Badbadbad

by Jesus Angel Garcia

  jesusangel: or quit the bad behavior

  dream2live4evR: moi?

  jesusangel: you’re a good girl, huh

  dream2live4evR: i’m not *that* good

  dream2live4evR: but not stoopid

  jesusangel: safety first, that’s what the good book says

  dream2live4evR: which book is that?

  jesusangel: the driver’s ed manual

  dream2live4evR: haha, dork

  jesusangel: hey, I’m an upstanding gentleman of the community

  dream2live4evR: of fallenangels???

  jesusangel: if the wings fit

  dream2live4evR: i’m new, got hints for weeding out the weasels?

  jesusangel: stick with me and you’ll want for nothing

  dream2live4evR: what if i want to want?

  jesusangel: depends on what you want

  dream2live4evR: never ask a girl what she wants

  dream2live4evR: she might tell you the truth!

  jesusangel: so what is it that you want again?

  dream2live4evR: i want to take my shirt off

  jesusangel: shut up!

  dream2live4evR: it’s HOT in my dorm room

  jesusangel: tease

  dream2live4evR: haha, you love it

  She wasn’t wrong. Waiting for her to come back online, I gazed at her jpegs, struggled not to touch myself. I cued up Gregorian chant on my AweMediaPlayer, hoping the church song might take the starch out of my shorts so I could focus on my chat. I was drawing circles on her breasts with the cursor when she returned.

  dream2live4evR: much better

  jesusangel: half nekkid are we?

  dream2live4evR: two-thirds

  jesusangel: I can see that

  jesusangel: I’ve peeped your jpegs

  dream2live4evR: too much?

  jesusangel: not for me

  jesusangel: I have a high tolerance for beauty

  dream2live4evR: that’s sweet :)

  dream2live4evR: i really like the contrast of the sunlight and the shadows and my dark hair and skin

  jesusangel: and the white blouse and black (ahem) brassiere

  dream2live4evR: yeah it’s cool huh

  jesusangel: H

  jesusangel: O

  jesusangel: T

  dream2live4evR: haha

  jesusangel: tasteful

  dream2live4evR: i wasn’t sure about posting that series of pics

  jesusangel: tasteeeeee

  dream2live4evR: i’ve always been hypersensitive about my body

  jesusangel: such a girl

  dream2live4evR: there’s a reason

  jesusangel: I’m all ears

  jesusangel: I’m a listener

  jesusangel: really

  jesusangel: I’m listening . . .

  dream2live4evR: are you?

  jesusangel:

  dream2live4evR: so i developed super early, my body did

  jesusangel: I can see that

  dream2live4evR: and i had a priest in middle school tell me, “God created girls like you to test man’s faith”

  jesusangel: no f--ing way!

  dream2live4evR: yes f--ing way

  dream2live4evR: that sorta sums up my experience with guys

  jesusangel: until now

  dream2live4evR: i’m still struggling to come to terms with all that

  jesusangel: God created you

  jesusangel: to show the whole wide world

  jesusangel: what

  jesusangel: beauty

  jesusangel: is

  dream2live4evR: i wish you could see my face

  dream2live4evR: thank you, that means a lot

  jesusangel: I’m just truthtelling, darlin

  dream2live4evR: people don’t usually say such nice things

  jesusangel: I know God personally

  dream2live4evR: haha, good

  dream2live4evR: too many people rely on others to know Him

  jesusangel: people are people

  dream2live4evR: so you’re jesusangel

  jesusangel: in the digital flesh

  jesusangel: that’s my real name

  jesusangel: hey-seuss ahn-hell

  dream2live4evR: remedios

  jesusangel: a latina remedy?

  dream2live4evR: chica mexicali in the, um, two-thirds flesh!

  jesusangel: south of the border healers like us should stick together

  dream2live4evR: like refried beans and rice

  jesusangel: bandaids in a box

  dream2live4evR: chocolate and strawberries!

  jesusangel: I’m the chocolate

  dream2live4evR: that makes me a fruit

  jesusangel: juicy sweet

  dream2live4evR: yeah right

  We chatted all night. She told me about her dad, a second-generation Mexican-American who had to battle the haters every day of his life. I told her about mom (as I remembered her before your father, bro) and how she’d sold her soul, thinking that would be best for me.

  When Remedios confessed her fear of failing at school, I assured her she’d succeed. I called her Remedios the Mighty.

  She wrote: “you’re my own guardian jesus” (just like mom said I was your angel, bro . . . I was your guardian angel).

  By the end of our first chat, Remedios and I were in love. I still don’t know what it was about her. I gave her my birth name, for one. Then there’s the blood line.

  What is Mexico to me?

  Is it the colors on a flag?

  A mariachi beat? The beans

  In a burrito I’d rather not eat?

  It may be a land my ancestors knew,

  But I feel too many times removed.

  What is Mexico to me?

  That’s an excerpt of a poem of sorts I wrote at the time. Can you imagine, little brother? This girl had me rhyming like a school boy. Maybe the Mexico connect was a link to mom. I could see Remedios as mi mami just before she traded her freedom to be who she was for the security of a man who told her how to be. I hated that man. Sorry, bro, but it’s true. I never forgave our mom.

