Badbadbad

by Jesus Angel Garcia

  Above all, I was to stay out of trouble. Any lapse with the law, even an unpaid parking ticket, he said, could jeopardize our cause. I didn’t mention reckless-driving my car into a lamp post.

  I was now on fallenangels nearly every night. Browsing the photos and write-ups was a welcome diversion during the workday as well. Maintaining the church web sites had turned into simple routine, so I’d procrastinate by searching for curious profiles to tag and message later. I only contacted girls I thought I could help.

  Believe it or not, I paid less mind to the pictures than the words. I knew from altering my own online appearance there was no limit to jpeg doctoring. I posted several different versions of myself on the site, varying age, height, hair, race, occupation and hobbies to match (within reason) the requested specs of the girls. When it came down to connecting in the meat world, I’d do whatever I had to do to bring the digital illusion to life. I invested in haircare products, colored contacts, glasses with fake lenses, teeth-bleaching, platform boots, vintage to designer clothes, plus a few professional costumes, suits and such.

  I realize how all this may sound, brother, but I wasn’t lying or aiming for deceit. Since the ex had stripped me of my role as father and husband, I’d been struggling through the days not knowing who I was. This online shapeshifting made me feel weightless, free at last from the burden of no-identity.

  When I opened myself up to another’s needs, I was able to explore who I could be. Whenever I’d push my comfort ceiling, challenge deep-seated prejudices and fears by refusing to pass judgment, I’d feel like a new person, reborn in the spirit of communion.

  As with any birth, there was pain, though months would pass before I’d realize how I suffered in equal parts to whatever pleasure I got from being of service. At the time, my acts of selflessness seemed to bring me closer to what I thought of as my true deepdown self.

  I’m now convinced there is in fact no one true self. We are all naturally fluid. The container in which we find ourselves, the form imposed on us by our reflection in the moment, dictates what we say, do, think and feel. In other words, who we are and how we live and die is at the mercy of a power outside of and greater than ourselves. The Reverend would call this God. I like to think it’s a love supreme.

  I dove into this fallenangels period by first searching for Shannon, but her SexxxeeYoungMama handle had vanished. It’s better this way, I told myself. She’d said I should give the feelings she woke up in me to someone else. That’s what I would do.

  The time stamp on Philomela’s profile showed she hadn’t signed in to the web site since the morning of our Saturday night together. She could have finally made the break, fled to higher ground, or her problems at home may have further gone downhill. Worried for her safety, I almost messaged her, but there would be no point if she was no longer in the community, and those love bumps, less fun than you might imagine.

  I didn’t suffer physically from Lil_Girl, but being with her took almost as much out of me. Gazing at her in pigtails, cherry lips on a lollipop, stoked conflicted emotions: arousal, concern, sorrow, disgust, self-hatred. Roleplay is a dangerous game when you’re not prepared for your part. No, I couldn’t see her again.

  Prior to meeting new girls, I checked on happyhappy. She had struck out so far in her quest for a redemptor. Here are some excerpts from her DEAR DIARY posts: “Please don’t write if you can’t give me what I’m asking for. . . . Three times now I’ve gone through the motions and each guy chickened out at the last minute. I realize this is an awful thing for a good man to wrap his heart around, but as I’ve already stated, I need you to be brutal. The violence needs to be real. If you can’t summon the rage you would have to bring to this experience, then please don’t waste my time. . . . ‘Loving touch’ will not ‘open me up’ or ‘help me live again.’ I don’t want a boyfriend or a shoulder to cry on. I don’t need ‘someone to talk to,’ a therapist or a minister. My life coach knows what she’s doing. You’ll find me at worships every Sunday and Wednesday. I’m at peace with my Savior. . . . Stop fretting on how what you would do to me might make me feel worse. Just do what I ask. Give me what I need. If you can’t, then leave me alone. . . . As I’ve said, I need to be hurt to be healed. If you don’t get it, then don’t contact me. And no one with a criminal record, please. My radar is supertuned to creeps of all shapes and disguises. I look forward to hearing from serious prospects only. God bless.”

