"Clams" by Justin Chandler
Bobby gave me a plastic bag full of those kodak disposable cameras before I left town. I went through them all while I was gone. Every now and then there’s a picture of me making some goofy face or one of the guys. Some pictures of people getting baptized. None clear enough to make out who’s who. And our card games. But mostly it’s pictures of houses.
We built five while I was there. I loved to watch a house go up, feeling the hope made real, seeing it rise against the force of gravity and become a balanced, structured shelter. I took so many pictures. We’d be in the middle of roofing over the joists, and I’d get obsessed with capturing the way the light was coming down on everything or somebody’s shadow poised on an exposed wall and have to get it. I was seeing something it’s harder to see now, but it was beautiful to me.
My court-ordered time was technically up in March but Curtis came up one day after work, while we were sitting in the living room playing euchre and watching some movie about a dancer in New York City, and asked me to step outside.
“I could use your help around here a little while, til we get some fresh blood in. Maybe another month or so? It would be a big help.”
The pay was no good, and I’d already earned my certificate in “Construction, Teamwork, and Self-Direction.” I knew it had nothing to do with helping him. He knew I was scared. Getting clean meant coming to terms with all the ways that the most comforting aspects of your life could also be the most destructive. That’s how home felt, like I was stepping back into a trap, one that I fit perfectly inside.
Curtis was the manager of the halfway house and the pastor of a church down the road that did a lot of soup kitchens and legal advice and professional development type stuff. The day before, his sermon took one of its characteristically strange turns when he asked the dozen of us gathered there if we’d ever had clams. That got some laughs and a couple boisterous Amens from the group. Curtis shook his head and carried on, grinning. When there’s a clam that won’t open, most think it’s just dead. Nothing good inside. Don’t waste your time. But the truth is that’s not always the case. Sometimes those are the liveliest clams of all. They’re strong, determined, and they aren’t going to open up to just anyone. But you keep the steam going, keep applying that pressure, and eventually they open. That was what God’s love was like, Curtis said. It was that steam, that pressure that doesn’t just take our tightly shut shells for a sign of death but keeps working until we open ourselves to Him and the work He wants to do in our lives.
It was weird, this metaphor that made it out like God was killing us so He can slurp us down with some rosé. Maybe it stayed with me for its weirdness. But that day when Curtis asked if I’d stick around, even though he acted like I’d be doing him a favor, I knew the lie for what it was, knew he’d seen me now and then with that thousand-yard stare. It wasn’t a request—it was a gift. I said Sure.
I stuck around an extra month and a half, before Curtis and I both left, he to another ministry over in Oregon, me back to Indiana, where over the next several years I fathered three children—two girls with Carole and a boy with a woman named Stephanie. I also dug deeper into all the things people kept telling me would someday kill me. It was just at the end of May, 1995, that I got the call from Steve, my buddy who first put me in touch with Curtis and the program out in Wisconsin, letting me know that Curtis had passed away. Multiple myeloma. Bone cancer. He’d been given six months and lived three years, but it finally got him.
I was fresh off a six month stay in the county jail for burglary and possession, living above my ex-girlfriend’s brother’s house in a glorified attic. Staying clean this time around felt like holding onto a strand of hair while being dragged across a field of jagged stones. But when people asked, “How do you feel?” I always said, “I feel ready.”
I called up Curtis’s wife and we stayed up all night talking. He was gone and it was too late, but I lay there, staring at the exposed ceiling beams and packs of insulation, listening to this stranger offer up these little glimpses of the man she loved, finally getting to know him.
Before we got off the phone I told her I thought Curtis had saved my life and she cried all over again. I started crying too. It was a lie, but it was also my gift. I was giving something back to Curtis, finally. We hung up and I lay there. I didn’t feel saved at all. If anything, his death seemed further proof that I was trapped forever, that I’d never make it out, never be able to look back and say, “Hey, look everybody. I did it. It’s over.”
It’s funny. Decades later, and the last six years clean, but I’m still waiting to make it out. And I’m still thinking about those clams. The metaphor is a little confused for me now. It’s not God above, looking down, doing the work. It’s just the world, every part of it second after second putting on that pressure, prying me open. And I want that. Every day I want it. Every day I say I’m ready. I’ve been ready to open up for years. All my life really. I still keep thinking someday I will.
Justin Chandler is a writer, editor, and PhD candidate in American Literature. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
