Frank DiPalermo
Body of Christ
It was late on a summer night in Northern California, one of the few that stayed warm
long after the sun set. The air had a strange, sexy feel that reminded me of the
time I’d left a black bathing suit in the hot sun. I put it on, and when the warm
nylon touched my balls my whole body went electric. The night was kind of like that.
I knew that in the city, right at that moment, people were getting high, getting laid, maybe even getting busted and damn, that sounded good. I knew that in the back-country, right at that moment, people were stretched out in sleeping bags on smooth granite still warm from the sun and damn, that sounded good too. But I was a thirteen-year-old, gay-but-didn’t-dare, New York dago trapped in a middle-class suburb populated entirely by Nordic-looking Protestants, most of whom hated me on sight. It wasn’t city, it wasn’t country, I wasn’t welcome, and on this crackling night the wrongness of my situation made me feel like I was about to split my skin.
After my big-voiced parents went to bed I prowled around their hideous house, a two-story like the one on
The Brady Bunch except my parents paid extra to have a row of grooved white columns hold up the staircase and two more columns at the doorway to the living room. They gave the place a creepy fakeness that made it feel like Disneyland. I hated Disneyland.
In the living room Mom had this swoopy couch with a heart-shaped back. The whole thing was upholstered in gold vinyl with a paisley imprint. I laid there until the pattern of the vinyl nudged into the skin on the back of my legs and arms, then I sat up quick, unzipping myself from the gold monster. Oh, there was something satisfying about that, something soothing about seeing the little paisleys pressed into my skin. But it wasn’t enough, not this night, no way.
The Hutch called to me.
It was right next to the couch, a massive, floor to ceiling thing, wide as a Chrysler, made of dark, greasy wood with curlicues and filigrees carved into every surface. Dad kept the sweet liquor on
the top few shelves, serious stuff on the bottom behind creaky-hinged doors. I pulled
those doors open quick, quieter that way. I lifted the half-full gallon of Gemco
Whiskey over the little bottles of more expensive stuff. The liquor inside sloshed
and shifted, made the glass jug as clumsy as Ellie Ballum, the hefty blond girl I
got paired with for the hateful ballroom lessons they gave as part of P.E.
class. Dancing with Enormous Ellie must have had taught me something about moving bulky objects around because I eased that bottle over the others without even a ding.
Damn, I loved the smoky taste of whiskey, loved the fire it started in my mouth, the pleasant slug after it landed in my stomach. But even as I swallowed I knew it wouldn’t get me where I wanted to go. Not that I knew where that was. Besides, mom put this waist-high statue of a pudgy naked boy holding a giant basket of fruit over his head right next to the hutch. Boy, he really got on my nerves. I grabbed my package of Marlboroughs and went into
the backyard just to keep myself from taking a hammer to the little bastard’s plaster ass.
Someone must have been playing on the diving board earlier because it was just damp enough to be cool. Damn, I loved lying there. It was the only place I could look up and see just sky – no houses, no fences, and none of those horrible Italian Cypresses everyone grew in their yards. I smoked and stared; saw shooting stars and something that was probably a satellite. After a while I didn’t feel like such a freak. Wait, that’s not true. I still felt like a freak but I didn’t care as much. The coolness of the diving board worked into my back. The cigarette slipped out of my fingers. I heard it sizzle in the pool.
Right then I came uncoupled.
A big invisible hand slid between me and the diving board, pulled me into the sky, sort of like a kid scooping a pollywog out of a stream. Not my body. Just some invisible me-ness rushing upward. Was I dying? I honestly didn’t care. All I knew was that my cage door was open and I was flying free. It felt incredible. It felt unbelievable. It felt like the time I took myself up on a dare.
I was all the time daring myself to do stupid stuff like find a way to touch Tom Hicknel’s ass during gym or write "Mr.
Worthington Eats Farts" on the art building’s crapper wall. I never did any of it
except this one night as I walked home after Confirmation Class, alone of course.
I cut through the old abandoned pear orchard. When I got to the middle where it
smelled kind of like cider and the sounds of the town got distant and tinny
and the dark got so much darker, I dared myself to take off all my clothes. And damn,
I did it. Then I dared myself to run around like a crazy bastard. And damn, I
did that, too. It felt so fine having the cool night air swirling over all that
secret skin. Rotten pears squished under my feet, I got scraped by branches I
couldn’t see, a sharp stick poked into my ankle, but all of that was okay.
Better than okay. It was clean and easy and lifted-up special
like when the priest holds up The Host and says this is the Body of Christ.
