To the readers of Taint Taint Taint Magazine,
I came to know there was a god when I was eleven. There was a lunar event or meteor shower or planetary orbit thing that wasn’t going to happen again for a half-million years—one of those something-or-anothers the TV tells you will reoccur in your lifetime, but always seems to—and I had invited my sixth-grade class over to huddle around my new telescope. The real reason was it was the only way I could get Lauren Mazingo to my house, as her family was even more obsessed with Jesus than mine and unlikely to let her accept my invitation of a party for two. Memories fail me often, but I’ll never forget seeing those flashes of pokey-dot undies every four seconds when she would rocket skyward on the swing set, kicking her blue jean-skirted legs out to guarantee maximum height. From that day onward, I was very much a fan of religious women, and it brought me comfort to know that god and church and all that could be made bearable knowing that the girls my age were catching breeze under that long denim tube.
Upon reflection, that should’ve been the moment that led me to god, knowing some holy force would have surely had to create something so simple and wrong. Left up to chance, nature was rarely generous. But, no, it was the night with the telescope, and an epiphany far more mundane would prove to be my first peak behind the curtain:
The Little Dipper. I’d be lying if I said I knew it existed before that night—I hadn’t asked for a telescope, nor had I thought about stars all that much until I saw it as a ticket to woo Lauren Mazingo; but as my schoolmates careened around my telescope, I looked up into heaven’s shimmery black blob and noticed it. Something worth knowing: on the inside of my calf, I have a constellation of tiny, pin-prick moles that resembles the Dipper to the mark. And that was it, an epiphany so commonplace that no amount of writerly pomp could make poetic or, more importantly, interesting. I hiked up my basketball shorts and studied my leg, then peered up at the sky, then back down at my leg, sky, leg, sky, leg, sky. That ludicrous jerking of my head must have been powering my thinker, because a thought had lodged its way into my brain that had been evading me for over a decade: god.
Nature lacked generosity. I knew this, but nature also avoids such unimaginative repetitions. No, my mushy, eleven-year-old brain thought, only man would make such a dull decision in design, and since I had been taught I was made in god’s image, and that god was surely a man, it was only logical that god must exist, and that he apparently only had a finite number of patterns in his toolbelt. Armed with both the knowledge of a higher power and the disappointment of his artistry, I moved forward with my life.
Here we are: eleven. pokey-dot panties. Mazingo. Dipper. god. I spent a decade being skeptical of a grand author, only for him to make himself perfectly and undeniably evident to me as I grew older. Call it the Reverse Santa.
It would provide me relief to say something along the lines of “You’d be reluctant to believe in a god had you been raised in the atmosphere I had,” but the sad truth is it would be a lie. You would probably be a preacher, like my cousin who grew up breathing my same air. Or a closeted choir director, like the kid I was told to teach how to throw a football, despite the fact that neither of us knew anything about sports. The most likely scenario, however, is that you would become addicted to Gran-Gran’s pills, have six kids with seven men, and run to the pulpit three times a week begging for forgiveness until you fucking died.
If you were raised in a room of funhouse mirrors, I imagine you too would feel the amazed disappointment of first laying eyes on the true human form.
Despite my admitted disappointment at the mundanity of creation, this discovery made life a bit easier for a while. I could suddenly see the truth between the words of hymns, the desperation that fuels the marathon altar calls, the fear that got children dressed and into car seats every Sunday and Wednesday. I still hated church, as any kid with a chance of making it in the world would, but I found new places to channel my ornery boredom.
The pomposity and fervor of preachers, for instance, became a recurring source of pleasure to me. I found genuine respect for a god who would give these men such pink, bulbous faces with one hand and accept their effluent praise with the other. They’d work themselves up a lather, their baby blue shirts navy with sweat. You could always tell which part of their sermon they were most proud of because they’d take their suit coat off right before they went there. On the rides home, my parent would discuss the most memorable (i.e. loudest) moments, and I would think about his moist tie that swung over me as I prayed, ever so often touching and sticking to my forehead.
* * *
I won’t waste too much of my time being petty and mean, but only because pettiness is only useful when accompanied by supreme wit and meanness only tolerated when one has the social or economic capital to afford it; and, sadly, I am in possession of none of these things.
