They hadn’t understood a thing I’d said.
The fact that they were in my locker meant one of my good friends had been part of it, because they were the only ones who knew my combination. I felt completely betrayed. They were all Christians, too. But sometimes I felt like we didn’t worship the same God. My God was much more serious than theirs, and at the same time, my God was a joke to them.
My God had been coming under more and more scrutiny by godless members of my now godless nation. When George Bush was president, there was God in the White House. I cried both times Clinton was elected, sobbed like someone was dying. Someone was dying—thousands of unborn each year—and Clinton and Gore were baby killers, out-and-out, unapologetic. Under their rule, the persecution of Christians increased tenfold. This was no surprise. Since I could remember, I’d been told that I should expect increasing persecution as a Christian. But it was hard to take. During one of the pro-life rallies I attended during the eighth grade, several women attempted to rush our life chain. In case you don’t know what a life chain is, it’s when pro-life demonstrators link arms to form a human chain around an abortion clinic. These women shouted obscenities at us and flipped us their middle fingers and tried knocking us over. The police intervened, but I couldn’t believe the brazenness of the women. All the years before, when I’d attended rallies at abortion clinics, the women shuffled in, heads hung, hiding their faces. The only way to commit knowing sin is with your head hung. These women, though, during the Clinton administration, they acted like they weren’t even doing anything wrong. They acted like we were the ones who were wrong. It was real religious war. The other side was fighting for their own damnation.
My absolute favorite talk show host, Jack Van Impe, and his wife and cohost, Rexella, the founders of Ministries International, had warned that this sort of fighting would begin to occur. Jack Van Impe is a Revelations scholar who broadcasts a Christian news show out of Michigan. He knows about holy wars and the increasing persecution Christians will be facing as the Second Coming grows nigh. Christians have to fight to make way. As it is foretold in Revelations, when Israel controls the Dome of the Rock, which is currently controlled by Palestine, the Muslim nations will rise up against the reigning Christian nation, and Jesus will return. This is why it is so important that Israel take back all of the Palestinian territory. George Bush secretly hired Jack Van Impe as one of his foreign policy advisers. That made us feel very comforted, knowing someone we trusted had the president’s ear. Bill Clinton only gave lip service to Israel’s cause, and, as far as I could tell, did not seem concerned with events that needed to occur to bring on the Second Coming of Christ.
When I was in the eighth grade, Clinton was president. There were no wars in the eighth grade, save the ongoing unseen holy war between good and evil. There was no Desert Storm. The surface of the sand stood still. America was engaged in no war, so there were no wars. The road to the rapture was on pause. The hourglass frozen in midair. The sand stood still. A soldier stood before us, once again, fidgeting with a duffel bag. “Boys,” he told the boys, “in about four years, you’ll be old enough to be drafted.” Usually if something was only available to the boys, the girls protested the unfairness of the situation. Everyone kept quiet here. “Boys and girls,” he told us all, “in about four years, you’ll be deciding whether to go to college or get a job. There are a lot of big choices ahead of you.” He produced a gas mask. It looked like an elephant head. He asked for a volunteer. One of the boys went up and the soldier showed us how to wear and use the gas mask. He placed it over the boy’s head. The boy looked like a weird elephant-headed god. He waved his arms, clowning. We giggled.
“How many of you want to go to college?” the soldier asked us. Less than half of us raised our hands. I lived in a rural farm town of a thousand people. There were two hundred kids in my school, which housed the seventh to twelfth grades, and combined the populations of three towns: mine, and the neighboring hamlets. Most of our families didn’t have money for us to go to college. Most of our parents hadn’t attended college. Some of our parents hadn’t even completed high school. There were a few farms to be inherited. There was the cement factory, and the car parts factory in the next town over. There were two gas stations, and one dollar store. There was also nursing and teaching. These were mostly our options. In my entire class, two people would go on from graduation directly to a four-year college. One of them (me) would drop out the first year.
“For those of you who raised your hands, and also for those of you who didn’t, college is a great opportunity. You know, if you join the military, you can go to basically any college you want, and I mean for free. We pay for it. If you go to college, that means you can get whatever job you want when you’re older. Think about that.” We thought about that. We were thirteen- and fourteenyear-olds thinking about it.
“What do you want to do when you grow up?” he pointed to Josh. In two years, Josh would be dead. Beginning my eighth-grade year, each year, one student in my school would die, and also, one girl would get pregnant, so I guess it evened out. It was a stable population.
The deaths were all unrelated to each other. My freshman year, Justin drowned in the creek while swimming with my two boy-friends. My sophomore year, Josh got depressed and rammed his hot wheel at eighty in a twenty, twisting his car around the American flagpole in the town triangle (we didn’t have a square, we had a triangle) set between warring gas stations. He was sixteen and they say his head smashed clear through the hole in the steering wheel like the wane reduction of a cat slipping between impossible openings. The girls got dressed up to cry in the tiled halls, like a gathering of distressed school birds, and we all discovered who had really loved him before they slew each other over which one had worn the most scandalous skirt to his funeral. My junior year, Blaine sucked the barrel of a shotgun after blowing the fine white globe of his two-year-old daughter’s skull to bits. His ex-girlfriend, the child’s mother, threatened the school populace with unnamed punishment if they attended his funeral. Her daughter’s coffin was so small, and the mother only eighteen. I remember her in study hall looking like a thin succession of lines meeting at a shivering torso, bent mourning a dead child over SAT books.
