There’s that fucking song playing on the radio, the one that always made me think of her, even when I was with her. I should have noticed this as a sign before tonight—“Where all the bodies hang on the air”—that’s not a sweet song at all. The fact that this is the song I most associate with my romantic relationship, there is definitely something very wrong with that. She’s gonna miss me. She destroyed everything else. She’s gonna tell me she can’t go on without me. And she probably can’t. Pretty soon now, though, I won’t really care. I crossed the waters. I’m gonna go home through the town. I’ll pass the shadows that fell down from when we met. But I’m gone from there.
WHAT’S
HAPPENING ON
THE NEWS?
When I was in the fourth grade, our teacher’s twenty-year-old son visited our class to present an educational show-and-tell. He brought in a helmet full of sand. He was a soldier. It was a Desert Storm helmet. He poured the sand out into a Ziploc bag. He said, “This sand is from Iraq.” We awed. Iraq was so far away and on the news. We had our simulacra experience. We were ten and didn’t know what it meant. He passed the helmet around. We laid hands on it. We all touched it with our hands like it might be healing us or transmitting some wisdom from far-off, soon-to-be-conquered places through war-armor osmosis. There was an indentation in the helmet. Our teacher’s son said the indentation was from a bullet. The helmet was bulletproof. We imagined his head in the sand in Iraq as we placed small hands silently on the helmet. It was an act of worship. He was a hero and we were worshiping his headdress.
He told us a story about another head, not his own, Saddam Hussein’s head. He said the army had secretly put a bounty on Saddam Hussein’s head, one million dollars to any soldier who delivered. I raised my hand. I wanted to know if Saddam Hussein’s head should be delivered on a platter or a stick. I was a child familiar with the Bible. In biblical stories, heads are often delivered on platters, and sometimes left as warnings on sticks. He said that “the bounty on Saddam Hussein’s head” wasn’t literal, that it just meant they wanted him dead, but if a soldier brought back Saddam Hussein’s head without the body, that would have been acceptable, too. That soldier still would have received the million dollars. This information about the bounty, he told us, was a secret, because it wasn’t technically legal. It would be a war crime. But it shouldn’t be, because Saddam Hussein was very bad.
He opened the Ziploc bag of sand. We formed a line, and, one at a time, walked up to him and poked our fingers in the sand. Now we could say we’d touched sand from Iraq, so far away and on the news.
Tyson was in line right in front of me. Our last names began with letters at the end of the alphabet, so we did everything last, together. Tyson poked his fingers in the sand solemnly, then pulled his fingers out and stepped away. I stepped up next. I poked my finger in the sand, fingering a souvenir of war below the fourth-grade blackboard. It was minuscule and cool like the sand on any beach. But it was desert sand, Desert Storm sand. I pulled my finger out, then followed Tyson to the back of the room where we sat in our end-of-the-alphabet-last-name seats. He turned around and said, “That’s a great movie idea. Someone should make a movie about a soldier cutting off Saddam Hussein’s head.” I nodded, but couldn’t immediately think of any part I might play in this film of his. The role of “soldier’s wife” would most likely only include the most minimal side scenes, and I was interested in major roles.
Tyson wanted to be a film director, but like the kind that writes his own scripts and then directs them. His family was Italian, although hundreds of years removed from Italy, so he loved The Godfather, and GoodFellas, and Scarface. He loved Quentin Tarantino, and Spike Lee, and Woody Allen, too. He loved any director that a kid who wanted to be a serious film director in the US was supposed to like. He had wanted to become this thing, a serious yet entertaining film director, since he was eight years old. That’s all he wanted to do and mostly all he talked about, except for one girl who he was in love with since he was like five, and the fact that his family was Italian. Those were his three subjects: films, Emily Spencer, and being tenuously Italian.
