Get Thee Behind Me, Satan!

Mary Burke was a receptionist at a prominent and reputable law office in town. Steinway, Stapleton and Schwartz. The applicable acronym for the firm is "SSS" and I imagined they could have a snake for a logo. Maybe an office pet. But I don't like snakes, or serpents, because they remind me of Satan. I don't think most people like snakes, either, so it probably wouldn't make good business sense. 

I was there to hire a lawyer for a child custody hearing. Out of all the names on the directory, I chose them. Fate, it was, I concluded when I saw Mary. Due to the absurd laws of my state which give absolute rights to the mother, I had no rights to see my 6 year-old daughter until the courts declared them, so her mom was keeping her from me because she could. She said I was drinking too much and sleeping with too many women. She said my house was a brothel and I ought to put a red light in the front window. She said I have a "hooker problem." She would never see me any differently than what I once was. I didn't have a hooker problem. I had given them up years ago.

 

I never liked seeing them in the first place, but I saw them on lunch breaks at work in the office, or in an open conference room, or in various parking lots and garages in the back of my car, or theirs. They broke up the tedium of my government job.  Other times, I drove to their apartment or hotel like someone going to an optometry appointment to get his eyes checked. It was some casual and necessary thing to me. Sometimes it was the same girl over and over. Sometimes it was someone different. Sometimes she was black. Sometimes she was white. Sometimes she was Latino. It all depended on my particular mood that day. It was like ordering food and was based on hunger and craving. There are too many to remember. 

They were efficient. They were a drug and I was an addict, but the high never lasted and it always left me with a vacant feeling. It was though when I left from their upscale hotel, or rundown motel, or dingy apartment, or suburban house, or whatever parking lot we were in, I left part of myself there beneath the seat, or on the bathroom sink, or buried in the sheets; and whatever part of me was left wasn't ever coming back. I wasn't like one of those lizards that lose their tail only to regrow it. I was losing my soul. I was being left behind like those religious books where there is Rapture and the people who hadn't asked Jesus to save them are left on Earth clinging to something futile. I hadn't read any of them, but I read the back covers. I never enjoyed religious books or music. They always seemed to lack something. Like low-fat ice cream. 

I am a Christian. But I like fat, and I like sugar, and for a long, long time, I liked to sin. I love love. I am a love junkie. But inevitably, I sabotaged love so many times a case could be made that I didn't really love love at all. Instead, maybe I loved heartbreak. I loved newness and romance. I didn't need to go to therapy to get over hookers. I was getting tired of it as it went along. Of the fake names and lies. The impersonal efficiency of it that I once loved so much was suddenly very boring to me. I compartementalized my sex life into Costco. Sweating out blood tests in clinics. Wasting money. Losing time. What thrill they once evoked had evaporated. I didn't want to get to know them. Or to fall in love with them. I wanted to be out of love. Shot up into space. A million miles from anywhere, from any emotion, or anyone. Like a cosmonaut. I wanted to be one of those monkeys.

 

I suppose a therapist could tell me more if I cared to know. They could tell me why when I was with a beautiful woman I sabotaged it all. Like driving a car into a tree over and over. Why I had random affairs, or why I hired hookers when I needn't. It was over though. And I knew never in my life again would I hire someone for sex or have sex casually with a stranger from a dating site or a personal ad. How silly it all seems now. It seems like a harmless thing, a simple consensual arrangement and exchange of parts for time and money, albeit demonized by the morality police who often call it human trafficking and profit from codifying it. Yet, unmistakenly, it takes quite a toll. 

But with the last piece I had left of my soul, I stood there in the slithering law office of Steinway, Stapleton and Schwartz and I hired an attorney. Mary is the aforementioned receptionist who greeted me. Mary. Mary. Mary. I said it over and over in my head as I stood there waiting to be introduced to the lawyer who would handle my case. What better a name for someone so pure and perfect? It was as though she was in a pageant she never knew she entered and in the audience there were fifty thousand people who were all me and five million more people watching at home who were also me. I had been 6 or 7 months without seeing anyone. Without indulging in the carnal pleasures of the flesh. I read a book that insisted that abstinence would bring me closer to God and so it was. And so it would be until I found the right person for me. I had never felt better. 