My senior year, my brother’s best friend died because of a broken arm. His arm got an infection under the cast where it had been stitched. His mother had spent so much money on the initial emergency room visit, she didn’t want to go back to the hospital, thinking his arm would heal on its own. He died from a gangrene infection. Two years after I graduated, the valedictorian of the class below me overdosed on heroin and meth in her living room with her one-year-old daughter in her arms.
But this was not yet. None of this had happened yet, and live Josh, handsome still-living Josh, sat with his mop of blond hair and hopeful fourteen-year-old eyes sparkling, as the soldier pointed, commanding him to contemplate what he wanted to be when he grew up. He wanted to be a veterinarian or an engineer. He wasn’t sure. The soldier told him he could learn engineering in the military. He pointed to Tyson and asked the same question. Tyson puffed up his chest. “I’m going to be a film director and write my own scripts,” he proudly announced.
There is a moment, for every child, when the adults around them, either one by one or collectively, decide that the child’s dreams must be obliterated. Adults do this so that they can replace the noble and ridiculous aspirations of children with the ignoble and ridiculous aspirations of grown-ups. They do this because they too, in a moment where they were on the other end of this awful thing they are doing, were taught that only the most ignoble and ugly things are attainable. For this reason, disappointment with one’s life becomes a much more believable outcome. And, as Americans hate failure, this actually becomes the grudging goal of how one’s life should be lived—passing the time with hated tasks, thankful and even possessive of the most basic aspects of survival: family, roof, clothing, food.
The soldier turned his jealous eyes on
Tyson’s dream. “You need to go to college to learn to direct and write scripts. How do you plan to pay for that?”
“His family owns the grocery store and the bar,” Emily, Tyson’s lifelong love, chirped from the front of the room, shooting Tyson an approving smile.
“That’s great,” the soldier nodded, “but have you thought about this realistically?” Tyson shifted in his chair. “Do you know how many people want to go to Hollywood and direct films?”
“I guess a lot,” Tyson croaked out. The wrecking ball was swinging toward him. He wasn’t ducking in time.
“Millions,” the soldier answered, as if accusing Tyson of something. “And do you know how many people actually get to go off and direct films in Hollywood?”
“Not a lot,” Tyson said, dejected.
The soldier pursed his lips as if in apology, “About point zero, zero, one percent of the people who want to do that.” And then he added, “Every little girl wants to be a ballerina. But there’s only one part for the swan.”
The class giggled. Tyson looked like he’d been punched in the gut. I prayed that the soldier wouldn’t ask me any questions. The soldier turned to the blackboard and chalked the words, all in caps: BE ALL YOU CAN BE. “What do you think about that?” he asked the entire class.
The first time I ever saw the line in the sky that the airplanes make, trailing steam behind them, I didn’t know what it was. I saw the trail, but not the plane. The plane was long gone, but the trail was there. I didn’t know what it was, but I thought I did. I was eight years old. I was raised preparing for the apocalypse. I saw that long, thin white line in the sky, and I thought the sky was splitting open. I thought it was the tear in the sky that Jesus ripped and was about to come flying through, occurring right over my house. I ran inside screaming, “The sky is opening! Jesus is coming down! Come look!” My family shouted, “Dear God!” and “Praise the Lord!” They waved hands above their heads and held their hearts. Four of my adult family members ran out on the lawn with me. We all looked up for Jesus flying down on a horse through the torn sky. “Where?” Mom shouted. I pointed to the line. The air was let out of everyone. They shook their heads. The blush began to leave their cheeks. They told me what that line was. It was not the Apocalypse coming of Christ. No rapture for the saved, no tribulation, just steam from an airplane. An airplane was not the end of the world as we knew it.
When the first plane hit the first tower, I was eighteen and becoming a nonbeliever. When the first plane hit the first tower, I was asleep in my room, dreaming that I was a black, male vampire in a coffin and someone was slowly running a wooden stake through my heart. When the second plane hit the second tower, my dad woke me up, screaming about what was happening. September 11 was happening. I went to the television. I watched the smoke billowing out and the little specks of bodies leaping and falling from the buildings with the sky-blue sky doing nothing to help behind them. The part of me that still unwillingly believed expected them to all halt in mid-fall and begin ascending up into the blue, into His arms. It was the rapture in reverse. Everything was falling.
