To worship women

I dreamed last night that Peggy and I were having a threesome with another woman and my emotions went from sublimity to despair when the other woman had to leave. Part of me has felt abandoned at least since I was a child and the first woman I wanted to sleep with (not that I knew what sex was) ended her visit with my family. I was lonely even then, and her smile, her lap, and her arms around me lifted me to paradise. I convinced myself that she was magic, that she could read my heart, that she returned my love, and that she would never leave me. I was not a child to cry, but I’ve never forgotten my anguish at her departure, or the fact that she laughed at my tears. Whatever else about me was immature at age four or five, my ability to feel despondent was as strong as it has ever been.

My dream represents a lifestyle that I once had, but now, except for Peggy, all those women and all those times are gone forever, and there is a sadness about that, although I wouldn’t go back if I could. I became attached too easily, yet no sooner had I made love to one woman than my sights would be set on another. Women were my drug, and I wanted them above all else. I would walk away from any other thing to have sex with a woman whom I considered an angel or a goddess, and my world was populated by angels and goddesses. I divided them by name, and I wanted one of each. I kept a list of the states they were from, and after I had sex with an Austrian, I started a list of countries too.

I imagined women to whom I was attracted to be of a different substance than other women. Their liquids were like holy water, and their touch made me feel as if I had entered a universe of eternal magic in which I wished more than anything I could remain. I, who couldn’t believe in God despite my best efforts to do so, worshipped women despite my best efforts to not do so. It was probably my belief in their magic that drew them to me. They interpreted it as the supreme compliment, but the downside of a man seeing a woman as more than human is the pain that comes when she disappoints him.

I never went to bed with Patty, but I still think about her after the passage of these 40 years since she sold me a used Datsun. She agreed to have some work done on it, and when I asked her to make a list of the work and sign it, she looked as if she might cry, and said that she had considered me (who she had only known for an hour) to be one man for whom trust was still possible. I was stricken to have hurt her and said that the list would not be necessary, but when I went back to have the work done, no one knew what I was talking about. When I told them that my salesperson had been Patty, they sighed knowingly and said that Patty had moved to another dealership the same day she sold me that Datsun. Even so, I still remember her with a smile because she had a smile that made me smile. She was magic.

Then there was Memory. She was the wife of a friend’s brother and had come from Missouri to help him settle his parents’ estate. Her smile was like Patty’s in that it could bring light to the darkest night. I wanted desperately to be alone with her before she went back to St. Louis, but it wasn’t possible. Ten years later, my friend moved to be near his brother, and I went to see him, presumably, but really to see her. My friend had no bed for me, so naturally I stayed with Memory and her husband. As soon as he left for work the next day, I told her of my adoration. When she found her voice, she asked me to tell her again, this time on my knees. Memory’s husband was more interested in alcohol than sex; she was feeling old at forty; and she was distressed about having gained ten pounds, so she saw me as a godsend to her ego. I stayed another day waiting for her to find time when we could be alone again, but I became bored and left hours before it was to happen. I’ve regretted that ever since.

I think I could list every woman I had sex with or very much wanted to have sex with. I hated being a slave to beings whom I forever had to persuade to give me that which I so desperately needed, but I saw no option. After she got used to the idea of an open marriage, Peggy seemed okay with it (as she later did with a group marriage), but it got to be too much, yet she didn’t even know about most of my one-time liaisons. The ones she did know about were even worse, because I often became attached to women who weren’t attached to me. Some of them had even chosen me because they imagined that my marriage would keep me from becoming attached, and that would keep them safe from having to deal with anything too intense. The opposite would also occur in that it was the woman who became the more attached. Such women would invariably try to win me away from Peggy, but there was no way I was going to give up the one certain anchor to my uncertain life, yet I would grieve when such women finally ended our relationship.

