No Land's Man (10 page)

During the next few months, I spent as much time with her as she’d let me. Together we went to church gatherings and Bible group meetings and socialized with friends of hers who were youth ministers and Christian camp counselors. I even found myself singing along to lyrics by bands like Petra and Stryper at the top of my lungs after she introduced me to Christian rock. This is a style of music that retains the throbbing bass line and screaming vibrato of traditional rock music but replaces the lyrics about sex, drugs, and rebelliousness with lyrics about salvation and morality. It was an odd yet effective form of marketing, a truly American approach to take the devil’s music and rebrand it with Christ. Christian rock was an oxymoron, I thought to myself, an absurd notion, much like Christian pornography, but that didn’t stop me. I was speaking in tongues to myself, convincing myself that I could successfully feign
an interest in a churchgoing life, maybe even genuinely adopt it as my own belief system as long as Diane kept smiling at me . . . and my parents didn’t find out.

Both Diane and I prayed earnestly to the cross, though while Diane’s hung high on the church wall in front of us, mine hung on a silver chain between her perfectly shaped breasts. From what I could tell, however, except for occasionally ogling the scantily-clad underwear models on the cover of
International Male
catalog, which she claimed was under her coffee table because her roommate got it, she seemed to have no interest in exploring physical pleasures. No matter how much time I spent with her, she seemed only interested in a spiritual salvation.

As I got to know her better I discovered that Diane had turned to Jesus after an overindulgent adolescence. She had spent her teens doing drugs, dating bikers, and getting arrested, while I had spent mine doing school plays, watching movies, and going to the mall. It became clear that I was trying to win Diane for the exact opposite reason she was trying to win me.

It was as if I was finally ready to appreciate Katie Ashcroft’s vagina—but with the wrong girl. Diane kept her vagina quite well hidden from me, as she did her breasts, her arms, her legs, and even the nape of her neck. In fact it was soon clear that Diane’s entire physical body was off-limits. What she was really looking for from me was a friend in Christ. The only fantasy she was hoping to fulfill was to lead another soul to the Kingdom of Heaven. There were times I became so desperate, I would flip through back issues of
International Male
, feigning interest in the latest boxer brief designs just so that she would look over and I could possibly catch a glint of lust flash across her eyes like an accidentally exposed nipple.

After a couple of months of yearning and hoping, I managed to become friends with all of Diane’s Christian friends. I was even able to impress them with my ability to discuss such issues as the controversy over whether, as per the Bible’s Latin translation, Jesus had actually walked
on
water or merely
by the side
of the water, or whether the young man hiding in the bushes in the garden of Gethsemane during Jesus’s arrest by the Roman soldiers, mentioned only in the Gospel according to Mark for some reason, is actually Mark writing about himself. Truth be told, I was merely parroting the few things I had managed to absorb from the curriculum of my religious studies class at boarding school. I was surprised I had retained anything at all since I actually spent most of the class carving images of naked ladies into the side of my wooden school desk. This was becoming a pattern, it seemed, for once again, here I was, discussing fellowship and abstinence all afternoon with Diane and her friends while simultaneously fantasizing about a naked woman’s body. Christianity, it seems, makes me horny.

Perhaps in some mysterious way, however, Jesus was winning me over, for the idea of trying to win the heart and body of an alabaster-skinned Christian beauty by faking being a Christian had started to feel distinctly unchristian. This need to seduce her was either an unconscious pathology inherited from my subjugated ancestors or Diane was indeed the most beautifully and sexually inspiring creature I had ever met. Perhaps both things were true. Perhaps both things would always be confused. Perhaps it is a legacy of imperialism and slavery that the descendants of the conquered will forever need to possess the crusader’s daughter.

It was upon this realization that something began stirring inside of me. I had a genuine epiphany: even though I had no intention of
becoming a devout Christian, perhaps there was another religious route to gaining Diane’s affections, one that could leave me with a little more integrity. I would come clean. I would reveal my true self to Diane. I would become a born-again Muslim.

