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InterText Vol. 7, No. 3 / May-June 1997
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Contents
Graceland..................................William Routhier
The Lady of Situations.......................Madeline Brown
Missionary...................................Gary Percesepe
Paddlefish Sky..................................Hollis Drew
....................................................................
Editor Assistant Editor
Jason Snell Geoff Duncan
jsnell@intertext.com geoff@intertext.com
....................................................................
Assistant Editor Send correspondence to
Susan Grossman editors@intertext.com
susan@intertext.com or intertext@intertext.com
....................................................................
Submissions Panelists:
Bob Bush, Peter Jones, Jason Snell
....................................................................
InterText Vol. 7, No. 3. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published
electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this
magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold
(either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire
text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1997, Jason Snell.
Individual stories Copyright 1997 their original authors. For
more information about InterText, send a message to
info@intertext.com. For writers' guidelines, mail
guidelines@intertext.com.
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Graceland by William Routhier
=================================
....................................................................
Those who accuse the music industry of deifying its stars have
_no_ idea.
....................................................................
Jasmine's been after me for about a month now to go with her to
church. She says it'll cement the relationship. Now these are
two words I don't like to hear when it comes to women -- cement
and relationship. See, I see love as more a fluid kind of thing.
I tell her I wouldn't mind going once, but don't go thinking I'm
going to join. I like the music all right, I tell her, but the
preachers ruin it for me, with their the gold belts, white jump
suits, mutton chop sideburns, wraparounds. "They look so cheap
and old," I say.
Jasmine gets a hurt look on her face but in a blink she segues
into her conversion mode. "That's just false perception," she
says. "You can't judge by the superficial, you gotta take a leap
of faith, then everything that seemed superficial before shines
in glory and you're rocking on real gone holy ground."
"Yeah, yeah, easy to say," I say, "but once I leap, there's no
way I can know what ground I'm landing on till I land."
"Exactly," she says, then shakes her head. "Don't you trust me?"
she says, and I don't answer. She casts her eyes downward and
quietly tells me I might just be the type who'll never love
someone tender, who'll never take care of business. Then she
looks up and says "TLC," waving her hand in the air like a
benediction. "You may never know burning love," she says. Unless
of course I go with her to a service.
I could show you a thing or two about burning love, I'm
thinking.
After our dramatic little scenario, though, Jasmine cuts me a
beautiful, forgiving grin, says, "You're so square, but baby I
don't care." It's my greased black hair, I know. She can't
resist. There's something about religious zealots that's so sexy
to me. Everything so clear cut.
I looked into it, for the sake of keeping her. I'm not against
the whole idea. I just liked the young guy better. Even though
most churches admit to two distinct periods, they all seem to
settle on the Vegas one, the overweight, glitzy one. The "Peace
in the Valley" one. I hate that song.
I read an article in a magazine once that some Ph.D. at Harvard
wrote. Said the Church of the King -- Jasmine's particular
church is the First Church of Grace of His Trembling Lip -- was
a natural step in religious development, came at the right time
to snatch up millions of disillusioned Catholics after the gay
Pope scandal.
Then when they found those scrolls, archeological evidence
recounting Jesus' actual death, how he got no burial, was left
for the dogs after they took him down, that nixed the
resurrection, this Harvard guy says, which upset a lot of
Fundamentalists and other Christians as well. Some called it a
fake, some tried to adapt their dogma, but then scientific proof
came in showing how eternal life and reincarnation were real. So
the abortion argument lost its zing, not to mention the heaven
idea. The walls came tumbling down.
The mass recognition, Harvard Guy goes on to say, led to Him
replacing Jesus as Christ figure easier than anybody could have
guessed. What with the tragic death, the numerous sightings and
visitations, the spontaneous pilgrimages to Graceland on Death
Night which started up a few years after He died and turned into
what's now the largest annual gathering in the whole damn world.
Not quite so spontaneous anymore, of course. August 15th, Death
Night, day before the tragedy -- just like Holy Thursday and
Good Friday. It all fell right into place, Harvard says.
That's why the churches go with the Vegas guy. Historical
continuity of myth. Hot buttons. Works the crowd better. It's
true, people love a tragic story best. The King's tragedy turns
into our salvation, just like with Jesus. Makes them forget
about themselves. Shakespeare knew it, littered the stage with
bodies. And costumes make the show. Give 'em enough for their
dollar, people'll believe what you want 'em to believe. Colonel
Tom Parker used to say that, but they don't talk about him.
So with all this myth and spectacle, why would anybody want to
believe in the rockin' song of holding onto everlasting youth,
like the young guy tried to do? He sure couldn't, anyhow. Hard
to live that way, Daddy-O. I know.
They had a vote on which guy back when, before the turn of the
century. Post Office asked people to decide who they wanted on
the stamp, young or old. People picked young.
People had a better sense of style then.
I play His music all the time. I never bought any official
church holy discs. All that sanctified crap they give you along
with it always creeped me weird. I got the old RCA ones. Songs
sound good still. The man could sing.
Jasmine tells me as we're driving down A1A toward Miami, palm
trees swaying in the warm spring breeze coming off the ocean,
that Elvis -- all the preachers call themselves Elvis -- that
her church's Elvis, Elvis, told her she was a real Priscilla.
Jasmine's squealing, practically creaming her gold silk pants
and she runs a pink lacquered fingernail to her mascaraed eye
and brushes away the touch of a tear, she's so happy because he
said she was a real Priscilla. I think maybe I'm wasting my time
on this whole thing with her. Then she throws both hands into
the air, squeals again and shakes her glorious mane of black
lacquered hair, as much as she can, leans over with her silky
white blouse all billowing in the wind, puts her arms around my
neck and lunges in, kisses my cheek, and the thick whiff of her
perfume drowns out all my doubts as her heavy breasts rub
through my black cotton t-shirt onto my chest and it makes me
believe, good lord, yes. Love me tender, love me true.
I sing the song to her in my... His voice. She's nuzzling my
ear, melting like a chocolate bar left in the sun.
Personally, I'd love to have something to believe in like
Jasmine does, something to console myself with. My parents were
traditional Christians back when preachers were still guys with
white hair sprayed into a stiff pomp talking Jesus on Sunday TV.
Florida was the main place for television church back then, and
unlike many, my folks went out to worship and watch in person
every Sunday. Part faith and praying, part the kick of being on
television. I liked it too. We always videotaped, and that
afternoon before Sunday dinner, we'd sit there and watched what
we'd just sat through, pointing and cheering from our living
room couch when we'd spot ourselves in the crowd, among the
faithful. Weird how something as strange as that can be a sweet
memory. The clear-cut simplicity of it, I guess.
Took quite a while for the whole Jesus thing to die. They held
out, even with the growing popularity of Elvis churches
encroaching and eventually taking over established Christian
church buildings, like when the Crystal Cathedral went belly up
after the big scandal with Preacher Morris Delbert and the four
choirgirls. That's pretty well forgotten now, but it was
plastered all over the tabloids back then for months.
The day I realized it had really changed, I was about fifteen. I
remember it clear, this one Sunday morning, driving down Federal
Highway with my folks and hearing for the first time church
bells chiming "Love Me Tender."
Wow, I thought. The whole thing started to blossom after that,
till pretty soon you couldn't find Jesus anywhere for looking.
My folks still went to one of the last Jesus churches, a small
one in Pompano, blue hair country. Mom said the Elvis stuff
signalled the coming of the apocalypse, but the century had
passed a little while back, Christ didn't return, so the wind
was gone out of those sails too.
A few years later I remember getting a historical biography of
Him out of the library, a real book from the reference section,
with paper pages and black and white photographs and everything,
the kind the church doesn't like to acknowledge or talk about,
the kind they call secondhand tales told out of turn,
falsifications and lies, blasphemous trash. The librarian looked
at me like I was some kind of devil.
Book said He wasn't so holy after all, He wasn't any saint. He
had sex with hundreds of women when He was on the road, wasn't
particularly faithful to anyone. He was a young guy full of the
juice of life. Later on, He took drugs by the fistful to dull
the pain of seeing His juice slipping away.
Next Sunday I'm sitting in church beside Jasmine. Jasmine's
beaming with the victory of me being there. She's looking so
good, her hair in a high tease, tight pink angora sweater and
black capri pants, doused in perfume, that gold bracelet I just
gave her for her birthday jangling on her thin, pale wrist, I'm
thinking I might convert, just for today, just to have a night
of pure bliss peeling it all off of her back at her place. The
deal is she won't go past kiss and touch without me first
"joining in the oneness of the King's holy rocking soul." Right
now she's got my soul rocking and my rocks aching, jumpy to join
in that oneness, and she knows it.
All along the circular walls between each stained glass window
are these big black velvet paintings of the King. One's a warm,
compassionate face. One's a serious face in profile,
contemplating a light from above. One's a full figure of him
performing in the white suit, microphone in hand. One's him in
the same suit standing sideways, doing a karate chop. One's him
with arms outstretched, eyes heavenward, half circle of white
cape under the arms. One's him in a dark suit, strumming a
guitar on a leopard skin couch, wearing the shades. On and on,
the many aspects of the King. Jasmine told me on the drive over
it's considered sacrilegious to refer to him as Elvis. It's
always the King. The preachers, though, they get called Elvis.
Up on the big altar stage, there's a choir of women singers in
white robes, swaying and clapping, singing -- "See, with your
eyes now, see, what the King has done, o-ooo see, with your eyes
now, what the King has done, Lord..."
The choir's wailing this to the old tune "C. C. Rider." The band
is hot, tight as Jasmine's pants, slick as her red lipstick.
They got these beautiful old vintage guitars, authentic brass
horns, real drums, no programmed stuff, everybody's playing for
real, working up a sweat and damn if it isn't starting to get
under my skin, down into my twitchy zone. My leg is bouncing,
Jasmine's noticing, wearing her cat just ate the bird grin, but
I don't give her the satisfaction of even a hint of a smile.
The congregation is weaving, clapping, singing. A little boy in
front of me is kneeling on his seat, bobbing his head to the
music, staring at me. Black boy about five, cute, got on a
little beige suit, daffodil yellow shirt and red bow tie. I wink
at him and he grins and starts gyrating to the music as best he
can from his knees, two little hands holding the back of the
seat. His whole family, sisters and brothers of various ages on
either side of Mom and Dad are all bobbing their heads and
clapping in a grooving, rhythmic oneness, like some kind of
human caterpillar undulating along the branch of a tree. Except,
of course, they don't slide sideways.
I been used to seeing blacks and whites together all my life, in
school and work and the market, but never in church. It was
always black church and white church. A few spill-overs either
way, but here I'm looking around seeing how it's all real
intermingled -- black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and there's no
big pockets of any one kind though the congregation either, it's
cozy and mixed nice, mostly couples and families. The other odd
thing I notice is I've seen about a dozen dwarfs.
The band kicks into "Good Rockin' Tonight," the choir changing
it slightly and singing "Have you heard the news, there's good
rocking today!" The little kid throws both hands up in the air
and is bending his body, swaying side to side at the waist. I'm
hoping he doesn't fall over in his seat. With the entire
congregation going at it like this, I'm feeling it too though,
and that's what I'm beginning to concentrate on, how I feel
good. I groove along for a while until I get this calm inside,
like I used to feel when I was about ten years old and it was
early spring, not hot yet, just before summer hit and I'd go
outside in the morning on Saturday early before the day had
started, everything quiet except the occasional whoosh of a car
going down the highway or the buzz of a lawn mower far off.
Balmy air cushioning me like soft white cotton. I'd pick some
green palm leaves off a small tree next to a hotel pool and go
around to the back of the Wal-Mart parking lot, sneak down to
the edge of the intercoastal canal and float the leaves out into
the water and watch until they sailed out past the docked boats.
Then I'd make up all kinds of little stories and adventures
about where they were going, what they were going to find.
I turn and look at Jasmine. Her blue eyes float dazed in the
black circles of her mascara and they're coming closer.
"You're real gone now," she says, and kisses my cheek.
I look at the velvet paintings along the wall. They look like
they got lights behind them shining through. I stare.
Then I look around at the people, and their faces are beaming
and I think I never saw anything as beautiful.
The band all of a sudden finishes and the music stops. The crowd
hushes and the lights go down. Even though there's some light
coming in the stained glass windows, it's fairly dim. One
spotlight hits the microphone and an orchestra is coming over
the speakers, a recording of the theme from the classic movie
"2001."
