Getting a Rise out of Me

I’M NOT IN THE HABIT of dressing any too quickly when I know I’ll be working at my desk in the morning, so when visitors showed up at my door a few days ago, I was clad only in bathrobe and slippers, unshaven, still waiting for the coffee to kick in. A pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses strolled onto the porch and up to my door. Two young, attractive women, each clutching a Bible and a stack of Awake! and Watchtower magazines.

My introduction to that sect, as a young teen, was through a kid named George who lived up the street and shared the bus to junior high school. He came over to play one day and went on and on about his fabulous religion, the only detail of which that impressed me was the threat to disbelievers of a succubus showing up in the night and forcing you to have sex. “What’s wrong with that?” I asked excitedly. “That’s FORNICATION!” he declared, which seemed unnecessarily judgmental for one who, like myself, surely must be provoked by the merest suggestion of forbidden flesh to a frenzy of self-abuse.

Each of my visitors had wide-eyed, rosy-skinned faces, and if there was an inviting glisten to their lips, I can only ascribe it to the fuzzy border that must exist between evangelism and erotic desire. They wanted me, surely, but I could count on that border being well-patrolled.

Yet here I am confronted with these cute, grinning ladies, and all I can think of is a porn-movie scenario in which they invite themselves in and reveal themselves as the succubi of which I was warned, and we frolic in a merry threesome, dampening many a Watchtower along the way.

Not surprisingly, this did not happen. I explained to them that my blackened soul was far beyond the point of being saved. “But do you read the Bible?” asked one.

That Old Testament teems with threesomes. I thought about Lot and his daughters. I thought about Jacob with Rachel and Leah.

“Yes,” I said. “But only the King James version. Later editions lost the poetry, and therefore the soul, of the work. My religion is the English language.”

Which proved to be enough to propel them on their way. I headed back to my desk. Thinking about Onan.