We got along. I wanted to be an actress and Tyson said, when we grew up, I could definitely act in his movies. Most of the types of films he was interested in making called for a quirky and fiery redheaded female lead. I was a shoo-in. I wanted to be a Christian actress, and the first thing I wanted to know when we began discussing this collaboration was if he would be making any Christian films. There aren’t really any gangster Christian films, and he said he probably wouldn’t be making the breakout gangster Christian film, but that he wouldn’t be making any anti-Christian films, either. That was good enough for me. Tyson and I had a plan.
When I was ten, I wanted to grow up to be a Christian actress and live in the little yellow house next door to my parents. That was my plan. With Tyson, I had at least one other person besides my parents invested in some portion of my plan. Dialogue-driven gangster movies were okay, as long as I didn’t cuss in them. In order to be a good Christian actress, I didn’t have to do only Christian films, just as long as I didn’t do any anti-Christian films, and I was a Christian myself and spread the word of the Lord through my fame, that was enough to keep me qualified as a Christian actress.
It is hard to be a Christian actress. My mother warned me that when I got to Hollywood, I would have to contend with the gay mafia. If I didn’t sometimes pretend to be gay, she warned me, I might not get any good roles . . . because of the gay mafia. But even if it meant struggling for years, I couldn’t pretend to be gay, because the fate of my immortal soul rested on not doing that. When she invoked the gay mafia, I pictured men who looked and dressed like the people in the movies my friend Tyson wanted to make—large men with scarred faces wearing tailored suits, mysterious fedoras, and ostentatious gold jewelry, only being much nicer to one another than those men. That’s what the gay mafia was in my head: Al Pacino giving Marlon Brando sweet little kisses on the cheek.
There were many other reasons it was going to be hard to be a Christian actress. I watched a lot of Christian talk shows with my mom, and they interviewed a Christian actress on one of these shows. The actress told the hosts everything about just how difficult it is to be a Christian actress. She couldn’t get many leading roles, because she refused to do any nudity or profanity. This made it hard, she said, because so much of Hollywood was working for secular values, which often intersect with the values of Satan. She traced her path to Christianity and talked about coming of age in a family of “holiday Christians”—Christians who only went to church on Easter and Christmas. These people, her family, didn’t practice their beliefs in their everyday life. She was now living a true Christian life, imbuing each choice and moment of her life with a Christian conscientiousness. That’s why she wouldn’t do sex scenes in movies.
She told the hosts that because she was raised by holiday Christians, no one ever talked to her about the evils of sex when she was younger, so she had sex outside of marriage when she was in her late teens. The hosts gasped and guffawed. She told them, the first time she had sex, she didn’t even know what it was. “The first time I had sex,” she said, “I didn’t even know I was having sex. I had sex and didn’t even know I’d had it. I didn’t know what it was. I found out after the fact, when I told a friend about what had happened. I was like, ‘Huh, that was sex?’ Not only did I not know how sacred or precious an act it was, I didn’t even know what it was.”
This revelation by the Christian actress made my mom very nervous. My mother made sure I knew exactly what sex was so that I would never accidentally have it.
There are many types of sex not to have. Sex is when a man puts his penis in a woman’s vagina, and that is basic. Basic sex not to have is basic sex outside of marriage. Just because you are married, though, doesn’t mean you can have sex with anyone. Adultery is sex not to have with someone you are not married to if you or they are married. There is sex never to have under an
y circumstances, for which there are grave punishments. Homosexual sex is sex never to have and no one ever explained to me the exact functionality of the majority of homosexual acts, except to occasionally invoke male anuses and cringe. Worse than homosexual sex is sex with animals, and in the Bible, dirty women who committed bestiality with dogs were led in chains like dogs before the king and stoned, righteously. Worse than this was sex with oneself, or masturbation, which is the dirtiest, lowest form of sex never to have, ever, and, I have found, the easiest of all of them to have accidentally.
I spent some serious time wondering how the Christian actress could have had basic sex not to have accidentally. After she divulged this information about accidentally having sex in her late teens, the Christian television talk show hosts looked at the Christian actress like she had two heads, and with deep concern. I could tell they were thinking she wasn’t smart. But I knew she was.
I knew that in order to be an actress you have to be very, very intelligent, because acting is the highest form of art. Getting the expression just right. Manifesting another’s consciousness, emotional history, and mannerisms, and blending all of these factors into one perfect moment of realizing you are in love with the man you thought was an oaf, or that the world is about to end because of a meteorite that’s headed directly toward the Earth; or deep surprise, wide-eyed shock at the revelation of a long-kept family secret about a faked-death inheritance. Acting is pure alchemy. It is an art that is so near a science and nothing deserves more reverence, which is why we celebrate actors above all other artists. Actors preserve and illustrate our history and are the harbingers of our future social, emotional, and intellectual evolution. Like Andie MacDowell.
Andie MacDowell is a serious artist. If only she’d used her power and fame for good. Not that she used it for evil. It was just hard for me to respect and admire her as much as I did while keeping in mind the basic fact that she did not imbue her daily actions and choices with Christian conscientiousness.
She’d never even publicly proclaimed that she was a Christian, and Sex, Lies, and Videotape was arguably an anti-Christian film. But Curly Sue, Green Card, and Groundhog Day, those films were works of high art and also worthy of moral respect. When, in Groundhog Day, Andie MacDowell first views the ice sculpture Bill Murray has impeccably chiseled as her face, what other portrait of Cupid’s sting has been so authentic as her brown eyes jutting like two blushing twins skating upon the realization of love in the apocalyptically repeated dusk of that eternal night of romantic comedy? None so much.
It was hard for me to boycott Sex, Lies, and Videotape, because I loved Andie MacDowell truly, and respected her as an artist and had to forgive her, because I knew it was part of the artistic temperament to make less than scrupulous decisions, on occasion. It was not hard to boycott Madonna. She was never an artist. She was just filthy for the sake of being filthy. It was slightly difficult to boycott Kmart, which was a boycott led by the entire Southern Baptist church for nearly eight years. That boycott occurred because Kmart sold novels in which basic sex outside of marriage between teenagers was portrayed in a positive light. Some secular people also said that the boycott happened because Jerry Falwell and other members of the Southern Baptist Convention owned stock in Walmart. That, though, was a coincidence, and Walmart was a righteous store, so it would make sense that righteous men would invest in it. The first few years of the boycott of Kmart was hard, because sometimes there were things at Kmart that we couldn’t get at Walmart. Soon enough, though, after the boycott spread to other Christian denominations in our area, the local Kmart shut down and Walmart grew into a Super Walmart, and they always had everything we needed in stock. So that was a boycott that was only mildly inconvenient to me.
Almost all of the boycotts were easy enough for me: Barney, Dungeons & Dragons, karate, yoga, the metric system. I boycotted all of those things and all of those boycotts were fine. Only one boycott truly shook my devotion—the boycott of Troll dolls. Troll dolls were a difficult boycott for me.
Like I said, I was very familiar with the Bible and was raised Southern Baptist, which involved a lot of boycotts. It involved a lot of protests, and a lot of paying attention to what was happening in the world, in order to try and guess how near the end times really were. My parents and I watched a lot of Christian talk shows and Christian news shows on the Christian News Network, which is not the same as the secular CNN, which is a fact I found out the hard way.
When I was seven, “CNN” reported that the Russians had dug a manhole too deep, and they had dug all the way into Hell, and a demon had risen out of the hole bearing a sign that read, in Russian, “I have risen.” I was obviously very upset by this. An open hole in the world letting out the demons of Hell is very upsetting to a seven-year-old. I went to school all worked up, and in front of the whole class asked the teacher if she’d heard the news on CNN. She couldn’t exactly debunk it, because it was part of my religion, but I gathered from her tone and response and the looks on the faces of the other students that I wasn’t getting the same news they were. When I returned home, I learned that this demon rising out of a Russian manhole had been nothing more than a prank by some graffiti artists. They’d made a fourteen-foot-tall papier-mâché statue of a demon holding a hand-painted sign and placed it in a hole at a construction site. Blurry images of this had been mistaken by CNN for the real thing. It was still possible that the graffiti artists responsible were Russian Satanists, and we should let this be a warning that the Russians were, as always, up to no good. This misreporting did not dissuade my family in any way from our adamant devotion to Christian news and talk shows.
We liked Christian talk shows so much we even attended a live taping of Action Sixties in 1990 as part of our summer vacation. Action Sixties was a Christian talk show that was partially responsible for the boycott of Troll dolls, Dungeons & Dragons, and Barney. The episode we attended was on the theme of occult toys, and featured a teenager who had attempted to kill his parents because of a sort of Dungeons & Dragons–inflicted dementia that was not unlike demon possession. He had actually spent time in juvenile detention for this attempted murder of his parents, and came on the show to speak out against the evils of magical roleplaying board games.
Two years after we attended the taping of this show, a friend of the family bought me the Dungeons & Dragons board game as a birthday present. Mom had told me to be polite no matter how I felt about any gift I received, but opening that was hard. I was terrified. This game made kids kill their parents. I didn’t want to kill anybody. I thanked the people for the gift, but when everyone left, Mom and I had to decide whether it would be best to return Dungeons & Dragons and replace it with a more wholesome birthday present, or to burn it and so subtract one object of evil from the world.
We burned it in the trash pile behind the garage. I expected to hear the wailing of wayward spirits making their way up to the starry country night sky as the cardboard crackled. To my disappointment, I heard nothing of the sort. Just some smoke and the non-demon-possessed sound of plastic popping.
Action Sixties did quite an in-depth series on occult toys over the years. It is a little-known fact that many members of the pagan occult are toy manufacturers, and own numerous design companies and movie studios. There are real witches in the world, real pagans running the gamut from Wiccans, to Satanists, to demonologists, and they attempt to subliminally influence children through cartoons and by embedding magical objects disguised as toys in ordinary homes.
This is what happened with Troll dolls, and I have to admit, this was difficult for me, as this occurred at a time when I was beginning to waver in my constant, righteous devotion to Christ. An adamant evangelical Christian with an obsession with perfect grammar, and an unfortunate perm, was a difficult thing to be in junior high.
I was being unfortunate in multiple ways in the seventh grade when Action Sixties featured interviews with three kids, teens and preteens, claiming that they had been woken up in the m
iddle of the night by demon-possessed Troll dolls. All the kids said the dolls’ eyes glowed red. One boy said the dolls told him to kill his parents. Another girl said that the dolls spoke to her in an unknown language, which her mother believed to be a demonic language.
I had quite a large collection of Troll dolls, both brand-name and generic, as well as three collector’s edition Cabbage Patch Kids plush Troll dolls. I loved these dolls.
The smoke from that fire, I didn’t want to watch. I didn’t stay to hear if I could catch the sound of wayward spirits leaking out of their beady eyes or seeping through their bejeweled belly buttons. I walked away, head hung, arms folded, mourning a pile of much-wished-upon plastic tokens of nineties kid-hood, soon to be Christian righteousness goo.
This is not how I described the incident to my friends. I guess I felt that if I had to burn all my Troll dolls, I wanted them to think it was at least of my own volition, and, furthermore, I wanted everyone else to do it too. If I couldn’t have them, no one should. I told my friends they were walking on thin ice keeping those dolls around. I told them about the kids who shared testimony on Action Sixties, after the Troll dolls had told them to kill their parents. I told them the dolls were tools of the occult, and were possessed by wicked spirits, and that they should be burned.
Two days before seventh-grade graduation, I opened up my locker, and an avalanche of Troll dolls spilled out. Green-headed and rainbow belly-button-bejeweled plastic, pot-bellied Trolls fell around me like pop-fad raindrops, landing at my feet and bouncing along the tiled floors of the hall. Everyone pointed and stared and started laughing, shouting out mean things like, “Be careful. They’re going to get you! They’re possessed! She thinks Troll dolls are real!”
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