Pulpit Fiction

It's Monday. I have work.

Last night, I watched a pre-recorded Meet The Press on which David Gregory interviews Pastor Rick Warren. I got so angry I fast-forwarded through most of the interview. What set me off was how he did not answer Gregory's question [paraphrasing]: Will you campaign for prop 8 again, knowing now what you do about AIDS through your charity work? Warren's response sounded rehearsed. He said [paraphrasing]"I'm not a politician. I'm a pastor, and my job is to love everybody.

Pastor Rick continued saying that he has been very clear about his spiritual stand on homosexuality. Chirp! Chirp! Chirp! Mr. Gregory rolled some footage of his stand against the sin of homosexuality from his powerful pulpit that speaks to tens of thousands every Sunday. I just couldn't stomach anymore.

Ms. Bauer, in Not That Kind of Girl, believes in God and arms herself with a message from her Catholic priest that sinning makes us appreciate the grace. At this point in the story she is a 23 year-old assistant, sleeping in a window in Carroll Gardens. She has yet to loose her virginal faith in God but would she have been able to stomach Rick Warren? Her faith in a God is not vengeful but merciful, not bigoted but accepting.

Her ability to love God and live in the world is challenging to me. She has given up on the idea of finding a place to worship and continues to believe in destiny. Her book is beginning to read a bit like a Christian novels teenagers advocating abstinence, thinking for yourself, and staying true to your inner faith. Despite this underlying message, I am enjoying it.

Now to work. Sad face.

Action = defeat

The Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, I was sure I was going to get laid by the hockey-player with a porn-sized johnson, until we started talking about his ex. A little back story.

One night a while back, I got pissed-off at him for not giving it up until we'd talked for hours and I just told him that I wasn't with him to TALK but to F*@k and if we weren't going to for another five hours, I had to go. These weren't dinner and conversation length interactions, these were him up and down off the couch, changing the music on the television ten times, going on-and-on about his ex, how great hockey is, how much the market sucks, or how fantastic the early Rolling Stones were but they lost steam after a while. He had called me, after all. I assumed he knew the deal. And his response was beyond. He tried to placate me at first with words - Aw, c'mon! Why so crass? What happened to talking before sex? - and when I wouldn't budge, he yelled in real pain, "SHE BROKE MY HEART!" And that was my cue to leave, but not before I asked him for twenty dollars for a cab home, which he gave me.

Back to last Wednesday night, we're talking about her and he just cannot help telling me about their last encounter and how she'd called him up and told him that all she wanted was to get wasted and screw, and he wanted her even more for that. (That wounded me.) And she's not even the best-looking woman he's been with but there is something about her smell that makes him crazy.

I'm sitting patiently for him to breath and then I said, "You do know why I'm here."

"Oh. You're right. I'm sorry. It's just that you're my sounding board for all of this stuff with her, you know. You're right. I do know."

I figured he'd already been pounding back the vodka and orange so I repeated myself, "You know WHY I'm here?"

"No. What? I thought you said, 'you know I'm here," A brief pause and he said, "Sex?"

Bingo!

He smiled, he knew all along what I was after. He said, "Well, to be honest, I don't know if I can. I had it last night at like 3 a.m. But, I was thinking we might just after we've gone out."

I should have gone back to my neighborhood and hung out with my friends, but I wanted to see where this was going. It's really not the sex that I wanted (not anymore) A part of me wanted to be there for him because I could. I also really wanted to go along for the ride that is Mr. Hockey. Going out with him is like riding the tilt-a-whirl that uses alcohol for electricity. It still kinda lights me up, makes me dizzy, and I feel like I've had an experience, every time I see him - good and bad. It may sound weird or sad of me to say, but most of life is not nearly as eventful.

The rest of the evening, we talked with lonely-hearts and party-goers alike who all told Mr. Hockey that I was fantastic and he should hold on to me, that I was a keeper. Around 1:30 a.m. we're outside smoking and we kiss like horny teenagers. I was back on the bandwagon again and we left. Back at his place I think things are going in one direction and then he starts playing music and pours himself a drink. He wants me to wait but I just can't and I pass out.

