 |
|||||||
|
First Communion The first time I tasted another person’s blood was when I was seventeen years old. It was a Wednesday. It happened when my face was buried between the legs of Alex Enselme. The day that it happened, the day that I let Jesus down, the day that she called, the day that was a Wednesday, was also in the middle of August. A Wednesday in the middle of August meant that there was nothing to do. When Alex called I wasn’t doing nothing I wouldn’t normally do on days that there was nothing to do but sit and do nothing. I remember being chill. I remember my voice only hitched a little when she said, “I’m coming over,” but my body did react to something, though I didn’t know what. Alex was the type of girl I shouldn’t have known. She was the type of girl who had a map of the world written on her. She was the type of girl that a mother, not my mother specifically, but a mother, my friend from school, Christopher Freeman’s mother, would say was bad to know because Alex’s type was the type that got types like me into things that shouldn’t be gotten into. Which turned out to be both true and false. The reason that Alex was able to come over was because I was sitting at home doing nothing; the reason I was sitting at home doing nothing was because my friends from school didn’t like me. Well, one friend from school didn’t like me: Christopher Freeman. At the school that we went to, that tiny school, that tiny Christian school, everyone who mattered to me looked up to Christopher Freeman. Everyone that mattered to me looked up to Christopher Freeman because he was the most Christ-like person at the school. This wasn’t conjecture, it was fact. Christopher Freeman had been given the spiritual-life award for most Christ-like three years running, so his Christ-like-ness was incontrovertible. Maybe, if the people that mattered to me (Adam, other Chris and James) didn’t look up to Christopher Freeman, Christopher Freeman not liking me wouldn’t have mattered, but they did, so it did. But also, it seemed to me, that if Christopher Freeman didn’t like me and Christopher Freeman was indisputably Christ-like, then it was the same as Jesus Christ not liking me. And Jesus not liking me bothered me at least as much as Adam, other Chris and James not liking me. I have my theories as to why Christopher Freeman didn’t like me, but they would be speculative and I would have no way of knowing whether or not they were true, or I was just picking out the things I didn’t like about myself and attributing them to Christopher Freeman. The important thing is that Christopher Freeman didn’t like me and had a way of saying bible verses with his eyes whenever I said something that he thought wasn’t very Christian. For example: If I was with the rest of the gang and we were watching MTV or something, Christopher Freeman would look at me, as if it were my fault, and with his eyes say 1 Corinthians 11:13. 1 Corinthians 11:13 seemed like Christopher Freeman’s favorite verse to say with his eyes. So when Alex called and told me she was coming over, I had to let her because my friends from school didn’t hang out with me because Christopher Freeman disliked me because I wasn’t Christian enough (although, I guess that’s speculative). So really, when Alex’s blood entered my mouth because I was on my knees between her thighs, her Tweety Bird panties underneath my foot, it wasn’t really all of my fault, I was a victim of circumstance. The thing that I will remember most about that day, other than the taste of copper in my mouth, was the green dress with pink flowers that Alex wore. But it wasn’t like a green dress with flowers on it that a mom might wear, not my mom, but someone else’s mom, again maybe Christopher Freeman’s mom. It was a green dress with flowers on it that ended before it should have. And that green dress with flowers on it felt like silk when I touched it later. But it wasn’t silk. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t silk. It just felt like silk, or so I thought. But now I wonder if I just thought it felt like silk, but really it felt like a dress that someone’s mother, who isn’t mine, someone like Christopher Freeman’s mom, might wear. I have no way of finding that out now, but I guess I wish that I did. Christopher Freeman would not have approved of the dress Alex wore. Christopher Freeman would not have approved of anything Alex wore, and he would have told me so, with his eyes, if he’d ever met her, which he didn’t, because Alex didn’t go to that tiny little Christian school. She was of the world. She was secular. Christopher Freeman had expressed many times his negative feelings on all things secular. He would express those feelings to me when, without having met Alex, without knowing anything about her, when he told me to break up with her. Because, he said, she was causing me to stumble. So if Christopher Freeman didn’t approve of Alex’s dress, wasn’t that the same as Jesus not approving of Alex’s dress and therefore Jesus not approving of Alex and therefore Jesus not approving of me? “Invite me in,” she said through the chomping of a piece of blue chewing gum. I obeyed. She walked past me into the foyer and my eyes automatically slid down her back like a slow moving elevator. When they hit the bottom they lingered there for a moment, or longer. “Are you going to stare at my ass all day?” she said then turned around and smiled at me with her blue chewing gum sticking out between her teeth. The thing I’ll always remember about that day, besides the green dress with flowers and the taste of blood in my mouth, was the blue piece of gum that stuck out of her mouth—a violet pressed between walls of ivory. Somehow she could make that piece of gum disappear when she spoke, then reappear when it became convenient. But then there was this other thing about that piece of gum: This thing that didn’t occur to me then, not in the way that it does now. This thing that makes me sort of lighthearted when I think about it—which is why I try to think about it as much as possible. The thing about that piece of gum, which is less about that piece of gum than the way I looked at that piece of gum. Anyway, the