“You’re my best brother in the Lord,” Jennifer said. Her comment came as a surprise-a pleasant one- but still a surprise. Even better, it came with physical touch. She softly kicked at my leg with hers and with that rare but recognizable kind of gesture my whole body came alive, especially my groin and my belly. At the moment, with my blood racing, I couldn’t reconcile Jennifer’s affirmation about our companionship in Christ with how she touched me. I didn’t much care to. I sat there next to her, on the O’Malley family sofa, enjoying what was happening to me, aware of the beautiful girl next to me, and worried about the possible detection of my growing erection.
In those days, though there was plenty of hand holding at prayer, embracing in the Lord, and at times, laying on of hands so as to anoint each other in the Spirit, touch that had even a hint of romance and sexual attraction was unwelcome by our community. Our group of late adolescents and early adults-few among us were over thirty- had a rule, implicit until violation rendered it explicit: no dating, no sex.
I had invited Jennifer to the O’Malley’s for Saturday night chili, their regular tradition. It was the first time she had visited the home. It was the thousandth I had. The home, despite the secrets and dysfunctions that only its residents talked about, provided a sanctuary and salvation to me while my own family imploded silently given my father’s alcoholism. Irish Catholic, Mr. and Mrs. O’Malley had ten children, the youngest five of which I knew and adored and who adored me as well.
Jennifer and I sat on a sofa in a tucked away corner of the home while convivial chaos swirled around us. The place was always lively, but Saturday nights in particular buzzed with constant activity, a phone that never stopped ringing, and the smell of chili powder and sizzling ground beef. Jennifer belonged to the larger fellowship we all attended, but was not that familiar with the O’Malley’s.
Jennifer didn’t belong to the O’Malley Clan. But I did. I belonged to it before we all got saved in the middle and late 1970s while we were still in high school. Jennifer attended the rival high school. She appeared one day, at a late afternoon Bible study that I had started to attend. Our defacto pastor, Doug, determined that our larger gathering, about 40 people on Monday Night, a two and a half hour love fest, praise music and study on the inerrant Word of God, grew too large to develop our discipleship potential. Smaller Bible study groups that orbited the larger gathering would provide in-depth study and strengthen our commitment to Christ which, in turn, would lead to our ability to witness to his judgement and universal call to conversion.
I met Jennifer for the first time at my assigned small group. I joined a little late that day, entered the room upstairs, and noticed Jennifer sitting on the sofa. She wore bell-bottom jeans, had gorgeous flowing brown hair, and a mouth full of steel wire and braces. I knew all the other members of the group but her. She held forth in conversation and questions, didn’t acknowledge my arrival, and continued to share with the small group, the dilemmas of her discipleship. I took a seat on the carpet and became enthralled. Her sandaled feet aroused sensuality in me and her snug jeans invited my stealthy glances into her thighs and the Holy of Holies.
I simply couldn’t keep my eyes off of it. Her position on the sofa gave me a perfect vantage point into the whole array of labial wonder before me. Seventeen years old and uninitiated sexually, I simultaneously satisfied myself with a fuller understanding of female anatomy and condemned my interest in it. I liked what I saw and thus worked very hard to avoid detection during the course of our study. While the other attendees buried their heads in the Word of God for spiritual nurture, I delved into the subject of Jennifer, both fed and disturbed by my deep commitment and interest in it.
One of our favorite symbols for our new life in Christ was the butterfly. We spoke about how the worm, once it broke free of its cocoon tomb, emerged transformed as a beautiful butterfly dancing about God’s creation. As she spoke about her own new life with Jesus, Jennifer, perhaps out of nervous energy in a new environment, kept opening and closing her legs, as scissors open and close, in front of me. Transfixed rather than transformed, I concealed my growing attraction to this new girl. Not only did she love the Lord, she was pretty, and unlike most of the females in our devoted crowd, attracted me deeply.
