DURING my early years of sobriety, I spent most Monday nights in
a smoke-filled parish hall with some friends who were also sober
alcoholics, drinking bad coffee. Pictures of the Virgin Mary looked
down on us, as prayer and despair and cigarette smoke and hope rose
to the ceiling.
We were a cranky bunch whose lives were in various states of
repair. There was Candace, a suburban housewife who was high on
heroin for her débutante ball; Stan the depressive poet,
self-deprecating and soulful; and Bob the retired lawyer, who had
been sober since before Jesus was born, but for some reason still
looked a little bit homeless.
We talked about God and anger, resentment and forgiveness - all
punctuated with profanity. We weren't a ship of fools so much as a
rowboat of idiots. A little rowing team, paddling furiously,
sometimes for each other, sometimes for ourselves; and when one of
us jumped ship, we'd all have to paddle harder.
In 1992, when I started hanging out with the "rowing team", as I
began to call them, I was working at a downtown club as a stand-up
comic. I was broken, and trying to become fixed, and only a few
months sober. I couldn't afford therapy; so being paid to be
caustic and cynical on stage seemed the next best thing. Plus, I'm
funny when I'm miserable.
This isn't exactly uncommon. If you were to gather all the
world's comics, and then remove all the alcoholics, cocaine
addicts, and manic depressives, whom would you have left? There's
something about courting the darkness that makes some people see
the truth in raw, twisted ways, as though they were shining a black
light on life to illuminate the absurdity of it all. Comics tell a
truth you can see only from the underside of the psyche. At its
best, comedy is prophesy, and societal-dream interpretation. At its
worst, it's just dick jokes.
WHEN I was working as a comic, normal non-comic people would
often say: "Wow, I don't know how you can get up in front of all
those people with just a microphone." To which I would reply: "Wow,
I don't know how you can balance your cheque book and get up for
work each day." We all find different things challenging in life.
Speaking in front of hundreds of people was far less challenging
for me than scheduling dental appointments.
It was almost effortless for me to do comedy, because the
underside was where I felt at home; there, everything is marinated
in irony and sarcasm until ready to be grilled and handed to a
naked emperor. I got regular comedy work, but never went far in the
comedy world, for several reasons.
First, it was because I tended to make the other comics laugh
more often than actual audiences, whom I held in contempt (and
maybe that's why). Then there was the fact that I wasn't driven to
succeed: as soon as it became an effort, I backed off.
But the most important reason comedy didn't work for me was that
I became healthier, and just wasn't that funny any more. Less
miserable equals less funny. In the process of becoming sober, and
trying to rely on God, and be honest about my shortcomings, I
became willing to show vulnerabilities. This made me easy prey in a
comedy-club green room, which is basically a hotbed of emotional
Darwinism; so it wasn't a place I really wanted to spend a whole
lot of my free time.
In other ways, hanging out with comics could be kind of great.
Next to most of them, I was the picture of mental health. I
befriended - and by befriended I mean occasionally slept with - a
wiry-haired, gregarious comic named PJ, who had a keen, albeit
incredibly perverted, mind. PJ was one of those guys who wasn't
exactly GQ material, foregoing well-cut jeans for a
regrettable combination of baggy shorts, button-down shirts, and
sport sandals.
HE HAD a distinctly feral quality about him that made him seem a
bit canine. Despite his almost total lack of style, PJ managed to
have a really full social life. He loved women, and life, and
booze, and girlie magazines, and poker, and comedy, not necessarily
in that order.
He was also completing his Ph.D. in communications while doing
stand-up, which was made just atad difficult by his aforementioned
vices. One day, I invited him to the rowing team, and he remained a
faithful member for the next eight years, often hosting the
post-meeting poker games at his house.
If you didn't know PJ well, he didn't seem all that smart, but
underneath his foul-mouthed rants was a stunning intellect. His was
one of the more filthy acts in Denver, without a lot of highbrow
content. He played stupid on stage, and he was brilliant at it. I
called PJ once to see how his dissertation was coming along.
"Great," he said, "but no one realises I'm living in my office at
the school."
PJ was like one of those cloth dolls with long skirts that you
turn upside down and pull the skirt up - and it's no longer granny,
but the big bad wolf. The right-side-up doll is a foul-mouthed
simpleton; flipped over, a Ph.D. in communications. The
right-side-up doll is the fun-loving and charismatic host of a
weekly poker game; flipped over, a non-functioning depressive.
