Girl on a Wire

by Libby Phelps

  WE MADE OUR FIRST VIDEO PARODY AROUND THE SAME TIME. It was of Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin’,” with Megan writing the words to a parody called “Big Fibbin’.” She studied up on Jay Z and rap in general. This would not be just a chant for pickets but an actual video. The videographer would be Steve Drain, the new arrival to the church.

  I’d never liked Steve or his teenage daughter Lauren very much, simply based on their rude, egomaniacal personalities. Steve had showed up at the church initially aiming to shoot a documentary on Gramps and the church called Hatemongers, a movie that would be critical of the supposed cultlike atmosphere of WBC. But after a series of long conversations with Gramps, Steve did a complete about-face—the first and, I believe, only time Gramps had ever successfully converted someone—and moved his family to Topeka to join Westboro. It was never really a natural fit. Steve Drain was bossy and condescending, and I didn’t think he and his family had any place within mine. But it was a victory for Gramps to have actually convinced a sinner to see the light and join the only true religion. And we couldn’t deny that Steve’s skills would be useful in an age when video was becoming the predominant way of getting our message out.

  We set to film one warm, late-summer day in 2007. Before we went anywhere, Steve stopped us with a little speech. “Now I don’t mind doing this,” he said, “but all of you need to step up and start doing more. I know this is fun, but not everything is fun and games. All of you need to help out more. If you see something that needs to be done, you fill the gap. You know, if you see someone needs help with their kids or help with housework, you do it, you fill that gap. OK?”

  We all looked at each other, wide-eyed. This guy was reprimanding us? He’d been around for a relatively short time. He didn’t know what we did or didn’t do to help out. And the implication that we were a bunch of slackers—which couldn’t have been further from the truth—was obnoxious. It was like he was yelling at us for something he’d just made up. But we all nodded dutifully: “OK.” Looking pleased with himself, he walked off to the set we’d put together in Shirl’s basement. The exchange made me highly uncomfortable, but I quickly got excited again about the project, because I was with my friends. It turned out to be a fun day. We had gone out and bought costume jewelry for the shoot: giant $ necklaces and big, fake-diamond GANGSTA rings. I worried someone would be mad that I wasn’t wearing an official church T-shirt, but I figured a brown tank top looked better for the song. Jael wore her orange SIGNMOVIES.NET hoodie, despite the oppressive heat that day. We shot against a backdrop of picket signs in the basement, then moved on to the backyard and to our favorite picket spot at 17th and Gage for our walking-down-the-street shots. Steve turned very professional once we started shooting, and all the girls got along well despite the presence of Steve’s daughter, who had the reputation of making up stories about us to make trouble. I stayed away from her as much as possible during the shoot and everything went smoothly. We all had fun laughing and making up dance moves, and the tension with Steve Drain was momentarily forgotten.

  In 2008 came another shift for the church—a focus on the White House. After Barack Obama’s historic election, the church closely studied scripture and concluded that the president was in fact the Beast himself—the Antichrist manifested as a symbol of the end of days. It was written in Revelation commentary that the people of the world would not see the Antichrist as a fire-breathing beast, but rather as a beautiful, brilliant, and charismatic friend to the world. To the church, the new president met all of those qualifications. They saw Obama as one-third of the hellish trinity that mocks the Holy Trinity: the Dragon (Satan), the Beast (Obama), and the False Prophet (the Pope).

  Gramps introduced this idea in a fiery sermon, as he had done with many other bombastic theories, and the idea spread like wildfire throughout our little community. Citing Revelation 13, he preached that Obama had “risen out of the sea of troubled humanity” to “capture the imagination of the world.” My grandfather accused Obama of “blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,” because he valued some parts of the Bible while choosing to ignore others. He also said that Obama was guilty of using the “bully pulpit” of presidency to lead this nation and the world to believe blasphemous things against God.

  Partially, we targeted Obama because he was the biggest political figure, thereby guaranteeing we’d get press if we picketed him. But Obama made a particularly good target for us. He was relatively young for a presidential candidate, and was seen as so cool. Many kids my age were really excited about him. It was obvious to Gramps and the others that he supported the homosexual agenda, even before he came out and said that he was in favor of gay marriage. We started calling him Antichrist Obama pretty early on.

  When the picket request went out for people to go to Washington, DC, for his inauguration, I signed up eagerly and Shirl gave her consent. I knew it was going to be a big event, and I wanted to be a part of it. Lots of us did, but only twelve of us were picked to go—I was a little surprised that I’d passed muster with Shirl for such a major event, and I wondered if Megan had leaned on her a little to let me go. Marge, Steve, Megan, Bekah, Katherine, Grace, Isaiah, Abi, Jael, Tim, and I, plus Shirl, made up the group that left for Dulles Airport on the night of January 19, 2009.

  When we boarded the shuttle in Washington to get our rental cars, I sat next to an older black man and noticed a giant ring on his finger. “Did you play basketball?” I asked him. He told me that he had once been the physical therapist for a black basketball league before they joined the NBA. “That’s so awesome!” I said. I told him I’d just graduated from physical therapy school, and we talked shop until we reached the rental car building.

