judas. we’ve been pleased with you on the board.
that’s good, because i hadn’t said or done anything.
were you aware we’ve begun a preaching council?
i wasn’t.
while one of its objectives is to advise the pastoral team on themes that may be important for the congregation to hear and that we may have missed, it’s also an opportunity for those we feel are sufficiently gifted to have an opportunity to preach themselves.
i fingered the dead shrimp in my risotto and looked at juan’s chest hair, drunken and dancing at the party of his open shirt.
it wouldn’t be too often, of course, and the topics would have to be pre-approved and the team would be available for consultation if necessary, but it’s a chance for the preaching load to be shared more than it’s historically been and for the congregation to hear from someone other than me.
and juan laughed his juanjuan laugh and i watched his pasta-belly leap with the happiness of the ages.
there’s something else i’d like to talk to you about.
his voice softened and he leaned forward as if we were fellow cabalists about to share the combination to unlock god’s heart. my pulse quickened while i imagined the two of us stalking bear and cougar on the pacific rim and afterwards watching the angels ascending and descending the ladder to the stars. but i was confused; i knew juan wasn’t interested in my soul and from what the man of gin had said, i didn’t think i was gendered in such a way as to make him seduce me. nevertheless i waited, sweaty and pregnant with jesus.
have you read iron john?
i’d read it, but i suspected it was a trick question, so i said no.
4 or 5 of us men who like to read have been talking about forming a book club. something casual, once a month or so, maybe here at mama’s. everyone knows you’ve got a good mind and we thought you might be interested.
hmmm. i drew a psychic cost-benefit analysis table in my mind.
pros | cons |
i could … observe juan observing me | he could observe me observing him observing me |
… further investigate whether he was or wasn’t the messiah | disillusionment was possible |
… interact with people who like to read | no one likes to read anymore |
… talk about men with men | women were more interesting to talk about men with than men |
… explore the gin man’s claims |
pros 5, cons 4
in an exciting match at the kraft dinner center in judas city, the judas pros narrowly defeated the judas cons by a score of 5 to 4. it was a back-and-forth bite-your-nails sort of game, a real edge-of-your-seater, and while the cons were never ahead, they also never gave up | until they had to, which was when it was all over and judas, the cons’ captain, was heard saying, we outplayed them and it could have gone either way but everyone did their best and i’d like to say hi to mom. judas, the captain of the pros, said, we outplayed them and it | could have gone either way but everyone did their best and i’d like to say hi to mom. the winner gets to advance to book club, whereas the loser has to go into judas’s very creepy basement and play ping-pong with himself. |
men talking to men about men—more particularly men talking to men about notions of maleness in a book written by a man—is a curious thing if you’ve never done it. to cope, i ordered a bottle of wine for my entrée and 10 minutes into the dinner and halfway into the bottle i decided on a strategy of absurdity.
man a it’s all a bit socially constructed, don’t you think?
man b maleness?
man a no, iron john.
man c did anyone see the game last night?
man b well, it all depends what you mean.
me man is absurd.
juan i remember my father walking down the driveway when i was 12 saying he’d never come back, and he didn’t.
man a i don’t think there’s any way out of it really.
man b i think we need more community, more times like this.
man a like they say, be a man, but you know …
man b i think a man is whatever you are.
me a man’s a cock—99% jelly and 1% carrot.
man a judas has a point.
man b what does bly say about it?
man a doesn’t he say the jelly-carrot combo isn’t working?
man b like we need more carrot.
man c viagra in the tapwater.
me carrot jelly.
man a i think the church has something legitimate to contribute here.
man b i think it’s all about our mothers.
juan what are you thinking of, man a?
man a maybe a regular men’s night. or a retreat with men speaking about men. to men.
man c all i know is i like the smell of pussy.
man b juan, did you invite this loser?
juan i think those are good ideas, maybe you can raise them with the board.
man c it smells good.
man b i just think we have enough programs. and we’re all busy as it is. with our jobs and wives and children and houses and finances and parents and cars and church commitments and reputations and insecurities and psychotherapy, there’s not much more we can take. something’s got to give.
juan what would bly do?
man b bly would do something less programmatic i think.
man c fuck bly.
man b i think part of the problem is we think there’s a problem. we just need to be ourselves.
man a i don’t buy the whole be yourself marketing campaign; i mean i know it works and i’ve certainly used it when i’ve had to, but i think we’re all someone else really.
man c like your mothers with dildos hidden under the mattress.
man b it’s more that we all have an image, some notion of a man we should be and it’s that notion that we try to be and sometimes in our best or most deceitful moments think we are.
man c i love to shag, loud and long and clear, i love to shag, i do it most of the year. some people shag through their noses, sounding …
man b mary poppins, for example.
man a but she’s not a man.
man b precisely.
man c some people shag through their teeth goodness snakes …
man b but when you’re awake in the middle of the night and your wife’s asleep and you’re really thinking about life, isn’t mary poppins your ideal man … independent, strong, articulate …
man a she can fly …
man b … knows what to do with the kids, resourceful, screws the bank and the banker …
man c and you know she’s getting pussy for dinner. if mary ain’t a dyke, i’m a lesbian.
man a so, like, bly’s got it wrong.
man b it’s not that bly has it wrong, it’s that all bly is is words and words don’t do anything anymore. poppins gets things done.
me men. what are they but the needle in the greenback
man a haystack
me that they’re looking for? what are men other than the hiss you hear from a wounded tire, pigeon poop and a poem about pigeon poop and maybe the laws about not pigeon-pooping but nothing not about pigeons? men are a song in the night with no one listening but a worm, he’s a worm stranded on a sunny sidewalk waiting for a shoe, he is women but with woe, he’s woeman, men is … {singing} my friends are wrong and the air is gray, there are rakes in the places where i used to say that i’m crazy for love but i’m not coming on, i’m just stroking my tumescence in the tower, in the flower of bong …
man c bonk
me bonk
and man c ordered two bottles of hendricks gin and we all drank and sang and none of us remembered anything.
the next morning i woke up with man c beside me, reading eleanor and franklin: the story of their relationship.
the problem with your book club, judas, is it has no chutzpah. everyone’s scared. men a and b are scared of their wives. juan is scared of his mother and his wife and his lovers. and you’re scared of yourself. you all want to be men of the past, with god and spears and harems, but you can’t be because society doesn’t let you, you’d like to be men of the future but you can’t be that either because no one knows what it is yet and even if you did you wouldn’t have the courage to be it; so you’re stuck in the middle with yourselves, sandwiched by time, being eaten by abstractions, clinging to technology and women as if they were the next chapter in the west’s advance instead of the grand subversions that they really are, subversions you secretly desire but don’t have the courage to come to terms with. and that, my phallic freak, is religion in a nutshell. let us pray.
and he dove underneath the covers and began doing things that weren’t very baptist.
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