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My uncle was describing in graphic and inappropriate detail how he “titty-fucked” this real estate agent on their first date last week. Graphic because he insisted, certainly with the intention to make me squirm — as if this were his chief calling in life — lingering on the moment he felt his pubic hair tickling this woman’s sternum. Inappropriate because even though I’m sixteen, I’m old-fashioned. I believe that what happens between a man and a woman in the privacy of the bedroom should remain solely between them even or especially if it unfortunately occurs out of wedlock which is the only way it does occur for my uncle the relentless bachelor, my guardian and tormentor. Plus, regardless of my views on premarital sex, I never want to hear about my uncle’s pubic hair.
Then he said, “but this didn’t happen in the bedroom, Father, but on a plush ottoman next to her tv.”
I’m his nephew but he insists on chiding me with this nickname Father because he likes to mock my faith and I’ve told him, politely but firmly, that I’m not a Father as he full well knows, I’m not even Catholic, and that the bond between God and Man must be understood in each individual’s heart and soul free from poisonous Papist greed and if he’d stop boozing and smoking and gambling and fornicating long enough to think about God, he’d realize he was living in dread. A state of total fallen dread flailing about for meaning. And after this prerequisite realization then, perhaps, we could have a real, meaningful, consequential, adult conversation. To which he always says, “Ok, father, save the preaching for the pulpit.”
But I have no pulpit and no interest in standing behind one. I have my faith and my uncle and this house in San Diego I’ve grown up in and my parents left me in — abandoned is too strong a word; they had a choice to make and they made it — to finish high school while my father mid-life crisis-ed his way into a career change with an entry-level job as a foreign service officer in Djibouti. My uncle’s task is to pay the utilities and be my “guardian” while I pray for him, for me, and for all of humanity in this shallow and anxious age.
We live in a craftsman home by the zoo and I spend my days reading Kierkegaard in Balboa Park wearing my father’s red-tinted aviators and roasting in the southern California sun. I’m going to drop out and get my GED and roam around a bit, discovering the world, maybe, myself, hopefully, and a place of meaning for the two to meet. My uncle mocks these dreams, says I’ll forget about Kierkeguru, as he calls him, and about dropping out once I get laid. “The power of the puss,” he says, making a V with his middle and index fingers — which I thought, in my naivete, signaled some sort of victory the first time I saw it — and waggling his grayish tongue between them. He’s a crude man but loves me in his way.
Truth be told I’m a fine student and some of the classes are bearable but there’s too much temptation at Garfield Highschool. I’m in my junior year and a lot of my female classmates, young, upstanding women succumbing to the influence of our decadent culture, are wearing shorts that barely cover their derrieres. The strongest, most testing temptation, though, is the teacher’s aide in my history class, Ms. Garcia. She dresses modestly and bears her faith in a cross that hangs on her exquisite chest — yes, it’s exquisite; I’m a knight of faith, not a saint. She understands me. She even gifted me a well-worn copy of the Essential Kierkegaard with the faintest penciling underlining key passages which led to a curious and unexpected intimacy developing between us causing me to blush when I first felt it sitting on a bench outside the Spanish Village Arts Center, regular stomping grounds for my parents and I throughout my childhood, and watching tourists take pictures with the colorful tiles at their feet hot in the sun. She underlined “When we take a religious person, the knight of hidden inwardness, and place him in the existence-medium, a contradiction will appear as he relates himself to the world around him, and he himself must become aware of this.” And I wanted to tell her that I had become aware of this, partly thanks to her, but I’d also become aware in my sessions of study and inward reflection that I was growing increasingly interested in Ms. Garcia, aware, as it were, of her erotic qualities: an unremarkable awareness for a teenage boy, perhaps, but an unhealthy obsession for a knight of faith. So, no more school for me.
