Asher and I watched the clock for ten minutes after my dad left, just long enough for him to start gambling, before we began exploring the hotel.
We ran down the endless mazelike hallways, knocking on the doors we passed, emptying the ice machines and having ice-ball fights in the stairwell; took turns sitting in the maid’s cart and pushing each other into walls; tried to sneak into an after-hours dance club and got caught by the bouncer, who laughed his ass off when—with straight faces—we told him it was Asher’s twenty-first birthday. We searched the casino floor for the members of Green Day and got kicked out, scarfed down some late-night pizza, and ended up sitting on the boardwalk with our elbows on the railing and our feet dangling over the side.
“Man, this night was the shit!” Asher said. “Best birthday present ever. Hands down.”
“Yeah, you know it,” I remember saying as we listened to the waves crashing somewhere in the darkness.
“Do you think we’ll come back to this hotel when we’re adults?” Asher asked. “Do you think we’ll still be hanging out?”
If you would have put my grandfather’s Nazi P-38 handgun to my eleven-year-old head, told me to tell the truth or die, and then asked me if Asher and I would be best friends for life, I would have said yes on that night without hesitation.[40]
“Probably,” I said, and then we just sat dangling our feet off the boardwalk.
We really didn’t say much more than that; nothing all that extraordinary happened—just typical stupid-ass kid stuff.[41]
Maybe it was the type of high only kids can get and understand.
There were hundreds of adults drinking alcohol and gambling and smoking that night, but I bet none of them felt the high Asher and I did.
Maybe that’s why adults drink, gamble, and do drugs—because they can’t get naturally lit anymore.
Maybe we lose that ability as we get older.
Asher sure did.
TWENTY-ONE
One day after a long, depressing afternoon wearing my funeral suit and studying miserable adults in Philadelphia, I exited my town’s train station, and this girl[42] I had never seen before stuck a piece of paper in my face. Then she said, “The way, the truth, and the light!”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Here’s a tract. Read all about it.”
I took the piece of paper, which was like a mini-comic book. The pictures and words were all in red ink, which looked dramatic and intense. On the front cover was a picture of a smiling man. Underneath his kind face were these words: You can be the nicest guy in the world, but without Jesus in your heart, you are going to hell.
I remember laughing when I read it, because it seemed so over the top—like a joke maybe. And I wondered if this throwback-looking girl was playing some sort of game—like this was just part of her spiderweb, her trap.
“Who are you?” I said, trying to sound cool and collected and Bogie-like.
“My name is Lauren Rose. And I’m here to show you the way. Tell you the good news.”
Her name was Lauren and she was a tall blond.
Lauren.
If I were the type of person who believed in signs, I would have been a little freaked, because she actually looked very much like a youngish version of Lauren Bacall, a tall blond who was also cat-faced, and was devastatingly beautiful in her prime—irresistible. And after watching Bogie win Bacall so many times in black-and-white Hollywood land, I felt a sort of inevitability. This would be the first girl I would kiss. I declared it in my mind—set the goal, and then I locked on like a greyhound chasing a rabbit.
“What good news?” I asked, trying to sound as calm, suave, and confident as black-and-white Bogie—pretending that we were in The Big Sleep. “Because I sure could use some.”
“That Jesus Christ died for your sins.”
“Oh.”
I didn’t know how I felt about that, and her selling religion seemed to snap me out of the scene for a moment, but I had already set the goal—and I knew that Bogie always gets Bacall no matter what the odds, no matter how many bad guys are in his way. So I tried to change the subject.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you before. Do you go to high school here in town?”
“No, I don’t,” she said to me, and then said, “Jesus loves you,” to a group of businessmen who ignored her and the tract she was trying to hand them. They didn’t even look at her. It was like she was invisible. And while I’m not really one for getting into debates with religious people either, I felt bad for Lauren, because she had this desperate look in her eyes—the kind that needs someone else to make it go away. I imagined she was invisible to most commuters, who only wanted to go home after a long day of work, which I knew from many hours of observation.
I mean—there are people who believe in one of the various gods available already and therefore don’t need the tract, and then there are people who will never believe in this sort of thing. And I imagine the gals and guys in between mostly aren’t interested in being harassed on their way to and from work.
