HURTLING THROUGH THE DARKNESS A man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. -- The Brothers Karamazov T HE FLIGHT from Sydney to Los Angeles is fourteen hours, shortened for me by two valium and the complimentary whisky. Even so my back aches, sciatic twinges pulse in my left buttock and leg, and my mind spins repeatedly through the first paragraph of the lecture I have to give Monday at Ohio State. From a pay phone at the airport I call Maggie in Columbus to let her know that I've made it as far as LA. In the three weeks since she left Australia, while I finished the term and oversaw exams, she has bought us a car, set up the apartment and begun looking for work. Her voice is sweet in my ear and I momentarily regret deciding to spend a day in Atlanta on the way in. "But it's your anniversary, everything is set up," she says. "You guys'll have a great time, and we'll be together tomorrow night." Mike meets me at the airport in Atlanta. I had asked him not to, to allow me the urban pleasure of finding my own way on the trains, but he insisted, promising I could take myself back alone if I still wanted. At the gate we crush each other in a long, wordless hug in which I feel an unanticipated desperation. A few tears sting my eyes. I hug the more fiercely, rocking slightly in his embrace, breathing heavy and shallow. "Welcome home, Sam," he says after a minute. "Welcome home." It has been four years since our last reunion. He takes my bag and we walk together up the concourse, subdued by the emotion of the greeting and not yet ready to talk. We stand in the crowded subterranean car that connects our concourse to the central terminal, our bodies close and sometimes touching with the braking and acceleration. At the terminal we switch to the rapid transit, sharing a seat. As the train accelerates we move slowly into conversation, beginning with news of the move and new position. "Do you think it was worth it?" he asks. "Giving up tenure there for tenure-track here?" This is all that Maggie and I have been thinking about for the past five months, and we're still not sure it's the right thing to do. "I made it once," I say, offering the short answer. "I suppose I can do it again. But the real thing is, we just can't go on living so far from everything we love best. That's what this is really about. You have no idea what it's like to be away from home for so long." "Well, there was the mission, you know." "Sure, sure, I know, but it's different. A whole career versus a couple of months. But can you believe it?" I say, turning the conversation back to the comfortable past. "Tomorrow makes nineteen. Nineteen years. Jesus." On August 8, 1973 we entered the Mission Home, then still in Salt Lake, and by powers who consult God on such matters were assigned as companions. "Best two years of my life," he says in a hicksey Granger accent. I laugh at the cliché and the farcical face with which he delivers it. He returns to his own voice, in which Granger can still be traced. "The past couple have been a bitch, though, Elder." in the three a.m. coolness, the puffing of the driver warm above us. We talked of healings and other miracles, excited by the raw theurgic power pulsing in our priesthood and faith. Neither of us spoke anything of doubts or misgivings, as I recall; it seems to me now that we really had none. Word came in the morning that Subowo was well. "If you're tiring of the wages of sin, Elder, maybe it's time to repent." I speak this phrase lightly, aware even so that it is tinged for us both with the traces of a vague guilt – and with a certain spiritual nostalgia. Indonesia was our field of labor. For two years we thrust in our sickles, hoping for a harvest of elect souls. For two years we spoke for Jesus. I say this – "spoke for Jesus" – as the train carries us east through the suburbs. Mike shakes his head. It seems a distant world, a different life. Yet the recollection is compelling. From the train we move to Mike's car and in five minutes, chatting now about taxes and mortgage payments, arrive at his house. We carry my things into the sparse bedroom where Kip sleeps when he is not with his mother in Provo. He has been gone for two months now, since school got out Mike says; the room echoes and accumulates dust between guests. One late night, about twenty months in, when Mike and I were together again, living in Solo, I was awakened by a frantic tapping. A young boy, the son of an elderly convert, called to me through the open, screenless window that his father was ill, writhing in pain in his bed. He begged the elders to come. I woke up Mike, rather than my junior, and together we went to the man's hut. I drop my bag on the bed, kick off my shoes and go right out to the living room. There, in an awkward moment, I meet Ruthie, pecking her two cheeks like an Australian academic rather than kissing her on the mouth. I recognize her from Madison, as Mike said I would: one of the younger teaching assistants in the history department when I was finishing up. She is tall with an open Irish face that