I'm Sorry You Feel That Way

by Diana Joseph

  People from my church said Catholics aren’t true Christians. In fact, people from my church said Catholics are misled, misguided, just flat-out wrong. Satan has tricked them, and because of their willful blindness, Catholics are going to hell.

  It’s partly because Catholics gamble and worship false idols like the Virgin Mary and all those weird saints, and what is with that hocus-pocus jibber-jabber to Saint What’s-his-face they run in the classified ads?

  It’s partly because Catholics don’t read the Bible. Some of them don’t even have a Bible. How can they ever know the Word of God if they don’t read the Bible?

  But the big deal breaker, what truly keeps Catholics locked outside the gates of heaven no matter how good they’ve been, no matter how much good they’ve done—and, Mother Teresa, this includes you!—is that they have not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior. They haven’t invited Jesus into their hearts. It’s a real Christian’s moral obligation to explain to them that this is the wrong road. That this is the one true highway to hell.

  Jewish people are going to hell. Muslims, too. So are Mormons and Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Unitarian hippie chicks. So are Hindus and Buddhists and Rastafarians, queers and lesbians, feminists and communists, Quakers and Mennonites, Democrats, and all the Baldwin brothers except Stephen (he went born-again after 9/11). So are the native peoples in places like the Congo and the Dominican Republic and the Ivory Coast.

  Satanists are most definitely going to hell.

  So are you.

  Unless you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Unless you welcome Him into your heart.

  Which I have.

  More than once.

  I went to church every Sunday morning when I was growing up. My mother woke me, then my two brothers. She poured us bowls of cereal or fried us some eggs. She made sure we were nicely dressed, our faces washed, our teeth brushed, our cowlicks slicked down. Then she sent us off to church with my aunt and her family, kindly people who agreed to assume responsibility for our souls on Sundays between eight-thirty and noon.

  “Bye-bye, kids,” my mother would say.

  Sometimes, when we got home, there would be a box of Dunkin’ Donuts on the kitchen counter or the house would smell like bacon. Sometimes, my parents’ bed wasn’t made. Sometimes, my mother would be singing and my father would be taking a nap. As far as my parents were concerned, they’d come into a win-win situation: they had the house completely to themselves for several hours, their children were learning about God from experts, and this babysitting/moral instruction didn’t cost them a dime.

  The Christian and Missionary Alliance church my brothers and I attended had two items on its eternal to-do list:1. Send Christian and Missionary Alliance missionaries to places like the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and the Ivory Coast to spread the Good News about Jesus; build Christian and Missionary Alliance churches; and convert the natives.

  2. Prepare for the Second Coming.

  Item Number One didn’t seem so bad to me. The first Sunday of every month was Missionary Sunday, which meant a slide show that included photographs of mud huts and scrawny donkeys and women lugging jugs of water on top of their heads. At the beginning of the slide show, we saw pictures of skinny, barefooted, sad-eyed, dark-skinned children wearing skirts made of twigs and leaves. By the end of the show, these same kids had fattened up. They were wearing our surplus tie-dyed Vacation Bible School T-shirts from the summer of 1981. They were wearing Easter shoes we’d outgrown. They were holding Bibles. Those kids were grinning ear-to-ear, and they were giving a thumbs-up. They were finally happy and at peace and well fed. When they died, those kids would go to heaven. Because they knew Jesus.

  Item Number Two, however, preparing for the Second Coming, gave me nightmares worse than the flying-monkey-from-The-Wizard-of-Oz bad dreams, worse than dreams of falling out of the sky, worse than the dream where I’m at the National Spelling Bee, naked and unable to spell formaldehyde in front of my teachers and family and peers, and infinitely worse than the dream where Miss McCade stands before our Sunday-school class and explains what Bob Seger meant when he said he was working on his night moves.

  Miss McCade was a sweet old lady whose panty hose wrinkled some around her knees and her ankles. She had tightly permed gray hair, and every week she wore the same lavender-gray skirt and jacket. It would take me years to identify that she smelled like old lady: rose-scented lotion and Ben-Gay. It was Miss McCade’s job, her calling, to prepare children between the ages of twelve and seventeen for the Second Coming.

  Preparing for the Second Coming means you have to be on call at all times, always on your best behavior. Because as it says in Matthew 24:36, “of that day and hour knoweth no man,” and since the Second Coming, also known as the Rapture, can happen at any time, it would not do to be caught in a compromising position. It would not do to be fornicating on the Day of Rapture, for example, or sitting alone in your bedroom spilling your seed, or even merely considering the secrets of what is under clothing, your own or anyone else’s. It would not do to be caught swaying while flicking a Bic lighter at a Bob Seger or Black Sabbath concert. It wouldn’t do to even be listening to Seger or Sabbath on vinyl, eight-track, or cassette tape.

  Don’t you know the letters in KISS stand for Kids in Satan’s Service? Miss McCade would say. AC/DC means After Christ, the Devil Comes. And don’t even think about listening to that especially beguiling music known as Christian Rock. There is no Christian Rock. That’s just another one of Satan’s tricks designed to distract you from knowing the Lord, Miss McCade would say.

