I Am The Local Atheist

by Warwick Stubbs

  “Sit at the bar by the window?” he asked, moving ahead of me, sitting down and immediately lighting up a cigarette.

  Lucas wasn’t going to be returning to any work for another couple of weeks. I asked how he got by with such random amounts of income coming in. He said he relied on the government to top him up with a benefit whenever he didn’t have full-time work. He considered himself so unskilled that they had given up trying to find him full-time permanent employment ages ago and just accepted that he was quite happy to go about looking for temporary work on his own.

  “So long as I’m finding work, even casual work, then it’s a sign to them that I’m making the effort. Those guys can’t stand people who don’t make the effort to find work. They bug you and bug you, but fuck, most people who don’t wanna work, just don’t work or find a good excuse to get themselves out of it.”

  I sipped shyly at my light ale. After leaving church I had claimed emotional and mental stress. That had lasted a good solid six months before they began putting pressure on me to start finding work again. I kept skipping meetings and then ringing up making an apology and rescheduling so each monthly meeting got later and later in the month and eventually it would work out that I had managed to skip an entire month. I think I must have been one of the lucky ones who got a soft case-manager, because she was forever taking pity on me and letting me off the hook.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Lucas blew smoke out of the open window as people walked past. There was a clear signal from most pedestrians that they didn’t appreciate having to walk through someone else’s smoke.

  “So what else do you do with y’ time David?”

  “Play computer games.”

  “Like what?”

  “Half-Life, Splinter Cell. Mostly first-person shooters. Basically anything that allows me to run around killing people.”

  “Sounds like you have some pent-up anger there.”

  “You could say that. SWAT games demand a few more tactics so you don’t kill innocents. My flatmate Martin is more into strategy and RPGs; Final Fantasy, Civilisation, and stuff like that. He’s doing Computer Design and IT at the polytech. Pretty typical for computer nerds. I don’t really have the patience for those kind of games.”

  “Right. What about car racing?”

  “Like Gran Turismo?”

  “Yeah, and Need for Speed.”

  “We have console nights where we get together and have comps.”

  “That the only time you get together with y’ flamates?”

  “Generally. Martin and I have a tendency to stay in our rooms playing individual games, occasionally having lan games together or connecting to outside servers.”

  “Internet eh?”

  “Yeah, it connects people.” I took a swig of the beer, happy that we were making conversation about something that at least interested me. “Tinsdale ain’t much of a gaming freak like me and Martin.”

  “Tinsdale? Matt Tinsdale?”

  “Yeah. You know him?”

  “Kind of. Know some people who know him. Been to a few of the same parties. I heard he was a drug dealer. Not the sort of person I care to hang around with, especially some of his friends.”

  “Yeah, he’s alright most of the time. But has a kind of attitude about some things, y’ know? Maybe that just comes with the territory of having to be a dealer. Well, he’s a weed dealer – I wouldn’t really class that in the same category as being a full-blown drug dealer, y’ know?”

  “Illegal is illegal.”

  “Right,” I said taking another sip of my beer, not really convinced that legality was all that it had cracked up to be. “But still, sort of the kind of person y’ don’t wanna get on the wrong side of.”

  “Likes to think he’s a tough nut.”

  “Trust me, from what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t fuck with him!”

  “What have you seen?”

  “Some nuts were yelling abuse…” I took a quick sip of my beer, “at him in the driveway. Don’t know why, but he walked right out there amongst the four of them, smashed one through a window and had another on the ground warning them never to return. I keep out of his way. Just live in my room watching the computer screen and tapping at the keyboard. Or at least I used to.”

  “Work always has to interrupt the play.” Lucas took a long suck on his cigarette. “Unless you can combine the two. Then it’s a whole new ball game.”

  I couldn’t imagine how work and fun could be compatible. I always enjoyed my role in the youth group, but I had never considered that as work, more a vocation that allowed me to share my joy with others. Work so far hadn’t been fun at all.

  “How do you make work fun?”

  “Well, work is work, but the enjoyment that I get from it is knowing that I’m doing myself good from whatever I do. If no good is coming from what I do, then I stop doing it.”

  That wasn’t the answer I was looking for.

  We sat for a while musing over our drinks, occasionally joking about some strange looking person that had walked past, and then going suddenly quiet as good looking girls caught our attention.

  Because it was on my mind, I asked “do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Is that a come-on?”

  I laughed. “No. There’d be physical touching if it was.”

  He laughed as well. “Nah, I don’t. I’m not the girlfriend type.” His face struck a perplexed grin. “Hold on, that made me sound like… I mean, I’m not the type that hangs on long enough to call someone a girlfriend.”

  “One night stands?”

  “Weekly distractions.” He turned from looking outside. “What about you?”

  “No girlfriend. Haven’t had much luck on that front. Been quite a while!”

  “Dry spell?”

  “You could call it that.”

