ISRAELI AIR FORCE GIRL
PART 1
It was frightening that I had no memory of the build-up to this date. Usually I remember everything. Who hit on whom, the factors of attraction, the warmth or aloofness of the female's profile, the humor exchanged on the pre-date emails, even the negotiation for which candlelit table we would meet over and when, but with Girl 93 I had no memory of any of that. My other personality simply told me where to show up and what to wear.
People think I'm just being cute when I talk about my relationship to my traitorous penis, Tyrannosaurus Rex. I suppose they imagine this six foot tall veiny mushroom-headed thing walking beside me talking about the weather. In reality, the part of me that is Rex is as separate and distinct from my consciousness as a wife's personality is from her husband's. Certainly there is a knowledge of the other and a closeness and the ability to predict how the "other" will react. Rex is a voice in my head, and sometimes he's an apparition as real as another person walking beside me.
So then I'm asked what Rex looks like. He looks like me, except me dolled up as a tough guy. He's got better muscle definition. His face is a bit more gaunt, his jaw a bit straighter. He always has a five o'clock shadow. His hair is perfect, slicked back Sicilian style, a little longer than you might expect. He's six foot one, weighs exactly 200 pounds, and the general impression is of a striking, good looking, aggressive, outgoing, macho guy. He wears Ray·Ban sunglasses, so dark that his eyes can't be seen. He's dressed in an Indiana Jones, brown, worn leather jacket, no matter the weather, a starched Poloshirt unbuttoned at the top, a gold chain peeking out below - though there's not a single chest hair - jeans, and brown Timberline hiking boots.
On some occasions he chomps on a lit Cohiba cigar, clamping it between his incredibly white movie star teeth, and his voice is surprisingly gravely, as if the bourbon and cigars have made him sound older than he looks. His age is indistinct, perhaps mid-forties, though he's youthful. The overall impression is of a man who seems bigger than his physical appearance, whose energy can fill a room. Despite his machismo, Rex impresses as someone with a playful sense of humor, but he is also intense. He gives the impression that if he doesn't get what he wants, that his anger is just beneath the surface, and that anger would be volcanic if let loose.
But, someone once asked me, if he looks like you, in your mind's eye, what do you look like? I shrug, as if it is beyond me to describe it to you. I suppose if you took Tyrannosaurus Rex, put ten pounds on him, gave him cancer so that he looked sickly and washed out, then took the fight out of him and made him somehow wimpier, so that your overall impression would be that of a harmless geek, that would be what I'd expect to see if I turned the corner and ran into myself. It's not a good self-image, and perhaps explains a hell of a lot, but my eyes avoid mirrors at all costs. When, during my affair with Girl 6, my beloved Alayna, I would fuck her in the missionary position, face to face with a woman for the first time in my life during sex, she would say, "Oh my God, you are so fucking gorgeous, I love you on top of me." My built-in lie detectors said she was serious. She'd look at me with this all-consuming lust, like a tiger would look at a juicy steak, and say, "you are so fuckin' handsome, I need you to fuck me right now." I tried to inject that into my self-image, but somehow I thought that during my relationship with her I must have looked different. I must have been more handsome then and since we broke up, I lost it somehow. There's a part of me that misses being looked at like she looked at me. That misses being told I'm "gorgeous" and "fuckin' handsome," and with my crazy mental wiring, a woman saying the F-word completely turns me on. But the guy who was "fuckin' gorgeous" just doesn't seem to be me. Perhaps I'm like the ugly duckling who doesn't realize he's become a swan, or I'm mentally built like the anorexic models who are certain they're homely but in reality they are beautiful.
It only matters in that there is an understanding going into this tale that there are two separate parts of me that communicate at arm's length.
Then there's the God factor. I hesitate to broach this subject, but I suppose it will only make sense to do so now. I don't know that I'm particularly religious, but I have had a sense of someone external to me who seems to want to use my life as a Powerpoint demonstration. When things go wrong, I hear this voice in my head saying, "see, see where you fouled that up?" When things go well, and it's not by chance but by deliberate intention and hard work, I can feel a figure standing next to me, a personality simultaneously fatherly and motherly, and it is smiling.