invites familiarity. For all that she is a stranger. I hope she understands how short the weekend is. I remember particularly the light of a flickering teplok on a plaited mat wall in the back room, and the ogreish, wavering shadows we cast in the small space. The sick man, Subowo, had been dressed for our visit in a clean white shirt and sawocolored batik sarong and was lying supine across the family bed, his head at the edge so we could reach him without clambering over the mattress. While his wife explained the illness a hidden tokay began to call in the space above the ceiling. The family fell silent to count the number of croaks, hoping for an omen. Perhaps she does. Her first words are an apology. There is a conference in Charleston and her ride is coming in just a few minutes. "I'm sorry," I say. "I was hoping that we could do something together. Will you be going out to Utah this summer with Mike?" Mike led the way in the blessing. We knelt together at the bedside, the earthen floor hard and smooth beneath our knees, and placed our hands on the old man's burning head. I anointed, then Mike sealed, rebuking the illness, promising comfort, encouraging faith in the usual phrases. Afterwards we rode home through the dark by pedicab, the rubber strings stretched below its axle humming She answers with an easy, intimate air, as if we've known each other all along. "Looks like it," she says. "I think it's about time I saw Michael's Zion for myself. Lately I've even been thinking about – how do you say it, hon? – joining him in the waters of baptism." Mike sees my look. "Don't worry," he says, "she plans on going inactive right 2 the door. "Have fun boys. I'm glad we finally met, Sam." away." While he goes to the kitchen for beer Ruthie drapes herself across the arms of an overstuffed chair and explains her fascination with Mormonism. "I get the feeling I'm being left out every time the subject comes up – which with Michael is about every day. This way maybe I'll be on more of an equal footing. Besides, there's something special about lapsed Mormons that I'd like to have in my life." "Me too." With Ruthie gone we settle at the table to talk; we drink the beers, take slugs of cold vodka, chase it with more beer. This on empty stomachs, before the pizza arrives. By then the desired effect has been achieved, and we spend an hour of smuckered sentimentality recalling the events with which we capped our adolescence in the Indonesia Jakarta Mission. Mike shouts down the hall from the kitchen, "The word's 'inactive' Mary Ruth. You're giving your papist inclinations away." Then he reappears with the cans of beer, lobbing me one across the room and handing one to Ruth. We begin with the same buddy tales always exchanged in such sessions, each one prefaced with a rhetorical "Remember the time?" or "What was that guy's name?" The characters – once our friends and brothers, but now long lost – have taken on Brunvandian1 roles. I settle down in a chair, popping the tab and slurping quick to keep the foam from spilling. "Yeah, but what about the temple? Baptism's one thing, but it hardly counts till you've gotten your endowment." "In Semarang, remember that deal with the garments?" This is one from Mike's repertoire. "I think so, yeah," I say, "how'd it go?" "No sweat, Sammy. Already planned out. We'll just borrow a couple of recommends when we get there, and with a little bit of coaching for Ruthie, I figure, bingo, we're in. It's the mission we're still having trouble working out." "I don't know, but someone – I think it was Tobler. Remember that jerk? Well, he had these old garments, all ragged from washing and yellow from the water in Solo. Remember the well in that house? He'd been there for about five months then moved to Semarang when Healy got his malaria and had to go home. Anyway, he gets a new shipment from home and needs to get rid of the old ones, right? So he takes them, snips out the marks, just like the little book says. Burns them and flushes them down the john." "That won't work. Haven't you heard they've computerized the temples now? I'm not sure what the deal is, but you have to have this swipe card thing or you can't get in. And besides, do you think you're ready to go back to doing it through nylon garments?" A horn sounds outside. Ruthie picks up a small valise. "Wait a minute, doing it?" she says, putting on a mock glare for Mike. "Nobody said anything to me about that. You've got some explaining to do when I get back." "Wait a minute," I interject. "They didn't have a toilet there did they?" "OK, OK, sloshes them down the kakus. Jesus, is this folk narrative or a fucking language lesson?" He pauses to take "Yeah, we'll talk," he says, kissing her goodbye through a slobbery grin and grabbing for her crotch. She fends off his hand and scoots away laughing towards 1 Jan Brunvand is a well-known American folklorist who has written about Mormon folk beliefs and urban legends. 