“Where do you go to school?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Oh, I’m homeschooled.”
“So your mom teaches you?”
“And my dad. Yes.”
She kept looking eagerly at the people coming out of the subway station and wasn’t really paying me much attention anymore, which I thought was weird, since I was the only person who had taken her pamphlet. You’d think she’d concentrate on winning me over, right? She was a classic femme fatale—determined, gorgeous, a real dame.
“Why?” I said.
“Why what?”
“Why are you homeschooled?”
“My parents want me to have a Christian education.”
“What’s that?” I said, just to keep the conversation going.
“An education rooted in the Bible.”
“Oh.”
“Jesus loves you,” she said to an old man who ignored her outstretched pamphlet.
“If I read this,” I said, holding up the story she gave me, “can we talk about it afterward?”
She turned to face me and her eyes lit up. “Are you serious? You’ll really read it and consider giving your life to Jesus Christ?”
“Sure,” I said, and then laughed. I must have been the first person who ever agreed to read her tracts. She was acting like a little excited kid, but she had to be about my age—and yet she seemed so much younger, maybe unspoiled, like she could still get really excited about something in public without trying to hide it. Even though she was getting excited about Jesus, I liked the fact that she was genuinely keyed up about anything.
She said, “Do you want to come to my church this Sunday?”
“Let me read this and we can talk about it.”
“How will you contact me afterward?” she said, looking very concerned.
“I’m going to read it on that bench over there and then we can talk, okay?”
She bit down on her bottom lip and nodded way too enthusiastically—like it sort of creeped me out—and if she wasn’t doing that cat-eye thing that Lauren Bacall sometimes does in Bogie films, the thing where she squints sophisticatedly and looks up at her man from under her eyebrows or seductively out of the corners of her eyes, I probably would have left right then.
When I started toward the bench, she said, “Oh, wait,” and then began shuffling through her papers. She smiled and said, “Read this one instead,” and extended a new pamphlet toward me. “It’s for teenagers.”
“Okay.” I sat down on the bench and read it in about five minutes.
It was sort of unbelievable.
Actually, it was a little insane—and should have been my cue to get the hell away from this dame.
The basic gist is that there are four teenagers in a convertible, out “cruising”—two guys, two girls. They go to the woods to “park,” which I gather basically means to drink beer, make out, and feel each other up. The protagonist of the pamphlet is the boy in the backseat, who is a “born-again Christian” and feeling a bit conflicted about the “sins” that are happening. In the little bubble over the kid’s head it said something like, “Cindy is so beautiful and I really want to go all the way with her, but I know Jesus would be disappointed in me. I already let him down by drinking beer.”[43]
At one point you get the protagonist’s view of the front seat—it’s one of those old-style front seats that’s like a bench with no space in between the driver and passenger, or no center console, which makes me think this is a very old tract—maybe from the 1950s. And we see the girl’s naked ankles sticking up in the air, which I guess means the couple in the front is having sex. Cindy, the girl in the backseat, says to the protagonist, “You know you wanna. Let’s have some fun. Didn’t your mother ever tell you to try new things?”
The next frame shows protagonist Johnny chugging a beer.
And then we see them driving home and the driver’s eyes are slits, which I assume means he is drunk.
We get a close-up of Johnny’s face next, and the bubble over his head reads, “I let you down, Jesus. Sex. Booze. I’m so so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?”
You won’t believe this but the next frame shows the car crashing into a tree, and then we see Johnny’s ghost floating up to heaven, which is when I figured out that he was dead. I was sort of happy that the other three teenagers lived at least, but I couldn’t figure out the point of the story.
The pamphlet shows a sober Johnny in heaven speaking with Jesus, who has a typical Jesus beard and white robe and halo, but Jesus kind of looks like a professional baseball player to me and I’m not sure why. He has that baseball-player look with shaggy hair and a beard, but he’s clean-cut at the same time. Not like a hillbilly or anything. Do you know what I mean?
“I’m so sorry I let you down, Jesus,” Johnny says.