My uncle the aesthete scoffs at my resolution. He can’t fathom such resolve. I suspect he goes on a date nearly every night partly to taunt me. He’s forty-six and works as a warehouse manager and he’s ok-looking, full head of dirty blonde hair, trim, tall, but he’s no model by any stretch of the imagination and yet he seduces all sorts of women: divorcees his age, widows twenty years older, graduate students twenty years younger. Picks them up at bus stops and in hookah lounges, at line-dancing meetups and cruising the boardwalk at Mission Beach. The only thing these disparate women seem to share is they all sleep with my uncle and they all bake. Evidence of the latter is supplied by the sweets he hauls home like the spoils of war: bags of macaroons and trays of fudge and bowls of knafeh and Ziplocs stuffed with half-eaten red velvet cakes. Our fridge is almost entirely baked goods courtesy of his various conquests. I abstain from such tempting luxuries, preferring to lecture him while he gorges on these unjust desserts, urging him to reflect more carefully on his lifestyle, his choices, drawing his attention to how while he might feel liberated in the aesthetic life, a lothario chasing relations with women who don’t truly know or value him, he’s in point of fact trapped. I urge him to embrace his task in life, whatever that may be, whatever he chooses that to be — managing a warehouse, raising a nephew — because he’d have a healthier relation to the world and himself. I don’t push more than this, toward the true meaning of a religious life, because we’re not there yet and I don’t want to overwhelm him. People should be made aware of the abyss yawning wide beneath them in increments. Especially if you love them.
But this week he has chosen. Chosen to make my life a horny hell. On Monday, he brought home a middle-aged black woman, busty but with the finely-toned legs of a svelte tennis player, a security guard at the bowling alley out in Coronado who made him frangipane bars with raspberry jam, a recipe some old Swiss bowler had given her. I ignored the frangipane with the almond slivers and powdered sugar and tried to ignore the sounds of their raucous congress coming from my parents’ bedroom down the hall. Countless times I’ve requested my uncle use the white noise machine I bought him to cover or at least somewhat obscure his “lovemaking” sessions but to no avail. He prefers to torture me. But I stayed strong, reading passages in Kierkegaard about the knight of infinite resignation and Ms. Garcia’s delicate underlining brought Kierkegaard to vivid life within and beside me, my own personal prophet and bridge if not to God, then to the edge of the abyss I must leap blindly across. I could almost feel him and all his combative pseudonyms standing beside me in the dark. Eventually my uncle and his date commenced another round of lovemaking and ratcheted up the volume, sending tremors through the oak wainscotting so I could stand it no longer. I put Kierkegaard aside and left the house, exhausting myself by walking through and across Balboa Park, back and forth and back again, until my arches ached and dawn had nearly come.
Another night, another woman. Tuesday, he brought home a Vietnamese woman who was an engineering student at the University of San Diego working on some ultra strong rivet that would revolutionize the future of aeronautics. She brought cream puffs and squealed like the prairie dogs I’d seen driving through the Dakotas with my parents as a kid. What this future patent holder saw in my uncle, I won’t even venture to guess. On Wednesday he brought home a platinum-haired grandmother from a bingo night saying “we’re about to celebrate Hump Day in style” and the way they carried on you’d have thought she was one of those debauched college girls going wild in Cancún. She’d made angel food cake and I watched my uncle inhale it whole the next morning, chasing it with hot black coffee and a devilish grin.
It was just Kierkegaard and I in my chivalric inwardness bearing up under this onslaught of lust and gluttony. And the occasional, somewhat inappropriate, thoughts of Ms. Garcia and that crucifix dangling between her ample breasts like my faith nestled between two voluptuous temptations. “Father,” my uncle said, interrupting my reverie, “did you hear me?”
“No. But have you heard the word of God? The word of God in your heart and soul?”
“That grandma had a pussy like a vice grip draining me, Father, hand to God,” he said, slurping up more coffee. “She’d been married to a marine for forty years. Semper fi, Father, semper fi, the guy must have had a cock of steel sticking it to her for forty years, tempered in the Halls of Montezuma. He left a big pussy to fill, so to speak. Pardon my French.” Then he held out a crumb of remaining angel food cake to me and said, “Hungry? Just a little bite?”