3 another swig of vodka, making a show of re-establishing raconteurial authority. years in Indonesia, particularly of Solo where the well water stained our garments so uniformly yellow. Sitting in the bathroom I think of ours in Solo – an open ceilinged, grotty room with a dimly naked, insect-grimy bulb hanging on a long wire from a roof beam, mould growing thick above splash level on the walls and in the corrugations of the floor, an untiled squat hole on a platform raised six inches off the floor, a small cement cistern beside it to hand wipe then "flush" from, another larger one for splash bathing by dipper. "So anyway, he burns those little mark things and flushes them down the john. But the garments he just chucks into the wastebasket. Desacralized, right? Well, about a week goes by, then one day they see their jaga2 or one of the servants decked out in these G's with the little holes all sewn up, good as new. Tobler just about kills the guy and they fire his ass on the spot." "God, I remember that," I say. We both chuckle and shake our heads, settling back into our drinks. Every few minutes we test another story of missionary folly, but with lengthening pauses to drink in between. Eventually a silence settles on the room. I'm feeling jet-lagged from the flight and pissy from the beer, and consider cutting off the session so I can get to bed. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. I spent much of my first week in Solo in that room, sending a five-second spray, sharp and painful, into the squat hole at least once an hour, day and night. Weak and delirious I lay in bed, drinking the ferrous water, eating boiled noodles, pining for my mother's care and the smells of home. In the middle of the week I had a visitation from Jesus. In the predawn dark, drifting in a half dream after fighting vicious cramps for hours, I felt a hand, warm and heavy, settle on my head, then begin slowly stroking my neck and down my back. It seemed a natural thing, and I lay for several minutes enjoying the pressure and rhythm of the caress, realizing only by slow degrees, as if coming out of a dream, that I was in Solo, disturbingly ill and far from any hand that would touch me with such tenderness. In the midst of this thought, as if to contradict it, a fluid male voice came from beside the bed. "Why do you doubt? I am always with you." From the timbre and power of the voice, from the fiery tide of goose bumps rushing up my spine and into my scalp, I knew that this, finally, was Jesus. I turned and saw him standing beside the bed, an utterly human figure by appearance, but tangibly bending all of moral space around him by the infinite mass of his charisma. His face possessed me, scouring my soul of everything but him. Overcome with passion, I rolled over the The toilet is squeezed in close under a neatly curtained window at the end of a long, narrow room, tub to the left, sink to the right. Beside it is a rack of magazines: American History Review, New York Review of Books, recent issues of Utah Holiday, all of them thumbed and dog-eared. The room smells slightly, but in a familiar way – mildew from the shower curtain screening the tub mingled with a womanly funk partially cloaked by evergreen air freshener. The thought that Ruth is having her period crosses my mind, and I think carnally of Maggie and my homecoming tomorrow. I bend over to lift the lid of the toilet, reeling a bit from the drinks as I stand upright. A mirrored medicine cabinet hanging above the toilet gives an unwelcome vision of my paunch and the operation in hand. My concentration stymied by the vertigo and the view, I sit down to take my time. The mission talk, and just being with Mike, has put me in mind of those two 2 Night watchman. 4 the habits of the tertiary orders. It was the only material symbol of spirituality that the Church offered, and it awoke in me a craving for more symbols and more rituals in which to discover and perhaps grasp the God receding from me. bed's edge and onto the floor before him. There, in an act that in the reading had seemed a literary exaggeration, an absurdity of self abasement, I wept upon his feet, kissing them with an impossible joy. At the same instant, my guard relaxed in the momentary exultation, a convulsion of the intestine loosened my bowels, and I found myself suddenly alone, soiled and stinking on the floor beside my bed. For that reason alone I never would have stopped attending temple sessions. What other communal ritual of real worship and awe do we have? When the stranger brushed his lips to my ear in speaking the New Name, when God clasped me to his breast at the veil and breathed his questions into my face – that is when I remembered best my vision of Jesus and the joy of weeping at his feet. But my faith in the Church was fading, and the year after our marriage my bishop would no longer issue me my temple pass, my recommend. Finishing in the bathroom I join Mike to say goodnight, but before I can he starts talking in a subdued and earnest voice. I didn't think we would move so quickly to confession, but I sit down across the table from him now that it has begun. "That story about Tobler... that's twice tonight we've