Dah -- dah -- dah! Last note, lights go up, he comes whirling
out in his white caped suit, its golf ball sized spangles
shooting off lines of light, he's twirling the cape and holding
his hand out in the air to the congregation, who are standing
now and going nuts. He's not as fat like I thought he'd be, and
he's pretty good looking. The hair is jet black, he's got the
big weird mutton chop sideburns. No shades. The band is ripping
into something I can't place. He stands in front of the
microphone, raises his arms three-quarters up and the cape falls
out full bloomed. In a flick, he whips his arms down, karate
chops the air twice. I'm hearing a few screams and he grins. The
lip curls.
I feel this pure sexual thrill of identification with him, how
he knows he's making the women go crazy and he's loving it and
that transfers to me somehow, this sexual feeling, that it's
something I can do too.
I look over at Jasmine, and she doesn't know I'm there anymore.
Her mascara's running a little, a tear out of the side of one
eye and she's breathing too hard.
Elvis grabs the mike and starts in singing.
"Train I ride, takes me to the King
Train I ride, takes me to the Lord
If you wanna go there with me,
Just gotta hop on board."
The congregation's right there with him, singing and clapping.
He goes along, singing new words to "It's Now or Never," "Can't
Help Falling in Love," and "Suspicious Minds."
As the last song's about to end he holds his hand up behind him
to the band and wiggles it, bringing it down, signalling for
quiet. Dead silence. Then he points at the choir, not looking
back, and their voices start up gloriously in a capella ooo's.
Elvis sings, to "Are You Lonesome Tonight,"
"Are you holy today,
Are you going his way,
Are you free from the doubt and the pain?"
Everyone is swaying, some got their arms in the air, some are
shouting "Amen! Yes, King! I'm free!" Elvis signals the choir
and it drops down to a bare hush of oooo's cooing soft in the
background. He points out at the congregation.
"You feeling holy today?" He's got the voice, the deep, mumbly
honey-throated Southern drawl.
The place shakes from shouts.
"Are you going my way?"
A joyous babble of Amen's agreeing.
"Are you free from your doubt and your pain?"
Yes, King! I'm free!
"Listen to me, then," he says, the choir still cooing soft. "We
all want a burning love, don't we? We all want a love that'll
free us, purify us, make us clean, holy and whole. Well, the
King can give you that love!"
Amen, King! Gimme that love!
"But the mistake churches always used to make was to try to
confine that love, stop up that love, connn-troooolll that
love."
Everybody goes quiet. I realize it's basically the same
performance every week and this is a cue.
"Did the King control his swiveling hips?"
No!
"Did the King control his wiggling leg?"
No!
"Did the King control his burning love?"
No!
"Why not? Because you cannot control love, that why not! You
gotta give love, take love, shake with love, love with love!
"All love is good in the spirit of the holy rocking oneness of
the King. But of course, we can't be wanton and unfaithful. As
man and woman, we must care for one another. How? How does the
King instruct us, what are the two special rules we must follow
to keep it all together, keep it from going astray? One! TCB.
Taking care of business. Responsibility. Faithfulness. Hard
work. The men especially need to pay attention to TCB. Two! TLC.
Tender loving care. Nurturing. Comfort. A kind word. Specialties
of the female. These dictates were handed down directly from the
King to his personal entourage. If we follow them, we can't go
wrong.
"Can we follow the King?" he shouts.
Jasmine's head's bent forward, lines of black snaking down her
soft cheeks. She's shaking all over.
Both hands are up into the air like possession blew into her and
she's shouting "Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!"
I look to the stage. Elvis' casting a strong look her way.
"Who feels holy enough today to pledge their burning love?" he
shouts into the mike. "Any first timers out there, new to the
King? Who wants to pledge a new found burning love?"
Now, part of the reason for what I did next was definitely
because of Jasmine and the look I see Elvis give her, but part
was maybe because I really did feel something.
I hear myself shout "I want to pledge my burning love!"
Amen's come up all around. Jasmine turns, shocked, snapping out
of a trance. She's beaming, squealing, kissing me on the lips.
Hands guide me out the aisle then I'm bounding onto the stage.
A hush comes over. I'm wearing my blue sharkskin suit, my hair's
slicked on the sides like usual, pomped a little on top, jet
black as Elvis' and from a distance, you'd might say I had more
than a passing resemblance to the King. People have remarked. So
standing beside Elvis we're the two Elvises, young and old. He
puts his arm on my shoulder, leans in.
"Any chance you can really sing, son?"
I nod. "Bet on it."
I look in his eyes. Steely brown, no wavering in them. Grins.
He's got deep lines on his face you can't see from stage hidden
under a heavy foundation of make-up, crusted at the edges around
his sideburns. All his magnetism disappears as I stand there
beside him. He pats my back, says, "Then you just jump right in
wherever you can," flicks his hand behind him and the band
breaks into "Burning Love."
He's good, I admit. After he sings the first verse, we do the
chorus together, then I stay on the mike and take the next verse
myself, Elvis beside me clapping. We're both on the mike at the
end, side by side singing, "I got a hunka-hunka burning love,
gotta hunka-hunka burning love."
The place is going nuts. Jasmine is looking at us in ecstasy,
doing spasmodic little half crouches, pressing her knees
together and going into squeals and I know what that means.
Song finishes. He pats me on the back, gauging crowd reaction.
"I might just bring you back another time, son," he says. Then
he looks down at Jasmine and leans over, intimate, confidential
Elvis-to-Elvis arm and says, away from the mike, "Sweet little
piece you got there. Real choice A-1 Priscilla. Best keep your
eye on that though, 'cause I've had mine eye on it a while. I
might just steal it if you don't pay attention."
Then he laughs, big white teeth, slaps my back.
"That so." I slap his back a little too hard, wink and grab hold
of the mike.
"Pastor here just graciously asked me," I shout out to the
congregation, "to do a couple more on my own. What you think of
that?" Applause comes strong up over.
I see him go white under the make up. Then grits his teeth to a
tight smile and waves out, turns, glaring anger and unease as he
walks past to side stage.
The band is looking this way and that. Confusion. I step back to
the guitarist and ask if they do "All Shook Up."
"'Course," he says.
"Then make it really rock, man."
He nods.
I hold the mike out shoulder level, do a couple hip swivels.
Screams. I count it off -- One, two, three, four!
They hit the first chord like thunder. It slides up nice and
slow. The drummer's got the in between beats cracking.
Dah dum! Dah dum!
I point my finger at the middle of the congregation, slow glide
it until it's right on Jasmine. Give her a wicked grin. Hell, my
lip curls. I turn and wink at Pastor E., then I'm singing to
Jasmine.
"I'm proud to say that your my buttercup, I'm in love... unh --
I'm All Shook Up! Umm, umm, umm -- ummm, yeah, yeah!"
The place is crazyland now. Chaos. They're rockin', on their
feet, some are standing on the chairs, young girls are making
unrestrained noises. I look over to Pastor, see him bravely
clapping along, smile plastered ten times tighter. I'm thinking
he looks like what he is, cheap old car salesman in a loud suit
waiting to get back and make his tired tried and true. Song's
ending, I point at him, shout, "I'd like to sing this next one
for that man there, your Elvis!"
Crowd roars. He waves to them then gives me two fingers off his
eyebrow for show.
I run back, quick consult with the guitar player, who I can tell
likes me now, then back to the mike.
"Welllllll..." Band finds the key. Guitarist nods.
"It's... a one for the money -- two for the show -- three to get
ready -- now go cat go! But don't you, step on my blue suede
shoes..."
My antennae are up, nerve ends tingly. I'm rock solid on the
beat, in the middle of the music, hearing each instrument clear,
separate, rocking on real gone ground, just like Jasmine said.
I'm cueing the band with my body to where the emphasis is, like
a conductor. Like the King.
I feel the crowd and I'm right there with them.
I sense waves of tension in some of the older folks, though. The
challenge in the song. Young against old.
I cast a quick glance back. Pastor Elvis isn't clapping anymore.
He's studying them, squinty-eyed, waiting for the time to move.
The song's ending; I'm on the last line -- "But lay off of my
blue suede shoes -- " I snap around, point at the guitarist,
then turn sideways and face the Pastor.
"You ain't huh-na-thin-buh-da -- Hound dog! Crying all the time.
Y'ain't nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time. You ain't
never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine!"
Drum beat goes rat-a-ta-tat-a-ta-tat-a-ta-tat-a-ta-tat!
Swiveling front I point down to Jasmine.
"Well _she said you was_ high class, but that was just a lie!"
The congregation's barely clapping now. They're stunned, except
the little boy in the beige suit, yellow shirt and red bow tie,
who's standing on his seat gyrating, going crazy still till his
sister slaps him on the shoulder. It's like he's waking up. He
looks around and starts bawling.
I finish the song. Dead silence. A few boos. The Pastor strides
over to the mike.
When he's close enough I put a hand out to hold him at bay.
"I just insulted this here man, pastor of your church," I say.
"Why? Why would I insult a man I just met? And why would I
insult you in your church? Am I crazy, a rabble rouser?"
Silence.
"No, ladies and gentlemen."
There's murmuring, unquiet shifting. Pastor stands back,
watching close.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I have to tell the truth, and the truth
isn't always nice, but see, this old man here, he said something
to me, disturbing."
Pastor Elvis pushes in to grab the mike from me. I shove him
away. A shocked inhale out there an audible "Ooohhh." One sound.
Pastor yells to the crowd without the mike.
"This disrupter... he's obviously disturbed. Please treat him
with care -- TCB -- TLC -- but please -- come up, somebody help
me... get him off the stage..."
Several burly guys are heading down the aisle now.
"Wait a minute," I say. "That beautiful young woman there, see
her? When I came to the stage to receive salvation from this
Pastor, well, he winked, whispered she was one sweet piece."
Congregation hushes, the big guys slow down.
"Said she's a real Priscilla he had his eye on a while and if I
didn't watch myself he'd steal her when I wasn't looking. Guess
he thinks he can, because he's Pastor Elvis."
The big guys stop. Someone shouts "No!"
"Yes! What reason do I have to lie?! I'm standing here 'cause of
a leap of good faith. Don't know a thing about this Elvis but
what Jasmine told me -- she said she was happy because he told
her she was a real Priscilla."
There's general hubbub, babble. Jasmine's nodding, big.
"That innocent girl," I say, "didn't know what was waiting. Now
I don't know how you people run things, but that don't sound
like TCB to me. Personally I'm offended, as you might figure."
Pastor Elvis is square-jawed, shaking his head in the negative,
making broad gestures as if pushing me away with his hands,
playing like what I'm saying's hogwash.
"Well, then, you all tell me," I say, "if I'm lying. `Cause if
I'm not, I just bet Jasmine's not the only one, I bet there's
another woman out there done to the same, someone who maybe
didn't want to say so publicly before, or someone who knows
about such a thing. Anyone confirm what I'm saying? Pastor made
someone else his Priscilla too?"
Dead silence. I got a strong feeling my instincts are good but
at the same time I'm not sure if I just hung myself. A half
minute goes by. People are looking up at me, over to Pastor.
Out of the back a woman's voice yells "Yes! It's true!"
Down the aisle she comes, big teased hair, blue eye shadow and
thick mascara, gold lame jacket, tight black pants packing
sagging weight, pushing I'm guessing forty. A flash hits me.
Looks just like what Jasmine's gonna.
"He told me I was his Priscilla too!" she says, up close to the
stage, pointing a long red fingernail. Then she faces the
congregation.
"When I was fresh, he loved me. Then I wasn't anymore, my sin
was I got older, so he dumped me. That's not TCB. I don't know
why I keep coming here, I still have some TLC for him in my
heart I guess. But I'm just a fool, `cause his love wasn't
tender and it sure wasn't true."
Poor old Elvis is frozen. Drops of sweat are falling off his
sideburns.
Out of the crowd pop two more teased hair brunettes, younger
than the first, older than Jasmine, shimmying down the aisle.
In the front row a woman who looks like the oldest of the
Priscillas gets up, hurries off to the side and pushes herself
through the emergency exit door.
Pastor's wife, I figure.
Pastor Elvis' looking at me. Hard. Then he suddenly swings
around flourishing his cape and disappears.
I wait a beat. Don't know if it might be blasphemy, but I say it
anyway, can't resist.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building."
There's a pause, then they start to laugh and clap.
One eternal minute goes by as I stand there at the mike,
thinking, Maybe got what I wanted. The young one. Only it's me.
Destiny breathing down my neck hot and heavy. Clapping's louder.
