My Girl, Cockroach

My ex-girlfriend, Cockroach (just a nickname), was so special (and, for all I know, she still is).  I remember how she worried about me being dressed too nicely before I met her parents for the first time, how she insisted that I change into something even more slovenly than what I was already wearing.  She was so comfortable with underachievement. I think she might have romanticized failure, and we were so heavy into each other.

Once, in preparation for a European holiday with her family, she was reading up on the Hapsburgs.  I remember her telling me some story about the Hapsburg army decimating some other king’s army at some battle.  The non-Hapsburg king was felled and was clearly dead, but his outnumbered soldiers who’d been fighting by his side remained loyal. Rather than fleeing, as they could have successfully done, they instead dove onto the king’s corpse (and toward their certain doom) in order to shield his corpse from the indignity of further blows from the swarming Hapsburg halberdiers.  Cockroach was nearly ecstatic.  She thought that story was so sexy, and I knew right then that I’d never be enough for her.

Cockroach was hella anti-Jesus.  She was pretty much down on religion generally, but she had some particular grudge against Jesus.  She had these blowdarts, and on her dartboard was an image of Jesus, one of those old-fashioned icons like in Andrei Rublev.  She’d invite visitors to play blowdarts, and she’d distrust those who declined.  “I can’t trust anyone who isn’t willing to shoot Jesus in the face with a blowdart,” she’d always say.

One time we were at my house and I was playing Big Star and that song “Jesus Christ Was Born Today” came on, such a good song, but Cockroach claimed that she found the song deeply offensive.  I suggested that she should relax because it was such a good song and because Jesus wasn’t really all that bad, but she just got up and turned off the stereo.  Cockroach was so rude, almost pathologically so, and she had such terrible taste in music.

What I never understood is how Cockroach couldn't see the erotic charm of Jesus’ martyrdom.  The very concept of the martyr, the heroic victim, involves just the sort of paradoxical interplay between power and helplessness that always seemed to turn Cockroach on immensely. How could those absurdly enthusiastic anti-Hapsburg soldiers of hers have been so sexy, but Jesus’ sacrifice not be sexy?  That never made any sense to me.

I mean, even as a heterosexual man who hovers somewhere between agnosticism and atheism, even I can see that Jesus is obviously sexy. Jesus Christ, He’s totally sexy...He's fuckin’ rock-star sexy up there, all sweaty and half-naked and delirious with His sufferings and passions. He’s the original bad-boy heartthrob, brooding and tortured and misunderstood.  You can practically see His persecuted, defiant boner poking out from ‘neath His robe or His loincloth or whatever He’s wearing.  There wouldn’t be any James Deans or Donny Wahlbergs or any of that shit if it hadn’t been for Jesus.  He's the reason for the sleazin'.  How could Cockroach not have seen that?  It just never made sense to me.