Operation Shylock

at four a.m. the next day — a marvel too that, listening to this lengthy story that couldn’t make a scrap of difference, I was only plunging further under their spell.

“Which things?” I asked her. “Which things of this world?”

“My appearance. Trivial things. My friends. Entertainment. Vanity. Myself. I was not supposed to be interested in myself. That’s how I decided to go into nursing. I didn’t want to go into nursing, but nursing was selfless, something I could do for other people and forget about what I looked like. I could serve Christ through being a nurse. This way I would still be in good with God. I moved back to the Midwest and I joined a new church in Chicago. A New Testament church. All of us attempting to follow Christ’s recommendations for living on earth. Love one another and be involved in one another’s lives. Take care of your brothers and sisters. It was total bullshit. None of it actually happened, it was just a lot of talk. Some people tried. But they never succeeded.”

“So what brought the Christianity to an end?”

“Well, I was working in a hospital and I started getting more involved with people I was working with. I loved people to take an interest in me because I was a waif. But twenty-five! I was getting old to be a waif. And then a guy I got involved with, a guy named Walter Sweeney, he died. He was thirty-four years old. Very young. Very passionate. Always that. And he decided that God wanted him to go on a fast. Suffering is very big, you see, a certain brand of Christian believes that God allows us to suffer to make us better servants of Him. Getting rid of the dross they call it. Well, Walter Sweeney got rid of the dross, all right. Went on a fast to purify himself. So that he could be closer to God. And he died. I found him in his apartment on his knees. And that always stayed with me, and that became the whole experience for me. Dying on his knees. Fuck that.”

“You slept with Walter Sweeney.”

“Yep. First one. I was chaste from about fifteen to twenty-five. I wasn’t a virgin at fifteen, but from fifteen to twenty-five, I didn’t even have a date. I got involved with Sweeney, then he died, and I got involved with another guy, a married man in the church. That had a lot to do with it too. Especially because his wife was a good friend of mine. I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t face God anymore, so I stopped praying. It wasn’t long, maybe a couple of months, but long enough to lose fifteen pounds. I tortured myself about it. I liked the idea of sex. I never could figure out the prohibition on sex. I still can’t figure it out. What’s the big deal? Who cares? It was senseless to me. I went to a therapist. Because I was suicidal. But he was no good. Christian Interpersonal Therapy Workshop. Guy named Rodney.”

“What’s Christian Interpersonal Therapy?”

“Oh, it’s just Rodney talking to people. More bullshit. But then I met a guy who wasn’t a Christian and I got involved with him. And it was gradual. I don’t know how to make it any more clear. I grew out of it. In every sense.”

“So it’s sex that got you out of the church. Men.”

“It’s probably what got me in and, yeah, probably it helped to get me out.”

“You left the world of men and then you came back to the world of men. That’s the story you tell, anyway.”

“Well, that was certainly part of the world I left. I also left the world of my dismal family and the world of living chaotically. And then when I was strong enough, I was able to do things on my own. I went to nursing school. That was a big move for me away from Christianity. Part of what Christianity was about for me was about not thinking. About being able to go to the elders and ask them what I should do. And going to God. In my twenties I realized that God doesn’t answer. And that the elders are no smarter than I am. That I could think for myself. Still, Christianity saved me from a lot of craziness. It got me back to school, stopped me from doing drugs, from being promiscuous. Who knows where I could have ended up?”

“Here,” I said. “Here is where you could have ended up — where you ended up. With him. Living chaotically with him.”

You are not here to help her understand herself. Go no further. You are not the Jewish Interpersonal Therapy Workshop. It only looks that way tonight. One patient shows up, spends his hour telling you his favorite lies, then he exits, after exposing himself, and another materializes, takes possession of the pillow, and begins telling her favorite lies. The storification of everyday life, the poetry you hear on the Phil Donahue show, stuff she probably hears on the Donahue show, and I sit here as if I hadn’t heard the fucked-up-shiksa story from the Scheherazade of fucked-up shiksas; as if I hadn’t got myself morbidly enfolded in its pathos over thirty years ago, I sit and I listen as though to do so is my fate. In the face of a story, any story, I sit captivated. Either I am listening to them or I am telling them. Everything originates there.

