Andreas Fleps

Neon Altar

When I was in high school, a nightclub converted into a house of God, and every weekend I made a pilgrimage to observe an electronic sabbath. Every weekend, I got to be adorned in its LED lights like Joseph in his dazzling, Technicolor coat.
The club was named Zero Gravity, and it used to be located in the western suburbs of Chicago. On the outside, it looked like a shithole. It was wrapped in white-painted brick, and the roof displayed the architectural essence of a 1990s Pizza Hut.
But once you got inside… it still looked like a shithole. The floor had a faded and fraying dark gray carpet with a design that reminded me of fireworks and was covered in stains comprised of melted snow and salt from the winter months, sweat, gum, and vomit. There was a scuffed, black tiled dance floor. Dust clung to the ceiling’s vents, pipes, and lighting fixtures, as well as the thick blackout draperies. Anything wooden, from the tables to the platforms girls would dance on, was chipped. And small, grainy, and scratched TVs lined the walls, playing old music videos. 
The club was for those aged between sixteen and nineteen who couldn’t yet get into the real deal, or didn’t possess fake IDs. It was also a place for people who wanted to listen to live EDM when the genre was still a subculture, and not nearly as popular and mainstream as it is today.
Was it a bit trashy? Yes. Could it be sketchy? Absolutely.
But I’ve heard more hallowed sermons emanating from a DJ booth than a pulpit, and within those vibrating walls, I discovered a baptismal of goosebumps; how only a sinner contains the imagination to wring a blessing out of what God hasn’t touched.
I attended an evangelical/fundamentalist school in the late 2000s where you had to sign a pledge to foster a personal relationship with Christ (their American/right wing/capitalistic perspective of Him), adopt and cultivate a biblical worldview (their acute/literal/morally obsessed interpretation), and above all else, not to drink, smoke, do drugs, or God forbid, fornicate. (Although dry humping was widely utilized due to its venereal grey area. Teenage Christians must be some of its most dutiful practitioners.)
I can’t say I honored any of the moral terms of the pledge. However, I did read the Bible with interest, and being a chronic repeater of the sinner’s prayer from an early age, I’d ask for Jesus to come into my heart over and over again because it never felt as if He’d entered, turned the lights on, and made Himself feel at home. My heart was like a dark, dusty room where I couldn’t find evidence of His fingerprints, despite being told I had the proper forensics and correct blueprints to reveal Him. I’d been sold a faith that multiple aspects of myself refused to buy into, yet I internalized what it was selling all the same. I was furnished with the guilt of God’s absence.
In the course of that time, I first encountered apophatic theology without knowing the term (I would later go on to study theology in college), how you can speak of God via negation; by describing what He isn’t, like generating a composite image out of all the pictures that display Him poorly. Down the school’s halls, in its chapel, and through the teachers’ and students’ actions and words, I glimpsed where God and His son weren’t, who God and His son couldn’t possibly be.
I remember a faculty member introducing a guest speaker—a friend of his—and he proceeded to tell the story about the horrors of being homosexual, and how the “lifestyle” turned him into a drug addict, and, praise Jesus, he was no longer gay, which meant he was no longer an addict.
I looked around the auditorium and saw an individual trying to wipe away and hide his tears. He was sinking in his seat as if he were a shipwreck.
I felt horrible for him, and it made me wonder how it was acceptable or even allowed for a school to be indoctrinating minds at an age when they’re most impressionable with toxic, outdated, and harmful teachings.
The answer was simple: the parents wanted such ideologies taught. They paid extra for it.
Or during a period one day, a cop came to visit the teacher he was engaged to. He brought her roses and a note to the collective, drawn out “Awwwwww” and giggles from some in the class.
A few minutes later, I went to her desk to ask for help with a question I was having problems with, and the note was folded, but not enough. I could just make out the words “can’t wait,” “you,” and “ride me,” which there’s nothing wrong with! Have a great time! Sex is a vital component of a healthy relationship! Unless you believe in, are a part of, and represent an institution that preaches it’s a sin to have sex before marriage in the first place.
She spoke at one of the chapels a couple of months later on the importance of celibacy. She claimed she and her fiancée hadn’t even kissed yet, and the Lord had blessed their relationship because of it. At the end, she basked in the applause.