Months later, as we sat on one of the worn but comfortable O’Malley sofa, comfortable with the aroma of O’Malley chili and fending off insistences that we abandon our post and join the action in the heart of the home, my erection finally emerged. Jennifer and I spoke to one another, less about our triumphs and travails as disciples and more about our teen-aged journey as high-schoolers. She was the prettiest girl of the whole lot and as such, her high school peers awarded her a spot as a homecoming attendant. Yet, she told me she didn’t attend her senior prom because of a problem with her date. Neither had I attended my own. The regret of a missed opportunity sobered me, as I beheld her beauty, wondering why I didn’t think to take her to her prom or invite her to my own.
We talked about the difficulty she had living in her home. Her stepfather could be cruel, her brother could be distant, and her mother could be overbearing. These relationships drew her deeper into her faith to help her manage, to help her walk accompanied by our personal Jesus. My father’s alcoholism, my mother’s radical embrace of her own fundamentalism, and my own home’s tragic emptiness of nurture and relationship compelled me to abandon Anglicanism and delve into our world of Scripture study, marathon prayer sessions, and the call to witness to non-believers about our born-again lives.
Many of us commiserated about our teenaged angst in those days and none of us had perfect families. What was new for me was commiserating with a beauty queen, who loved the Lord, with whom I sat shoulder to shoulder, and who had given me a hard-on. Given the taboo against dating and sexual contact, I kept my attraction to her a secret, but my uncomfortable erection pushed hard against my Levi’s, despite my continual adjustments. I feared my peers might detect, might find, my soldier at attention and issue their own call to arms against me for falling in love.
Typically, I remained at the O’Malley’s as late as I could, enjoying the frivolity, dancing solo around the furtive crushes I had on the O’Malley sisters, and conversing with Mrs. And Mr. O’Malley about matters of politics and faith and our shared Las Vegas history. That night, however, as soon as Jennifer was ready to leave, we were gone. I drove her home and once arrived, I parked in her driveway where we remained for a while in the cab.
I remember little about the conversation we had on the bench seat of my little red pickup. In those days I had quite a few intimate conversations in that truck, typically later at night following a Bible study or some kind of larger event I attended with friends. The intimacy was palpable but never sexual or arousing. As brothers and sisters in the Lord, we supported one each other in Christ.
Because Jennifer was never part of our scene and didn’t attend the concerts and myriad activities we feasted on in those days, our conversation had a different tenor that night. We knew of each other’s familial problems, but our conversation took another path, one more typical of late teens, sitting outside their parent’s homes. We arrived at the decision that we would become boyfriend and girlfriend. I had no idea that my evening with Jennifer would turn out so. It never crossed my mind that she would have that kind of interest in me.
Despite the strong affirmation my Christian friends offered me, I had an abysmal self-esteem and had never had a girlfriend. Oh how I longed for that kind of companionship and connection with a female. Yet the community to which I belonged had an unstated but clear prohibition against dating. Such relationships could lead to temptation and forbidden actions and so, despite a tremendous amount of sexual energy and mutual attraction-good God, we were all in our late teens and early twenties!-nobody dated. We transferred our need for intimacy on to Christ and he sufficed as a romantic surrogate. Those who succumbed to biology and natural human development were shunned from the community.
Still, the prospect of dating Jennifer thrilled me. My heart beat accelerated, my erection returned, and without considering the consequences, I asked Jennifer to be mine and she accepted my proposal. I loved the way Jennifer talked. Her voice had tenderness and a vulnerability to it that drew me to her. So enamored, I gave little heed to the request she made when she directed me to speak to our de facto pastor, Doug, about our new arrangement. Without stating it, she wanted permission from him. I wondered briefly about his response, but abandoned the thought as we walked to her front door.
A cool, but not uncomfortable night, a calm enveloped Jennifer’s neighborhood. Small, but well kept, the house felt safe. The bright overhead light reflected off the white front door where we stopped before she entered. Jennifer leaned back against the wall bathed in the light. The whole night had been one surprise after another so I didn’t entirely understand her delay in entering. She said nothing as she stood there. Her full brown hair fell below her shoulders. The sweater she wore fit her well outlining her sacred breast. I looked at her, at her face with dark brows and thick, brown eyes. They avoided my glance and looked everywhere but at me; toward my parked truck, along the porch, overhead. She said nothing.
