“Tell me, can you really meet my request? Be honest with yourself. Are you a guy who makes shit happen?”
Apparently so. That’s what Joy had said. Cyrus too. And the Reverend.
I hope it’s clear from these pages how I longed to be of service in whatever way I could. It was my calling to do unto others. I should note this impulse came from outside myself, from something bigger than me alone. I was powerless to ignore it.
Yet happyhappy’s need was beyond extreme. Could I do it? Could I hurt this girl to heal her?
I’ve long understood how rape is about violence, not sex. I’m not a violent person. I don’t look for trouble. I take no pleasure in causing pain. It should be obvious that since coming down South I’d acted only with the best intentions, in the interests of others: giving the First Church community an online presence to be reckoned with, rescuing fallenangels from oblivion, not taking advantage of Good Charlotte’s recklessness, fulfilling my commitment to ticktockclock under trying circumstances, battling the law so my son will know his father loves him, respecting the ex’s right to live even though she should be dead. No, I couldn’t see myself as a perpetrator of brutality, even if its end were redemption. There had to be another way.
I replied to happyhappy, telling her what I thought she wanted to hear and asking for more information on what happened to her. What I said was if I knew more about her story, who she was, where she’d come from, then I’d feel more comfortable in the role she expected me to play. What I hoped was by writing about herself and her experience, she would come to terms with her tragedy, change her mind about the reenactment.
Settling in for the night in front of my laptop with the stash I’d borrowed from ticktockclock, pain pills and a big bottle of bourbon, I watched for the dove to appear above the dream2live4evR user name while downloading MP3s from music blogs and web sites. By ten o’ clock, when Remedios still hadn’t shown, I began to question her existence.
How did I know she was for real or if what she’d said about me, about us, had any truth in it at all? I couldn’t know anything for sure until I heard her voice (did she have an accent?) or saw her brown eyes (did they look like mine up close?). I needed to touch her hair (would it feel the same as mom’s?) kiss her soft skin (would it smell of lavender and tangerine?). These were the essential oils in the lotion she alleged she put on after baths, though she might as well have used aloe vera with vanilla extract post-shower. Her dorm probably didn’t even have a tub. How would I know who she was until I saw how she lived?
Half my face looked like chewed-up, spit-out meat. But it only hurt when I felt the open wounds with my fingers, as I was then doing at the mirror, perhaps to prove to myself that I was in fact alive, in the flesh, not zeroes and ones, a digital persona, like so many I’d made up to give others the feeling they were not alone.
And yet what was the cost to me? Who was I?
Not a father, not a husband for so long now. Nobody’s significant other. Not a worthy big brother. I’ll never forgive myself for failing you, bro. A good son? Ha! Is anyone a son when his birth parents are MIA or rotting in a burial ground? An honorable Christian soldier? Hardly. Of course, when I wasn’t passed out, I still attended services each Sunday. Tech geek? In part, but what I did was babyfied. I wasn’t Bebe or Joy. I called Cyrus on his cell. Voicemail. I hung up. Then I texted him: “Who am I?” His response (days later): “One crazyass muthafucker!”
What had I done with ticktockclock? If she conceived, what would that make me? Would I see her again, per our agreement, or would I bail, leave her to face her fate alone? Then there’s Lil_Girl, Philomela, Ms. V. Who was I with them? Who would I be with CondeeCandee, watch_me_now and the rest? Was there a me in any of these relationships?
It felt wrong to curb my impulse to connect, but I wondered if I was making excuses, telling stories to justify my behavior. There may have been love behind my actions, but was it body and soul, or me reaching for a less empty feeling? Is there such a thing? Maybe emptiness is what’s real, and everything else a fabrication. If that’s so, then what does anything matter?
