The Discomfort Zone (8 page)

“Just a reminder,” Mutton said before we dispersed for the night. “The three rules around here are no booze. No sex. And no drugs. Also, if you find out that
somebody else
has broken a rule, you have to come and tell me or tell one of the advisors. Otherwise it's the same as if you broke the rule yourself.”

Mutton cast a glowering eye around the circle. The dinner thieves seemed greatly amused.

 

AS AN ADULT,
when I say the words “Webster Groves” to people I've just met, I'm often informed that I grew up in a suffocatingly wealthy, insular, conformist town with a punitive social hierarchy. The twenty-odd people who have told me this over the years have collectively spent, by my estimate, about twenty minutes in Webster Groves, but each of them went to college in the seventies and eighties, and a fixture of sociology curricula in that era was a 1966 CBS documentary called
16 in Webster Groves.
The film, an early experiment in hour-long prime-time sociology, reported on the attitudes of suburban sixteen-year-olds. I've tried to explain that the Webster Groves depicted in it bears minimal resemblance to the friendly, unpretentious town I knew when I was growing up. But it's useless to contradict TV; people look at me with suspicion, or hostility, or pity, as if I'm deeply in denial.

According to the documentary's host, Charles Kuralt,
Webster Groves High School was ruled by a tiny elite of “soshies” who made life gray and marginal for the great majority of students who weren't “football captains,” “cheer-leaders,” or “dance queens.” Interviews with these all-powerful soshies revealed a student body obsessed with grades, cars, and money. CBS repeatedly flashed images of the largest houses in Webster Groves; of the town's several thousand small and medium-sized houses there were no shots at all. For no apparent reason but the sheer visual grotesqueness of it, the filmmakers included nearly a minute of footage of grownups in tuxedos and cocktail dresses rock-and-roll dancing at a social club. In a disappointed tone, as if to suggest just how oppressive the town was, Kuralt reported that the number of tough kids and drinkers at the high school was “
very
low,” and although he allowed that a “minority twenty percent” of sixteen-year-olds did place high value on intelligence, he was quick to inject a note of Orwellian portent: “That kind of thinking can imperil your social standing at Webster High.”

The film wasn't entirely wrong about Webster High in the mid-sixties. My brother Tom, though not one of the film's 688 eponymous sixteen-year-olds (he was born a year late), remembers little about his high-school years besides accumulating good grades and drifting in social backwaters with all the other nonsoshies; his main recreation was bombing around with friends who had cars. Nor was the film wrong about the town's prevailing conservatism: Barry Goldwater had carried Webster Groves in 1964.

The problem with
16
was tonal. When Kuralt, with a desperate grin, asked a group of Webster Groves parents whether a civil rights march wouldn't maybe “sort of inject some life into things around here,” the parents recoiled from him as if he were insane; and the filmmakers, unable to imagine that you could be a nice person and still not want your sixteen-year-old in a civil rights march, cast Webster Groves as a nightmare of mind control and soulless materialism. “Youth dreams, we had believed, of adventure,” Kuralt voice-overed. “But three-quarters of these teenagers listed as
their main goal in life a good-paying job, money, success. And we had thought that, at sixteen, you are filled with yearning and dissatisfaction. But ninety percent say they like it in Webster Groves. Nearly half said they wouldn't mind staying here
for the rest of their lives
.” Kuralt laid ominous emphasis on this final fact. The most obvious explanation for it—that CBS had stumbled onto an unusually congenial community—seemed not to have crossed his mind.

The film's broadcast, on February 25, 1966, drew so many angry phone calls and letters from Webster Groves that the network put together an extraordinary hour-long follow-up,
Webster Groves Revisited,
and aired it two months later. Here Kuralt came as close to apologizing as he could without using the word “sorry.” He offered conciliatory footage of soshies watching the February broadcast and clutching their heads at the pompous things they'd said on camera; he conceded that children who grew up in safe environments might still become adventurers as adults.

