Shooting Up isn’t, as I first assumed, a memoir of a drug addict. This is author Jonathan Tepper’s wild, loving, and harrowing story of growing up as a missionary kid among heroin addicts. Billed as a mix of Angela’s Ashes and The Cross and the Switchblade, this memoir lives up to both titles. It’s as sad and poignant as the first and as riveting, gritty, and ultimately hope-filled as the second.
The Teppers moved to San Blas, a slum of Madrid, in 1985, a family of six with parents Elliot and Mary and four little boys, including the second oldest, Jonathan. They are no ordinary missionary family. Elliot is a convert from Judaism, educated at Harvard. Mary, though more traditional in her evangelical upbringing, is strapped in for a radical ride and seems to run with it in a way that astonishes me. At times, the parents appear to be nearly reckless (at one point, little Jonathan and his brother are tasked with handing out flyers for the Tepper’s hoped-for, home-grown drug rehab to junkies in the slums). Yet this couple trusted God wholeheartedly as they raised their family among potentially dangerous men and women.
As Elliott and Mary build Betel, a now renowned drug rehab and church that started with eight men in an apartment, Jonathan is a keen observer of the world around him. Like most missionary kids, he is a Spaniard despite his American heritage. He watches his parents offer relentless compassion to the junkies they work with, individuals who are broken seemingly beyond repair when they come to them. At the same time, the Teppers are loving parents to their boys, ambitious for them to achieve every great thing in the halls of academia someday. Jonathan revels in the classics his father reads aloud to him and brothers David, Peter, and Timothy, and in the erudite lectures about capitalism delivered at the kitchen table.
When tragedy befalls the family (nowhere near the slums of Madrid), deep grief permeates their story. With the onset of the AIDS epidemic, suffering layers on top of suffering as Jonathan sees a nightmare of death unfolding. The sensitive boy, now a young teen, is witness to the terrible destruction AIDS has wrought among his dearest friends, most of whom are ex-junkies. He sees Raúl and Jambri, two former junkies who become leaders at Betel, waste away cruelly, slowly. There seems to be no end to the dying, and it’s sometimes scalding to read.
But hope glimmers amid the destruction. Raúl and Jambri’s faith shines, even as they take their last breaths. This is inspiring, as is Jonathan’s love for them and the magnificent friendships they shared. This is a son’s story, a brother’s story, and a friend’s story, and maybe the latter most of all.
Tepper is a lyrical and wise writer whose sentences I savored. He has a wry sense of humor which saves the book from being too sad or hopeless.
The memoir is a commentary on the good work missionaries can do, and the joys of growing up abroad. It’s also a frank look at the confusion and dissonance of returning to one’s native country and finding out one has become much more rooted in the country of their lived experience. What do you do with that? Every missionary kid must answer that in their own way, as the author does here.
Tepper grapples with his losses in an honest, sometimes profane way, though whether or not he continues to believe as he once did is unclear. What is clear is that his story is laced with mercy and love, even in the darkest of circumstances. (Infinite Books)
About the Author
Lorilee Craker, a native of Winnipeg, Man., lives in Grand Rapids, Mich. The author of 16 books, she is the Mixed Media editor of The Banner. Her latest book is called Eat Like a Heroine: Nourish and Flourish With Bookish Stars From Anne of Green Gables to Zora Neale Hurston.