In my thoughts I loved her, if she would love me. Yet the sex-act had come between us. Though I had forced this act upon Edna Mae, yet it seemed to me that she had behaved weakly in not stopping me. I disliked her for this weakness in giving in to me. Like a rutting hog I could not stop myself. The slime of my semen on the girl’s thighs was so vivid to me that if I recalled it later, I was excited at once, and my penis hard as a rod.
The sex-heat was everywhere in me. My blood beat hard and fast from my groin up into my belly and chest. My tongue felt engorged in my mouth, like a penis. My body had become a great Thing, engorged and upright, barely able to stagger. If I did not seize and stroke myself, I could not endure it. And yet if I gave in, I was overcome with disgust. I had not attended Bible school for years and did not regularly attend church but recalled Jesus’s words If thine eye offend thee pluck it out and cast it from thee; it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.
In the old barn behind our house in Sandusky at my father’s workbench (which my brothers and I were forbidden to touch) there came to be a screwdriver in my shaking hand. It was one of the larger screwdrivers in my father’s toolbox. For a long shaking moment gripping the tool in both hands bringing its (dull) point slowly to my face thinking Pluck it out! Pluck it out, pig!—but in the end, I had not the courage.
Yet Jesus did not judge me. This was a great relief to me at the time and would prepare me for later in my life, when Jesus would come into my heart of His choice to save me.
My friends (who had also quit school to work during the day) and I went drinking until we were sick to our stomachs. We pissed, and we vomited. We were happy only in the company of one another for we did not judge one another (as our families judged us) and yet, when we were not drinking we shrank from the sight of one another. Often we fought. We had no idea why, we hated each other like brothers who have had to share a room and a smelly bed for too long. In a filthy lavatory in a tavern on Overhill Road when I entered I saw one of them at a urinal, his face was flushed and coarse, there was a red pimple or pustule on his cheek that drew my eye, and a drunken rage came over me, and I seized him around the neck and tried to throw him down, I beat him with my fists and kicked him where he had fallen, I shoved him so that he struck his head on the urinal, and I did not help him up but hurriedly left the tavern; and had only the mildest worry that my friend might die of a skull fracture or a broken neck.
My knuckles were swollen and bleeding from the attack. Even my feet ached, where I had kicked the unresisting body. There were lacerations in my face, there was a shortness to my breath, the old wound between my ribs ached where Felice Sipper had sank the three-inch jackknife blade.
I did not see my friends for weeks. I had no news of my friend who’d been beaten and his skull cracked against the urinal but I did not think he had died or was hospitalized for there was nothing about this in the newspaper or on local TV. I made calls to Edna Mae Reiser who did not return them. But I persevered, and left messages with her mother and came to know Mrs. Reiser, through these conversations; and felt that Mrs. Reiser, who did not know Luther Dunphy, yet liked me. Then, at another time, I saw my friends again, as one of them had enlisted in the U.S. Army and would be leaving soon for boot camp, at this exciting time (for it was made to seem exciting on TV) when the Soviet army had invaded a remote Asian country called Afghanistan, in defiance of U.S. warnings, and there was a promise of a new war now between the United States and Soviet Russia; and the subject of the beating in the men’s lavatory came up, and my friends were embarrassed looking at me. Luther, you never found out who did that to you? Never saw his face? Fucker should be killed.
WHEN I WAS BAPTIZED for the second time, at age twenty-two, by the pastor of the St. Paul Missionary Church, Jesus rejoiced in my heart. Jesus did not need to say—I knew that you would come to me, Luther. All those years I was waiting, I knew.
Very quickly it had happened. Edna Mae had brought me with her to a new church, in Muskegee Falls, about which her friends had told her. At once stepping into this church (that was not fully finished and smelled of new lumber) I felt a turmoil in my soul as if I had come home, and would be recognized here.