Angry Conversations with God (18 page)

“I didn’t know you smoked.” Butler smirked.

“Neither did I,” I replied through a smoke ring.

“And aren’t you a Christian?”

“I’m trying to quit.”

Butler laughed. “Well, then, Merry Christmas to me.”

A week later, I was at Butler’s apartment. (We’d gone to the movies four nights in a row, and every night ended making out
in his car, after which I went home to drink and smoke away my anxiety. At least I wasn’t overeating!) I even drank before
I came over, to silence the Still, Small Squatter.

Nevertheless, I informed Butler that
no way
was I going to have sex with him. (It had been…Yeesh, fourteen years? I was
not
going to admit that!) “I’m not comfortable, Butler. I need time to get to know you as a person.”

“I respect your integrity.” Butler smiled. Those cheekbones. Those eyes. Jerk. “Let’s just go slow; let’s know each other
well.” Well, a guy who honors your boundaries is really,
really
hot. And so with a great deal of alcohol and denial, I ended my self-imposed fourteen-year sabbatical.
Whoosh!
Over the falls I went. It felt great. As long as I kept drinking.

“That misogynist?” Gwen exclaimed. “You passed on Pedro for the Rake of Harvard?”

“I don’t know what got into me. It won’t happen again.”

But the semester resumed and it did happen again. A lot. Butler was great! He was smart, educated, and funny; he could even
be romantic when he wanted. Yes, I had concerns. I didn’t go back to grad school to major in obsessive relationships. But
I could manage this for a while. As long as it didn’t interfere with my writing.

But it did interfere with my writing. I had to drink to relax, drink more to silence my guilt, then smoke to calm my resentment
over feeling guilty, then rationalize my drinking and smoking. I was too exhausted to write. My secular friends ate, drank,
had sex, and went on with their day. They also fell in love, got married, had families, and recycled. Premarital sex didn’t
turn them into monsters!

If only religion hadn’t blimped sex into this life-altering, spirit/soul/body transcendent unto-the-Lord moment that you can
enjoy only when you’re married, which of course you can’t do until you get the sin out of your life and go through inner healing.
No wonder Christian men escaped into Internet porn and Christian women escaped into trashy novels. Religion had screwed us
over! At least, that’s what I told myself when I was tweaked on booze and nicotine.

Some nights, after the alcohol and nicotine had worn off and I was alone, I thought back on the early days, when all I wanted
to do was talk to God and listen to his reply. Had I
ever
heard him speak? Yes. I had heard words of comfort; I’d felt God’s love. He’d encouraged me, even healed me. But wasn’t God’s
love just as conditional as my father’s? Didn’t he love me only as long as I loved what he loved, thought what he thought?
“Stand up or you won’t get the blessing. Get healed or you won’t get a life. Laugh like a hyena and repent of your pride!”
Yes, I’d heard from God. Now I wanted to drown out any sound of him. Turn up the music and drink. Still I could see the Nice
Jesus moping in my head.

“You are a stalker!” I cried into the dark. “I broke up with you, and you keep stalking me. What if you got me back? What
would you do? You’d go back to treating me the same way. You’d control me or neglect me or turn me over to some abusive pastor
friend. Well, it’s not going to happen. I’ve moved on. You should too.”

But I couldn’t move on. How could I erase God from my memory? He was in everything I wrote. What other language did I have
to describe my longing for beauty and goodness and transcendence? What other Person existed who could fulfill that longing?
I could not escape him. Maybe I was just as obsessed with God as he was with me. And what if I did succeed in drowning him
out? What would the world mean then? Try as I might to cast God as Bad Guy, deep down I knew the story went another way. That’s
why I did whatever it took to avoid going deep down.

A relationship based on chemistry alone eventually combusts. After a few months, we broke it off and Butler went back to his
life, as if the romance hadn’t mattered. Maybe because it hadn’t.

But it had mattered to me! He was the first guy I’d been intimate with in fourteen years! Sitting in a classroom with him
after that was like sitting next to pheromonal plutonium. I tried to keep my cool. We’d be polite; then we’d be warm. Then
he’d ask me how I was, tell a joke, walk me to my car, throw out a “miss you,” and leave. Sooner or later there would be a
knock on my door and we’d be back in our cycle: passionate, silly, enmeshed, arguing, breaking up, calling a truce, and obsessing.
This went on for close to a year; a year when I was paying buckets of money to learn to write.

During one particularly radioactive détente, Butler announced to our film structure class that
Doctor Zhivago
was playing at a revival theater. “I don’t know a film that so captures the sense of beauty and loss,” Butler waxed.