  I was moved to write her, even though I knew I wasn’t what she wanted. I wouldn’t be able to meet her needs. But I still felt like I should reach out, somehow, try to connect.

  Under the pen name cain_is_abel (with my profile photo blurred) I put together an introductory fiction on how I knew where she was coming from, since a close friend had been traumatized like her not long ago, and I’d do my best to provide the services to help with her recovery. I also said I was a high school P.E. teacher, a churchgoer and an uncle to a nephew I adored like my own son. I assured her I wasn’t a felon. My only interest was in setting her on the healing path. I met her other prerequisites as well.

  I hesitated before sending this note, thinking how I shouldn’t be wasting her time or mine. What would I do if she responded? There had to be a less extreme way to bring her back to life. Even if this were so, what made me think I could find the answer?

  Thing is, I didn’t think it. I knew. At least that’s the way it felt. Besides, we don’t always know what we need even when we think we do. Therapists and preachers, they don’t know it all either. Self-knowledge is a crapshoot. Best to put our faith in one another. Play the odds. Stare down the looking glass of another pair of eyes. Epiphany comes hard and fast. Don’t blink or you might miss it. Never ever flinch.

  _________

  I talked so much talk I couldn’t keep it all straight. Ever since I was a kid, I liked making up stories. This used to be a survival tactic. It may still be. Once upon a time . . . I was your guardian angel, little brother . . . I was a good father . . .

  When you don’t know who you are or where you come from, but you know it means something to come from somewhere, you bring imagination to bear on the day-to-day and design a world of your own creation. Otherwise, you’re adrift, alone, crippled with fear. You might as well off yourself.

  But the will to survive tends to trump suicidal impulse, so you conjure fiction as truth and lullaby yourself to sleep. This was the seed of the Book of Genesis. Not the Word of God, but man afraid.

  The trouble with endless storytelling, though, is life comes to you in fragments, which may be better than no life at all, but tasting pieces of the pie while never devouring the whole sweet delight, let alone getting up-close with the ingredients or the baker or the bakery, makes you wonder where everything’s coming from, what’s for real and what’s made-up, who’s authentic, who’s a poser, what matters, what means nothing. Can you trust your own tongue, your own eyes and ears? What about the heart?

  This cuts to the marrow of kinship, beyond blood, roots, family, friends. When you know, you feel the connects in your sinews and bones. This is what I have with you, brother. It’s what I found on fallenangels, at first.

  While I’ve forgotten many of the stories I told, I remember the girls. There was psychobillycheesecake who reveled in her pin-up curves. She made me get behind the wheel of her classic El Camino, push it to a hundred before she let me come. Elvis on her pelvis, inked in a silhouette black as the spots on a hound dog’s gums. On her left rib the phrase You Can Have This Back. Reverend Horton Heat’s “Liquor, Beer & Wine” poured from her surroundsound. The thump in her flatbed from a steel-mounted, weather-proofed, sixteen-inch subwoofer jingled my bells. I was sure I’d kill us both if we chanced an encore performance. She could only get off in overdrive. I had to think of my son. Her real name was Charley. We saw each other just once.

  Blossom was dying on the vine. At seventeen, she married a man nearly three times her age and moved overseas, Southeast Asia, as I recall, where he ran a dril
ling operation for U.S. Energy. She befriended the local girls who would service the oil men after a long day’s dirty work. Ten years on, when her husband left her for one of these kids, she bartered her collection of precious stones, purchased for pennies in the open-air markets, for a one-way ticket back to the States, where she soon bedded down with another geezer. Recently separated, she said she hadn’t been touched in seven years. “I’m scared,” she confessed in her profile. “But I’m not afraid to be.”