The core value in Webster Groves, the value whose absence in
16
most enraged its citizens, was a kind of apolitical niceness. The membership of First Congregational may have been largely Republican, but it consistently chose liberal pastors. The church's minister in the 1920s had informed the congregation that his job was “clinical,” not personal. (“The successful minister is a psychoanalyst,” he said. “If that thought shocks you, let me tell you that Jesus was the master psychoanalyst of all time. Can a minister do better than follow Him?”) In the 1930s, the lead pastor was a fervid socialist who wore a beret and smoked cigarettes while riding to and from the church on a bicycle. He was succeeded by an Army combat veteran, Ervine Inglis, who preached pacifism throughout the Second World War.

Bob Roessel, the son of a local Republican lawyer, grew up going to the church under its socialist pastor and spent his summers with an uncle in New Mexico who administered the Federal Writers' Project in the state for the Works Projects Administration. Traveling around the Southwest, Roessel fell in love with Navajo culture and decided to become a
missionary—an ambition that survived until he went to seminary and met actual working missionaries, who spoke of leading savages from darkness into light. Roessel went and asked Ervine Inglis, whose proclivities were Unitarian (he didn't believe in the effectiveness of prayer, for example), if a person could be both Christian
and
Navajo. Inglis said yes. Abandoning the seminary, Roessel married the daughter of a Navajo medicine man and dedicated his life to serving his adoptive people. On visits to Webster Groves to see his mother, he set up a table at First Congregational and sold blankets and silver jewelry to raise money for the tribe. He gave barn-burning speeches on the greatness of the Navajos, telling church members that their Midwestern world, their shady lawns and good schools and middle-management jobs at Monsanto, would be
heaven
to his other people. “The Navajos,” he said, “have nothing. They live in the desert with nothing. And yet the Navajos have something you don't have: the Navajos believe in God.”

In the fall of 1967, the church's new associate minister, Duane Estes, gathered together sixteen teenagers and one seminary student and made a proposition: How would they like to form a group to raise money to go to Arizona over spring vacation to help the Navajos? Out in the town of Rough Rock, Bob Roessel was starting a “demonstration school,” the first Indian school in the country for which the Bureau of Indian Affairs would be ceding control to a local Indian school board, and he needed volunteers to work in the community. First Congregational's old senior-high group, Pilgrim Fellowship, had lately fallen on hard times (this may have had something to do with the black Pilgrim hats its members were expected to wear at meetings). Estes, a former prep-school chaplain and football coach, jettisoned the word “Pilgrim” (also the hats) and proposed a different kind of pilgrimage, a football coach's pilgrimage: Let's go out in the world and hit somebody! He'd anticipated that a couple of station wagons would suffice for the Arizona trip, but by the time the group left for Rough Rock, a day after the
shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr., it filled a chartered bus.

The lone seminary student, Bob Mutton, was there on the bus with all the clean-cut suburban kids, sporting big sideburns and wearing his outsider's glower. Mutton had grown up in a blue-collar town outside Buffalo. He'd been a bad boy in high school, a pursuer of girls in the hulking '49 Buick convertible that he and his father, a machinist, had fixed up. It happened that one girl whom Mutton was particularly chasing belonged to a local church group, and the group's leader took an interest in him, urging him to apply to college. He ended up at Elmhurst College, a church-affiliated school outside Chicago. For a couple of years, he kept up his antisocial pursuits; he hung out with bad boys and he liked them. Then, in his fourth year of immersion in Elmhurst, he announced to his parents that he was going to marry a classmate, a working-class Chicago girl, and go to seminary. His father didn't like the seminary idea—couldn't a person be a Christian and still go to law school?—but Mutton felt he had a calling, and he enrolled at Eden Theological Seminary, in Webster Groves, in the fall of 1966.

It was a time when schools like Eden were attracting students who coveted the military draft classification, IV-D, which was given to seminarians. Mutton and his first-year friends had rowdy parties in the dorm and laughed in the faces of the pious upperclassmen who complained about the noise. The longer Mutton and his wife stayed in Webster Groves, though, the less social life they had. Webster Groves wasn't a town of blue bloods, but it was full of upward middle-class striving, and the Muttons seldom met young couples they felt comfortable with. Mutton ate with his fork in his fist, like a shovel. He drove a car that burned almost as much oil as gas. He paid his school bills by working as a tile layer. When the time came to choose his fieldwork, in his second year at Eden, he was one of only two people in his class to sign up for youth ministry. He'd become aware of a huge submerged population of lost teenagers, some of them good students, some of them roughnecks, some of them just
misfits, all of them undernourished by the values of their parents, and, unlike CBS, he gave them full credit for yearning and dissatisfaction. He'd been a kid like this himself. Still was one, basically.

