by Pete Holmes
But I still didn’t feel clean; God could still see my faults. So I picked up the oil-soaked calendar with two sticks, as though I were rescuing a manta ray from a polluted ocean, put it in a plastic bag, and took the crime scene to a park, where I threw it in the trash, safely miles away from home, where God most often looked for me and tracked my behavior.
I knew He was watching, so I had to show Him I was really sorry. When I got back home, I took the remaining evidence—the tissues—climbed up the ladder on the back of our Winnebago, and jumped onto the roof of the garage, where I sat and lit them on fire, praying to the verge of tears that God would forgive my afternoon with Miss October. The roof because I was closer to God, the fire in hopes that the smoke would carry my apology even higher, filling in the distance between sinner and my Lord.
What my father made of the missing calendar, flushed cigarettes, and ceremonial ash pile on the roof—if he ever noticed it—I have no idea.
My pattern of finding and destroying porn didn’t end in the garage. Like an alcoholic housewife in the ’60s—only a boy, and sober—most days I would drift from room to room in our large Victorian house, haunting the antique room, then the attic, the laundry room, occasionally drifting into my brother’s closet to borrow his GI Joe figures—not to admire them, but to play with them.
This was in my late teens.
One such afternoon, encased in boredom, I went to retrieve the action figures from the closet when a new thought dawned on me: What else does my brother have hiding in here? I snooped, like a mother looking for evidence of pot, and there, right under the GI Joes, was a bright-orange-topped, gray-bottomed Nike shoebox that rattled in a suspicious way when I shook it. I opened it like a gangster checking a briefcase for cash in a diner.
Jackpot.
The box was filled with a Playboy that I promptly stole and kept in my bedroom, hiding it in the lining of an old antique chair that once belonged to my grandmother, and four or five VHS tapes. Most of the videos were sleeveless, but I could still tell I had stepped in something huge. Even without their casings, the tapes themselves were hot pink, letting me know I had either found my brother’s secret collection of Claymation Christmas specials or my brother’s porn stash. It was the latter. Babewatch. Buttman. Rocco Unleashed.
My instincts became heightened, as in a near-death experience. My vision sharpened, my mind felt like a diamond. I had one task: to get these things in a VCR and press Play.
This was easier said than done—it wasn’t as if I could just watch these tapes in the family living room, ejecting Uncle Buck and popping in Prison Lesbians III. Panicked, and rushed for some reason—in hindsight, I had all day to find a reasonable solution to this problem; what else was I doing?—I found a way to glimpse my first frames of real, moving, American pornography: the family camcorder.
Sure, it was black and white. Sure, there was no sound. And sure, the vertical hold was busted so each frame moved slowly upward as if on an elevator being pushed by the frame below. But it was enough. I hit Play and pressed my sweaty eye up to the viewfinder.
My life was never the same.
The whole experience lasted about ninety seconds. It wasn’t the women, per se, that excited me. It was the thrill of finding it. It was the thrill of how bad it was. It was the idea that these women had even let something like this be filmed. I was excited by the taboo of it, the liberation. Sex was something you hid, like a cigarette while pregnant, but not for these prison lesbians. They may have been behind bars, but to me they seemed remarkably free.
Moments later, with no motor oil to be found, overcome with shame, I pushed back the protective casing on the top of each videocassette and cut the tape with a pair of scissors. I had had my fun, but snipping each tape and asking for forgiveness felt even better. But not for long.
Twenty minutes later, I was back in my brother’s closet, on my knees, impressing myself with a skill I didn’t know I had: mending broken VHS tapes with Scotch tape. I would do this three, four, fives times a day. I cut the tape in shame, I mended it in lust. Cut in shame, mend in lust. On and on and on, like an old-school reel-to-reel film editor, but hornier and more at odds with himself.
What my brother thought when his trusty porno tapes made a weird self-repaired noise from inside the VCR and randomly skipped frames like the Zapruder film—if he ever noticed it—I have no idea.
treasure in heaven
ENTERING HIGH SCHOOL, WITH ALL THE PORN IN MY house ceremoniously destroyed, I was more determined than ever to stop masturbating and to save myself for marriage. Not that anyone was offering me sex, but boy oh boy, if a slippery temptress ever came across my path I would remember my training, stay calm, and send her up the street to Gomorrah if she wanted that kind of fun.
