Faith Junkie, Part One
From the upcoming collection of short stories titled “The Secret Society.”
This is Part One of a two-part story inspired by a relationship I had with an adjunct professor in my early twenties. She came to mind as I reexamined my life following post-cancer surgery.
So many years ago, when I was young and impressionable—and also a gigantic douche and meathead—I had a girlfriend who was in recovery. She also loved to party, and if that meant tying herself to me at the gigs I used to play out as a DJ back in the day—to give her plausible deniability for being in those spaces where she could be tempted—then that’s what she was gonna do.
It didn’t matter that partying was also part of Marilee’s job. As an assistant to the owners of several large nightclubs in the city, she had all the access she needed to place herself in situations where she could be tempted. But to do so without someone like me was extremely dangerous for her. She still needed the high that came from dancing while being surrounded by exploding lights and booming sounds, which, if she were alone, would lead to the need to go higher.
It was also through her job that she heard of an ex-Catholic priest who had been excommunicated for his “radical” belief: that women’s spirituality was as important and equal to that of men, and therefore, women should also be priests.
His so-called radicalism led one of those old bishops in Rome to push a button on him, just like a capo in a crime family would on someone who had to “go.” Now that he was no longer a priest and out on his ass, Marilee said Salvatore (his name) had been hitting the pavement, showing up at every nightclub and underground spot in the city, preaching his belief to anyone willing to listen about the sacred feminine. And that the raves that were going down back in the day were like mass—a celebration of a Cosmic Christ
Hearing someone who had been a priest reaffirm what Marilee always felt was wrong about religion and spirituality and confirm what she believed was true—that dance was prayer—turned her into one of his biggest advocates. I mean, she wouldn’t shut up about him, going as far as insisting that I meet him, which I did, at the Limelight—a nightclub, funnily enough, located within the walls of an Episcopalian church that had been deconsecrated sometime in the early 1970s—where now everything that could go down for sex, drugs, and music did. After pushing our way through the sweaty throng of people—losing their minds as they danced—we entered a part of the club playing ambient music and found him.
It struck me as odd that this man, in his sixties, was surrounded by an entourage of young men, all dressed like kids in their long striped shirts and baggy pants, with pacifiers dangling from their necks. Marilee, whose situational awareness for bullshit was most times a million times better than mine, didn’t seem to have the same impression about Salvatore. She rushed up to him as he stood from his lounge seat to receive and embrace her. The way he held her for several long, lingering seconds reminded me of a Jim Jones type embracing a follower—paternal, maternal, and creepy all at once. But because she was much older than me—by a lot—and I was young and impressionable, I trusted her reactions more than I trusted my impressions and followed her lead.
We sat down, and Marilee and Salvatore got down to business. The more he talked about his vision of throwing raves where DJs would play music to conjure up a sense of spirit and of God for everyone—while his gaze sometimes drifted away toward the male strippers dancing naked behind us, their bodies painted gold like the statue of Prometheus at Rockefeller Center—the more I saw that he wasn’t as sincere as Marilee had thought. At the time, I couldn’t put my finger on what it was about that gaze—that, as he talked, his affect in describing what he claimed were passionate beliefs shifted to an almost monotone, disaffected tone, like that of a computer-generated voice trying to simulate emotions.
Because the drug use and marijuana smoke around us had reached a level that I knew would threaten Marilee’s sobriety, it was time for me to do what she had asked me to do when we first started dating. I stood up while he rambled on about how the first rave was documented in the Old Testament—when David danced with “all his might” before the Ark of God in 2 Samuel 6—and said the phrase she’d established with me in our power dynamic as one of our safe words when we were out clubbing: “I gotta take a shit, and I don’t wanna do that here, so let’s go.” (She found it funny for me to say something like that openly, in front of people.)
Anyway, she pulled me to sit back down next to her, repeating the phrase she had established to let me know she was fine, “Well, I don’t need to go,” and then returned her focus to Salvatore, who was laughing at the both of us.
