My Fourth or Fifth Time

My Fourth or Fifth Time

My father is a duplicitous person, a real piece of work. My mother is prone to histrionics and self-pity. They are in their second and third marriages respectively, and I pity their spouses. Things went askew in the lives of all my siblings, no surprise there. This one ended up in jail, that one is addicted to spiked seltzers and balloons filled with nitrous gas, that one’s thrice divorced, but I really can’t get into all of that now. I don’t speak to any of them anymore and I’m better for it. Me, I’ve never been hooked on anything, never gotten into any trouble, never been nasty or cruel. I’ve always made an honest living, never failing to pay my debts. I wasn’t one of those people who used their rotten childhoods as an excuse to behave badly. I wanted to be a good man.

I did all sorts of research on how to heal my mother-wound and my father-wound, how to set myself up to become the kind of person who could one day have a wife and children. I exhausted all of the available remedies, both chemical and New Age, for curing unhappiness, dread and low self-esteem. I did all sorts of things I did not even believe in: I saw psychics, acupuncturists and Reiki practitioners, and tried psychedelic therapies under the care of local professionals, because even though I do not condone the recreational use of drugs, this was all medicinal. Ayahuasca made me sob and vomit. Mushrooms made me sensitive and fearful. Ketamine made me feel that I did not have a body and that I was not a person. None of it suited me. I saw a psychiatrist who put me on medication that made me unable to dream or form erections. I saw a herbalist who sold me mullein and butterfly pea flower so that I might dream again. I went to scalding hot springs in Arizona. I dipped my body into pools of ice – a practice which was supposed to cause euphoria, but didn’t. I read inspirational biographies about the great men of history. I refrained from masturbation. I tried tai chi. I ran many miles and lifted heavy weights. I meditated, thinking of nothing purposefully. But it was all bogus, none of it worked. After all of it, I still felt unable to see any point in living in general and remained unconvinced of the meaningfulness of my life in particular.

No one could say that I had not tried to improve myself. The long evenings after work spent reading online forums about how to ‘optimise’ my life and ‘level up’ were a testament to how badly I wanted to not only feel or look, but actually be better. I tried to put myself out there romantically, wondering why I had not met someone suitable. For two years, I dated a woman who lived in Dallas, but I didn’t feel it was headed towards marriage. We wanted different things – namely, she wanted a lot of material things I couldn’t provide. So, I left her and wished her the best, hoping, as I hope for everyone, that she would find what she was looking for. I was on my own journey and couldn’t be with someone unless they wanted to travel this path with me.

So now, I’m mostly just focused on work. My job is on the other side of town and I see my friends less these days since they’ve mostly had children and moved to even smaller suburbs than the one I live in. I go on dates now and again, but I find that women don’t like a kind, sensual man as much as they claim to. Some time ago, I dated a woman with an English accent, which I found sophisticated since you don’t get that much around here. We met at a noisy bluegrass concert, and when she told me she was a ‘barista’ I didn’t hear her properly and thought she said ‘barrister’. When I finally realised that she worked at a coffee shop rather than a law firm, I broke up with her. I want a woman as ambitious as I am, someone who has never had anything handed to them, someone with tenacity, someone who has worked as long and as hard as I did for my job as an HR specialist for the United States Postal Service. I haven’t slept with anyone since, and I’ve spent the last five Christmases alone. Does it ever get lonely? Of course. But I’m a resourceful man. I’m a solution-seeking person.