This was how I flogged myself that night while waiting for Remedios to come online. (Who was I with her? A distinguished Latino poet? Es verdad!) I tried to recollect a core sense of self, calling up how I felt with Shannon on our last night together. This gave me the strength to recommit to my current obligations. I acknowledged that I was a force for good, a mere speck of light in the big black, but a light nonetheless, and my doubts were selfish, self-pitying, pointless, like Christ’s in the garden before the fatal kiss.
I’m sure this isn’t easy to understand, little brother. It’s hard to explain. All I knew for certain by the time I slept that night was this: I was not in control and there was no turning back. I didn’t know what that meant, how far I would go, and I don’t know now, except there’s no retreat, there never has been. The only way is forward, and the only way forward is straight ahead, with eyes and arms, heart and mind wide open.
TWENTY-TWO
The calendar said autumn had come, but it was still so damn hot I woke up sticky with sweat. My face hurt bad. My head throbbed. I was angry, jittery, afraid I’d be late for services and look like hell for my date.
I washed up quickly, tried to get presentable with makeup (yeah, makeup) to mask the injuries, a pricey linen suit, conservative tie, blow-dried hair and a splash of gray around the temples for that middle-aged groomage of CondeeCandee’s desire. Hollywood sunglasses completed the look. In the right light and from a distance, I could pass for a dapper businessman, a pillar of the community with a penchant for dildos, vibrators, French ticklers and the like. I breathed deep, then raced off to First Church.
Cyrus’ prophesy came to pass as the Reverend introduced his latest political crusade: a ban on the sale of sex toys within the city limits and a rezoning of strip clubs or “any establishment with explicit intent to arouse prurient behaviors” two hundred yards or more from schools, churches, ball fields and shopping malls. Inspired by the Holy Spirit to shore up “natural bonding in the conjugal bed,” the Reverend explained how he had worked with civic leaders at Bliss U and in the city council to draft a bill “to expel perversion and encourage sanctity in sensual union. I’m no prude,” he said. “The pleasure of relations between a man and his wife are a gift from God, an organic outgrowth of a caring, committed relationship consecrated by the church and supported by communities of faith. But ‘sexual enhancement devices’ and ‘adult entertainment’ undermine this spiritual bond while distorting physical, psychological and emotional clarity.” He removed the reading glasses from his scarecrow nose, wiped the lenses with his kerchief, set them both down on the lectern.
“What husband wants to lie with a wife,” he said, “who ‘knows,’ as the Scriptures put it, an electronic contraption in the same way she knows him? Tantamount to adultery.” He stepped back, stared down the congregation. “What wife,” he shouted toward the microphone, “wants to serve a so-called man who soils his psyche with images of other women in unspeakable acts of degradation?” I considered how his message applied to the New Media Frontier, where there was no limit to opportunities for dirty fun. “If thoughts carry the same sinful weight as deeds,” the Reverend said, leaning forward now, both hands gripping the lectern, “then this, too, is adultery.” He put his glasses back on, licked his finger, turned a page in his notes.
“As the Lord told Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, ‘Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ This legislation is designed to aid our community in its war on weakness of the flesh. In Jesus name, I urge you to contact your council members and the mayor with your support.”
While the Reverend catalogued the wages of flesh sin—AIDS, impotence, abortion, divorce—I snuck outside to check fallenangels on my cell. No messages. I worried something awful may have happened to Remedios, but I also wished it had. Otherwise, she’d have no excuse fo
r blowing me off on a Saturday night. Back inside First Church, anxious to get with CondeeCandee, I prayed for a speedy end to the sermon.
_________
We met at the Sunny Spot Café, an ironic choice given the overcast sky, which failed to cut the heat and humidity but provided a veil of soft lighting for my face. We smiled politely at each other across a small table on the patio, she sipping a latté, me stirring a Very Merry Berry smoothie with a straw. I lowered my shades, just so, to meet her eyes. Her photos hadn’t lied. I needed to keep in mind that she was a devout Baptist. Sex for her was sacred. It was for me as well, or at any rate it used to be.
