Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth

by K. Dawn Goodwin

  Then it started: the mystery sex pain. It was just a little tinge on the downward thrust, a bad burn that threatened to get worse if we didn’t time-out.

  “What is it?” Justin asked, looking down at me.

  “Maybe I’m getting an infection,” I said. “I’ll get it checked out.”

  But when it turned out I had nothing wrong with me, other than an apparent deficiency of K-Y Jelly, I was left to ponder what mystery ailment, besides the looming apparition of Mom and Dad’s unhappy faces, had crept its way into my sex.

  “My mom’s a therapist,” Justin explained. “Talk to her. She’s very open about sex. And she doesn’t care if I marry someone who’s not Jewish.”

  “Doubt that.”

  “You’ll see. On spring break, we’re driving to my house.”

  Sure enough, Justin’s mom—the open-minded therapist—waited for our arrival with open-minded arms.

  “I made you a bed up in the room down the hall.” She winked as we dragged our suitcase of condoms inside. “That way you can tell your mom you’re sleeping down there.”

  In the morning, she brought orange juice on a tray to our bed. That was great, but also kinda not-so-great. It was one thing to be doing it doggy-style on your future mother-in-law’s guest bed, and quite another to have her replenishing your electrolytes between positions.

  She also presented me with the latest edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves. It had the biggest and boldest diagrams of sexual positions I had ever seen. There was a whole chapter on contraception. Another one with dark pictures of botched abortions. And pages upon pages on female masturbation.

  “There’s also a section in there on codependency,” she said. “I think you should read it.”

  Justin came in just then to nuzzle in my neck.

  “Me wan coh dohs,” he baby-talked. “Coh dohs.”

  “You wanna cuddle with me?” I goo-gooed back.

  “Coh dohs,” he repeated.

  “Like I was saying,” his mom continued, swallowing a little vomit, “I think two people can be too close.”

  “Coh doh!” Justin whimpered.

  “It’s coh doh time.” I giggled, and we ran off to 69 in her shower. “Thanks for the book!”

  It had arrived a little too late.

  14 | The Great Band-Aid in the Sky

  “The Holy Spirit came on them, and they began speaking in tongues and prophesying.”

  —ACTS 19:6

  Justin and I were together for four years, and every year that passed, our spirituality grew and blossomed like a flower. Or a limb with elephantiasis. Or a mushroom cloud that amazes you, right before it incinerates your eyeballs and turns your head into fertilizer.

  We had become devout Christians. Not just any kind of devout, either. We were into the mystical stuff. The crazy shit. The trapdoor that led directly to Jehovah. In order to get there, we had to do special things, like get baptized a lot. Like get real comfortable speaking in tongues. And most important: We had to get the anointing. We had to get healed. And by “we,” we meant me.

  At the time, getting healed seemed to us like the best way to help my chronically poor self-image, while getting Justin the training he needed to rule the world. He had studied televangelists closely and decided there was definitely something to it, some energy field these guys were tapping into, some trick of nature or physics that anyone could master with enough dedication.

  A few times, Justin practiced on me.

  “It’s about belief,” he explained, practicing his deep breathing. “You erase all doubt and extend chi through the wall.”

  Then he placed his hands on my back and made several sharp blowing sounds.

  “They feel warm!” I told him, concentrating. “I think I feel it! I think I felt your chi!”

  “Hmm.” Justin nodded. “Yeah, but. Still not enough. We need him.”

  He nodded at the TV, at the luminous ivory Armani suit of Benny Hinn, the best of the best on the Anointed Jesus Supersquad circuit. Benny Hinn could heal the hell out of people, send them bouncing out of their wheelchairs and straight onto the ropes of Cirque du Soleil. Justin was sure that if we flew to Hinn headquarters in Saviourland, wherever that was, and he presented himself as a disciple, bowing cutely with a very serious expression, the televangelist would intuitively sense his latent spiritual power and invite him into his Superpowers Healing Preschool. The problem was that Hinn had so much anointing he required bodyguards and security clearances. We needed easier access.

