diving onto the couch beside Adam. “I think he was kind of showing off. I think Richard must’ve just given it to him or something.”
“Was it in a holster?” repeated Kyle.
“No! He had it in his jacket frigging pocket like it was, like it was one of his mittens or something.”
They all start laughing at the word mittens. The idea that someone like Ivor would have mittens in his pockets.
“There’s no way Richard would give Ivor a gun,” says Rank. But as he says it, Rank realizes he knows no such thing. What he meant, when he said the word Richard, was “anyone with any sense.” You would have to be crazy to give a paranoiac cokehead a gun. But Rank knows nothing about Richard, really, except that he owns Goldfinger’s, sells drugs from his morose, fluorescent-lit office, and suffered raging acne is his youth.
They’re all silent for a moment. Wade leans over to retrieve the remaining slice of pizza sitting lonely in its box. Solid, miniscule beads of grease have formed across the pepperoni.
“Should we call the cops?” says Adam, and everyone laughs again.
21
08/08/09, 10:36 p.m.
FOR A FUNDAMENTALIST, Kirsten was remarkably easygoing about sex. I saw a lot of this sort of thing after I joined the church. The most faithful people on earth are able to be so abstemious and upright all the time because when it comes to what they really want, they manage to convince themselves that Jesus wouldn’t mind. I might mention that Kirsten had been married before — at eighteen years of age. “Too young,” she said. “But we were dying for sex.” By the time they reached twenty-two, the dude in question was on his knees snivelling and praying every night until one such evening he raised his leaking face to hers and confessed, “I am so afraid that this is all there is.” Long story short, when Kirsten and I met up the husband was long gone but the pleasures of the flesh were by no means unknown to her. And she wanted more of them. But she had learned an important lesson about tethering yourself to another person for life just to get a little action.
I made the mistake of joking to her about Swaggart once. In fact, I compared her — in her okay-ness with illicit sex — to Swaggart. This was a mistake.
“Jimmy Swaggart was a liar,” she barked at me. I had only made her bark in the nicest way thus far in our relationship, so was taken aback. “Jim Bakker was a liar. Nobody cared that they were sex fiends — everyone’s a sex fiend. That’s what it is to be human, to be fallen creatures, it’s who we are. The sin is the lie, Rank. The hypocrisy. I don’t lie to myself about who I am and I don’t lie to you and I don’t lie to Jesus. I can’t lie to Jesus. The difference between me and Jimmy Swaggart is that I’m not so arrogant I’d even try.”
It was lying that was the ultimate trespass to Kirsten, so no surprise that it was lying that broke us up. I wasn’t cheating on her, if that’s the conclusion you just leaped to. Eventually she just came to see how I was faking my way through faith — characteristically, she saw it before I did. Don’t get me wrong, I had no desire to leave the church. I loved the church. I just didn’t buy what they were peddling anymore. I still loved it; I wanted to buy it. I would have done anything to buy it. But I didn’t. Every time I closed my eyes and tried to feel the Holy Spirit bearing down on me like a typhoon of love and terror, all I’d get was Zeus, aiming drunken thunderbolts, sticking it to nymphs. Other times, I’d picture Kirsten’s father in the dust. She saw through me, somehow. And she would be damned, literally, if she was going to let me keep pretending otherwise.
“My husband,” she said to me at one point very close to the end, “was less of a coward than you.”
So that was it with me and Kirsten.
But that’s not really enough for you, is it, Adam? I’m starting to figure out how it works. I remember the details in your book that freaked me out the most — it was the minor stuff, those dead-on grace notes that no one else would notice. Some tiny, throwaway item like how every once