Chapter 6 — Christian

By the time I met Julie, I had already started drifting away from many of the people I grew up with. Some of my old friends had parents who saw where I was headed long before I did. They didn’t want their sons following me into smoking, drinking, and the rebellious path I had started walking. Looking back now, I don’t blame them. I probably would have done the same thing if I had been watching someone like me circle around my own child.

After high school there were not many opportunities in our small town. The factories were still alive then, but only barely. The future everyone talked about on television never really seemed to reach places like ours. I got a job at Radio Shack for a while because I loved electronics. I understood components, speakers, stereos, remotes, and wiring better than I understood people. I could build things. I could fix things. What I couldn’t do was sell things.

I had trouble convincing customers they needed something unless I honestly believed they did. That made me a terrible salesman.

I wore secondhand suits trying to look professional while still feeling like a confused kid underneath them. That was where I met Jason Carter. Jason was everything I thought a ladies man was supposed to be. Confident. Smooth with women. Funny. Social in ways that felt effortless to him and impossible to me. Along with another friend, Jason Mason, we jokingly called ourselves the Bosiphus Brothers. It was a ridiculous name, but at that age we were trying to build identities for ourselves out of music, friendship, rebellion, and whatever freedom we could find.

We spent nights blasting Van Halen through giant stereo systems in the mall. There was a Christian bookstore across from us, and we thought it was hilarious watching their crystal crosses shake while “Runnin’ with the Devil” echoed through the hallway. Security would start walking toward us from the other side of the mall, and the second they got close enough we would hit a hidden remote and kill the stereo instantly like nothing had happened.

Back then rebellion still felt funny.

Jason introduced me to bars, clubs, girls, and nightlife. He moved through the world naturally while I always felt like I was studying everyone else trying to figure out how men were supposed to act. Jason was interested in getting women in bed. I was interested in figuring out how to make them fall in love with me. I spent many nights as the third wheel, but I didn’t mind as much as maybe I should have because even being nearby made me feel closer to the life I thought I was supposed to be living.

Every now and then Jason would disappear for weeks whenever he found a girl he really cared about. Then eventually he would come roaring back into my life with another story, another heartbreak, or another adventure. At that age you think friendships like that will last forever.

They don’t.

There were other friends too. Adam Kessler had been one of the earliest. Adam understood what it felt like to stand outside the culture around us. His family was Jewish yet wanted him to have a good education even if in a Catholic environment, and in some ways he understood my anger toward religion better than almost anyone else did.

I wish I had kept him closer.

One night after Adam got his driver’s license, we went out together. By then I had started becoming reckless, constantly trying to turn life into chaos because chaos felt exciting. Adam was driving carefully and seriously, like someone who still respected consequences. Like an idiot, I thought it would be funny to loosen him up by grabbing the steering wheel and jerking it hard while we were flying down the highway.

The car power-slid sideways at fifty-five miles an hour.

Even now I feel sick remembering it.

Nothing happened physically, but something changed after that. I apologized the rest of the night, but apologies do not always repair trust once someone sees what you are becoming. We slowly drifted apart after that.

There were many moments during those years where luck outran my stupidity.

One night my old 1978 Buick Regal rolled down a boat ramp and into the river after the transmission failed while I was trying to push it backward uphill. My hand got trapped in the driver’s door as the car slid into the water. I can still remember the pressure holding the door shut while the car dragged me deeper into the river. The water climbed up to my chest before the pressure finally released enough for my hand to come free.

My friend stayed behind while I walked home injured to get my parents. Before the police arrived, he opened the trunk underwater and let the beer drift downriver so there would be no evidence left in the car. At the hospital the officers questioned me while my hand was being examined. Luckily I had not actually been drinking yet.

Later they told me I was lucky to still be alive. The Buick had caught on a lip near the end of the ramp before the river suddenly dropped off into deeper water. When the police first arrived, the headlights were still glowing underwater four feet beneath the surface. The tow truck driver originally thought divers would be needed to retrieve it before realizing he could lower a hook down the ramp and snag the bumper without going underwater.

I survived those years largely because luck kept outrunning my stupidity.

Then I met Julie.

Jason Carter had gone out with her a few times through another job he worked after Radio Shack, but for him she was just another girl. For me she became everything.

For the first time in my life, I fell deeply and completely in love.

I was nineteen years old, finally experiencing the kind of love I thought I was supposed to have at seventeen. I had never gone to my own high school prom, but Julie took me to hers. We dressed up, spent time with her friends, and for one night I felt strangely normal. We didn’t drink. We didn’t party. We just enjoyed being together.

That night mattered more to me than she probably ever realized.

Julie steadied me in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time. We spent endless nights together driving around, talking, watching television, and trying to build little pieces of adulthood while still barely understanding what adulthood actually was.

Eventually she stopped taking the pill.

Neither of us talked openly about it very much, but looking back I think we both understood what we were doing. Maybe we wanted something permanent. Maybe we wanted to create a family because neither of us fully knew what came next.

A month later we found out she was pregnant.

We were foolish. We were young. We were nowhere near ready.

But once the shock settled in, we did what young people raised the way we were raised believed they were supposed to do. We got married to make it legitimate.

Oddly enough, my family seemed relieved. After years of rebellion and drifting, marriage suddenly made it seem like maybe I had found one of the paths they always hoped I would follow. They threw us a party at my parents’ house. There was happiness there, mixed with uncertainty.

Julie and I had never really lived on our own before. Bills arrived quickly. Reality arrived even faster. We received government assistance, read pregnancy books, and attended Lamaze classes trying desperately to learn how to become adults before adulthood fully arrived.

Around that same time, I found work at a print shop. Factory work suited me well. I liked machinery, routine, systems, and production. For the first time in my life I was making decent money for someone my age.

Then Christian was born.

I drove Julie to the hospital terrified the entire way there. When my son finally arrived, I was the first person to hold him.

Nothing in my life had prepared me for that moment.

I had loved before. I had lusted before. I had searched for acceptance, freedom, rebellion, friendship, and excitement. But the love I felt holding my son was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was immediate and overwhelming.

At the same time, I felt something else hit me just as hard.

Responsibility.

For the first time in my life, someone else’s future mattered more to me than my own.

Standing there holding my son, all I could think was that I wanted to be the best father I could possibly be.