  So we started out at the mostly black megacathedral in South Atlanta. The World Anointers rose like a bronze coliseum amid gutted strip malls and run-down fast-food joints. We followed the streaming throngs and shuttle buses, and walked inside to find several tiers of unsmiling greeters who reminded us in a gently threatening way to remove thy gum. They handed out tissues, for tears of joy or infection control, I wasn’t sure which. We were quickly ushered into the purple-carpeted stadium, which vibrated with the most sublime gospel singing I’d ever heard.

  “Run to God,” they sang in gorgeous ten-part harmony. “Run to God.”

  Must run, I thought involuntarily, lifting my hands in the air. That was how you received a direct transmission to the most high without a Walkman, by holding your hands high and blubbering in tongues. I closed my eyes and joined in.

  “Homina-homina-homina-homina,” I hummed, trying not to appear scared shitless. “Labia-labia-labia-labia-labailabai-adonai!”

  Pastor Creflo Dollar took the podium, followed by the long arm of an aerial TV camera, and the massive space thundered to life.

  If preachers had superpowers, then Creflo’s would’ve been the gift of decryption. Like a Magic 8 Ball, he could look at any Bible verse on any given page and decode the hidden message about your finances, your depression, even your herpes.

  “Jeremiah, Chapter One, verse five,” said Pastor, speaking with calm, good-humored authority. “‘Before I formed thee, I knew thee, I sanctified thee, I ordained thee’— people: He knew you and He chose you! Before the foundations of the earth! You were born for a time such as this! You were alive for a time such as this! God knew… He knew that He had to have the best running in the fourth leg of the relay race! You are here right now for a reason!”

  The crowd roared around me, lifting the hairs on the back of my neck. I was sold. In the gift shop, I would put down all my cash to buy the Creflo box set of sermons on Healing the Demon of Low Cash Flow.

  But Justin wasn’t satisfied. “He’s good.” He shrugged. “But not the man we need.”

  As it turned out, through a creepy Jesus-loving hobo friend (of which Justin had several) he’d found our man, Pastor Tim Storey. Tim had once worked for Benny Hinn catching healed people as they fell onstage. He was a catcher, and as such had caught the anointing, much like an exciting spiritual STD, and was currently on a speaking tour preaching at a Pentecostal hole-in-the-wall four hours away in Asheville. Without hesitation we packed Justin’s gun collection, his matching fanny pack holsters, all my makeup and curling irons, and headed north.

  At the Holy Tabernacle of Wonderment, which was a corrugated tin trailer, we sat riveted in the front row, Justin the soon-to-be-anointed Jew, and me, his soon-to-beserotonin-balanced white girl. The margins of our newly purchased Bibles were already chock-full of scribbles and our verses were well highlighted. As Tim Storey came up on the stage, we popped the caps off of our pens and sat with bated breath.

  “He looks just like you!” I whispered to Justin, clutching his nonwriting hand.

  Justin looked back and nodded, smiling big. It was not uncommon for us to see Justin in everything that was impressive—brilliant professors, successful doctors, famous dead people, a slice of cheesecake.

  At the end of Pastor Storey’s sermon, I ran up onstage to receive my portion, to be cleansed of my ugliness and cured of my fear of sleeping alone, my codependence, my flatulence, the list went on and on. I’m not sure what Justin wanted to be healed of. I don
’t think he really needed to be fixed so much as activated. Like Frankenstein.

  As I mounted the steps, Pastor stretched out his arm, eyes rolling up into his head like Moses before the Red Sea.

  “Signs and Wonders through your hands!” he cried out to me, and long distance zapped me with what I imagined to be a can of God’s very own whup-ass. I didn’t really feel the whup, but I felt something a notch above grocery shopping. Which was a problem. I didn’t get knocked down. I was supposed to get knocked down. Holy shit, what the fuck was I supposed to do now? I hadn’t done enough anointment pre-planning. There was a protocol when being healed, and moseying off the stage with your hands in your pockets was so not it. Thinking quick, I listed to the right and improvised a standing triple lutz, disintegrating near the podium, where I landed on my back.