Then in the late 80s I began my career as a writer, and the strangest thing was this sense of being a passenger. I would write the story till four in the morning and then I'd be late for work the next day so I could reread it and find out what happened. What do I mean by that? It was more like reading a great suspense story than writing one. I had no idea what would happen next. The plot and characters took on a mind of their own, and I was simply along for the ride. Soon it became evident that I was merely a conduit, a channel, for someone writing the work who passed it through me. I finished the last 200 pages of my third novel in one sustained 60-hour continuous all-nighter. An hour after typing "The End" and the printer shot out the last page, I boarded a train for "the city" to meet my publisher. It was my fourth novel. He had seen it at the 75% point, and he couldn't wait to read more. In his office, he smiled, shook my hand and asked in excitement, "how did it end?" I looked him square in the eye and told him the truth. I have no idea, I said. He didn't understand. He loved the book, but thought I was flaky. The point is, when I read the ending, it was as fresh and new as if it had been written by someone else.
As indeed it perhaps was. The last novel I wrote was mostly done in a ten day sustained writing sprint in a log cabin in the southern Pennsylvania hills. It was like going into a trance. There were twelve hour stretches of "lost time" as whatever it was that took me over did his thing. To this day, I have only read the novel once, and I thought it was amazing, but I have no memory of writing it.
But although this had been going on for fifteen years of my writing career, God doing the work while I took the credit, I had never actually seen him.
Until after Girl 6. It was around the aftermath of Girl 14, Piano Girl, that I first saw the supreme being in the flesh.
That's what he likes me to call him. The supreme being. No capital letters. No capital "H" in "he." He doesn't like pretentiousness. He's a humble entity, if you can imagine God the Father, the Alpha and the Omega, the Creator of the Universe, Jehovah, the God of Abraham and Isaac, I Am That I Am, being humble. Too much of a stretch for many people, I assume. But, forgive me for saying this, the supreme being is a regular guy. He's a friend, more in the sense of a true friend than anyone I can point to on earth. It's like he knows me, he puts up with me, he loves me, but it is more than that. He genuinely digs me. He thinks I'm hilarious. When I write a blog entry that is done without his help, he laughs his ass off about it. I've seen tears come to his eyes from his laughter. He's slapped my back in joy before and shaken his head as he looks at me, as if he's glad that I exist. There are times the supreme being looks at me like any of us would stare up at the stage at Chris Rock doing an explosively funny stand up act. The supreme being gets a tremendous kick out of me, and he always acts like he's at once glad he created me and astonished at the things I do.
This is where I and most religions disagree. Most religions would tell you that God is both perfect and omniscient and omnipresent. That's not my experience. Let's take perfection. The supreme being scoffs at the word.
"What is perfection?" he asks. "For one thing, perfection would presuppose something unchanging in time. If God is perfect, then he doesn't change, because he has perfect comprehension from the start. Not true," he continues. "Hey, look at the old testament - do I act like that anymore? No way. I come off like an abusive father in that work of art, and in fact, I kind of was, but face it, humans were like celestial two year olds back then. They could hurt themselves, so for safety reasons I yelled at them not to run on the pool deck. That's all the Ten Commandments were. None of those apply anymore. Think about it," he says. "Today, as an adult, is it STILL a rule that you have to hold Mommy's hand when crossing the street? Duh! No! So do the Ten Commandments have any relevance to today? Maybe as a study of morality, or the foundation of man's laws, as they progressed from the ancient Mesopotamian Laws of 2250 BC to the Magna Carta all the way to the U.S. Federal Code of Regulations. But as a day-to-day, hour-by-hour guide to behavior? I don't think so. That commandment, "thou shalt not kill" is a bit primitive. Nice thought behind that one, as in, it's not polite to go to your friend's house and slaughter his three year old for running around and making noise. But how do you apply that simplistic commandment to a checkpoint in Baghdad when a car-bomber speeds toward you? You think you should turn the other cheek to that?"
