Coming to Los Angeles: How I Learned to Quit Worrying, and Love This City

THE STORY I'M ABOUT to share with you over the next six weeks is true. It's personal.

The storyline is simple: a conservative Mennonite lad comes to Los Angeles, runs out of money, almost despairs. But then something happens, and his perspective changes.

This novella will be published as a serial piece. This entry is the preface. You'll get one new chapter per week -- every Friday morning.

Preface: Compromise

AN OLD JOKE: A reporter decides to do a story on an Amish family. He interviews the mother and father at the kitchen table. He gets it all down on paper.

"So -- you don't go to movies, you don't drink, you don't smoke, you don't drive cars, you don't listen to the radio" - he stops and looks up.

"So what do you do for fun?"

They look at each other. The wife giggles.

"Well. We have 12 kids."

IN APRIL 1989, I did an internship at a talent agency in London, England. It was my second semester at Richmond College. Before I started, my program director warned me that my new boss, Vincent Shaw, was very different.

"He's not like anyone you've ever met," she warned me. "He puts it like it is."

I decided I would like Mr. Shaw.

At 25 years old, I took myself very seriously. I was a Rotary Scholar, studying abroad. To keep in touch, I wrote a monthly newsletter to 175 people each month, pretty much everyone I knew -- family members, professors, fellow students and church members.

After I began working at the Vincent Shaw Talent Agency, I sent the April edition to my new boss.

MR. SHAW HAD taken a keen interest in mentoring me. Under his supervision, I did mailings, learned to answer the phone, ran errands. I saw shows and reported on potential talent. Mr. Shaw even interviewed an actor upon my recommendation.

Afterwards, with great amusement, he and his secretary, Cherry, asked me if I knew what the word camp meant. I didn't. They laughed. Then they suggested that in the future, I might want to avoid recommending over-the-top actors.

One morning when I came in to work, he sat me down. He recited the first two lines of an old jazz number --

How you gonna keep him down on the farm
After he's seen Paree?

-- and asked me if I had ever heard of it. I looked at him, confused. He shook his head, gesturing to my letter lying on his desk.

"This is pompous shit," Mr. Shaw said.

It was not the reaction I expected.

"If I had my way," Mr. Shaw continued, "I'd give you £500 sterling and cut you loose in this city, let you survive on your own. You don't belong to your community anymore, and you need to figure that out."

I DID NOT TAKE Mr. Shaw's advice. Instead, I went home. And it took me 12 years to begin to realize what Mr. Shaw meant. Sometimes I'm a slow learner.

I struggled to find a compromise -- a way to satisfy my family's expectations while pursuing my dreams. It was impossible.

A CLOSE FRIEND of mine who also left the conservative Mennonite world put it to me this way: "It's hard to talk about our childhood world in cocktail party language -- because it takes too long to explain."

It's true. People need labels. When I say the words Amish-Mennonite or conservative Mennonite, my listeners recall The Witness or Little House on the Prairie or Devil's Playground -- and they assume my world must look like that. It doesn't.

No story from the world of my childhood has penetrated popular fiction. This blog is a sketch pad for my first novel, Schwartz Creek. In it, I'm hoping to capture the essence of the world I knew as a child. It's a world that lives in my head.

Schwartz Creek is fictional -- no, I didn't witness a rape and a killing. My childhood world was not a valley in Southern Ohio with a church built out over a lake. My parents weren't farmers, and my uncle didn't go off to Vietnam and then return. None of this happened. Instead, the story is a metaphor for the ferocious currents that moved through my church community when I was a child.

THE WORLD OF conservative Mennonites is an insular one. Only about 120,000 of these believers exist -- yet most of them believe they are the only true faith. They explain their insularity by reminding themselves that "narrow is the way" -- and very few people locate this path.

Of course, it's absolutely necessary for conservative Mennonites to believe this. After all, their rules are very strict -- and if they didn't believe their way was the truest road to heaven, they'd never have the stamina to stick with it.

What caused me to leave the conservative Mennonites, reject their dogma?

Certainly it was the education I've gotten in both Christian and secular colleges -- allowing me to tie the psychology of submission and dominance to the lure of authoritarianism.

But it took Chaim Potak's novel My Name Is Asher Lev to help me see that I was not the only artist chained to the rock of my birth community dying of thirst. And then as I met others growing up in segregated cultures -- Hasidic Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, isolated Islamic sects, Mormon polygamists, Christian fundamentalists -- I began to understand. I had not been dying alone.

The controlling forces within each of these communities are precisely the same: the dogmatic belief that they are the only true faith, the corrupting influence of absolute spiritual power within the lives of spiritual leaders (always male), and the use of guilt to control and bring back those who stray.