“You asked forgiveness and I have forgiven you because you are a Christian,” Jesus said, which I thought was pretty nice.
“Thank you for sparing the lives of my friends,” Johnny says.
Jesus gets this really sad look on his face, which lets you know that the friends didn’t live, and I almost stopped reading right there, because I was pretty sure I knew what sort of bullshit was coming. “Why didn’t you tell your friends about me before they died?” Jesus says. “You had so many opportunities.”
“My friends died?” Johnny says with this horrible look on his face.
The next frame shows the three other teenagers screaming and holding their faces as a sea of flames burns and engulfs them.
“They could be here in heaven right now with you, Johnny, but you didn’t tell them about me,” Jesus says.
Johnny puts his head in his hands and weeps.
Then there are numbers you can call and websites too, all of which will help you give your life to Jesus.
Jesus Christ! I thought.
It was a wild story, and I was mostly confused, so I walked over to Lauren and said, “I’m not sure I get it.”
This awful, anxious look bloomed on her face and she said, “You don’t want to go to hell, do you?”
I was going to say I don’t believe in hell, but I was determined to kiss Lauren Bogie-style, so I didn’t want to say anything that would end the conversation. I had seen enough Bogie films to know that you have to ride out the insanity when it comes to beautiful women, and even with all the crazy talk, Lauren seemed to get more and more attractive every time I looked at her. Also, this was the longest conversation I’d had with a girl my age, so I didn’t want to blow it.
I asked, “Why didn’t Johnny go to hell if he had sex and drank, just like the others?”
“He asked Jesus into his heart.”
“What do you mean?”
“No matter what you’ve done, if you ask Jesus into your heart, you get to go to heaven. The blood of Jesus Christ washes our hearts clean as snow.”
“So you just have to say magic words?”
“What?”
“If you say, ‘Jesus come into my heart,’ you are covered? You get to go to heaven then. That’s it?”
“You have to mean it.”
“How can you tell if you mean it?”
“You know in your heart, and God knows. What’s in your heart?” Lauren pointed at my chest.
“I don’t know,” I said, because my heart was full of desire. I wanted to kiss Lauren like the girl kissed Johnny in the car. I wanted to “park” with Lauren in the worst way. That’s what my heart was telling me.
“Do you want to come to my church this Sunday?” Lauren asked.
“Will you be there?”
“Of course! My father’s the pastor. You can sit with me in my family’s pew, right up front!”
I didn’t want to go to any church, but I knew going would help my cause, so I said, “Okay, then.”
That Sunday I went to Lauren’s church, which I had walked by a million times without even giving it—or what it stood for—a thought. It was a medieval-looking stone building with an impressive steeple, a classic bell tower, circular stained-glass windows, red cushions on wooden pews, and all the rest.[44]
The men inside were wearing suits and I had come in jeans and a sweater, which made me feel self-conscious, but no one said anything to me about it, which I thought was civilized of the churchgoers.
I found Lauren sitting in the front row with her mother, who was also a head-turner, like Lauren, which gave me high hopes for the day.[45]
They looked more like sisters than mother and daughter, and I wondered if believing in Jesus kept you younger-looking. But then I thought, if that were really true, Linda would be the biggest Jesus freak going, because she’d drown a baby in a bathtub if it would make her look ten years younger.
The best part about the church were the huge organ pipes at the back, up in the balcony, which were so loud you could almost see the air buzzing when the organist played. It made me feel like I had traveled back in time, that organ music, although I’m not really sure why.
Just to make things more interesting, I pretended that I was an anthropologist from the future sent back to observe what religious life was like in the past.
There were announcements about various church goings-on—like Bible study groups meeting at this or that time, and church dinners, and which people needed help, and who was in the hospital—which was nice, because it really made you feel like everyone took care of each other here, like they all were part of a gigantic family.
I could really see the appeal, for sure.
Next, everyone sang a few hymns—which was also kind of nice, because where else will you experience a few hundred people singing together?—and then Lauren’s father gave a talk about humility and humbling ourselves so that we might be able to best serve God, which I didn’t really understand.
I could really see the appeal, for sure.