Lynn lived with her husband at a small rural commune in Tennessee. They had their own house, and I stayed with them for two nights. On the first night, her screams during lovemaking kept me awake. When she asked me the next morning how I slept, I told her that I had spent the night wanting to be with her. She suggested that I sleep with her and her husband that night. I said I had rather have her to myself, but she said it was a take it or leave it offer, so I took it. Bob and I took turns with her throughout the night with brief periods of sleep in-between. I envisioned a lasting friendship with both of them, but I soon learned that Lynn was as threatened by affection out of bed as she was enamored of sex in bed. I took Peggy to see her and Bob in the hope that a foursome might result, but Peggy had no interest in him. Like most women, Peggy needs more than looks in a sexual partner, whereas if I consider a woman beautiful, I immediately conclude that she is also possessed of every other virtue that matters to me.

Now, it all seems like a dream, sometimes heavenly, but more often like a dark pit of bottomless desire. I went from the equivalent of being content to get drunk four times a year to wanting to get drunk anytime and anywhere. Sometimes, there would be another couple, and the other man would instigate a foursome. Once, the four of us were side by side on the living room floor, and had just started our lovemaking when I reached out and touched the other man on the back. I did this because I was feeling playful and affectionate, but his wife had been led into having sex with me mostly to please him, so she began to cry and, after putting on her blouse, ran out the door.

On another occasion, the woman of the other couple was Peggy’s best friend. I had long since wanted to have sex with her, and her husband felt the same way about Peggy. Unfortunately, Peggy was repulsed by him, so while he chased her around the house, I nailed his wife as quickly as possible on the bathroom floor because I knew this was one party that was going to come to a bad end early.

I never was much of a salesman, and seducing women is salesmanship, but I did my best to learn the formula, and to use it as effectively as possible given my near terror of rejection. I discovered that most women like men who are open about their feelings, so I was open about my feelings (this was easy for me). They like a man who can cry, so I learned to cry, and this too came easily. They like a man who is playful and has a good sense of humor, and I was both of these things. Mostly, they like a man who likes them, pays attention to them, and thinks they’re beautiful, so I worshipped them, hung onto their every word, and said they were angels who were all the more beautiful for not having wings. Nothing I said was a lie, yet it was still a ploy, a formula that I knew I must follow if I wanted to get one hand beneath a woman’s blouse and the other up her thigh.

I only remember one time when I lied shamelessly. It was on a canoe trip with twenty other people, and I was smitten by one of the women who wasn't with a man. I made sure we ended up in the same canoe, and I soon realized that the attraction was mutual. She cursed with every breath, and she asked me if I minded that. I said, “No, it just proves that you have an independent spirit.” She also smoked cigarettes and asked me how I felt about kissing a smoker. “I don’t mind at all that you smoke,” I lied as I pictured her mouth as a dirty ash tray. I don’t know why we didn’t choose to fall behind the others, but instead we raced ahead and made love behind a log. We were just putting on our clothes on when the other canoes appeared, so there was no mistaking what we had done. Later, it became chilly and started to rain. For some reason, we had to leave the canoes and walk a fair distance through the rain, and we all became cold and hungry. This woman whom I had so recently wanted enough that I would lie to have her now held no interest to me. In fact, I didn’t even want to talk to her. It was the only time I ever felt that way, but I was disgusted by her vulgarity and cigarettes, and by the fact that I had lied.

Some women had sex with me to spite their husbands who they never planned to tell. One woman assured me that her husband would kill both of us, and I believed her, yet even this didn’t stop me from having sex with her in the woods and sending her home with muddy underwear. Everything else in life seemed a poor second to my sexual conquests. Peggy told me the other day that I am less needy of women now because I’ve grown more mature, but I give the credit to hormones. It’s not that I don’t want to have sex with strangers, but that I no longer want it with an ache that never gives me more than a few moments peace, and I don’t want it enough to go to the trouble to get it. I used to wish I were sexless so I could be rid of my obsession, yet it plagued me for decades. Along with chronic pain and sleep apnea, being obsessed with women was the greatest trial of my life, and the best I can say for it is that I came away with my marriage intact and that I never caught anything. I’m also glad that I wasn’t anymore obsessed than I was because I might have even ended up paying for sex, and that would have been the absolute bottom for me because I saw sex as more about being accepted on the inside than about getting to the inside. I wanted to be wanted. I wanted the magic that I thought women had and I didn’t.