As I talked to these children of fundamentalism about the men who led them, as I read departure stories, as I listened to the common tales of sexual abuse and extreme corporal punishment -- I began to realize that I was part of a common story -- and we had all met the same demons: men who abuse their spiritual authority while genuinely believing that they speak for God.

Perhaps I saw the similarities between my home community and other insular communities around the globe because I had the opportunity to travel abroad.

Strangely enough, I haven't found a single example of a fundamentalist sect that has been started by a woman. By definition, all fundamentalist groups require a man to lead them -- because in the mind of a fundamentalist, only men can speak for a God who of course is male.

I BEGAN TO REALIZE that I could not fulfill the expectations of my parents -- now or later.

My parents would only be truly happy if I married a conservative Mennonite girl, used my writing and teaching gifts to become a minister or parochial school teacher, raised a family of conservative Mennonite children, and followed the standards of the church.

These rules forbade the following "worldly activities" in which I participated: going to the cinema or theatre, watching television, writing plays and secular novels with profane or foul language. The fact that I dated women who dressed stylishly, owned advanced degrees, and believed they were equal to men also hurt my chances of keeping my family happy.

The true depth of my community's attitude towards those outside the faith became especially real to me when I began bringing girlfriends home to meet my family during my college years. My mother's sadness warred with her friendliness. It didn't matter that my girlfriends professed to be Christians -- they weren't conservative Mennonite, and thus, not acceptable for me to marry.

It was difficult for me to watch my new friends get taken in again and again by the embracing vibe of my family and church. Although I tried to explain the rules of my world to them ahead of time, it never worked -- the warmth of my community was too seductive.

Across my childhood, I had seen "non-Mennonites" attempt to join our community. As time went by, they began to understand that some families were more influential than other families. They realized that they would be "new to the community" for the rest of their natural lives -- and only their children or grandchildren would become respected, influential members -- if they did all the right things.

For some, it took years to figure out that they would never be truly part of our culture. I saw them realize too late that you really had to be born into it -- as I had been -- in order to gain complete acceptance by our community. And I saw how the resulting pain of this realization usually ended in bitterness.

In my teens and early 20s, I led the youth group with my peers, encouraging an atmosphere of inclusion. But slowly, I realized there was nothing I could do to change the way my community worked. Ultimately, a person's name was the final determining factor.

I had seen the power of a closed culture up close -- its effects upon the friends I introduced to my community. I realized the truth. The books I was reading, the education I was getting, the people I was meeting -- all came together to help me understand what I was facing.

There could be no compromise.

The insularity of the conservative Mennonite world in which I grew up was as strong as a concrete wall -- and every bit as powerful as an Hasidic Jewish community. In such a world, compromise will damn you. It's all or nothing.

I DON'T BLAME my family for their response.

My decision to leave -- and certainly the frankness of my writing -- has saddened them. Almost all of my siblings have remained within the essential framework of this community. And although they say they do not judge me -- "That is God's job, not ours" -- they cannot accept the route I have taken in life.

A fundamentalist has no other choice. He cannot live within an authoritarian community without believing that his is the only true path. If he believed another way, he would follow it. His adherence to sacred Scripture demands that.

I was taught that the conservative Mennonite community -- with its anachronistic dress code -- is the truest expression of biblical values. My family sees my choices as a lack of appreciation for my heritage, at best. At worst, they believe my choices have sealed my eternal fate.

How does one compromise with that?

TWELVE YEARS AFTER I returned home from London, I realized that instead of finding a compromise, I had gotten 12 years of unhappy family, stomach ulcers, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and recurring panic attacks.

But allow me to back up a bit to the fall of 1998, where my story really begins.

To be continued . . .

NEXT WEEK - Chapter 1: Labyrinth

Comments

[john7815]

Thankyou.

[john7815]

I am waiting for friday, I spent a large time period living in Amsterdam and returned to the rural midwest. Life is now ever stagnant, stiffling, and suffocating my personal identity; incredibly, I find it hard to genuinely leave my relationships of the past, though I have threatened to leave for good, I feel an overwhelming guilt to leave others in mediocrity.

[springsm]

Oh my, I am so looking forward to the rest of this intro into your book. Actually I am looking forward to the book. My grandfather was a Mennonite from PA., altho he was "kicked out" at age 18 or so, I don't think they were the conservative ones. I have not been able to track his PA family and he died when I was a baby (years ago) so there is no one to ask. Interesting history Mr. Denglinger and I would imagine abit painful for you as well.

[mijumom]

I'm into it...looking forward to reading more.

[rlc41]

I look forward to the first chapter. I live in a small rural community that has a large Amish community. I have to admit I know very little about them. I worked with a woman who's parents left an old order Amish community and of course them and their children were shunned. Her father was getting to the age where his older siblings were dying. He could go to the house where his sibling laid but had to leave before the food was bought into the house. Most of what I do know about the community are from the odds and ends stories she would tell.