mentioned garments," he says. "It's strange how you put those things out of your mind." For the next several years I made the putting on of my garments a compensatory ritual in itself, speaking Latin verses from my grandfather's breviary over each mark, putting my limbs into the legs and arms in nomine Patris, right leg; et Filii, left leg; et Spiritus, left arm; Sancti, right arm. Girded in this cruciform cloth I traced thousands of steps across campus at Madison in a four beat utterance of the Jesus prayer: Lord – Jesus Christ – have mercy on me – a sinner; Lord – Jesus Christ – have mercy on me – a sinner, scuffing my left foot heavily with each fourth beat, grinding out my sins like a cigarette butt, as under my breath I hissed the words "a sinner". I ask if he remembers when he stopped wearing them, but he just sits there hunched over the table, not looking up or answering for a while, and I wonder if he's taken drink beyond his limit. Then he raises his head, looking at me slow and nodding just a little. "How about you?" My temple garments outlasted my faith in Mormonism by several years. In part this was because of Maggie whose agnosticism flourished much more slowly than mine, though sinking more intractable roots in the process. Her first trip to the temple, in preparation for our marriage, was one of my last. But beyond not wanting to hurt her by a too audacious or public display of my doubts, I had also grown attached to the vestments themselves. In them my Catholicism – which I had thought obliterated by the religious firestorm of teenage conversion – was reborn. The textural presence of the garment against my skin recalled for me my confirmation scapular, the cassock and surplice of youthful service at the altar, But my attempts to hold on to the Mormon God gradually diminished. There was no particular day when these acts became suddenly hollow or foolish to me and I gave them up. It happened rather by degrees, an apostasy of attrition. Ten years after having first donned them, the only garments I still had were two pairs of the full length, button up, heavy cotton ones. They had become comfortable old long johns against the Madison winter to me, threadbare on the 5 back, stained at the crotch. Maggie observed this process uneasily, accepting my explanations with attempted sympathy but obvious reservations. She offered no objections, though, on the afternoon I put the last pair away, high up in the closet in a box. It was three years before hers followed. idea how to go about initiating it with someone else, even if by some wild chance the possibility arose. I wasn't in love with her, you know, and she wasn't Mormon. But God I was lonely. And horny as hell. And I didn't want to worry about explaining the funny underwear to a fucking gentile. Or a gentile I was fucking. Ha. When I finish this elaborate narrative Mike smiles and shakes his head. "Sounds like you've already written this up as a screen play." "But in the end it was easier than I thought, really natural, ya know? But so different from Lynnda – her smell, I guess, and sort of the way she was shaped down there. Which, that was a surprise. And especially the way she moved and, like, the sounds she made. You wouldn't believe it. Or, at least I couldn't believe it, couldn't believe we were doing it. I felt so exultant and free, but at the same time guilty and – I don't know, odd – because I was so distant from her. Just bodies, ya know? And I'm thinking, who is this person? I didn't even look into her face once we really got going." He shakes his head a few times and expels a breath audibly through his nose. "Stage play. Didn't I mention that? Tom Rogers is producing it next month in the Pardoe."3 "Shit," he says, sending a snort of laughter at me. "How am I supposed to compete with that? My story totally lacks drama. There wasn't any real theological debate for me. I just stopped wearing them after my first post-Lynnda... experience." He begins self-consciously, winding around his intent with stilted expressions and truncated ideas. "I had this date set up, or she did really. It was this woman that we'd been in some of the same seminars, you know? She's the one that said why don't we go to this movie. I didn't really know her at all, but I had a feeling this wasn't gonna be anything like roller skating on Redwood Road with Lynnda or stopping by Scott's Drive-In after MIA. "So, I get home about three in the morning, take a shower, go down the hall to the bedroom, drying off. The old garments were hanging from the corner of the closet door with this mirror on it, and I can just see myself standing there all naked with my dick shriveled up and just sort of absurd, you know, just kinda hanging there. You know what they look like. I couldn't take my eyes off it. And this is like the first time. I mean I don't remember ever just looking at myself like that before. "So, I'm getting ready for this 'date' or whatever, my first one in about eight years, and I just kinda took them off, you know, thinking there might be a chance she'd want me to