  I wanted to talk about Lisa. I couldn’t help it. Seeing her twice in one week had caused a great deal of frustration. The kind that I had been able to deny while engrossed in games that substituted sexual desire for an adrenaline rush based around the excitement of killing or being killed. Games made it so much easier to ignore the fact that I didn’t have a girlfriend but Lisa had managed to bring that knowledge rushing back. Being out in the work-force didn’t help either. Somehow I wondered if Mum’s advice had been any good after all – conversing with someone like Christie made me want to hide even further in my room. As a Salvation Army officer, she was even more off-bounds than any Christian I had ever known – these people took oaths for crying out loud! It wasn’t just a case of ‘giving’ yourself to the Lord in mind, being re-born and then carrying on living your life as usual, but the Army was an actual life-long commitment that involved a uniform. I should have been reassured knowing that she was off bounds, the uniform wasn’t exactly sexy, but damn it, her smile definitely was!

  “I have this friend. She’s suddenly come back into my life. Been over a year since I last saw her.”

  “She wants to have sex with you?”

  “No!”

  “You wanna have sex with her?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Ugly is she?”

  “It’s awkward.”

  “It’s always awkward when they’re ugly.”

  “No. She’s really good looking. No problems there, I just mean that she came from an abusive family. I took her away from that, gave her a chance to be around people who weren’t abusive and accepted her on her own terms. I don’t really feel like she’s acknowledging my help in her life anymore.”

  “Well, sometimes people move on. Y’ know, they gotta put their past behind them, no matter what.”

  “Yeah true. It’s just that…”

  “What?”

  “Well, we used to be really good friends. I mean I can’t deny that I tried to take advantage of her in a moment of weakness, but that didn’t work out too well for me…”

  “Haha – right, I know exactly what you mean! Women are at their most vulnerable when they’r
e sad. Yeah, I’ve been there before. Been there done that, lah-dee-dah. Haha.”

  I carried on. “Well I got to know her a lot better after that and I thought that we had become really good friends, but we had a complete misunderstanding and she wouldn’t speak to me. Completely deserted me, like I hadn’t even existed. Now after more than a year she seems to finally be back talking to me. But I’m not sure why. Add to that the fact that she now has new friends who she seems to appreciate even more than me, and I can’t help but feel suspicious about why she’s befriending me again.”

  “Sounds terrible.”

  “Thanks. Your sympathy doesn’t help.”

  He laughed. “Sounds like there’s heaps of sexual tension. Just have sex with someone else and imagine it’s her underneath you.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  A young woman with dark tousled hair pulled up outside on a bike, chained it to a pole, walked past the window, looked in, pulled a finger and poked her tongue out at Lucas. He waved a hand towards her, smiling and winking at the same time. “What about her?”

  I knew who she was though. It was the girl who had had the exhibition that Lisa had invited me too. I could still vividly remember her shoulders shaking before I turned away and walked as fast as I could towards the door.

  “I think I know who she is.”

  Lucas looked at me. “You do? She’s a friend of mine. Callasandra. You wanna meet her?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll call out and stop her…”

  “No! Forget it.” I didn’t want to be put in that position of having to explain to her that I had seen her nearly burst into tears. And that I ran away.

  “Okay. Well, maybe some other time then.”

  “Sure. Whatever.”

  “How do you know Callasandra?”

  Damn. I hadn’t wanted him to ask that question. “I saw her exhibition.”

  “You were there? I missed it. Heard about it though. Bit of a stinker what happened eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuckin’ Christians. I hate how they go ape at even just a little criticism, y’ know? I mean, fuck, Callasandra didn’t deserve to be treated like that.”

  “So how come you spend so much time with The Salvation Army if you hate Christians so much?”

  “I’m not saying they’re without their faults, but I mean for people who are supposed to be living by the example of Jesus, they are the only ones who even come close.”

  Everybody does what they can. I had always focussed on the youth group because I had felt like that was my calling and that was what God had been asking me to do. I didn’t need to be out helping the poor, healing the sick; God had something else for me to do. And I had done it to the best of my abilities.

  I couldn’t deny though, that he had some cause to be antagonistic. Rickerton was the least ‘Jesus-worthy’ of any Christians I had known in the church and he was the man at the top, the one that, if anything, was supposed to be setting an example. Yet all he ever did was either sit in his office surfing the net or drive around in his big blue hybrid car showing it off to Invercargill as though he was the only person in town who could afford such a luxury.

  “I don’t hate Christians anyway. I just hate the religion. Y’ know? I mean Christie, and even Alice, are cool people, but if they ever started preaching to me, I’m fuckin’ out of there!”

  “Do they know you’re not a Christian?”

  “Don’t think so. Don’t exactly make it obvious eh? I just like to fit in where I can, not make too much trouble. I’d rather get along with people than constantly feel like I was in the wrong, or was being judged because I was somehow different. They don’t ask, I don’t tell. If it gets left at that then everyone’s happy.”

  Lucas started puffing on his cigarette with greater enthusiasm. “But fuck Christie is a hot chick. I mean, she’s not like cover-girl material or anything, but there’s definitely something about her that really turns me on.”

  “It’s the smile” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess so. I’d like to put my smile all over her!”

  “Is she married?”

  “Nup. Still a pure-born virgin.”