Getting over Lauren Mazingo wasn’t hard, especially after she married the preacher’s son, a man eighteen years our senior. I had already gone through several girlfriend phases by this point—the party-girl phase, the vegetarian phase, the farm-girl phase, the reformed-party-girl phase, a preacher’s-kid phase of my own—so the blow didn’t strike with much force. I was actually dating that preacher’s daughter when they announced their engagement. We had us a good laugh and then ate pizza in silence for an hour and a half.
A few days later, we were sitting in her room listening to records—her favorite artists were the sun-tanned, strummy types who typically serve as gateway drugs to actual good music—when a song came on about stars being holes in the floor of heaven or some shit. I thought, it’s time to make or break this one, baby. After I told her all about being eleven and the Little Dipper and figuring out god was one of those yeah-it’s-broke-but-still-works-sometimes-so-don’t-fix-it kind of dudes, she got all teary eyed and hugged me big.
“That’s beautiful,” she said, and that got me sweating because I was expecting, even wanting, her to say god doesn’t make mistakes or Hell’s hot, honey.
I straightened my spine tall and said real natural, “Your crying’s kind of weirding m3 out.” She was heading upstate to college that Fall, anyway.
* * *
On the ride home, I thought about how firemen were the only ones to ever make holes in the floor seem like a good idea.
I pictured a million miles of traffic blocking up a solid gold highway because Azrael or Gabriel or L. Ron Hubbard got their leg stuck in a star hole again, and Jesus having to bring some mighty technology I could never dream of to get them out (though, based on my previous observations of creation, it was most likely just some big ass chain that god makes everyone sign out at a counter, which would have explained the million miles of traffic, because god would have only made about four of them, and it was no use waiting on Cassiel to bring back the one he rented three-and-a-half millennia ago.)
My letter has and is coming to a point. Though I sometimes struggle to decide how I’m going to tell my story, it’s clear to me that these pages are not in service of a cheap twist you’ve seen before. In the interest of full transparency, I must put something on the table: as embarrassing as it is to admit, Jordan James, the author, is my god. To underscore how shitty this fact is, I am not allowing the revelation to be the last sentence of this paragraph. I will, instead, move on now.
Before I wind back the dial and fill you in on how I made this discovery, I would like to take a moment to emphasize how much of a drag this is, and why you should be thankful that he is not your almighty. I’ll start out with some cheap knocks and work my way up: he once saw Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights on Broadway, and his highlight was seeing Corbin Bleu, the kid from High School Musical, of which he owned a copy, back stage. He’ll deny it if you ask him. Go ahead. Look across the table and ask next time you see him. And speaking of musical numbers, a few years later, when he was in high school show choir, he sang the lead solo to Guns N Roses “Welcome to the Jungle.” Go and listen to that song right now and try to imagine a kid barely out puberty shaking his wiry ass and singing “sha-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-NEE-NEE” all over a poorly lit stage while people in the audience feigned enthusiasm. Correction: his mother thought it was, like, really cool.
If you ask him how he came to play the guitar—one of his few marketable skills—he’ll say something along the lines of how he was inspired at the magic coming out of Eddie Van Halen’s fingers the first time he saw the legendary musician play. It’s one of his earliest lies, before he became really good at them, before he would create cities and lakes and me. It worked because of all the sprinkled truth: the concert happened, and I’m sure it was inspirational, though perhaps Van Halen is far more revered in my world, but he had already been playing guitar a year by the time he saw the band. The truth is, he got Guitar Hero for Christmas that year and started playing for real shortly after. What’s morally bankrupt is not the lie itself—Guitar Hero rocked—but the fact that he still tells that story, just to see how far he’s come at selling people bullshit. Call it his framed dollar bill.
And he only has 149 Instagram followers.
Try and remember the moment you realized that god existed. Maybe your grandmother was spared from a disease and you attributed her recovery to your hours of hopeless prayer. Maybe you heard Aretha sing. Or thought you got somebody pregnant and said, “God, if you make her not pregnant, I promise I’ll never doubt you again,” and then she turned out to have no condition after all. No matter how joyous or chilling or pathetic, it’s always beautiful. I had my telescope, and it was beautiful.