Just months before high school graduation, Tyson signed up for the army, along with one other boy in our class, and two from the class below. The average class size in my school was about twenty kids per grade. Each year, at least two kids joined the military. That means at least ten percent of the students every year left high school from my town to join the military. They signed up at lunchtime. Twice a week, every year, during the last few months of school, the military set up an information and recruitment booth in the lunchroom. One after another, year after year, the boys would turn eighteen and start eyeing that booth over their ham and cheese sandwiches like it was a girl they were afraid to get fucked by. Then finally, one day, one of them would have too much Coca-Cola and he’d swagger over to the corner of the lunchroom and sign up for a private appointment at the recruiting station in the next town over. The next morning, he’d come in and announce proudly, puffing his chest, “I’m in the army, now. I’m getting outa here, fuckers.” I think that’s what they thought, that they were getting out of this Podunk town. Going to see something beautiful. Going to see the real world. Even if they were just there to bomb the real world, at least they’d get to see it first; something that wasn’t cornfields and Walmart, and bent-over grandparents heading to factories, and teen moms trying harder than anyone could bear to look at long, and church potlucks, drunken bonfires, and strip-mall parking lots and all that.
They wanted to see something spectacular. Everyone wants to live a spectacular life, live something anyone would ever make a film about. Who wants to make a film about bent-over grandparents still struggling to pay electric bills after sixty years of working, just struggling to pay bills? They probably thought bombing the real world, like the one they saw in movies, would save them from that fate too. They didn’t have access to the kind of story lives where people walk around great cities falling in love at museums, or become rich spy-thieves and go on high-speed car chases, only to discover the meaning of life was hidden in a jewel behind a secret door right where they started, or the kind of story lives where people get rich starting an exciting but quirky business, or make academic dialogue over complex personal entanglements. Hell, they didn’t even have access to living a college road trip film. But they did have access to Marlon Brando. They had access to “. . . it’s safe to surf this beach!” and the tanks rolling over a moral dilemma, where either way, whatever they decide, they are the hero, shooting or not shooting the shivering man, the slant-eyed man, shooting up the family cowering behind torn couches and searching for the armed men hiding in the closet, trudging through the desert, Hurt Locker, Jarhead, pounding your girlfriend against the wall, legs spread, on leave, for God, for country, for fuck’s sake, what’s the other option? Either way, pull the trigger or not, they are the hero, because they just had to do it or just couldn’t bring themselves to. Everyone feels compassion. There’s so much weighing on their dumb, brave heads.
I remember the day Tyson made the decision. We were sitting on the bleachers in the gymnasium. The gym was empty. They’d begun hanging the decorations for graduation. There were sequined trestles lining the basketball hoop. We were eighteen and this was the most adult conversation we would ever have. He told me he was going to sign up. I asked about his life’s dream, the one he was just ditching. He told me that’s all it had been, a childish dream. He told me he had no experience with film. “You,” he told me, “you could really be an actor. You’ve been acting in the community theater since you were five. You have real experience to put on your resume.” This of course was ridiculous. My starring roles had been, namely, Gossip Lady Number Two in The Sound of Music, and a very lesbianic Peter Pan in a children’s musical version of Peter Pan. My rural community theater experience couldn’t make for an acting resume that would give me any credit in a real city, even accounting for the elite Hollywood gay mafia.
“Maybe that’s your path. With everything that’s happened in this country, I’ve got to step up and take responsibility. I have to defend your freedom to follow your dreams. Maybe that’s my path, to make the world safe for people to grow up and do the things I always wanted to do.”
When people begin to talk in words you’ve heard before, it’s easy to know who’s writing the script. I’d seen words like those on pamphlets, and heard the meaning of them in my own speech as a child. I’d heard these words on the real news, the Christian news, and from the mouths of young military recruiters who stood in the corner of the lunchroom below helicopter explosion posters trying not to look like they were checking out high school girls. And now it was coming from Tyson, the aspiring, serious yet entertaining Italian film director. And I realized what I always should have known when I looked at the certainty and question battling in Tyson’s wide, baby blue eyes, and his dimples showing even when there was no glimmer of a smile on his face, his boyish face with the impossibly clear, smooth skin, and his wavy black
hair ending in curlicues on his forehead. He wasn’t a director at all. He was the leading man. He was the one everyone was rooting for. And it was a gangster Christian film he was starring in, after all. The movie opened up before me. I could see all the scenes:
Tyson in Iraq pressing buttons, and buildings miraculously exploding hundreds of miles away. Tyson standing in uniform in Baghdad, machine-gun-armed, passing day after day, just watching out. Tyson running in combat boots, the sand scattering in clouds behind him.
He wrote home, sending a letter addressed to all of his friends that Emily transcribed and emailed. He told us how he guarded a building in Baghdad when the military had taken over. He made friends with the local kids. He taught them about America. He talked to the Iraqi children about Jesus, and about owning cars and houses, and playing video games. He taught them how to say the word “tits.” He taught them what it meant. They thought it was awful, then they thought it was hilarious.
This movie he starred in, it had side characters as well. Their stories would not end in triumph like the one of the leading man. A year into service, another boy from our town who served with Tyson was sent home on permanent leave for mental instability. He got a job delivering pizza in the next town over. He was fired after six months for repeatedly telling customers gory details about the war, how his job in Iraq was to shoot his friends in the ankles during house raids. This was his job, because he never “froze” during raids. (He would always be proud of that.) Many of his fellow soldiers just froze during crossfire, stood staring dumbly into the oncoming blaze. So his job was to notice when this happened and then shoot his friends in the ankles so they would fall down and not get shot in the head and killed during crossfire when they froze, which he never did, which he was always very proud of.
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