In my sexually-frustrated near-delusional state this lightbulb moment made more sense to me than it would have to a less desperate guy, but truth be told there were some pretty good rationalizations to back me up. Islam and Christianity are essentially siblings, being born of the same root religion of Judaism. The prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) met many Jews and Christians while travelling as a merchant throughout Arabia. From Jews he borrowed strict laws and discipline, and from Christians he took its view of a loving and forgiving God. The more I thought about it the more I could see that many commonalities bound the faiths together. Armed with this sense of religious communion, I decided to raise this as a discussion at our next Bible study meeting.

“Maybe I could read passages from the Koran to discuss in the same way we discussed passages from the Bible?” I inquired as we were wrapping up that day’s discussion.

I waited for their response with a guileless expression. Diane and her friends stared at me, then at each other, looking for clues as to what the Christian protocol would be in a moment like this. I realized they were at a loss because the point of inviting me to these Bible study meetings had been to introduce me to Christ, not to have me introduce them to Mohammad.

After a long pause Brian, the youth minister, smiled and said, “Sure, that’d be great.”

With that, I began what I am pretty sure was the first-ever reading of the Koran at the Young Floridian Christians on Fire
Bible study meeting. Diane and her friends listened attentively as I narrated the Koranic version of the birth of Christ (I figured I would start with somewhat familiar territory), where Mary alone (no Joseph, wise men, or shepherds) gives birth to Jesus under a tree with only dates for sustenance, and Jesus’s first words are from the cradle saying, “I am indeed a servant of Allah, he hath given me revelation and made me a prophet.”

When I was through, I looked up at their faces. Diane was smiling from ear to ear, as were her friends.

“I’m so glad you suggested this!” said Brian. “I have many thoughts about the similarities and differences between the faiths.”

“That was fascinating, Aasif,” Diane agreed, looking rather impressed and relieved. “I think you coming here every week and bringing us your faith is a tremendous idea.”

Everyone else nodded in agreement. Had my crazy idea actually worked? Would I finally have sex with Diane not by pretending we were alike, but by accepting that we weren’t?

For the next two weeks I basked in the bliss of having achieved a true spiritual union with Diane. The more discussions I led, the more I could discern a shift in Diane’s attitude toward me. She began to single me out for my opinion on things and laugh really hard at my jokes. I noticed she was suddenly wearing more makeup, had gotten a new haircut, and was wearing outfits that were far more revealing than I had ever seen her wear before. On several occasions I even caught her looking at me out of the corner of her eye. It had worked. Praise Jesus or Mohammad or both of them. Maybe for once they were actually working in tandem. Perhaps, inspired by my work here on earth, they’d decided it was time to put aside
their differences and help make one boy’s sexual fantasy come true. Praise Jesusammad!!!

I don’t think Diane even understood why or how, but it was clear that she wanted me, that some emotion was boiling up inside of her. Perhaps the Islam thing made me seem dangerous, forbidden, like one of those biker dudes from back in the day. I was
infidel-icious
and finally in the driver’s seat. Armed with the knowledge that I could probably get Diane to go to second base, I went back to her apartment one Sunday to make my dreams come true.

Diane went into her bedroom and I stood outside it. I listened as she rhapsodized about that week’s Bible study and how interesting my reading of the Koran had been. That she had no idea that Jesus was considered by Muslims to have traveled during his twenties to what is modern-day Iraq. I followed her, nodding and agreeing, and then I did something I’d never done before: I entered her bedroom without being invited. Standing there in the early evening light, Diane looked especially beautiful, her hair hanging loose. Leaning against her dressing table she masked her surprise at seeing me in her room with an overly casual demeanor. We both stood there silently smiling at each other. I froze. My hands were clenched and sweaty in my pockets just as they had been many years before with Katie in the bathroom.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing . . . just, you know,” I mumbled.

We stood there for a moment longer, staring at each other, waiting.

“Hey, do you want to see
Dirty Dancing
?” she said suddenly. “I love Patrick Swayze.”

She quickly brushed by me, back into the living room.