Here comes the Doogie Houser ending. I have said it before and I'll say it again, recycling is not always cost-effective.

Turning me over

Last week, I finished Jeff Sharlet's expose on radical fundamentalists influence on politics in America. I have moved on to Carlene Bauer's "Not That Kind of Girl", which is a memoir about how she freed herself from her fundamentalist Christian upbringing. I first read about this book in Time Out. Reading the praise for her first book, I felt a lump in my throat. Carlene has beat me to it, I thought.

Going from Sharlet to Bauer is like going from the Library on Fifth to a bedroom in content and tone. It is so much harder to read Ms. Bauer's book without constantly comparing her experience to my own. Sharlet's book was about discovering a secret world I know very little about, but I know what it is like to grow up born-again. I know how I came the decision to leave the fold and yoke myself unevenly with the world and lost souls.

I'm at the part where Carlene is in love with a brilliant student, Joshua, who was kicked out of the ivy league and ended up at her catholic college in Baltimore. She writes this about how he makes her feel:

Someone had demanded to meet me, and now was demanding to know what I thought about every last thing. Someone was looking at me, taking me in, turning me over in his palm, wondering where to put me. In diners, in cafes, in his minivan, in my room, in his room, on streets under heavy clouds.

On break, she took a job as a waitress to subjugate self to the customer. Carlene decides, while on hands and knees picking french fries from the carpeting underneath the booths after her shift, that she can no longer just be friends with Joshua and endeavors never to speak to him again. Joshua was forcing her to listen to herself, her desires. So, Carlene clarified what she wanted from her relationship with Joshua - while crawling on hands and knees in polyester, as she put it, "mortifying the flesh."

Burthen

Last night, I arrived at my door just as my dog-walker was bringing Bubbie home for dinner. I asked her how she was and she cried as she told me that her relationship was over. I gave her the biggest hug, but had no better words to say than, I'm so sorry.

I don't know her that well and had no idea about her boyfriend or their relationship. They met soon after she divorced her husband and moved here from D.C. He was fun and sweet and they fell in love. For a year they have lived together in her apartment with his daughter and their dogs, like a happy little family. The trouble was after a long day of working two jobs, she wanted peace and quiet. He had been working alone at home all day and wanted to see his friends, who were over constantly and at all hours. So, after it became too much, she suggested he move out. He refused to move without lashing out and broke-up with her. To which she said, "We take care of them and they take advantage of us."

I have noticed that being a princess or a bitch does have advantages over being accommodating and understanding. I know men who carry more of the household chores, child-rearing and financial management in their relationships. I know how important it is that we are fair and the burden is equal in a relationship. But how does one define fair and equal in a relationship? They are certainly not the same.

In relationships, it is practical to divide the day-to-day responsibilities by facility, just as you would at work. Some people happen to be better with deadlines, follow-through, and time-management. Others are better with throwing parties, creating menus, and video games. In my last serious relationship, I was the former and my boyfriend was the latter. He was a graduate student studying to be the next German-Norwegian Juan Diego Florez with a beer-gut. With my career path, we were never going to be rich but we would be able to buy a place and build a life.

Princess always brought up his lack of fortune and great debt as a reason why he was no good for me. In our last conversation he nearly shouted into the phone, "You'd have to pay my rent!" As if he was saying, "I have gonorrhea!" and I was supposed to react accordingly and run the other way. For the longest time I accepted these outbursts as a defense mechanism. We all carry the failures of past relationships with us and the hurt surfaces at odd times. Now, his song and dance of: I'm-a-poor-boy-with-empty-in-his-pockets-and-nothing-to-loose is just that - a song and dance that pays his freedom and keeps his burthen light.

Falter

I question this blog's contribution to building the pedestal on which Princess stands. Am I allowing myself to think like a crushed school girl?

I did write the email that brought me to this corner. I have a position. I deserve to be a priority. Princess had so many other priorities than me. Supreme among them was protecting himself from anything that might divert him from his chosen path. His way is dark and lonely and requires all of his precious attention to maintain.