We griped about the weather. She quizzed me on my background. I kept it simple, mostly true to fact with some strategic shifting of the timeline. My son was a teenager, the ex was dead. “So you never remarried,” she said.
“Never found the one.” I reached out to touch her hand.
Her fingers were solid, gentle, a sign of maternal strength, like she could get any job done and no one would get hurt. Her rings matched her bracelets and necklace: gold, diamonds, rubies, her birthstone, symbolic of passion, she’d tell me later. “After all these less-thans I’ve put up with, I don’t know about ‘the one,’” she said. “To make whole your half?”
“For always and forever? Odds say . . .” I drum-rolled on the table. “No!” We both laughed aloud. “But in the moment? Sure, I like to think we have a fighting chance. God willing.”
“Amen.”
I was surprised she didn’t notice the funkiness of my face. She may have said nothing out of courtesy, but it also occurred to me people tend to see what they want, what they can, which is rarely what’s right before their eyes. This makes them easy to manipulate, if one were inclined to do so. I’ve never understood how anybody can use others like that, though. I let CondeeCandee see me however she liked because I was here for her, to be what she wanted me to be, to love her how she needed to be loved. I told her so too: “I’m here for you, Condee.”
She leaned back in her chair, stared off at the strip mall across the street where a gift shop advertised The Good Book - illustrated pocket edition - $4.95!!! “I have to get home to my kids,” she said. “Family movie matinee.”
“The demands of mamahood.”
“You know teenagers.” I nodded like a veteran parent. “I’ll do whatever it takes to bring us together in the same room at the same time.”
I touched her manicured nails, ruby-red and sharp. I imagined them slicing me open, tearing my insides to ribbons. “And us? When do we come together?”
She dug an e-planner out of her shiny handbag. We made an appointment for next weekend at the downtown Marriott, the city’s premium hotel. I would foot the bill. She’d picked up the café tab. Fair’s fair.
At home I found a frenzy on FEAR NOT, the posts screaming in all directions at once. On one hand, this meant the original idea for an interactive forum had taken root. On the other, the hysterical tone of many of the threads meant the Reverend’s intention to ease concerns over “little nothings” had been flipped on its head: the parishioners were freaking out.
Married guys with erection issues worried their “enhancement” activities (pill-popping, roleplaying, videos, vibrators) would soon be outlawed by the Church and the city council and they would lose their wives without such boosts to their man power. “With my arthritis,” one elderly gent wrote, “my hands aren’t what they used to be, and neither is the rest of me. Don’t make fun. It could happen to you. . . . If I can’t be a good man to my wife, and be in good standing at my Church, then I might as well shoot myself dead.”
A couple of women argued that the Reverend didn’t belong in their bedrooms or between their legs. They said his politics were “misguided, misogynistic and misanthropic. Who does he think he is? God Almighty Himself? Accessorizing is adultery?! Puh-lease. I wouldn’t be the woman I am if it weren’t for my little Buzzy Boo. Girls, you know what I’m saying. And I like who I am.”
A college kid fretted that the proposed legislation would shutter the town’s first Hooter’s restaurant, recently opened to public outcry in a mall within peeping distance of one of the storefront ministries I worked with. “Now that I’ve seen the light,” he said, “I can’t live without my barbeque breasts!”
Among the posts supportive of the Reverend’s position, there were detailed lists of diseases and ways of death associated with “sins of the flesh” (AIDS, hepatitis, autoerotic asphyxiation), an inventory of unthinkable violations (from gang date rape to necrophilia) and mandates to “reflect, repent, repair before it’s too late!”
A self-described “mother and educator” wrote: “Millions of Americans DIE every year from not following Reverend Puck’s visionary example. Millions more are infected with devastating sicknesses. Who will be next? You? Your spouse? Your first-born? Can you afford to NOT just say NO?!”