As she did, I glanced down at her bed and saw peeking out from under her pillow the most recent issue of
International Male
. Staring at me from the front cover was a photograph of a muscle-bound tanned model in a mesh thong with a sculpted chest, perfect biceps, a stubbled chiseled jaw line, deep brown eyes, and long flowing shoulder length blond hair. Behind him the sunset formed a halo around his head as he smiled, and in perfect Spanish said, “Hola mi amigo, me llamo Jesus, y ella siempre sera mio.”
⁴

I nodded my head as I agreed to get the popcorn.

4
. Hello my friend, my name is Jesus, and she will always be mine.

A
T THE AGE OF SIXTY
, my father was fired from his part-time job as a Verizon customer service representative for using profanity. Even though she had heard him swear before, my mother was outraged and couldn’t believe he would use such language at any time for any reason in a professional setting.

“Why does your father have to use such bad words?” she remarked while sitting in her armchair reading her copy of the Koran, as she did most afternoons. “The rest of the people who work there are young enough to be his grandchildren; what kind of example is that setting?”

But I was secretly proud of him. Not because he swore, but because of the reason he did so.

Let me first say that I am a huge fan of profanity. I know many people consider it to be coarse and uncivil and I would agree with them in most cases, but it can also be one of the most powerful tools we humans have to express something that cannot be expressed in any other way. Profanity is the chili pepper of language. If used by an idiot or a clod, it can overwhelm the discourse so the meaning is lost, but if used by a linguistic master chef, it can insert a piquant passion to the point where even though your ears may burn and
you may want to rinse your mouth out, you cannot say it doesn’t sound delicious.

Now, it was not out of character for my father to swear—he has used profanity for as long as I can remember, but only at home with us, his family. He would often mispronounce the swear words, much to the amusement of my sister and myself. He could rattle off quite a tiger-like roar of curses in Gujarati or Hindi, such as
bhenchod
(sister-fucker),
madarchod
(mother-fucker),
gadhero
(donkey), and
buckwaas
(bullshit), but his command of English profanity was less sure-footed. More often than not he would end up stringing together the wrong words: “I am shitting on you” or “I will fuck your shit” or “Bloody shit damn.” It would just make us laugh, which was clearly not the reaction he was attempting to elicit. Sometimes he would just shorten it to “shit damn,” which means even less. You wouldn’t really call someone a “shit damn,” though I suppose there could be such a thing as an actual shit dam that keeps a river of shit from flooding a nearby town. Perhaps my father was referring to the great shit dam that lays somewhere out in the American West, an ecological eyesore where he intended to throw the lawn mower he was yelling at, or where he would like to send my sister and I when we used up all the hot water and he was forced to begin his day shivering naked under what felt like the receiving end of an ice cold shit dam.

In spite of all that, I had never seen him swear in front of his customers or his colleagues. During all the years that he stood behind the counter at his newspaper shop or grocery store back in England, cursed out by drunken skinheads and called a Paki and a wog and told to go back to his country on a daily basis, he never shouted back at them. Perhaps after they had left he called them
bastards or
gadheros
, but only once they were out of hearing distance. Even after coming to America, when he and my mother would travel up and down the East Coast selling cheap Indian costume jewelry on the flea market circuit, he kept his cool. Often, because of their brown skin and exotic clothing, customers assumed they couldn’t speak English and would speak to them like they were deaf children.

“WHAT IS YOUR NAME?” they would scream.

“Fatima and I speak English,” my mother would reply, attempting to head off any misunderstanding or embarrassment.

The customers would look relieved and say something like, “Well, good for you. So many other Mexicans won’t learn the language.”

In spite of all this, I never heard my father lose control. This was, of course, in large part due to the fact that my mother was incredibly charming and a master salesperson. She could, with a disarming joke delivered with a self-deprecating laugh, get even the nastiest redneck to buy jewelry his wife would never wear, while simultaneously convincing him he might learn something by reading the Koran. This made it possible for my father to bite his tongue and sit quietly as my mom’s second fiddle, telling himself that if he ever did say what he thought, he would go too far, say too much, and more important than losing his dignity or my mother’s patience, he would commit the greatest act of sabotage and lose a customer.