She was beautiful. Stunning, truly. Maybe an outside observer would say that she was too beautiful for me, but that was never a mountain too high for me to climb. She sat there in a conservative blue dress, with a pretty smile, busy on the phone or talking to lawyers. Typing at her computer. She sat behind the desk as though it were the holy gates of St. Peter, the mouth to all that is sacred in the universe. There in front of her was the blind lady of justice, a twelve-inch pewter statue which held a scale in one hand and a sword in another. There was a blindfold around her eyes. There was a candy dish next to the statue. It had peppermints in it. Red and white striped peppermints and I thought of some religious metaphor to be had in the colors of the candy. The blood of Christ. His innocence. I smiled at Mary, and she smiled back at me. We were then equals. 

Mary reminded me of the kind of girl I wanted to meet in church, but never did. All the pretty ones were married and married women were off my newfound radar. Nothing ever comes of married women, after all, besides lurid sex. Mary was the non-judgmental type who I could confess or disclose my sordid history to, and she would quote some scripture absolving me of my past and say I was forgiven and look at me no less than she had before I spoke of it. It would not effect her view of me when the realtionship got intimate. She would not think of me as some sort of creep, or think of herself as someone who could never be on par with someone who had sex for an occupation. I wouldn't have to tell her, again and again, "They were really not that good," as I had to explain many times before of hookers. "They're just people." She was a lamb. A perfect spring lamb. And I was born again. 

 

I have so much hope in Mary that if I were to think logically, I would have realized that life couldn't possibly live up to the expectation. But I could not think logically about her. Not in the least. What grand hope wallowed in my head like a fat hog in mud. What foolish dreams paraded through my reckless mind so blissfully flamboyant. I figured since my case was ongoing, I'd take it slow because patience is something I never had before and in the book I read about abstinence, patience is critical. Discipline, as well. Little by little, I'd get to know her. Day by day. Week by week until such time that the clouds parted and a halo of light lit her forehead and tiny angels danced in her twinkling eyes as my cue to ask her out.

My case stretched out for several months and each time I was in the office I spoke to her and we talked about life, and the weather, and things around town, and what food we liked, and current events, and books we read, and movies, and hobbies, and sports, and our kids. Her kids were cats, she told me. "Furbabies," she called them, and while such an inane cliched word would have normally made me cringe, it only further endeared her to me. And I said I was fond of cats, but I really wasn't. I had no particular aversion to them, but I overstated my affinity for them in so many words. But inch by inch, I got closer to her. I got to know her like I had never got to know anyone before and we had such wonderful common interests. She too was a Salvador Dali enthusiast and she also loved Nikola Tesla and big-band music and "The Great Gatsby" and classic novels, with an emphasis on Hemingway. It felt beautiful to flirt and to get to know her in the old-fashioned sense of getting to know someone. Like I never had before. It seemed a little like what my grandmother described in seeing my grandfather. "Courting," they called it. It was true. I, Mr. Matthew Paul Joseph, was contentedly courting Ms. Mary Marie Burke. 

It was hard not to get ahead of myself, but I loved coming to the office, even if it was to pay my bill. I purposely paid in smaller increments once a week so to see her at least weekly. I knew that law office like the back of my hand. Every creak of the step going up. The very tint of the lighting. Every inch of the oil painting of the town's founder, Captain Hannibal French. His cold glower, which never changed. The map of the town on the opposing wall, dated 1870. The portraits of ten county judges, matted and framed, their names, the years they presided on the bench, and where each of them were down the hall of attorney offices. I knew the feel of the leather seats in the waiting area. I read every magazine on the rack. I knew the scent of the candle that burned on her desk. The smell of the deodorizer in the rug. The sound of the wood floor as I walked upon it. My optimism slowly flowered into a beautiful garden of hope. 

I attended church every Sunday because I had made mention to Mary that I go to the Methodist Church on High and issued an open invitation for her to join me, if she ever wished to come. She replied that she didn't belong to a church, so I figured there was a good chance she might show up. So, even when I was hung over, or tired, or not feeling my best, I went. And the pastor went on and on and spoke of things that were out of this world to me. And I felt every first Sunday with the Holy Eucharist that my soul was being replenished. That part I left in all those hotels, or motels, or dingy apartments, or under the seats of cars with lose change, was being fulfilled with every offering. As often as you eat of this, do so in rememberance of me. And as often as you drink of this, do so in rememberance of me. 