These threads snowballed into a series of statistical rants on “preventable deaths” from all the popular causes. Smoking: 400,000 dead in the U.S. every year from cancer and cardiovascular disease related to tobacco products. Drugs: countless millions of wasted lives, gutted families, decimated communities. Alcohol: 100,000 drunks will pass out and never wake up, their hearts bloated, livers corroded, spirits vanquished for all eternity. Diet: 60% of American adults are obese: 400,000 die from sitting on their fat behinds. The environment: toxic agents are everywhere—in our houses, at our jobs, in the air we breathe and everything we eat—polluting immune systems, triggering asthma and allergies, killing 60,000 Americans every year. Improper hygiene: 80,000 U.S. citizens die from not washing their hands, two-thirds of those in states below the Mason-Dixon. There’s a reason we call it the Dirty South.
Fascinated by the uproar, I censored nothing. I now believed the Reverend needed to see how his politics rattled the congregation. In the interest of healthy debate, I contributed a statistic on guns, which the preventable-death bloggers somehow neglected to include: on average, 81 Americans are killed from gun violence every day, which equals almost 30,000 dead per year. In the least I expected to hear the NRA party line, “Guns don’t kill, people do,” or cries from soccer moms on the tragedy of the latest blowup at some mall, church or school. But among the hundreds of posts, this one alone didn’t draw a response.
When the national media descended on First Church around this time, a network news hack cited the unusual quiet on the Second Amendment front as “the dearth of American temerity among the common folk in the Bible Belt.” Many of the reports skewered the Reverend as an “Agitator of Anxiety” during what they called “the critical homestretch of this election season.” Good Charlotte told me how her husband was deeply hurt by the misunderstanding of his mission and its misrepresentation in the press. While the attention ramped up our web traffic, the Reverend was so distraught he considered pulling the blog offline.
The Commander-in-Chief then singled him out in a campaign speech at Bliss U. This was just what the Reverend needed. The president applauded his “divinely inspired fund- and consciousness-raising efforts to ensure a peaceful democratic future for the United States and its many friends around the world.” His faith renewed, the Reverend declared FEAR NOT would remain the cornerstone of First Church of the Church Before Church’s e-ministry.
After work I stayed online all night, every few minutes checking for dream2live4evR’s little digital dove. In between times, I scoured the web for free MP3s and surfed OVA for random retro music videos. When bored, I browsed news clips with the search terms Initiative for Peace, DU weapons, cluster bombs, immigration, Mexico, sex trafficking, Christian politics, U.S.A.
Soaking up images of decorated officers reading prepared statements, limbless kids on cots with open eyes and sealed mouths, little girls with brown faces selling “good love!” on street corners, mutilated corpses, rouge-cheeked politicians, sweaty ministers, golden crucifixes, amber fields of grain . . . I felt like I’d been to a porn festival. Even though I was sp
ent, bleary-eyed, my head pounding, I still craved: more stimulation, more media input.
I wound up navigating the links on TheWebNeverSleeps, WatchThisOrBeBlind and similar domains that archive data on the planet’s grave worries, from alien invasion to the Commander-in-Chief’s plans for martial law. Dispatches on the sorry state of VA health care made me feel like an only child. (I searched your name, bro, came up with little more than your rank and a notice on the date you were shipped to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in D.C.)
Every now and then I returned to fallenangels, looking for anyone to connect with. I found no one.
Shortly after midnight, dream2live4evR’s dove lit up. Unsure how to proceed, I waited a few minutes to give her a chance to message me. She could see just as well as I who was on or offline. If she wanted to chat, she knew how to get me.
I twisted in my seat with indecision, not wanting to appear foolish or aggressive, a jealous controlling lover, but she deserved to be called out. My first move would be crucial. I knew what I would I say.
jesusangel: hey
dream2live4evR: hi!
jesusangel: hola
dream2live4evR: where have you been?! i’ve been missing you . . .
jesusangel: then what happened last night?
dream2live4evR: i wasn’t feeling so well. i went to bed EARLY
jesusangel: I thought we had a date
dream2live4evR: oh baby i’m sorry
jesusangel: you’re sorry
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