  If it wasn’t listen to your father—He’s not my father!—it was trust in God’s way. Mom would say, “There’s nothing to be afraid of, niño. Go talk to God.” Then she’d shuttle me off to the sin-buster box where redemption would be mine.

  Okay: I lied to Remedios, I lied to Shannon. I haven’t used protection since before the ex, I’ve never been tested. There. Am I saved?

  I failed to protect you, bro. I should have known better, acted sooner. But I didn’t realize what was happening. I was young, dumb, a stupid bitch, the ex would say. Maybe she was right all along.

  SEVENTEEN

  While concentrating on work the next few days was tougher than usual, by Friday afternoon I had plowed through nearly every deadline. I would have no worries hanging over me come nightfall and chat number two with Remedios.

  As I polished off an email to the Reverend on his PACC plan, Cyrus came knocking. It was only the second time I’d seen him since our loco weekend at the Playpen. He rang the bell and rapped the door continuously until I answered. Blowing in like a hurricane, he tore straight to the kitchen, paper bag in hand. “We have to talk,” he said, lifting glasses from the cabinet, filling them with ice. “No foolin.”

  “You know it,” I said. I had to introduce him to dream2live4evR. I keyed in fallenangels on my laptop. SERVER NOT FOUND. My insides lurched, calling up the e-attacks on the churches from before. But this couldn’t be that.

  Cyrus growled as he mixed the bourbon and ginger ale. Handing me a glass, he looked at me dead on. I turned away. “It’s over,” he said, pausing with dramatic precision like his daddy. “Unless . . .”

  If you want to mark the decisive moment of my descent, you could say it started here, or you could just as well choose any of the other crossroads where the path I wound up on offered no U-turn: chasing the ex across the country, blowing three years of sobriety, accepting the gift of a pickup truck tricked-out with a gun
rack. If you’ll excuse the melodrama, bro, in truth I’ve likely been in freefall from the beginning of time, my time, that is, since I was born a bastard. But it somehow feels right now to blame the Reverend’s son.

  “Unless,” he said, “you’re willin to step up and be the savior.”

  “I’m listening,” I said, knocking around the icy glass with my finger as we moved into the living room.

  Cyrus explained how fallenangels was in trouble, slapped with an obscenity violation and ordered by a district judge to pull the site, pending the outcome of the prosecution. If we’re to believe what he told me, and I’m not sure anymore that we should, he said he was looking at up to five years in prison and a ten thousand dollar fine. He thought this was a hoot since he wasn’t even online at present, not since Emmalee.

  “Emmalee,” I said, staring into my drink. “I don’t get it.”

  Cyrus leaned into the wall, breaking down the situation as such: he was responsible for launching the beast. Bebe and Joy developed the software, but it was his vision, so to speak, that brought fallenangels to life. This confession contradicted what he had originally told me. When I called him out, he started doing laps around the coffee table, talking on how he never craved the limelight. “The idea was always to serve the underserved,” he said, “provide a voice for the voiceless, grow community from the grass roots, peer to peer, word of mouth, that sorta thing. A no-frills connection zone for outsiders to feel at home. No membership fees, no appropriation of personal data, no spybots, no hassles—no judgment—what the web was made for, like a fanbase that springs up around an awesome indie band like Children’s Crusade.”

  He dumped himself on the sofa, steadying his glass above his head so it wouldn’t spill. It did. “You don’t know what it was like for us growin up in this hellhole,” he went on, smearing the liquid into the cushions with his bare hand. “Knowin you’re different from day one, bein told you’re bad because you see all this bull for what it is, you’re wrong when you speak your mind, refuse to bow down and be a good Christian soldier with your mall-issue khakis, polo shirt and jarhead.”

  “I can imagine,” I said, fingering my spiked hair.

  “You’re one of us.” Cyrus glanced at me like a shy first love. I held his gaze. “I could tell when I first saw you in my daddy’s parkin lot. You remember?”

  “I remember you on your bike with your crazyass T-shirt.”

  “Damn straight.” He slugged down the rest of his drink. “That’s why we need your help. You know how we roll on fallenangels, brotherman.”

  I couldn’t begin to spell out what the social network meant to me, how I’d be lost without it. “Go on,” I said.

  Up on his feet again, he explained how the site needed a kind of secret host where it could hide from government surveillance. His tech girls said we could bury the whole kitty on another home page, specifically, firstchurchofthechurchbeforechurch.org. Now I was the one who slumped on the sofa.

  He promised I wouldn’t be implicated in any way. Pacing the room, he talked to the walls, the windows and ceiling. If on the outside chance the law ever did find the phantom site, he said he’d take full responsibility. “It’s my daddy’s gig, after all.” Nodding toward my empty glass, he said Joy would deal with the maintenance. I wouldn’t have to do a thing. I followed him into the kitchen, arguing there had to be another way. “We’ve exhausted all the options,” he said. Our glasses refreshed, he knocked his into mine. We threw back our heads and drank. I watched him wipe his lips with the back of his hand. “You’re it.”