By senior year I had taken to wearing khakis and navy polos to school. I also started leading the weekly Bible study—“Mustard Seeds”—and had the high and tight haircut to prove it. As fate would have it, it was also the year that I came closest to touching a boob. A real boob, attached to a real female.
Although I didn’t know it.
There was a girl I had a crush on, let’s call her “Lisa,” who was pretty and cool and didn’t seem to mind having me around, so we would sit in well-lit, temptation-free, wide-open public spaces and talk. She was the first girl I felt that conversational chemistry with, and it was exciting. We really could talk about anything, including sex—specifically, my decision to wait until marriage before having any. I remember thinking it was strange she was so interested in that point, but I figured she needed help and thought myself just the kind of Mustard Seed who could give her some eternal wisdom.
“You really wouldn’t have sex until you’re married?” Lisa asked.
“Yup,” I beamed, proud and actually thinking my response would impress her and lead to six weeks of age-appropriate hand-holding and seated meals. For some reason I was acting like a forty-year-old youth pastor giving some much-needed guidance and direction to one of my flock. It didn’t even cross my mind that this girl may in fact have been trying to flock me.
A week later she started dating another boy—a skinnier, cooler boy with reckless hair, baggy jeans, and a Sublime T-shirt—with whom she would publicly make out, hard, for all to see on their way to class. I didn’t even change my course to avoid them, thinking maybe my huge-backpacked proximity would remind her of what we could’ve had and make her realize what a huge mistake she had made. You sure you don’t want this, baby? I don’t know if you noticed, but these are real Dockers. Off the rack. Marshalls. Pleated. Lightly stained.
After a few days of this, a fellow Mustard Seed and friend of mine with sources on the inside told me that Lisa had indeed wanted to date me, but not if I wouldn’t have sex. Without missing a beat, I smooshed down the swell of emotions—the disappointment, the shock, and my screaming horny side that to this day has still not forgiven me—smiled, and said, “Oh well, treasure in heaven.”
“Treasure in heaven” was something we were taught to think whenever we sacrificed some worldly pleasure for God. You may not get the girl, or the party, or the thrill of seeing the R-rated Die Hard trilogy in theaters, but when you get to heaven it’ll be even sweeter because you’ll have, I dunno—more treasure than the other people? Everyone will have treasure, sure—it’s heaven. But you’ll have slightly more. You’ll be upgraded to the premium package. This is basically my church’s forty-virgins motivational scheme, but in my religion, there’s only one virgin, and it’s you.
My non-Christian friends teased me mercilessly. I had given up sex to be a “good boy.” I remember thinking, Oh yeah? We’ll see who’s laughing when I’m dead!
sweaty toothed madman
I GOT A 1040 ON MY SATS. THAT’S ABOUT THE NATIONAL average, but all my friends scored in the high 12 and 1300s, so I studied really hard, made flash cards, and took the test again.
I got a 1050.
I seriously considered not going to college and heading straight
into the real world. Beyond the academics, I was scared of big universities with their keggers and their atheists and braless women rolling their own cigarettes. Colleges seemed like big, unregulated cities, lawless lands filled with the same jocks and bullies from high school, but drunk, yelling and shoving, crashing cars and playing ookie cookie. I was scared of those kids, and scared of who I might become if I started hanging out with them, so my 1045 SAT average became my excuse to opt out.
Just as I had resigned to a higher-education-less future, my church friend Fonz told me about a second option: Christian college. Of course! I could still have professors and a dorm; I could still read a book lazily on the quad; my parents would still have a sticker for the back windshield of their car. And I could remain a virgin and go to root beer keggers and major in the New Testament.
I liked telling jokes, I liked making people feel good, and I could even play guitar and speak in front of groups. The skill set decided it for me: I was gonna be a youth pastor. Partly out of love for the Lord, yes, and partly due to low test scores. I was like a kid joining the army after flunking out of school, convincing himself that he wanted to serve his country after the fact.