spend the night. I didn't put it in those words as I changed. I mean, I'm just getting dressed, getting ready to go. You know, we were still virgins when we got married and I had no "So here I am, half stoned, and I'm just staring at this absurd thing, and all I can think of is, like, the mystery of it, you know, like what it's for, where it's been. You know, jism and everything. And I'm thinking... Jesus, this is me. But it's so foreign, too. Then, I don't know, this line comes to me out of Blake, which I'd been reading for some reason, 'The head Sub- 3 Thomas Rogers is an LDS intellectual, essayist, scholar and playwright of a liberal humanitarian turn. The Pardoe refers to a theater in the arts complex at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where Rogers was a professor of Russian, and where some of his plays have been produced. 6 Here he stops cold, as if he's finished telling the story. "So what then?" I ask. lime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands and feet Proportion...' Something like that." "What do you mean? That's it. That's all there is," he says. "I just rolled them up in a ball and threw them in the trash. Next day I grabbed the rest from the drawer, took them out and chucked them in the dumpster, marks and all. That's it. I told you there was no drama." He pauses for a minute and looks hard at me. I'm caught up in the moral tale, but at the same time curious about all the gritty details. And since when does he quote Blake just like that? But his ardour forces me back to the heart of his confession in anecdote. He has been playing with the empty beer cans on the table. Now he picks one up, brings it to his mouth and starts tapping the bottom to shake out the last drops. He repeats the same motions with two more cans before continuing. "So, I take the garments down off the door where they're hanging, and just bury my face in them. You know how you do? I remember how soft and clean they were in my hands. I was thinking, like picturing Lynnda sleeping at her parents' house back in Salt Lake, Kip probably in the port-a-crib next to her bed. We'd slept there ourselves a lot of times, even made love once over her giggling objections at doing it with her parents upstairs and her stuffed animal collection looking down from the shelves." "You said yours was gradual, with no clear demarcation? Well, I can time mine to that night in front of the mirror. Since then I've felt almost like an alien to my past. Cut off but not liberated from it. Anything but. I can't open a lousy can of beer without feeling that it's an unnatural act, that people are looking at me and shaking their heads, wondering when I'll grow up and quit the silly rebellion act. When I go down on Ruthie, let's say, or she's doing me, sometimes I just shudder with the recollection of what a sin this is, or would be if I believed. I'm sick of these echoes from the past – a dead past. They're like haunting ghosts or something of this morality that's become totally foreign to me. Yet there they are, inside my head trying to masquerade as my conscience." He pauses here for a minute, remembering something, then continues, almost in an aside. "You know, she always slept in those damn garments. Plus the night gown. Plus underwear. I used to beg her to sleep just one night, the whole night through naked, next to me, so I could feel her whole body. Half the time when we made love it was with her, or even the both of us, still all insulated up in those things." He pauses. "Was Maggie like that?" I start to answer that yes, for a while... But it isn't really a question, just a breathing point, and he goes on. This statement strikes me as extreme, perhaps alcoholically so, and I rouse myself to interject. "Wait a minute. Don't you think you're exaggerating a bit? Just because it's past doesn't mean it has to be dead. Besides, how can the past be dead when it's so obviously part of your present? I mean, what about all this garment talk and mission stories and Ruthie's joke about getting baptized? And my being here? Our Mormonism is as much at the root of our relationship as anything." "So I just stood there in front of the mirror, pressing those garments into my face, breathing them in. Remember how they used to look and smell fresh out of the package? When we went on our honeymoon all of hers were still in the goddamn packages. She opened a fresh one every day. But mine were still the old ones from the mission, starting to rip on the back panel." 