  It was blustery and very cold the next morning when we had to get up at the Days Inn before dawn to be at our police-appointed spot near a barricade. I pulled on layer after layer: gray ski pants, giant black mittens, a few layered jackets with a fur-hooded purple vest over them, and a ski hat to keep my ears from freezing.

  As we waited in line to go through the metal detectors for the inauguration route, the man from the shuttle was right next to me—out of thousands of people, he was the one I’d ended up next to. I gave him a smile. I was a little embarrassed; I didn’t think he knew I was with the church since we didn’t have our signs out yet. I was nervous, though. It wasn’t like I had built a strong friendship with this man, but something about the situation definitely made me feel awkward—I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was supposed to always be proud of who and what I was.

  Even before the sun came up, there were people starting to appear along the streets. A lot of them were black, I noticed. The cops near us were wearing riot gear helmets, the kind with the visors that can be pulled down. We got into place and held up our signs; I had picked an Obama one that had a picture of him with horns on his head. We wanted to get the biggest reaction we could out of people. We wanted all of their hate.

  Another sign bore the words THE BEAST and pictured a frog coming out of Obama’s mouth. That was from Revelation 16: “And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, out of the mouth of the false prophet.” There was a sign about abortion, because the new president believed in abortion; it had a picture of a bloody baby on it.

  Some people talked to us as they walked by; most just looked shocked or dismissive. “You guys are so stupid,” one said. “This is ridiculous,” another laughed. “You guys voted for a fag enabler!” we shouted back. There were cops every four or five feet nearby. Everywhere around us people were wearing Obama shirts and hats and pins; if you didn’t have one, you could buy them from the many vendors on street corners.

  None of these people knew what we did: that Obama was going to be the last president and that the Lord was going to come back during his tenure. As for me, I felt relatively indifferent. I believed what I was told, so it was easy for me to parrot the teachings of my grandfather. Later on, I would notice certain things that I like
d about Obama—that he would do the Final Four picks, or read to kids on the White House lawn.

  In the moment, though, I mostly just thought it was amazing that I got to go to a presidential inauguration, even if I was picketing it. Vice President Biden drove by us in a limo at one point, shaking his head in dismay. We never did see the president himself.

  After a couple of hours, we left for the airport. Everyone felt good about the presence we’d had there, talking about how Biden had come by. “We were the biggest story of that inauguration,” Shirl assured us while we waited for our plane. “They will all be talking about us and our signs.” She was sure to speak loud enough so everyone waiting could hear her. We’d stolen Obama’s thunder, we were sure.

  Obama would become a frequent sermon topic during the years that followed. We got a lot of online feedback about our campaign against him: “Why do you hate Obama?” people would ask. “We don’t hate him,” we would write back. “God hates him. We’re just the messenger. We’re the people that love you.”

  AS A YOUNG ADULT, I WAS STILL GRAPPLING WITH THE TOPIC of sexuality. Sex remained a terrifying and taboo subject. In one physical therapy class, a teacher asked us if any of our patients had complained about not being able to have sex, or of pain while having sex. I raised my hand and began to describe one man who’d told me back pain was keeping him from being able to do it … I couldn’t say the word “sex.” (I still have trouble saying it today.)

  “What did you tell him?” the teacher asked me. “I told him, ‘I’m not going to talk about this,’” I admitted. I told her I thought it was inappropriate talk. My teacher treated me kindly for that, suggesting other ways I could have approached it. There were a few instructors who didn’t take so kindly to my presence in their classes, though. There were some clinics that didn’t want to work with me because of my last name; they’d call my school and say they didn’t want me there because of my affiliation with the church.

  BUT A CHANCE ENCOUNTER AT THE LAW LIBRARY AT WASHBURN, where I worked when I was wasn’t studying, helped nudge me toward a little more awareness of sexual attraction. One of my jobs there was pushing carts of law books around, putting them away. It was harder than you’d think. Puzzlingly, they didn’t use the Dewey Decimal System to know where some of the books would go, so I had to ask for help a lot. It was kind of humiliating, but I always liked meeting the people who were studying there.

  One day while I was pushing the cart around on the second floor, I saw a guy sitting at one of the big rectangular communal tables. He was surrounded by stacks of books, and he was really cute: tall and muscular. I liked his skin color. I thought he must be half black. I liked his looks; I had never really thought white guys were all that cute, though I’d always been mostly surrounded by them in Kansas.

  The thought of approaching him made me nervous. But this was my job, I told myself, putting the books away. Just my job, nothing else. I asked him if he was done with any of the big law books that surrounded him at the table. I was hoping he would tell me he was still using them, so I wouldn’t have to look like an idiot trying to figure out where they went, but he said he was done with them. He was really nice. Gentle. When I sheepishly asked him where they’d come from, he didn’t act like I was an idiot.

  He asked me what my name was, and where I was from. He said his name was Enrique, and he was a Washburn graduate student, studying family law. He was trying to have a conversation with me, and I didn’t know how to handle it at all. It made me realize that I didn’t know how to have a real conversation with anyone, really, if it wasn’t about picketing. We’re not supposed to talk about ourselves in the church. Nothing is supposed to be about us, only about praising God. So I always felt bad talking about myself. Getting increasingly uncomfortable, I wanted to get away from him and get back to the book cart. I knew talking to him would have been considered “messing around” by my family. When we have a job outside the church, we’re supposed to go there, do our work, and come home. No messing around. Definitely no conversations with handsome strange men.