PJ was a natural addition to the rowing team, and he infused the
meetings with hilarious dark rants. "I wanted to kill myself this
morning," PJ would say, "but I thought how much I'd hate providing
all you fuckers with a reason to become even more self-absorbed
than you already are, so . . ."
He ended most of his sentences with "so . . ." as if we all knew
how to fill in the next blank; if he were to do it for us, it
wouldn't be as funny.He was someone I wanted to be around, as if
his juju would rub off, making me witty, and smart, and likeable,
like him.
COMEDY clubs are closed on Monday nights, but PJ's house was
open for Texas Hold'em after our rowing-team meetings. I'm pretty
sure that when he got sober and removed booze from the equation, he
just added extra women, and poker, and comedy.
Mondays at PJ's became a dark carnival of comics, recovering
alcoholics, and comics who were re-covering alcoholics. Rounds of
poker went late into the night, but competitive wit was where the
real points were scored. Whenever I could, I would shove aside the
inevitable pile of PJ's dirty magazines on the piano bench, and sit
myself down for a few hours of belly laughing, which was well worth
the $25 I always lost to them in the process.
Still, underneath the academic success, the adoring comedy-club
audiences, the many women, and loads of friends, was something
corrosive. Eating away at our friend PJ, over the course of a
decade, was a force or illness or demon that had staked a corner of
PJ's mind, and, like the Red Army, marched determinedly, claiming
more and more territory each day.
PJ was loved by a lot of people, who had no idea how to help
him. The rowing team watched over his final years, as his mental
illness was tugged and pulled by modern pharmacology, but never
cured. He'd show up less and less often on Monday nights, and each
time he would be skinnier. It was as though his body began to
follow his mind and spirit, which were slowly leaving. He stopped
returning our calls.
Several days before he hanged himself, PJ called me. He wanted
me to pray for him. It had been ten years since I'd met PJ, and I
had since returned to Christianity. I think I was the only
religious person he knew. He wondered about God: was he beyond the
pale of God's love?
Throwing all my coolness and sarcasm aside, I prayed for him
over the phone. I asked that he feel the very real and always
available love of God. I prayed that he would know, without
reservation, that he was a beloved child of God. I'm sure I said a
bunch of other stuff, too. I wanted to be able to cast out this
demon that had hold of our PJ, possessing him, telling him lies,
and keeping out the light of God's love.
A WEEK and a half later, I was sitting in a huge lecture hall at
the University of Colorado Boulder (where, as a 35-year-old,
married mother of two, I was finishing up my undergraduate degree),
when my cell phone rang. I rushed outside, the cold air making my
eyes water.
Sean, fellow comic and rower said: "Nadia. It's, um . . . PJ,
honey."
"Shit," I said.
"I'm sorry," Sean said. We were all sorry. "Can you do his
service?"
This is how I was called to ministry. My main qualification? I
was the religious one. The memorial service took place on a crisp,
fall day at the Comedy Works club in downtown Denver, with a full
house. The alcoholic rowing team and the Denver comics, the comedy
club staff and the academics: these were my people. Giving PJ's
eulogy, I realised that perhaps I was supposed to be their
pastor.
It's not that I felt pious and nurturing. It's that there, in
that underground room filled with the smell of stale beer and bad
jokes, I looked around and saw more pain, and questions, and loss
than anyone, including myself, knew what to do with.
And I saw God. God, right there with the comics standing along
the wall with crossed arms, as if their snarky remarks to each
other would keep those embarrassing emotions away. God, right there
with the woman climbing down the stage stairs after sharing a
little too much about PJ being a "hot date". God, among the cynics
and alcoholics and queers.
I am not the only one who sees the underside and God at the same
time. There are lots of us, and we are at home in the biblical
stories of anti-heroes, and people who don't get it; beloved
prostitutes and rough fishermen. How different from that cast of
characters could a manic- depressive alcoholic comic be?
It was here in the midst of my own community of underside
dwellers that I couldn't help but begin to see the gospel, the
life-changing reality that God is not far off, but here among the
brokenness of our lives. And having seen it, I couldn't help but
point it out. For reasons I'll never quite understand, I realised
that I had been called to proclaim the gospel from the place where
I am, and proclaim where I am from the gospel.
What had started in early sobriety, as a reluctant willingness
to start praying again, had led to my returning to Christianity,
and now had led to something even more preposterous: I was called
to be a pastor to my people.
Cranky, Beautiful Faith: For irregular (and regular) people
by Nadia Bolz-Weber is published by Canterbury Press at
£12.99 (Church Times
Bookshop £11.69, code CT273). This extract appears by kind
permission.