In the Shadow of Fundamentalism

Chapter 4, parts 1 and 2

Chapter 4

For Now We See Through A Mirror Dimly

Watch the news for five minutes.

Watch stories of human destruction: murder, rape, abduction, violence and gruesome hatred.

For every story of strength and honor, there are ten stories where the cancer of the human soul has destroyed an innocent life. Watching these, being aware of the world around us, makes one wonder what the meaning is. We ask ourselves: “In a world so demented and dark, why persevere? Why breathe, why wake up in the morning to a place where my life has no value, and my values have no life?”

For this reason I believe the concept of romantic love has so much of a hold on the collective human psyche. Love and hope are so tied to one another, it is nearly impossible to have one without the other, or to lose one without the other fading like the wisps of smoke that fade from incense.

The children of fundamentalism feel this even more potently. We are displaced from our culture, reminded daily that our beliefs and values are different from the norm. Not a day passes without our fevered acknowledgement of the love and sacrifice of God – a love that makes life possible and worth living.

This sense was magnified by my personality. As an artist, I could see the aesthetic of love with almost tactile clarity. I could taste and feel the concept of being accepted so completely, intertwined physically and psychologically with another person in a way that defies any purpose but love.
Furthermore, around the age of sixteen I began to dream about women. Hardly ever the lurid dreams designed to release sexual tension, these were imaginings of what it would be like to look into the eyes of a beautiful woman and see myself wholly reflected there. My romantic self would be completed in that reflection, empty bits and flaws glossed over by the warmth of her gaze in a way that only the fevered mind of a teenage artist can construct.

Part of my soul always existed outside the mainstream, as if a section of my thoughts was racing along in a parallel world. First this splinter of my psyche sojourned in the world of Arthurian legend, later I learned that the codes of chivalry were constructs of authors from the nineteenth century, and I began to research the roots of that fabled tree.
My investigations led me deep into ancient Britain, where a people once lived in tribal splendor.
The Celts valued everything that my teenage mind was clinging to for inspiration: art, poetry, honor, valor, and romance. How could I not be entranced by them?
And, although I would later find these values among other non-industrialized peoples (Shaolin monks, Samurai, and the African slaves in Brazil) the culture of the Celts became my idiom for a span of several years.

How do myths and legends describe the beauty of a Celtic maiden? She is pale, thin, a little sad, and a little artistic. She loves poetry and song. She dreams of freedom.
She is always, always gifted with one beautiful trait: hair that flames like morning sun reflected off the bronze weapons that Celtic warriors wielded in battle.

This image, held within my mind like a sepia photograph in a locket, would lead me to one of the harshest lessons about life and love I have ever learned.
Melissa was beyond me. I had come to grudgingly accept that there was a rift between us, a sort of misunderstanding, but at a deeper fundamental level. And why shouldn’t there be? She was athletic, active, on the move constantly. When did she stop and read a book? When did she pause to think deep thoughts?

Somehow, I surmised, there must be a woman in the world who would understand me on a deeper level. She must look beyond the outside, the trappings of the physical world, and see into the core of what makes me unique and special.
For a while I doubted that such a woman even existed. But over time I came to a sort of realization: I actually knew a female that understood me.

As I drifted from conversations with Melissa, and into discussions with her older sister, I found how many interests we had in common. I could wax poetic and she would understand. I could quote Shakespeare and she would appreciate the words.

And those eyes. Those eyes.
All surrounded by the most flaming red hair I had ever seen. A color so vibrant it defied earthly origin; so alive and powerful in our little world surrounded by drab colors and cast in the moody greens of fluorescent lights.

How could I not be lost?
She was like a character ripped from one of my stories, rent from the grey-green mists of the ancient Celtic world and set among us wandering around unnoticed. She towered over my imagination like mythological figures tower over mortals. In the center of my mind she was placed on a small altar like a goddess of ancient times. She was the Morrigan incarnate, inspiring my Celtic soul in the virtues of battle, sovereignty, and strategy.
And yet, while I painted these glorious colors on the canvas known to others as Amanda McKay, I forgot about her intrinsic humanity.
What I actually knew about the girl was a mere caricature of her whole personality. I had generated a woman entirely devoid of fear, insecurity, or human frailty and used her to crush the girl I actually sat beside.
I’m certain it was frightening there for a teenage girl atop my gilded altar. I’m certain it was a heavy burden to realize that she was the avatar of my inspiration, keeping hot air moving through my lungs and blood in my veins.