So off I went to Gordon College—which, I know, doesn’t even sound like a real school. It sounds like my parents hired a wise old man named Gordon to tutor me one magical summer. It wasn’t exactly rigorous—for a start, my application essay included an illustration. It didn’t say to include an illustration. I just threw it in. While other kids were writing and rewriting the thirteenth draft of their application essays, I was sending Gordon College a drawing I had made with Sharpies on an 8½ × 11 piece of printer paper of me being set free from the bondage of sin, the tree of life in the background.
I got in.
Thank God I became a comedian. I can’t imagine sliding my résumé across a desk in the real world like, “Gordon College. Read it and weep.”
That said, I really liked my school. It was more like a summer camp than a college, and once I started enjoying the fact that it was more like a summer camp than a college, I felt right at home. It was quiet, and everybody was nice, and the classes weren’t too hard. I liked being with other kids who considered second base “swing dancing.”
Bored but independent for the first time, I started doing as much comedy as possible. I signed up for the closest thing we had to a sketch comedy group, a social-issues theater troupe called REACH—Re-Examine And CHange—where I got some laughs, but the content was usually pretty heavy; mostly we did sketches that were about couples screaming and crying after finding out they had both gotten AIDS because of sexual promiscuity. The year prior, REACH had done a pro-life sketch where a female performer sat in a rocking chair and sang a lullaby to a jarred fetus the group had borrowed from the biology lab. Yeah. It wasn’t exactly SNL.
REACH even traveled around to grade schools to do our skits, just a bunch of nineteen-year-olds scaring twelve-year-olds into reexamining and changing their lives, before they even had lives to change. At one performance, our leader grabbed me and one of the female cast members to illustrate a point onstage. “If I have sex with her,” he said, pointing to the girl, “and then she has sex with him,” he said, pointing to me, “then it’s like me and him have had sex!” He then led the crowd of preteens in a group “Ewwwww!” and smiled, his point having been made, somehow managing to be sex shaming, homophobic, and biologically incorrect all at once. I decided to look elsewhere.
Luckily, the next year an improv team popped up on campus, the Sweaty Toothed Madmen—it’s a Dead Poets Society reference—and I felt for the first time like I had found my calling. I didn’t know that what had been missing from my life was standing onstage and riffing thirty reasons as to why someone might be the world’s worst doctor—“I’m Ray Charles!” was always a go-to—but improv theater quickly became my favorite thing. There was no agenda. We weren’t trying to convert anyone or change anyone’s mind. We were going for laughs, plain and simple.
We did short-form improv, and some nights, improvising a scene in the style of Shakespeare (one of my favorite games), I’d call someone a “bastard” and, after the sea of laughs and boos had worn down, I’d have to wear the “satchel of shame”—a paper bag improvisers would have to don over their heads if they ever took things too far. I wore this bag a lot and didn’t mind one bit. For the first time in my life, I got the glorious feeling of being a rascal—I was as close as I’d ever gotten to being the bad boy, chewing on a matchstick, flipping a nickel in the moonlight, making jokes about Bathsheba having a nice rack.
And with that, the idea of becoming a youth pastor started slipping away as I considered for the first time that maybe I wanted to be a professional comedian. I didn’t tell anyone at first. Not only was I turning my back on the Lord, but it’s a weird thing to tell your friends that you think you’re funny enough to get paid for it. It felt like saying, “Hey, remember the other night when we stayed up laughing?
“You owe me twenty bucks.”
open dorm
GORDON HAD A POLICY CALLED “OPEN DORM,” WHICH meant the boys weren’t allowed in the girls’ dorm and vice versa except for a three-hour window, excluding Tuesday, when there were no visiting hours whatsoever. (Tuesday, I guess, was feared to be the horniest day of the week.) When you did visit someone of the opposite sex in his or her room, the door had to be propped open ninety degrees, there had to be at least two lights on—the overhead light and an auxiliary lamp—and both of your feet had to remain on the floor. This is real. While other schools were giving out free condoms, my school enforced celibacy to the extent that they mandated the placement of our feet on the floor.