  I blinked up at the stage lights. I figured it was okay if I faked it a little. I’d still been touched by God. I tingled with wonderment just thinking about how my DNA was probably rewiring and renewing, soaking up the energetic baptism. Thud. Thud. More bodies crumbled to the floor around me.

  But when should I, like, get up?

  Should I play dead?

  Should I get up now?

  How about now?

  The other healees were still twitching like just-caught fish. How long did it take for the average wave of God to pass through? If I got up too early, would I be asked to lie back down? Should I appear woozy? Exhilarated?

  Unsure, I lay frozen, hoping for clues, afraid to lift my head and look around, or move my hands to a more comfortable position, or inch my body to safety.

  I hoped Pastor Storey would not step on me, or be embarrassed, seeing as how he was still preaching, and I was splayed out by his feet with my dress near my ears. But who was I to question what God hath set in place.

  Signs and wonders, bitches. Signs and motherfucking wonders.

  15 | Won’t the Real Savior Please Stand Up

  “And the person who keeps every law of God, but makes one little slip, is just as guilty as a person who has broken every law there is.”

  —JAMES 2:10

  My life with fresh anointment was very sparkly. It lasted for about three hours.

  It fell off when I returned to our one-bedroom off-campus apartment where we lived with Joe and Joe’s moldy plates, which he kept in the closet by the keg.

  I had lied to my parents and told them I wasn’t shacking up with Justin anymore. I didn’t want to dupe them so much as I just wanted to see the color return to their faces, to see them experiencing the abiding peace that cometh with having a well-adjusted daughter, whose boyfriend wasn’t the center of her entire existence.

  Earlier that year, as reward for lying convincingly, they’d paid for a nice little off-campus dorm room for me, which even came with some nice, pre-assigned female roommate, what’s-her-name, and I, in my newly acquired old-soul wisdom, would live there with her about as long as it took Mom and Dad to drive back to the airport.

  When the coast was clear, I frantically mined my closet for clothes and fled back to Justin’s apartment, leaving behind only tinkling wire hangers, like the skeleton of my identity. At Justin’s, my skirts and T-shirts and platform shoes were stuffed into the coat closet next to all his shiny basketball jerseys.

  I hated the possibility that I’d been reduced to nothing more than his groupie. Just because I cried every time he left my side to go to his kung fu class, or to the store, or the bathroom, that didn’t make me a groupie. I couldn’t help that when we were apart, I felt like I was dead. I’d crumple on his kitchen floor sobbing, daydreaming about cutting my wrists so he’d come home and find me bloody and dead, and be sorry that he’d ever left.

  But what would actually happen is, I’d finally get up off the dirty vinyl, fix my mascara, and drive over to my empty apartment, where I’d make my weekly call to Mom so she’d continue to believe that I was happier than ever, and not living in both sin and misery simultaneously.

  “Did you get the Dr. Laura book I sent you?” she asked.

  You mean the devil’s manifesto?

  “Yeah,” I said, disliking how my voice echoed off the bare walls and empty cabinets. A few of my old skirts had been left out on my bed for so long that the sun had actually bleached out the pattern in the shape of the window. “I got the book right here.”

  Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives, screamed the title. I cringed at the bloodred cover. Somebody was trying to convince me that premarital cohabitation was unpaid prostitution. Somebody was trying to wean me off my life support. But oh no. Not going out like that.

  I’d cracked the book a tad, not all the way, and skimmed the sections Mom had highlighted, some case study about a stupid, needy woman who’d married a drug addict and had kids with him. Ha ha ha, I gloated as I read. What a dumbass. Note to self: DOES NOT APPLY.

  Then I turned the page and was, in mid-sentence, skullfucked by the exact diagnosis of my own malfunction: Dependent. Defined by men. Cop-out. No independent goals. I read quickly, for fear if I paused too long my eyes would snag on one of Mom’s fluorescent yellow exclamation points and bleed from sheer guilt. The basic gist was, I embodied nine out of ten stupid things women do to mess up their lives. I was the poster child for Stupid Women. Maybe Dr. Laura had a point. But dammit, so did I. I just wasn’t sure what mine was yet. And I wasn’t going to figure it out with a book that made my eyes bleed.

