Some Sort of Holy or Some Sort of Whore
The thing about telling a story is that you’re basically bound to fuck up and lie. Accidentally. Our memories are shattered, shaky, unreliable bits of brain and firing neuroreceptors and perceptions and imagination and we so often see what we want to see that we neglect to see what was there, in flesh and reality. We are, at best, plagiarising our own stories, at worst, completely fabricating events to create meaning. The harder I work to remember, the more I wonder if I’m wrong.
You know that game, two truths and a lie? I am playing it, with myself, always and unconsciously. I'm tattooing the words on my body and then willing them to be true. I stand at this crossroads of life and adulthood but I cannot properly trace backwards the path that led me here. I don't remember. I don't remember.
When I was 16 I finished highschool, the summer of 2001. The world hadn’t ended the year before, as we’d all held baited breath and crossed fingers it wouldn’t and, perhaps un-inspiringly but vitally, AOL Instant Messenger was still working just fine - enabling conversations of meaning between horny teenagers across the globe. I graduated highschool a consummate virgin. I’ve always liked the way those two words work together and against eachother, and I was determined to spend my summer doing my white privileged best to bring Jesus to those in need - upholding some level of purity and righteousness, babe!, in more of a puritanical way than an Ani Difranco way. This desire landed me as a week-long summer camp counselor at a church camp on Pine Ridge.
I don't know the name of this camp. I am unsure what church it was connected to. I don't remember how I met these people. I don't know any of them by name, anymore, and don't know if I did then.
My dad took me to a random ladies' apartment, somewhere off Haines St. or Anamosa, where I signed some liability paperwork to promise to not sue whatever organization it was if I was injured or killed or Left Behind, in the Biblical best selling book series sense, or the actual, bus leaves without you sense, or whatever but I don’t know where the apartment was and I remember it being dark, like late at night, and I remember going home with my dad and thinking that I was about to make some sort of big difference in the world because I was going to rub shoulders with people "In Need" and I was going to be "Impactful."
Fuck.
I boarded a bus from a random church parking lot. My memory says it was the big Lutheran church near the Northside Walmart where, years later, an impromptu memorial to two dead cops would go up. I think. I could be wrong - I may have assigned some value to that place by way of connection.
I rode in a two person bench seat next to this little girl, I don’t remember her name. She had long, stick straight, black hair and a curious smile. I remember telling myself that she was cute, incorigible, but deep down I knew she was untrustworthy - manipulative. I rolled my eyes and offered some prayer or platitude when she told me her dad was dead, her mom was in prison. She told me she lived with her grandma and her cousins. I don’t know. I don’t know.
The camp had tents, I think, but maybe small cabins. How do I not remember this? We were "counselors" with no training. Some kids from Sioux Falls came to help us be counselors and there was this tall black kid who read from the Bible but quoted Steinbeck and I thought maybe I'd fall in love with him for the week.
I did.
On the 2nd to last day of the camp, most of which had been spent holding hands and pretending to pray, while kissing in the corner of the tent or the cabin and yelling at the younger kids to not do the same, some of the kids went on a horseback ride. I think. It could have been a kickball game. All I know is that precocious little girl that I'd been seated next to on the bus came back with her leg at a weird angle. Or maybe her arm. How do I not remember?
I don't remember.
They were taking her to the hospital. Before the ambulance loaded her, I knelt down next to her with that well spoken strong, dark boy by my side and we prayed like we knew how to talk to God - like by some privilege or birthright we were born to minister some holy spirit blessing and healing and like we knew what we were doing we touched this kiddo with open hands and denounced demons and... fuck.
She came back from the hospital walking. It must have been a leg. Because I remember she was walking and we were all exclaiming about the healing power of prayer and Jesus and one of the leaders, I don't remember their name or gender or any identifying features, anyhow one of the leaders got the microphone and said, "when we got to the hospital she was feelilng better, able to stand up and walk. They did an x-ray and it shows that the leg WAS BROKEN but healed miraculously. The prayers of the righteous will prevail."
And I remember thinking I was magic or fire or chosen or righteous... and the fact that I bullshitting the whole time I was praying, the fact that my hand had been on that girl, sure, but also was wrapped around that boy's hand and massaging up his finger, mimicking a hand job against his index finger, the whole time, is the one thing I remember, most. That I know is true.
I never saw that boy again, after that week. I don't know his name but I think we sexted a few times on AOL Instant Messenger in between Bible references and applying for Christian colleges.
I did see the little girl and took her to the mall a few times after I got my drivers' license and started college and started giving real hand jobs and blow jobs and growing up and getting jaded about the Jesus thing at a fever pace. The three times (it could have been five) we hung out her story changed, every time, and soon her dad was alive and her grandma was in jail and another time her cousin was in jail and her mom was dead and ... the last time I saw her I asked her about her broken leg.
She said it never happened.
I don't know what I don't know but I thought I knew that had happened and if I close my eyes and hold a hand, any hand, I can still feel that boy's hand wrapped around mine and feel the fake tears dripping down my cheeks as I pretended to be some sort of holy while being some sort of whore and...
An alternate telling.
Natalie went to Pine Ridge as a camp counselor for some janky Jesus camp without a name. She didn't lose her virginity there, but she came damn close and she tried to assign some meaning to the trip so she'd be able to tell her parents God had moved there.
Maybe He did. Maybe He didn't. Maybe magic and miracles happen in spite of us or because of us or because energy and space and time are all relative to the ways we hope and the ways we grow. I know this one thing - something happened. I want to hold it how I hold it because it feels better to believe it this way.
Memory is an insufficient vault for our stories. They change and stretch and die and are remade - never actually contained and never actually true. What I remember isn't what that little girl remembered and I don't know if anyone would even remember, now, that I was there. We are all accidental liars, because of time and perception and feeling and the ways we absolve or blame ourselves or others, the way time shifts like sand and finds cracks in the ways we've tried to hold our stories.
Every story is a lie. We are all unreliable. I don't remember. I don't remember. I don't remember.
