Jezebel
CHAPTER THIRTEEN from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale
Jezebel
13
The tiny, twin-engine plane surfed the island’s trade wind pattern and bounced onto the tarmac. As the door opened, damp salt air mingled with the scents of pineapple, tuberose, and jet fuel. Petra filled her lungs with luscious, rich, life-affirming extravagance and realized she was back in the arms of the Mother.
Everything was as it should be. Never mind, the three teenage lads whisking her away to a beachfront condo in Kihei. Young men eager for a party in paradise. She had mixed emotions. They spent the first week exploring every beach on the island. Each one had its own personality. Unique sand color from whitest white to yellow to deep black. Small lava rock-encased coves, lengthy tree-lined expanses of endless sand, coral reefs teeming with sea life, massive open ocean waves and calm, flat-water bays.
“Glorious!”
Not so much at home, in the condo. Typical nineteen-year-olds drinking beer, watching sports, cooking and refusing to pick up after themselves. Dishes piled up. They shoved dirty laundry into every corner. She had two choices: become a dorm mother or find an escape hatch.
A local Hawaiian guy selling a “Maui Cruiser,” code for rusted out piece of crap, agreed to monthly installments. The car, its exterior salt eroded, (there was an actual hole under the floor mat) ran well and had a safety inspection valid for the next ten months. They shook on it. Now she was getting somewhere. Next, she secured a server job at a fancy country club in Wailea and, in a few short weeks, found a peaceful room to rent in an orderly home.
Time to thrive.
She fell into a daily routine. Leave by 8:00 a.m. for a leisurely breakfast at a roadside coffee stand.
“Hey, Kekoa, café au lait, and a frozen yogurt with fresh mango, please.”
“Da usual, den, Miss?”
Followed by several hours of snorkeling or body surfing, home for lunch, shower, nap, work at 4:00 pm, rinse and repeat.
The healthy regime did its magic, harmonizing her body and soul with the beauty of her surroundings. She was almost sober, just a few beers here and there and an occasional joint with her new friend/boyfriend, Ezra, a server she met at the restaurant.
He lived with his mom, his older sister, and a younger brother in a one-bedroom apartment. The whole scene was charming. A cool stoner mom and her loving, pot-smoking offspring, all cohabiting in communal close-quartered bliss. In contrast, Petra lived with an older, set in their ways, couple who preferred it if she stayed out of sight. She slept, showered, cooked one mid-day meal and kept to her room. It wasn’t ideal, but it served its purpose.
She often wondered about Carlo and Chef. After several months, a server she used to live with in Vermont telephoned with an update.
“I heard from Chef. He wanted to make sure everyone’s okay. Turns out, they opened a place in Costa Rica. It’s right on the beach and the restaurant’s taking off. He offered me a job!”
“That Carlo. He really worked some magic down there in the cellar. Did he say anything about me?”
“Actually, he did. Something about not sweating the small stuff.”
“That’s a relief.”
A devastating tropical storm pummeled Maui. Unable to bear the thought of being trapped in her room, she drove through four feet of water to get to Ezra’s. Her beat up piece of shit car, water bubbling up through the hole in the floorboard, persevered like an over the hill fighter on steroids. Katie, his mom, welcomed her.
“Now, I have four kids.”
For three days and nights, she shared a one-inch futon on the living room floor with Ezra, until the roads became passable and the island returned to normal.
They smoked a lot of dope. Petra went out of her way to help with the chores, evidence that The Ranch experience had made her a better person. Fresh out of dishwasher detergent, with no way to reach a store, she improvised, and filled the machine with Tide laundry detergent. Everyone, stoned out of their minds, died laughing as suds poured out of the dishwasher, across the kitchen floor and into the living room.
The morning of the third day, she asked Ezra for help.
“Hey, can you get this fucking sticker off my car?”
It read, “THE BOOK.”
“That’s the Bible, right? I can’t have that crap on my bumper!”
