Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  I should reiterate that the Mormon wasn’t really Mormon and most of my jokes about it have been misleading. He was raised one but he started to question the church as a teenager, right about the time he started having sex (I’ve always suspected the two were related). By all outward appearances, he was thoughtful and logical and didn’t really believe in God. Every now and again, though, I’d wonder if he had some repressed Mormon leanings, like when he shut off and became comatose with anguish after sex. I guess it never bothered me because I found him so refreshingly unencumbered by gender stereotypes.

  I was receptive to this meet-the-bishop request primarily because I was relieved to be back together with him. I also found his old stubborn solace in spiritual guidance kind of romantic. I posited he wanted to see the bishop because bishops were stalwart authority figures from childhood, like Santa or Ronald Reagan or that guy who’d stand beyond the playground’s chain-link fence for hours at a time, just silently regarding us as we played. Like an angel.

  The church itself was this menacing, low, brutalist building that rose from a sprawling concrete parking lot flat atop the desert, which is weird because most Mormon temples look like the seventeenth hole of a miniature golf course. We’d made an appointment with the bishop but had to wait anyway, because I guess you can’t shuck spiritual guidance out in thirty-minute increments, which makes sense because it’s not like these guys have degrees in psychology or medicine or something real.

  The interiors of Mormon churches are also incredibly weird because apparently Mormons believe Jesus was like Pocahontas. I looked at a ton of velvet paintings of Jesus breaking maize with little Aztec children and this is what I could deduce. The most distracting thing about these paintings is that Mormons also believe both Jesus and little groups of Aztec children all look like Hitler Youth. Or maybe they only had white paint? Also, I bet velvet paint is expensive because it’s quite shiny, so it makes sense economically if the Central American natives and Middle Eastern Jews are the same color as the white people who attend this church. After all, running a church isn’t anything like running a business and sometimes you have to cut corners.

  We waited a long time on the bleachers of the church’s vast, silent indoor basketball court and my boyfriend sat there, becoming increasingly nervous. He was spinning a basketball compulsively between his fingers, just staring ahead and saying nothing. I didn’t know what he expected to get out of this, but whatever it was meant a lot. Every now and again a preteen girl in a bonnet would scuttle in and back out without making eye contact, probably to go work on some lemon squares for a bake sale.

  I too grew increasingly nervous, though not for the same reasons. I had been in only a handful of churches before. I’m pretty principled in my agnosticism, so I always swore I would never enter a church unless it had a Caravaggio or wax statues of celebrities or if they were giving away artisanal jams. Or even just selling them at a deep discount. Essentially, my whole aversion to churches is a pretty hollow edict, but it still felt like I was giving him something by being there.

  After a long time, we were escorted into the bishop’s office. The bishop sat us down and shook the Mormon’s hand and they exchanged pleasantries. The Mormon answered a few questions about how his parents were doing, visibly agitated and trying to be still. Never once was I acknowledged, not even by eye contact.

  The bishop was a giant, heaving man in an ill-fitting suit and he sat in the severe parallel slats of light that broke through the blinds of his office’s sole window. He addressed my boyfriend by his full name and said, “You haven’t been here in quite some time.”

  “Yeah . . . I know,” the Mormon said and I could see him wrestle the guilt down.

  The bishop looked at him and then swiveled in his chair like a Bond villain glutted on donuts. Leaning into the shadows and out of view momentarily, we heard him pull open a file cabinet. He retrieved a folder, thumbed through it and found the name he was looking for. He then pulled out a slender dossier containing a few pages of handwritten notes I could not see. That’s when things got weird.

  “So. What brings you here today?” he asked in a low, menacing drawl, pausing heavily between each word like a honky-tonk Darth Vader, blocked sinuses and all.