Six months later, my case was finally resolved. I was granted standard visitation rights and my daughter went back to church with me. I had almost forgotten that she was baptized in the same church years before when her mom and I were still together. I had pink-eye that day, which I got from enthusiastically pleasuring a young beautiful black woman who lived in apartments near my bus station, who I met off some random dating site. She squirted in my eye. 

As pretty as a remember her being, I cannot see her face at all anymore. I can't see any of their faces clearly and they wander about in my subconscience as faceless spirits. The guilt of them used to haunt me, but they don't anymore. They are just there. I wonder if, like their faces, will they one day vanish entirely. Will God rid me of them so that it is like they do not exist and we were never aquatinted. Is my mind capable of such a holocaust of thought. A targeted amnesia. 

The unholy thoughts are gone and I have no desire to revisit them. There had been several times in life I thought I was fine or that I was over the sickness that compelled me to become such a licentious lothario, but still that poison tree bore the wicked fruit of my sins and everything I touched died. But this, I knew, was the time. As I held my daughter's little hand in church. As I listened to the words that Jesus said about the road to happiness through love and charity. And in my heart, and in my replenished soul, I knew I was healed. And I thought of all those barnstorming baptist preachers a hundred years ago or so in those hot sweaty revival tents putting their hands on sick people and screaming wildly, "You are healed! Healed! Great God Almighty! Lord in Heaven! You are healed!"

They had commanded the devil out of me. The book of abstinence brought me back to life and abstinent I would be until some day when the fleshy gates of Heaven parted in such a holy and romantic way that it could not be denied that it was God's will that I trespass into Eden. It was the devil that itched the desire in me to cavort with hookers and strangers for nefarious purposes. To cheat my wife and several girlfriends past of what I promised in the very assumption of our union. But he had been cast out and he wallowed again in the pitiful depths of his lonely Hell, while I follicked in the delight of angels, high in my new Heaven. 

I sat there in church victoriously and held my daughter's hand, grateful for a Sunday when the pastor, as he unwittingly had done so many Sundays before, preached a sermon that was coincidentally similar to my life. His sermon was from Matthew 16:23: "But He turned and said to Peter, “Get thee behind Me, Satan! You are an offense to Me, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men."

And I smiled as my daughter in the pew beside me colored pictures of Joseph leading Mary to Bethlehem on a donkey. We ate lunch and dinner and I drove her home up the long and winding country road past the apple orchards that seemed more ripe than ever before. The air was sweet and cool and I watched her hair whip in the wind as we sang Frank Sinatra songs and she smiled in delight. My life was holy and it was fulfilled and it was time for me to share it because I no longer bore the poisoned fruit, nor had I the bad finger of death. 

 

The next day I went to my lawyer's office to pay my final bill and I knew with Satan behind me as he was, it was finally time. It had been nearly a year since I dated anyone and I had not given in to the temptations of the flesh, as my grandmother might call it, in just as many months. And for the very first time in my life I found it hard to remember my last sexual encounter and if it wasn't for mornings and an occasional involuntary reflex, I would have thought my most intimate of organs to be dysfunctional.  

It was Wednesday and I stood at Mary's reception desk and I thought in my head that if we married her name would be Mary Joseph, which made me chuckle. I needed nothing more than that perfectly spiritual oomph to bolster me, and at last those clouds parted and the lights of Heaven shined down upon her in such a favorable way that it could not be denied that she was my intended. It was in reality that the light above her work station had been replaced and the maintenance worker put in an 100-watt white bulb, rather than the 60-watt amber bulb from before and he had yet to be back to fix it, she explained. But to me it was no accident. It was a sign. An intentional act of God Almighty who knew that such an omen would not be lost on me.

As my grandfather used to say it was either shit or get off the pot, so as I wrote the last check I asked her out. I asked her if she wanted to go to the Mexican restaurant this Saturday night, and she smiled and said yes so emphatically I knew it was all but written for us. Somewhere there was a greeting card company that was printing invitations and envelopes that we would order. Somewhere a banquet hall sat ready for our inevitable reception. And the Methodist Church on High awaited to host our nuptials. And a piano to be played. And a dressmaker to make her dress. And a florist to make beautiful arrangements. And a bachelor and bachelorette party to be had. 