Now imagine you finally get to meet your creator and they turned out to be some sweaty millennial in pawpaw boxer shorts who’s always kind of thinking about whacking it. You’d be kind of disappointed, wouldn’t you? You’d back into a corner and say no no no no no no no, or else find yourself speechless. You’d scan the room looking for a sharp object and weigh the pros and cons of deicide. The worst part is you’re given no time for second guessing, no brief lapse of denial; when you are in their presence, it is the most certain thing in the world. Whenever your number is called and you meet yours face to face, I pray to Jordan that he (or she, if you’re lucky) doesn’t have his arm submerged in a Flaming Hot Cheetos bag as they wait on their Nintendo to load. Suffice it to say, there is no greater existential defeat than watching the man who made you from nothing and pen ink wait at the mercy of a Princess Daisy go-kart icon.
I was sitting on a table when I found myself awake in his presence. The first thing I remember being aware of was the coiled, metal spine of a notebook digging itself into my butt. The second was there he is, that’s him, he looks just like me. He looked my way and said hello as if I was a soft-headed baby or a cat. He betrayed no surprise that a grown man was sitting cross-legged on his dining room table; a tingle of annoyance, maybe, but not enough for him to get up and put pants on or spray me with a water bottle or ask why there? In between races, most of which he lost, he would set the controller down and explain to me how I was made.
* * *
It was as dull as I had always imagined. Nothing but a character sketch that went nowhere, I had lived in a space of half-realized personality traits and ticks, a voice for him to test out the quips he thought were funny. He would return to me once every couple months and put me through a variety of situations that might end up in a better, more purposeful story full of characters who acted on their world and tested their agency on the bounds of something scary.
He seemed shameless in his admission that, once it became apparent I was worthless to his stories, he reworked me to simply exist in a variety of sexual situations, like some avatar of long-shot fantasies made impossible by marriage, social status, gutlessness, laziness, geography, bad luck, and an overall lack of charm or grace. Because of this new purpose, he explained, I was redrawn to be his twin in almost every way. An enthusiastic smile swept his face, signaling me to thank him for my status as his sex-doll doppelganger. I wanted to ask why he didn’t just watch PornHub or xxnx like regular people, but I was afraid of being given some cocktail of halitosis, IBS, gout, and a hunchback.
I let it slide and listened as he went on about all of my girlfriends and their real life counterparts. I felt sorry for them, but I was mostly overcome with sadness that the women I had known and been with were only his pitiable attempts at making them available and real for him. The conversations I had with Lauren Mazingo and Heather the preacher’s daughter and Chelsea and Ashlee-with-two-e’s were just conversations with him, or else some slanted version of myself. Their jokes were his jokes, and the sex I had had with some of them was just some masturbatory exercise in puppetry and hubris.
* * *
I was gone from his living room in the same manner I had arrived, in a moment and without notice. I went on with my life as best I could, and it would be a lie to say my circumstances didn’t improve after that first meeting: a distant relative died and left me near $450; Van Halen announced a reunion tour with David Lee Roth; my car started for two weeks in a row; even my pet succulent, which had died three weeks earlier due to a complete lack of care on my part, started to look green again, and continued to for another month, after which point it died for good this time because I didn’t water it.
One day, Lauren Mazingo emailed me out of nowhere; my brain sparked with the possibility of marital problems and dramatic intrigue, and because of this I went and washed my hair, combed it afterward like a mid-century president. I wrote back, telling her to check her lawn, because them crazy poor kids in apartment 69 are selling poop bombs under her azaleas again, and she better run them off or else they’ll make sweet hash out your new spaghetti casserole. I sent the message and she replied, briskly, Thanks! Will do! Great to hear from you. Call me! ;-) !? I thanked Jordan for ruining the fantasy of Lauren for me and clicked off the window. That very instant, I was sitting criss-cross on his dining table again, this time in a full plate of tomato sauce. He considered that humorous. He had summoned me because, as he put it, we needed to define the borders of our relationship to help me find and remain in my place. His first demand was that I refer to him as God from here on out. I said Fuck that, amigo, which caused his ears to go red. We eventually agreed on god with a lowercase g, but he added that, when talking about him, I must point out in regular conversation that guitar is one of his marketable skills. This seemed harmless enough, considering that I would never admit to anyone that my lord and savior was an angsty white male prone to excessive irony and wearing clothes that fit only vaguely. Writing that compliment in this letter has been my first ever opportunity; I can already feel my lower back pain going away.
