Three's Company: My Summer Living with a Baptist Minister

I swear on a stack of Bibles that I once shared a small house with a Baptist minister.

I spent the summer of 1982 in New Haven, Connecticut, where I attended Yale. My friend Ted, a Classics major, had become acquainted with a bearded Divinity School student, Charles, through their mutual do-gooding in the community. When we needed a third roommate, Ted suggested we recruit Charles.

And just like that, there we were, a Jew, a Roman Catholic, and an evangelical Baptist, in close quarters. Ted was easy to live with and spent most of his time smoking pot. Charles was another matter entirely.

Charles’s room and mine adjoined, and we separated them with a couple of large sheets of cardboard for privacy. It was less than ideal. 

Charles and Ted volunteered at Dwight Hall, the hub of Yale’s volunteer efforts. They enlisted me to volunteer at something or other, and I lasted only a fraction of a morning. Community work was not my thing. Neither, at the time, was waking up in the morning.

One day, Charles brought home a large brick of government cheese from work, which, in his case, was the church. I told him I would have preferred Camembert or Stilton, though I don’t think he found my snark amusing.

But by far my most searing memory of Charles was listening to him rev himself up to deliver sermons. In his loud, booming voice, he would practice early on Sunday mornings, summoning fire and brimstone as he addressed the mirror in his room while I was struggling to recover from a night out in my adjoining bedroom. The cardboard divider didn’t cut it.

It was heaven to say goodbye to Charles at the end of the summer, but I kept running into him on campus.

Charles would go on to become a notable New York City-based minister, an early AIDS activist, and a political agitator. I won’t link to his bio here, but his last name rhymes with “thing.” You can look him up on Google. He remains quite active.

Today, he lives an ascetic life in a tiny studio apartment in the East Village, cooking on a hot plate on the bathroom windowsill.

And while government cheese is a thing of the '80s, I am quite sure Charles still rocks the neighbors with his sermons.

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