  I didn’t dare risk losing my job or getting caught up in more trouble with the law, but he promised again and again, staring at me like I was the bad guy. “No worries,” he said. “Look, they’re gonna drop the charges by Thanksgiving. This all just pre-election, good-Christian posturin. Clean up the local smut brokers. You watch. Next they’ll be gunnin for the sex shops and strip joints.” He eyed me with confidence.

  I trailed him into the living room, thinking how there was nothing else like fallenangels online or off. It was an authentic virtual community. Real people with real needs reaching out to others who felt what they felt. A sanctuary, a sacred space, not for profit, not a scam. No paid models posing as real users, no avatar wannabes. Just warm bodies longing for connection. He rested his hand on my shoulder, looked at me directly. “You know you wanna be of service, bro.”

  “Asshole,” I said.

  He hugged me close. I tried to push him off, but he wouldn’t let up until I committed to the project. “Clear your evenin plans,” he said, easing his embrace. “Joy’s comin over in a few.”

  “You were so sure,” I moaned.

  “You’re one of us, JAG.” He tapped my glass again. “I love ya like a brother.”

  _________

  Joy grinned. “I knew you wouldn’t chicken out on us,” she said, sliding past me at the door, laptop in hand. I felt like I’d do anything to get next to her. Cyrus curled his arm around my shoulders. I elbowed him in the gut. “You’re willin to make shit happen is all. Or so I’ve heard. Ya got that rebel yell.”

  “More more more?” I said, snarling my lip.

  “Music, yes, music!” Cyrus hopped around the room, pouncing in front of my CD shelf. “A soundtrack for the transcendent reunion of fallenangels with God the Father, Son and First Church of the Church Before Church, ya know, because there is no other church, never has been nor will be.”

  “You’re goin to hell,” Joy said.

  Cyrus blew her a kiss. “I always forget you’re a believer.”

  “I believe in lotsa things,” she told him. “Respect bein number one.” Her look made him lower his eyes.

  I tried to redirect the mood away from my weak CD collection toward the massive library on my AweMediaPlayer and external hard drive, but Cyrus wanted to go old-school. “Let’s play an actual compact disc in its entirety,” he said. “You choose, bro. Dazzle us with outtabounds sounds to inspire our work. I’ll supervise from this here sofa.” He plopped down on the couch, dribbling whiskey on his Misfits T-shirt. “That’s why it’s black, baby.” He rubbed in the spill.

  Joy sat next to him, booting up her laptop as I scanned my CDs. I handed Cyrus an unusual compilation of “Ethnic Music Classics” from the first half of the twentieth century. “Nigeria, Sardinia, Russia, Ceylon . . . Rajasthan?” He looked to me for a geography lesson. I turned to Joy.

  “India, children.” Genius Joy. “On the border of Pakistan. Way old-school. Ancient land of the Maharajas, Rajput warriors, the elusive Asiatic tiger.”

  “Elusive meaning dead?” Cyrus said.

  “More or less.”

  “At least they’re not being raped by lions.” I told them about the rogue elephants I’d seen online. We all groaned in disgust. “Animal head doctors blame us.”

  “Not me, brotherman.” Cyrus pointed at himself.

  “Humans.” I cozied up on the sofa, me and Cyrus now sandwiching Joy.

  “For settin an example?”

  “Not funny.” Joy maimed Cyrus with a glance.

  “Habitat loss, poaching, destruction of healthy social networks,” I said. “The young bulls don’t seem to know right from wrong anymore.”

  “It is just like us!” Cyrus screamed.

  “Do you even realize,” Joy said, “how fucked up this is?” Her face was flush, her jaw set tight. “Don’t you know the numbers?”

  “For elephant sex crimes?” Cyrus, being a dick.

  “Fact: at minimum, a woman is raped in the U.S. every two minutes.” Cyrus shut up, nursed his drink. Joy went off. “Fact: a minimum of two hundred fifty thousand women are raped here every year; one in four women and one in six men will be sexually assaulted in the span of a lifetime; one out of every seven victims of sexual assault is under the age of six; fifty to ninety percent of rape victims suffer from PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which can cripple their ability to function in society; four hundred twenty-five registered sex offen
ders live right here in our town.”

  “No!” Cyrus and I said at once.

  “No?” We huddled up as Joy showed us the web site. There they were. All four hundred twenty-five of them. Names, zip codes, birth dates, physical details, descriptions of the crimes. There was a link to another database with pictures, legal stats and addresses. She suggested a quick search for these monsters in the neighborhood. “It’s good to know,” she said, “just to, you know . . . know.”

  She punched in my digits. We got seven hits within three or four blocks of my place. Here’s one: a guy named Richard Foster Wilson (“additional identifiers”: Rich Foster, Will Dickson, R.F. Wilson), fifty-one years old, six feet tall, two hundred forty pounds, blue eyes, partially gray/blond hair and moustache, medium (white) skin tone, convicted twelve years ago in Atlanta for “criminal sexual conduct, second degree,” currently living in my apartment building.