartending and working at the student center were two of the best-paying job on campus, so of course he had a wider circle of friends than just the Christian set. Having to work his way through college made him different from, for example, the two people who had warned me that he didn’t always walk the walk.
Also, he had ambition. He wanted to excel at a military career, go to law or business school, travel, make money—he had heroes who were not only Jim Elliot and career aspirations beyond doing missionary/service work in developing countries. Christianity was an important scaffold, providing a framework for ethical decisions, a family identity, and some cultural traditions. It provided a way to make sense of grief and fear through prayer, and a mechanism for being in touch with spiritual and unseen things: love, insight, intuition, visions. Christianity was a check on his baser instincts, too; he had played football for Dartmouth for two years, but he would have never tolerated something like “Beta-Vision,” the particularly sick brainchild of a group of mostly football players who set up their frat bedrooms so that they could watch each other’s sexual assaults on women.
Getting drunk on Holy Saturday and accidentally bashed in the head by a door was a tiny speck in the constellation of things that made up his character.
*
Which didn’t stop me from wading right in. I quoted scripture about not being drunk with wine. I quoted scripture about being the kind of light and example that would draw people to Christ. I mentioned Christ’s suffering on the cross and how it redeemed the world—was it so much to ask that we spend 48 hours reflecting on the infinite darkness of the soul that our Lord shouldered so that we didn’t have to? What about the New Testament admonition to treat our bodies like temples?
The conversation went on throughout our dinner, punctuated by other topics, hopefully and helpfully introduced by Mike, Frank and Scott and mediated by Barb. It was honestly too literary. I already identified a bit as the problematic child in my own family—no matter how many times I won the scripture memory competition at church camp, I was still the kid who got in trouble for sassing teachers and got cars stuck in river banks on the mountain in the middle of the night. Now, here was my boyfriend with the Mark of Cain smack in the middle of his forehead. I couldn’t let it go.
I don’t even think that I actually cared about the being drunk thing—I think that deep down inside, I was fighting for the last vestiges of my own ability to avoid confronting the irrational and performative nature of the Christianity that I had been trying to sustain all year. It wasn’t actually about the core Christian values that I held dear—and in some ways still hold dear. It was about the upholding the appearance of them. He wasn’t wrong to call our Easter judgement into question.
Looking back, I wonder if it wasn’t some kind of subconscious tipping point for John, too. He was almost 22 years old, he was heading to active duty in the military, he had all the financial burdens of an adult, and he had been playing abstinence roulette with his freshman girlfriend for months. He’d done nothing to repudiate the true tenets of the Christian faith—he was even of legal drinking age. He had worked hard for every opportunity he had and had been a good son, student, teammate, employee and friend to a lot of people. And yet, he was still subject to the nitpicking of what amounted to an on-campus Christian nanny state.
*
As we finished our main course, Bill got up from the table, fished a VHS cassette out of a pile of books and papers and went over to the VCR.
“Bill. No.” said Mike. Frank and John looked up at him and then over at Bill.
“Dude. This is not the time,” said Frank.
“Who wants dessert?” John said over his shoulder as he got up to cut the pie that he had baked. “Bill, nobody wants to watch that while they are eating.”
“Of course they do. I’ll explain it,” said Bill. He pressed play on the video footage from his recent ossicular chain reconstruction—middle ear bone surgery—and settled himself back into the recliner to narrate. “You guys will love this. First, they took cut back the skin from my scalp . . . “
Barb and I met each others eye and started to giggle. Scott got up and started stacking dishes. John passed me a plate with a piece of pie and gave me a look that said, can we be friends again? I gave him a look that said omg you with your sexy green eyes and took the plate.
I went over to the side of the couch that offered a blessedly obstructed view of the television and pointedly left room for the Holy Ghost next to me. Soon enough, my bruised and bemused boyfriend joined me, using one arm to pull me in close to him and the other to reach across and steal the last bite of pie. All was forgotten and forgiven. There were so many other, better things to do and see. Like an ossicular chain reconstruction. Or whatever movie marathon was coming up on Showtime. Monday, there would be classes to go to and work to do. Today, it was the Sunday of the resurrection. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah.