“Max?”
“Yeah, Max.”
“Mad Max.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re mad aren’t you? Like Mad Max.”
My parents didn’t always have the name Max in mind. They’d been kicking around Andrew, John, Elton, John Elton. Eight months into her pregnancy, my mother sat down to watch Mel Gibson in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. And it hits her: “Max. We’re going to name him Max.”
Fast-forward to this old-timer and me in a back parking lot somewhere in Los Angeles still shaking hands. He tells me his name is Calvin. “Calvin and Max,” he says. “Someone ought to write about us.”
I smile. “Listen, Calvin, are you homeless?”
“Been homeless for a few years now.”
“Where do you sleep at night?”
“Came into a few extra bucks so I’m sleeping on the floor of a studio apartment until Friday with five or six others. Money’s all dried up again after that.”
“Are you here every day, Calvin?”
“Every day. These people here, they let me walk up and down these shops here. Everyone knows me. I don’t cause no trouble.”
I ask Calvin if he needs anything. Not that I have anything to give. It just seems like the right thing to say.
“Need? Clothes, brother Max. I need clothes.”
As it would happen, I have a bag of clothes stashed in the closet of the last place I stayed. I ask Calvin if he is going to be here tomorrow. I tell him about the extra clothes.
“My God,” Calvin shakes like a Pentecostal overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit. “God Bless you, my brother.” He takes two steps too close and hugs me. I’m defenseless. I don’t like being touched. Particularly by strangers. I barely let my own mother touch me growing up. But this is the best hug I have ever received. I want to permanently reside in his embrace. Calvin smells of stale cigarettes and department store cologne samples. His beard scratches my face, makes me itch. When Calvin breaks the hug, he asks what time I’ll be back. We agree on noon the following day. He walks me over to a dumpster behind a five-foot concrete wall. I am instructed to leave the clothes behind the dumpster if he happens to not be there.
“Calvin, don’t lie to me, do you live here?”
“No, this is just where I feed the cat.”
“The cat?”
As if the damn thing knows we’re talking about it, a black kitten emerges from the dumpster, meowing incessantly. Calvin and I peer over the wall.
“What’s her name?”
Calvin shrugs. “I usually just call it ‘Cat.’” He puts his hands over the wall, whistles. “Here cat, cat, cat, kitty, cat, cat.”
“Listen, Calvin, I’ll be back tomorrow at noon, all right?”
Calvin lets go of the wall, takes my hand again. I believe we are about to try and break the record for the world’s longest and most vigorous handshake, but he does something else entirely. He bows his head, kisses the back of my hand, and prays.
For me.
For blessing and favor and all the riches in the world.
Calvin, this homeless man treading the streets of Los Angeles, caring for a stray cat behind a dumpster and begging for quarters so he can eat a proper meal, is asking God to bless me?
I want to tell him, “Trust me, Calvin, that doesn’t work. I just spent the last two years trying to get God to bless me. He isn’t listening,” but I let him go on. It seems to make him happy. I leave Calvin feeling depleted, my very core aching about my place in this world. Had Calvin just represented the Christ of the Bible better than anyone I knew? Jesus was poor, born in a barn on the outskirts of society. He was homeless. He worked a common job, and lived with the outcasts, the whores, the widows, the orphans, the criminals, the drunkards, and the lost. He was a friend to sinners and the oppressed. Yet Jesus still healed the sick, prayed for the broken, and befriended the lonely. He met their needs even though he had needs himself. It doesn’t sound comfortable, but nobody said it was going to be easy.
I show up the next day, right on time with a brand new wardrobe for Calvin. Only Calvin is nowhere to be seen. He warned me this might happen.
I climb the concrete wall, landing hard on the other side. I set the clothes behind the dumpster as instructed. On my way back over, I stall. I am surrounded by four walls. Two of them belong to the pharmacy and Urban Outfitters, suitable for scaling only if you’ve been recently bitten by a radioactive spider. The third is a chain link fence with a locked gate. The forth is the wall I’d just climbed. I don’t want to discredit anyone’s capabilities, but I recall Calvin’s pirate hobble from the day before. There is no way in hell he was ever able to get over that wall.
Three years later I still have no idea what happened to those clothes or if Calvin ever got them. With or without them, something tells me he’s doing okay.
And The Hero Hides In The Bathroom
My first experience with vulnerability is in the sixth grade. The first time I extend myself towards someone who is not a parent or a sibling will be a girl I pass in the hallway each day on my way to English class. Her name is Sarah.
Oh Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.
Sarah likes me. A lot. Rumor has it she left her boyfriend, Liam, for me.
Me.
Of all people she could pass in the hallway between third and fourth period, she chooses me. Liam and Sarah are together for an entire year before she leaves him. Through a friend of a friend, she asks me to be her boyfriend. Not understanding the concept of a rebound neither on the court nor in dating, I’m instantly, hopelessly, destructively in love.
Yet I refuse to speak to her. What will happen when she gets to know the real twelve-year-old Max? The one obsessed with dinosaurs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The nonathletic-always-picked-on-by-the-jocks-Max who just went through a growth spurt so awkward the previous summer he’s now three sizes too big for himself and learning what to do with all the extra arm and leg.
I will eventually work up some courage, sputter out the word, “yes,” and spend the first month of our relationship hiding my new girlfriend from my parents. Telling them I am in a relationship is not an option. Every time talk of the opposite sex comes up in our home, Dad shuts it down. In the eighth grade I will spend a summer vandalizing my neighborhood with less fear of my parents and the law than the amount of fear I had about bringing sex into our home. Even as an adult I will have no idea why the word, “sex,” appeared to frighten my father so, but I knew the very mention of the word “balls” could have you grounded for a year and raking leaves all by yourself in the front yard at midnight. My oldest sister, Julie, finally stepped up to talk about the deed when I was eleven, and the verbal thrashing she got for sketching two stick figures with their faces in each other’s crotches should have stopped her from ever picking up a pen again. It certainly stopped me from ever wanting a girlfriend or having sex.
It was clear to me even if my sisters didn’t get it: Being in a relationship would upset Mom and Dad.
Eventually my parents will discover Sarah when my grandfather, Hal, dies. Battling Alzheimer’s just as the rest of my grandparents eventually will, he’s found face down in a puddle of his own vomit. When news gets out around school he has passed, I keep it from Sarah. I don’t want her showing up to the funeral. But she does. With her mother. The moment I see her, I escape out the back door of the mortuary. I could stay or go on the lam. The way I see it, those are my only options. This is the first time in my life I desperately desire to be an adult. Not to have the ability to drive or be a fireman or an astronaut or sit at the main table with all the other adults during Christmas dinner, no, I want to be an adult so I can smoke a cigarette or take a drink to smother some feelings. Where does a twelve-year-old come up with that kind of crap?
Perhaps it’s due to Hal’s passing, but Mom and Dad don�
��t seem to care. In fact, they think their youngest child having his first girlfriend is adorable. And with the approval of my parents, I am a new man.
Until Sarah decides she wants to kiss me.
And I mean really kiss me. This would have been fine—I’d heard about the mystic art of making out from the older kids at the back of the bus and what it was like to feel a girl’s tongue in your mouth—except Sarah was experienced. She would be my first, but I wouldn’t be hers. Call me Old Fashioned, but I grew up believing my first real kiss was supposed to be special. This is an idea about intimacy I will carry with me into adulthood, and will experience a near-identical dilemma again the first time I have sex.
Despite my father’s strange attitude about it, my mother still tried to raise us in a house where sex could be openly talked about when he was not around. She spent her time volunteering for a pro-life ministry committed to providing alternatives to abortion-minded women. When my mother started there, the Pregnancy Help Center was a tiny, dingy, one-story building in a bad part of town. Ten years later she is the director of the Pregnancy Help Center, a brand new, two-story building, complete with a medical facility, store, counseling rooms, classes, and offices. She committed her life to the ministry and often brought her work home with her, always prepared to talk to about sex. But I never spoke with her about it. She wasn’t allowed. She informed me it was my father’s responsibility. Yet the only time the subject is broached between us I am sprawled across the living room floor playing with G.I. Joes while he watches True Lies on cable. When a half-naked Jamie Lee Curtis begins stripping for a very interested Arnold Schwarzenegger, my father simply inquires, “Do you have any questions about sex?” to which I promptly reply, “No,” like any other normal fifth grader.
I already knew everything I thought there was to know about sex anyway. I’d been watching pornography regularly for over a year by then. Plus, based on the way he handled the topic with my sisters, I feared my father when sex or intimacy was discussed. Too young to separate what I was truly afraid of, intimacy or my father, my subconscious fused the two.
So Sarah, along with the rest of the sixth grade class, began to question my masculinity. It was time to put myself out there. I wasn’t known for anything, barely recognized, and forever picked last for kickball during Phys-Ed. Yet all the bullies shoving me around weren’t kissing any girls.
In sixth grade my best friend is Shane. His popularity skyrockets when word gets out his parents never check in on us whenever he has friends over. When he’s allowed to invite the girls over, we play truth or dare or watch movies in the dark. By the time we are in seventh grade, odds are the first time you touched or kissed a girl, it happened in Shane’s basement.
Sarah and I go to Shane’s a handful of times, yet we never kiss. That all changes the night my parents show up early. When Shane’s mom calls down to say my ride is there, Sarah walks me to the stairs. The lights come on. Everyone is watching.
I wanted it to happen, but not like that. Not with everyone there to see it.
Sarah leans in, closes her eyes, and her lips land on mine. Her tongue finds its way into my mouth. I freeze. I have no idea what to do with my hands. No one ever told me what to do with my hands. I try to conjure images from the Internet, but none of it seems right. I keep my arms at my sides in fear of touching something I shouldn’t. And my eyes: closed or open? I didn’t know. I go with open. I can see all my friends and their smiling faces in front of me. Then there’s the issue of my tongue. What am I supposed to do with my tongue? I know it belongs in her mouth, but there’s so much of her tongue in mine I can’t maneuver it properly.
I finally extend myself to her, risk everything, and engage in what is still one of the most exciting and horrifying experiences of my life: my first kiss.
The next day at school I am a hero.
Three weeks later Sarah breaks up with me, and I hide in the bathroom.
She leaves me for Marcus Jones, a man I will continue to be at odds with until high school graduation. I will never know what sparks our feud or fuels his utter dislike for my person, but I know his taking Sarah from me cemented any possible friendship to eternal damnation. And if taking my first girlfriend from me isn’t enough, three years later he will proceed to break my hand in an embarrassing display of masculinity on both our parts. For the second time in my life, he will be responsible for breaking important things inside of me.
We all know heartbreak and rejection. It’s universal. And if you believe in a thing like Intelligent Design then you might believe we feel those awful feelings because God feels them too. After all, he made us in his likeness. And we reject him day after day after day. Yet he remains persistent, unmoved, and just as in love with you as he was yesterday. He takes an endless risk with us by letting us know how much he loves, yet never asking us to love him in return.
Sometimes I wonder why, if God loves us so much, there are so many bad first kisses and Marcus Joneses in the world? Is it because we live at the mercy of each other’s choices? Have we no control over what the other person will say when we ask them to dance, for a date, out for a cup of coffee, or to fight? Maybe this is where the idea of “guarding your heart at all costs” comes from. However, I don’t believe the heart is as dumb and dangerous and deceitful as Christianity has led us to believe. If it’s true that Christ makes all things new, then wouldn’t accepting his reality change our hearts? How can we doubt the very place he resides within us? Risk is a part of life. Making a decision not to risk is making a decision never to live, never to love, never to truly experience God.
When I think of risking, I often think of kissing Sarah or standing up to Marcus. I think, “If history is anything to go by, this is might hurt.” But if I’d been too scared to let my guard down with Sarah, I may have never let my guard down when I met Lauren, my wife. I may have never let her jump in the car with me after meeting in Columbus, Ohio. We may have never spent four months on the road together, and would I have been too scared to propose to her on the side of a desert road in Texas? Actually, I was terrified, but I did it because in my heart it felt right, and in my heart I hold Christ.
I Am The Greatest Hypocrite That Ever Lived
I will cross the country in search of your faith
even though I have lost mine.
I will claim to believe in a God who is fair
but there is nothing fair about this.
I will give you the last dollar in my wallet
when I see you on the street.
Just to forget you.
Never to feed you.
When I tell you I don’t use pornography,
that there’s nothing wrong with me,
you will find me browsing magazines
and movie screens.
I will swear I am saving myself for marriage,
while I undress you
every day
from unsafe distances
and miles away.
I will proclaim to be an original,
A Warhol.
A Kerouac.
But I’m jealous of your cool.
How you’re always oh, so cool.
Your hair,
and the clothes you wear.
And when I ask you how you are,
it’s unlike me that I’ll care.
I’ll stare polite,
but I’m only waiting for my turn to talk.
Before I walk
away
for good.
When I say I am going to pray for you
today,
I am only praying for myself
tonight.
I need to make rent.
I need that promotion.
I need more devotion,
to You.
I need.
I need.
I need.
I need more than you do, don’t you know?
I work honest and hard
but only because I am planning
to steal from you
on Saturday.
I lift my hands in worship
on Sunday,
and cry out to God
on Monday.
But on Tuesday
I speak only in blasphemy,
no more need
to be on these
weak knees.
So I sharpen my blade
to fit between your shoulder’s
blades.
I want you to promise me,
but I break them all
oh, so easily.
I’m begging for authenticity
to wreck this fatal hypocrisy.
For I am the worst man that ever lived.
I’ve been built to fail, not succeed.
Wherein lies my need
to be saved.
From myself.
From you.
In a society that screams for me to be
an original.
A Warhol.
A Kerouac.
I can only be
me.
The Only Thing Left To Fear
I do not like the man I see in the mirror. Not what is on the outside, but rather what I can see lurking just underneath. Just out of reach. The way I find satisfaction in this world. The way I need pornography to feel wanted. I make promises I can never keep. And I am desperately in love with a God who I am uncertain loves me back.
For years I feared nothing but my own death. I would lay my head down each night and pray for just one more day, convinced my soul was lost. Yet I did not fear God. I feared the devil. I feared the uncertainty of the unknown. My entire life I called myself a Christian, but I was a sorry excuse for one. Thankfully I will learn we are all sorry excuses for Christians when I meet the pastor of a church in Denver called Scum of the Earth, and I’ll be reminded again when I meet a man named Lonnie feeding birds on the streets of downtown Savannah.
An Anthology of Madness Page 2
