I don’t necessarily mean a laying on of hands and forcible eviction from the premises, though I’d love to hear those stories too. No, I’m just looking for times you’ve told guests that they were, as of that moment, no longer welcome in any real estate you held title or lease too, and that if they took twenty seconds to leave, that was nineteen seconds too long.
I tossed a date out once, a little over a year ago. I’d been set up with this woman by one of my sisters, when she was tired of hearing me bemoan my outcast state. "Skald,’ my sister said, “you’re too damn picky, that’s your problem. Try dating my friend Linda from church.”
I was a little hesitant, because my sister belongs, like all my family but me, belongs to the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal, basically fundamentalist denomination headquartered in our home town. But my sister insisted that I’d like this girl, so I agreed.
The first three or four dates went well. Linda was smart and cute and funny, and despite having all those attributes seemed to like me as well. But the fourth date…
Well, it happened thus. Linda had been surprised to hear that I actually chook most of my meals for the sheer enjoyment of doing so. She jokingly challenged me to prove it, so I invited her to the apartment for dinner. While we planned to cook the meal together, I made the dessert–a lemon meringue pie–ahead of time.
During the preparation we were listening to the radio, and there was a news report mentioning a prominent bishop in the church. Now, I have a serious dislike for this bishop. At my uncle’s funeral a few years earlier, you see, he had delivered the eulogy, which in COGIC congregations tends to be a sermon. Before talking about my uncle’s life and good works, the bishop spent, by actual measurement, five and a half minutes inveighing against sissies and fags, all of whom were by definition doomed to hell. He did so while staring at my uncle’s oldest son, my cousin, who’d taught me how to ride a bike and who was my favorite relative as a child. My cousin also happened to be a gay man dying of AIDS–which, the bishop said at least twice, is God’s punishment for homosexuals. The bishop also made a couple of pointed comments about tempters and demons in human form who draw good men into faggotry (his word), while looking at my cousin’s boyfriend, who stayed with my cousin throughout his illness and nursed him as best he could, though he himself is HIV-negative.
You’ll understand why I didn’t care to listen to this bishop being praised. But Linda didn’t. “Why’d you turn it off?” she asked.
I told her. “I don’t think it was necessary for that…man to attack my dying cousin,” I said.
“But he wasn’t attacking him,” she replied. “He was trying to save his soul from hell.”
“What?” I said.
“He was trying to save your cousin from hell. 'Cause, you KNOW he went to hell unless he repented before he died, right?”
“Excuse me? Are you telling me that you think my cousin is burning in hell for loving men?”
She didn’t hesitate. “God hates fags,” she said.
I looked at her for about a minute and said, “You need to get out now.”
“But you promised me dinner,” she said.
I turned around, got the lemon pie out of the refrigerator, and handed it to her. “Enjoy,” I said. “Now get out.”
So that’s my story. What’s yours?
But I never did see him again.