  “You ought to read it,” Mom was still saying. “She’s so good. She really tells it like it is.”

  “Or like she sees it.”

  “She’s Jewish, you know.”

  “What, do you still think I’m living with Justin? I told you I wasn’t.”

  Daring to talk back to my mother was new territory. It made me sweat and shake all over.

  “But I can never get hold of you. What on earth are you doing?”

  Shacking up and having sex! I screamed silently. Dedicating my life to God!

  “Just stuff!” I bellowed. Because how could I possibly do both and still do either.

  But on Friday nights, while normal college kids did bong hits and played Mortal Kombat, we were doing laundry and studying our Bibles for our World Anointers Bible class. Because in order to become megachurch megamembers, we had to become mega-Christians, which meant committing to all the tenets of Christianity and accepting them without question, forever and ever amen.

  Justin wasted no time assimilating all the rules and regs, arranging all the important Bible stories into his own self-created philosophical paradigm, which he would then deconstruct for me in little folksy wisdoms. Like, with Sodom and Gomorrah.

  “I mean, as a man, you have to understand,” Justin tried to explain, dragging his highlighter across Genesis 19. “Something about a guy fucking a guy.” He paused for emphasis. “It’s just wrong. Y’know?”

  Maybe I was just dense. I couldn’t figure out how the same God who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to it could also hate some of it so much He’d nicknamed it the “abomination.” Abomination was like fifty points worse than “sinner.” An abomination basically meant that you were the Lord’s nonlovable delinquent shit-stained bastard child, and as such He needed to wear a hazmat suit to remotely detonate your mortal soul. A soul that, incidentally, He’d created. And supposedly loved. I was so confused.

  “If the Bible said it,” Justin tried again, reading my blank expression, “there has to be truth in it.”

  What he meant was, if you can’t understand it, you still have to accept it. After all, he was a Jew and he’d accepted Jesus. He was a Christian but he’d accepted reincarnation. Justin had swallowed all kinds of contraindicated doctrine, because without doing so how could he increase his chances of getting the supernatural endorsement he needed to heal the sick and defeat Skeletor? If the One Living God also wanted to be the One True Homophobe, so be it. Make it work.

  But I sat there and stewed, staring down the barrel of Genesis, where
the sex-crazed gays of Sodom were so horny they were begging to bang Lot’s male friends, who were actually God’s angels in disguise. So Lot does what any upstanding man of the Lord would do: he hands over his two young virgin daughters to the horde, and tells them, Do whatever you want to my girls, just please: no gay sex with my friends! A few verses later, the entire city and all of its gays were consumed by the fiery wrath of God, and all the heteros lived happily ever after. Case closed.

  “Hold up, wait a minute.” I tried to form the question.

  The ridiculously arbitrary and moody nature of God’s “wrath” notwithstanding, why would He pour it upon men for anal sex and not also upon fathers who used their daughters as human shields? What sort of loving and omniscient God kills time by tricking His people? Right before He firebombs them?

  But before I could even open my mouth, I realized I already knew the answer. God didn’t write that. It was probably just some guy.

  Siccing torches and pitchforks on outsiders, spewing contrived propaganda, killing an entire city to purify some Country Club in the Sky? Canonizing his fear of cooties and entitling them the Holy Word of God? That kind of primitive douchebaggery had “straight man” written all over it.

  His faith undeterred, Justin pushed his papers aside, set his pens and highlighters down on the dryer and began practicing his kung fu forms. I stared at the hard, glossy cover of his closed Bible. How could I put my whole heart behind God’s wonderful promises, sandwiched as they were between page after page of contradictory logic, murderous threats and self-masturbatory filler? These were somebody’s marching orders all right. Somebody’s creepy journal entries. But they weren’t the Almighty’s. How on earth could I possibly make them mine?

  On Monday I drove to the university alone. Justin and I usually took all the same classes, but more and more, I was ending up having to take my own. And as with anything that belonged solely to me, I cared less and less about it. Especially prerequisites like Astronomy 301, a class I was actively failing. But I drove to campus anyway to sit in my car at the parking deck.