“I’ve already had my oatmeal,” I said. “Healthy, unassuming sustenance.”
“But did you sleep alright? Because I could’ve sworn I heard you out in the hall at some point, eavesdropping a bit, eh? Did you enjoy the show, Father? It’s ok to say you did.”
I stormed out of the kitchen after that remark, grabbed my shoes and once more sought sanctuary in the park. Spring was turning into summer. My parents were low-level bureaucrats in a tiny country in East Africa. My uncle was fucking — there, I said it, fucking — half the women in the city. And me? I was about to drop out of high school. A virgin sitting around reading an old dead Danish philosopher and thinking about a teacher’s aide. What sort of life was this? What stage or sphere? I stood on the tiles embedded in the ground of the Spanish Village Art Center again and felt that these squares of ceramic, blues and seafoam greens, mauves and canary yellows, were bound together by a common clay and suffering under a shared sun but also unique before each other and themselves and God, just like us.
Thursday was parent-teacher night at my school but my parents couldn’t attend because they were scanning passports in Djibouti and I couldn’t attend because I was a student and barely even that. I didn’t bother to tell my uncle because the only things he attends to, as he’s said himself numerous times, are “tits and ass.” Thus, I spent the night, as usual, reading Ms. Garcia’s copy of the Essential Kierkegaard. I read about leaps of faith, of the irrationality of faith, about inwardness and the more I read, the more I became aware of Kierkegaard as a conduit for me to this bigger and higher and mightier thing but whether that was Jesus or God or my own specific religious life opening up before me, I couldn’t say.
I read until I heard my uncle arrive home with another date and another tray of desserts for yet another night of debauchery. I did my best to ignore them. Tried to focus harder on the words on the page but this date, unlike the others, had an enchanting laugh. Bright and clean. A familiar warmth and pull. I went to the kitchen to investigate and immediately wished I hadn’t. My uncle was there with half a bottle of Wild Turkey on the table beside one full sweaty glass and filling another in his hand. Before him, a tray of homemade tiramisu. Beside him, waiting for her refill of bourbon and wearing a thin pink sundress which exposed more of her legs than I’d ever had the illicit privilege to glimpse in history class, sat Ms. Garcia.
I wasn’t sure how to feel. Was this my uncle testing me? God? What would Kierkegaard say? But before I could sort my feelings — envy, confusion, betrayal, anger — Ms. Garcia stood and hugged me. She smelled like bourbon and cigarettes and a bit of sweat but I forced myself not to think of that, of her and her body, and said, “Ms. Garcia.”
She said, “Please, call me Aurora outside of the classroom.”
It may have been the Wild Turkey or my uncle’s negative influence or just that Ms. Garcia was looser outside the confines of the classroom, but she rolled her “r”s more than I’d ever heard her do before, sounding like a cat purring which combined with my pulse to pound in my ears with an ominous inwardness. “Aurora,” I said, hearing the dawn in her Christian name, the light that felt so out of place in my kitchen, far too bright for my lecherous and unrepentant uncle. I had to warn her. I began to quote the words of Kierkegaard she’d underlined back to her to break my uncle’s spell, “When we take the religious person —” but I was interrupted by the sound of my uncle’s hand landing a hearty slap on Ms. Garcia’s backside which was followed not by indignation and outrage from her, which is what I expected and hope for, but by a playful giggle and the widest smile I’d ever seen from her, from anyone. All was lost.
I turned around and marched out of there head held as high as I could as Ms. Garcia fell into my uncle’s lap yelling after me to help myself to some tiramisu. But this knight of inwardness had wanted mutual aid, her to help me and me to help her, two true Christians choosing to act in good faith, and those hopes, those delusions, were done now, helpless, over.
