CHAPTER 428: Graven Images

The summer between seventh and eighth grade had been boring enough that I found myself agreeing to go to summer camp to break up the monotony.    The camp - we'll call it Camp Gracefield - was recommended to my parents by family friends from our very liberal Lutheran church.  If anything, the pamphlet seemed to play down religious aspects.

The indoctrination into Fundamentalist Christianity kicked into high gear Wednesday night, when the older campers, myself included, were rounded up and taken to a cabin further out in the woods.  First, the councilors told us about the evils of popular culture.  Rock music was inherently evil because it was based on voodoo rhythms.  The Led in Led Zeppelin referred to the band being led by the Golden Dawn.   At one point, I asked about the Beastie Boys and was told that they ate cigarettes and did not take care of the bodies that God had given them, so they too were servants of the devil.  They'd never heard of Jane's Addiction, but assumed that they were at least involved in drugs.  Ministry were fine, though.  The pop culture lecture was followed by info-dumps about Satanism, the secret sacrificial baby holocaust, the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, feminism, homosexuality and Sammy Davis Junior.  Finally, they told us about the Book of Revelations, the Antichrist and the coming apocalypse.

Thursday, we went on an overnight trip into the woods, which basically amounted to a forced march, dehydration and sleep deprivation with more lectures about evil.   Also, at one point my CIT taught me how to make napalm and asked me if it was true that there were gay bars in Lewiston.  By the time we got back to camp on Friday morning, most of us were delirious.  I'm surprised there wasn't an outbreak of glossolalia.  That's not sarcasm.  Things had gotten weird enough that I expected someone to start babbling and everyone else to start worshiping him as a prophet.
 
Now it was Friday night, the last night before my parents came to retrieve me,  and I was sitting on my bunk, listening to the mayhem unfolding outside.   I'd had enough brainwashing, and decided to go draw in a corner.  An angry mob of young, newly deputized religious zealots was outside, shouting and parading around, driven into a religious fervor by the instructors, preparing to burn a graven image.

A moment earlier, the mob had barged into the cabin, looking for contraband - pornography, music, books, inappropriate t-shirts - anything that they could make an example of.   As I had chosen not to participate in this idiocy, they initially tried to strong arm me into handing over any forbidden fruit mingling with my personal property.   I stood my ground, and explained that I had left all my heathen porn and heroin suppositories at home because the instructions we all had been given before coming to the camp had said to do so.

Boomer, the obligatory, chubby kleptomaniac kid with low self-esteem, stepped forward after a tense moment and announced that he had a graven image.  He ran to his bunk, unzipped a duffel bag and produced a t-shirt.  The crowd gasped as he held it aloft, then began shouting death threats and condemnations to this idol of Satanism.  They charged back out of the cabin and paraded off to the fire pit.  Boomer was beaming as he left, finally having a chance to be the hero.  

My jaw dropped in disbelief of what I had just seen.

Several minutes later, Paul, my cabin's councilor, walked in.   It had been his day off and he'd gone down to Brunswick.   He was surprised to find me alone in the cabin and asked what was going on.

Paul was a pretty cool guy, but had always been kind of enigmatic because he was primarily occupied during the day as a lifeguard.  He had a Clash sticker on his footlocker and wore combat boots like me.  We had spent a bit of time talking about punk rock.  Beyond that that, though, I didn't really know the guy that well.

I told him about the mob.


"Fuck." he muttered.  "This happens every week."

It turned out that Paul wasn't nearly as religious as the other councilors and took Fridays off so that he didn't have to sit in on the insanity of the build up to the bonfire.   It was just a summer job.

"Look," he said, calmly, "what's going on out there is bullshit.  That's humanity, not God.  Did they even find anything to burn?"

"Boomer had a Vanilla Ice shirt in his duffel bag."

Yes folks, the face of Satan belonged to Vanilla Ice, and this being July 1992, he'd been a stale punchline for nearly two years.  The moment Boomer had presented his shirt to the mob was transcendent, perfect and perfectly awful.  It may not have been the exact moment that I renounced organized religion, but it definitely sealed the deal.

 Paul closed his eyes, knit his brows and shook his head for a second, then we both fell over laughing.