  Though she told me she was thirty-five, her face said otherwise. Her skin was dull, faintly splotched, creased like a touring band’s road map. Her lips were paper-thin, crayoned with a neon crimson that stuck to her front teeth. Her eyes were emeralds, pink-striped, framed by centipedes. I would stare at her like an anthropologist, unsure where to fix my gaze without making her uncomfortable. The pint of Everclear she carried around took the edge off.

  We saw each other twice. First time, we’d barely begun making out when she pulled down the top of her sundress and placed my hands on her breasts. They were small, firm, less round than oval, with surprisingly animated nipples. As I caressed and kissed her, she seemed to be holding her breath. When I asked if she was alright, she gave me a stiff grin, and grabbing my wrist, moved my fingers to her panties. The moment I touched her she hiccupped, then she pushed my hand away. “That was great!” she exhaled. “Sorry, I’m quick on the trigger.”

  When we got together again, I was determined to school her on the art of delayed gratification. Blossom had never experienced mature lovemaking. At her age, whatever it was, this was a tragedy, “a crime against God’s greatest gift to mankind,” Cyrus later said when he finally came round, more than three weeks after Gay Pride. Busy with all these girls, I’d barely noticed his disappearing. He egged me on. “Go for it, brotherman. Do it do it do it! Miracle-Gro that wilty rose.”

  I gave it a shot but failed. She was nervous, drunk, frightened from the get-go. I’d no sooner touched her when she hiccupped and was spent, “too tickly,” she said, for another go-round. She didn’t reply to my follow-up message and soon deleted her profile from the web site.

  After Blossom I met the Vocabularist, an associate professor in the English department at Bliss U. She was about my age, prim, tightly wound, and by her own admission “in need of a good fuck.” She wore glasses with small rectangular frames that brought out the squareness of her high forehead, cheekbones and jaw. Her lips were pale, chapped, tiny for the length of her face. One of few secularists at the religious institution in the region, she was hardup for companionship, “desirous of affection with a gentleman of stimulating lexical talents for nightlong vigils over Scrabble and New York Times crosswords.”

  In my intro message I wrote: “I’m uncertain I’ll be able to match your ideal, but I empathize with your feelings of alienation and will endeavor to embody the spirit of your paradigmatic mate.” I used thesaurus.com to fancify my words.

  She wrote back: “Though your jesusangel moniker gives me pause, your accurate use of an extensive lexis of three, four and five syllables excites me to no end. Let’s parlay our kismet into an exceptional adventure!”

  Realizing I wouldn’t be able to front like this in person, I played the Thinking Man whenever we’d get together, appearing to obsess on the board game or puzzle, staring at the ceiling, absorbed in Deep Thoughts, speaking only when spoken to, asking polite personal questions to which she would respond at length. We shared several late nights on the hardwood floor of her apartment, Scrabble tiles sticking to our sweaty bare asses. She liked when I would spell out words in rings around her long, thin, eraser-pink nipples. I told her I’d give anything to be a workbook page with a “surfeit of errors in need of fixing.” Every week I’d try to memorize a line or two to sneak into our “post-coital repartee.”

  Ms. V (I petnamed her) seemed to soften with every orgasm, but I don’t think she ever let herself go. Rather than rattle the walls, she would whimper when she came, her lower lip trembling, tears swelling her eyes. Working toward a climax, she’d pump her narrow hips, grimace so to flatten her face like a cardboard box. Skinny white girl with big white-boy ambitions.

  In the middle of the act, only time she’d dial back her vocab and grunt in what she called “infantile argot,” she’d say, “I don’t wanna be a girl. But I need this. I need it so bad. I need to be split open. Give it to me, JAG.” When I’d vary the dynamics of my movement, she’d go, “What are you doing to me? Where did you learn this?” Her questions made me self-conscious. At such times, I wasn’t in the mood to be probed. So I’d rev the tempo in an effort to shut her up. If this didn’t work, I’d plug her mouth, pull her hair.

