"Open to me my sister, my darling,
My dove, my perfect one!
For my head is drenched with dew,
My locks with the damp of the night.

My beloved extended his hand through the opening,
And my feelings were aroused for him.
I arose to open to my beloved;
And my hands dripped with myrrh,
And my fingers with liquid myrrh,
On the handles of the bolt."
--Song of Solomon

Driving out of Austin on the 183 I'd pass this black town of trailer homes; bleakly poor but not trashy, and the trailer home nearest the highway was painted white, had a dirt parking lot in front, a thin, stark wooden cross nailed over the building and a hand painted sign which announced it was a Primitive Baptist Church. I liked that. Primitive sounded good to me. I wasn't too nuts about the sophisticated Baptists, who were all white and angling for my money. I wasn't too nuts about the middle class Baptists either--a ways up North Lamar was the Church of the Sacred TV, which was run out of an old car dealership showroom. It was all glass, so you see the worshipers inside, and what they were worshipping was a large screen TV upon which their televangelist preacher appeared every Sunday exhorting them for money. They didn't seem to have the Holy Spirit in there. Instead, they seemed to be drained of it; glassy eyed blank faced members of some weird middle class cult. The Holy Spirit was on the other side of town, next to the laundromat near my place in a Holy Roller black church. I loved doing my laundry on Sundays. I could hear the holies rollin' in there, hootin' and hollerin', clapping their hands and stomping their feet, singing gospel tunes at the top of their lungs, and when they'd pour out of the Church after service they'd all be soaked in sweat and joy--they were having fun in there, which is not what I could say for those white folks in the Church of the Sacred TV, who looked bland and brainwashed, or the fundamentalist white folks I'd see on campus, who just looked ferret faced, outraged and plain ol' mean.

The Holy Rollers next to the laundromat were flush with love, and this wasn't a chaste romantic love either. It was a raw sweaty physical love, a lusty, exuberant summertime fuck. God was not coming to these guys through a TV, I'll tell ya that much--He was making his presence felt, He was inside them, and they liked it.

That kind of God made me horny. I'd always be in the mood for fucking after a Sunday morning doing laundry next to the Holy Roller Church. I wanted to writhe around on the floor and work up a fervent sweat--we're gonna speak in tongues, mama, handle some snakes! Oh yeah...Oh yeah...

I loved sex with Catholic girls, with all their ritual--it's a drug addict thing--we love rituals--everything about drugs is a ritual, and sex makes a great ritual too. Although their rituals were approximately the same, the Catholic girls had it over the goth girls in spades. The whole goth trip of being dark and jaded and vampiric killed it all; ennui might be a fancy $25 word but what it means is boredom. There was never a sense of ennui with the Catholic girls; they were rough, enthusiastic; their sex wasn't burdened with fake ennui. Goths feigned boredom. They were trying to say they'd seen it all and done it all, which, of course, they hadn't; they needed to front like nothing mattered, they were so jaded and experienced, here--let's try some S&M, yawn, maybe that'll awaken our senses, but then again, nothing can awaken our senses because we're vampires and have lived for 2,000 years...Yeah, right. Goth sex was boring, about senses dulled by 2,000 years of vampiric knowledge somehow acquired by an 18-year-old girl in the suburbs. It was strictly limited to the known. Catholic sex was all about the vast unknown, about fucking yourself into a spiritual dimension, about the thrilling promise of new experience, even if you did it the same way every time.

The other part of the whole Catholic trip is guilt and shame. Goth girls fucked robotically. They claimed they were evil and nothing could shock them; they just went through the motions. Catholic girls were pumped up with the spirit of shame and guilt; you really felt like you'd participated in some sort of thrilling taboo, gone to that secret illicit place, the rush of excitement from the fear not that your Mom was gonna walk into the room and bust you but that God was.

Guilt and shame and secrecy were already things I'd associated with sex since childhood, all for reasons much darker than any Anne Rice vampire novel. I was turned on by them. S&M intrigued me in the same way that fire & brimstone religion did--I had an unhealthy fascination and identification with characters like Flannery O'Connor's Hazel Motes, from Wise Blood, who wore barbed wire underneath his suit of clothes. I was fascinated with blood and pain and suffering and associated them with Christianity as much as with sex. St. Francis used to practice self-flagellation thousands of years before anyone ever took a whip to a Goth girl from the Valley. I remember standing for hours just studying the carvings on the door of the Duomo cathedral in Milano--majestic women triumphantly holding the severed heads of their just vanquished heathen foes. The severed heads had such exquisitely pained expressions, blood like tears dripping from their necks onto the feet of their victors who stood on their tortured corpses; St. Stephen shot full of arrows, an expression of post coital bliss on his face, his eyes rolled lifelessly towards the heavens. Swords and arrows, penetrating phalluses wielded as often by women as by men, sending the vanquished--the fucked--on their way to finally meet God. I identified with the suffering of Job in a way that I didn't identify with the boredom of the goths. I believed pain needed to be transcendent; you endured it to get somewhere and not just to show how cool you were.

The Bible, of course, is jam packed full of sex. Adam and Eve got it all started when Eve got down with the snake, and a lot of begats later begot us. It begins with sex, and it ends with sex too, sex with great fanfare, trumpets blaring as 7 angels with pour 7 plagues out of 7 chalices and onto the dirt of the Earth, and somewhere in the wilderness is a pregnant woman clothed in the sun about to give birth to the child who will rule all nations with an iron rod, and somewhere else in the wilderness is another woman last seen straddling a scarlet beast, drunk with the blood of the saints and the witnesses, and she is Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the Earth.

Biblical scholars will tell you that Song of Solomon is about God's love for man and not an endorsement of sex, and evidently God loves us indeed, that horny fucker:

"Open to me my sister, my darling,
My dove, my perfect one!
For my head is drenched with dew,
My locks with the damp of the night.

My beloved extended his hand through the opening,
And my feelings were aroused for him.
I arose to open to my beloved;
And my hands dripped with myrrh,
And my fingers with liquid myrrh,
On the handles of the bolt."

Amen, brother.