Deafening. I can't help...
I feel my lip curl, looking at all of them looking at me.
Shouting "Sing!"
"But I ain't Elvis," I shout back. "I ain't the King."
"Sing!"
Jasmine is gazing up glassy-eyed, they all are, like I'm a
velvet painting. I want to run but my leg's twitching.
Shouts grow louder, trying to drown it out of my head, voice in
there telling me over and over, "You ain't the King. You ain't
the King."
William Routhier (routhier@tiac.net)
--------------------------------------
William Routhier lives in Boston and is currently working on a
novel. He has written for _The Boston Book Review_, _Stuff_
Magazine, and _The Improper Bostonian_; his fiction has appeared
in _Happy_, _atelier_, and _Dream Forge_.
The Lady of Situations by Madeline Brown
============================================
...................................................................
"Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out into fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still."
-- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
...................................................................
Once when I was a little girl my mother took me to the best
place I have ever been. It was on a summer evening and I had on
a new yellow dress that she had sewn for me and that matched one
she had made for herself. I woke up the morning of that day and
went into her workroom and saw it there hanging up, newly done;
she had promised me it would be ready and it was, and it was the
most beautiful dress I had ever seen.
And that summer evening in the flower-laden air we walked down
the dusty path from our doorstep past the farthest spot I'd ever
been before, which was the village church, and it seemed to me
as we went that we were making up the world as we went along, or
at least that she was; that past the church, which I knew was
real, every bush, every squawking mockingbird, every leaf
stirring in every breeze was a moment's imagining for her, and
that what she was showing me, what she was teaching me, was how
to build a magic world and people it.
And so when I think of that place -- Summer, The Past, Araby,
Oz, Xanadu -- and the festival we went to that night, where the
ice cream truck's tinny music mingled with the haunting silver
notes of flutes, and youths and maidens in bright colors danced
all night long, and where my best friend found us and grabbed my
hands and kissed my lips; that place -- I think of it as my
mother's invention, the sign of her consummate artistry.
It was the last time as a child I felt her power so palpable,
the last time I felt myself protected, initiated by the magic of
her company. It was not so much that I felt her power weaken and
die as that I slowly discovered the power did not exist, and
never had. After my father's death, or in the year or two right
before it, when I had to watch her smoke straight through a pack
of Viceroys every afternoon, leafing through magazines since her
soaps had gone off the air, until she'd dulled her senses or
sharpened her desperation to the point where she could bear to
do what she had to do, which was to stay alive a little longer
-- then I thought the cruel thing. Not, how art the mighty
fallen; nothing so kind as that. But rather, how could I have
ever so mistaken who she was.
Now I know better than that disenchanted child-self. Now once
again I believe in magic. Sitting here in the afternoons, when I
have tired of working at my loom, as I look at the green flag
flying from the tower across the courtyard, I think of her and
how, were she still alive, she'd fly through this window and
carry me away, carry me away from all this.
Every night I climb into the bath whose water I have scented
with the spices that remind me of her and I emerge recreated
from those waters. When I dream at night I am back in her arms.
It pleases me sometimes to be thought, to act the part of femme
fatale. It is so far from what I actually am that the imposture
makes me feel safe, perfectly disguised. I watch myself smile,
walk, flirt with infinitesimal motions of eyelash and fingertip
(so subtly accomplished am I), and I wonder: Where did I learn
this? how did I become so skilled? I think I must be a natural
actress, or at least have found a perfect part to play.
But I am also capable of judging my behavior. What a bitch, I
think sometimes. I am a bitch, for instance, to my lover's
former concubine. But I don't know how else to express my desire
for her. For isn't the jealousy I show her a form of flattery?
And flattery a form of flirtation? She is a shell-pink creature,
and the sweat-damp, dark gold curls that cling to the back of
her neck in the heat of the day move me unspeakably. But she
will never see me; when her glance hits my body it cuts through
me -- the shape I have for her is that of the woman who stole
her lover, and who now gives her orders besides. But if I didn't
have this power over her, to so command her distress, I'd be
nothing to her.
I desire her for her innocence. It pleases me at times to
fantasize about corrupting her innocence; at other times, to
fantasize being redeemed by it. Pleasant reveries, an
afternoon's pastime, such rumination.
My lover visits me every night, except when I tell him not to
come. When I have lived the long weary afternoon through, and
made my state appearance in the banquet hall on my husband's
arm, I retire once again to this chamber and wait, but in the
evenings there's a direction, a focus to my waiting. Inside my
clothes my body feels different to me then, exotic and exciting,
as if the imminent prospect of its being seized by other hands
has somehow estranged me from it, made me able to desire myself.
And I do. I look at myself in the mirror, lips parted, eyes
wide, my dark hair loose around my pale face, while at my back I
hear my lover's spurs jangling on the stone as he mounts the
stairs, and I reach the pinnacle of ecstasy. I feel as if I am
about to ravish myself. Then there is the denouement of his
entrance, the entanglements of clothing -- which once I enjoyed
so much, the abrasion of wool and hard buttons on my skin (and I
remember the time he fucked me with his boots and spurs still
on, the pleasure and the danger of it) -- but which repetition
has dulled the piquancy of. No, it is the intervals in our
affair that now most arouse me, the fact of it and not the acts
-- I have a lover, I am someone's mistress! And I delight in it.
But sometimes that delight seems so strange, so odd to me.
Because I am a Queen, because all eyes are trained on me,
everything I do has a consequence, a political significance; in
short, it matters. And if what I did didn't matter, would I want
to do anything at all? Isn't my desire for my lover, my joy in
being his mistress, in part the result of this sense of our
being watched? And if that is so, can it be that these things I
call "feelings," that I think of as part of me, don't come from
inside me at all but from outside me, are scripted somehow by
the expectations of others? And yet they feel like they come
from inside me.
I don't like to think very long along these lines. It's funny --
in college I could go on for hours, spinning theories and
discussing them. That seems so fruitless to me now.
I grieve my husband. His grief began before I cuckolded him; he
married me so that I should grieve him, I think. If I didn't
understand this at the very outset, it wasn't long before I did
-- no later than our honeymoon trip, certainly. He had left the
planning of that to me, giving me carte blanche to choose where
we would go. I wanted the Cape, though ours was a late-winter
wedding and the marshlands would be soggy with snow, the shops
and pleasure-places boarded up. But I had gone there on holiday
once before, as a child with my mother -- it was after my
father's troubles began, in fact they were why my mother took me
there, to protect me from full knowledge of them -- and it was a
happy month I had spent there, dutifully ignorant. The idea of
going there again seemed exotic to me as a new bride -- the
ferries of course have long since ceased to run and we had to
get a special dispensation to drive on the scarred and pitted
highway, but I thrilled at my husband's power to command such
privilege. I didn't want a police escort and so we were on our
own, like any young married couple from a fairy-tale past,
setting out for a seaside pleasure jaunt with a map and a picnic
basket. But it took us over an hour to even find the bridge
across the river -- a mountain of crumbled cement had fallen
over the exit ramp -- and the ruined roads depressed me, with
their decade-old litter of broken bottles and hubcaps and
cigarette butts, paper bags and cups emblazoned with the logos
of defunct fast-food restaurant chains. And the motel we stayed
at, the only one we found between the bridge and the outermost
Cape, was a cheap cinderblock kept in business by teen-agers and
extramarital affairs, for of course there were rarely any
tourists anymore. We must have been the first any of the
residents had seen in years. And though some of them must have
seen us on television -- they still ran occasional news programs
at that time, seven years ago now -- or at least our pictures in
the papers, you wouldn't have known they knew who we were from
how they treated us, with a kind of brusque indifference. In the
morning after our first night there I took my husband to the
beach and even the ocean looked different from what I
remembered, lapping at the shore in scant ripples like
thin-lipped smiles.
My husband knew by that morning what I had known sooner, that I
felt no desire for him. But he was kind to me. After the beach
we sat at the motel's outdoor cafe, by the empty swimming pool,
in the pale February light, and we ordered drinks and my husband
read me poetry. "Summer surprised us, coming over the
Starnbergersee/With a shower of rain; we stopped in the
colonnade,/And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,/And
drank coffee, and talked for an hour."
I knew the poem, had heard it read aloud once before. I'd had a
professor in college who'd read it to me, along with many other
poems. My mother was dead by then, had been for some years. I'd
been adopted by a kind older childless couple, my guardians --
they'd been colleagues of my father's before his fall but had
survived the political vagaries of ensuing years and were doing
well, and could afford to give me the best of everything. They
told me I had a fine mind, and should have an education; I could
be whatever I wanted, they said, but I knew they wanted me to be
a theorist. So when they sent me to college I studied theory.
First one kind, then another, each terribly important to me at
the time. And then in my senior year I found my professor,
whether by accident or as part of some design, I don't know. In
the beginning of the fall semester I was browsing through the
course catalog when I saw a listing that intrigued me: "Readings
in Counter-indicated Complexity," it was called. The professor's
name was not one I had heard before: some junior person, with no
reputation yet, it seemed. But I had taken all the recommended
seminars taught by well-known faculty already, so I went to the
first class meeting.
He was young then, just barely into his thirties. But even then
he had the solemnity of a cleric about him. When all the
students had entered the room and taken seats, he closed the
door, opened a book, and began to read poems to us. It had been
years since I, or any of the others in that room I would
warrant, had heard a word of poetry. We students sat there
transfixed, and I remember the way the late afternoon fall
sunlight slanted through the windows into the room, made and
held a kind of space for the syllables to unfold in time like
music. We were waiting, of course: waiting for the poetry to end
and for him to begin to theorize about it, for surely that was
the point of it all, that was what we were there for, but while
we were waiting we held our breath, and tears formed in the
corners of our eyes. And that expected theorizing never
happened. From that first day until the end of the semester, all
he ever did was read aloud to us, poem after poem, sonnet and
free verse and narrative epic. He never asked us to write for
him, never even learned our names, but sometimes he would gaze
at one or another of us as he read certain lines, as if he were
speaking them to us individually, and whenever he looked at me I
felt he was looking into my soul. "Here is Belladonna, the Lady
of the Rocks,/The lady of situations," he read once, from a poem
called The Waste Land, and he looked at me as he read it.
It made me shiver to hear my husband read the same poem to me,
on our honeymoon, as we sat on the concrete terrace with our
drinks tasting like rust in our mouths, tasting like metal and
blood and vitamins. (As I write this I am looking out my window
at the tower across the courtyard, and the green flag flying
from it. It means the Minister is in his study there, or so I've
been told.) I felt a sense of threat and excitement both, the
way I feel when there's going to be a thunderstorm. It seemed to
me my vision of things changed then, or completed an act of
change that had begun that semester in college. The barren
landscape all at once ceased to depress me -- looking past the
chainlink fence, I saw the sparkle of broken glass in the tough
tall marsh-grass and thought it pretty, and I saw the brown
water lying in the lowlands and thought it scary and
interesting. And far away, over the edge of the horizon, I
half-expected to see a horseman come riding toward us bearing
portentous news. There was a kind of shouting inside my head, a
shouting that was like a silence too, and I knew myself a part
of this place, its beauty and its danger.
Across from me at the table my husband went on reading, his
voice dry and sad. He looked small to me, smaller than he had
been before. As if he could feel my gaze on him he broke off
reading and looked up, and our two glances met, and I knew he
knew what I knew too: that the sad parentless maiden he had
married to share his mournfulness was no longer me. That I would
not make my home in loss, or if I did I would call it by another
name and so transform it. And that in living thus I would bring
him pain after pain, and that it would be this pain that would
keep him alive. So we forged our contract.
When I was a girl and my husband the crown Prince, I was in love
with him, as young girls often were. But I didn't actually meet
him until I was grown and had graduated college. I had returned
from the university only weeks previously, and was living with
my guardians, trying to decide what I should do next. My
guardians, though kind as ever, were growing a little impatient
with me, with my persistent ennui and sudden irritable bursts,
which I sometimes directed at them; impatient and a little
worried -- they thought I had suffered a disappointment in love
while I was away, and they tried to get me to talk to them about
it. But I couldn't explain what had happened to me. It didn't
occur to me that the kinds of things I was feeling could have
names put to them and be translated into an awareness, an
understanding in someone else's mind. What would I have said?
That I had sat in a room and a man had read poems aloud to me,
and that because of that experience nothing else, not my degree
in theory, not my promising future, seemed to matter anymore?
