Jesus Boy

by Preston L. Allen

  to the Bahamas that she is saving up for, her promotion at work, her speeding ticket—every complication in her life. That takes all of the sexiness out of it for me. I already have a wife with all of these things, so when I am in a bar and some hot number comes up to me, I don’t care how hot she is, I begin to see all of these things instead of her sexy breasts or butt. We cannot separate women—people—from everything that they are. The idea of a one-night stand is great, but how realistic is that? Oh sure, it is a one-night stand, but then next week she is calling you at work. The sex and the sexiness are just an excuse to burden you with her complications. So then you have hookers, but they are lowlifes. You want to catch a disease? So then you have masturbation, but that is lonely. So then you stay faithful to your wife, not because you love her that much, but because you cannot afford any more complications—and your wife has complications, plenty of complications, enough for two lifetimes. But then something happens, something wonderful. You end up in bed with this teenage girl. You have discovered someone who has no complications at all. She is just a beautiful, loving, grateful, worshipful body next to you in the bed. If she has a boyfriend, he is some snot-nosed kid. No real complication there. If she has a job, it is not that important. She does not really need the money and it’s not like she is going to work as a counter girl at the drugstore all of her life. So that’s not a complication either—she will skip work to be with you. She has parents, and if they find out about you there will be trouble. But of course she won’t tell them about you because that would be so immature and not grown-up on her part. Remember now, you are her secret affair, so she must keep you a secret if she is to feel grown-up. So parents, usually, are not a complication. She has school—but the hours are regular. So that’s not a complication. In fact, that makes things better. It gives her something to occupy her time so she doesn’t get on your nerves. She starts to pester or bore you, you remind her she has homework to do. Money. That’s not a complication. If she needs money, it’s small time—money for lunch or perfume or a hot-looking outfit. She is so grateful when you give it to her because she doesn’t understand that it’s not real money. Real money is the stuff that comes regular like a mortgage or car payment or insurance. Real money is stuff that comes big, like busted plumbing, a sudden illness, college loans, funeral expenses, a tax lien—if any of these things affect your teenage girl, she doesn’t bother you with it because her parents take care of it. If she gets sick, her parents tote the bill. If her car breaks down, same thing. When you give her money, it’s for fun stuff—a new purse, say—but not for complications. Her parents pay her tuition, room, and board. So that’s why I got in trouble with these girls. I bit off too much. If I had done ten or twenty of them, I would have been all right. But three hundred, I think maybe that was going too far. I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar. So now they’re calling me a pedophile. Do I look like a pedophile to you? These girls aren’t children—they are fifteen- and sixteen-year-old women who are as yet unburdened with complications. But you have your laws, and the law is the law. And after I do my time, what do you think I’m going to do? Go back to grown women? I would have to be crazy. Of course, my girls are always going to be under eighteen, and I’ll be careful not to get caught this time. You say it’s a crime. I say it only makes good sense.

  Sound familiar?

  Sincerely,

  Harrison Franklin

  p.s. No, our father never touched me. He was bad, but not that bad. Clearly, in your case, the seed does not fall far from the tree. Stop f—-ing that boy. You’re doing to him what Daddy did to you. How the children suffer when adults cross that line. The suffering never ends, Elaine. They carry the suffering to their graves.

  HERE ENDETH THE TESTAMENT OF THE APOCRYPHA

  V. TESTAMENT OF EXILE

  Book of Ezekiel 4:13

  And the Lord said, Even thus shall the children of Israel

  eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them.

  The Freshman

  Jedediah Witherspoon, “Reverend Jed” as he was called, held court every day at noon in the Plaza of the Americas, a tree-lined public forum and major thoroughfare on the campus of the University of Florida, and as the students passed through he accosted them like a twentieth-century Samuel.

  To a couple holding hands: “Your parents sent you here to make grades, not babies!”

  To a long-haired man drinking beer from a paper bag: “God has a new weapon for dealing with the slothful—it’s called Ronald Ray-gun. Zap! Zap!”

  To the Krishnas serving vegetarian meals in the plaza and their potential recruits: “Heed not the false prophet! God is no cow!”

