out in service

Saturday mornings to a kid in the typical American household are sacred. They're for cartoons, maybe little league practice, some sort of sleeping in, etc. That's what they're for. Eat some cereal in front of the television and do whatever else you pretty much feel like other than what you might get dragged to by your parents. Every Saturday the sun goes up on the sleeping faces of America's children and lights the way forward for whatever they'd like to get into.

Personally, I can't say I ever dreaded Saturday mornings but I never really looked forward to them either.

Most, maybe not most, but a lot of those days for me were filled with something all children adore- proselytizing. The dictionary defines proselytizing thusly- it's the one thing every kid wants to do that only a few lucky ones actually get to do and it involves knocking on strangers' doors and asking them if they'd be interested in accepting some bible based literature written to let them know about god's plan for the Earth- Armageddon.

Proselytizing. 

Yes, friends, I was one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Did you pick up on the grammar there? I was one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Not A Jehovah's Witness, not a Jehovah, but one of Jehovah's Witnesses. So truth be told I often referred to myself as a Jehovah's Witness, but being older and wiser now I can remember the phrasing to be 'one of' rather than the indefinite article 'A'. Very important stuff I'm happy to drag you through.

So Saturday mornings me, my older brother, my younger sister, would all get woken up by our parents to go out in service. More jargon, "out in service." That's what they called it when you go knocking on doors at 10am. Probably still is now but to be fair I haven't checked in on the happenings of the Christian congregation in quite a while. I actually don't believe in god at the moment. Or maybe I believe in god and hate god. Any way you slice it, my soul is up for grabs.

Here's a little more to set the stage- my father is Puerto Rican having moved to New York City around the age of 8 and lived in Park Slope for many years. My mother is mostly Irish and got more than her fair share of abuse out on Long Island in a town called Ronkonkoma smack dab in the center of Long Island. They met at a district convention for Jehovah's Witnesses held at Yankee Stadium in the early '70s. They were both serving punch to thirsty attendees and one of my mother's first memories of the man I call Dad is him making a fuss over how concentrated the punch was or whether people were handing out too much or some other triviality. They wed quickly, as religious youths are wont to do, him being nine years her senior. Part of that was my father's wish to extricate her from her abusive environment and part of it, I'm sure, was the flamboyant dexterity with which my mother served punch. 

They lived in the city, then Jersey City, and then on Long Island in a town called Centereach even more smack dab in the center of the fish. So smack dab they called it Centereach. Not a rich town, not a poor town. Maybe a little poorer than surrounding towns, but everybody did OK. It might have just sucked a little bit. 

I think everything sucks for everyone no matter where they lived or where they grew up. Poverty is only that in comparison to comfort and stability and everybody does such a good job at keeping up appearances that it always looked like everybody was ok. Hard to say in retrospect how good or bad we really had it out there but I grew up without a Nintendo and one year the school gave us food for Thanksgiving. Weird to get that from school because we didn't officially celebrate the holiday, but I think it was just the matter of my dad being unemployed at the time. We ate it with neither ceremony nor mention of the holiday it represented. Probably on a day other than Thanksgiving or as we called it Thursday. 

We didn't celebrate the holiday because we were Jehovah's Witnesses and they don't celebrate holidays or birthdays, but you probably knew that already because you have probably made fun of me at some point. I'm sorry, I'm sure that's not true. You're a good person. You have tolerance for other religions and are respectful to all creed and culture. You have that in common with everyone from Long Island.

Ever met a Long Islander? Most likely they have charmed you with their accent or their nail art and regaled you with some endearing and heartwarming anecdote of volunteering at the local children's hospital or soup kitchen. Just kidding, they probably disgusted you with their accent and nail art and told a story of the time they didn't care about something they definitely should have cared about. All of everyone is exactly that. If you're from there I am talking specifically about you personally and we have a problem we can discuss later the way we were taught in keeping with the tradition of our people by cursing and screaming. Internet sensation Bagel Boss guy is from Long Island, and that's how all of us are, all of the time. 