I remember working with my father to replace a roof, or a bathroom floor, or to paint a house, and in my memory, I’m perpetually tortured by the thought that I’m trading the lesser for the greater because ALL I REALLY WANT is to have sex with lots of women before the day arrives when my desirability is lost. Fortunately, when that day arrived, I no longer wanted women like I once did. At 63, younger women are friendlier (thinking, I suppose, that age makes me safe), and women above fifty are more likely to approach me than I am to approach them. Because I am more nearly free than I’ve ever been, I don’t care if they approach me or not, or even if they find me attractive or not, and I especially don’t like it when I think they’re scoping me out the way I used to scope them out.

The woman in my dream had me in the old way. She turned the darkness to light, the cold to warmth, and the commonplace to the poetic. I became so absorbed in her that time and the universe disappeared and heaven opened. She was a higher high than any drug, and I became an instant addict only to fall into withdrawal when she said she had to go. This explains the melancholy that has overtaken me. I want to rise to that heaven again, but then I remember the hell that I went through to get there. Schopenhauer wrote that pleasure isn’t, as we imagine, a positive good but a respite from longing, and that was certainly what sex meant to me. Not sex by itself because I did, after all, have Peggy, but sex with different women. The more women, the more magic until, as I thought, one day I would go up and never come down. I used to wonder how many women it would take before I could absorb enough magic to feel complete, and I decided that 300 would be enough. 

Now, I remember with fondness the smells and the stickiness of having made love the whole night through after which I would feel completely satiated for hours. The only other times I knew such freedom for more than a few moments were when I was asleep, sick, drunk, or else shivering with cold or aching with thirst. At those times, I would be aware that even my desire for sex was gone, and it would be good in the same way that you don’t mind having a headache nearly so much after you’ve dropped a hammer on your toe.

The song might make sense or it might appear absurd, but in either case it fits what I'm feeling.

I get a letter from a prestigious Mississippian

I got a letter from a professor at the University of Oregon in response to my last post. He and I are both from Route 4, Bogue Chitto, Mississippi, only he turned out better than I did as can be seen from the fact that he makes money as the head of the White Ebonics Department, whereas I stay home and write on my blog for nothing. Here’s his letter. He wrote to me in the simple language of our people.

Dear Snowy,

So what if God did order them Old Testament Jews to murder thousands of babies; and what if he did drown all but two of the world’s population of kangaroos and armadillos (and everthing else too) because Middle Easterners sinned back in Noah’s day; and what if he did say that if a man raped a woman, then that man had to marry that woman and listen to her bitch about it for the rest of his life? What you overlook is that God did a lot of good stuff too. Like there was that story about the man what God told to be a preacher, and that man didn’t wanna be no preacher, so God had a big fish (it weren’t no whale, it was a big fish) swaller him for three days after which the man decided he rather preach than to have to smell fish-breath everday. Now, that’s a good story.

Another story I like is that one about the man who got off his mule and beat it with a two by four (it was really just a stick, but I always picture it as a two by four) because the mule wouldn’t move, and that mule turned around and looked at him and said, “You dumbass. There’s a angel with a sword up ahead, and he’s waiting to chop you up into buzzard kibbles, so instead of beating me this way, good mule that I am, you oughta be thanking me for saving your sorry life.” Yessir, I’m partial to them animal stories, but they’re all in the Old Bible. In the new Bible, God got in touch with his softer side. For example, God said to love everbody else just as much as you love yourself. That means that if you have a toothache, and your neighbor’s wife has a toothache, and she can’t pay to get her toothache fixed because her husband’s job got sent overseas to Chiner, then you have to take her to the dentist with you unless you’re like Mitt Romney and need a new car elevator so you get all your vehicles in and out of your basement without having to put a hole through the foundation.

