Church Boy by Kirk Franklin

Author:Kirk Franklin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

6

Where the Spirit Is

Imoved out of Gertrude’s house in July 1989, and I was completely on my own for the first time in my life. On Sundays and Wednesdays I had a steady job leading the music at Immanuel Baptist Church, and I was still performing with the Humble Hearts from time to time. But it still wasn’t enough to pay my expenses, and I realized I had to find a real job.

There I was, needing a job, tossed out of Gertrude’s house, and with a baby on the way. I agreed to help with the expenses for the baby, but marriage was out of the question. We knew that marriage would have been a disaster, just compounding the injury of a relationship that never really was a true commitment and was bad long before there was a baby. In the meantime, I had to find some way of pulling myself together.

By this time, a lot of the kids I had grown up with in Riverside were into drugs, and they were robbing and stealing to pay for their habits. So there could be no more contact there. But to make matters worse, there were also some people I had known through the church who were a bad influence, either because they were living a double life or because they were gay. So no matter which way I turned, I was alone and very much on my own.

The kids I had been hanging out with at the Professional Youth Conservatory had all disappeared from my life by this time. They had been a lot of fun, and we had been friends while I was still at school. But I never saw any of them again after I left.

Finally, in December 1988, I landed a job selling pianos at the mall. It was during the holidays, and the store was pushing pianos and organs for Christmas. So they hired me as a combination demonstrator and salesman. I was supposed to play the pianos and show people how much fun it would be to own one.

That was the easy part. I could get them interested in buying one, but, unfortunately, I was never able to take the next step and make the sale.

I was having so much fun playing the pianos and entertaining people that I wasn’t doing much selling. Shoppers walking through the mall would hear the music and come over to where I was jamming, and before long there would be a crowd of forty or fifty people around me. But nobody was buying!

Naturally, I was disappointed. I was getting a small hourly wage; the only way I could make any real money was with the commissions I would earn from making a sale. But I wasn’t making any! I was beginning to think I would never be able to hold a regular job like other people. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for it. If that were the case, then I needed to find some way of making a living in music.

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