At my core was a great fear. I knew that, if I posed the question (although I was completely uncertain what the question was, let alone how it could be worded and spoken where other humans might hear it) she would certainly reject me. How, I wondered, could I be worthy of such a being?
I was painfully aware of my inadequacies, having been passively rejected once in favor of someone with better looks and more money.

So we existed in a sort of awkward quiet. I adored her in silence from what I thought was invisibility, she quietly held in her refutation of my feelings for fear that my fragile ego might shatter. It was a dance, a harmonious union made perfect in the irony of the distance between us.

This story extends beyond the boundaries of Hope Christian Academy, to the first college I attended. Even in the tentative grasp of the “real world” I held her as a walking ideal.

As Amanda, Spike, Steven and I began to set foot in reality we kept contact with one another like the survivors of a wrecked ship grasping one another’s flotsam to survive. We ventured to bars and clubs together, fascinated with what made those people drinking beer and smoking cigarettes so completely free and seemingly happy.
Many late nights we rode back from some disco with the echoes of thudding 90’s dance music in our heads. I often sat in the car and wondered if I could ever bridge the gap between us.

My first sign was at Christmas of 1997.
My first Christmas with a job was a powerful opportunity to buy gifts for all my friends. Although I can’t recall what I bought anyone else that year, I will never forget wandering aimlessly looking for something – some object that might hint at the quiet hopes burning like embers in the hearth of my heart.

I found a small bracelet worked into an intricate Celtic knot by chance. What caught my eye about it as I passed was that the metal reflected in a color that made me think of her hair. It was perfect for Amanda. It was perfectly from me. It was possibly the most perfect gift I have ever given anyone.

With clumsy fingers I handed her the small box at college, choosing a moment where the fewest eyes would spy my little demonstration of love. In my mind I had envisioned her seeing the gift, looking into my eyes, and finally making the connection. I dreamed of her returning my feelings. I was prepared to voice my Quixotical romance for her in that moment, to give utterance to my silent belief in fate and destiny.
What I was unprepared for was her one word response. It undid me, as only the organic response of a flesh and blood woman (and not the planned eloquence of a mythical goddess) can undo the machinations of a man in love.
“Why?”
She looked at the bracelet in its fiery knit glory and asked me why.
And I realized that if she could look me in the eye, or look at my gift, a perfect physical embodiment of my feelings and ask such a thing, she was not the graceful goddess I had imagined.
When the marble veneer cracked and I saw the flawed humanity beneath, I ran from it. She was as insecure as I was, as capable of error. How could I worship a goddess who could err? How could I devote myself to someone as unsure of life as I was?

Shortly after that year ended Amanda McKay left. She returned to Washington state where she still lives. But our story didn’t end when she left.

When I turned twenty-one I was still scarred from that single word. Why. It echoed in my brain like a gunshot on unprotected ears.

And sometime in the midst of my business with earning foolish money at Blockbuster video and whiling my life away without a purpose, I heard a rumor that sent me reeling.
Amanda McKay was pregnant.
At first it seemed like a silly and vicious thing spread around by those parents that were always too hard on the children of pastors and missionaries. I knew from observation that, as often as these children were exemplified as the apex of the “godly generation” they were condemned for the very humanity that occasionally led them to stray from the rigid expectations of the fundamentalist regime.

But this rumor was substantiated by her own words. Written in script that I had come to recognize and adore, photocopied, and mailed in a sort of chain letter of self immolation came an apology for Amanda’s sins.
I read in mixed awe and revulsion as the woman of my adorations explained how a moment of lust had filled her womb with an unplanned child. She asked for forgiveness from our church – forgiveness and understanding.

Ridiculous, I thought, to ask for forgiveness from the very people whose backwards attitudes about sex led to all sorts of wild experimentation and obsession with it in private school children. Ridiculous to ask for forgiveness from people who couldn’t know the real Amanda McKay other than her status as the daughter of a missionary family. Ridiculous to ask for absolution from faceless drones of some zombie collective when her real friends were hurt and confused at the loss of one of our own.

While I was still struggling with maintaining my purity, fighting to keep some vestige of virginity despite the raging power of my own sexual awakening, this former object of my adoration had given herself to someone as disposable and worthless as any other member of the “world” outside our greenhouse.

This is the lesson that all boys learn that makes them into men.