Next, everyone sang a few hymns—which was also kind of nice, because where else will you experience a few hundred people singing together?—and then Lauren’s father gave a talk about humility and humbling ourselves so that we might be able to best serve God, which I didn’t really understand.
If god existed and he created the whole universe, like these people believed, why would he need our help, let alone our praise?
Why would he need us to serve him?
Was god really both all powerful and emotionally needy?
It didn’t really make any sense to me at all, and I knew I was going to have a hard time conveying this idea to my superiors in the future when I—being a time-traveling anthropologist—report on ancient religions.
There was more nice singing after that, and then we all waited in line to shake Lauren’s dad’s hand, because he was the head of this church.
So many people kissed Lauren’s dad’s ass—like he was a god himself—it took forever for the line to move.
When we got to the front, Pastor Rose patted my back and said, “Are you the fish my Lauren reeled in this week?”
Fish? I thought. This was getting even more bizarre.
“I guess so,” I said, wondering why the hell he was wearing a graduation gown.
“You come to my office sometime and we’ll talk man-to-man about the finer points of Christianity, okay?”
“I prefer speaking with Lauren,” I said, and he gave me a look that let me know that was definitely the wrong answer.
“Well, when you get serious about Jesus, I’ll be here. Young men like you need mentors, and that’s a man’s job, son. Lauren’s a fine Christian young woman, no doubt. But she brought you to us for a reason. You come see me, okay?” He winked—I shit you not—and then shook the next person’s hand, so Lauren and I moved on to lunch in this basement gym where tables and chairs had been set up and everything smelled of sweaty socks and pot roast.
“So what did you think?” Lauren asked me over plastic plates and red Solo cups.
Church was okay, I guess. I liked the singing part, and the organ. But mostly the whole thing just seemed sort of silly to me. I was smart enough not to say that to Lauren. Instead I went into Bogie mode and said, “You look very pretty in that dress.” It was a deep violet number, knee-length, with spaghetti straps. She was like one of those exotic plants that lure insects into their sticky sweet traps and then eat them. When I looked at her, I wanted to be eaten.
“Thank you,” she said. “So do you think you want to give your life to Jesus?”
I was just about to lie when this muscle-y blond football-player-looking kid snuck up behind Lauren and started to massage her shoulders. “Hey, buttercup,” he said.
Buttercup? Really?
“Hey,” Lauren said in a way that let me know this wasn’t just any old church member. He looked like the Johnny kid in the pamphlet and nothing like me. “Leonard, this is my boyfriend, Jackson. Jackson, this is Leonard.”
“I hear you’re serious about making Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior,” Jackson said to me. “It’s definitely the way to go.”
“Do you enjoy parking?” I asked, although I’m not sure why. Probably because I was angry and just wanted to leave. I felt so tricked by Lauren. Being eaten by her was one thing, but introducing me to her boyfriend after she’d led me on—that was entirely unacceptable. She used her femme fatale skills to get me into her church, bait-and-switch style, when she already had a boyfriend who was much more normal-looking than me—a completely different type. “Do you guys park?”
“Leonard!” Lauren said, because she definitely got the reference, although it took her a second.
“What are you talking about?” Jackson said, and made a confused face.
I looked up at the clock on the gym wall—I remember it was protected by mesh wire so basketballs wouldn’t smash it.[46]
“Quarter to one already?” I asked, and then started to lie again, only these were escape lies. The Bogie-Bacall fantasy had been temporarily shattered, so I just wanted out of this church. “Holy shit! I have to roll my grandmother over in her bed. She gets bedsores if I don’t do it every four hours or so. My grandfather does it when I’m at school, but he refuses to do it on the weekends. He says, ‘The weekends are mine,’ which seems mean until you know that he has Alzheimer’s, so you really can’t hold it against him. Okay. Off I go.”
I stood up and walked out of the gym, up the stairs, and out into the afternoon.
Lauren followed me and kept saying, “Wait up. Let’s talk. What’s going on here? I thought you were serious about Jesus.”