That loving your neighbor as yourself part of the Bible, that’s good, that’s real good because it cuts down on all the suffering in the world. For instance, if your neighbors are hungry, then you can’t go out and buy yourself no new TV until they’re all fed because you sure the hell wouldn’t go out and buy yourself that TV if you was hungry. No, sir. You would buy groceries first and maybe eat ‘em right there in the parking lot if you was real hungry, and this means that you’ve got to do that for other people too because if you don’t, you can’t very well say that you love them as much as you love yourself, and if you can’t say that, then you should be ashamed to show your face in church on Sunday. Like Jesus said, “By their works will you know them,” and in another place, “If you love me, keep my commandments,” and in a third place the Bible says that faith is okay, but it ain’t as good as love.

But you don’t never talk about none of the good stuff that the Bible says, and what I mean by that is the kind of stuff that Christians live by. You just make out like God’s worst than Hitler, and that don’t wash. So what you need to do is, you need to be damn happy that us Christians love everbody else as much as we love ourselves, cause what kind of a mess would this world be in if not for us making sure that everybody has got enough to eat, and everbody can go to the doctor when they’re sick, and poor kids have a chance to go to college if they want to? You answer me that, Mr. Athiest because that’s the kind of stuff that we Christians stand for, but I can’t tell what you stand for other than attacking those who spend their lives doing without luxuries because they’re so filled with love that they can’t stand to see no one going without the necessaries.

Leroy

Dear Leroy,

I’m going to talk to you like you talked to me which was like one Mississippi boy to another, and what I’m going to say is this. When I was a kid, I too liked them animal stories, and I especially wanted me one of them talking mules—or maybe it was a donkey, I’m not too sure no more because I don’t never read the Bible no more. Anyway, when I got a little bigger, I got to thinking seriously about what it would mean to love my neighbor AS MYSELF, and I thought, holy shit, I don’t know nobody what does that, or even tries to do that because all the Christians I know live just like everbody else except that they go to church even when nobody’s dead.

I asked my preacher about it, and what he said was that Jesus didn’t mean that everbody in the whole world was your neighbor. He just meant the people what you interacted with everday. I went away and I pondered about that for awhile, and it seemed to me that since poor people mostly interacted with other poor people, and rich people mostly interacted with other rich people, that his interpetration put all the responsibility for helping poor people onto the backs of the poor. I also reflected on the idea that most of the really poor people around where I lived was niggers, and everybody said that niggers didn’t need no help because niggers didn’t mind being poor. Of course, there was poor white people too, but everbody said they was lazy, so nobody helped them either except for taking them a basket of food at Thanksgiving, and that was only if the man and woman was married and had children. For these reasons, all the Christians I knew got to keep most of their money, which is pretty much how it is today too.

I sort of didn’t quite buy all that about nobody needing or deserving help because even if it was true, I thought you should still help their children even when it weren’t no holiday. Everbody I asked about it said that, no, it was up to their parents to do that, and if you did it for them, you would be encouraging their laziness. It occurred to me that when you added all of the reasons for not helping other people together, it pretty much meant that what Jesus said didn’t really have no effect. I went back to the preacher again to try to understand what the hell Jesus was talking about then, and what he told me was that what was true in Palestine way back in Jesus day wasn’t true in America today, because, unlike back then, America was the Land of Opportunity, and everbody who was willing to work for money could get all the money they needed. I doubted that Jesus would see it that way, but I also knew that I didn’t want to give my money away neither, and this meant that I never could be no real Christian, but then it struck me that that’s why faith is so wonderful. You don’t have to do nothing to get into heaven except to say, “I believe in Jesus, and I’m sorry for my sins,” and you will probably come out okay if you hold off on saying that until you’re so sick that you didn’t feel like sinning no more no how.