  The Mormon sighed, folding and unfolding his hands. He was silent for a long moment, looking off with a tight, pained expression, his eyes flitting any direction but the bishop’s. He then launched suddenly and fully into the story of how we’d met a year ago, been together, had some ups and downs, broke up, how he met another girl, started seeing her, decided he’d made a mistake, got back together with me and now he had a lot of guilt about what he’d done and wanted some help.

  The bishop folded up his sausage fingers but otherwise didn’t move one brittle hair through the whole story. For the five or ten minutes it took the Mormon to stutter it all out, the bishop just sat there like a boulder perspiring in the sun and listened with his mean little face all bound up in jowls.

  When the Mormon finished and looked down in shame, the bishop stared at him firmly and said, “Have you been fornicating?”

  This is when I realized the bishop was full of shit. No insight, no analysis, no compassion. That lack of compassion was the most inexcusable: it didn’t matter if we were good together, or if he’d hurt me or hurt himself. There was only one thing that mattered to God, at least as far as the bishop was concerned.

  The Mormon nodded slowly and sadly.

  “The Lord is very clear in his declaration that sex before marriage is a sin.”

  The Mormon nodded again, more quickly. They then entered into a conversation about our physical relationship as if I wasn’t even in the room. I wish I could say I told the bishop where he should stick his maize, but instead I just sat there in the darkened office listening to this awful man placed unjustly in a position of authority as he questioned my boyfriend about the kind of monogamous, protected sex we were having. I obviously didn’t think a Christian bishop was going to let the whole premarital sex thing slide, but I figured there’d be some actual guidance mixed in with the condemnation.

  Right about then I began to feel extremely uncomfortable. I suppose it was because a morbidly obese stranger was asking my boyfriend how often we had sex. Even worse, it was only during the more explicit moments that I was acknowledged: the bishop’s eyes would edge a little in my direction and I had the distinct impression he was trying to visualize the answers to his questions. He looked at my legs.

  The whole conversation was so gross and mortifying that I searched around the office for anything else to think about. I settled on yet another velvet painting—at this point I’m just assuming Joseph Smith didn’t care for watercolors—a huge, crudely fashioned diptych. The right side depicted people bathed in God’s love, with much light and clouds and flattering white unisex smocks. On the left side, the world was shrouded in darkness and everything was rubble and people were screaming and visibly injured because God had turned away from them and they couldn’t have any smocks. One thing I remember most vividly was that the “rubble” depicted was made of both fallen modern-day skyscrapers and a structure that looked like the Acropolis. I wondered if the destruction of the Acropolis was supposed to represent the destruction of logic and reason and hubris or if it was just another example of how Mormon velvet painters have a pretty laissez-faire attitude toward historical accuracy. It also bothered me that everyone in the rubble looked like they were in agony; it seemed pretty awful that God would leave them out like that, in full view of all the cloud frolicking. It was then I decided to never again take shit from any representative of any religion that has to scare people into believing in God. Moreover, I wasn’t going to listen to a diatribe about sin from someone who looked like he was hiding a Christmas ham under his Men’s Wearhouse jacket. The Lord’s also very clear about that.

  We left and the Mormon regretted it and only felt worse, which is understandab
le because in addition to his own remorse he had to deal with this horrible man’s judgment. Our relationship dragged out miserably for another year and he seemed to suffer under increasing guilt from all the monogamous, protected sex we continued to have. I finally broke it off and the only thing I really brought out of the relationship was this suspicion that all Christians like lemon squares. I’m being facetious, obviously (Christians love all citrus desserts, not just lemon squares). Apparently after we broke up he met some girl who was really into “erotic knot tying,” which is a pretty canny way of coping with your crushing sex guilt.

  We weren’t right for each other. I’d wager few people can really be “right” for anyone in their early twenties but, in the end, he was a good person. He still is. As for the bishop, I hope he chokes on a lobster roll (something with shellfish). Or maybe autoerotic asphyxiation. He seemed like that kind of guy. You can always tell, like how some people are Beatles people and others like the Stones.