While we struggle with boyish issues, while we grow the testicular fortitude needed to express ourselves and assert our feelings and hopes to the women we love, some other man has strode in with an air of confidence and made a conquest of her. It is the root of the struggle to mate, as expressed by social mammals of all shapes and sizes. While we wish to assert our dominance over lower species, when it comes to reproduction some elements of nature are merely cleverly embellished by our intelligence and ability to communicate, not abolished by them.

And so, one night, I sat in the fading stupor of metabolized alcohol at a diner and lamented her passing from grace. I sat with my three best friends, and the second to last nail was hammered into the coffin.

“Steve, you should tell him,” Jonathan always had this sly little smirk that came with knowing your darkest secret. I thought this would make him the best psychologist in history, because it gave him some magical ability to get you to talk about embarrassing things with him in humorous confidence.

“Shut up,” Steve was more immune than I was, plus he was sober.

“Tell me what?” the silly smile still felt warm and fuzzy on my face as I poked my French toast playfully.

“Oh Gawd, not now,” Spike always avoids confrontation.

“C’mon, tell him about the Omega.” Jonathan wasn’t going to let up.

Steve had this car back in those early days of bars and clubbing. The Omega’s fatal flaw was that it had a bad transmission and couldn’t climb hills. Since my parents lived on a hill, Steve would pick me up at the stop sign a mile and a half from my house. This also meant I was often the first one to be dropped off after a night out, so I could walk to my house in decent time.

“What about the Omega?” I was getting suspicious.

“Oh Geez. Ball, pass me the ketchup.” Spike was trying to divert in a silly drunken way.

“If you are friends, you should really tell him.” Jonathan was showing a rare aggressive side. I would later understand that his status as an only child made him treasure our band of friends in a unique way. Our friendship, and his love for his girlfriend (now his wife) were the only things that could make him abandon his trademark passivity. The only way to make Jonathan violent is to threaten his friends or the love of his life.

We sat in silence.

“Tell him.” Jonathan’s voice was almost a growl.

“Okay okay.” Stephen seemed to relent, if only to get Johnny to let up.

After a deep breath: “Ball, you know how we used to drop you off at the foot of the hill?”

“Yeah, Steve, and I had to walk back in the dark with all those noises. Sometimes it was really creepy. This one time the light from the moon lit up the mist and…” somebody shut me up, please.

“Yeah, yeah.” Steve took another uncharacteristic pause. “You know, sometimes we would walk with you, too. Sometimes I would drop you off and it would be just me and whoever else was in the car.”

“Uhh… so?”

“Well you know Amanda used to go out with us a lot back then.”

“Before she was knocked up,” Johnny was being crass again.

“Wait…” a picture was forming in my mind. Something like: hey, we just got rid of the awkward, tubby, romantic guy. Now it’s just you and me in my busted car on this country road, sweetie.

“You know, it’s no big deal. Why did you bring this up, Johnny?” now Steve was diverting.

“Because he should know everything,” Jonathan was showing a little steel again. “It will help him get over it.”

“So you and Amanda…what?” I wanted to know, but then I didn’t want to know. I was caught.

“Well it wasn’t like we… you know we just made out and stuff.” Steve waived his hands dismissively in the air. “It’s no big deal.”

“Yeah but… was this when I was all, you know?” I was still chewing on the mental picture, wondering if I should believe him.

“Ball,” Johnny broke in, “when weren’t you retarded over that girl?”

“Everybody kind of knew, Ball.” Spike was trying to soften the blow.

“Yeah but if you had told me, maybe I would’ve…”

“You would’ve got mad at me.” Steve was finally making eye contact. “The same way you were mad at Matt Mosier when you found out he was screwing Janet.”

“But I would’ve gotten over it sooner or something.” So this meant Amanda was into… Steve? Interested in my friend? One of my best friends?

“No, you would’ve been mad.” Spike was being his philosopher self. “You know how you are.”

“You’re mad now, aren’t you?” Johnny breaking some of the tension. “Are you gonna hit him? Or just sit there and cry like a bitch?”

And like that, the choice was clear. My friend, my best good friend who had always stood behind me, or a girl who never felt for me how I felt for her.

But Now Remains: Faith, Hope and Love

Steve dragged me, some time after that, to the wedding of Melissa McKay. He has a way for taking me places where all these old ghosts linger, the same way Jonathan can get me to reveal my deepest oddities. It’s the power your friends, your chosen family, have over you that no one else has.