Long Island is one suburb after another from Queens to central Suffolk. It's not awesome. There are beautiful beaches but they're chock full of obnoxious townies. Once I went to the beach on Memorial Day and there was a fight. It was ignoble. I stand before you as a mournful ambassador apologizing for all the human backwash flooding up from Penn Station into the city on days like Santa Con or any given Friday. I'll pause and admit that not everyone's experience out on the island may have been as miserable as my own and I will happily admit that there were and are good things happening out there, but for a while, for me, it was really touch and go. If there's time I'll tell you about the kid I played street hockey with who robbed my house with his pals in the summer after 8th grade. He turned out a minister somewhere in Florida and tried to reconnect with me via Myspace friend request years later. Or the first (in fairness first and only) time I saw cocaine at the high school lunch table or the kid I was best friends who wound up in jail for manslaughter or something for shooting heroin up his friend's arm and the kid just ups and dies. I know, these things happen, but it's important for me to provide a complete picture because I'm sure your vision of Long Island is a wonderland of beautiful homes and Saturdays filled with lawn mowing homeowners and well-intentioned religious apologists meandering through friendly neighborhoods touting the promise of a paradise Earth via Armageddon to grateful and receptive friends they haven't met yet. 

Now as far as all that goes, I was one of those friendly apologists and I did that until age 18ish on most Saturday mornings. Saturdays would start with waking up and putting on clothes for church. We called church "Kingdom Hall" but for convenience's sake I'll say church. I went to church three times a week. Church three times a week and if we were lucky some bonus door to door time. We called it that colloquially, "going door to door". I'll say that again, I went to church three times a week and got to canvas Long Island neighborhoods every Saturday morning and I turned out fine and never wondered what it was like dress up for Halloween.  

Who really needs Halloween, when you get to go door to door proselytizing? And we did it every Saturday, or Sundays, or Saturdays AND Sundays, or really any given day on summer vacation. Typically two hour stints and an average of 4-10 hours a month. I was what they called an 'unbaptized publisher', and as such my father thought it best to shoot for about ten hours a month of going out in service. Plus church three times a week. Every week. For 18 years.  

Okay, so wake up, brush teeth and hair, put on some church clothes. All my church clothes were well fitting, classy, not handed down, and smelled great, especially during wonderful wonderful puberty. Again, simply false. I stank and wore whatever I could scrape together. I remember having a lot of church clothes because we'd take whatever anyone would give us, and I also remember nothing ever fitting right or looking totally normal, and we're talking 1980 to 1999 when fashion wasn't really that fashionable. All a kid really needs is a tie, a button down shirt, some slacks, some goddamn slacks, maybe some penny loafers or those leather shoes with the two tassles. How hard could that have been? Moving on, I'm dressed in whatever was lying around, smelled like I was dressed up in whatever was lying around and we're in the car and we go to somebody's house to meet up.

Time for the inside scoop.

These little meetings were well organized, mostly. We'd meet up in a group ranging from five to twenty or so and we'd know what neighborhood to venture off into because we had maps. We had little cards called 'territories' that were basically just maps split up into little cards and we paid attention to where to go because we didn't want to inundate any particular area with too much of god's truth, unlike my brain. So if it ever felt like that, somebody wasn't doing their job. So we meet either at the Kingdom Hall or somebody's actual home, organize ourselves according to who's going where, somebody prays, and then we go out into the world, usually carpooling so there's not a parade's worth of vehicles on any particular road.  

That's where the fun begins. We park our minivans or whathaveyou and soon the neighbors know we're coming and they're out on their Long Island porches with pitchers of lemonade on small patio tables and the ladys of the houses are in aprons standing with trays of tall glasses to welcome us and our bible based tracts and magazines. We barely ever had to knock seeing how the good news of eventual Armageddon travels faster than we can walk. We'd get lemonade from one house, brownies or cookies from another, maybe a glass bottle of Coca-cola cracked open from an old timey coke machine in the garage of some weekend mechanic fixing up a Shelby Mustang. So many soft drinks, so much appreciation for the truth of the one true god, all happening on pastoral Long Island. Such a familiar scene to me I forget that most people never got to experience the joy of coming of age as a young disciple of Christ who didn't celebrate his birthday, didn't say the pledge of allegiance, knew Santa was bullshit, and smelled like other people's food.

Again, there was actually very little lemonade. I can't actually recall any lemonade, but to be fair we weren't dodging garden hoses or water balloons either. People were either polite or they weren't. We'd walk up to doors in pairs, with one person taking the lead and the other providing some sort of support, or even better it was me and my Father. I was a kid and the script went something like this:

"Hi, my name is Jeremy and this is my father, and we're coming by offering a bible based publication called the Watchtower, this one's called 'Do All Religions Please God?', and if you'd like to read it I'd leave it with you." 