  The Mormon and those like him may always be the sort I go for, these men with Christian values who don’t believe in God. There’s something appealingly complicated about them, but they still open doors for you. Part of me wonders if this is some weird fetish I’ve developed from an upbringing mostly free of religion.

  The other part of me (the part that loves canned statements!) knows it was all worth it because whenever someone asks, “Why were you dating a Mormon?” I can just give ’em this cool sideways grin and say, “He put the fear of God in me,” and then I can be content with myself since that’s at least marginally funny. Because it’s a euphemism for intercourse.

  GAY ANXIETY

  I didn’t realize how skewed my perception of normalness was until I got out of my little liberal enclave and went to college. Mine was kind of an opposing narrative to your average sheltered kid arriving at school and his world opening up, by which I mean I found the world outside my hometown to be dramatically less progressive. The most striking example of this is with respect to the LGBTQ communities.

  My father played a lot of tennis and—between you and me—lesbians fucking love tennis. They can’t get enough of it. Thus my parents’ social circles were made up of a lot of lesbian couples and, by extension, a lot of the kids I babysat or tutored were cultured in labs. Most of my family’s dinners involved more gay couples than straight ones, so I grew up thinking having two moms was just as normal as anything, if not, statistically speaking, a little more normal.

  This, in turn, led to lots of dinner table conversations involving words like “fag” and “queer,” which everyone present were comfortable with because there weren’t any doubts about where you stood, politically. My parents’ friends all had pretty dark senses of humor and were extremely self-effacing, so I learned to believe that was how you joked as a gay person about being gay.

  This means I grew up ascribing absolutely no unflattering qualities to same-sex couples or, at least, none having to do with their sameness. I made fun of our family’s gay friends with the same aplomb as I did our family’s straight friends. The idea that these people had ever suffered for who they loved or who they fucked was so foreign that it never occurred to me. When Ellen DeGeneres came out on the cover of Time with that famously blithe headline (YEP, I’M GAY), I was eleven and couldn’t for the life of me understand why that should merit a magazine cover. I consider myself extremely lucky to have grown up in that environment, by which I mean it completely fucked me.

  By the time I got to college, casual use of “gay” (and, to an admittedly lesser extent, “fag”) were pretty much part of my vocabulary. It turns out they make a lot of people uncomfortable. Because I went to a small, sanctimonious liberal arts college, people were thrilled to take umbrage with those they perceived to be less progressive. They even get kind of competitive over who can be the most outraged. I learned, in about a month, that there are certain words you’re not supposed to say unless you are X or Y.

  I dropped the words from my vocabulary and got pretty defensive about the idea of being perceived as homophobic in any capacity. For a long time, I didn’t even understand how someone could think that about me (in retrospect, it was probably because I said “fag” sometimes). But the problem with that is, once you’re worried about being perceived as homophobic, it really shows. You can never go back.

  Consequently, whenever I meet a gay person, we always end up talking about their sexuality. The only explanation for this I can imagine is I want to aggressively demonstrate how okay I am with it, which is completely embarrassing and transparent and only puts a focus on their sexuality when it should really have no special place in conversation. Inevitably, when I meet someone who’s gay, I always start going on about marriage equality or LGBTQ issues or famous gays who are doing an excellent job of upending gay stereotypes and holy shit is it awful.

  I start talking about how I grew up in a progressive liberal enclave and thought gay couples were the same as straight couples and how our dinner parties were comprised of more gays than straights and pretty much everything I said, verbatim, a few paragraphs ago. And I use that “lesbians love tennis” joke. Every time. Because really what gays are interested in is a straight perspective on their experience. Moreover, this essay is primarily an agonized exegesis for neurotic, self-loathing liberals because we need a voice too. Like Notes from Underground, but I say “fag” sometimes.