I stewed in my room listening to their laughter and to the silences between, imagining the lewd groping and licking and sucking that occurred in them just out of earshot. I thought about the tiles again in Balboa Park, reflecting a star or two above San Diego in this state that’s forever poised to slide into the sea. Thought about a dawn that seemed so far off and what sort of day it might usher in. I tried to reread Kierkegaard, seeing him over my shoulder one minute or bouncing on the edge of bed the next. He seemed giddier than usual. Less cerebral, less stern. He walked to the door and rested his ear against it and I realized that even this gloomy Dane needed to know exactly what Ms. Garcia was up to.
Together, we opened the door, me and my ghost advisor, my phantom prophet, two knights of inwardness creeping outward into the dark hallway and tiptoeing down it, into the now empty kitchen, and over to the opening in the wall that gave a view into the living room beyond. I heard the sounds of the television, a nature documentary. A posh British narrator described some sort of snowy hunt. A lynx after its prey. Hares fleeing futilely across the ice. A struggle for survival in an arctic world. Kierkegaard and I craned our necks through the opening and we saw Ms. Garcia — Aurora now, dress hiked up, face slack with booze and lust — sitting in my uncle’s lap on my parents’ couch in my living room. They were both facing the tv. My uncle’s left hand was rubbing Aurora’s crotch and from our vantage point we couldn’t discern any particulars, but that didn’t prevent Soren from getting aroused. Unashamedly so. I even noticed my ghostly companion begin to rub his own sex on the kitchen counter, back and forth, in an act of ectoplasmic onanism. I confess to experiencing an erection as well. We bent farther over the counter to get a better look and that’s when my uncle saw us, making eye contact with me and smiling. I couldn’t see his entire face, obscured as it was by Aurora’s head shaking back and forth in her ecstasies, but I could tell he was smiling. I turned away in embarrassment and hurried back toward my room but Soren’s phantom remained at the opening, watching the show and rubbing himself on the kitchen counter, a philosophical emanation in heat.
I never made it to my room. I stopped at the table and stared at the tiramisu in its tray. Inwardness? Chivalry? Faith? None of it mattered in that moment. It was just me in my humanity, hungry and horny and alone. But I was made in God’s image, sentenced to live out a life in the body God assigned me, moved by urges God gave me, so how, in the end, were these choices mine to make?
With my God-given body I satisfied a God-given urge and grabbed a handful of tiramisu and shoved the mascarpone and espresso-soaked cookies into my mouth, swallowing without chewing and by God it tasted good. He wanted me to choose. Wanted me to act. I chose to take another handful and I chose to return to the opening in the wall — not my uncle or my parents or the world, me. I did. It was my decision but one informed by God, by the brain and body he’d seen fit to give me. Wasn’t it?
Soren and I stood there together, my perverted phantom and spiritual guide, and I took another bite of Aurora’s dessert, savoring yet also disgusted by the sweetness, the richness. My body betrayed me as blood rushed to my penis, the inward engorging outward, the fleshy tip grazing the counter. “God,” I wondered, whispered, begged, “what is it you want from me?”
I’d been grappling with all my contradictions in this existence-medium, rereading Kierkegaard, dropping out of school, pacing Balboa Park, just to end up here — a voyeur in my own kitchen, standing before a ditch, an infinitely broad ditch, with my uncle on one side, his left hand pulling down the top of Aurora’s dress, exposing one perfect breast, a Madonna in my living room being desecrated by my uncle for I was certain my un-Christlike uncle was thinking mostly of himself, of his own needs, a predator locked onto his eternal prey of tits and ass. Yet for a second, standing alone in the dark kitchen with a mouthful of sweet mascarpone and waiting to decide if I would masturbate or return to my room, observe or interrupt or ignore this fornication, it felt like he was exposing her breast neither for himself nor me, but for God, for his idea of God, a God of his own making and that was his choice just as this was mine for I had no idea what lay on the other side of the ditch but I knew that I’d spend my whole life leaping over it so tomorrow, after my morning prayers and before I left for school, I would be sure to thank my uncle for this invaluable lesson.