Still, it mattered to me more than I realized not to disappoint
this kind couple, and so when my guardians made requests of me I
complied when I had spirit at all to do so. It was at their
request that I accompanied them to the debutante party of the
daughter of friends of theirs, a great decadent display of
fabric and food and furniture such as was popular at that time,
in the first flush of the Restoration. I accompanied them, but
in my sullen pride I wouldn't dress for the occasion -- I wore
instead my college uniform, the plain blue smock that was the
habit of my order, and I didn't dress my hair or put makeup on.
But because it was a party for the very best people, no one
raised an eyebrow at my austerity; the men all kissed my hand
and the women my cheek with perfect aplomb, and I felt foolish,
childish in my petulant withholding from pleasure.
It was the feeling foolish, I think, that made me want to behave
really badly. I had drunk too much wine too quickly besides, and
felt overheated in the crowd. Someone, a youngish man, a
graduate of my own university who had a Cabinet post, was saying
something about a new post that was soon to be created, a
Ministry of Culture, and in a voice that sounded thin and reedy
to my own ears I heard myself say, "My father wanted to
establish such a post fifteen years ago, and they destroyed him
for it." There was a pause after I spoke for just a heartbeat's
length before the smooth momentum of the conversation around me
resumed, and in my memory it seemed that that pause in time
opened up a physical space too -- the crowd around me parted for
a moment and through the gap I looked down the room and saw the
King nearby, in just the next knot of people, saw him hear my
words and turn to see who'd spoken them, saw something register
in his eyes when he saw me. I felt a moment's shock as I
recognized him -- I hadn't known it would be quite so grand a
party -- but I was compelled by some other directive to look
past him, further down the length of the room, to the great gilt
mirror that hung on the far wall, and in that distant glass I
thought (and even now I am not sure) I saw my professor, he who
had read me poems, his face half-turned from me.
When I turned around the wall of people behind me had closed
again, and someone was calling us to dinner. And at dinner there
was no sign of my professor, if indeed he had ever been there.
But the King was there.
What did my husband think of me that night, at his first sight
of me? What was it in me that drew him to me? Curiosity, a kind
of prurient interest, because of my being my father's daughter?
Perhaps that was part of it, but it couldn't have been all --
there were other victims of the purge, after all, and many of
them had daughters. I try to see myself through his eyes, as I
must have appeared then: a pale, eager creature, awkward in her
schoolgirl disguise, thinking she was burning with strength and
arrogance when all she was showing was a shame and fear and rage
so deep it was like a request to be preyed on. Did he want to
prey on it? Or did he want to protect me from being preyed on by
others? Or some combination of the two?
But no, this is just me speculating -- it is what I now think of
my younger self, what I wish someone had been able to think
about me then. Who knows what my husband thought, strange man?
The next day my guardian brought up to me in my room the fateful
calling card as heavy (or as light) as beaten gold, with the
famous monogram scrawled across it in fountain ink, and that
series of interviews began, in the private sitting-room at the
palace where the spaniels lay on the rug and the timed
intrusions of tea and sandwiches or scotch and sodas punctuated
the formal courtesies of our exchanges. And though I delayed and
hesitated and even feigned illness or hysteria at points in that
chess-game courtship, it seems to me now that nothing was ever
in any real doubt: there was never any question that I would
marry him, for the plot had been set in motion, and I'm a sucker
for a plot: on and on it draws me, eager as I am to discover
what's going to happen next.
Before the purges began, before the civil war, before the
restoration and the truce -- for so people of my age count time
-- but after my father had begun to be unfaithful to my mother,
for so my own sense of history dates it -- there was a story
that came on television in the afternoons that my mother and I
watched everyday. All my friends at school watched the program
too, and we talked about it at recess, and acted out our
favorite parts and made up new scenes, but there was something
about the show that was intensely private to me all the same --
it was like it was my secret dream, this television show,
despite its widespread broadcast. It was about a fairy-princess
whose name was Laura. Her face was like a painting, quiet the
way the faces in paintings are. I remember I didn't think her
pretty, the first time I saw her, because I didn't think she was
fancy enough. Then after a week or so I understood how beautiful
she was, and it was as if my eyes had grown new wisdom. She had
wavy hair that was the color of wheat with the sun in it, and
eyes like the ocean, sometimes green, sometimes gray, sometimes
blue. She was ageless and young at the same time. The story she
was in had many sub-plots and many characters, but the single
central strand was the mystery surrounding Laura and her great,
secret lost love. Every episode ended with a vision of her face
at a window, gazing out, speaking in voice-over to someone in
low, intimate tones: "And so another day ends, my love. Another
day without you near me..."
I remember how I used to sometimes whisper those words to myself
as I lay in bed at night, and try to imagine who that person
could be, the person to whom those words were addressed.
Thinking about that story now, about its sweet continuance, I
know that it wasn't the promise of revelation that kept me
enthralled with it day by day, but the certainty that there was
always something that would never be revealed.
The story was on for years before it was finally cancelled, one
of the last of the television shows to go off the air. After the
first year or so, the actress who played Laura didn't want to be
in the story anymore, and so they replaced her with a different
actress. I remember the harsh jarring sensation, the outraged
betrayal, I felt the first time I watched the story with the new
Laura. But after a few weeks I got used to her, and a few weeks
after that I stopped thinking about the previous Laura.
Sometimes, I remember, I felt a vague kind of loss, a longing
for something out of reach, that now I associate with loyalty to
the first Laura -- but then again, wasn't the loss and longing
there even when the first Laura was in the story? They had five
or six Lauras over the span of time the story was on, I think.
As I sit here in my tower room, working my tapestry, I get a
feeling that takes me back to that time, that quiet afternoon
time when my mother and I curled up together and lost ourselves
in that story, each losing our separate selves but staying
connected by the contact of our physical bodies, each to each.
It is a feeling of quivering expectation that fills me now, a
thing I almost want to call joy -- it makes me want to run down
these stairs and out onto the green and up the bell-tower, and
set all the bells a-swinging.
But at that thought I always stop, and my joy is strangled in my
throat. For the Minister's study is in the bell-tower, and the
green flag flying tells me he is there.
It is time to speak of him. I have put it off long enough. I
have tried to wade in slowly, referring to him here and there,
trying to prepare. But I can't. He's a jarring note, someone I
can't make sense of. Someone I can't work into the tapestry
without tearing the thread, warping the woof. But I can't ignore
him either. (Write it, Terah, I tell myself, and even as I do so
I hear the echo of a poem, read by his voice.)
I will, I will write it. I will tell you.
He first came, oh when was it? Six years ago? Though I knew
before then that he was coming. When was it I knew for sure that
it was he who would come? Coming to know that I knew was
gradual, the way getting to know you're in love can be gradual,
the recognition of one's state trailing so far behind the
important event that the event itself -- the moment of falling,
the Great Moment -- is located in an unlocatable past (does the
theoretician in me show?).
There was talk even before my marriage about the new Minister of
Culture, how the King had surprised everyone by choosing someone
young and unknown, and surely I must have at least suspected
then? (For I thought I had seen his face in the mirror, the
night I met my husband.) (But why does it seem important to try
to puzzle this out? Because somehow I think of my knowledge as
guilt, and my ignorance as innocence. Was I ever ignorant? Was I
ever innocent?)
Certainly by the day of the culture festival, held to honor his
arrival in the capital city, I had long since known that the new
Minister was my professor. I knew too, by then, that his wife
came to the city with him, for she had been appointed Priestess
of the Chapel. (It shocked me to hear that archaic title brought
forth again after so long, and it frightened many people. Not
all the old traditions are best reinstated, some said.)
On the festival day my husband had the avenue that led from the
palace to the tower strewn with flowers, and musicians,
jugglers, actors, painters thronged the square, plying their
trades. Makeshift bookstalls displayed dusty volumes for sale,
dug out of obscure storage in recent months. And I was there, on
my husband's arm, dressed in my regal robes, in my powdered
hair. I was there when the closed litter (for as of times of old
her face was never to be seen) carrying the Priestess went in
procession down the avenue, and I saw the Minister riding behind
her on his white horse.
He had changed. Once, in that distant classroom, he read to us
as Satan, speaking to the sun, and he had said: "Me miserable!
which way shall I fly/Infinite wrath, and infinite
despair?/Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;/And in the
lowest deep a lower deep/Still threat'ning to devour me opens
wide,/To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n." And I thought
how like a fallen angel indeed he looked as he read those lines,
his florid face twisted into passion and his short yellow hair
standing on end, and the sensuality of the mouth with the
clarity of the gray-blue eyes ...
But he had changed. His face was a stately mask that festival
day, immovable, it seemed.
It made me want to make it move.
Write it, Terah. Say: it was all my own doing. He never once
gave me any sign, of recognition or of interest. Unmoved mover,
he greeted me in the formal manner on state occasions, making me
the low bow, kissing my brow with cold lips. But a fire had
flared into being somehow (As kingfishers catch fire, so
dragonflies draw flame -- ). It raged in my blood and would not
let me sleep, let me eat, or let me work at my loom. (What I do
is me; for that I came.)
And so one night, I followed him after vespers. It was still and
dark on the stairs to the tower. He preceded me, seemingly
unaware of my presence, his robes a faint glow up ahead. But
when he reached that round chamber at the top of the stairs, he
turned and stretched out his hand to me. There was a brightness
there. I moved toward it. When I reached him he was naked. It
was his skin that was glowing. His naked sex, erect, curved,
pure white. My own skin, when I removed my robe, looked gray
next to the whiteness of his. His hands on my shoulders, I went
on my knees, the bones of my knees on the cold flagstone, and
then his cold sex in my mouth. How could it have been cold?
There must have been some heat there. And then the sudden force
of his ejaculation, the jolt of that.
With that unholy milk still on my lips he lifted me up, led me
to a curtain at the back of the chamber, swept it aside, and
there she was, as if entombed. The Priestess. I had never seen
her face before that I could remember, and yet she looked
familiar to me. She was younger than I had thought, but her face
was like a death-mask, white and still. There was a blue cloth
covering her, but there was a rent in that fabric over the rent
in her, her vagina open like a sea creature lifting itself to
the air, a pink stain like spring blossoms in bare woods. His
hand on my hair, he put my mouth to her bleeding gash, and his
milk on my lips staining her was like the breeding of maggots in
her flesh, and I gagged and struggled free and fled. Out into
the night. To the Knight, who became my lover.
For the Knight, my lover, was encamped on the green between the
tower and the palace, sleeping his troops there for the night,
just returned as they were from the northern regions where they
had put down the recent rebellion. One of his guards seized me
as I fled the tower, naked as I still was, and bound me and
brought me to him. I saw from his shocked eyes that he knew who
I was, had seen my photograph, or me myself in some state
procession.
And he was kind to me. He said, Bring her a cloak, it is a holy
madness that is upon her, for such things afflict royal folk
sometimes, 'tis said. I grasped those words and held them, hold
them still. Perhaps they are true.
His simple lust restored me. His concubine, the pink and gold
girl, lying next to him on her divan as he received me from the
night, I thought not of then. Later though, after I had crept to
him from the separate bed where he had couched me (for he
thought not to return me to my husband that night,) I heard her
weeping. But I did not stop. I needed him, needed his clumsy
surprised passion. Afterwards I slept, as I had thought I never
would again. I found refuge in the passion and the pain of this
simple couple, from the unholy holiness of that other pair.
Who yet are always with me, even as I write this, breathing on
my shoulder, the troubling sun and moon of my nights and days.
Madeline Brown (madeline@mit.edu)
-----------------------------------
Madeline Brown lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She is at
work on a series of interrelated fictions, of which "The Lady of
Situations" is one.
Missionary by Gary Percesepe
================================
...................................................................
"So they drew near to the village to which they were going.
He appeared to be going further, but they constrained him, saying,
'Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is far spent."
--Luke 24:28-29
...................................................................
Right after high school, I spent almost a year at a
fundamentalist Christian college in upstate New York, where I
seduced my English professor and got C's in all the courses not
in my major, which was psychology. My papers in John's classes
were all weeks late, which explains the C's, if you believe in
explanations.
I wasn't dumb. I left before we were caught. They didn't have
anything on me, or on him, but they were on the scent. I could
tell. John was hopeless in the area of deception, and they had
ways of finding things out, a whole legal machinery of sin
detection, complete with informants. Leaving was something I
could do for him, at least. I never got to say goodbye, which
was the way I thought I wanted it at the time. Just check out,
like a rehab gone bad. Failed fundamentalist. Don't look back.
Lead him not into temptation. Deliver him from evil.
