HOOKED - Andrew Taylor-Troutman

It’s like fishing in the dark … our thoughts are the hooks, / Our hearts the raw bait. — Charles Simic

I turn forty years old in one month. One Sunday evening Bible study over a Zoom video conference, a high schooler senior asked if I’d always wanted to be a pastor.

The summer after my high school graduation, these three guys and I chugged beer and fished the ponds around our suburban neighborhood. They were math and science majors, future engineers. I was pre-law and liked poetry, though I kept that a secret. By the pond’s edge, the mosquitoes were terrible. As I fished, buzzed on cheap beer, I cast my thoughts toward college on the horizon.

By the spring semester of my freshman year, I got high every day after class with some other guys I’d met drinking. We’d pass the joint around the car as one of us drove aimlessly through the neighborhoods close to campus. I’d already changed my major to history and was burning through my savings. I was paranoid about getting caught by the police or, worse yet, my parents.

But I kept casting. I dropped acid twice.

The first Saturday night I was already stoned, which was why I had the nerve. I woke up the next morning on the dorm floor beside my bed still wearing last night’s clothes.

The second time I started seeing tracers of light. I ducked into a bathroom in the back of the fraternity house. I splashed water on my face and looked up into the mirror. My pupils were dilated, although a florescent bulb burned above my head. There were puffy, purple bags under my eyes. Zits splayed across both cheeks. A ratty, brown toboggan high on my head. I spoke to my reflection: “Your name is Andrew. You are Andrew. An-drew.” Who knows how long I gaped at this rough-looking stranger?

I ended up on the rooftop with a young woman I’d had a crush on since the first week of school. We were strictly friends; she called me by my last name like all the frat guys. That night, we watched for shooting stars. It was frightening and thrilling. I confessed my undying love for her. She told me I was on drugs. She added, “There’s the perfect girl for you out there and you’ll marry her one day.” Then, this friend whisper-sang Natalie Merchant’s cover of “One Fine Day” which, twenty years later, I can still hear in my head.

Now we are both married with our own kids. We commiserate about sleepless nights with fussy babies and their blowout diapers. “It can be a real shit show,” she wrote, “but it’s also my favorite show ever.” Amen.

~

I did not get clean and sober until my sophomore year when I was arrested for drug possession. As part of my plea bargain, I showed up at a 12-step program that met on Tuesday evenings at a local Lutheran church. Sitting in the basement of the fellowship hall in a hastily arranged circle of metal folding chairs, I drank bitter coffee as older men shared their stories. Many of them had passed out in gutters. Tales of lost jobs and lost dreams, broken teeth and broken relationships. Despair, nihilism, redemption.

I started attending at a church across town where my faculty advisor attended. After a couple of visits, his pastor let me volunteer with the high school youth group. I felt like I belonged. I had found a purpose. I stopped attending the meetings in the basement, but I kept showing up for youth group. I was hooked.

“Follow me,” a wandering mystic once said to a group of fishermen, including my biblical namesake, “and I will make you fishers of people.” Those guys dropped their nets, left their boats behind. You know when you know.

But why were they chosen? Why have I been fortunate while many others have suffered and died?

After graduation, I was hired by a Presbyterian church as the full-time youth director. I wouldn’t meet the woman I’d marry for another two years. I rented an apartment near a public lake. On days off, I’d buy a 20 oz. Diet Mountain Dew and fish alone with my old rod. Cast and watch and wait. The mosquitoes were always biting. Every now and then, I’d reel in a small fish. After gently freeing the hook from its mouth, I’d watch the little guy disappear back into the dark water.

Some call it grace, others luck. Providence, destiny, or fate. Let other theologians dispute the relative amount of human free will in the hands of the Almighty. As I turn forty years old, I know to be grateful for my story and who I am.

~

These reflections have surfaced a memory from the depths. I was about eight years old when a babysitter tucked me into bed and called from the bedroom door, “Good night, Andrew.” The calling of my name hit me like an electric shock—the sudden realization that I had my one life to live. I whispered to myself in the dark, “You will always be Andrew.” I shivered, both frightened and thrilled.

Andrew Taylor-Troutman serves as poet pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, NC. His fourth book, Gently Between the Words, was published in 2019.