Crazy for God (24 page)

Kathy left L’Abri, and just before she did I lost my virginity to Mandy, a beautiful twenty-year-old, all because Dad took me along on a speaking trip to Covenant College, an evangelical school located on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Actually, I lost it back in L’Abri with Mandy a few weeks later; but I met her at Covenant, where I kissed her in the library and, while Dad was lecturing to the whole student body, got my hands down her panties while on the bed of Dr. Barnes, the college president. (Mom, Dad, and I were staying in his home.) When Mandy traveled to L’Abri, I met her at Geneva Airport and we necked for an hour, all the way from Geneva to Aigle station. We had cheerless intercourse in my attic studio a few days later. I ejaculated after about three seconds and two thrusts. Within a few weeks, I was able to manage five or six thrusts. Why she was interested in sex with a young bad lover, a horny dolt, remains a mystery. Maybe it had something to do with me being the guru-of-the-moment’s son.

I played sex like I played soccer: no hands and go straight
for the goal. She had had six other boyfriends and an abortion, she said. Our “relationship” lasted for about three months. Kathy-the-virtuous used to pound on my bedroom door when she knew we were having sex, trying to make me behave according to the principles L’Abri officially stood for. My parents, as usual, were nowhere in sight, either to reprimand me or to tell me to use condoms. How their failure to be effective parents squares with Kathy’s worship of my mother and father as people oh-so wise, I don’t know.

The odd thing was how the line between whom we were trying to reach for Jesus, and those doing the reaching—in other words, my parents—was blurring. American pastors would sometimes visit and compliment my parents on being able to “reach,” and put up with, “all these hippies.” What they didn’t realize was that we Schaeffers had
become
these hippies.

Mandy modeled for me, and most of the modeling sessions ended in my lickety-split version of in-out bad sex. My nude paintings from that period seem rather hurried.

During the period Kathy remembers so fondly, Dad was at his angriest. And my sister Priscilla was about to have her first complete nervous breakdown. A fight was brewing between my brothers-in-law that would eventually split L’Abri. On some days, Mom was hiding bruises on her arms; on other days, she was flirting shamelessly with Roger, a handsome “sensitive poet” from San Francisco, twenty years younger than her. This was the source of my parents’ biggest fights.

Mom would take Roger to pray with her in the woods, to her prayer trees—a great and unique honor!—where he would collect moss, twigs, and flowers and make lovely Japanese-style arrangements. Dad was reduced to glaring fury by these activities. He never so much as picked a bunch of flowers, and now here was this Roger, writing poems, empathizing with Mom’s “if-only” wistful remembrances of opportunities lost, and endlessly seeking her spiritual advice.