  The romance ended when I beat her at Scrabble. She was a serious competitor. She had to be, she explained in an early note, to make it in academia. I didn’t care who won or lost. But I thought she wanted honest-to-God gamesmanship. She said this was the kind of foreplay that made her wet. Then when I kicked her ass, she threw a tantrum. “You’re gloating!” she yelled at me. All I did was sing to myself the teeniest tiniest ditty to celebrate my victory by a mere five points after weeks of crushing defeats. She refused to accept my apology. Every date, anyhow, was an English exam, and while I mostly managed to pass these tests, the stress had been wearing me down.

  At first I thought my low energy was from staying up too late on too many dates. But it was more than this. After every intimate connect—word or touch, face to face, skin on skin, listening, speaking, thinking, feeling with another warm body—I would be wiped out the entire next day. No matter what I’d do, I couldn’t focus or motivate.

  Coffee made me hyperfixate on every sound, from the traffic outside to the churn of the refrigerator. Tea didn’t move me and its bitterness browned my teeth like toast. Food made me sleepy, exercise hurt, not working when I should have been plagued me with guilt.

  The e-maintenance routine I’d just established was blown. Despite the relative mindlessness of the job, I still had to pay attention to detail, problem-solve on the fly and communicate with church leaders, all of which required a level of clarity I wasn’t able to summon. Too sluggish to be productive, I’d download music all day, eavesdrop on various DEAR DIARY posts, check but not answer texts, email, voicemail, fallenangels messages, search OVA for random news bites.

  One of the most disturbing clips I’ll never forget showed a bull elephant raping and killing a white rhinoceros. The headline: ELEPHANTS ON THE WAR PATH. Another, HATE CRIMES ON THE RISE, zoomed in on the image of a noose nailed to the office door of an African-American Studies professor at a major university.

  I was also spending more time now on fallenangels, reading between the lines, holding close the heartache, the longing in all the profiles I’d come to see as naked portraits of need built up over a lifetime. There were so many girls I could care for. It was my moral responsibility to do so.

  SIXTEEN

  On one of these listless days I came across dream2live4evR, a third-year film student at the state university in Athens. Her jpegs were exorcisms. Bright white sunlight backlit every shot, as if chasing off the darkness within. Her sumptuous hair, black like Indian ink with a licorice shine, curled at her shoulders. Pursed in each frame, her lips were readymade for kissing, advance notice recommended, not required. Her eyes were wide, theatrical, seductive, sad, heavy mascara masking a weariness no one her age should know. She had just turned twenty-one.

  As I was dreaming on her photos, a little dove icon blinked above her user name. She was online. Though reluctant to start a long-distance relationship, I figured one chat couldn’t hurt. Here’s a partial transcript of our dialogue.

  jesusangel: Your pictures are the bomb! Are you a pro photographer?

  dream2live4evR: haha, hardly . . . but i do hope to be a documentary filmmaker someday

  jesusangel: What do you want to documentarily film?

  dream2live4evR: haha, uh . . . real life

  jesusangel: What’s that?

 
dream2live4evR: exactly!

  dream2live4evR: i dunno . . . politics violence religion sorta stuff

  jesusangel: Lite topics :)

  dream2live4evR: i know, it’s ok if you wanna go

  jesusangel: What are you talking about?!? you’re no foolin

  dream2live4evR: girl can’t help it

  jesusangel: how did you get so intense?

  dream2live4evR: i dunno . . . it’s a family thing

  jesusangel: can’t we all just get along?

  dream2live4evR: haha, apparently not

  jesusangel: well, maybe we can, you and me, darlin

  jesusangel: we’ll show them all

  dream2live4evR: yeah right

  jesusangel: hey, if we can’t come together one on one

  dream2live4evR: then we’re destined for extinction blah blah

  jesusangel: might as well love like there’s no tomorrow

  dream2live4evR: i dunno . . . does that mean you don’t use protection?

  jesusangel: of course I do

  dream2live4evR: i’ve got friends with all kindsa nasties

  jesusangel: maybe you need some new friends :)