7 Mike jerks forward across the table jabbing his finger in the air, suddenly angry. "No. It's dead," he shouts. "Dead. And as dead to you as it is to me, whatever you say." I try to object, but he lurches on heedlessly, as if reciting a memorized litany. "The Church, the gerontocracy, the theology, the beam-upthe-butt morality, the self-righteous arrogance, the smug self satisfaction, the deification of self, the worship of mediocrity, the abnegation of intelligence, the abhorrence of the body. The whole thing is bullshit and any alliance with it is poison to the soul. Just thinking about it turns my stomach. I say fuck it, just fuck the whole goddamn thing." I answer in courtly Javanese. "Anything you say, Elder. Master's wish is my command." This venom erupts unexpectedly out of the general melancholy of the preceding exchange, delivered with a spitting rage and contempt. Mike's hands are on the table, balled into white fists that I see tremble, despite the blurring of my vision. I wonder if he will punch me, or himself, or pound the table. He isn't looking at me, but off to the right, his teeth clenched, his head shaking in anguish or silent denial of something. "Hell of a political statement you make with your trash, Mike," I say, trying to lighten the mood and get us back on track. When Mike starts the car the digital clock flares on, showing half past eleven. I watch his profile, faintly lit by the dash lights, as he backs down the long drive using just his mirrors. The car is compact, newish. The back seat and floor are littered with books, papers, parking stubs, napkins, old french fries and fast-food wrappers, mostly from McDonalds. "I guess," is all he answers. "You sure you're okay for driving?" "For now, yeah. Where should we go?" "Didn't you say you knew a great place for prospective investigators? So…where's it at?" "Mike? What is it?" I say. I put my hands over his, and after a while the fists begin to go soft. His chest heaves, his lip curls, but he doesn't cry or meet my gaze. "Well, depends. There's this bar I've passed a lot of times. Haven't gotten in there yet. Should we try it?" "Does it look friendly?" Some minutes tick by in frozen awkwardness. A chorus of crickets swells around us in the night outdoors. They seem on the verge of interjecting insight or contempt in Aristophanic meters, but then fade into insect chatter on a sultry night. "God it's hot in here," I say. "Let's get out and tract or something." "I don't know about friendly. It's a strip joint. Redneck, I think. But we can go find out how friendly it is if you're interested." Mike makes this suggestion casually, but his nonchalance seems forced. I have been thinking in another direction entirely – drinking, talking, reopening the confessional – and am caught off guard. "You're kidding me. Do you go to places like that?" "Yeah," he says, tight in the throat but looking at me now and easing into a tentative smile. Then he's a smart ass again for a moment. "I think I know a place where we might make some great first contacts. Let me just take a whiz, then we're out of here." We have just stopped at an intersection. Without pulling away Mike turns to me with a grin less sheepish than weary 8 joints, convenience stores and drivethrough liquor shops, all hopping with Friday night trade. People are lined up at an automatic teller machine outside a branch bank like communicants at the rail. Teenagers in baggy clothes migrate back and forth between a video parlor and a 24-hour donut stand. and says, "Not yet, okay? But I've been thinking about it." "Thinking about it? Strippers? What else you been thinking about?" "Gimme a break, Sam," he says with an edge in his voice, shaking his head as if I've disappointed him. He sinks down into the seat, forming a long fricative sigh out of the word fuck, and turns to look out the side window. In a minute though he turns back to me and pleads. "Look, what's the big deal? I'm curious what these places are like, okay? Aren't you a little curious?" We drive through a few blocks of this in silence, then come to a one-story cinder block building set back a bit from the sidewalk, its facade festooned with flashing signs advertising nudity, amateur nights and weekend 'exotique' dancers. There are no windows, no signs of activity out front, but a neon arrow points down the alley beside the building for parking in the rear. We pull behind into a deep, unpaved, unlit parking lot fairly jammed with cars, then squeeze into a tight space next to a station wagon with a car seat in the back. "Sure I'm curious," I say. "Of course I'm curious. But what are you getting so upset about? I just was thinking, you know..." I trail off here because I'm not sure what I've been thinking. After three weeks away from Maggie my mind has been running more than usual to sexual reverie and speculation, but it strikes me as a little bit unfaithful to rent a view of someone else's body the night before we're reunited. Something else is bothering me, too. "What exactly goes on, though?" I ask. "I mean, how far do they go? Total stripping? Live sex shows? Don't professionals hang around those places?" The entrance is at the back of the building. Above it the name "Pussy Willow Lounge" has been painted on sheet metal; a bulb mounted on the wall gives just enough light to make it legible. Moths and bugs circle around the dim bulb or crawl on the sign, casting shadows. Muffled rock music leaks into the night from the other side of the door, vibrating the air in the parking lot with a pulsing bass line. "That's what I mean. I'm not sure what's in there, but I think it's just the stripping. But no