If “God is dead…And we have killed him,” as Nietzsche proclaimed, the idea of Him was killed in me there, at the hands of His prejudiced, hypocritical, and holier-than-thou followers.
It’s such an old, frequent story.
When I first started to attend the school in my sophomore year, I was picked on. I’d roll into the school’s parking lot on a Monday morning with the likes of Deadmau5, Kaskade, Afrojack, and Swedish House Mafia booming from the speakers of my black Nissan coupe. I’d walk my bony ass through the atrium’s doors in an Ed Hardy or bejeweled Affliction T-shirt, jeans with fleur-de-lis emblems embroidered on the back pockets, and a pair of Jordans (at least there wasn’t a hardcore dress code). I was also rocking a blonde and black mohawk I had no business having, considering how curly my hair is. But I had a miniature, blue flat iron and hordes of styling products at my disposal, which allowed me to conjure miracles atop my head.
I had presumed the kids would be nicer than they’d been at a public school, or at the very least be a bit more tolerant of individual differences, intended or unintended, given the very specific commonality the students were supposed to share.
God, was I ignorant. God, was I wrong. It was the opposite. They were even more judgmental, with superficial cliques rooted in physical appearance, which is typical, but also, and more importantly, in the appearance of one’s faith. This created deeper and more solidified notions of those who were considered “in” and those deemed “out.” The Pharisees would’ve been proud.
Individuals who wanted to appear Christ-centered to teachers and parents were often the biggest dicks to their fellow students. In this sense, popularity boiled down to who could be the most two-faced—who could best hide their den of vipers in the loudest hallelujahs.
One early afternoon, I was by myself enjoying lunch outside on a splintered wooden bench beneath a maple tree beginning its autumn blush, when a kid grabbed the Bible I was reading, knocking my sandwich to the ground.
I looked down at my sandwich in the grass like a fallen comrade.
After a deep breath and long exhale through my nose, I asked, “Dude, can you just give it back?”
I took a step towards him, and he shoved me away with his right arm.
“What the fuck, man, c’mon,” I said, stepping forward again.
He retaliated with a snarky comment I can’t remember, and then dangled the Bible in front of me like a bone in front of a dog, as two of his friends stood next to him, laughing and egging him on.
I clenched my jaw, grabbed the collection of holy texts back, and proceeded to give him an Old Testament beating with it.
Once I got him on the ground and had him pinned, I forced his mouth open and put the Bible’s spine between his teeth, like a gag.
I smacked his face while I kept pressing the Bible down, as if I was trying to shove the Word down his throat.
In my anger, I didn’t want to put my sword away as Jesus had instructed Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane. I wanted to be the Jesus with righteous anger, flipping all the tables in the goddamn temple.
His friends did nothing. They just watched in fear. I don’t think they’d witnessed a fight before.
Later that day, I was called to the principal’s office.
After staring at me for a few seconds, she said, “As you know, we have a zero-tolerance policy concerning all forms of violence, and this is your second offense.”
“Yes, I’m aware, Mrs. K,” I said. “Though if we’re already at the two mark, the whole zero-policy thing doesn’t carry much weight.”
Trying to tuck in the contempt on her face, she continued. “But before we get to the discussion of suspension or possible expulsion, I want to hear why you felt it necessary to attack B.”
“Well, you obviously already spoke to him and those who were with him, because I didn’t say anything to anyone about this. What did they tell you?”
“That doesn’t matter right now. I want to hear your point of view.”
Shifting in the chair to sit straighter, I said, “I don’t know, I’m sure he skipped some key details, and if the only other people to see it were his friends, they will cover for him, so what’s the point? And I barely want to be at this school anyway. Do what you want.”
Looking down with her forehead lodged in the crook between her thumb and index finger as if she were about to start massaging her temples, she looked back up and said, “Please, Mr. Fleps, can you just tell your side?
I shook my head slightly while I sucked my lower lip. “Fine,” I said. “He took my Bible, and as I approached him, asking for it back, he pushed me. So I decided to defend myself.”
Her eyes widened as they met mine. “He took your Bible and pushed you when you wanted it back? She asked, voice tinged with disbelief.