I know what people think when they hear all this, and it's OK --
maybe I think some of that too. But the thing is, it's been six
years since I left, and I still don't know what any of it means,
or even how to make this sentence keep going until it made sense
to anyone who wasn't there. Or to anyone who was.
Like Garbo
------------
Winter is my favorite season. I've always known this. It seems
wrong to speak of other seasons, as though they exist. I liked
it there in winter. The sky was low like a snowy roof and in the
brilliant woods adjoining campus a furious wind was blowing,
always. The lake was frozen three straight months. Sometimes
John would walk me across it, laughing and moving in a
half-skate. We danced, a kind of tortured mock tango there on
the lake, remembering bits from old movies that John had seen in
videos that he rented and played late at night in his cabin,
where I'd go late at night, breaking curfew with the help of my
roommate Kit, another fugitive from fundamentalism, who'd let me
in the locked dormitory door at six the next morning.
When we stumbled and fell we'd lie in a heap on the ice,
kissing. After, I'd pull away and stare at him, my face lit by
moonlight, immobile, like Garbo. Like that, yes. I knew what he
saw when he looked at me, his conflicted desire.
It hurt to look at him then, seeing the shape of his care
reflected in his cloudy eyes. Poor boy. It was then that I knew
he was as lost as me. At these times and no others I'd let
myself think, "he loves me," but then I'd remember that to him,
as a fundamentalist Christian, love and rescue meant the same
thing. He's big on salvation, I would think. Then: It's not his
fault; it's all he knows.
John
------
John did his best to impersonate a normal fundamentalist college
professor, but it was an unconvincing performance to me. He'd
tell me that he didn't belong there at Redeemer College, that he
took the job only because he was desperate for work in his
field, that he got the job because the Dean knew his father (a
pastor), that he'd leave when he finished his dissertation, that
something better would come along. And I'd say "What?," sweeping
my hand in a dramatic gesture that took in the eight-by-eight
square of his office with the droopy tile overhead and the
blinking fluorescent lights. "And leave all this?"
John believed that leaving would be the best thing, after what
had happened between us, but I observed that belief was
precisely his problem, that he was excessive in his need for
belief. Besides, I'd tell him, you're needed here. You're a
missionary.
Mr. Darcy
-----------
When I was small, the single missionaries would stay with us at
the parsonage, and my sister and I always dreaded it. The women,
with faint moustaches and impeccable grammar in their
fund-raising newsletters, always seemed to have the most
terrible physical problems; they limped, they gave off a vague
medicinal smell, they used no makeup, they wore K-Mart shoes and
hose with seams. I changed the sheets when they left, holding
them at arm's length as I threw them into the washer.
It's possible that the single men, however, were worse. Once, in
sixth grade, a man named John Darcy stayed a week with us, and I
never saw him come out of his room -- that is to say, my room; I
had to stay with my sister -- until the last night, just before
dinner, when he appeared before me and Cassie and our
girlfriends and started doing calisthenics with an unholy
enthusiasm. Amazed, we watched as he stood on his head in the
living room, his glasses awry, his spastic mouth twitching with
exertion. I was twelve, and horrified. I wondered what he had
done all that time alone in my room. I grew up deathly afraid
that I would become a single missionary and do calisthenics in
the houses of strangers.
Class Notes
-------------
What I remember comes in pieces, like the soft doughy squares of
bread my father served at communion in the Baptist church, the
crust carefully cut away by deaconesses. I reach inside and seem
to pick up a piece of Wonder Bread memory. This do. In
remembrance of me. This is my body. Broken for you.
I remember John lecturing on the history of romance. It was a
morning in early January, missions week at Redeemer. Slouched in
my seat against the pale green wall, notebook in my lap, I
sleepily took notes. Tall titled columns of them. But when I
look, my notebook now looks like the haphazard ramblings of a
bright but disorganized deity:
happy love has no history
Tristan lands in Ireland
Iseult the Fair love has always been nourished by obstacles
romance only comes into existence
when love is fatal, frowned upon doomed by life.
what draws us is the story?
It surprised me that a fundamentalist college would offer
courses on Shakespeare and the age of Romanticism, lots of
Keats, Byron, Shelley, but I've learned that fundamentalists are
very big on love and romance. They're suckers for tales of
conquest and heroism, evil dragons slain, fair damsels rescued
from distress. They don't really believe in happy endings, at
least not in this life. They want to believe that all are
sinners, all are lost (they're right, there!), that everyone and
everything can be saved through a personal relationship with
Jesus.
I'd say: Jesus saves. Moses invests. Lead us not into Penn
Station. Deliver us from Evel Knieval.
This was not what John wanted to hear.
Mother, Milky
---------------
I had sex for the first time at fourteen, and by the time I was
sixteen I had had four lovers, a drinking problem, and an
abortion. My parents were oblivious to what was going on in the
house. They were never home, always at church, organizing, or
practicing the cure of souls, and Cassie and I quietly became
famous in the Grand Rapids underground, a loosely knit criminal
network of mostly pastor's kids. It was fun, until Cassie fell
off the back of a motorcycle, and my parents remembered me, and
started to use my name in sentences in a way that seemed to me
excessive, and began asking to spend time with me, their
cadaverous eyes haunted, their skin stretched tightly over
remaining flesh.
Late one night I got up for some milk. My mother, drawn like a
moth to the light of the refrigerator, silently sat down in the
middle of the kitchen floor, naked. I dropped the milk. I laid
down next to her, my head in her lap, and kicked the carton
away, then drew my milky legs up until they were under my chin.
There was no money for college, but Redeemer offered free
tuition the first year for the children of pastors, so there I
was. I figured I'd do one year, then transfer some place. It
wasn't much of a plan, but it was what I could manage at the
time. My parents said they'd find a way to help pay for a
secular school later if I gave them that one year at Redeemer.
They'd say it just that way, like a prayer: "Give us this year."
Like it was a gift.
To them, I guess it was.
To me it was a life. Or half a life. A half-life.
I was eighteen years old.
Chapel
--------
The first week of winter quarter was missionary week at
Redeemer. Did I say this? We were required to attend chapel
twice a day during missionary week, in the morning and again at
night. The missionaries that came to the conference were the
real item, all the way from Chad and Brazil, Zaire, Mexico, the
Philippines, Japan, England, France, you name it. And "Home
Missions" people too, from Grand Rapids and Atlanta.
I found it odd that they would have missionaries in a lot of
these places, especially England and France and Grand Rapids,
where there's a church on every corner. Kit said the evening
sessions were a great time to catch up on your homework. We'd
sit in the back of the chapel in the part we called "The Zoo."
We'd pass notes, giggle, set off the occasional alarm clock, and
make fun of the nerd boys they had there, who carried gargantuan
designer Bibles with their names printed in gold block letters
on the cover. (They prayed over ice cream cones when they'd
venture out on dates, which was rare.)
One night I asked to look at one of these Bibles. A nerd boy had
come in late and had to sit in The Zoo, so I reached over and
opened it to the inside cover, looking for the inscription Kit
said was always there, in the five line space Zondervan made for
this purpose. Sure enough, there it was: "To Travis, in the hope
that this book will keep you from sin. Remember, son, This book
will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from this book. For
prayerful study at Redeemer, where we trust you will get a safe
education, by the grace of God. Your loving parents." I gave the
Bible back to Travis and squeezed his sweaty hand, dragging it
into my lap. I pecked him on the cheek. I put my tongue in his
left ear and smiled sweetly. I did not ask him how safe his
education felt then.
Sex
-----
I didn't tell anyone about us, except for Kit, but I knew that
we were being watched. At Redeemer points could be scored for
bringing someone down; a sexual fall was a biggie. Sex was
preached against on a daily basis in chapel, but the really
funny thing is, all that did was call attention to it,
heightening anxiety and, of course, curiosity. Lust was
everywhere. The place was a hothouse of love, love, love;
everyone was a possible victim, anyone could fall. It was the
most sexually democratic place on earth. I'm saying there was an
obsession there about sex. Even Hugh Hefner got tired of it, for
Christ's sake, but at Redeemer they just didn't know when to
stop.
John, II
----------
Somewhere in here I concluded that John belonged there. I say
this because I watched him pray (while safely disguised as a
good-attitude coed in a navy blazer and plaid skirt). John sat
up front on the right side of the College Chapel, with the other
faculty. His head cradled in his beautiful hands, the long slim
fingers threaded through his wavy hair, when he prayed he seemed
to be lifting off the pew, as if elevated by an invisible wire.
Afterwards, students and colleagues would gather around him to
ask what he thought of the sermon. Even if it was a disaster --
say the preacher had gotten off one-liners on abortion, the
ACLU, how God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, liberal
apostate theologians, all in a commentary on the first chapter
of Paul's Epistle to the Romans -- John would look each of these
petitioners in the eye and speak carefully, without
condescension, giving his careful critique. Evenhanded. He must
have known that it was killing him to be there, that he should
leave, but I began to feel that this was because of me, not
because he had outgrown the place. How could I take him away
from all this when I didn't even know what it was, the life he
had there?
I'd think: If anyone finds out about me and John, we're fucked.
I felt bad about this, because as I said, John was so hopeless
in the area of deception. He wanted to turn himself in. He was
unprepared to live in the world, that was pretty clear.
One day we went to the post office in Albany. He wanted to mail
a package to his grandparents. We were in the downtown office,
it was crowded, and he drifted from counter to counter, unable
to settle anywhere, until finally he found the right one. But
then he realized he didn't have the right zip code. He stood
there, turned to stone. He was ashen. I asked what was wrong and
he said it was impossible, we'd have to return home and look up
the address. I told him that was ridiculous, it was a thirty
minute drive back, and besides, one of the clerks at the window
could look up the zip code. He stared at me as though I were a
Martian, as though this were news from another planet. Finally,
he got in line, the clerk addressed the package complete with
zip code, and John paid him. But when he counted the change, he
saw that he had one dollar too many, so he gave it back to the
clerk. Then he walked away slowly, counting again, and in the
middle of the staircase he realized that the missing dollar
belonged to him after all.
I stood next to him, at a loss, while he shifted his weight from
one foot to the other, wondering what to do. Going back would be
difficult; a crowd upstairs was pushing and shoving in line.
"Just let it go," I said. He looked at me, baffled.
"How can I let it go?" he said.
Not that he's sorry about the dollar, money in itself is of no
consequence to him. But it is the fact that there is one dollar
missing. How can he just forget about something like that? He
spoke about it for a long time, and was very unhappy with me.
And this repeated itself with different variations, in every
shop and restaurant. Once he gave a homeless person a five
dollar bill. The man had stopped him and asked for a dollar so
he could eat. Five was all he had, so John asked the man to
change the five, but the man claimed he had no change. We stood
there for a full two minutes trying to decide what to do. Then
it occurred to him that he could let the beggar have the five.
But we hadn't gone ten steps when he began getting angry. This
is the same man who would have been eager and extremely happy to
give the poor man five hundred dollars with no questions asked.
But if he had asked for five hundred and one we would have spent
the day trying to find a place to make change, he would have
worried himself over one dollar.
His anxiety in the face of money was almost the same as his
anxiety over women. Or his fear of things official. Once I
called his office in the morning, begging him to take me away
from there that day. I was beside myself, I needed to get away,
just for half a day, somewhere, anywhere. I cursed him when he
said he couldn't. Afterward, he didn't sleep for nights, he
tormented himself, wrote me letters full of self-destruction and
despair. Why didn't he come? He couldn't ask for leave. He was
unable to bring himself to ask the Department chair for release
from his one remaining class that day, the same Department Chair
he admired in the depths of his soul -- I'm not kidding --
because of the Chair's skill with computers. How could he lie?
he'd say. To the Chair? Impossible.
Lying is possible for most of us because it gives us a safe
place, at least momentarily, a refuge from some situation which
would otherwise be intolerable. At one time or another all of us
have taken refuge in a lie, in blindness, in confusion, in
enthusiasm or despair, or something.
But John had no refuge, nothing at all. He was absolutely
incapable of lying, just as he was incapable of getting drunk or
high. He lacked even the smallest refuge; he had no shelter in
the world. He was exposed to everything that most people are
protected from. He was like a naked man in a world where
everyone is clothed.