It dawned on me. One thing remained before the evening ended. It was time to kiss her good night. I battled with myself and lack of confidence in what seemed like an interminable moment. At the door, silence signaled that the time for talk was over. I could have left without kissing her goodnight but her pose at the door made a clear statement. She had walked me through the steps to this juncture but now it fell to me to do my part.
In a too quick movement I made my move. I took a step toward her, pointed my mouth toward hers, and went in. It relieved me when I made contact with them. I feared I’d miss the landing zone and slobber all over her eyebrow or chin.
But there is no mistaking a soft landing. Nothing like it. Once contact with the other set of lips occurs, the stress of potential debacle gives way to the gateway of love. I remember her lips tenderness. There’s no mistaking that feeling. It was something special, sacred even. The light ridges of Jennifer’s lips brushed along mine and I detected a hint of her lip gloss- popular among teen girls in those days. But too little practiced in the smooching arts and more directed by self-doubt and low confidence than the rage of seventeen year old testosterone, I bailed quickly. Satisfied that I had complied with the requirements of the moment, I pivoted off my foot and walked away quickly not even considering the possibility of cupping my palm around her round, attentive breast or offering an embrace. Both pleased with myself yet embarrassed by the moment, I fled.
As I drove home, the magic of the kiss and the evening that preceded it swirled about me. Elation, expectation, and hope replaced sleep that night. I finally had a girlfriend. I knew I had reached a milestone. More than that, I knew that the one I had satisfied me immensely. I made endless plans in my mind. Attending events with her at my side. Sharing time alone. The possibilities seemed endless. My mother would say that I was ‘journey proud’: unable to sleep because of the exciting adventure that began with the new day. I didn’t think about sex with Jennifer. I thought about walking with her, hand in hand, in my favorite park in Las Vegas, Sunset Park, the same place I had played with friends, failed at little league baseball, and chased Frisbees. I imagined kissing and holding her under the cover of the larger cottonwood trees that canopied the picnic tables at the park. I saw us there in the twilight, in the transition from day to night, even as we journeyed from friendship into something deeper, something intimate and physical.
My erection, the constant companion of that evening, reminded me that something new was afoot with Jennifer, but I didn’t think of satisfying it with an ejaculation. I was starved not for release, but for touch, for a deeper touch than my Bible community allowed me to have, a deeper touch than I allowed myself to have until Jennifer. I was like the man who Jesus healed from paralysis. The real possibilities of movement delighted his soul.
So many of my childhood pals had made the transition, had abandoned the desert roaming, the dumping grounds near our neighborhood, and the cul-de-sac softball games, for girls. I watched from afar, like the crippled man on his mat, unable to move, in envy of the movement about me. That night, my healing had come. I would walk soon, walk with Jennifer, would take her hand in mine and wander about in my own adventure, no longer lame but restored.
The night finally passed and I readied myself for church. By that time, I had abandoned the Episcopal Church of my childhood, and attended a fundamentalist and Pentecostal church that provided the Sunday morning anchor for our weekly Bible study. Unlike our second story fellowship of young people, this church had a professional pastor, church program, and pews. But it was terribly different than my parent’s church. Committed to Biblical inerrancy, glossalia, and male primacy, the preacher called us to premarital sexual abstinence and preached against the evil of masturbation. Doug, our de facto pastor, the man Jennifer needed to approve our new status attended the small community church in Henderson, Nevada.