“Mmm,” I replied. He was so poetic, that Butler.

“We should get a group to go,” Butler announced to the air in the room. So he organized a group to meet at the IMAX. Only
he and I showed up. Whaddya know.

The lights went down, and up came that lush, haunting, “Lara’s Theme.” Butler reached over and wrapped his pinkie finger around
mine. “I’ve got it at home on DVD,” he whispered. We were gone before the opening credits were finished.

Later that evening I asked him what we were to each other. “We’re each other’s harbor,” he said with a sigh. “That safe place
we come back to before we venture out again. We’re not sure where we’re going. But it’s this journey that matters.”

“You’re no Boris Pasternak,” I replied.

Later, as I drove home, I felt that nudge; the Still, Small Squatter in the back of my head.

“I know what you’re going to say,” I interrupted, “and I don’t want to hear it! You had plenty of chances to bring around
Christian Mr. Right. And you didn’t!”

There was a moment of silence, and then I “heard” a reply.

“One question, Susan.”

I huffed. “What?!”

“Do you feel loved?”

I began to cry. No. I did not.

Christmas was our anniversary, if two years of hooking up and breaking up constituted a relationship. “I don’t give gifts,”
Butler said. “I give experiences.” Butler wanted to experience a ride to the airport.

When I stopped by to pick him up, he reached for his carry-on, and out fell a box of condoms. An entire box. “Got a date in
Bar Harbor?” I asked.

“Susan,” he said, recovering quickly, “my dad taught me to always carry condoms. You carry tampons in your purse.”

“I never get the urge to menstruate.”

He sighed. “We’ve been so up and down. Life is funny. I might meet the girl of my dreams on the street tomorrow.”

“Well, then, she’s not me.” I turned. “Thanks for the experiences.” I walked out and never came back. I felt like a rock star.
And I had the alcohol problem to prove it.

I entered graduate school with confidence and left in obscurity. I came to write and left obsessing over men. I did manage
to belch out a few decent screenplays. They would have been terrific, I told myself, if I hadn’t been distracted. Next time
I’d be focused. An agent liked one script and asked for a rewrite. I was afraid my rewrite wouldn’t be good enough. So I drank
and procrastinated, and the agent moved on. “Next time, I’ll be prompt. I’ll be focused
and
prompt.” And I had another drink to forget about it. I had blamed God for holding me back. Now I was doing it all by myself.

The only alcohol I remember as a child was a bottle of rum over the stove. Mom used it to make rum cake. That cake rocked.
I got drunk once in high school and spent the next day praying for a coma. That was enough. In my twenties I discovered chardonnay,
like everyone who lived near Trader Joe’s. I could take alcohol or leave it. After I ran out on God, I took alcohol more than
I left it. And I kept taking it.

Breaking up with Butler solved my boy problem. But now I had a new set of problems: resentment, self-loathing, and regret.
Here’s the thing about booze: It never makes the problem go away. But it sure puts it off nicely. So I put it off. I started
to crave booze. I started to drink during the day. I slept in the afternoon. I drank alone at night. I woke up with hangovers
and drank more with my coffee.

I went to parties trying to forget Butler: school parties, friends’ parties, even the occasional Christian party so I could
remind myself why I disliked church guys. One night I got hammered and went home with a church guy.
I had a one-night stand with a church guy!
He was actually a decent guy—he wanted to get to know me after that. But I didn’t even want to know me after that. Surely
this was not what I was made for. Surely this must be what it was to hit bottom.

“Dear God,” I prayed, “I can run toward you or away from you, but I cannot make you disappear. You’re written on my palm too.
You are in my DNA. But how can you forgive me after all I’ve done? How could you love me after this? How can I trust your
church? It feels too broken to repair.”

I waited in the darkness for the Still, Small Squatter’s rebuke. He did not speak. Instead a picture came to mind. It was
the prodigal son, limping home in rags. I saw the prodigal’s father cry out from the gate. I saw the father nearly tripping
just to get to his son and embrace him in tears. But the son? The son stood there frozen in disbelief. How could the son grow
up with such a generous father and still be unable to recognize love when it draped in tears around his body?

I finally wanted to stop drinking. Only now, I couldn’t.

“They have a 12-step program for that too,” Cheryl reminded me.

I’d dropped out of OA when I started grad school (and drinking). I didn’t have the time for meetings (or accountability).
Now I had to hit another 12-step group for drunks. The next morning I was sitting in a dingy room with a bunch of bottom-feeders
who were chain-smoking and inhaling donuts. But they weren’t drinking.