  It gets worse. Because I’m socially awkward, I’ll be having this conversation with a gay man, for example, as a straight woman—this conversation about LGBTQ issues—and self-doubt begins to permeate: Oh my God, seriously? You think he doesn’t realize what you’re trying to do? You might as well go home and make a crude webcam video about how it’s not always going to be so challenging for him then make sure it culminates in you putting duct tape over your mouth and flashing a goddamn peace sign. Post it to Facebook, too. Don’t forget to tell him everything you’ve ever voted for, LGBTQ causes you’ve given money to and which famous gays you think are really sexually attractive because you’re open-minded. Tell him about how sexuality is a spectrum. A spectrum, you know, not binary! Not black and white! Say, “Some people have an extremely literal understanding of sexuality!” It’s not patronizing. He’s definitely never heard that from an over-compensating hetero asshole before. This is what my brain does, it starts to turn on itself. It becomes both predator and prey.

  Once I’ve thoroughly patronized him—lesbians love tennis! ha! what an irreverent but obviously not hateful observation!—next begins the part of the conversation where I reverse overcompensate. I start criticizing famous gays and telling this person how I long for high-profile gay men in Hollywood who break the mold of cartoonishly shrill interior decorators. I tell him how I want gay role models for LGBTQ youth who aren’t all simpering and one-dimensional, the species of gay that network television has sanitized to the point of glossy asexuality and spoon-fed to middle America, the same ignorants who needed Bill Cosby in order to accept black people. I want a gay’s gay! I want famous gays who are stalwart and levelheaded and handsome in conventionally rugged ways. I tell him which gays I think are advanced and “doing important work” and “making a difference.” I criticize straight pop stars for arbitrarily declaring themselves gay icons and inserting themselves into gay culture. I act enraged at what I see as the hollowness of their faux solidarity; I suggest that it’s merely a shrewd PR move, unintentionally aping my idea of a cynical gay.

  The entire time, this hypothetical gay man I’m talking to in a bar is looking at me like, You complete fucking twat. As in, do I really think this man—this man who got the shit kicked out of him in middle school, who was made to feel monstrous on account of his instincts, who had to hide his sexuality from his family, who had to rely on shady Internet hookups for gratification, hookups with ostensibly straight men who’d ignore or ridicule him the day after giving him a clandestine BJ in the backseat of a car parked somewhere far removed—do I really thin
k he gives a shit about my opinion on gay culture? Do I really deserve to say anything to this guy?

  The reason this even happens, though, is that we’re still in a place as a society where some people aren’t okay with gays, which is, of course, a gigantic stain on the human race. Homophobia is insidious and therefore a lot of straights like myself find it important to broadcast that we’re not among these idiots. Turns out, the only way I can demonstrate fellowship with gays without actually being one is . . . to act like a fucking idiot.

  Basically, I am petrified of being confused for a bigot. Which means I’ll absolutely be sending this section of the book to all of my gay friends (I have a bunch!) for their explicit approval before it ever sees the light of day—and, sidenote: thank you so much in advance, guys; please let me know if this comes off as callow, reductive and condescending. Hopefully they won’t think I’ve asked for their input purely because of their same-sex preferences—thus defeating my own purpose by abbreviating them to nothing but their sexual orientation in a monumental lack of self-awareness—but that I also respect their opinions because they’re so hygienic and well dressed.

  —

  When I was in college, my roommates had a friend who was (1) gay and, completely separate from that, (2) insufferable. His gayness had very little to do with his horribleness, although one evening he came over to teach a pole dancing class in the living room and showed invited female attendees how to remove a man’s pants with their teeth. I’d find this kind of behavior objectionable in anyone, regardless of gender or sexual preference. He was dumb and loud and abrasive, he had no respect for personal boundaries, he borrowed money he never paid back, all he ever talked about was sex (which, granted, is still a weird objection to make as the author of this book) and he was all around backstabbing, manipulative and bitchy. Essentially, he was everything I disliked about shallow, stupid girls preoccupied with “celeb gossip” and fucking and dieting, only he was a man and therefore I was supposed to overlook all that. Because of his struggle.