  After that, though, he would come in a lot. In spite of myself, I began to think it was because I was working there. He just seemed to stand up a little straighter when he walked by me, and sometimes I could tell he was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. One time he came in and asked me where the Bible was, and I thought that was probably to impress me. He’d found out about my family connection somehow—he never would tell me how. But it didn’t seem to put him off talking to me. He even told me he had worked with my uncle, Tim, at the local jail years ago.

  Gradually, I got more comfortable talking to him. One day, he came in to check a book out, and looked me over as I was checking it out for him. I was wearing a black shirt that day, with an oval neckline that hung off the shoulder a bit.

  “Your shirt is funny-looking,” he said with a mischievous smile.

  “Well, your face is funny-looking!” I shot back, then froze. We said that kind of stuff to each other all the time at the church, but not to anyone else. Oh my gosh, I thought, he’s going to stop talking to me now. He started to laugh, though. He seemed to like the way I talked to him. I didn’t know how to flirt like other girls my age did.

  One of his favorite subjects was black rights and reparations. He was convinced that he should get money and reparations from the slave era, and we would argue about that frequently.

  “You are not a slave!” I told him. “If you were a slave, you should get something. But you’re not. And you get scholarships for being a minority. I don’t get that.” He would just start laughing at me. He would say stuff to me to get me riled up. I said, “I’m getting sick of arguing with you about this.” But I wasn’t, not really.

  Eventually, I started physical therapy school and left my job at the library. I thought that would be the end of my friendship with him. But one day during our regular daily picket, at the corner of 17th Street and Gage, Enrique showed up. I was holding my usual TURN OR BURN sign. He parked his car by the side of the road and strolled over to me. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to get in trouble for talking to him. But he came over, grinning at me, and told me he was campaigning for a local politician named Hurd. He gave me a pamphlet, and said that we should all vote for this guy. My cousins and aunts and uncles looked at me suspiciously; why was this guy so friendly with me? Feeling desperate to convince my family I wasn’t messing around, I started a chant of “Hurd the Turd.” Enrique just smiled, unfazed, and walked away. Immediately my relatives started questioning me: “Who was that? What was he doing?” I shrugged it off, but I couldn’t help blushing.

  AT CHURCH ONE MORNING, I APPROACHED TIM AND SAID, “I met someone who used to work with you.” I told him it was Enrique. I was taken aback at how mad and protective and defensive my uncle immediately got. “Why are you talking to that guy? I’m gonna do something about this.” I didn’t understand why he’d reacted like that. I had zero intentions of having a boyfriend; it wasn’t on my radar. It wasn’t a possibility. I had been told none of the rest of us were ever going to be in relationships or get married, and I wasn’t rebelling against that. I was worried he would make a big deal out of it. Why had I said anything in the first place?

  Months later, right after graduating from physical therapy school, we were picketing at the law school when Enrique pulled up at the picket and waved for me to come over. I was really happy to see him, though I didn’t want to show it in front of my family.

  “Hey, I haven’t seen you in a long time,” he said with a smile. The way he said it, I knew he had missed me. He told me about his work in child placement and divorce cases. We exchanged emails, and started writing a little bit. He mentioned that his back was hurting, and I told him, “I can work on that, if you want to stop by sometime.”

  The next week, he came to the office where I was working as a physical therapist. I tried to be as businesslike as possible, but I was beyond excited to see him. I brought him into the tiny t
reatment room, had him sit on the treatment table, and turned my back to get lotion. When I turned around, he was standing right there behind me—and he kissed me. I was really shocked. It was my first kiss. I was twenty-five. I recovered my wits a second later and recoiled a bit, but he swooped in and kissed me again. This time I kissed him back.

  “Slow down,” he said with a laugh. I confessed that it was my first time, which didn’t seem to surprise him. “I’ll show you how to do it,” he said with a smile. Worried someone would catch us, I told him to take off his shirt and lie down on his stomach. I tried not to look at him as an attractive man but as a patient, nothing more. I worked on his back like I’d said I would. Afterward, we went out to his car, where he kissed me again before he left. It made my knees weak. I couldn’t believe what I had just done.

  Over the next few months, I saw him several more times. Quite a few meetings into our tryst, he told me he had a girlfriend. I knew nothing was going to happen with him in the long run, because he would cheat on me just like he was cheating on his current girlfriend. I knew it was wrong to see him. But I couldn’t resist when he called. The kissing, and everything else, was so much fun—I couldn’t believe I’d never done it before. It was so good that I forgot to worry that I was going to hell for doing it, at least until I was driving home afterward. But I still didn’t want to disappoint my family, my parents, and I knew that disappointment was inevitable from Marge who had had sex with somebody and gotten pregnant. I knew it was wrong. So I tried to keep busy with whatever they wanted me to do. I was worried about my parents finding out and kicking me out of the church.