I actually asked the supreme being, if he felt that way, how did he feel about the Dirty Harry movies. He grinned and did a passable imitation of Clint Eastwood. "Go ahead, punk," he said, "make my day."
You want to know what a conversation with the supreme being is like?
I asked him, so, if you're not perfect, how can you be the supreme being?
He said, "you define perfection in human terms, which makes it imperfect."
You change with time? I asked.
"Of course I do," the supreme being says, "I made you in my image, and I learn and grow just as you do. And as as humanity grew up, so did I. As you progressed from stone knives to nuclear weapons, so too did I mature as a guardian spirit. After all, did I let any nukes go off after World War II?"
No, I said.
"Well, there you go. And stop numbering your wars. It makes it seem like the next one is inevitable. And it's not."
You think we can have a society with no wars? And can you see the future?
"As to war, it won't seem like war as you know it today. There will still be police and criminals and arrests and raids, but more on a global scale. But one nation arming and fighting another? Not really."
Will there still be separate nations?
"Not as you know it today. History marches on."
How will that happen? What will it be like?
He shrugged. "Turns out your constitution got popular. It caught on. It spread. The European Union added a little flavor to it, a few more cooks came on the scene. Three thousand years from now? The law of the land then will be like comparing the Code of Federal Regulations to English Common Law. Similar, but one is the great-great grandfather of the other."
You really like law, don't you?
He smiled again. "I love a good lawyer joke, same as anyone else. But yes, I get a kick out of it. The very concept that human behavior can be changed and governed by things written down by other humans is amazing to me. I frankly didn't see that one coming. I was psyched to see it happen."
Oh, I said, so you can't see the future?
"I can detect trends," he said, "but human free will is a dark curtain. All I can do to imagine an individual's future is to use a sense of their personality. I'm a good psychologist, but I've been fooled before. But given the right demonstration in their lives, people can change their own future."
So, is there destiny for each of us?
"I don't define the concept of destiny like you do," he said.
See? You could go in endless circles talking to him. It's like being four years old and having a loving and patient big brother who's 18. He thinks in terms that are much bigger than we are, but he plops down on the floor and plays the same game we're playing. And notice I didn't say "father figure" or give his age as 35, because in so many ways he has a childlike joy to him, and he always says that he is developing and learning just as we are. Blasphemy and heresy are the words people will mumble, but I don't care.
But my comment here goes to his sense of humor. He's a comedian. Here's how I know. You asked me what Rex looked like, and I told you he's a Hollywood version of me. Now you ask, what does the supreme being look like? He's Rex's identical twin. Is this some weird failure of my imagination? Or God's sense of humor? If you've heard of Alcoholics Anonymous, you know they have a Twelve Step program, and peppered through the Twelve Steps is the idea of "God as we understand Him." That's the key here. The supreme being knows I have a self-image problem. He sent me my firstborn son, who is a physical clone of me, though not a mental one, to remind me to love myself just as I adore my son. But it wasn't enough. So he made Rex appear to me as a sexy version of me, to remind me that my sexuality is a beautiful part of who I am, and to revere that part of me. And when that wasn't enough, when the supreme being made an appearance in the room with me, he came wearing my costume, perhaps to remind me yet again of how highly he thinks of me, as if the headline is that I've been hating myself for far too long, and that the cosmic struggle is really to free myself of that.
But when I consciously try to think of the meaning of that, a headache blooms behind my eyes and I can't think about it anymore. I'll save that for another day.
The point here is that all the pre-date prep work for Girl 93 was done solely by my traitorous penis, Tyrannosaurus Rex. I had no memory of it. And that disturbed me. For one reason, it had never happened before. Always it was I who hit on the girl or received the hits. I was the one who either set the early relationship on course or wobbled it badly. If Rex were there, it was him leaning over my shoulder giving advice that I frankly ignored most of the time. After all, what the hell did Rex know about matters of the heart?
(Continued)
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