  “We assume.”

  “Ha. Yeah.”

  But that was probably it. The amount of times I had been attracted to girls at church purely because of the knowledge that they were virgins! I had been able to weasel my way out of any suspicious criticisms purely because there hadn’t been anyone else that had been as successful with the youth as I had, and most of the time, I was able to claim that the girls were just flirting and didn’t mean anything anyway (backed up by the fact that I certainly had no dishonourable intentions! A wry smirk on Rickerton’s face usually suggested that he knew exactly what that claim meant, as though he too had made it once before in his life. That was probably the only time that there was any sense of understanding between the two of us).

  But it was so hard to look away from a pretty teenager knowing that I had the power to change the status of their purity. So many times I had looked into their blinking eyelashes, glanced over their low cut tops with a shiny cross flashing just above their cleavage and thought, ‘yip, they’ll fuck me!’ And half of them at my church probably would have too! The sixteen year olds there were nothing but trouble – troubled teenagers that I was supposed to be looking out for and bringing into their lives the love for Jesus. I was partially successful at least most of the time.

  Lisa, on the other hand, was older and more mature, experienced in the darkness but failing to find love in her own soul; a troubled teenager at the time who was growing into a woman quicker than her friends were getting convictions. Had I not met her and taken her away from that, she probably would have ended up behind bars herself.

  The conversation about Christie had briefly taken my thoughts away from Lisa, but now she was back in my mind even more than before: the awkwardness at the gallery, her strange behaviour at church making it so obvious that her new friends were the best friends she had ever had. The displays of affection were like a slap in the face, like a way of making it clear that she had something that I didn’t, and that pissed me off. And it wasn’t just that I had tried to have sex with her, either, because most of the guys I knew at the time had been hitting on her as well, but I just happened to take it that extra step further; it was the shear fact that despite all of that, I had still managed to win her friendship by giving her a life that she had never experienced before, a life that brought her happiness and spiritual growth. And because of that, I couldn’t help wondering where my spiritual growth had disappeared to. Why was I not as happy as she was? Why didn’t I have friends that hugged and kissed me? Why had I lost my way when she got to continue being the same self-centred bitch she had always been?

  Fuck!

  I hated the fact that she had come back into my life.

  I hated how she had stirred my balance of stillness and go-nowhere attitude.

  I hated her friends for loving her the way that I wasn’t allowed to.

  Part III

  – New friends –

  I had to admit, her new friends were actually pretty cool. Claire sat in the driver’s seat with an army cap propped neatly over her long brown hair, busting out random sayings without any clear direction – “and that my dear friend is why you shouldn’t ever count your chickens before they hatch. Believe me, because I’ve had chickens, and I’ve had eggs, and I like eggs, especially on toast with lots of sauce, and maybe even a sprinkling of salt and pepper, or just pepper, but that kind of depends on who’s sprinkling and how much they sprinkle because too much would just ruin it, which just goes to show that too many cooks spoil the broth, but that’s not the point. The point is that I know. I know!” Wendy dressed casually like Lisa but with brighter and no doubt, higher priced clothes, taking notes from the passenger seat on who was bonking whose sister, who was cheating on whose brother and what church leaders were doing the dirty with whose wives. The main street had never h
eld so much appeal for me before.

  But when they suddenly announced that they were going to go “beat the crap out of Jason Ball” I began to wonder just how far their own Christianity extended. Okay, sure, I was never the perfect Christian myself. I too had sex (long) before marriage – shit, I’ll take that a step further and say that I had sex for purely carnal reasons; I also smoked weed every now and then (I had Christian friends who smoked weed every now!), but I never, never, decided that somebody was worth beating the crap out of because they were a loser! ‘He who throws the first stone’ and all that jazz…

  I had to ask: “What did this guy do?”

  Lisa took the initiative to explain the situation: “Oh don’t worry about it David, he deserves everything he gets – he’s that much of a dick.”

  If he was that much of a dick, wouldn’t it be more worthy of your time just to leave him alone?

  “He treats people like shit,” Wendy added from the front seat.

  Oh I see, so it’s about retribution then? “Don’t you think that’s a little bit… non-christian?” I was highly curious about their motives towards this act.

  “It sure is,” Claire said. “The Bible says to treat everyone like your neighbour – he treats people like shit.” A big cheesy smile crossed her face as she looked at me in the rear-view mirror and nodded. “We’re doing it for Jesus!”

  Yes, because I seem to remember Jesus going around and beating the crap out of everyone… I wondered what version of The Bible they had been reading – the Anarchist paraphrase? My initial thoughts of them being ‘cool’ were rapidly dissipating with every word that came out of their mouths.

  Wendy put her fist in the air. “We all in?”

  “Yeah, lets go beat the crap out of him!”

  It was decided just like that. But with three chicks in the car and one guy (and no baseball bats), I highly doubted that it would go that far. It didn’t of course. But I’m sure Lisa was beginning to wonder the further out of town we got as small quarter sections turned into half acre sections and we were driving down Jason Ball’s street, keeping a look out for that ‘wide front lawn of his’.