This piece first appeared in Issue 24: Music of the Word on Fire Institute’s quarterly journal Evangelization & Culture.
. . .
I’m a rolling stone, all alone and lost
For a life of sin, I have paid the cost
When I pass by, all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway1
—Hank Williams, “Lost Highway”
The night before my senior year of college, I absconded. There is no other word for it.
Sitting on the brick steps of the Pit, the pedestrian hub of the University of North Carolina, I smoked a Parliament cigarette and brooded over the coming year. My plan was to move to Chicago after graduation. But I was uneasy about the plan. The dread of entering the real world on its own terms loomed over me like a feral animal. I longed to simply get the confrontation over with. To eat or be eaten.
And then, for the first time in my life, an internal voice spoke to me:
Don’t wait. Go now.
I entered into silent conversation with the voice: “I can’t leave.”
Just one step at a time. Stand up.
I stood.
Go to your apartment and pack what you need.
“That I can do. But I’m not leaving.”
One step at a time.
I went to my apartment and packed some clothes, a few books, and a plywood acoustic guitar. My 1997 Ford Ranger, Seabiscuit, was parked outside. As I placed those belongings into the passenger footwell, I reiterated, “I cannot leave.”
That’s fine. Just drive to the edge of town.
I drove to the Marathon gas station at the edge of Chapel Hill and filled the truck’s tank. Inside the station, there was a rotary display of laminated maps. I spun the white wire baskets of the display and found a map of the USA in its lowest resolution: a red grid of the Eisenhower expressways. I bought the map and a Coke and two royal blue packs of Parliaments.
“This has been fun, but I’m not really leaving.”
Drive to the border of Virginia.
I drove until my headlights revealed the roadside “Virginia is for Lovers” sign.
If after all this, you still wish to turn around, you may do so.
That night, by the thick red lines of the laminated map, I drove clear through to Chicago. When I awoke in a Jewel-Osco parking lot, sprawled across Seabiscuit’s bench seat, the voice was gone. No more terse directives to follow. It was the end of what I now recognize as my first conversation with God. At the time, I mistook it for a nicotine buzz of uncommon strength.
My agnostic heart did not dwell on the radical fact of that first conversation. After all, I was a Modern Person. And Modern People do not have literal conversations with God. That’s how I saw it anyhow. I had gleaned from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces that the concept of God was just an anthropological artifact, well past its use date.
In any case, there were practical steps that had to be taken when I arrived in Chicago. I was no longer in the safe confines of the university. The confrontation with the feral animal of reality was upon me.
The first step was lodging. The Chicago Reader classifieds listed precisely one room for rent within my budget. Three hundred dollars a month. Lyndale Street. The first month’s rent plus security deposit would be six hundred dollars, nearly all of my cash on hand. I called the number in the listing.
“You can come by and see the place,” the landlord told me, “but I think I’ve already found a tenant.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I replied.
The house resembled the crumbling redoubt of a Springsteen protagonist. Bare lightbulbs hanging without fixtures, peeling linoleum kitchen tiles, white ceiling paint stained yellow from cigar smoke, a basement with a literal dirt floor. After a brief tour, I told the landlord that I would take it.
“Well, I’ve already found somebody. But if they fall through . . .”
“Would it make a difference if I told you that I really need it?” I asked with intense sincerity. He paused. Something approaching a paternal smile crossed his face.
“Yes . . . yes, actually it would.”
The second step was to find work. Later that same day, I walked past a construction site. A trim man carrying a tube of blueprints was exiting the front gate. A general contractor out of central casting.
“Are you hiring?” I asked without introduction.
“What can you do?” he replied without breaking stride.
“Not much. Are you hiring any laborers?”
The contractor appreciated the moxie of the request.
“We just pulled up the flooring from the first floor. There’s a dumpster in the rear alley. Come here tomorrow at eight a.m. and load it all into the dumpster. Fifteen bucks an hour.”
By the time the contractor returned to the jobsite the next day, I was sitting within the gate eating my second PB&J. The dumpster was loaded. I had already spent the morning catwalking across the open joists to clear every last nail-filled plank.
Any pangs of conscience not drowned out in the noise I outran with constant motion.
I rented the Springsteen house and worked that construction job for three years. In the dirt-floored basement, I found the calling that I had fled from college to find. Every night after work, I descended the curved stairs. Guitar in hand, I played the songs of artists that I loved: Dylan, John Prine, Tom Waits, John Hiatt, and of course, Hank Williams.
“I’m so lonesome I could cry,” “They’re selling postcards of the hanging / They’re painting the passports brown,” “You may see me tonight with an illegal smile”2—those lyrics would peal up the basement steps nightly.
Before long, I began writing songs of my own. The difficulty of bringing a single song to life was astonishing. It felt like grabbing a deep-sea creature by its tail and dragging it from the abyssal depths to the surface. Each beast would wriggle with violence back toward the bottom. Even if I managed to get one out of the water, it died in the sunlight. Or if it lived, it was just plain ugly. The early songs were bad.