thing about that piece of gum is how much I wanted that piece of gum. I led her to the TV room and we sat on the couch which I didn’t realize before wasn’t very big because her shoulder was touching mine. While I wouldn’t have moved over because there wasn’t much room to do so and it would have been rude, and I couldn’t have asked her to move to the other couch because that too would have been rude, it made me realize that the couch we were sitting on wasn’t very big at all. It was hot because it was August and I was sweating and maybe, I like to think, she was sweating, but I know I was sweating. Also, I think my ears started to ring. And then she asked me what I was watching and I told her MTV and she said cool and it was cool and so I said so and she smiled. But not in the way that I would smile at her, because I wasn’t yet capable of smiling at anyone that way. Puff Daddy was on MTV in a white suit singing about always loving Big Poppa, and I wondered who I would always love and I first thought my mom and then I thought Jesus, but then I wondered if that was really true, but I don’t know why. Alex leaned into me a little more. And I was like, OK, I know there’s more room on the couch than that, but I still didn’t ask her to move because again: rudeness. For a couple of minutes we watched MTV. Not saying anything. The TV went from Puff Daddy to U2 to other people I can’t remember because after a while she wasn’t leaning into me anymore, she was leaning onto me and I can’t stress enough that subtle distinction but it was pretty obvious when her head was on my chest that there was one. Even if I don’t think I could have said so at the time. Not because it would’ve been rude, which I guess it would’ve been, but because I don’t think I had access to my voice and wouldn’t until the phone rang, which, after scoping out the Caller ID, I picked up immediately. “Hello Mother,” I said. I don’t remember what my mother and I spoke about that afternoon because almost as soon as we got on the phone Alex stood up and asked, “I’m wearing Tweety Bird panties, do you want to see?” Without really thinking about it one way or another, as if someone had opened my mouth and answered for me, I said sure. I don’t know why I said sure and not no, like a good Christian should have. Like Jesus and Christopher Freeman would have wanted me to. But I said sure, like everyone, besides me and besides Alex, wouldn’t have wanted me to. It was a decision that just the two of us were involved in, so it seemed important that I go with the available consensus. I was trying to say goodbye to my mother just as I saw Tweety Bird’s big blue eyes staring at me. I gulped. I think I might’ve actually gotten the words out, but maybe I didn’t and maybe it would have been weird if I did. Because, you know, it’s my mom. I don’t remember sitting back down on the couch. But I did, because for a second Tweety Bird was eye level to me, doing a dance, the flapping wings stealing my breath. Then Alex lowered the green dress with flowers on it and Tweety disappeared from sight. She flopped down next to me and everything felt really tight, like I couldn’t breathe tight. Yes it was summer, and yes it was hot, but I don’t think it was supposed to be that hot or that tight, but it was. I was sweating, and my chest was hurting and I think that maybe I was expanding, like water was being flushed into my body and removing everything that had been there before by Alex or by MTV or by some outside source that wasn’t me in any little way at all that I couldn’t locate because I felt like it was hard to see anything in front of me. And then her leg covered mine, and I could see again, but better, like golden lights shining from the heavens better, like epiphany better. “Hi,” she said. “Hi,” I said and I put my hand over her thigh. She looked at my hand, or her thigh, it was hard to tell because they were both occupying the same space. Which, I know, breaks the laws of physics, but that’s just the way that it was. “Why is that there?” she asked. But not like in an ‘I don’t want it there’ sort of way, but in a ‘what took you so long’ sort of way, or maybe an ‘I don’t care either way’ sort of way, whatever it was, it wasn’t an ‘I don’t want it there’ sort of way, which I know to be true because when I took my hand away she immediately put it back, but closer to where Tweety was. It was then that I thought that Jesus would’ve walked through the front door and sat down on the couch next to us. The couch that maybe one of us should have been sitting on in the first place, if one, or both, of us didn’t mind my hand being on her thigh, because Jesus would have minded, and he would have said so with his eyes. Jesus would have been there because Jesus was always there. But Jesus wasn’t there as I lurched my lips over to her lips, my neck craned over her shoulder at such an angle that only part of my mouth ended up on hers, beginning a battle for that piece of blue chewing gum that wouldn’t end that day, nor the next. He wasn’t there when I slid Alex’s green dress with flowers on it that felt like silk to the touch, and wasn’t the only thing, up to her waist. Jesus still hadn’t arrived when Tweety Bird was discarded happily to the floor and I dropped to my knees in front of her, the wood floor pressing into my flesh. And Jesus was nowhere when I saw it: A single drop of blood that trickled down the folds in between Alex’s legs, staining the white couch beneath. I hesitated at the sight. Alex, her hands already cupping my ears, looked down at me, her eyes demanding and warm. “Well?” she stated more than asked. The huskiness of her voice slipping down my throat, her thumb and index finger rubbed at my earlobes, her scent consuming my senses, she was bewitching me. Then, before I really knew what I was doing, Alex’s legs were spread wide across my shoulders and I was tasting, for the first time, the blood of the flesh. If Jesus was there, he would have said, with his eyes, that fornication was wrong, that sins of the flesh were the path to the devil, that I shouldn’t be putting any desire before the word of Christ, but he didn’t, because he wasn’t.
t o p |
||||||
 |
|||||||