“It pleases me to see a couple so open and honest about what makes us human.” He leaned in closer to lock eyes with Marilee, who appeared to have become enchanted by him and his soft way of talking. “It’s also human to feel the natural urge to dance, and touch upon the spark every living being carries in their heart, to make it burn brighter. Only through this would we feel ourselves seen by God, which is why I had proposed to your bosses a collaboration where we would have a night devoted to making our vision come alive, playing music that would help everyone in the dance feel like King David, passionately worshiping God.”
Marilee snapped her fingers, saying, “Yes, yes, yes—preach! This is why I wanted you to meet my boyfriend. He’s a DJ—a real good one, at that. Maybe he could do a set.”
Salvatore looked at me, his squinting eyes sizing me up as though I were a potential kink in his overall plan. I had no idea what that plan was at the time, but I’m sure he could see through my eyes what I thought of him—that he came off as no different from the hustlers I’d grown up with: talking fast with their woo-woo words that sounded pretty but masked the ugly reality of the big ask that was part of their grift, their long con.
Salvatore broke eye contact, shifting his focus back to Marilee and saying, with a forced smile, “Maybe.”
“Maybe? Do you have anyone else in mind?” Marilee asked.
“A few others—”
“Like who?”
“Like I said, a few others.”
“Have you heard them play out?”
“I’ve heard their mixtapes.”
“You’ve not heard his, and you should know that my bosses—the men whose clubs and money you want to use, whose money you want to spend to test out your ideas—trust my judgment. After all, I’ve been working with them for years, and my boyfriend has played at some of their smaller spots before and has proven not only capable of pulling in the kind of crowd you’d want at an event like yours, but he’s also proven he can keep them coming back. So, if you want your first night to go well, consider my boyfriend; otherwise, something may happen where they might ask you to front the costs of your ideas or not let you use any of their spaces at all.”
Salvatore laughed. “One of the positives I’ve taken away from having been excommunicated is that the experience has forced me to learn how to be a better reader and listener. Not of books or of what’s being said, but rather of people and of what they are not saying.”
“Reading between the lines,” Marilee said.
“Exactly.”
“I consider myself an expert on that.”
“Is that so? How’s this, then: since your bosses are fronting the cost, I’m afraid I don’t have any say in their budget.”
“My boyfriend will do it for free,” Marilee said.
“I will?” I said.
“Yeah, sure—it’ll be another line you can add to the resume of places you’ve played out at. Besides, money is not that big of a deal for you anyway; I pay your way everywhere we go.”
“That’s because I do what I do.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Marilee looked back at Salvatore and said, “Now that that’s settled, if you don’t mind, I’ve got to get out of here—go home and also take a shit.”
I know it sounds crass, but that phrase was specifically set up to convey her urge for drugs, which, to her, was as base as answering nature’s call. She rarely said it to begin with, so hearing her say it—and feeling the urgency in how hard she was pulling me by the arm, dragging me through the throng of people dancing in the main room, away from Salvatore and his circle of club kids blowing smoke from blunts that reeked like they’d been laced with angel dust—left me as terrified as she looked once we were outside.
She was breathing hard, as if she’d just escaped a burning building, her wide eyes expressing relief at having made it out.
“I know you said what you said, but I didn’t want to go, not before making the deal, hooking you up,” Marilee said.
“But I didn’t ask you too,” I said.
“But I wanted to,” she said.
“Not if you’re gonna end up like this.”
Marilee sighed. “Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean I’m not always like this. I hide it until I can’t.”
“Why don’t you just stop coming to places like this? In fact, why don’t you quit?”
“What good would that do? It’s all the same—whether I’m at my brother’s house watching him drink, or we go out to eat and there’s a bar there, or I get up to go to the bathroom and see some chick bent over a sink doing coke—there’s no escape. This is the world I have to live in.”
