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In the Church of the Subgenius

The old church. 📷: Jordan Kartholl, Star Press.

My brother and I lived in an abandoned church sometime in the early 2000s. It was the start of a renovation project that failed to happen (the owners never showed), and it was ours for a song at $200 a month.


It was a massive old castle of a building built in 1902 that hadn't seen a sermon since the 80s. And in the time since, it had been a commune, a punk squat, and a place for counter-cultural happenings like Bob Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius devivals.


There was a local mystique about it. There's a party at the church was a phrase that was almost always met with a corresponding oh shit. Like something out of a Chuck Palahniuk book, it sat on a dystopian side of town across the parking lot from an abandoned house, an abandoned neighborhood grocery store and an abandoned hair salon. Next block over was a notorious motel that had a reputation for hustling and carnal transactions behind smoke stained curtains.


Sometimes the police would respond to a domestic call in the one occupied house catercorner that always seemed to have some kind of 911 situation. The red and blue cop lights would reflect in the stained glass, giving us our own private light show.


By the time we moved in, half the ceiling had caved in in the pastor's study but the rich wood paneling was still there framing red and blue glass that gave the room a kind of glorious despair when the sun hit it right. Like Morpheus' realm of dreams from The Sandman. When it rained, water would drip inside in a steady click, slowly digesting the old wood to the beat of a metronome. We were young and mold was the last thing on our minds.


The basement was a subterranean labyrinth of rooms filled with trash and the remnants of parties past. A shrine sat in the main room covered in esoteric books and the ashes of burnt offerings. We left it as it was, setting up band gear in the one Sunday School room that still had juice, and had impromptu boxing matches under a bare lightbulb when we weren't practicing, even though the only person who knew how to throw a proper left hook was my friend Fish who routinely beat the shit out of all of us.


It was gothic as one could get. Waking up to tall ceilings and spires and stained glass stamped with death dates. We'd climb into the belfry to sit and read and think and dream in hidden spots no one had seen in generations. It was here that we formed the first sounds of what would become the band Brazil. Where we wrote our first songs and booked our first tours on my brother's modem wired into the building's only landline. Back when you'd check your email once or twice a day for a promising word from a promoter in Dubuque.


We lived normal lives, otherwise. Going to class and working part time jobs. There were two rudimentary lofts built into the banquet hall, accessible only by construction ladders. My brother was in one and I was in the other and for some reason we had cats. A place like this needed familiars, I guess.


In the winter, heat from a handful of registers on the opposite wall would waft up and over the dropped ceiling to form pockets of warmth in our plywood caves. I cooked rice mixed with canned beans warmed on the stove and ate in a sleeping bag on a futon up in the loft with movies from the public library. For about a month, the bathtub was useless. The drain would get plugged by ice, resulting in a floating iceberg that grew after each shower.


I'd unfortunately missed the heyday of the old reckless oh shit church parties. The Subgenius devivals, sage ceremonies in the basement and gutter punk shows in the main chapel. But we carried on its next generation. Every few months I'd make a handbill and send a few emails to friends alluding to some kind of vague agitprop-style theme.


We'd bring the practice PA up from the basement to play Atari Teenage Riot, Aphex Twin and Ladytron at high volumes while our friends came through the door dressed in whatever interesting thrift store things they could find.  We'd pile junk TVs and Christmas lights on the altar in the chapel with Ghibli films on loop and the sound turned off. There were fog machines and accent lights. Eventually, the owners came and cleared more of the detritus and people would rollerskate on the smooth wooden floors.


But like all good things, the church scene came to an end when it was sold out from under us to a group who wanted to make it an actual place of worship. We threw a last party on a humid Saturday and they showed up around midnight, walking through us like parents coming home from a vacation to a trashed house.


"Oh, no. Uh-uh, no." they said. "This is the house of the lord. You need to stop this right now."


The music stopped with a record scratch. A kid on rollerskates came out and they told him to take them off. I hid my bottle of Olde English behind the front steps.


"What is this?" they said, pointing to a print of Dali's Temptation of St. Anthony in the pastor's study with the ceiling caved in. It was hopeless. If I had a little more chutzpah, I could have told them it hadn't been 30 days, the legally required amount of time for tenants to move out and we were well within our rights. But I didn't have my druthers. Not then.


My brother and I spent our last days there planning our next move to a place above the local civic theater. In that time, two construction workers started to let themselves in while we were away at class. They moved our personal effects around, like the ladders that allowed us access to our lofts. Every day I had to move them back, and the next day they were gone again. It was like a game.


"I don't know why anybody would wanna live in an old church," one of them said in the rare instance we were there at the same time. They looked at us like we were something a bit less than human. Like they failed to understand that other people lived in the same world they did. I came home one day to a huge piece of their unflushed shit in the toilet and toilet paper roll strewn across the floor. The party was over.


Years later, I learned the church that kicked us out went under, or whatever you call it when churches go out of business. The owner who evicted us had some kind of tax issue and left town while the building continued its rot into oblivion. Slowly digesting to the tick of the metronome.


Decades later, it's now a rather nice event venue for weddings and unique proms. Its new owners reinforced the structure whose rollerskating floor had caved in entirely long after we'd gone and filled it with nice furniture and greenery and interesting lights, making use of the old stained glass that gave us our police dispatch light shows back in the day. Maybe the outcome the original owners had hoped for, but life got in the way.


I hadn't planned on writing about this, but a comment from an old friend (Matt Robertson) made me think of those days. It wasn't just home to my brother and I. Other friends had lived there briefly before we moved in, then split when they realized no work was going to be done to make it livable.


The church was only about a year of our life, but it's one worth documenting. The parties, hot summers and freezing winters on a side of town that had seen better days. Like a formative road trip or a backpack tour of South America. An extreme version of the one weird place we've all lived in college. I wonder if the current owners know anything about its storied past, or maybe it's better if they don't.


Maybe it's better if the stained glass motifs and the old stone faces keep their secrets.


All photos by Jordan Kartholl, Star Press:




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What I’m reading: Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD (Martin Aston)

What I'm listening to: Mind Burns Alive (Pallbearer)


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