I thought of that bachelor party in great detail as I left the office. My friends and I at my favorite bar, all at a long table, and me there in the middle being celebrated and roasted all in good humor. A beer in front of each of us. And a little drunk, hoisting my mug, I would say some wonderful words to each and all of them. The married and unmarried alike, concluding with, "As often you drink of this, do so in rememberance of me." And then, raising a piece of pizza, "As often as you eat of this, do so in rememberance of me." 

I smiled thinking of it all. Stone sober, but drunk on romance and irrepressible optimism. So grand and luxurious in my mind like an art gallery of everything beautiful. It was the way they sell you exotic beach vacations and impractical timeshares the way my mind sold it to me. If she were a stock, I would have invested all that I owned in her. If she were a candidate for office, I would have campaigned tirelessly for her. On and on. Metaphors abound, but so woefully insufficient they were to express my beaming bullishness. I had anointed myself king of her infallible kingdom.

 

That Saturday, I picked her up and we had dinner and drinks and it all went so well that I could have cancelled any future plans if I would have had any. We laughed and we cried from laughing and in the bar where I would have my last bachelor supper, we kissed. It was new to me then. Brand new and I was in love. Pushed off that romantic cliff. Drowned in torrid words, touches and glances. The book of abstinence I had been reading probably self-immolated at home on my bedroom dresser. Or else it had plunged to it's demise out the bedroom window. And whatever parts of my anatomy I had doubted as to working, fired up and stood ready for further orders. I might as well have booked our honeymoon to the Yucatan Peninsula while she used the restroom. 

Then after several drinks, she began to show me her tattoos. At some point in time, I had been here. In this exact location and predicament. I had been here repeatedly, actually, and I felt bewildered for a moment. There seemed always a point in the evening when a woman with tattoos will feel compelled to show them to you. It was a bit trite, but I wasn't dismayed by it. I wasn't old-fashioned in the sense that I thought tattoos to be tasteless or indicative of only either sailors or whores. I knew better. I knew perfectly good Christians that had many tattoos. Those new-age thirty-something Christians in those department-store-turned-churches with the clever names. Those that believe Jesus came in a space ship to visit and would have an Instagram account and drink Starbucks coffee. But her impromptu tattoo exhibition wasn't an iceberg and this wasn't the Titanic, I told myself. They just caught me off guard because I wasn't expecting them. 

She pulled up her sleeves and there were Indians and Japanese writing and she said this means that and that means this. So on and so forth. She introduced me to Cochise, who was an Apache Indian chief who led uprisings in her native Arizona against the US government. I raised my hand and said "How," which she didn't find too amusing. Then I remarked it was a very good likeness, though I didn't know what he looked like at all, but which seemed to please her. I can admire a woman who loves history, I immediatelty countered any self-doubt I was feeling. I was building a dam of resistance. 

Then she lifted her dress and she had a pyramid and sphinx down the Nile Delta of her thighs and some other Egyptian things which made me feel like I had just exhumed the tomb of some unknown Pharoah there in that bar. I figured it meant she was cultured, but somewhere something disappeared or was pushed back inside of me. Those wedding invitations or that banquet hall were yet to be warranted. I needn't rush to look for a band, and that bachelor party was on hold, for now. Not that it was permanently shelved and never to be. No, not at all. Just that the flying monkey on her shoulder blade would take some getting used to before I was eager to call him family. 

Then she pointed out bolts of electricity on her inner thighs which she traced all the way over to her other leg where Nikolas Tesla was hanging out staring up at me as though he were forever lost in some consequential thought or theory of something. He looked good for his age, I remarked, and I said hello, but he didn't reply. I suppose I would get used to him. But the position that he was in on her right-inner thigh meant that anytime I was in the act of pleasing her, a favorite pastime of mine, he would be whispering into my ear all the while. 

 

"I won't show you all of them," she declared, taking a shot with one hand while the other was firmly over her clothed heart. "Not yet, anyway! I'm afraid of how you might, well, you may judge me."