“Christianity saved me from a lot of craziness,” she said, “but not from anti-Semitism. I think I really got into hating Jews when I was a Christian. Before, it was just my family’s stupid thing. Know why I started hating Jews? Because they didn’t have to put up with any of this Christian nonsense. Death to self, you have to kill yourself, suffering makes you a better servant of Him — and they laughed at all our suffering. Only allow God to live through you so that you become nothing more than a vessel. So I became nothing more than a vessel while the Jews became doctors and lawyers and rich. They laughed at our suffering, they laughed at His suffering. Look, don’t get me wrong, I loved being nothing. I mean I loved it and I hated it. I could be what I believed I was, a piece of shit, and get praised for it. I wore little plaid skirts, wore my hair in a ponytail, didn’t fuck, and meanwhile the Jews were all smart, they were middle class, they were fucking, they were educated, they were down in the Caribbean at Christmastime, and I hated them. That started when I was a Christian, and it just kept growing at the hospital. Now, from A-S.A., I understand why else I hated them. Their cohesiveness, I hated that. Their superiority, what the Gentiles call greed, I hated that. Their paranoia and their defensiveness, always being strategic and careful, always clever — the Jews drove me crazy just by being Jews. Anyway, that was my legacy from Jesus. Until Philip.”

“From Jesus to Philip.”

“Yeah, looks that way. Done it all over again, haven’t I? With him.” She sounded amazed. An amazing experience and it was hers.

And mine? From Jesus to Philip — to Philip. From Jesus to Walter Sweeney to Rodney to Philip to Philip. I am the next apocalyptic solution.

“And it’s only just dawning on you here,” I asked, “that he might constitute a bit of a relapse?”

“I was coasting along, you see, winging along there, being a nurse, seven years — I told you about all that, I told you about killing somebody —”

“Yes, you did.”

“But with him I didn’t know how to get out. I never know how to get out. One guy is battier than the other and I don’t know how to get out. My trouble is I get very passionate and ecstatic. It takes me a long time to get disillusioned with the whole unreality of everything. I guess I was still loving people taking an interest in me the way he took an interest in my anti-Semitism. Yeah, he did take over from Jesus. He was going to purify me like the church. I need it black and white, I guess. There’s really very little that is black and white, and I realize that the whole world is nothing but gray areas, but these mad dogmatic people, they’re kind of protection, you know?”

“Who is he? Who is this mad dogmatic person?”

“He’s not a crook, he’s not a fake, you’re all wrong thinking that. His whole life is the Jews.”

“Who is he, Wanda Jane?”

“Yeah, Wanda Jane. That’s me. Perfect little Wanda Jane, who has to be invisible and a servant. Jinx the Battler, Jinx the Amazon, Jinx who thinks for herself, who answers for herself, who makes decisions for herself and stands up for herself, Jinx who holds the dying in her arms and watches every kind of suffering a human being can suffer, Jinx Possesski who’s afraid of nothing and is like an Earth Mother to her dying people, and Wanda Jane who is nothing and is afraid of everything. Don’t call me Wanda Jane. It’s not funny. It reminds me of those people I once lived with in Ohio. You know who I always hated more than the Jews? Want to know my secret? I hated the fucking Christians. I ran and ran and ran until all I did was circle back. Is that what everybody does or just me? Catholicism goes very deep. And the craziness and the stupidity goes very deep. God! Jesus! Judaism makes my third great religion and I’m still not even thirty-five. I got a ways to go yet with God. I ought to sashay over tomorrow to the Muhammadans and sign on with them. They sound like they got it all together. Great on women. The Bible. I didn’t read the Bible — I would