(derekbaker)

The Bells in My Head

kay, so that was weird.

I had to get to church early to play the bells last Sunday. It was my first time, actually: the bells are up in the tower, but you play them from one of the ranks on the organ, and we have a small group who volunteer to play two verses of three or four hymns on the bells before the service as people are coming in.

I had gone through my first hymn, and my friend Ned was standing next to me at the organ console giving me encouragement and explaining which switches go on or off before and after, and I get through the second hymn, and it's on the third hymn -- which is the toughest, and I have to transpose it down a key to play on the very limited scale available with our bells -- when I hear Ned whisper, "Oh, my gosh!" I thought I'd done something wrong.

"What??" I say, as I'm playing the hymn "Crown Him With Many Crowns" (we'd be singing it in a few minutes, as one of those traditionally sung on the last Sunday before Advent, sometimes known as the Feast of Christ the King).

"There's a guy who just came up to the altar," he said. I glance quickly to my right and see some young guy in the chancel start to kneel down in front of our communion altar. "I can't really look," I said, "or I'll flub this."

"He's...he's taking off his shirt!" Ned said. So I glanced again to my right, on a whole note, which I could hold a bit longer than even was warranted. And sure enough, he was.

My peripheral vision isn't great with my glasses on, but I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was arching his back with his hands extended, in something like a cross between Alvin Ailey and a yoga move. "This is so bizarre," Ned said.

We're both whispering, of course, but we could probably haved spoken in normal tones of voice at this point and no one would be paying attention to what we were saying -- or to my bell-playing, for that matter.

I gave a quick glance again as I ended the first verse. "He's in remarkably good shape for a crazy person," I observed.

As I started the second verse, I saw one of the assistant sextons come up to the front and approach the man -- not aggressively (we used to have a sexton, who was a wonderful old Haitian guy, who would bodily and forcibly grab and remove disruptive crazy people -- which happens more often than you'd think, even for a church in Greenwich Village in New York City) -- but definitely in a careful way; he may have thought the guy might have a gun or a knife on him, which was perfectly possible.

The guy put his shirt back on and the assistant sexton led him back down the aisle and out of my peripheral view. Apparently, he left the building about as quickly as he had rushed in, and the rector saw him just a few minutes later, headed back up Fifth Avenue, possibly to pull the same stunt at First Presbyterian next door. You never know.

That was my last hymn. Our organist and choirmaster showed up to play the prelude just as I was shutting things down, but he hadn't seen any of the commotion, so we told him. I think he was sorry he'd missed it.

Of course this would happen on my debut on the bells, which is probably the largest audience for which I've ever played keyboards (if you consider the neighborhood that's in earshot), and especially on a hymn (with accidentals, no less) that I was transposing.

The rector, who was standing at the door greeting people as the guy rushed in and was again rushed out, seemed to think, and he's probably right, that the guy was at the end of a long, all-night crystal meth bender, and probably out of his mind. He said he had the jerky walk and mannerisms associated with people he'd seen on speed or maybe acid. (Our rector came of age in the 60s.) While I myself can say the guy was maybe "tweaked out on tina," the truth is, I am so ignorant of drugs and drug culture, I only know lines like that from watching Queer as Folk when it was on Showtime.

When I told my dad on the phone about my bell debut later that evening, I told him that the rector thought the guy probably was on drugs. "Yeah," my dad said, "or else needed to be." Which could also be true. Funny how that brain chemistry stuff works.

Labels: church, personal

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