  The reverend’s doggedness, which reminded Elwyn of himself before he had sinned, never failed to attract a sizeable crowd. Unfortunately, many of the other students came only to make sport of his ministry. Some of them called him Big Black Jed.

  One young man went so far as to wear blackface makeup and a suit similar to the reverend’s, then, positioning himself a few feet to the left of the fiery evangelist, proceeded to shadow him throughout the sermon.

  When Reverend Jed raised his Bible to heaven, the young man raised his.

  When Reverend Jed fell to his knees to cry “Hosanna!” the young man knelt also, like a mime in training.

  When Reverend Jed pointed at two men holding hands—“God has a new weapon for dealing with the sodomite!”—the crowd exploded with laughter, for his blackface twin had beaten him to the punch line.

  “Ronald Ray-gun. Zap! Zap!” said the young man, aiming his forefinger.

  Reverend Jed, set on edge from hours of fruitless evangelizing among the cackling throng, dropped his Bible and his pacifist stance and approached the boy.

  Sensing the danger, Reverend Jed’s daughter ran and thrust herself between the scrawny student and her father, a man of great height and girth, whose other nickname was “The Goliath of God.”

  A somber-faced young woman in white tennis shoes and a shapeless black dress, Sister Donna restrained Reverend Jed with a hand on his shoulder. “Daddy,” she reminded, “other sheep need tending.”

  The Bible in his hand again, the angry black preacher barked after the boy—“The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are bold as a lion!”—and he and his daughter went back to evangelizing and soliciting donations from the jeering, foolish throng.

  “But now,” lamented Elwyn, “I am numbered among the foolish.”

  Six weeks into his freshman year and already he had gone back twice to be with Sister Morrisohn. It seemed they couldn’t spend enough time together.

  Last trip, after he kissed his family goodbye and got into his car laden with clean laundry and Tupperware containers of his mother’s fried chicken and homemade cookies, he drove north on the turnpike forty miles before suddenly crossing the median and making a U-turn.

  When he got back to Sister Morrisohn, she fell into his arms crying, “Elwyn. Elwyn, my darling.”

  Peeling off her clothes.

  And his.

  Up before the morning sun, he stumbled into the bathroom, braced himself against the sink, peered into the mirror at his shameless sinner’s face, his shameless erection.

  He got back to Gainesville at 1:35 p.m., five minutes late to his calculus class, and as the professor lectured he slept facedown in his textbook and dreamt dreams of a sexual nature.

  In Gainesville, Elwyn took care to avoid those who knew him as a Christian from back home. Upon their approach, he pedaled down many a wrong street and ducked into stores he had no intention of entering, looking, always looking, the other way. He was indeed a backslider. But, he reasoned, a backslider is less evil than a hypocrite.

  Scripture says the hypocrite is a foul smell in the nostrils of God, but Christ is married to the backslider.

  The word of God is the word of God.

  * * *

  “I am naked in bed with my fingers in my p—-y. Come home. For just one
day. Come see how it misses you.”

  “Too much schoolwork.”

  “You always have too much schoolwork.”

  “I was home two weeks ago.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “I call you every night.”

  “A girl likes to hear her guy say it when he’s so far away.”

  “Elaine …”

  “Please.”

  “I love you,” he told her, though he wished he did not mean it. Life would be so much easier if he did not mean it.

  “I believe you, my love, but you’re so far away.”

  Yes, he thought, but not far enough.

  On the third floor of Rawlings Hall, everyone had a nickname.

  Brain Dead was a sixth-year engineering major, who would never graduate until he passed his freshman composition classes. He couldn’t string together two coherent sentences, he often omitted verbs, and a first grader could spell better. On the other hand, Brain Dead could calculate the square roots of complex equations in his head without use of pencil or calculator.

  Brain Dead’s best friend was a sunburned freshman, Squeak, who was named for his voice, which was indeed a squeak.

  Squeak and Brain Dead taught Elwyn to play poker and he stayed up many nights defending his plastic tumbler of pennies from them. He was not enthusiastic about gambling, which he knew was a sin, but he was trying to fit in.