I remember nothing of the worship that Sunday morning or the preacher’s words. The only thing on my mind was the conversation with Doug and then to find Jennifer. I approached Doug after worship, greeted him in the Lord, and then told him of Jennifer’s and mine decision to date. He didn’t affirm our mutual affection nor see the new juncture as important developmentally. He saw danger and the threat it posed to our salvation. He stated his conviction that, as new Christians, our foundation in the Lord, had yet to solidify, our concrete was not dry, and that romance could pull us from its moorings. Firmness in the faith was everything back then. Evidence of which manifested itself in the early morning and daily attention to God’s word and personal prayer. Never mastering myself well enough to start my day with Jesus, I lacked maturity in the faith. Others of our cohort seemed to incorporate that practice into their life and this usually led to a greater ability to witness to friends, family, and strangers about Christ. I, however, struggled. Doug and others attempted to baptize me in the Holy Spirit, but it didn’t take. I preferred the frivolity of the O’Malley clan over more serious pursuits of Fremont Street pamphleting. His response devastated me. Too enamored with thoughts of Jennifer and the time we’d spend under the cottonwood tree, I didn’t see his prohibition coming.
I accepted Doug’s assessment of my discipleship. It didn’t occur to me to do otherwise. My father’s emotional, and increasing physical, absence, caused me to find other male role models. Doug offered authority and the approval I needed then. He, more than anyone person, had welcomed me to the fellowship he led, affirmed my new life in Christ, and though self-appointed, took his pastoral responsibilities very seriously. Though terribly disappointed, I accepted his pronouncement without question, as God’s will, and returned home to inform Jennifer that our love was not to be.
Jennifer answered when I called. She asked me about Doug’s counsel. I responded that he told us not to pursue this, that our concrete foundation in the Lord had not sufficiently dried, and that to make our discipleship our priority, not our relationship. I relayed the information to Jennifer with sadness in my soul. Jennifer’s response deepened my despair. She told me she had been thinking about it some since the night prior, and given her plans to attend college in the fall, it wasn’t the best time for her to get involved. The death knell she offered following Doug’s ruling, snuffed out a remnant of hope there was in challenging our relationship to Doug and finding a way to see each other. Jennifer despite his desires to the contrary. At seventeen, buoyed by a clear sense I had that I was somehow special to Jesus, I had little sense that I was special to myself or others and found no inner ability to fight for what I wanted. In fact, what I wanted back then, I often denied as having any importance. The possibilities with Jennifer delighted me and promised enjoyment and happiness. But before I could even touch them, before I could let them penetrate my emptiness, Doug dashed those hopes against the stone foundation of my fledgling discipleship, a discipleship that in about a year and a half from that moment, I would ultimately abandon.
Had Jennifer not affirmed his decision with her own plans, perhaps I would have mustered the necessary courage to make a case for our relationship, perhaps I would have suggested we continue our relationship and walk into it, into wherever it led. Had she expressed some disappointment, that could have buoyed me to push against Doug’s authority. But when I heard her say she’d been thinking that it was the wrong time for us, I had nothing to say. Everything that surfaced, that rose up in me, that enlivened me in ways I had only fantasized about, was gone. Our short phone conversation ended and with it our brief love affair. I internalized my grief and wandered about the house unaware of the depth of my pain, pain that I have buried, pain that nearly four decades later continues to haunt me.
That Sunday morning, my plans to visit a particular picnic area surrounded by tall and full cottonwoods wrested from me, I wondered about my backyard. My father, despite his increasing disease, typically remained at home on Sunday mornings, working in the backyard and directing his three sons to household chores.
Uncharacteristically, he asked how I was. I told him about Jennifer and about the disappointing conversation with Doug. In those days, any time I solicited advice from my father, he listened but offered nothing but silence and futility. How I wish he would have encouraged me not to give up on my girl and our love. Alcoholism rendered him mute. In exile from his own life, he had no means to help me find my own. His sobriety came a year and a half later and that, more than anything, helped me jettison the confines of fundamentalism and the restrictions Doug and that community imposed. But that morning, without any intervening angel to strengthen me, to encourage me to wrestle, to take on the demons of fear and conformity and not release them until they offered blessing, my one kiss romance died a sudden and irrevocable death.