We moved on with our night, walking back to where I’d parked my car by the Flatiron Building. We got in and drove out to Coney Island in Brooklyn, where we both goofed around on the beach before stripping naked and running into the dark waters. That’s when we found out just how stupid it was to think we could have sex in the ocean. So, we got back in my car and drove away, up to the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where we holed up in her apartment for the weekend—binge-watching Kung Fu movies, gorging on Chinese takeout, and having cool, deep conversations in between our “scenes” before finally parting ways on Monday.
Marilee took the train to work in Soho, where the club owners’ offices were located. I drove toward Fordham University, where I was studying at the time. That’s how I met her—she was an adjunct professor teaching Introduction to Journalism, a position she was forced to quit because of her relationship with me, which she refused to end.
And I refused to stop teasing her. Case in point: throughout the week, whenever I came over to her apartment—I lived nearby in Kingsbridge—instead of telling me about her day or talking about her work, she talked about Salvatore. She’d go on and on about him and his ideas, about how progressive he was, so much so that I started busting her chops, joking about the crush she had on him.
And she took me seriously, denying it with such passion, like she was trying to deny it to herself.
After I made her face go red from how hard she was blushing, I told her, “It’s okay… I have my crushes too—but you better watch yourself with Jim Jones, or else you’ll be drinking the Kool-Aid.”
“Who’s Jim Jones?”
Marilee knew damn well who he was, but she was trying to trigger the pedantic side of me I had at the time—the side that would forget that, before her troubles with addiction, Marilee had been a journalist. She’d graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and was among the first in San Francisco to cover what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were calling, at the time, “gay pneumonia.”
To see all the deaths and the callous way officials and people, in general, were approaching this health crisis brought on by AIDS destabilized her. With the deaths of so many of her friends—friends who simply wanted to love who they wanted to love—there was no escape from the crisis of faith she began to experience.
At first, she took refuge in the bottle, then in drugs, then in all the unprotected sex she was having, using it as a passive-aggressive way to try and kill herself. It wasn’t until she had a vision of the Virgin Mary saying to her, “You are meant to be here,” that Marilee cleaned herself up.
Taking adjunct and office assistant jobs instead of going back to journalism—reporting on the way people had been dying in the grisliest way from AIDS—was her way of making sure she lived up to that vision. Becoming the party girl, which to her was the ultimate affirmation of life, countered any urge she still had to kill herself because there was no more illusion that she lived in a World of God.
And yes, Marilee was that much older than me to have had a beat in San Francisco in the early 1980s. But looking back on my precious time with her, I see she was teaching me about power—how so much of it stems from softness, from vulnerability. She showed this through action rather than words (because real power never has to proclaim itself), and her guidance made me a better man—a capable Dom in my later years.
In her own later years, she would tell me she knew what we had was impossible, given the age difference, but that being able to feel in control for once in her life, dictating the terms and the pace of our relationship—like a Domme—was the final step in her recovery. Because of that, I was the one who made her whole again and worth walking away from a bullshit job at Fordham University.
It was important for me to share that background information because, in mentioning Jim Jones—even though I’d said it in a joking way—I was serious. I knew Marilee’s urge to believe in something was more intense than her urge for drugs, and with the way she talked about Salvatore after that first meeting, I could see this urge morphing into a primal need not only to reclaim her faith but to resurrect the woman she once was before she lost her religion. Hearing someone from the priestly class speak on what had always troubled her about her faith—the way it regarded and treated women, the way it focused more on dogma than on people—she said Salvatore also had made her feel seen and validated.
It was not in me to take that feeling away from her, nor was it my place. Instead, I continued listening to her, knowing a moment would come in the near future when she would see the truth about Salvatore for herself—and that moment came weeks later.
Part Two of this story is coming soon. In the meantime, my novel The Beautiful World of the Alive, which explores many of the themes found in short stories like this one, is now available in eBook and paperback on Amazon.