  “Woe unto thee, thou backsliders!” Squeak squeaked, laying down a flush. He picked up the Go Gators cap they used as the pot for their penny-ante games, poured the coins out onto the table, and drew them to him with arms outstretched in mimicry of the great shepherd reclaiming his lost sheep. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.”

  “The rich just get richer,” Brain Dead complained, downing a shot of Captain Morgan.

  “That’s right,” Squeak squeaked with an arrogant nod. Squeak’s father ran a Pepsi distributorship in Ann Arbor. They held their games in his private suite where even the resident assistant didn’t enter without knocking first, which gave them enough time to hide the beer and rum under the bed.

  Squeak passed Elwyn the deck. “It’s your deal. What’s your game, Preacher?”

  “Preacher?” Elwyn had a confused look on his face. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Aren’t you a preacher, dude?”

  “Not me.”

  “You’re not a preacher?” the others chimed in: Brain Dead, A-T-O Joe, Punching-bag Brown, and Elwyn’s roommate, whom everyone called Gypsy, not because he was a brilliant sophomore cellist with the university symphony who could be heard late at night practicing Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody,” but because he had inherited a pair of strangely protruding eyebrows and an olive complexion from his Syrian mother.

  Elwyn laughed. “What would make you think I’m a preacher?”

  They all seemed reluctant to speak, except for Squeak, the rich boy, who pointed out, “Things. Little things.”

  “Like what?” Elwyn, in his nervousness, sent his neatly stacked pennies flying with an elbow jerk. “What things?”

  He did not go to church. He kept his Bible and tracts stashed in his briefcase. He took great care in the way he handled the letters he wrote weekly to Pastor, Sister Morrisohn, his grandmother, and his parents. No envelope was ever left unsealed so that its contents might be perused, except for Sister Morrisohn’s, which were addressed to Elaine and mailed in lavender stationery covered flagrantly with flowers and hearts, evidence to all that he had a lover and was, therefore, worldly.

  Perhaps I should let them read her most recent epistle, he smugly mused.

  My Dearest Elwyn,

  It has been a week since we made love, a week of the jitters. Do I love you, or am I horny? I’m up to a pack a day, and I’m sure your grandmother’s on to me. In missionary circle Monday night, she announced, staring right at me, “I smell smoke, but I don’t see the fire!” Will she always hate me? Brother Suggs proposed again. Smile. I love only you. I’m touching myself as I write this.

  “Things like that,” said Squeak, indicating the scattered pennies.

  “Don’t get upset, dude. It’s just a nickname. Chill out,” said Gypsy, the peacemaker. “Lay off him, Squeak.”

  Elwyn, laughing a fake, good-natured laugh, got down on his knees to collect his fallen pennies.

  But Squeak kept at it: “You don’t drink, you don’t smoke, you don’t curse, you don’t get laid …”

  Gilly Gorilla, the discus thrower, taught him to play table tennis, and then she ran up an impressive string of victories against him.

  Sixty-six straight.

  She taught him the rules of chess also, but in a few days he was playing her to a draw. Four draws in a row.

  “Pretty soon I’ll be beating you,” he told her, not so modestly.

  The hypercompetitive Gilly Gorilla smiled evilly. “You think so?”

  The game was called “chess for beers”: each chugged a beer from a six-pack, they played a game of speed chess, and the loser (Elwyn, two in a row) chugged the remaining four beers. It was the first and last time he ever imbibed strong drink, the first and last time he ever missed a day of class because of a hangover.

  The Faithful do not drink alcohol, which is a sin.

  Gilly Gorilla rolled him onto her lap and forced through his lips a mouthful of black coffee. He gagged when he tasted it and sat up, spitting. “How can people drink this mess?”

  The Faithful do not drink coffee, which is a sin.

  “What you need is more beer. Strange as it sounds, beer is the best cure for a hangover,” she explained, pressing his head back down in her lap.

  “Forgive me, Lord.” His stomach still felt like someone had sanded it. “No more beer. Ever.”