  Every Sunday she’d remind us that we needed to stay on our toes because no man knoweth the day and hour. She’d say, “I sure wouldn’t want to be sitting in a movie theater when Jesus comes.” She’d say, “I sure wouldn’t want to be playing poker when Jesus comes.” She’d say, “I sure wouldn’t want to be drunk on beer when Jesus comes.”

  Sometimes, during Sunday services, listening to the preacher call forth anyone who wanted a fresh start, anyone who accepted Christ’s redemption, anyone who needed God’s forgiveness, I’d feel such loneliness and longing that I went forth to be saved, and I even said I was saved: I announced it, proclaimed it, declared it, but really, I never felt like it took. I never felt differently from how I did before. I wanted to believe, but I second-guessed my motives. It wasn’t Jesus’ voice telling me to cover my ears when I walked past the duplex where the guitar-playing hippies lived and I heard them singing I set out running but I take my time, a friend of the devil is a friend of mine, it was Miss McCade’s. Miss McCade’s was the voice in my head when, annoyed with my mother, I purposely stepped on a crack in the sidewalk. I sure wouldn’t want to be breaking my mother’s back when Jesus comes.

  For years and years, Miss McCade had the power to mess with my head. Fears about what I would and wouldn’t want to be doing when Jesus came screwed up a lot of otherwise perfectly fun Friday nights at frat parties or keggers or in the backseats of cars.

  Miss McCade’s voice wormed through my thoughts especially insistently when I’d been smoking marijuana. I sure wouldn’t want to be doped up on Thai stick when Jesus comes, Miss McCade would say, mocking me, and she tugged on the ends of her perm. One time, during a party at the Theta Xi house, Miss McCade hitched up her saggy panty hose, then turned to me and quoted from Hebrews 10:26-27: “For if we sin wilfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries.”

  “Will somebody please please please make that chick shut the fuck up about raging hellfire?” a frat boy said. “Because the way she’s going on about it is really stomping on my buzz.”

  When I was in fifth grade, at Vacation Bible School, there was a contest for memorizing Bible verses. The prize was a globe with brown crosses on all the countries where missionaries were bringing the Word to the native
s and the natives to the Light. I was determined to win. The lazy kids all memorized “Jesus wept,” while smart-asses liked stuff from Leviticus—Leviticus 18:23, for example: “Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion”—but I was obsessed with the verses that describe hell.

  I still have a great imagination for the place. Hell is as far from heaven as you can get. The people there are cackling and crackling, flailing and wailing, weeping and gnashing their teeth. The image of weeping and gnashing of teeth is referenced in the Bible in seven different verses (six in the Book of Matthew; one in Luke), and at age eleven, I could recite every one of them.

  Twenty-five years later, I can’t recite the exact words to those seven verses well enough to win another contest, but the feeling they gave me has never left. It’s a creepy, jittery feeling, but it’s also enticing, like peeking at a scary movie through your fingers. Sometimes, in the mornings when I wake up, my jaw is clenched and aching, my head is pounding, I feel like my teeth are chipped, broken, in shards.

  Al tells me I need to chill out. Because what if there’s another possibility? What if when you die, that’s it, that’s the end, there is no God, no heaven, no eternal damnation, no fiery pit, no Miss McCade? What if there’s just nothingness. Al says that’s what he believes, so why not be a nice person but still have a good time.

  When I was in college, I read Pensées, a work by a seventeenth-century French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, who encouraged me to put my money on God. Might as well, Pascal said. If you believe, and He exists, the payoff is huge. But if you don’t believe, and God is real, you’re screwed. If you believe, and it turns out there is no God, then really, what have you lost? Pascal believed people were lousy anyway—“How hollow is the heart of man,” he wrote in Pensées, “and how full of excrement!”—so why not live a virtuous life? Why not believe, and live like you believe, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll end up behaving your way to belief?

  Pascal sounds a lot like Dr. Phil, who says you can behave your way to success, and Pascal also reminds me a lot of my father, who said I do as I’m told because if I didn’t there’d be hell to pay.

  Something in me resisted my father; it’s the same something that thinks it’s Dr. Phil who is full of excrement. Maybe it’s the desire to live a fiery and interesting life, a longing for adventure. Maybe it’s that I have an appreciation for fornication, intoxication, and AC/DC. Maybe it’s that I think Saturday night is more fun than Sunday morning, and if Eve didn’t pick that apple, there’d be no apple pie.

  Al says he’s going to turn his beliefs into his own religion, his own church; he can make good use out of the nonprofit tax status. He says he’ll be the spiritual leader of this new faith—no, actually, he will be God—and it will be my job to secure the compound, bring him virgins, and hang out at airports selling roses. He says he’s putting my friend the Satanist in charge of making sure there are enough clean flowing white robes for everyone. He says his new religion is going to combine the pacifist teachings of Buddha with the doll-making practices of voodoo. “I’m going to call it Boo-Doo,” Al says. “At the beginning of services, my members will chant ‘Who do Boo-Doo? We do and you do!’ five times. Then we’ll drink some beer, play some poker, and have some laughs. Then church is over. Until next time.”