Easy-peasy.

That's an actual title of one of those magazines from September 1996.  Not easy peasy, the 'do all religions please god.' I googled it. For many years we would charge twenty-five cents a magazine, but that changed at some point, then they'd get it for free and we'd ask for a small donation if we felt it appropriate to do so. 

My dad was a little more wordy. He'd ask some actual questions, maybe make some small talk, no big deal. It would be somebody's job to write down who wasn't home so we could come back and find them some other time. We'd also write down who took a magazine so we could follow up and see how they liked it. It was serious business. There were lives at stake and as such, there was a lot of accounting. Every year, in a Watchtower magazine, they would publish how many hours were spent door to door in each country that had people spending time going door to door. It's a lot of countries. It truly is. Our good friends at Wikipedia tell me that these humble bible students have grown from their inception to number somewhere around 8.5 million members. 

The best part... ahem... the most godawful insufferable part of doing all this was doing it as a kid. I'd get real anxious about knocking on the door of a house where somebody I went to school might have lived. Kids can be mean, even on Long Island. They can be mean to kids who do different things, like not say the pledge, not decorate Christmas things, or not sing Christmas songs because they were "against my religion". That's a line I'd serve up pretty frequently. Against my religion. Anyways, I only had to knock on doors of a kid I knew's house a handful of times but I'd always be on the lookout for bikes, basketball hoops, any sign a child might be present in the house because if they were and I went to school with them well that would just be the worst goddamn thing in the goddamn world. Worse even than being out in whatever weather other than rain or snow, worse than missing cartoons, worse than not celebrating anything, ever, even the things we did celebrate. 

Kids would ask me if I knew how old I was. I actually was asked this the other day but it's OK, I handled it gracefully as I've been answering it for years, but I'm bringing it up because it's a real question I would really get asked. They'd ask what I did on Christmas and I'd shrug. Christmas was just another cold day in December. Like my birthday, December 6th. You have almost four months to think of a gift. Anyway, you're not really different until someone let's you know, and they will let you know.

So no Christmas presents? 
No Christmas presents.

No birthday cake? 
No birthday cake.

I heard you guys can't take medicine. 
We can take medicine we just don't accept blood transfusions.

Why not?
Bible says not to eat blood and it's like the same thing I guess? 

Once you guys knocked on my door at like six in the morning and my dad yelled at you.
Nobody does that that early.

It was really funny we chased you with a hose.
Of course you did.

Who is Jehovah anyway?
It's god's name... it's in your Bible too I thi...

So what if I got you a Christmas present would you take it?
What about a birthday present?
Do you guys not celebrate Halloween because you can only go door to door to give things and candy is Satan's vegetables?
What if you got in a car accident and needed a blood transfusion?
What if you accidentally eat blood?
Can you eat your own blood?
Will you go to hell?
No hell? Is that because your life's already hell?
How about next Christmas I bake you a birthday cake and give you a tiny glass of delicious blood and maybe we say the pledge of allegiance a few times just for fun. I can bring over some pictures of what hell looks like and you can see why my God can beat up your god. 


You get the picture. I still wind up making apologies for their beliefs and my parents still actually believe in them as much as they are still practicing. All of their children have now defected. The religion has a retention rate of about 37% and I am a proud 63 percenter. I've made my peace with everything. I simply song and danced my way into convincing them to let me go off to college and got a tattoo. That was 1999. Twenty years ago almost to the day. More time out than in, actually, and I never thought about either of those facts until today, August 15, 2019. 

But let's be clear-

I really feel like I escaped something. Not everybody has it as easy as me. When those kids turn about 15 they start getting baptized. That's a symbolic ceremony with water and everything where they commit their lives to god. If you fuck up then, you're disfellowshipped. That means nobody from the Kingdom Hall can talk to you except your immediate family. It's very stigmatizing seeing as how there's already a world of people you shouldn't be associating with and the ones you are allowed to associate with aren't allowed to anymore. I was never baptized, so I dodged a bullet there. Never baptized, never married young, never got beat with a bible, never touched by a priest.

I have no obligations on Sunday or Saturday mornings and I believe there is no life after death. I have nothing worth saving my neighbor from. In fact, I don't really belong to any organization other than work. I don't really belong anywhere. I've been wandering the desert for half the time Moses did and with about as much to show for it. What do I have? I have this. You. Us.

Thank god.