But the terms of my continued existence grew with each visit. He was disappointed at how little culture he had endowed me with and began to immediately right that apparent wrong by “recommending” movies films—I feel an electric shock every time I get the terminology wrong—and books. I use quotes around recommend because if I don’t watch them within a forty-eight-hour period, I lose the ability to go to sleep. I tried taking six Tylenol PMs one night and still couldn’t knock myself to bed until I drooled and mumbled my way through Wild Strawberries.
After that incident, he admitted that he might have started me out too close to the deep end, so he assigned me 2001, which he promised was more accessible. At least the strawberries one was only an hour and a half long. Currently, I’m reading about a whiny woman who flees to New Zealand, where she proceeds to completely ruin the word wildebeest for any poor soul who manages to find themselves assigned this book. I realize that I’m probably getting my audience wrong here, as you are all graduate students with refined tastes. Apologies all around if I have managed to trash the movies—fuck me—films you like. I imagine I’d be pretty pissed if you ragged on Van Halen II. I need you to believe me.
Now more than ever, I need you to believe what I’m saying has merit and should be acted upon. What I have left is a story and a request: Two nights after the telescope and Little Dipper and my grand awakening, before I realized that I knew only half the truth of god, my grandfather died. His name was Bob, but we called him Poppi; he was eighty-three when he passed of complications from hip replacement surgery. He lasted a week afterwards, and the mood was initially hopeful, even joyful, as the doctors felt confident in their work. Poppi was talking straight with us later that same day, though he admitted the following morning to not having any recollection of me telling him about my new telescope and how I’d actually asked for a Gameboy Advance.
After making me think it was my idea, my parents reached out to my class friends and arranged a party to distract me from the fact that Poppi caught C. diff and his immune system just wasn’t putting in the work, not that I would have understood any of that at the time. I’d be making shit up if I told you I remembered the last thing we talked about; I saw him as extra tired and failed to dog-ear any of those memories.
Not only was Poppi broke when he died, he was in debt up to his wildbush brows. The sum owed on his Lowe’s card alone was enough to cover a funeral for him and two of his VFW pals. My mother and two of my aunts, who had flown in from New Hampshire when things started looking sticky, brought him home from the funeral home in a box no bigger than a toaster. I remember thinking that’s what it was because it was still warm when they set it on the table. I could feel him glowing from across the room.
Later, at a small memorial service, one of my aunts told me that Pop Pop, which is what her daughters called him, was with God now. It’s such a childlike statement, one that sounds out of place in any adult’s mouth, but she was right, and I knew it. Poppi was likely as disappointed at the big man’s uninspired craftsmanship as I was, but, for the first in my young life, I believed that what she had said was right on the money.
None of it mattered.
The army he was dishonorably discharged from didn’t matter.
The freshly abandoned woman he rushed into a marriage with didn’t matter.
The nine kids they raised, none of which they created together, didn’t mattered.
The daughter that mothered me.
She lives and breathes and bakes and doesn’t matter.
I’m having trouble remembering my father’s face, but oh well.
Once I shot a caged raccoon at point blank range and felt happy and sad.
Lauren Mazingo.
You don’t need my name.
His hip. C. diff. Gameboys. Poppi. Pop Pop.
His death didn’t matter because he didn’t matter. Never did, not a second.
The warm toaster of ashes I woke up early to cradle in the dark.
Simple as that, but not as simple as this: my request: I need you to kill my god. I need you to kill my god for what he’s done to me and how he’s made me matter so little. I’m powerless, or else I’d do it myself, would have done it a long time ago, the first moment I looked into his eyes, my eyes, and couldn’t see myself in their reflection—instead I saw a dark sun burning blue-black right there where I should’ve been. It could tell I wanted to scream and its fire swelled. I thought it would eat up the whole face of my god until he blinked and un-paused his game. I don’t have much time. My gout has inched its way into my knees and my shingles have ripened into scarlet, rosy bubble-scales. He won’t kill me, so I don’t mind if you (whichever one of you decides to carry this burden) take your time figuring out the best way to guarantee your own anonymity. Don’t worry about him fighting back; he believes the cracks will open up in the earth and lick off the poison from his lips. In all likelihood, you’ll snuff him out and I’ll just fade limb by limb, lash by lash, smoke in the air.
Writing it down doesn’t make dying any easier.
Jordan James has been published in The Westchester Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Periphery Journal, Kalopsia, The Song Between our Stars, The Robert Frost Review, and Poet’s Choice,with work forthcoming in Juked.