As he scraped it off with a razor, his mood deteriorated.
“What the hell? Who is this dark, brooding guy with a soul sucking demeanor?” she wondered.
His adorable twelve-year-old little stoner, surfer dude brother, Cody, witnessed the exchange and, seeing her confusion, whispered in her ear.
“What? How was I supposed to know he was a born-again Christian?”
From then on, in between tokes, he proselytized her day and night.
“You need to get right with God.”
They were sharing a futon, and Ezra had his way with her. To say he made love to her would be in error. The necessity for secret silence saw to that. After all, his brother and sister were asleep in the same room. At one point, he placed his hand over her mouth.
“Shhh!”
A maneuver that detracted even further from any possible romance. Petra thought nothing of it. It was the least she could do. Ezra, in a strange twist, teemed with self-condemnation and remorse.
“I can’t help myself. This is awful. I feel terrible.”
“What are you talking about?”
His reaction was new to her. She had never seen anything like it. He started throwing around words like fornication, sin, and hell.
Looking for a Christian support system, he dragged her off to meet his Rastafarian friend, Winston, who lived in a van, rotating his habitation between various obscure locations. After smoking a Jamaican sized blunt, the two of them double-teamed her with their missionary bullshit. They told her stories about Jesus that she did not understand and did not want to hear. To her, it was a symphony of incomprehensible drivel that faded into nothingness as she detached into her dissociative imagination.
Winston informed Ezra, “Dat uhman dangerous. Shi a waah Jezebel.”
“A Jezebel? What is that supposed to mean? It sounds pretty fucking derogatory. Maybe Winston should fuck off somewhere and leave me the hell alone.”
Petra started sleeping at Ezra’s more and more and he continued having sex with her, to his mounting horror. She was his pet project, and he had fallen for her hook, line and sinker. In his mind, he would get her “saved” and they would be married. He informed her that Christians can not be “unequally yoked” with unbelievers.
She was learning a lot about some very strict “churchy” rules. The entire thing was off-putting, except for one undeniable fact. Ezra was drop-dead gorgeous. He was super lean, with smooth, bronzed skin and a defined swimmer’s physique who insisted on wearing a sarong tied around his waist with nothing underneath. The epitome of a Hawaiian demigod, minus the obligatory tribal tattoos, which were another taboo item in his Christian rule book. His sexy demeanor wavered between relaxed acceptance and uptight, critical judgments.
The family was even more alluring. They were a constant source of good times, easygoing and more open-minded about their beliefs.
They would say things to her like, “Never mind, that’s just Ezra being Ezra.”
In truth, Petra was more interested in being part of a supportive family with a loving mom, than being his paramour. Over time, her resistance wore him down and he lost all hope.
Fearing for her soul, he begged her.
“Ask Jesus into your heart. You’re going to end up in hell!”
Petra tried to tell him she had already been there.
“You wear your suffering like a red badge of courage. It’s disgusting! I can’t take it anymore.”
Grace ran out. He reached the end of his rope and broke it off. Winston, convinced he was a chosen apostle of the Lord, congratulated himself on a job well done.
In the early days, at The Ranch, they asked Petra to attend a 12-step meeting. She chose Narcotics Anonymous. Near the end of her first meeting, she raised her hand and posed a question.
“I have this giant hole in me. I used to numb it with drugs. It feels bigger than the entire universe and it’s full of pain and fear. I’m scared and I don’t know what to do. What do I do?”
No answer. It was as if they didn’t hear her.
“Are they ignoring me?”
Her driver, an intern at The Ranch, was waiting outside in the parking lot. Humiliated, Petra bolted the first chance she got. She yanked open the passenger door. Between seething anger and crocodile tears, she let him know what happened.
“They don’t have what I need. I’m not going back.”
No one resisted her decision. The intense power of her emotions often got her the outcome she was looking for, no questions asked. On top of that, The Ranch lacked the knowledge or resources necessary to address the complexities of addiction.