I assured her I wouldn't, nor did I think differently of her for revealing the gallery of her previously concealed tattoos. I felt bad for wavering in my opinion of her, for what if she did the same of me when I told her about my lurid past which was straight from a Penthouse magazine? Surely, she would find out about the harem inside of me. I am not one to ever keep secrets. She could read court transcripts of the custody hearing where my ex-girlfriend laid it all out in fervent opposition to my character as though the person I was in the past is who I am now. Nothing ever stays buried, so you may as well be honest. And for all my faults, a lack of honesty wasn't among them. 

I smiled feeling the good Christian arise in me again. It felt like I was being flown back down to her with angels holding my arms. I'd get used to Cochise and Tesla and whatever else she had. It made her unique. It gave her an identity and too few people have their own identity. Even less actually know themselves. And maybe in time, Cochise and Tesla would be like family. Maybe they could be my drinking buddies. Maybe I would get tattoos, too, and my tattoos and her tattoos could be good friends. It helped that I was a little drunk because when I am a little drunk I feel slightly delirious, as though I am flying in a zeppelin at a very high altitude. 

When the bar closed, we went back to her place, a small but nice house near downtown. She insisted that I meet her cats. She said it was important to her that they liked me and she added that they were a good judge of character. There were 9 of them. A jury lot. What verdict they would render, I do not know. And what sort of appeal I could file if it was unfavorable, that too was a mystery. She listed their names and it was odd but they all had stereotypical Christian names. People names. They seemed to take to me without incident. I stood in the living room and they stirred about me, brushing my leg or watching me from various corners of the room. Observing through their big inquisitive green or yellow eyes. There was one missing, she said. But don't expect her to come out, she went on, absolving me from a suspicion I didn't have.

  

She told me she was going to slip into something more comfortable and to make myself at home, so I sat down and the cats seemed to overwhelmingly approve of me because they immediately gathered near me in two rows like Christmas carolers and meowed at me as though they all had something to say. And I let them speak and politely tried to talk back, but it didn't seem to amuse them, so I kept quiet and just waited for her to come back from wherever she went. Then she called out that I could come back to her room so we could be alone and have some privacy, and eagerly I did as instructed, which seemed to upset that feline octet.

I made my way to her room and the walls were red and there were candles lit and I shut the door behind me and turned to see her. I've been in strange places before and seen many, many strange things, but nothing prepared me for what I was about to see. Perhaps, it was the candles, or the scanty black leather lingerie which made her look like she was covered in strips of electrical tape, or the revelation of additional and more provocative tattoos, notably a pentagram on her chest, or the ouija board on the nightstand with the oracle on top. Or maybe it was the black goat head that she wore. Or maybe it was the jamboree of it all that startled me. But I felt that revival tent within me collapse and come tumbling down on me and everyone sitting there expecting a miracle from that barnstorming baptist preacher with the slicked-over hair who had given a little boy his legs back, and a sweet old lady her eyes, and cured the mayor of the next town over of his impotence. I knew it had all went up in flames that shot straight up from hell. 

There is no doubt that Mary is a sexy woman, whether she sacrificed lambs, or drank blood, or not, even with a terrifying black goat head on her shoulders and writhing in a seductive and possessed way on red satin sheets in a sinful red room lit by flames that licked the dark room like little yellow tongues. But in that moment, Mary Marie Burke would never be Mary Joseph. She had been banished from my dreams. And as I stood there looking at the expressionless faces of Cochise and Tesla and the inkling of every meaningful or meaningless ecletic thought she ever had which was drawn out and engraved on the canvas of her otherwise pretty milk-white skin, as her hands traced down a path of erratic ink on her stomach to her personal Hades, I stammered, "Well, I - uh - I - have church - in the morning. I got to go. It was - fun - though. It was." 

Posthaste, I reached for the door and jerked the handle and made my swift exit, stepping on a few of her cats that got in my way. I was like James Wilkes Booth bolting from Ford's Theatre. This was one of those ID Channel shows unfolding and I was the one everyone would be talking about in the past tense, exposing all my vulnerabilities. Burying me in condolences. She tried to take the goat head off as I fled the room, but it got stuck and top-heavy, I suppose, I heard her tumble off the bed as I reached the front door. She mumbled something, which may have been a hex or a curse, so I slammed the door shut behind me and raced to my car. My tires squealed goodbye. 