I spun around and said, “I’m a devout atheist. I don’t believe in hell, so none of this scares me. I really just wanted to go parking with you, like the kids do in that pamphlet you gave me, because I think you’re beautiful—like Lauren Bacall—and so unlike the girls at my school. And I sort of admire your standing at the train station all alone giving out pamphlets, trying to save people. You seemed so interesting when I met you—like no one else I had ever met before. But you don’t seem the same in your church—like there’s no risk being Christian here because everyone is Christian in your church. You’re just one of many here, where at the train station you were one of a kind. And I’m a one-of-a-kind type of person, and that’s just the way it is. So we’re definitely breaking up. And I can’t believe your boyfriend looks like Johnny from the pamphlet. Jesus Christ, you could do better!”
Lauren just stood there with her mouth open.
“I’m sort of crazy. I’m mostly lonely,” I said, because she looked little-kid confused and I was starting to feel bad for her again. I guess I only liked her when we were alone. “I follow sad miserable-looking adults on the trains all day sometimes and so I thought we had weird train-station behavior in common and—”
“You all right, Lauren?” said Jackson, who was now somehow rubbing Lauren’s shoulders again and glaring at me like he wanted to kill me before I could accept Jesus Christ into my heart, and would therefore—in his mind—end up burning in a sea of fire.
“She’s all right,” I said. “I’m leaving. Problem solved.”
I left.
TWENTY-TWO
I’d see Lauren at the train station from time to time but she pretended like she didn’t know who I was, and I pretended like I didn’t know who she was either.
This went on for a year or so.
Then one day, I saw her in Center City being harassed by a bum, who was following her and yelling, “Give me a sandwich and you think you saved the world? It don’t work like that! You think God sent you to give me two pieces of bread with a slice of cheese and a flimsy circle of bologna and cheap bright-yellow mustard and that’s supposed to make up for ten years of living in a cardboard box? That’s what you want me to believe? God loves me because you gave me a half-assed sandwich? I’m homeless—not crazy!”
The guy had wild eyes and a lion’s mane of gray hair that made his head look like a frozen sun or something.
“I’m sorry I disturbed you,” Lauren said.
“That ain’t good enough,” the bum said. “I gotta few things you can tell your god the next time you pray in your nice warm house with a toilet in it and a whole refrigerator of food that you’d never give to bums like me because it costs too fucking much and so it ain’t bum food. I bet you got a dog that eats better than me.”
“I’m sorry,” Lauren said. “I’m sorry.”
It was kind of funny seeing Lauren getting verbally beat down by a bum, and I was totally on the bum’s side, but Lauren looked so rattled that I had to intervene. And so I went up to the bum and said, “I was sent to you by the Atheist Society of America. We believe in chaos and no god at all, and want to congratulate you on putting this uppity Christian in her place. As a reward we’d like to give you twenty dollars that you may use to buy a superior sandwich or whatever you’d like. No strings attached.”
The gray lion-haired bum looked at me like I was insane, but he snatched the money out of my hand and walked away.
“He’s just going to buy alcohol or drugs, you know,” Lauren said, which made me sad, because she didn’t know that man at all, let alone whether he had a dependency problem.
“I don’t believe we’ve met before. I’m Leonard Peacock,” I said, and stuck out my hand confidently, putting on the Bogie charm.
“I remember who you are,” Lauren said, ignoring my outstretched hand, playing hard-to-get Bacall again. She looked really shook up, so I didn’t take offense. “Why do you think he got so angry at me?”
I didn’t feel like listing all the reasons why she deserved the verbal beatdown from the homeless man—mostly because I knew that wouldn’t help my cause—so I just changed the subject. “You’re welcome.”
“What?”
“You no longer have a bum trailing you, yelling at you.”
“Oh,” she said. “I was fine. God would have protected me.”
“Maybe god sent me to protect you,” I said, playing devil’s advocate.
“Maybe.”
“God says you should have coffee with me right now?”
“You want to have coffee with me? Why?”
“We can talk more about god,” I said, giving her the line she wanted.
“What you said to Jackson and me at my church,” Lauren said. “It was really rude.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry,” I said just to get her to have coffee with me, because her face was all red from her being harassed, and she looked so femme fatale—so much like she needed saving—that I didn’t even care she had trap written all over her.