matter what, it's bound to be hot. What do you say we give it a shot?" I hesitate for a moment longer until he adds, "Come on. For Blake." As we thread our way between the cars the door suddenly opens, releasing an unrestrained blast of amplified sound. Two men walk out talking in Southern voices, loud and thick with liquor. "Well, since you put it that way. How can I say no to Blake?" "Hell I didn't, asshole." "OK," Mike says with a note of relief, "we're not gonna regret this." He pulls away from the stop sign and crosses the dark intersection. We pass through quiet residential streets for a few more minutes then turn onto a long, busy commercial strip. It is a scene of American splendor and excess, brilliantly lit and cheaply adorned, dotted with car lots, burger "Fuckin' right, Frank, you're just too fuckin' shit-faced to remember." "Fuck if I am. Hell, I piss stronger shit than they pour here." "Well whip it out, then, Frankie, cause I could use me another stiff one." They break into wild laughter that adds weave to their gait, and are still wheezing and 9 snorting and stumbling when they reach us, nodding a friendly goodnight as they pass on in search of their car. the smell of cigarettes, sweat and beer, illuminated only by the stage and bar lights. "Nice place," I say to Mike when they are out of earshot. "You sure we won't get rolled here?" On the stage itself is a short, slim, heavily made-up Asian woman – maybe Vietnamese. As we enter she is gyrating slowly in place directly in front of a big-bellied man just standing up from his seat at one of the stage-side tables. He takes a bill from his shirt pocket and slips it lugubriously into a garter belt on the woman's left leg, stroking the inside of her thigh in the process, never averting his eyes from the black thatch of her pubic hair just at his face level. When he is through she bends down and gives him a little peck on the mouth then stands up and dances over, crotch first, to someone else waving a dollar bill. Mike taps me on the shoulder and points to a table on the far side of the stage. He cups his mouth and shouts something I take to mean it's the only one empty and we push our way between other patrons until we reach it. As we sit down the Asian woman's set finishes to scattered applause in the house and suddenly the room is vacant of the deafening music. "Don't be a rube, Sam. It's just a bar. Think Damon Runyon." "John Roscoe is more like it. Besides, I thought we were doing Blake tonight? What happened to 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'?" "This is it, man, come on. Welcome to the wedding. Why settle for the announcement when you can go to the gala? Just remember when we get in there, 'the nakedness of woman is the work of God'." "Don't tell me – another Proverb of Hell? Boy, you're an endless source of culture tonight, aren't you." "I guess so," he says. We stand for a moment just at the door, neither one of us making a move till Mike breaks the ice. "This one's yours, Elder. Anytime you're ready." "Jesus Christ," I say. We push through into a narrow entrance way and are immediately engulfed in a tempest of sound. We have to shout in each other's ears to talk over the amplitude. A bouncer sits at a folding table where the draped entrance hall opens into the bar, reading a newspaper and eating popcorn from a large bowl. A hand-lettered sign on the wall gives the cover as ten dollars. Mike pays for both of us and we move past the curtain into the main room. "What do you think?" "What do I think? Jesus, I don't know. Hot, I suppose. Like you said. But weird. Doesn't it give you the creeps?" "Not the creeps. More like butterflies, maybe. But I know what you mean. This is definitely liminal space." "Appropriate to a wedding, I suppose. But how could you do it for a job? And who are these guys? Who do you think comes to a place like this?" On one side is a long bar with fixed barstools; behind it a tall man in work shirt and no apron is mixing drinks. Protruding from the opposite wall into the center of the room is a low stage or runway brightly lit with footlights and spotlights, and around it an array of tables, all of them full of men. Everyone is white. The room is hot and smoky, close with "We do, Sam. You do. Open your eyes." As we talk a waitress stops at the table. She is topless, but unaware of her nakedness. Or unashamed. Her breasts are small and firm, hardly bobbing as she walks. She wears a uniform: skimpy 10 passing on his way up, pointing to the dancer and asking the man to pass it on. briefs, garter belt and black mesh nylons, red pumps with stiletto heals. Her hair is knotted on top of her head. Wisps of hair, escaped from the knot, stick at her temples where rivulets of sweat have left trails in her make-up. I am hot and nervous, with knots in my stomach, uncertain of the rules here. I feel safe looking at her face, but try at the same time to casually take in her body, especially her breasts. One is smaller than the other and appears to have an oblong bruise on it, or a fading hickey. When the set ends I turn to Mike and ask what he thinks. He has been drinking steadily. His face is flushed and clouded with a look of stupefaction. He answers in a slow slur. "Let's not do th'analysisis now," he says. "Long's we're here, let's just watch. 