We spoke last night. I left him a message. He called me back. He was in Tribeca and had finished making orange juice as performance art. I was lying in bed with my dog perched on a mound of pillows just above my head and he was standing in the wind on a street corner. We spoke for a little over a half-hour. It started out harmless enough. He said he was good. I said I missed him. He asked why? I told him I wasn't going to get into an argument about why I missed him. In the end he just rasped that he missed me too.

I asked him why it was so easy for him to walk away? He said, to be frank, you just want me because you can't have me. And you knew that from the beginning. Stop acting like a little girl and be the woman that you are!

To which I said, Then, you were a little boy that first time we slept together and you told me what you wanted after. So, we're even.

He said it (letting me go) was very hard. He said I was beautiful, so,so,so beautiful. He said I was smarter than most he holds dear. He said that I deserve better than him. And he also said that he is ten times the man of most men, that most men aren't worth much.

We went back and forth a bit longer about whether or not I had really thought about what I would be signing up for with him. The most important thing he said was, "For the, what, MONTH, we were together, that's what you would get. That is how it is with me." I would be in for frustration and significant sacrifice. He would make goddamn sure of that.

I feel a tenderness and a yearning for him that I can only describe as love. And I may never understand why we met or how I could want to be a partner on that long, dark path with this man. Perhaps he is right, I am just indulging my crush like a school girl and I should be out there getting my brains fucked out of me. Or something like that is what he said.

Toward the end of our conversation he said that he may be making a huge mistake but he had to get off the phone. I let him go without protest and the line went dead.

The Day After My Birthday

I do not know what day I was born. There is no record. I came into the world one of tens of thousands of girls, with a fifty-fifty chance of never finding a home and receiving the opportunities that I have had. The coin toss was in my favor.

Growing-up I cannot recall my mother or father ever asking for gratitude, not even a hint of it. When I would be overcome by my good fortune and I would ask them why me? They would say, because they loved me from the moment they saw my photo (I look like a space alien in that photo) and it was G*d's plan that I would become their daughter. Perhaps, when they meant that it was G*d's plan that I should feel safe in the truth that nothing happens without his blessing. I am significant, cradled in His omniscience.

Yesterday, they called me from the Pancake House to sing Happy Birthday. It has become a tradition and it brought tears to my eyes. I was overwhelmed by the thought that my life is forever tied to these two people singing into a cell phone in a semi-crowded restaurant at 12:30 pm. Though it may seem like a strange place to think of calling your daughter to wish her well on her birthday, it is in fact, a perfect place because it's essentially their Cheers. Everyone knows them and they have adopted all the young people who wait tables and make the heavenly dutch apple baby. I kinda wished I was there with them.

Yesterday, I went to the Whitney to see Georgia O'Keefe's early abstract charcoals and oil works. The museum worker at the ticket counter asked me if I was a student or under 25. I said thank you and gave her my id.

I am glad now that I went alone. I began to see that O'Keefe was a master of color and shape - what shapes! The exhibit followed her life from her first solo show '291' in 1917 through to her final move to New Mexico in the 40s. And I loved that even in her darkest works she seemed to apply the pastel or oil with a kind of wonder and awe, like she was waiting for the color to sing her a sad, low-down melody or a sea shanty or a love song. Given how much her palette seemed like a concert work to my eyes, her paintings dealing with music as a subject were not nearly as alive as her works from Lake George and her time in New York City.

As I discovered Georgia O'Keefe for the first time, I so wanted to reach out to Princess and tell him what I thought. But if I had gone with him would I have been much more concerned with his observations than my own? Which brings me to another realization, that I never really understood his artistic process or what he meant in his first email of his "fundamental hostility toward artists and art that drives his artistic production."

Throughout the day I heard from friends and members of my family. My birthday did not pass without notice and I was not alone, although I felt the absence of his presence all day long. Thankfully, my birthday was not spoiled by those wistful moments and I will give myself some of the credit for that but the rest of the credit goes, in particular, to three friends who shared a meal with me and made a true celebration possible.