“I’m not going to park with you,” she said in this really serious way that depressed me; I only had so much Bogart in me, truth be told, and I was already running low.
“Do people in your church really use the word park as a euphemism for having sex in cars? Do teenagers really have sex in cars? I don’t even drive.”
“If you’re just going to make fun of me for going to church and believing in God, I don’t want to have coffee with you, Mr. Atheist.”
Her calling me Mr. Atheist really deflated me because it felt like a wall—like my personal beliefs were going to keep us from being friends and ultimately kissing. It was like once again someone was labeling me and putting me in a box just as soon I expressed myself. Suddenly, the whole deal didn’t feel like a game anymore.
Consequences, Herr Silverman says. Consequences.
I abandoned my plan. I made a real attempt. “I’m not going to make fun of you, okay? I just want to understand you. Maybe we can have an exchange? Maybe we can talk about our beliefs over coffee without trying to change each other. What do you think?”
“I’m not going to kiss you.”
“You have Jackson to kiss, right?”
“I’ve never kissed Jackson either.”
“I thought he was your boyfriend.”
“I’m saving myself for my husband.”
“Saving yourself?”
“Yep.”
“So you won’t even kiss someone before you get married?”
“Not the way you’re thinking of kissing. A peck on the lips or cheek doesn’t count.”
I must say, her never having been kissed was really attractive to me for some reason. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe I was drawn to Lauren’s innocence. Maybe it reminded me of who I was before all the bad stuff went down.
I said, “You owe me one cup of coffee for getting the homeless man off your back. I know this place around the corner. What do you say?”
“We’ll talk about our religious beliefs. Like an exchange, right?”
“Right.”
And then we walked to this coffee shop that had crazy huge couches that were random geometrical shapes like triangles and rhombuses and circles. It was like being in a day-care room for giant babies.
We got a seat and I ordered a double espresso, because I thought that would sound really sophisticated and cool and was the most Bogart-like thing I could order since I couldn’t order gin or scotch. Lauren ordered a peppermint mocha, which made her seem like a child again, and I also liked that about her,[47] so I called the waiter back and said, “I’ll also have a peppermint mocha.”
Lauren looked around the shop and up at the ceiling like she was examining the construction of it, making sure the roof wouldn’t fall on our heads, and then said, “So why are you wearing a suit?”
“I do that sometimes when I take a day off school to do research.”
“What are you researching?”
“Aging and the possibility of adult happiness.”
“Jesus can make you happy.”
I laughed and said, “Do you talk about anything else besides Jesus?”
Lauren smiled and said, “So why have you been ignoring me for a year?”
“I haven’t. You’ve been ignoring me.”
“I have not been ignoring you! I try to catch your eye whenever I see you at the train station, but you walk by so quickly without looking. I’ve actually been quite hurt by your snubs.”
I noted that she was doing the cat-face femme-fatale thing again. She was now back in trap mode. “What about Jackson?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“I bet he doesn’t want you talking to me.”
“He would be happy if we talked about God. He believes we should save everyone too.”
“Then why doesn’t he help you pass out Jesus pamphlets?”
“He used to, but he’s at college now. And he’s not my boyfriend anymore.”
That bit of news got my heart pumping. “Is that why you’re having coffee with me today? Because you no longer have a boyfriend?” I said, hoping for the right answer, but the waiter came back with our peppermint mochas.
Lauren sipped hers and said, “Yum!”
That made me smile. I sipped mine and it tasted just like a melted York Peppermint Pattie.
“Maybe I could take you to dinner sometime, what do you think?”
“Are you asking me out on a date?” Lauren said.
“Okay, scratch that,” I said, because her eyebrows got all scrunchy and her eyes got all squinty, and not in the sexy cat-face Bacall way either. “Maybe this right here could be our first date, and then we won’t have to worry about the asking and saying yes part. We could just start now.”
“Well, I only date boys who are Christian.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.” I wasn’t really that daunted at first because it seemed like such a silly thing to me—something we could easily overcome. I didn’t realize how limiting her Christianity actually was.