'S plenty to watch. Talk about it tomorrow." I have been drinking, too, and find something funny in Mike's suggestion to postpone conversation. "I'm all for watching," I say, starting to snigger. Mike catches it and soon we are both shaking with stifled laughter. My mind lights on the image of a beer commercial and I slap Mike's arm saying inanely, "It don't get no better than this, Mike." Mike orders a fifth of bourbon for us. "A bottle, Mike? You're not thirsty, are you?" "I wouldn't say thirsty. But what's a wedding without wine?" "I don't really think this wedding is going to come off, Mike. I see plenty from the bride's party, but no sign of the groom." I start to laugh, but when I look at Mike I see not frivolity, but that airport desperation. I realise now that it has tinged the atmosphere around us since our first hug; our whole evening together has been spent breathing its vapors. "Not any more it don't," he says, and our laughter shifts, surging to the edge of tears. The show begins again. A punkish black woman with dikey looks peels off leather shorts; a redhead – red tail – with pale skin slips out of diaphanous lingerie, throwing her panties into the crowd; school spirit music blasts from the speakers and a cheerleader springs onto the stage wielding pompoms like two bushy dildos; a dark brunette dances to Steppenwolf in a frenzied, aggressive style flecked with high kicks that reveal flashes of pink. The parade of fantasies spins into perceptual remoteness as I drink the bourbon. I feel a lavish bond with each dancer, almost fraternal, but pregnant with erotic possibilities. Erections surge and pass, causing me to shift in my seat and pull at my pants. An ache builds in my groin and a sticky dampness. Each drink feeds a nascent throb in my head, but postpones its full realization. I am alarmed and want to ask what's wrong, but the bottle comes, and the glasses. Mike pours stupidly big ones for both of us, tosses his down, pours another while still gasping from the first. The music begins to blare again. A pudgy blonde in a skimpy version of a nurse's uniform appears on the runway. We watch as she removes her clothes piece by piece. She moves slowly around the stage taking contributions from men who crowd at its edge with bills ready. After a while she turns the energy of her performance towards our table, grinding and throwing rutting grimaces our way. I fish in my pocket for a dollar bill but can't bring myself to join the act by delivering it. Mike sees my struggle and laughs. He grabs the bill from my hand and stuffs it into the fist of someone The Vietnamese woman is on stage again, dancing to a pulsing beat. Bending forward at the waist she presents her backside to us, displaying a heart-shaped 11 mouth. His hair, grown greasy with the heat, has matted into clumps. For a long moment I watch him drawing breath, his face slack in relaxation, his eyes only softly closed. I recall the same face from nineteen years past: Mike reposed in sleep, his snore a faint rasp as we flew across the Pacific to our mission in Indonesia. Who knew what was ahead, or where we would find the strength to speak for Jesus? The plane's engines droned, vibrating deeply in the night as we went hurtling through the darkness to our call. The certitude, the mystery, the bravado, the passion of that past moment wash in a shiver through my body. rump and, between her legs, the plump outline of her labia trailing spidery tendrils of hair. My conscience returns to Mike's line from Blake, "the genitals Beauty, the hands and feet Proportion." I feel a moment of aesthetic awe at this unblushing tribute to naked humanity and the animal self, and wonder momentarily whether I shouldn't undress, roll off my seat and join her on stage. "The naked," I mutter to myself, "the honest, the pure. How have I lost this." Jesus ended his life naked on the cross and the nobility of his form hanging on windswept Golgotha flashes into my mind – gentle brow crowned with thorns, healing hands pierced at the wrists, manhood exposed, hirsute and circumcised. I scoot my chair close to Mike's and place my hand lightly on his head, smoothing his hair, stroking along his neck and shoulder. His eyes open for a moment and almost focus on me before he smiles and drifts back off. I stroke his head again and speak against the bluster of the music. "I'm still here, Mike. I'm right here with you." I turn to Mike to try and talk over the music, to share this vision of Jesus naked, to sort out these ideas. But he has succumbed to the whisky. He is slouched down in his chair, head back and tilted towards his shoulder, mouth open as if to snore, though in this room nothing but the beat of the music and chaos of the crowd are audible. Spittle has dribbled down his cheek from the corner of his Tim Behrend Jakarta, May 1992 12
