I like to say that I literally ran into James at a Harkins theater one day. I dumped a diet coke and buttered popcorn all over the both of us. Fortunately he thought it was as funny as I did. I don't know, he had a twinkle in his eye that really turned up the jets, know what I mean? Being a down and dirty flirt, I gave him my phone number. Would I have done that if I knew he was a PK (preacher's kid)? Probably. It would have appealed to my keen sense of the absurd. All through my teens, I was a happy slut. I realized my body had value and since it was the first thing of value that I realized I possessed, I found many interesting ways of bartering with it to get things I wanted. Well, I thought I wanted them at any rate.
At 19, I was coming to the end of my bisexual period, and beginning to find girls much more attractive and dateable than guys. Yet here was this long, tall, black haired, redneck, preacher's kid wanting to go out with me. Now, James was waaaay different from any guy or girl I'd ever dated in the past. The man was class. He dressed comfortable, but neat. He spoke in subdued tones, but there was a force of conviction and passion in his voice. He loved history and he loved the Herd Museum, which is where we went on our first date. Oh, and I didn't lie about who I was. I've never apologized to anyone for that. Nor did he ask me to. We hit it off just fine, thank you.
In one of our history chats, James brought up the fact that the Bible is, amongst other things, a history book and he asked me if I ever read it through. I admitted I didn't know anything about it, nor had I thought about it much. Well he offered to show me some things and I said, "Sure."
James was a great teacher. He understood my inclination toward Native American spirituality and showed me things about animals and man I didn't know existed in the Bible. I told him of my experiences with Christians in the past and he nodded and said that most Christians don't realize that the letters in the back of the New Testament were written to believers, not nonbelievers. He said all that stuff was like internal documents to help people walk a different path after they learned about Jesus. It wasn't for hitting people who didn't know Jesus over the head with rules. He said, "The Bible isn't a rule book. It's a compendium of sinful mankind's attempts to find God. In fact," he told me, "there is only one person spoken of as more than just a name in the Bible who was a sinner but whose sins weren't mentioned. The rest all had their sins laid out for everyone to see."
Now that struck me. I'd never realized that. I asked James why God allowed kids to get sick and die. He said, "People always want to know why bad things happen to seemingly good people. Actually, there's an easy answer for that. God tells us that Time and Chance happen to all of us." Harry (my father) was right. "It's one a them things."
So anyway, we went out together for about two years and James asked me to marry him. We had just come off a rather bad experience together. I'd invited him to come over to the Redman (our trailer) and after he sat down I excused myself and came back starkers to surprise him. Well, he didn't say a word, picked up his jacket and walked out the door. I was stunned, hurt, and cried for two days. But he called me back and acted like nothing happened. So when he asked me to marry him, it scared me sick. I said no and we broke up for about a year.
I missed him. Muchly. Finally I sucked it up and called his home. His mother told me that James had moved away and been involved in a terrible tragedy. He had taken in a roommate who attended his church and needed a place to stay. The guy was a druggie and stole a lot of stuff from James who finally had enough and asked the guy to leave. Well, the guy grabbed a hammer and beat James to death. Then hung himself off the second floor railing with a sweeper cord.
I don't know when I exhaled again. I blamed myself - if I had said yes a year ago, it wouldn't have happened. That wasn't a good way to look at things, but that's how I felt. It took me a long time to get over it.
There's my experiences with Christians. Some good. Some bad. At least I had James long enough for him to properly introduce that Jesus guy to me. That was very, very good. He taught me how to read the Bible. How to see that God was in Heaven and man was on Earth and that we couldn't make straight what God made crooked. I marveled that the Bible said a person shouldn't be overly holy. So much of what James showed me seemed to point to balance. That God wanted us to live balanced lives so that nothing that happened in this world would pull us away from him.
Anyway, that's it. That's where my knowledge of the Bible came from. Just thought I should let y'all know that, since I've been yakking about it here. Thanks for bearing with me.