This is why he could not continue seeing me, and also why he
could not continue teaching there. He knew this, but was unable
to leave either me or Redeemer. Like at the Post Office, I
thought: He will move from counter to counter, trying to find a
space to work it out, a place from where he can see through to
tomorrow. He couldn't leave because of me, but he couldn't stay
either. But what would be his reasons for leaving? He loved what
he did there; he felt he was needed by his students. And of
course he was. If he were to leave, where would they go? Had he
left last year, he would have never met me, and then my
suffering would have been greater. I know that he thought about
this, but for him it was more than a practical problem, it was
also a theological issue: How could God do this to him?
I told him: lying is inescapable. If he stayed there he lied,
because he couldn't remain and be the type of person that he
was. But if he left that was a lie too, because there was part
of him that very much belonged there, that would be misplaced
anywhere else.
I told myself: Maybe we are all searching for places where we
can stay the longest without lying.
Later, I thought, who knows? Maybe he reached his place of
optimum truth there.
Cabin Stories
---------------
When we met Fall Quarter, John was a virgin. He told me there
was a girl once when he was in high school, but they broke up
before it ever got to that. One had to know how to listen with
John. He tended to leave things out.
One night I followed him home to his house on the north end of
College Street. The street was lined with run-down shacks, with
broken down cars on the dirt driveways and little kids playing
tackle football in the street. No faculty lived on this side of
town. As we walked our shoes clacked on the concrete pavement,
then afterwards crunched on the long cinder path that led up to
his little cabin at the edge of a dark wood. Dry leaves rustled.
It was Thanksgiving break. I'm sure, to him, I was a waif, lost
and errant. It's true that I had nowhere to go. Everyone else
had gone home, most to their parents' houses. For many reasons,
my parents' house was out of the question. I called and told
them I was staying with a friend. They sounded relieved.
Over wine at dinner I got the rest of the story out of John. It
turns out that he had never even kissed this girl, whom he had
met at a dance when he was fifteen. She was the great love of
his life, there had never been another, and he hadn't so much as
kissed her.
There was a black coal stove in the center of the main room, but
the bin next to it was empty. The tiny bedroom was in the west
corner of the cabin. The bed was covered with animal skins. It
was funny to see John's white hands shooting out of those dark
skins at dawn, like some prehistoric creature with good
reflexes. We'd laugh and squirm around to get warm, grinding
ourselves into the cotton sheets while John re-positioned the
skins above us. I'd ask him to tell me a story, and he'd tell me
how he used to tug his little brothers on a sled up a snowy hill
in Peekskill, or about the time when he was four and his older
brother's dog bit him, and his parents made Matt destroy the dog
in the back yard, in front of him.
Right here was when I told him about Cassie. I mentioned her
wavy dark hair and did her laugh for him and made him get up to
get my jacket, which had been hers, for her scent, and we both
put our noses into the collar and rutted around, and when he
cried I knew I wanted a different story. After that he began
telling stories about God and I got less and less interested,
and finally I just told him to stop and then there were no more
stories.
We stayed in that cabin almost a week. John found some coal for
the stove, and it was a good thing, because on the second day it
snowed. The windows frosted over, and snow blew in through small
gaps between the logs in the northwest corner. When we talked we
could see our breath. John said it looked like something out of
_Dr. Zhivago._ I took his word for it.
We got into a routine: wake up, cook breakfast, back into bed,
up for lunch and long walks in the woods, drive into Albany for
dinner at a different restaurant each night, bed again. There
was no talk of Redeemer College.
The day before classes resumed we were lying in bed. We talked
past noon. I took a deep breath.
"John, how did you get into this whole fundamentalism thing? Why
are you here? I mean, you can't really believe all this stuff?"
" 'Jesus made as though he would go further.' "
"What?"
"That's it. That's why I believe."
"What are you talking about?"
"Luke 24. After his resurrection, Jesus is on the road to
Emmaeus and he meets up with two of his disciples, but they
don't recognize him. They think he's just another guy and
they're amazed that he hasn't heard about this Jesus person, so
they say, 'Haven't you heard? You must be the only one in town
who hasn't! He's risen from the dead!' Then Jesus finally
reveals himself to them, going back through the Old Testament
and showing them how all this was speaking of him, how he really
is the messiah. The first time I read this story, Zoe, I thought
to myself, this is sad, this is really so sad. I mean, to have
to explain yourself like that. After all the great things he
did, all the miracles and the healings and to top it off Jesus
rises from the dead, and here these guys that claim to be his
followers don't even recognize him. He was traveling through the
world incognito. Even the ones who claimed to know him best
didn't recognize him, or denied him, they all somehow missed
him, or betrayed him with a kiss. After three years they still
didn't know who he was, they still didn't get it."
"But what is this, Jesus made-as-if-he-would-go-further stuff?"
"After Jesus goes through this whole routine with them, and now
they recognize him, and believe again, it's dinner time, and the
disciples were going to spend the night somewhere. But the text
says that Jesus made as though he was going further, and they
had to persuade him to stay with them. I think that's why I love
him. I think that's why I'm here. He was just so incredibly
polite, he didn't force himself on anybody, he had the most
incredible manners. He didn't want to offend. He wanted to help
them to see. Jesus--"
"Wait a minute. That's why you're here? Because Jesus made as
though he was going further, because he had good manners? That's
a reason? You're saying that you came to teach at a
fundamentalist college with weirdo rules and a pervert for a
President, and you choose to stay here, the whole thing, because
Jesus was polite to these bozos?"
"Because Jesus goes unrecognized in the world, Zoe. Because
we've been in the presence of grace and we didn't even know it.
Because the greatest mysteries in the universe have been
revealed to us and we've forgotten or overlooked them or somehow
screwed things up but he's too polite to embarrass us again.
Because he travels through the world, travels through us,
incognito. We keep pushing him away, out of the world, out of
our lives, and he lets us! Because he's been right there with
us, hell, he's carried us and we didn't even notice."
He sighed, and looked into his hands.
Outside, the wind was picking up. Voices of children could be
heard at play in the street, and farther off, the low rumbling
of a train. I watched the grimy curtains move toward us,
disturbed by the wind, then lie limp against the window pane,
suddenly still.
John got up and threw some more coals on the fire, then came up
behind me and waited. I didn't say anything.
Then he said, "I know I'm not saying this very well, Zoe. I just
think I can help here, that's all."
Kit
-----
One day during missions week a Vice President of one of the big
missions boards used maps and charts to share with us missionary
possibilities all over the world, particularly in the former
Communist bloc, and could it be that God would like to use us in
Russia for His glory? Five hundred students raised their hands
and come forward down the aisle to go to Russia. That's one
third of the student population. I thought, What are all these
people going to do in Russia? I felt sorry for the place. I
pictured all those Bible thumping classmates tearing up the
countryside, knocking on doors and handing out tracts in poorly
translated Russian. I thought, if I were in the Kremlin I would
pass laws immediately to stem the tide of evangelistically
minded American students with large Bibles. The way I looked at
it, the country had enough problems.
But then, Kit and I figured that 498 of them would change their
minds. They'd get married, get a mortgage, have kids. Most of
the students I knew would rather die than think of themselves in
a country without shopping malls. And what would these students
wear? Kit and I tried to imagine the Redeemer girls with their
blazers and pearls, trying to talk to vodka-smirched Russian
women waiting in line for brown bread. We cracked up.
Besides me and Kit, there were our trainees, Alix and Jennifer
and Sara. After the missionary conference ended at 9:30, we'd
sit around complaining about how we were expected to get any
work done when they had us going to meetings all night. We'd
trade favorite missionary stories. Sara thought she had the best
one, about this missionary from Brazil who used to tell
repeatedly, every time he spoke, about how this giant bug was in
his skull for three weeks, how they eventually prayed that bug
right into oblivion, and Alix recalled a missionary who somehow
failed to tie up the livestock on a plane and wound up with
goats chewing things up and raising hell in the cockpit, but we
all sat there in amazement when Kit told us about her mother.
"I grew up in West Virginia, right, and down there we take our
religion seriously. No room to fuck up, I mean you've got to toe
the line, sister, or whump, they'll toss your sorry ass out the
church. So my mom tries, right, really tries, to please my dad
-- who incidentally is the pastor of the church -- you know, to
be the total woman. She even wears only Saran wrap when he gets
home from work, kinky sex to the Song of Solomon, the whole
fundy thing. But she knows that she's going nowhere in that
small town and she's itching to get out and back to school so
she can get herself a life before she's too old."
Jennifer stopped looking at Kit, and stared at the wall, a
vacant look in her eyes. I put my arm around her.
"So one Sunday night at church my mother shows up with three
roses, each in a Dixie cup of dirt. One rose is completely
closed, the other is partially open, and the third is in full
bloom."
"What was she doing with three roses?" Alix asked.
"They were her props, see. She was about to give us an object
lesson, just like she might have done in junior church or
something, but that congregation was about to hear something it
never heard before, I promise you. Us kids are sitting quietly
in the pew, we've got our coloring books, our Barbies, the whole
thing, like a normal Sunday night. But nothing was normal that
night.
"So now my dad, who remember, is the pastor, says it's testimony
time, and the minute he says that my mother stands to her feet
and in her hands she's holding her three roses, and she starts
in on her testimony.
" 'My dear sisters and brothers in Christ, I want to share my
heart with you. You see these three roses? They represent my
life. As you can see, the first rose is unopened. It signifies
my life as it has been for the first 33 years. All this
potential, all of my possibilities, going to waste. Do you know
what it is like to have a good mind, a sound mind, that the Lord
God has given you, but you are unable to use it? Well, that has
been my life. This is the old me, a beautiful rosebud, unopened,
yearning to burst out into bloom.
" 'And this second rose you can see is in bloom. Its petals
have opened, all the world can see its beauty, but it is still a
veiled beauty, isn't it?' My mom held the second rose aloft in
her hands. I could see old Mrs. Bartle sitting on the edge of
her seat, following that rose with her eyes. 'But something is
still wrong,' mom said. 'This rose is not all it can be. It has
yet to become all the rose that God intended it to be.' Now she
had her head bowed. She was weeping. 'This is my life now, this
rose. I've opened up to the Lord, I'm willing for the world to
see me now, but not all of me, just a part. I'm still only half
a person.
" 'But this rose.' She waved the third rose in the air now,
triumphantly. 'This rose is in all its glory! It is the rose in
full bloom. Nothing can be more beautiful than a rose that has
completely opened to its possibilities. And this rose is what I
want to be. What I shall become, by the grace of God.' "
"God, Kit, that is so beautiful," Jennifer said.
"Yeah, they all thought so. Mrs. Bartle was bawling so loud you
could hear her across town. But what no one knew is that I had
heard my parents earlier. They had a huge fight. They thought I
was outside playing with my sister. My father was pleading with
mom to stop having the affair, to stay with us, and she kept
screaming, over and over, 'Leave me alone, you're smothering
me!' That woman was heading for the door long before the trinity
of roses speech, I'm telling you. It was a great performance,
and it bought her some time and a lot of sympathy afterwards,
when she left town. _Masterpiece Theatre_."
"God, Kit," Jennifer says. How did you stand it? Did you tell
her that you knew?"
"I've never told anyone," Kit said, "till now."
On The Ward
-------------
Kit was the rebel. I didn't have the energy for rebellion. For
that, you had to care. I was just there for observation. I told
myself constantly, "You're on the ward, pay attention." But it
was weird, since they all thought the same thing, they were
observing you. After all the services at home, all those
Redeemer chapel messages, all the Bible classes, I had
internalized a fundamentalist voice. It talked back to the other
voice, my voice. I heard these conversations all the time.
--It's wrong to have sex. The Bible says so. Whoremongers and
adulterers God will judge.
--That's ridiculous. Sex is the most natural thing in the world.
You see a gorgeous guy, you think you're going to live forever.
God gave us sex. He made us this way.
--You must learn to overcome these lustful thoughts. God will
judge.
--Then God's judging himself, since he gave us these bodies in
the first place.
--That's blasphemy.
--Your God's perverted. Do you really think he's hanging around
the Ramada Inn, checking out what's going on in Room 208?
Shouldn't he be more interested in Northern Ireland, or Lebanon,
Bosnia, something more worthy of his time?
--He's working on that. Besides, God knows everything about
everybody. He is not only omniscient, He is omnipresent.
--So he's got the Holiday Inn covered too.
--You have a bad attitude.
--So what?
--You're headed for hell.
It's like fundamentalism is a double-voiced sickness, but the
ones who observe it are themselves observed, so no one knows how
to chart it. It's a standoff.
