My Life in the Devil's Rainforest

My earliest memories are of staring at the smooth, convex curvature of the clear yellow pine wood on the back of the seats in the Assembly of God church in Santa Ana, CA. I can still hear the somnolescent droning, on and on and on, during the hundreds---no, make that thousands---of Sunday morning and evening and Wednesday evening services. The few dozen hymns, repeated in heavy rotation, were always rendered as a funeral dirge, regardless of their otherwise joyful message: i.e. Life sucks here, but we'll have it good when we're dead. Much the same as peasants have, by necessity, done since time immemorial.

The seatbacks did change, however, as we changed churches. Some were darker than others, and a few of the really interesting ones might have a tiny knot or imperfection, or some asymmetrical patterns in their wavy grain; to which, like all primates, my nearly-comatose little brain would latch onto like a beetle in a chimp's barren concrete cage. To pass the time I'd stare at these things till they became whatever my mind could twist them into. Most often devils, of one variety or another, staring back at me. Occasionally, whe the pastor was on an interminably loquacious roll, and the ocular muscles began to fatigue, the little devils would morph themselves into breasts. But this was very rare; and usually, after fully awakening, they proved themselves to be simply devils again, sadly.

I shudder to calculate the number of hours spent in church. And, in fact, in my opinion, it borders on cruel and unusual punishment. Because if listening to thousands of hours of moaning and crying and blubbering and "speaking in tongues," if that doesn't seriously deform a child's gray matter, well then, he was probably FUBAR before he was ever conceived.

Myself? Probably a little of both. Nevertheless, I endured, fantasizing and scribbling, sleeping and grumbling, and always my gaze returning to that devil on the back of the pew.

And, you know, the funny thing, uncanny actually, about that devil? It was that he was always, without fail, staring directly at me. Seriously! Even when, seeing we were headed for one of our regular pews, whose seatbacks I knew by heart after years of careful study, I'd maneuver myself forward or backward in the line of my mother's ducklings in order to be sitting in a pew not directly facing him; yet he would somehow ALWAYS be staring at me! Always! Even if ol' Beelzebub was three or four pews away.

And thus was I convinced (by the logic that brews in a child's mind during thousands of hours of mental and emotional torture) at a precociously early age that all this moaning and groaning and crying and pleading and babbling and speaking in tongues and hopping up and down and keeling over "in the spirit," I was convice that it was all wasted on me, if not the most intractable sinner, then scorchingly close. Indeed, to borrow a phrase from my captors, I "knew that I knew" that the devil already had his grip on me; that regardless of any Herculean effort of intercession that might be put forth in prayer and fasting (whatever that was) for me, that I was, on that glorious day when the trumpets sounded, doomed to run with the devil....at least till I was too old to have fun any longer. Like 20.

I figured it this way. There was on the one hand God: which meant a life of a) church; b) prayer; c) discipline; e) suicidally depressing music; f) eternal life (whatever that was); and g) more church.

On the other hand there was the devil: which meant a life filled with a) breasts; b) fun people; c) lots more breasts; d) hellfireandbrimstone (whatever that was); e) NO MORE CHURCH; and f) sex for eternity (whatever that was).

Now, the fact that I really had no idea what sex was really had no bearing on the decision. I knew that this sex thing, or stuff, was something I simply must have, even if it meant dragging my beheaded torso through all that hellfireandbrimstone. I knew that sex had something to do with breasts, and with warm female flesh, and with that warm stiffness in the mornings, and that was enough for me. (Note: I also had some queasy suspicions that there were some positively distasteful things going on between men and women; things which, as far as I could tell, had nothing to do with breasts and were therefore not worth the time to investigate; things having to do with the nether regions of the female universe; things which, at that time, were too bizarre for even my rapidly twisting mind---acts for which I'd yet to form a theory).

Truth be told, even at the tender age of four I understood that there was some fundamental flaw in this whole "heaven-and-hell" scheme. I mean why, in heaven's name, would this God---this big old guy up there, on whom all this preposterous grovellation was heaped---WHY in the world would he make a girl, if she wasn't to be enjoyed as often and as much as humanly possible, and at the earliest possible encounter?

"WHY?" I asked him.

But there was no answer. Just as there never seemed to be any answers to any of my, or my friends, or my brothers and sisters, or even my parents' requests. Not so much as a murmurred maybe to even the slightest of our entreaties. Example: "Dear Heavenly Father, please kill this evil slimy hissing creature beneath my bed. Injeezuznameayman." I mean, come on, you'd think that he'd at least take pity on a petrified stiff little guy. Eh? Wouldn't ya? You'd think he'd think to himself: Well, maybe if I just show the little tike an few quark's worth of compassion, maybe zap a cockroach or a potato bug, anything to let him know I'm here....

And you wait. And wait. And nothin'! Not so much as a word. So much for that moniker.

Y'see, it ain't just the one thing. I mean sex is pretty much the meaning to life, but there are other things in life that you have to brush aside, circumvent, and otherwise endure in order to nuzzle up to those warm fleshy mammys that have driven and twisted and tortured homo-sapien sapien males since we first looked into that still clear pond and saw that reflection of our faces (superimposed on a gigantic pair of breasts)

To be continued

Marrs