Once I was safely away, I thought of the unusual names of her cats. The simple names of people. Brad. Joe. Josh. Tiffany. Sarah. Angel. Drew. I wondered if they were once people she lured into her house. Past dates. Maybe she put a hex on them and somehow turned them into cats. Maybe I would have been of that menagerie had I been a second or two later. Not as adroit as I proved to be in the pinch. Maybe that is what they were trying to tell me before I mocked them with that gibberish meow. I would never know. 

I read of people on Facebook talking about how women were once burned for being pretty. Or for having red hair. Or for having too much sugar in their cupboard or whatever thing it is. All innocent women accused of witchery. I don't believe it. I believe that some, if not most among them, were real witches and who were burned at the stake rightly because of it. Maybe those Puritans erred on the side of caution and were a little overzealous. But I have an open-mind about it. Maybe we got it all wrong and they tried to rid the world of Satan, but Satan lived on. He thrives in our doubt. In our inability to purify ourselves and our world. To resoundingly and conclusively cast him out. Or in our weakness of letting him back in after we do. I don't know. I wasn't there.

I sat in church the next morning and felt safe. I thought maybe I had imagined it. Maybe it didn't actually happen. Maybe it wasn't a goat head after all. It might have been a buffalo headdress and a part of some Apache mating ritual I should have expected someone as eclectic as Mary to wear when she was a little drunk. But no. The snapshot was clear as day and seared into my mind. And as I looked around the sanctuary, the goat head randomly appeared, and it was as though I could still see it ominously looking back at me. 

It took me by surprise when she showed up for church. When she at last accepted my longstanding open invitation. When she didn't burn up walking though the doors. She looked pretty again. Conservative again. Innocent and Christian. Proper and angelic. Cochise was back on the reservation and Tesla was buried in his lab and Egypt was under the sand of her clothes. She sat next to me and barely had time to say, "Hello, Matthew," before the pastor took to the pulpit and promptly began to preach. I squeaked, "Hey," like a pussy. 

He quoted Matthew 7:1-2. He made it clear that Jesus does not ever tell us not to judge others, or to help others become better Christians, but says we must first look at ourselves and not be hypocritical in our judgments. I should have expected nothing less for the sermons always seemed in synch with my life. "Do not judge lest you be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you."

She was attentive during worship, put five dollars in the collection plate, and sang along with all the songs, smiled at the little kids, and even shook the pastor's hand goodbye, thanking him for a wonderful service. I suppose that was enough to be forgiven for the goat head incident. 

I didn't know what to say afterward as we walked through the parking lot to my car. We decided to have coffee in a downtown shop. She said she threw away the goat head after I left. She tried to call me, she added, to explain. I shut off my phone, I said. She went on. It wasn't her thing, but she thought I might be into it. She read it in Cosmo, or something, that men love that kind of primal sacrilegious thing. Men love exotic bad girls, not Mary Poppins. She wanted to impress me. It was only a Halloween costume. It wasn't a real goat head. The pentagram on her chest was only magic marker. She only read about Luciferianism, she'd never practiced it. She hadn't sacrificed anything and she had never used that ouija board, which she threw out as well. She had a little too much to drink. On and on. I felt like one of those Puritan clergymen listening to her fumble through excuses, with matches in my fingers. 

"I'm sorry," she finished. "But I really don't worship Satan. And I'm not just saying that, either. I want to be Christian, but I'm afraid I'd be no good at it. I haven't even been baptized."

"Well, I'm not exactly Billy Graham, either," I replied. "Maybe we can be a couple lousy Christians together and go from there." 

"Really?"

"Yes. And by the way, I think Mary Poppins is very sexy."

She looked up at me and smiled, sipping her coffee. We were sitting by the picture window and the sun suddenly appeared through two perfectly parting clouds and struck her just so, heralding her in a halo of perfect light. There were orbs of light on the table and the walls and it appeared that there were tiny little angels dancing around the bonfire of her pupils. I never had the heart to burn witches, nor had I the desire myself to burn.