  I laugh, but secretly, part of me is nervous. Part of me is pretty certain that God in heaven—and certainly Miss McCade—is annoyed at Al but that they’re saving their real wrath for me. Because I laugh at blasphemy instead of setting the blasphemer straight. Because I haven’t brought the Satanist to the Lord. Because I was raised in the Christian and Missionary Alliance church, and that means I’ve been told, I should know, I’ve been given the truth and made aware of the consequences, so what part of eternal damnation do I not understand? Miss McCade pats me on the hand, saying, Girl, it’s going to be hot where you’re going.

  The Girl Who Only Sometimes Said No

  Yesterday my son was turning the pages in his eighth-grade yearbook so we could play a game I came up with called Guess Which Kids Are Retarded. The boy thought the game was terrible, so cruel and so mean that I should have to pay a fine, I should have to pay him ten bucks every time I was wrong.

  But I refused to pay him anything. I was horrible at guessing who was and who wasn’t retarded. I’ve never been good at knowing something about a person just by looking at him. The ones I thought were special needs for sure turned out to be some of the coolest kids in the class, and the ones who actually were mentally retarded looked to me like members of the chess club. The problem, I decided, is that most human beings between the ages of twelve and fifteen look like their needs are special. Their necks are too skinny to hold up their heads. Their teeth are shiny and enormous. There is a shifty, furtive look in their eyes, and their tongues frequently stick out at odd angles.

  All the girls who I thought were sort of cute my son said yuck about. The girl he pointed out as hot did not looked retarded. She looked pleased to be in front of a camera. She looked like typical cheerleader material, all blond and blue-eyed, skinny and pretty and prissy. Then he pointed to a different girl. He informed me that this girl is a slut.

  “A slut?” I said. “She’s thirteen years old! How can she be a slut? You don’t even know what a slut is. What does that word mean to you, ‘slut’? I mean, how are you defining your term? You can’t just call a girl a slut and not explain what you mean by it.”

  The boy rolled his eyes. “What I mean,” he said with exaggerated patience, “is she’s been with too many guys.”

  “Too many guys!” I said. “Too many guys!”

  The boy wanted to know why was I so worked up.

  When I asked him how many guys are too many guys, he said it wasn’t something that could be pinned down to a specific number. When I asked him what do you mean by “been with,” what do you think “been with” implies, he said it could mean a lot of things, none of which he cared to discuss with his mother. When I asked him, well, then, how could you possibly know this girl is a slut, what evidence do you have, he said he didn’t have any evidence. He said he didn’t need any. He just knew.

  “Right,” I said. “It’s one of those things a person just knows. Yes. Right. Of course. It’s instinctual.”

  Because the boy spent most of his free time burrowed up in his room, playing endless hours of Halo, slack-jawed and mouth-breathing, pale and getting paler, hopped up on Red Bull and Oreos, pepperoni pizza and Doritos, his eyes glazed over, his breath bad, his legs atrophied from lack of use, I figured he didn’t have any biblical knowledge of this girl’s sluttiness. It just wasn’t possible. One would have to leave his room for that to happen. One would need to take a shower every now and then. One would have to put down his joystick.

  “It’s not a joystick!” he shouted. “I keep telling you that! It’s a controller, okay?”

  I studied the slut’s yearbook picture. Long dark hair. Brown eyes. Her neck was scrawny. She was smiling and her teeth looked really big. She looked like everyone else. Unless there was someone in the know available to point it out, you’d never guess this girl was a slut. She looked like a regular thirteen-year-old girl.

  Maybe it was in how she dressed. I asked the boy if this girl dressed like a slut.

  “When I was her age,” I told him, “I had a belt buckle that said Boy Toy. As soon as I walked out of the house, I went in the alley and rolled up the waistband on my skirt. I once wore my father’s blue cardigan sweater to school. As a dress.” I paused, raising my eyebrows so he’d understand I meant business. “It was all I wore.”

  The boy said what he didn’t understand was why I was making such a big deal about this. “I mean, what is your problem?” he said.

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” I told him. I asked my son is this girl the slut of the whole class, the slut of the whole eighth grade.

  He said she
was.

  “Well, then,” I said, “you need to know there are worse things a girl can be. She could be a person who tortures small animals, for example, or she could be someone who eats paste. She could be the girl who wears white shoes after Labor Day. White shoes after Labor Day!” I said. “That’s a crime about a thousand times worse than being an eighth-grade slut.”

  I could tell the boy wanted to argue that nobody eats paste in eighth grade, not even the retarded kids, and lots of people wear white shoes year-round. He’d go on about white Reeboks, white Nikes, white Adidas—he was so predictable! But I’d already closed the yearbook. I told him Guess Which Kids Are Retarded was a terrible game, a mean game, and that I didn’t want to ever hear him refer to a girl as a slut again, that girl or any other. As far as I was concerned, the matter was resolved.

  “Fine,” he said. “She’s not a slut.”

  “I’m pleased to hear you say that.”