Blasting DMX tunes in Steve’s Chevy Malibu, we filled ourselves with a testosterone induced hardness for all those familiar disapproving faces. We would see all those parents who knew we were destined for hell, and face some of those girls who had chosen something other than us for their fate.

Dousing the music for a moment, Steve decided to share some of his wisdom during our car trip.

“You know, Ball,” has a formal way, very much like his father, of starting an important statement. “Amanda will be there.”

“Yeah? Fuck her. Put the music up.” I was going strictly to be an asshole -- and because Steve dragged me along. I don’t actually think I had even been sent an invitation.

“No, wait man,” here came the lecture, “this weekend is the perfect time for the ‘I wish you well speech.’”

“Yeah, I wish them all well. Now turn that music back up, bitch!”

“No, seriously. You know I never got over Lisa until I could sit down and actually say, and mean…”

“I know, I know. ‘I wish you well.” Blah, blah blah.”

“Just think about it, Ball. It could get this girl out of your system.”

“She’s not in my system. I’m over her.”

I was kidding myself. I saw her in the bride’s maid dress, red hair reflecting from a mile away. All the anger, the betrayal, the rejection came back to me in a single heartbeat.

The ceremony was endless, the reception was torture. Quietly nodding and looking serene when I wanted nothing more than to go back to the car and blast DMX until curses and pulsating bass overrode the whole ridiculous affair. I wasn’t just trying to be an asshole. I was an absolute asshole.

Steve brought her over to talk to us. I tried to act unaffected. I was a mountain, and she was the smallest insect beneath the valley below the mountain. I was above it, I was beyond it, but I’m sure I was obviously in pain.

“So, after this is all over, we should probably go get some dinner or something,” Steve was being his damned charming self. Probably the same self that did so well for him in the Omega, I was thinking.

“Yeah I don’t know if…” I was sending him a sharp mental signal. Dude, let’s not do this shit.

“I mean,” he seemed not to notice “that is if Amanda can get away. Can you?”

“You mean Grace? Sure, I guess I can head out for a little while.” She was conspiring with him. I knew it. “Just not to a club or anything, okay guys?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Just dinner, right, Ball?”

Like a robot I answered, “Sure thing.”

The whole way to pick her up he talked like Mick the trainer in the Rocky movies: You can do it. Don’t give up. This is the moment.

“I wish you well.”

And honestly I had prepared a whole way to say what needed to be said. In my mind I had made a mental image of me, falling through those teenage years, grabbing at anything that could hold me and give me purpose. In this image, I had grabbed at this girl, the first beautiful thing within reach, but she had been unable to bear my weight or my inertia. It was a poetic way of saying she wasn’t good enough for me, or perhaps that she wasn’t as good as I had hoped. The branch had broken, and I had kept falling towards the bottom.

Sitting in a restaurant eerily familiar to the place where I had hear the Omega Incident, I began to give my speech about falling and reaching.
Before I could finish my planned elegy, fat tears leaked from the corners of Amanda’s eyes and she stammered something completely unforeseen: “But I didn’t want it to be about looks!”

Those simple words quieted it. They soothed the pain. They dulled the empty ache in a way nothing planned or contrived ever could.
With that simple tearful lament Amanda McKay became entirely human. She was a goddess no longer, but instead a flesh and blood person falling as quickly as I ever had. For the first time I considered how she must’ve felt; how lost, how confused by my adoration. I suddenly realized she had been afraid to hurt me.

The altar in my heart, the reliquary where I had kept mementos of this female deity suddenly disappeared. Rather than being immolated in rage or dismantled in fury, it just evaporated into non-being.
At a loss for words and having forgotten my speech, I reached for something to fill the awkward silence.

“It’s okay, Amanda,” I finally managed, “I just wanted to wish you well.”

After we returned her to the McKay family, Steve and I sat in silence for a while in the car. We went to the park and smoked a pair of cigars and thought about old times. We were both writing an ending to a chapter in our personal stories, framing the tale in a way that made it happy to us.

In the car on the way back to my family’s house he finally spoke again.

“So, what do you think, Ball?”

“I think a lot, man.” I was smiling though. “I probably think too much.”

“No, I mean about the girl. I know she’s had a kid, but if you give it a few years…”

“What? What the hell is wrong with you?” I was genuinely shocked.

“I mean you’re both different people now. Maybe in a while you two could talk again. Compare notes or something.”

“Hey, Steve?”

“What?”

“Put the stereo on, bitch.”

posted by NY Monk @ 11:46 PM