  “And you call yourself a man.”

  “But really, what does drinking have to do with it? Samson never drank, and he was the strongest man in the world.”

  “Man?” Gilly Gorilla flexed her biceps impressively. “I am Samson.”

  “You’re certainly more man than I am,” Elwyn wisecracked.

  She was strong and she wore a crew cut. Elwyn liked Gilly Gorilla, but the Faithful shunned homosexuality, which is a sin.

  She grabbed him by the testicles and made him cry “uncle.”

  Punching-bag Brown, the only other black male on the third floor of Rawlings Hall, often accompanied Elwyn to the piano room in the basement.

  Punching-bag was a musical prodigy. Every time Elwyn got up, Punching-bag sat down and played almost note for note whatever Elwyn had been playing: Beethoven, Chopin, even impromptu gospel numbers that he made up.

  “I never took a lesson in my life,” he informed.

  He had earned his nickname at an inner-city high school in Tampa, where he never won a fight against the thugs who harassed him daily. He had also never backed down from them even though his nose was twice broken and several teeth were knocked out.

  “The pain isn’t so bad,” he explained, “and after a while, they’ve got to stop hitting you.”

  “Why fight if you can’t win?”

  “If you keep fighting, you always win. I graduate college next term. Most of them are in jail. Some of them are even dead.”

  “You have an incomparable ear for chords, Punching-bag. You have the courage of Daniel. You would make a great warrior for the Lord,” Elwyn told him.

  “Who says I’m not?” Punching-bag replied. “I’m Catholic.”

  The Faithful shun Catholics, who worship idols, which is a sin.

  K-Sarah, the sunshine blonde, walked into the common lounge in a sleeveless blouse, a miniskirt, and heels. She slugged vodka straight from the bottle until she was drunk and fell asleep on the couch with her skinny limbs splayed every which way.

  A-T-O Joe and Squeak, who had been watching, descended upon her.

  Squeak lifted K-Sarah’s blouse with a finger. “Jee-sus. I told you she wasn’t wearing a bra. Check out the nippleage on these healthy danglers.”
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br />   “She’s out cold,” said A-T-O Joe, with his hand on her knee. “Oh, grandmother, what nice legs you have.”

  “The better to wrap around your neck with, my dear,” answered Squeak. “What a slut.”

  K-Sarah’s pouty red lips parted and she snored.

  It was 3 in the morning, and Elwyn and the perverts were the only ones left in the common lounge. They winked and made funny faces at him as they fondled the sleeping K-Sarah. He frowned his disapproval.

  A-T-O Joe hoisted up her miniskirt, exposing her pristine underwear. “Oh, grandmother, what pretty panties you have.”

  “The better to pull down for you, my dear.”

  A-T-O Joe laughed, “Hehehe.”

  “Hehehe,” answered Squeak, with his hand under her blouse.

  Pouty-lipped K-Sarah snored contentedly.

  The vodka bottle on the table beside her was half-empty. The vodka bottle was half-full. The word of God is the word of God. Elwyn got up and stepped over to them.

  “Shusssh, don’t wake her,” Squeak told Elwyn. Then he turned to A-T-O Joe and said, “Hey, let’s go get the cameras and take a few incriminating pictures. Hehehe.”

  A-T-O Joe sprang to his feet. “Hehehe. Great idea. Watch her for us till we get back, Preacher.”

  Elwyn lifted the slight K-Sarah and bore her away.

  Behind him came, “F—-king a**hole. Bring back our slut. Hehehe.”

  In her room he discovered black walls spangled with white stars, an autographed poster of Mr. Spock, a Star Trek floor mat spread before her bed. When he set her down on the bed, her eyes yawned opened.

  “Preacher? Where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy I was waiting for. The Alpha Pi guy.” K-Sarah, a pre-med major, was what they called “easy.” They had all witnessed it. She would meet a guy. They would talk. They would end up in her room. Then she would meet another guy. The Alpha Pi guy was after the tutor, after the senior English major, after the T.A., after the fat guy, after the old guy, after the quarterback. “His name is Jim.”