Chapel, II
------------
I did some math: if you stayed at redeemer for four years, and
went to chapel and the special bible and missionary conferences
at the beginning of the semesters, and to church twice on Sunday
and Wednesday night prayer meetings you would have heard 255
sermons per year, for a total of 1,020 in four years.
Redeemer was in session for thirty weeks a year, fifteen weeks
per semester. This means that a student could hear 255 sermons
in 210 days in one year; graduating seniors will have heard
1,020 sermons in only 840 days. If you want the prayer figure,
take the sermon number and double it: 2,040 public prayers,
minimum, not counting required dorm bible studies and prayer
meetings.
Many of these were about sex. Not having it was the idea. There
was no mention of child abuse, homelessness, racism, or sexual
harassment. Math was not my strong point, but I checked my
figures three times. I thought these figures were not widely
known. When I told John he suggested I write a letter to the
school newspaper. When I told Jennifer, she said that's not
counting the summers, when you attend church and prayer meeting
at home with your parents. She went off to calculate the number
of times that worked out to in terms of hosiery bought and put
on. When I told Kit, she said, "What'd you expect, that they'd
leave anything to chance?"
The President
---------------
The president of the college frightened me. His name was Jack
Sampson. Since Redeemer was so small, we all got to see him way
more than we'd want. When he looked at me it sent shivers down
my spine. One day, waiting for John after Chapel, he looked at
me; well, not at me, he looked at my body. At my legs and butt.
It was a "degree day" today, meaning it was below zero and the
girls got to wear pants. Pants on girls were so unusual that
when we got to wear them, we'd flaunt it, whatever we had. So I
had on Jennifer's too-tight striped pants and he looked at me in
this really ugly way, and I knew he wanted to undress me. I
wanted to take John's hand and run out of the building.
That night's topic of dorm conversation was President Sampson:
Was he a pervert? Kit thought so. "Think about it. This guy
comes right out and says he is a friend of Jimmy Swaggart, I
mean this guy knows that weirdo! He has Swaggart's home phone
number, can you believe it?"
"Did you see the news when Swaggart asked forgiveness from his
congregation? Wasn't that nauseating? His poor wife."
"I saw the interview they did with the prostitute Swaggart was
with. She has a kid. She said the stuff he asked her to do, it
was sick."
"I don't know, Zoe. I don't think Sampson's a pervert. The
president asked for prayer for him, is all. And besides, we're
different from Swaggart in doctrine, right? So Swaggart doesn't
really represent the Christian community. I mean, Swaggart is a
charismatic, right? We don't believe that stuff about tongues
and all."
This was Jennifer. She was somewhat in awe of us.
"Right, Jennifer." Kit said, "Sampson doesn't speak in tongues
so he can't possibly be a pervert."
John, III
-----------
I worried about John constantly. It was unbearable. He was
wracked with guilt. I didn't believe in guilt. I thought it was
a false emotion that we manufactured to torment ourselves. I
watched my parents manipulate each other and my sister with
guilt. Fundamentalists are expert at guilt, but this is a
cliche. What's not widely known is how much they suffer.
I looked at it this way: I'd been around fundamentalism enough
to have received an inoculation. I think I'm immune to it now,
that enough distance has been created, but it's still in my
blood, traveling in me, silent and potent.
Saved Sex
-----------
John sometimes wondered if he was still saved, what with all
that we had done together. I'd tell him we need saving from
something every day, what makes this day any different? And take
his hand and place it on my breast.
Kit and Me
------------
One of the weirder rules at redeemer was that if two girls were
on a bed, they both had to have both feet on the floor.
I ask you.
So one night Kit and I were lying in bed in our underwear with
the door locked. Kit was admiring my panties, which were white,
with red hearts. My mom sent them to me for Valentine's day, but
they were too big. I knew Kit didn't have much money. After her
mom ran off her dad lost his church. He got another one but it
was a small congregation and couldn't afford to pay him much. I
said what the hell. I took the panties off and gave them to her.
My bra too.
Kit gave her professors fits. That day in New Testament she had
embarrassed her prof by asking him if he had sex before marrying
his wife. He deserved it, he kept going on and on about the
biblical view of sexuality and Kit just couldn't take it
anymore. I had to put my head on my desk to keep from laughing
out loud. The prof asked if he could see her after class. He
questioned her attitude. She had an appointment with the Dean
the next morning at eight.
Anyway, we're lying in bed, me naked now, regretting my decision
to stop seeing John outside of class, when Kit jumps me. We
wrestle till we're panting with exhaustion, our sides splitting
with laughter, but she has a good twenty pounds on me, and it's
clear I'm going to get pinned, so I decide to just lay back and
enjoy it. Kit pins me, then counts slowly to three in a
referee's voice, and calls me a wimp. She lip synched to the
illegal tape I had playing: "Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad,
I'm hot for teacher." Then she kissed me on the lips, and asked
me out to dinner.
I got back to the room the next day after classes and found a
note on my bed. From Kit. They'd kicked her out. I ran down the
hall crying. I found the Residence Hall Advisor and asked her
what happened to Kit. She looked at me like I'd dropped in for
the day from Jupiter. Then she said out of the side of her
mouth, "Kit had an attitude problem. As you know. She's gone."
It's been six years. I made my escape the day Jennifer was
kicked out for attitude in The Zoo. I piled all my Redeemer
clothes in the middle of the floor with a note saying "Help
Yourself!" and caught the next bus out of town. I didn't say
goodbye to anyone. I called my parents from the bus station and
they freaked. But they didn't ask me to come home, I'll give
them that.
I stayed with Kit in Ithaca until I got a job cutting hair and
an apartment. I took some night classes and tried to get into a
degree program at Cornell, but I couldn't get my Redeemer
credits to transfer. Whenever I said that word, Redeemer, I'd
get this look, like I was bad meat. There were fights with the
Registrar, and scenes in the Admissions office. Finally I just
gave up.
That was years ago.
I am twenty-four.
Last year I got married to this guitarist. We're on the road a
lot. It's OK at night, when there's so much set-up work to do
and then the band is playing and everything is moving by so
fast, the lights winking at the dancers on the crowded floor and
the crashing wall of sound that seems to flatten the room, picks
us up and throws us down again. But the days are slow.
Sometimes, after dinner with the guitarist and his friends, I
stand up and walk outdoors, and keep on walking till I'm in
sight of a church.
I just found out that I'm pregnant. I haven't told the
guitarist. I haven't told anyone, yet. I've given a lot of
thought to what I'm going to call the baby if it's a girl.
Katherine Anne, after Kit and my grandmother. And if it's a boy?
That's easy.
There's this song playing at work. I hear it all day long. The
one about God on the bus, trying to make his way home.
I think: What if God _was_ one of us?
I don't know what happened to John. For a while Kit was getting
Redeemer newsletters at her house but she called and told them
to fuck off. I never got any. I guess to them I never existed.
I still think about him sometimes, and yeah, about our
conversation that last day in his cabin. And I see John's point
in the Luke story. But I think Jesus made as though he would go
further because he just wanted to get away from those two guys.
Maybe that's the difference between believers and non-believers
when you get right down to it: the believers think it all comes
down to this one person, and they know how to hang on to what
they have.
And then I remember: We were in bed when he told me that funny
story about Jesus walking on the road. John's hands were there
on my belly, like mine are now, soft and warm, and he was
sobbing, shaking so hard I thought he would fall apart, and he
kept saying my name, over and over, Zoe, Zoe, Zoe, Zoe.
I tell myself I may be remembering this all wrong, that things
change and your life plays tricks on you, but I mean, there we
were, in that little cabin at the end of the road, and I was in
his presence and I never knew what it was, what he meant, what
was mine.
Gary Percesepe (cpwh49a@prodigy.com)
---------------------------------------------
Gary Percesepe is a former fiction editor at the Antioch Review.
A native New Yorker, he is the author of four books in
philosophy. His fiction, essays, and poems have appeared in the
_Mississippi Review Web Edition_, _Enterzone_, and other places.
He teaches at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio.
Paddlefish Sky by Hollis Drew
=================================
...................................................................
Those who know the most about the people of the River aren't the
ones who pilot the boats.
...................................................................
This is my last day to drive a school bus. I usually wake early,
but today a fat rain sweetens my sleep until a foghorn way off
on the Mississippi River roots through a rich, moody clabber to
bait me from my dreams. In the early spring the River can be
mulish and unforgiving; its swollen waters pulls along giant
trees, loose barges, even dead people, so bloated and dark and
sexless it takes weeks to identify them, in its hungry prowl
towards New Orleans. Hundreds of tiny islands along this stretch
of the River clog its waters. Sandbars and currents are tricky
through here. A tug pilot blinks at dark visions from inside the
dim, green light of his wheelhouse and prays his tow won't
bugger some careless fisherman who nods off in his skiff. Even
with million-dollar radar, the older pilots still only trust
their eyes.
The River changed its course long ago, which supports my daddy's
notion that only three rules in life are certain: "Time will
tell. Shit will smell. And water will seek its own level." The
State of Tennessee claims most of the islands, even though they
now snuggle up against our side of the River. My daddy probably
heard when it happened, but I didn't ask him before he died.
Even if my daddy didn't know, I'm sure my granddaddy knew the
history of the River.
I was young when my granddaddy died. I'm not sure now if I
remember him or just the stories my uncles tell. His name was
Tyrece and his people came from Virginia. He was a hostler, a
main man. He was also a tiny man, but unafraid of the meanest
mule in the lot. He dipped Garrett snuff and quoted scriptures
from memory all day. He played a piano by ear; and if he heard a
song played once on his old battery-run radio, he could play it
forever, banging proudly upon a tinny-sounding upright, with his
fingers hammering it out like little black hammers. He chopped
cotton for more than eighty years and died at one hundred three.
He outlived five wives and was buried beside them in a grove of
yellow catalpa trees.
He told wonderful stories from his youth: of the time when his
mother and two aunts, left alone and hungry during a spring
flood, paddled out in a boat left tied to the second story
bedroom window to slit the throat of a doe swimming through the
tops of a flooded corn field; and of a black panther that clawed
into the attic of their cabin one night to give birth, safe from
the hotly baying hounds; and of a groggy rattler seeking heat
that crawled into his bed when he was five, which he kicked
three times with a heavy thud out into the floor before his
puzzled mother came to investigate; and of winter mornings so
cold his father's moustache was caked with ice from his steamy
breath. He remembered when an ancient forest covered this land
and six men clasping hands couldn't reach around its huge
hardwood trees. My grandfather would have known all about the
River changing its course if asked, but a man only thinks of
such things when it's too late.
I live next to a dogleg in the levee just outside the small town
of Lazich, Arkansas, with the same wife, and in the same house I
did as a kid. I can brag on it some because I can count on one
hand folks who can say the same. Stella and me are still here.
No doubt, we've been pretty lucky.
Stella is spooned around a pillow on her side of the bed; her
breath hitches upon itself like something fancy, and I know she
will live forever. She cruises through her dreams. I am
comforted by her sighs. She makes me laugh and feel cozy. Some
mornings she rolls over, only partly awake, and mumbles in a
deep rubbery whisper, `You still lovin' me?' But this morning
the rain also holds her under. She won't wake up for another
hour. I'll be gone to the bus garage by then. After a cup of
black coffee, though, she'll air dry and be good as new.
Stella has made a good wife; if it is true, as my daddy said,
that all good marriages begin and end with a steady woman, then
I have been blessed, but he was still disappointed we married as
we did. It had nothing to do with Stella -- she is humble as a
parable and he loved her from the start -- but we were just
fifteen. He wanted me to finish school; but I thought I was old
enough and smart enough I didn't need his permission. I came in
one day to say this is what Stella and me was going to do.
"Okay, Mister!" he said. "Now, I'll tell you what you gon' do:
Come Monday, you gon' give your books to your cousin to take
back to school. Then you gon' grab a hoe and join me in the
fields." That was all he ever said about it. But he was hurt.
None of his children had finished school. He had it worked out
in his mind I would be the first. Even though I finally earned
my diploma through the Army, it wasn't the same. He lived to be
eighty-two; and he held it against me until Robert, my
firstborn, finished school. Then it was okay between us. His
intentions were good, but he just didn't know Stella.
We own a country grocery and bait shop that Stella runs. Nothing
fancy. We have a little meat counter in the back of the store
where we sell bologna and souse and slab bacon, sticky meat
bought by the slice and wrapped in white butcher paper. (Poor
people can't afford stuff that's low-fat or organic.) We don't
carry many fruits or vegetables. Fruits spoil too quickly in
this humidity. And most people around here tend a small garden;
squash and tomatoes and okra grow like weeds. So, we don't sell
many vegetables anyway. Some folks still make cornbread in black
iron skillets. Stella will buy a hundred pound sack of potatoes
each week off the produce truck from Osceola. But now most
people seem to prefer such stuff in a box.