Her initial response to the breakup was despair. Frozen in a state of disbelief, following Ezra’s dismissal, she drove home. Alone in her room, anger led to blame, which then morphed into a dreadful feeling of utter abandonment.
“This has Winston written all over it.”
She thought about the day she asked Ezra the same question she had asked in the NA meeting. Hadn’t he known exactly what she was talking about? Didn’t he insist that this Jesus fellow was the answer?
Flippantly, she spoke out into the air.
“Okay, Jesus. Go ahead. Come into my heart. I’ve tried everything else. Be my guest.”
What followed was unlike anything she had ever experienced. At the same time, it was reminiscent of the near-death experience at the Chelsea Hotel. Brilliant white light filled the black hole inside her. It pried open a well of hidden pain and suffering. She released a primal, guttural howl of grief as a murky river of shame and debilitating guilt poured out of her heart. Ancient screams, gnarled and trapped, screams as old as the generations before her, reverberated up and out of her throat. The sounds and sensations were shocking and unrelenting. The process continued for hours. It contained no memories; only pure virulent emotion. When it was over, she was different. She felt connected to something much larger than her earthly self.
A Bible Ezra had insisted she keep on the nightstand table caught her attention.
She opened it to a random page and read the words:
“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.“
For the first time in her life, she felt a glimmer of actual self-worth. Not only was she convinced that God was real, she believed He cared about her enough to go out of His way, to find her. She went from a complete agnostic to a fervent believer in one afternoon.
There was one tiny sliver of a vision at the tail end of all the emotional release that she placed on hold for the time being. She saw a strongman inside her heart with arms outstretched to his sides. He was pushing with all his might to create space for himself. With great effort, not unlike Sampson pulling down the support pillars of the temple, he forced out just enough emotional baggage to make room for an old, cracked leather recliner. Exhausted, he fell back onto the makeshift throne, an action that released a thick cloud of dust into the air. He put his feet up, took a breath of relief and rested.
Petra had seen all of it in a single flash. She could not decipher its meaning. Only years later, in retrospect, would she grasp the time and effort required to redeem her spiritual condition. She held within her a toxic waste dump, a seething, unpredictable cauldron of unhealthy emotions. Like a hoarder, she had collected an arsenal of self-recriminating thoughts and self-destructive patterns which her life experience seemed to support.
If it were up to her, she would have called a hazardous waste removal company and had it all taken offsite. She would have started over with a brand new slate.
How could she imagine that her suffering had value, that every experience, both good and evil, those done to her and those done by her, held within it the wisdom of the ages? All she had to do was face herself, accept what she saw and surrender the unthinkable into the hands of the Master. Today was not that day.
Excited to tell Ezra that all his hard work had paid off, she iced her monster face and drove back over to his place. His skepticism surprised her. She later came to find out that while she was being “born again,” he was over at Winston’s being forewarned.
“Dat woman di devil. Nuh believe nuhting shi say. Dat jezebel wi tek yuh tuh hell. Heed mi warning!”
Already, God was doing for her what she could not do for herself. Ezra, for all his devout evangelism and unwavering dogma, was also an emotional train wreck. He was quick to anger and prone to rages. He needed a regular intake of weed to remain calm. Petra had witnessed him throw an entire tray of food, dinner for six, across the restaurant kitchen, because the Chef criticized his plating technique.
Here she was, on the verge of going full-on religious, and now Ezra decided she was not to be trusted? She was not good enough for him?
“Oh, my God! The irony.”
Abandoned, she went to work filled with apprehensive dread. Luckily, Ezra was not on the schedule. As she brought a third bottle of wine to an alcoholic couple, an unfamiliar anxious feeling consumed her.
“How many types of anxiety are there? Why am I feeling pangs of guilt about delivering a bottle of wine? What is this bizarre moral compass shift? Who the hell am I?”
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A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.
This autofiction (autobiography and fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.
It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.