I sort of liked salvation by faith because it gave me a crack at heaven that I wouldn’t have otherwise had, but it sure didn’t seem fair that one person could live like a sack of shit for eighty years and get into heaven on the basis of saying a single sentence during his last second of life, whereas another person could do his best to love everbody everday of his eighty years, and then go to hell because he was a Jew or a nonbeliever or else didn’t have time to say the necessary sentence before he died and therefore went to judgment without his sins being forgiven. I found such thoughts worrisome, but I sort of noticed that nobody else seemed to worry about them because the other Christians I knew seemed downright convinced that they was right with God. As they saw it, it was Communists, liberals, atheists, humanists, and godless professers who was going to be mighty sorry on judgment day, whereas they themselves was going to be glad to see Jesus, and he was going to be glad to see them too. That just didn’t set right with me, and it still don’t.

Truth is, them Christians struck me as being like the old time Pharisees that Jesus was always calling hypocrits, only they was worst than that because at least the Pharisees thought that they needed to do more to please God than to say they had faith and apologize for their sins. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t see no conviction behind the Christian love for other people. All that Jesus meant to them so far as I could see was an insurance policy against hellfire, and that’s still how I see it, although I can’t hardly say what’s true for every Christian in the whole world, and no doubt some of them really do try to love everbody the way Jesus said, and I have no problem with that. But it don’t change the fact that almost ever last Christian I ever knowed took care of themselves first, and then if there was anything left over, they might give a little of it to church, but after the preacher took his cut, the rest of what little they gave ended up paying for air conditioning churches, attaching big old gyms to little old churches, putting teensy-weensy steeples on great big churches, and other such luxuries that had nothing to do with loving their neighbors as much as they loved themselves. Now, I can just hear you saying that Christians ain’t perfect, just saved, but it’s one thing to make any number of mistakes and then do your best to correct 'em, and it’s quite another thing to live your whole life through without ever making a serious effort to do what you say you believe is right.

Snowy

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition

Martin Luther King Jr’s claim to have “seen the Promised Land” was an ironic reference for a black pacifist given that the original Promised Land was inhabited by presumably lesser peoples that the Israelites set about enslaving or exterminating—by God’s command no less. Nearly three millennia later, we newly arrived Americans used the Biblical account to justify our own partial extermination of Native Americans and our enslavement of Africans. We called our belief that we, as white American Protestants, had replaced the Jews as God’s chosen, Manifest Destiny, and it allowed us to see others as either obstacles to our progress or tools for our use.

I once took a Sunday School class in which we studied these accounts in which God ordered the Jews to attack cities and kill every person and every animal (except for the young female virgins whom they sometimes got to keep for the victory party). It was a liberal church, and the liberal response to anything vicious, contradictory, or simply stupid about the Bible is: Oh, THAT part isn’t God’s word because it makes God look bad, but THIS part, the warm and fuzzy part about how Jesus loves us, and we’re all going to heaven (all we Christians that is), THAT’S most definitely God’s word. Not so for one old man, who sat there looking for all the world like Santa Claus in a three-piece suit, for he said, “I can only conclude that all those people and animals that God ordered to be killed must have somehow deserved it.”

The stores are already selling Christmas decorations in preparation for the one season of the year during which America talks about “Peace on Earth,” and I will admit that it’s good to have a respite from what the baby Jesus grew up to represent (“I came not to bring peace but a sword”). Jesus’ position on violence certainly reflects America’s approach to problem solving, and we take great pride in the fact that we’re the most Christian nation on earth, which I’m sure we are inasmuch as we are willing to forego necessities in order to buy Hellfire Missiles (“…he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one”). Our love for Jesus is so great that we even paid him homage when we named our favorite weapon, which we quite naturally use to kill those who don’t love him the way we do. Of course, some of them deserve it, I’m sure, but I can’t help but think that we deserve it too. After all, the biggest difference between us is that they kill for one god and we kill for another. Maybe whoever is left alive might finally have Peace on Earth.