This was deeply inconvenient for me. I wasn’t trying to have sex—I wasn’t—but all my friends were girls. Numerous movie nights in their more comfortable, better-smelling dorm rooms would be cut short, forcing me to leave before the end of the film, booted by an RA midway through Forrest Gump, me shuffling back to my room without knowing whatever happened to Jenny.
By my sophomore year, me and my girlfriends figured out a way for me to stay past open dorm—we closed the door, locked it, and we didn’t answer if anyone knocked. Genius, I know. This worked, of course, until I would have to leave well past visiting hours and make my way down a hallway lined with narcs and goody two-shoes, all too eager to get me sent to the judiciary board. To prevent this, my friends would wrap my body in blankets, quilts, and towels and lead me blind, tightly wrapped, like smuggling a six-foot-six genderless Snuffleupagus down the hall, me taking tiny steps like a mummy, trying to avoid suspicion, speaking, if I needed to, in a girlish falsetto.
For the first time in my life, I was with hundreds of other people who were as fucked up about sex as I was, and it only further cemented my relationship between God and my ability to not have sex with myself or anyone else. Instead of my beliefs being deprogrammed by a standard liberal arts sex-positivity, they were normalized and enforced by my school’s administration. Even more than ever, being good still meant, for the most part, repression and denial of your base human urges, keeping your sexuality safely and ashamedly to yourself.
But, rules be damned, there’s no group hornier than a bunch of young, repressed Christians. In fact, every year I was there, with only fifteen hundred students, one couple would get pregnant—that’s four couples during my time at Gordon—each time leading to weddings at which the bride and groom were too young to drink.
Then there was the dry humping, a kind of over-the-jean jamboree. Somewhere in between second and third base, dry humping is usually reserved for someone’s first sexual experience wearing sweatpants in a friend’s basement, but in the Christian community, dry humping remains a popular choice well into one’s twenties. Some of the more daring students would dry hump naked—something I called “moist humping”—happy as long as the hot dog was never fully sandwiched by the bun. It might visit, but you were fine as long as it never established residency, a sort of sexual version of t
he five-second rule.
Still others would be what I called “everything but” Christians. And I do mean everything and I do mean but(t). Like high-priced lawyers, they scoured the scriptures and submitted that there was nothing specifically saying not to have anal sex with your partner, just “sex,” which, with the authors long deceased and the council unable to question them, we had to assume meant “vaginal sex,” which allowed them to conclude that other types of sex may in fact be a gray area for God and, Your Honor, we motion for a mistrial.
I always found this hilarious, as if God were up on a cloud, looking down at two young people having sex like, “Hey! I specifically said not to— Oh, it’s in the butt? Never mind!” Then that person dies and God is waiting for her at the Pearly Gates, smiling, like, “Ahhhhhh, you got me! Get in there, you saucy minx!”
But I knew there was another way around all this drama. It was well known in our community that if you wanted to have sex and stay on God’s good side there was one simple solution:
You got married.
cry innocent!
I MET MY FUTURE WIFE WHEN I WAS WEARING KNEE socks, short gray knickers, and a gray topcoat with about a hundred silver buttons running down the front.
It was my first acting job. We were reenactors—you know, like Civil War reenactors—pretending to be Puritans wandering around Salem, Mass., like lesser-known Disney characters, imploring tourists to come to our play Cry Innocent! by asking them, in character, to sit on the jury of Goody Bishop, who had been accused that day of witchcraft.
Part of our job was to always be in character and to pretend like it was 1692, which was tricky in the middle of an outdoor pedestrian mall in the late ’90s. We called everyone we met “Goodwife” or “Goodman” and used “hath” a lot. We’d act confused by all the cars—“Ho! What is this horseless carriage?!”—and when children asked us for a picture, we’d ask them where their paint and easels were. Three times a day, to mark the start of our show, there’d be a loud arrest a few blocks from the CVS—all seven cast members would point and yell, standing on pillars and making a scene, as Bridget Bishop, usually played by my future wife, was arrested, chained, and dragged to her trial by Judge Colonel Hawthorn, usually played by me.