That’s what happened that night on the diving board, isn’t it? I somehow stumbled out of my pimply, uncoordinated, messed-up, queer body and into the Body of Christ. Which isn’t a body at all. Which has no blood or guts or boundaries. The Body of Christ is the black expanse of forever stretched between the stars, expanding and expanding, on and on. And I as I moved into it I became part of it. As I became part of it this squirmy, uncomfortable joy grew inside me.
I went higher and higher, building up some scary velocity. It felt like that moment in Star Wars right before the ship jumps into hyper-space and all the stars streak into white lines. Everything I knew and hated got small behind me while heaven opened up in front. Damn, it was pretty. But it was unfamiliar and huge and overwhelming. I panicked like a little kid who can’t swim and has been thrown into the deep end without any water-wings.
You know how Wile E. Coyote does that desperate claw and scramble right after the cliff ledge crumbles beneath him and he finds himself momentarily suspended in mid-air? I did some freak version of that, knocked myself right out of the Body of Christ and back into my own. I lay on the diving board with my eyes pinched shut, breathing like the woman in that birth movie we had to watch in health class. My mouth tasted of whiskey and there were flecks of tobacco on my tongue. The rough surface of the diving board had gone warm against my back. A night bird rustled in the azaleas. It was all like normal.
Already I’d convinced myself nothing happened. Nothing real anyway. It was just me being a freak again. Like the time I dreamt Grandma Maria wasn’t dead. She came into my room in the middle of the night, sat on my bed, put a hand on my shoulder, whispered to me in Italian. I was so happy to see her and smell the burned garlic scent that kind of followed her around. That was the secret to her tomato sauce. You had to burn the garlic. I reached out to her. I must have woken up right then because just as I was about to touch the little brown mole at the base of her pinky, she disappeared.
I missed her all over again, missed her so much it felt like someone laid a man-hole cover on my chest then parked a car on it. I cried hard and loud, the kind of crying that feels like it isn’t going to stop and makes you gasp and hiccup. Woke the whole house. Pissed off my dad because I was too old for this bullshit. Made my mom stare at me in the way I hated, like she was pretty certain something was wrong with me but not sure what.
The whole Body of Christ thing was going to turn out to be just like that, some weird kind of dream that I took too serious. At least my parents would never know about it. At least I wouldn’t have to hear my father say that I was too old for this bullshit or see that look on my mother’s face. I knew that when I opened my eyes the sky would be normal, like a painting, flat and distant, completely separate from me.
I opened my eyes.
There was no sky above me. There was only the Body of Christ.
I shot up, lit another cigarette, looked at my father’s crappy azaleas, looked at the lights from the crappy town, looked at the dark shapes of the crappy houses, looked anywhere but up. Maybe if I ignored it the Body of Christ would go away.
It didn’t.
I needed a closed door and a low ceiling so I went back in the house.
My room had this crazy black-and-white checked carpet and black-and-white drapes with drawings of vines worked into them. I had this habit; whenever I walked into my room I stood in the center and bent forward at the waist. Then I’d shake my head hard like I was saying no and really meant it. My eyes rolled from carpet to drapes and back. It made me dizzy and a little drunk. A cheap buzz. When I did it this night, when the scribble of the drapes blurred into the checks of the carpet, it reminded me of that moment of scary velocity, brought back a taste of the squirmy, uncomfortable joy. As soon as that happened the ceiling turned to Kleenex and I could feel the Body of Christ just beyond. Waiting. For me.
Holy crap, was I stuck like this? Once you know about the Body of Christ, how do you un-know it? I was so freaked out my mouth got this weird almost-taste, like when I pressed the business end of one of those square batteries to my tongue.
Only one thing I knew of would make me feel better no matter what. Yeah that. The mighty distractions offered by my own body.
It worked. There was something about the sinful, all-over tingly feeling I got right before I exploded that reminded me I had a suit of skin and a body of meat and muscle. That was some fine relief. But after a while I started to feel the Body of Christ again, just beyond the roof, pulling at the timbers.
Hell, it worked once, why wouldn’t it work twice? I did it again. And, miracle
of miracles, it worked again. Worked longer than the time before. When the
Body of Christ got back to prying at the ceiling I did it once more.
But by then I was raw and sore. So this time I didn't wait for The Body of Christ
to come calling again. I put on my headphones, stacked E.L.O, Boston, and the album
by that guy who sings
Hello Muddah, hello faddah. Here I am at Camp Granada on my
record player. I read the part of Salem’s Lot where the really creepy
bastard sacrifices the little boy and brings the vampire to life.
Then I read the crucifix scene in The Exorcist. Then I read the
scene where she pukes all over the priest. By the time I finished
the ceiling got a little more serious and the walls got back
some of their heft. By the time I finished I settled, permanently it
turned out, back inside my own skin.
©2010 by Frank DiPalermo