In churches the size of First Congregational, senior-high groups typically have thirty or forty members—the number that Fellowship had attracted in its first year. By June 1970, when First Congregational hired Mutton to replace Duane Estes, the group's membership had doubled to eighty, and in the first two years of Mutton's ministry, at the historical apex of American disenchantment with institutional authority, it doubled again. Every weekday after school, church elders had to pick their way through teenage feet in sandals, Keds, and work boots. There was a clutch of adoring girls who practically lived in Mutton's office, vying for space on his beat-up sofa, beneath his psychedelic Jesus poster. Between this office and the church's meeting hall, dozens of other kids in embroidered smocks and denim shirts were playing guitars in competing keys while cigarette smoke whitely filled the long-necked soda bottles into which everyone persisted in dropping butts despite complaints from the vending-machine company.

“I'll ask the youth minister to ask them again not to do that,” the infinitely patient church secretary kept promising the company.

Kids from other churches joined the group for the romance of Arizona, for the twenty-hour marathons of live music that the bus rides in both directions quickly became, and for the good-looking crowds that came to the acoustic and electric concerts that Fellowship musicians held in the church on Friday nights. The biggest draw, though, was Mutton himself. As the overplayed song then had it, “To sing the blues / You've got to live the dues,” and Mutton's blue-collar background and his violent allergy to piousness made him a beacon of authenticity to the well-groomed kids of Webster Groves. Working with adolescents was notoriously time-consuming, but Mutton, lacking a social life, had time for it. In his simmering and strutting and cursing, he stood for the
adolescent alienation that nobody else over twenty in Webster Groves seemed to understand.

Mutton on a basketball court was a maniac with blazing eyes and a soaking-wet T-shirt. He whipped the ball to weak players at the same finger-breaking velocity as he did to strong ones; if you didn't get your feet planted when he was taking the ball to the basket, he knocked you down and ran right over you. If you were a Navajo elder and you saw a busload of middle-class white kids arriving on your land with guitars and paintbrushes, and if you went to Mutton and asked him why the group had come, he gave you the only right answer: “We came here mostly for ourselves.” If you were a Fellowship member and you happened to be riding in his car when he stopped to buy Communion supplies, he turned to you like a peer and asked for your help: “What kind of wine should I be looking for?” He talked about sex the same way. He wondered what you thought of the European idea that Americans were passive in bed, and whether you knew the joke about the Frenchman who found a woman lying on a beach and started having sex with her, and his friends pointed out that she was dead (“Oh, sorry, I thought she was American”). He seemed ready to be guided by your judgment when he asked you what you made of certain New Testament miracles, like the loaves and the fishes. What did you think really happened there? And maybe you ventured the guess that some of the five thousand people who came to hear Jesus had had provisions hidden in their robes, and Jesus' message of brotherhood moved them to share their privately hoarded food, and giving begat giving, and this was how the five thousand were fed. “So a kind of miracle of socialism?” Mutton said. “That would be miracle enough for me.”

“Parents complaining because their high-school youngster spends too much time at church!” the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
exclaimed in a full-page article about Fellowship in November 1972. “Parents forbidding a high schooler to go to church as a punishment!” Some parents, both inside and outside First Congregational, thought that Fellowship
might even be a cult. Mutton in poor light was mistakable for Charles Manson, and it was unsettling how much the kids looked forward to Sunday nights, saving their favorite, most worn-out clothes for the occasion and throwing fits if they missed even one meeting. But most parents recognized that, given the state of intergenerational relations in the early seventies, things could have been a whole lot worse. Mutton had the trust of the church's senior minister, Paul Davis, and key support from several leading church elders who had gone on early Arizona trips and come home sold on Fellowship. A few conservative congregants complained to Davis about Mutton's style, his cigars and his obscenities, and Davis listened to the complaints with active sympathy, nodding and amiably wincing and repeating, in his extraordinarily soothing voice, that he understood their concerns and was really grateful that they had gone to the trouble of sharing them with him. Then he closed his office door and took no action of any kind.