“Correct.”
“Umm…”
“So it wasn’t unprovoked,” I continued, “and I’d like to have the records show I smacked him around with a leather-bound edition rather than a hardcover, and I think that distinction matters.”
Caught off-guard with the comment rather than the humor, she said, “Well, OK. Uhh… right… you still shouldn’t have acted in such a manner… but…”
“I… I do feel bad. I should’ve just gotten my Bible back and left it at that,” I said, comprehending the cops would most likely be called, and the parents notified.
But in the school’s eyes, there was more shame in a Bible being stolen than a boy being beaten, and I admit that’s wrong. My retaliation was excessive.
I will also admit, as I walked out of the principal’s office, I hadn’t figured a slap on the wrist could sound like a hymn.
Those weekend nights at the club were a sanctuary from the school’s perverse programming of purity and its weaponization of shame; from its self-righteous and self-limiting view of holiness and those who get to be held by it.
What they called profane, I learned to call communion, and among the thuds and reverberations, the lasers and fog machines, the ripped, red faux-leather couches and tacky interior, the dress shirts buttoned halfway and fake diamond stud earrings, the short dresses far above the knees and tube tops, the liquor-lined breath, which was also my breath and the smell of cigarette smoke wafting through the room as if emanating from a priest’s thurible, I tasted the supposed brokenness of a body and turned my blood into wine. I became the sacrament.
I knelt at a neon altar and began to learn to offer myself forgiveness, to see myself as good and full of worth within the parameters of my own soul’s burgeoning definition. The desperate need for external validation/salvation—divine or otherwise—had drained my capacity to inhabit self-love. I had sensed but couldn’t yet articulate my growing unease about separating the spirit from flesh. I no longer wanted to pray to have my sins taken two thousand years away.
Albert Camus said, “Too many people… climb on to the cross merely to be seen from a greater distance.” I wanted salvation to be the possibility of loving myself up close, self-disgust and disgraces in tow. I wanted to be like a turtle, capable of curling back into my own hands of God.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, students would attend mandatory chapel, and the services would usually begin with worship.
I’d watch some of them close their eyes and tilt their chins up as if they were basking in a ray of sunlight, arms raised in surrender as they sang along to the refrain “God is good” a hundred times in a row to make sure the Lord heard them correctly.
Praise felt like mummified songs in my throat. Any kind of movement seemed forced.
But at the club, electronic music was different. The bass vibrating through my feet felt like I was dancing on the pulse of God’s wrist. My eyes would shut, and my head would nod and sway as melodies built the heavens close, and once the beats dropped, I’d fist pump with angels like we were celebrating some divine victory. The trophy was joy. Unapologetic joy.
I enjoyed how the strobes flickered like existence itself, highlighting our brevity, but also our audacity to defy it. All of us disappearing and appearing again, losing each other and finding each other, dancing between Saul’s blindness and Paul’s sight, death and resurrection. And in those flashes, there were glances of desire, how one could turn into two, then widen and dilate into a bridge building towards touch.
I even enjoyed the overwhelming scents of cologne and perfume, as if everyone in the club were tracing their roots back to the flowers of Eden, and all of us decided to start grinding—body on sweaty body—like mortars and pestles bringing out the fragrance of each other.
Like most in their mid-to-late teens, I was desperate and hopeful. A distillation of knowing better and knowing nothing at all; the naivety of youth and the hard truths of life a body’s forced to grow into.
From sordid to sunlit, I sorted through spectrums of pleasure, however artificial, like the glitter some of the girls would wear on their cheeks. If I were lucky enough to catch an eye or receive a flirty smile, and if one of them said yes when I asked if they’d like to dance, the beautiful possibility would open for my face to get close to their glittering face. And before I knew it, I’d be awash in stars too—shining, alive, and burning for every sacred reason imaginable.
Although those were the years when my faith began to be snuffed out, the smoke kept appearing, but I’m not surprised. God might be the smoke because so many of the institutions in His name are the fire.
And should you be afraid of the hell you were taught, as I was, or you feel trapped by the disbelief you can’t help but believe in, or you fear the condemnation of a community you once communed with, may you also learn to dance inside damnation like a ballerina inside its music box.