The one thing I had not tried in earnest was following God. It’s what several men on the forums recommended. Nearly as much as diet and exercise, faith was supposed to be one of the things capable of fixing even seemingly irreparable problems, but I never did feel sold on the idea of a boundlessly loving Heavenly Father, nor the willingness of anyone to die for everyone’s sins. In the city neighbouring mine, there are many mega-churches that have these big, flashy Sunday services with crowds so large you can remain anonymous, particularly if you’re a clean-cut, ordinary guy like me: no piercings, no tattoos. Over the past few months, I’ve been baptised four or five times, maybe more. I don’t believe in God, don’t believe in anything I can’t see, but I don’t see why that should make any difference. I get baptised whenever I need a bit of attention. Of course, if you go to the same church twice, they become suspicious, so I mix it up. I pick a place and go in seeming very normal, as though I’m an ordinary member of the congregation. I sit up front, sing their hymns, bow my head in prayer, even though I don’t believe a word of it. Then when they call the new congregants up to the altar to be baptised, I walk up with a pious, solemn expression and wait for someone to grab me tight, tip me back into the pool, pick me back up, embrace me, give me a towel and tell me God bless you or Congratulations. Some of them even give you food or T-shirts. After my most recent baptism, a busty, friendly, elderly woman gave me a donut with a cross made of frosting and told me that today was the first day of the rest of my life, then she hugged me and I’ll admit I nearly cried when she said “See you next Sunday.”

A few Sundays before that, I met a young pastor. One could say that he was strapping, good-looking, friendly, and openhearted, comfortable in his own skin. Or at least he seemed that way to me when he stopped me in the purple-carpeted tabernacle while I was quickly moving to exit the church, having received what I came for. I was still wet from being dipped into the baptismal pool when he told me he had something to say to me, a message God had put in his heart that he couldn’t ignore. He insisted we speak for a moment, and he assured me that it would only take a moment. Many other people had been baptised that Sunday and it surprised me that he should single me out when he didn’t know me at all. I doubted he had anything of substance to relay to me. More probably it was just an act of religious bravado and spiritual showmanship, like the baptism itself. He touched my shoulder and sat me down on a now-empty pew.

“I can tell that you’ve been carrying a lot of pain, is that right?” he asked. I played along and nodded.

“Life hasn’t been easy for you, has it? Looking at you, I can tell you have been alone and haven’t known who you could turn to.”

“I guess you could say that,” I said.

“There’s an emptiness you feel, isn’t there? A big emptiness,” he said.

“I occasionally have felt empty,” I replied. “Maybe you aren’t even sure if there is a God,” he said.

“Maybe you were just going through the motions today, when you went into the water.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“I think that you have a special calling. I think that one day, you’ll lead your own congregation. I sense that you suffered in order to share your powerful testimony, my brother. And I think God brought you here today because you and I might be a real comfort to one another and share something powerful together. Do you think that’s possible?”

“Could be,” I said.

“I know it’s possible. I know it will come to pass,” he said.

He said a bit more about my being some sort of prophet and the two of us having met for a reason. After we spoke, he hugged me and told me his name. Then he told me he would be seeing me and looked forward to what the future held for me. I felt uncomfortable in his embrace, but I let it happen. I said goodbye and told him I would be back. I could not get to my car fast enough. I drove home and never returned to that church. I never saw him again and nothing that has happened to me since has resembled the preordained, consequential or holy. And I’m not holding my breath waiting for such an event to happen. I sense that I have no calling, beyond maybe moving up at the Postal Service or becoming a family man – ordinary things like that. My desires for myself are more modest than being led by God: I want a nice, pretty wife, a promotion, a healthy body, a child who respects me and depends on me. Maybe I’ll find those things in one of these churches. It has been done, people have done it before.

There’s nothing wrong with what I do, there isn’t any law against it. When a pastor asked me once to offer a testimony at the start of the ceremony, I made up an elaborate lie about how I had once been addicted to pornography, then found the Lord and put it all behind me. Do I feel guilty about lying in a place of worship? No, I don’t. Not at all. What business do they have asking me for my life story? I don’t know these people from Adam and they really ought to respect a man’s privacy. Besides, people do all sorts of things to get what they need. I need to be touched, to be wished well, I need to be applauded, to feel good and hopeful and clean. And right now, I may not get these things from my mother and father, or a woman who loves me. But I won’t sit around feeling sorry for myself like other people do.