Right around the time he determined that he had no choice but to start dealing drugs, three of his best friends had joined Crossroads. For Bobby Jett it was a matter of a girl he was chasing, for Keith Stratton the allure of nine undersupervised days on the Crossroads spring trip to Arizona, and for David Goya, whose mother belonged to First Reformed, a not terribly punishing punishment for multiple curfew violations. Under Rick Ambrose, Crossroads had begun to undermine traditional social categories. Seemingly unlikely candidates for Christian fellowship drifted in, gave it a try. Among the ones who stuck with it, to Perry’s surprise, were all three of his friends. They still partied of a weekend, but their center of conversational gravity had shifted. Referring warmly to the Arizona trip, or more archly to the sensitivity training they did on Sunday nights, or more lubriciously to certain choice girls on the Crossroads roster, they made Perry feel excluded from a thing that sounded fun.
After a harrowing spring, followed by a summer of inhaling lawn-mower exhaust and getting wasted and rereading Tolkien, he proposed to Ansel Roder that the two of them check out Crossroads. Roder refused emphatically （“I’m not into cults”）， and so Perry, on his first Sunday night in tenth grade, walked by himself into the vault-ceilinged third-floor room that Crossroads had appropriated in his father’s church. The air was blue with tobacco smoke, the walls and the ceiling vaults covered with hand-painted quotations from e. e. cummings, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, even Jesus, and with more inscrutable, unattributed lines, such as Why guess? Get the facts. DEATH KILLS. Before Perry knew it, he was being hugged by David Goya, physical contact with whom he’d heretofore naturally avoided. In the ensuing minutes, he was touched by—squeezed by, pulled into the exciting breasts of—twenty times more female bodies than he’d touched like that in his entire life. Very pleasant! After greetings and administrative business, the group marched downstairs, a hundred strong, to the church’s function hall, where the touching, male and female, in various formats, continued for another two hours. The only uncomfortable moment came when Perry, introducing himself to the group, alluded to his dad’s being the associate minister “here.” He glanced at Rick Ambrose and was pierced by a pair of burning dark eyes, slightly narrowed in puzzlement or suspicion, as if to ask, Does your dad know you’re here?
The Reverend did not know it. Since Perry seemed unable to argue with him without crying, he habitually concealed as much as he could for as long as he could. The following Sunday, to forestall any questions, he told his mother that he was having dinner at Roder’s, and he did stop in there, for a while, to consume freezer pizza and apparently quite a volume of gin and grape soda in front of the color TV in the Roders’ comfortably appointed cellar. Though he was noted for holding his liquor well, things started happening so fast when he arrived at Crossroads that he couldn’t remember them all later. It was possible he’d stumbled or lurched. He found himself confronted by two older advisers, alumni of the group, and informed that he was drunk. Rick Ambrose came wading through the crowd and led him out into a hallway.
“I don’t care if you want to be drunk,” Ambrose said, “but you’re not doing it here.”
“Okay.”
“Why are you even here? Why did you come?”
“I don’t know. My friends…”
“Are they drunk?”
Fear of punishment was killing Perry’s buzz. He shook his head.
“You’re damn right they’re not,” Ambrose said. “I ought to just send you home.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you really? Do you want to talk about that? Do you want to be part of this group?”
Perry hadn’t decided yet. But it was undeniably pleasant to have the full attention of the mustachioed leader about whom his irreverent friends spoke admiringly; to be in frank conversation, for once, with an adult. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”
Ambrose took him back into the smoke-filled room and interrupted regular programming for one of the plenary Confrontations that were at the heart of Crossroads praxis. The issues at hand were alcohol use, respect for one’s peers, and self-respect. Kids Perry barely knew addressed him as if they knew him very well. David Goya told him that he was an amazing person but that he, David, sometimes worried that he, Perry, used drugs and liquor to avoid his real emotions. Keith Stratton and Bobby Jett piped up in the same key. The thing went on and on and on. Although in some respects Perry had never experienced anything more horrible, he was also thrilled by the quantity and intensity of attention he was getting, as a sophomore and a newcomer, just for having drunk some gin. When he broke down in tears, weeping with shame, authentically, the group responded in a kind of ecstasy of supportiveness, advisers praising him for his courage, girls crawling over to hug him and stroke his hair. It was a crash course in the fundamental economy of Crossroads: public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval. To be affirmed and fondled by a roomful of peers, most of them older, many of them cute, was exceedingly pleasant. Perry wanted more of this drug.