Stella sells sack lunches for the cotton choppers. Stuff that
won't spoil; mayonnaise will kill you quicker than a moccasin in
summer. The farmers pay for the choppers' lunches and even pay
social security on the choppers now. Like the man says on TV,
"And so it is..."
A gravel road passes by out front and crosses over the levee
onto Island 35. We sell bait and beer to the local fishermen.
And I have a large tank where I sell fresh fish and soft-shelled
turtles bought off the fishermen on the River. But only the old
folks buy turtles from me now; they just scoff at the
high-minded talk in the paper about the danger of chemicals.
They speak, instead, in their high feverish voices of haunts and
swampdevils and croup, which worry them much more than the
poisons that rain down from the bellies of those swooping yellow
planes.
Children slip inside the store to dangle over the tank and watch
the turtles. They jump and giggle at their fear when the turtles
scrape their claws against the sides of the tank. The children
are suspicious and hopeful, and I tell them stories from my
youth, when giant alligator turtles crunched dainties from the
bodies floating down the River -- before the oily poisons
softened their dough-colored eggs and tainted the turtles' sweet
meat. Sometimes one of the brave ones will reach down into the
tank and poke the soft leathery skin of a turtle with a finger,
but not many do. I admire the brave child who thinks she risks a
finger.
Mister Feeny, the druggist, comes in each day at noon from his
shop on the town square to pray inside the walk-in freezer at
the back of our store. Three years ago he moved to Lazich to set
up business in an empty clothing store. People say he has a
family somewhere back up north, but they didn't move down here
with him.
Feeny is a short man with thinning hair; he sprays his scalp
with black dye, so he resembles one of those round Russian dolls
that looks like a metal bowling pin. And his teeth and fingers
are bronze from the rolled cigarettes he smokes. He has a steel
plate in his skull, a confusing reminder of Vietnam, like the
yellow crazies that chase him in his dreams. So, the war, and
Lazich, and the jungle prison camps sometime get all tangled up
in his mind.
I sometimes spy on him through the small square glass window in
the freezer door kneeling under the cold numbness of the light
bulb. It is safe to spy; his eyes are closed; so he can't see
me. Feeny often speaks in unknown Tongues. I can hear his
muffled words through the thick freezer door.
His skin is blue when he leaves, and his teeth chatter. Maybe he
purifies the children of Lazich with ice. When he leaves, he
often mumbles, "No matter what you do, it ain't enough!"
Stella shakes her head; he makes her nervous. "People want what
they can't have," she says.
But Feeny means no harm. He just don't have much chrome on him.
I don't know what he does at noon on Sundays; we usually close
the store until one. If it is our freezer that moves him, on
Sunday he's out of luck.
I have mixed feelings about retiring. I just heard on the
Memphis evening news they have put security cameras on school
buses over in Tennessee to catch kids carrying guns and knives.
But I'll miss it mostly. I have been getting up at four for too
many years not to miss it. A man can't walk away from forty
years of driving a school bus and not feel something. Still,
I'll be seventy-two this fall. It's time.
In 1952 I walked to the white school in Lazich and asked the
Superintendent if I could have a job driving a school bus, since
he was in charge of hiring. That was the first year our black
children would have their own buses. Before that, some black
children had walked up to five miles to the school we had built
for them out on the edge of Lazich.
His secretary made me wait outside the school under the shade of
some chinaberry trees. The berries crunched wetly under my feet.
He came out after about two hours and hired me on the spot. He
also gave me a job as a custodian. He was impressed that I had
been in the War. He wasn't, but he had lost a son in Belgium.
Stella had said before I left the house that morning, "Don't you
beg him for nothin'!" I waved her away. I knew how to handle
him.
Anyhow, that's how this school bus driving got started.
We are still a big school district, and my bus run is sixty-four
miles long. So I must get to the bus lot early. I'm always the
first bus to leave. I have a key to the gate and let myself in.
Still, I cut it close because I want the bus children to sleep
as long as possible. See, I have a rule, `You wait on the bus
'cause the bus don't wait on you.' They know I mean it, too.
I run into patchy fog down along the bayou. It stretches across
the land like an old man's cataracts. Slows me down some this
morning. Funny -- let two flakes of snow hit the road and we
close school for a week. But let thick fog slip in off the River
and the buses still roll.
I usually push the bus hard on the straight stretches. The
governor is set at sixty-two miles per hour. But not today,
because of the fog and planting. Farmers hog the road and run
their equipment blind. I keep my window open so I can listen for
their equipment on the road.
My first stop is seven miles out of town. Little Doc Odom gets
on. His daddy is named Doc Odom. When Little Doc was born, Doc
had them put on his certificate, "Little Doc." So it's pretty
official. I don't know what cologne Little Doc wears, but he
prefers it to bathing. Must cost one dollar a gallon up at
Wal-Mart.
Little Doc seldom speaks. He grunts once in awhile. He always
sits down right behind me. First window seat on the driver's
side. It's a good place to see everything. One morning we saw a
duck divebomb into ditch water beside the road. "Mister bus
driver," Little Doc said, his voice suddenly tainted by emotion,
"That duck just committed suicide!" That's been his seat for
since kindergarten; he's been stuck for three years in fifth
grade.
Little Doc's momma died of cancer last year. He climbed on the
bus one morning and said, "Momma died!" I didn't even know his
momma was sick. She rode my bus once, too; her name was Judy. We
talked about it some. How he felt. How sadness eats at you when
your momma dies.
I start my run toward Polk Island after crossing the railroad
tracks. It is a seventeen mile run to the far side of Polk
Island. Few children live along this road now. Used to be a
house was perched on every forty acres. So many children lived
out here, it took three buses to collect them all. Even then the
children who climbed on last had to stand in the aisle. Now then
the world stops at the end of this road.
I stop to pick up two brothers who live in a rusty yellow house
trailer beside a shallow ditch. The trailer squats in heavy
weeds under a peeling sycamore tree. Their high-butted mother
stands barefooted in the dusty yard cursing them for some
slight, but her angry words bounce off their wide backs like
harmless grit. They climb aboard scowling darkly, unable to look
me in the eye.
I am most happy on those days when these two stay at home. They
are much older than the others, too grown to be in school. They
are also mean and cannot be trusted. Last year they messed with
the young girls in first and second grade. Running hands where
they shouldn't. The courts put them on probation and sentenced
them to finish school. They don't like me for it, but I make
them sit up front in the "angel seat" across from Little Doc,
where I can watch what they do.
My grandchildren once gave me a wooden plaque for Christmas that
reads, "The man with all his problems behind him drives a school
bus."
The engine groans or hums to tell me what to do: I down-shift
through a curve, then brake to a quick stop at three shotgun
houses slumped together near a tractor shed. Flowers bloom at
the edges of their ragged, sloping porches; and in the yards the
forsythia's long rooster tails salute us with their bright
yellow bells.
Seven panting children climb aboard smelling of sausage, jelly,
and buttered biscuits; there is something healing about fresh
hot biscuits. They rush from their kitchen table when they see
my school bus coming. In the winter, they smell of clinging wood
smoke and Vicks salve.
A light wind sweeps the fog from the ditches into soft layers
that hover some twenty feet above the road where I run safely
under it. At the end of pavement, I turn onto a hard gravel road
that winds through a freshly plowed cotton field toward Polk
Island.
The children stir when we turn onto the island at the end of the
causeway. Deer, quick as rabbits, sometime sprint from the cover
of the hedge and into a field, then spin upon their hind legs,
like dancing bears, and dash back into the hedge when they spot
our yellow bus. Come summer, Mink and otter will feed on the
pale muscadine grapes draped in the hedges.
Once we clattered, like a swarm of angry locusts, upon a drowsy
alligator sunning in the middle of the causeway; the Fish and
Game Commission had brought them up from Louisiana to clean the
ditches of beavers. It was young, about four feet long, and it
ran heavily before us, then dove into the scummy water with a
loud splash. The children were too paralyzed to speak. The
Island is stringy and primitive, something untamed and lovely,
and makes the children solemn, as if we have quietly entered an
ancient cathedral.
Polk Island is a magical place. Osage oranges the size of
softballs grow beside the hard gravel road. Old people still
call them deer apples, and, in the fall, I stop the bus to let
the children gather one or two for their science classes.
Only one family lives out on the Island now. Ever so often, in
the early spring, after a heavy snowmelt up North among the
spruce, firs, and tall pines, the River crawls out of its bank,
and the Martinez family moves over the levee to safety, or
remains on the Island, if the water doesn't rise too high. If
they can stay, they bring David over to the levee and wait in a
fifteen foot aluminum boat for my school bus to arrive at 7:05.
I don't envy David. He is a loner, an only child. I've asked him
if he likes the Island and he says so; but it has changed him.
Their house is built upon a Nodena ceremonial mound and rides
high-and-dry most years, but it is bad luck and brings on
visions to build on hallowed ground. I believe David has seen
their ancient spirits. He wears a small dream catcher on
multi-colored beads around his neck.
I hunted rabbits out here when I was David's age: I struggled
through heavy snow along the River, following the rabbits' soft
tracks to their tunnels under the thick rimy grasses, then broke
their necks with a sharp blow from a club. Then I ran a wire
through the leaders on their back legs and carried so many of
them slung across my back the sagging wire cut into the cords on
my neck; it was easy to find them quivering under the snow.
Then, when the sun would break through the gray, rolling clouds
to sparkle off the water and snow, I'd be snow-blinded by the
light -- eyes bright red and burning like rubies, like the
rabbits' eyes -- but happy, too, because I had enough fresh meat
to last my family for a month.
At night the tugs on the Mississippi spray their searchlights
across the sky. The air feels damp then, like the wind blowing
against a fog. The Island is a spooky place, deathly still, with
owls mumbling inside the pale willow thickets crowding the
riverbank. I've fished for eel and suckers and drum in the
chutes by the achingly-white light of a gas lantern. At two in
the morning, the hissing lantern sucks up bugs and snapping
things which flutter against the tops of the trees, obscure
things you feel more than you see, like the restless Indian
spirits who visit David in his dreams.
People have been killed out here, falling out over a
round-heeled woman or strong brown whiskey or a drug debt gone
unpaid; at night it is not a good place to get excited or
careless.
Stella and I will come out here to fish now that I'm retiring.
We will find more time together. We will close the store on
Mondays. We will buy an aluminum boat and drift down the chutes
that hug the islands. I will teach her how to wait patiently on
the fish.
And I will show her the thick pink and white walls of wild rose
mallows growing in soggy places and the cheerful blooms of the
buttery tickseed and the bright orange trumpet-creepers. Come
July we will pick the wild blackberries, as fragrant as new
money, from the prickly vines drooped heavily over the water
until our fingers and lips turn purple; and we will suck at
their bitter seeds stuck between our teeth and spit our crystal
froth like offering upon the water.
We will drift among the dried, cupped leaves and place our
trotlines in the winding chutes, then listen to the beaver slap
the water with his tail to ward off our dominion, and watch
clouds of white egrets as they skim across the early, blushing
sky.
When a hot afternoon boils up lazy clouds into yellow, then
beige, then green and, finally, dark blue demons, we will tie up
to a bank and stretch our tarpaulin over us. We will wait below
the fragrant, rustling hedge, and watch the dainty waterstriders
skate across the water, and listen to the distant dogs idly
barking at only dogs know what.
After the rain has passed, we will wait patiently at the mouth
of the chutes to snag the giant paddlefish that enters the
shallows in search of food drug by the strong undertow along the
slippery bottom. We will slice open her huge belly and dip up
the warm dark eggs with our fingers. It will feel good out under
the cool shade of the giant trees.
We still have things to learn, just like when we were young and
couldn't keep our hands off each other.
But now we need not hurry.
Hollis Drew (hdrew@intertext.com)
-----------------------------------
Hollis Drew is the pen name of a 53 year old writer and retired
school bus driver who lives near the banks of the Mississippi
River. He had been writing unpublished novels and short stories
for twenty-five years when InterText published his short story
"Shooting Stars" last year (InterText v6n5).
FYI
=====
...................................................................
InterText's next issue will be released in August 1997.
...................................................................
Back Issues of InterText
--------------------------
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The flange with the cam goes in the groove with the tube.
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