My parents made me go to church every Sunday until I was 15. So I spent a lot of time sitting there in the church sanctuary, listening to the minister drone on and on, staring at the organ pipes. It was a big, huge organ and there were about 40 enormous pipes of various sizes sticking up like metallic crayons behind the pulpit. Once in a while the minister’s droning would be interrupted by a hymn. The organist would start playing and the choir would start singing and everyone would stand up and join in and the music would just reverberate off the walls and the high ceiling of the sanctuary. And I thought it would be really cool to play that organ some day.
So I hatched a little plan.
One day after church, when I was about 14, I sneaked into a back office and unlatched the window so that it could be opened from the outside. Then I called my buddy Joel Elliott, who was known as Jowls. I told him to meet me outside the church at midnight that night. He said “huh…???” but I told him not to ask questions, just show up.
At midnight there he was. I motioned for him to follow me, and I went around to that back office and opened up the window. I crawled in and dropped to the floor inside, then signaled for Jowls to do the same. He did. Once we were inside the church, I didn’t turn on any lights. Instead I found a couple of battery-powered candles I knew were in the minister’s office. I switched them on, gave one to Jowls, and we made our way to the sanctuary. It was big, dark, empty, and spooky with those high ceilings. We went up some steps to the organ bench and sat down.
“Are we going to play it?” asked Jowls. I nodded. It took a while to figure out how to turn it on, but we found a knob that said “pull on” so we did. And there was this big hissing noise, like steam pushing through narrow pipes. I touched a key lightly and a single note boomed through the sanctuary. “Cool!” said Jowls. He then started playing Liszt’s Sonata in B, a seriously spooky piece.
I giggled nervously and looked around as Jowls played. He was having a great time and the music sounded incredibly loud. And suddenly I got really scared. Because I saw the light of a flashlight in the hallway just off the sanctuary.
About two seconds later, a beam of light was focused on us, and I could make out the shiny badge on the police officer’s chest. Before I could even think, he yelled “Freeze right there!”
But we didn’t freeze. Without a word, we both jumped up and ran. We headed straight out a side door that opened to the street, and within an instant we were charging down Prospect Avenue as fast as we’d ever run.
There was another police officer in a car outside. As we were running, we could hear the car revving. But we didn’t look back; we just kept going. When we got to Chapin Street, Jowls went left and I went right. I ran another three or four blocks and dove into a huge shrub outside the Beloit College library. I waited there, gasping for breath and watching for the car. There it was! It had a spotlight on and was panning it left and right, up and down. I thought I’d be caught for sure. But they passed me and didn’t spot me. I sat in that bush for at least an hour before I made my way home. I didn’t see Jowls again until the next day at school. They hadn’t found him either. He had rolled under a car in the parking lot of the bowling alley, and said the cops never even came anywhere near him. I thought he might be mad at me about the whole thing, but he wasn’t. He just wanted to know if we could go back and ring the big church bell that night.
