By Remo Campopiano
It was early Fall, still warm and moist, but you could feel the threat of change, and not just from the calendar. The world didn’t make sense anymore since we got the call. Bob died. We took in the facts, but not the meaning, and there was no inclination to talk about it. Talking might make it real. George suggested we take a walk.
The three of us—Bob, George, and I—were all 26 years old, studying art, poetry, and philosophy at the University just half a mile down Old Westport Road. Our common denominator was Dr. Teeter, a retired philosophy professor who lived in a 300-year-old colonial home across from the Gidley Woods. We were all, at different times, her boarders. But more than that, she was a second mother to us. We loved her.
We crossed the road to the old cemetery, then over the mossy wall and into the woods. When the trees opened to a small private park, the sound of the rushing stream greeted us. We stopped at the stone bridge, our usual place to smoke and talk.
George finally broke the silence. “I thought the born-again stuff was just a phase.”
“Did they all die?” I asked.
“No. One survived. They were reading the Bible in a car during a thunderstorm. A bolt hit the tree. Split it. The tree fell on the car. Bob didn’t make it.”
“Didn’t his last poem mention a tree? And death?”
George nodded. “You still have it? The one he dictated over the phone?”
I fished it from my wallet—tattered scraps from an old philosophy test. I handed it to George and gestured: Read it.
No one spoke. I finally stammered, “D-did he know this was going to happen?”
“Maybe? Subconsciously?”
Later, I got tangled in brambles. The blood on my arm caused by the long straight thorns reminded me of crucifixion paintings. I returned the next day with tools and cut enough to make a crown. I told no one. Maybe it was too crazy, even for me.
Bob and I met in class. He heard I built houses before leaving the family business to become a sculptor. He had turned a garage into a studio and needed help fixing a leaking roof. I fixed it. We soon became best friends.
That summer was unforgettable. I moved into Teeter’s house. George and Bob lived in the studio. Every night, conversation flowed: art, philosophy, poetry.
One night around the fire, Bob told us about meeting a dental hygienist. He was smitten. But she was a born-again Christian. Our debates heated up: Christian virtue vs. Enlightenment rationality. Bob took her side. George took the philosophers’. I drifted somewhere in the middle.
Music shaped me in my youth—Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Dylan, and most hauntingly, Jesus Christ Superstar. George introduced me to the I Ching and Eastern thought. Teeter quoted Kierkegaard endlessly.
That night, tired of talk, I interrupted Bob: “Those four-by-sixes out back. They’d make a great cross. You up for it?”
In minutes, we were pulling timber from the yard, cutting notches, hammering spikes. We built a perfect cross.
The cross stood behind the studio, oddly elegant. Bob moved out soon after to live with his girlfriend. A few weeks later, he called. He read me a poem over the phone. I scribbled it down.
Then came the news. The lightning. The tree. The crushed car. The poem.
Fall semester began. I was unsure of my identity. Sculptor? Photographer? Filmmaker? I needed a project. I decided to stage a crucifixion. Not symbolic. Literal.
George looked the part: beard, long hair, Rasputin meets Christ. He agreed to help.
The professor didn’t flinch. I was known for pushing boundaries. Last semester I did all my photography without a camera, using enlargers and magazine cutouts.
I built the crown of thorns from the brambles. I made a loincloth. Glued spikes to my palms. But to make it real, I knew I had to be Christ, at least in rehearsal. Because I still had doubts.
We set it up. Lights low to the ground. Shadows dramatic. I climbed the cross. Pain radiated from the peg beneath my foot.
Then—sirens.
Louder. Closer. Six police cars rounded the bend, high beams sweeping the field. I couldn’t be missed.
They passed.
Just passed.
George and I locked eyes, then burst out laughing. No thunderbolts. Just sirens.
“Get the shots,” I said. “I can’t hold much longer.”
I didn’t see the face of God. I didn’t hear anything. Only sirens, and the wind in the trees. Not divine wrath, but secular noise.
The irrational death of my friend led me here. The crucifixion, the poem, the crown of thorns—it all collapsed into absurdity. Was it art? Was it blasphemy? Did it matter?
I don’t know. Maybe it was just my way of shedding what was left of the fear of God. Maybe that’s what becoming an artist is.
I will spend the rest of my life asking these questions, only glimpsing shadows of truth.