I continued this wrestling match with my subconscious for a year before it yielded fruit. I wrote a song that I did not despise. That was an improvement. Then I finished one that I mildly enjoyed. Better still. At last I wrote a song that I, myself, would pay money to hear.
For the next two years, I played those songs in every Chicago music dive: the Double Door, Subterranean, Martyr’s, the Bottom Lounge, Schubas. An amateur demo of mine made it into the hands of the songwriter Steve Earle, and he invited me to open his international tour. I quit my job, gave up my lease, and raced to meet destiny.
The next decade was an apprenticeship. I hired an agent and booked hundreds of shows. Signed a record deal. Drove the tour van, hired a band, paid the salaries. I wrote songs in hotel rooms and slept in greenrooms. Agonized over mixes in studio control rooms and clashed with music producers. (Do I need to mention that I drank too much, or is that implicit?)
I am unsure whether God ever came to speak to me during those years because I had surrounded myself with such a wall of noise—the album schedules, the tepid reviews, the sluggish ticket counts in Buffalo and Iowa City. Any pangs of conscience not drowned out in the noise I outran with constant motion. Indeed, the whole enterprise could have been best described by the title of a book once found in the Springfield Library by Bart Simpson: Selling Your Soul in a Buyer’s Market.
Then one day the constant motion stopped. And I was thrown headlong from my loud ride. The white noise was gone; the stillness was absolute. The voice did not return immediately. But when it finally did, I would not mistake it again.
Fatherhood. That’s what threw me headlong. My son was born in the middle of a sweltering August night in Austin, Texas. But when I first held him, the elation was tempered with fear. It wasn’t the diapers and the bottles that terrified me. It was the enormity of what I would be responsible for teaching him.
Faced with the prospect of teaching values to my son, I concluded that I had none. Until then, I had navigated my life on vibes. Cultural patterns—shallow ones—overlaid with a thin patina of Joseph Campbell. But I did not want to speak to my beautiful son about a “monomyth” or a “universal narrative.” Suddenly, that was weak tea. The notion that his spiritual inheritance would be spoken in grad-school jargon nauseated me.
So, Sunday after Sunday, I would sit in the back pew of our neighborhood church. Determined not to become Catholic, of course, but to crib off of their moral answer sheet. I would take what I needed and escape otherwise untouched so that I could remain a Modern Person in good standing.
Eventually, I introduced myself to the pastor, Father Charlie.
“What brings you here, Joe?” he asked.
“I’m trying to learn some values to teach my son.”
“That’s great,” he explained, “but fundamentally that is not what being Catholic is about. It all hinges on the divinity of Christ. Everything else flows from there.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Did it really happen? Is Christ who he claimed to be?”
“That is not something that I will ever believe,” I told him with emphasis.
* * *
When the voice returned, it was different than the first time. There were no terse directives. It felt less like a father commanding a child and more like a father leading his adult son through a series of questions. The voice would come to me in quiet moments, and I would answer it.
Do you have a Maker?
“I think so.”
Does your Maker love you?
“That’s harder to believe. Much harder. I don’t know.”
If your Maker loved you, what would he do?
“He would talk to me.”
What would he say?
“He would tell me a story.”
Tell you a story?
“He would live out a story.”
Why?
“To teach me. Just as I live out a story to teach my own son.”
What story would he live out?
“The greatest story in history.”
What is the greatest story in history?
“The life of Jesus Christ.”
No! I was desperate to not reach that conclusion. It was embarrassing. My credentials as a Modern Person were in serious jeopardy. There was a final chance for me to avoid that conclusion. I had still not accepted one of the fundamental terms of the dialogue:
Does your Maker love you?
That question perched on my shoulder like a bird that wouldn’t fly away. Curiously, the internal voice never prodded me further on it, never cajoled me with reasons. And rightly so. It was not a reasonable question; it had to be taken on faith. And then one day—I don’t know quite when or why—the bird had flown away and I believed.
Perhaps it was my personal response to the questions that Dylan poses at the end of his song “When He Returns”:
How long can you falsify and deny what is real?
How long can you hate yourself for the weakness you conceal?3
More likely, it was the success of a patient father’s gambit. When I was young, when I held him in contempt, he spoke only the words that I could hear. Then years later, when my heart had been opened by fatherhood, he returned with the words that I must hear.
My Modern Person card was revoked with prejudice. Everything changed. Once again, from life’s expected path, I had absconded.
1 Hank Williams, vocalist, “Lost Highway,” by Leon Payne, recorded March 1, 1949, track 3 on Sing Me a Blue Song, MGM Records E3560, 33⅓ rpm.
2 Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” recorded August 30, 1949, track 12 on Sings Hank Williams, Hickory LPS-134, 33⅓ rpm; Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row,” recorded August 4, 1965, track 10 on Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia CS-9189, 33⅓ rpm; John Prine, “Illegal Smile,” recorded 1971, track 1 on John Prine, Atlantic SD-8296, 33⅓ rpm.
3 Bob Dylan, “When He Returns,” recorded April 30–May 11, 1979, track 9 on Slow Train Coming, Columbia JC-36120, 33⅓ rpm.
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