Nailed
When I was twenty-one I found an ache inside myself, an ache I would only be able to quench, I believed, if I fucked a man who looked like Jesus Christ in the ass. I came to this realization alone in a Greek Orthodox Church a little after Christmas, peering through a plexiglass case sooted dark with incense smoke at a display of relics.
There was a vial of what might be blood, or maybe instant coffee. A finger bone of a saint (or a gibbon) a velvet cushion, the hair clippings of a martyr (or a cart horse) in a gilt box. The lineage was dubious, but the message clear: the body is holy. And then there was the painting over the altar: Christ’s arms outstretched to display those luminous triceps, the lithe body and ridges of hip bone, side wound strawberry-pink and dripping, the upward gaze, penitent and holy but also somehow coy as if to say, who, me? with his sweet dark eyes and hair you could braid like a pony’s.
I had ended a stint with a conservation corps in the eastern Sierra, fighting wildfires, cleaning up burn scars, and building trails. The strict rules of our employee housing left few places to engage in most forms of hedonism, the main options being a Subaru Outback pulled to the shoulder of a snowy forest service road, or a small sandy-bottomed cave where we’d stashed contraband liquor and decorated the walls with Chavet-style sketches in charcoal. But after a bad fire season that cave was wrecked now, the juniper roots that had held up its roof burnt through. The cave wasn’t the only thing that had collapsed. I had just exited an ill-conceived triad with two other members of the corps.
Gentle reader, some advice. A triad is not a good format for three non-monogamous newbies. A savage fire season, with 16-hour shifts and 40-day deployments, is a difficult backdrop for the most even-keeled of lovers. And when one member of a relationship is working in the backcountry, reachable only by letters delivered by mule, timely and consistent communication is untenable. What is there to say? Fuck around, find out. Or, in the words of some mystic whose name I forget: Desire, Reach, Repent.
A sense of should have known better reverberated through the landscape, the valleys of charred deer bones, scorched forests, streambeds poisoned pink with fire retardant. This place where, stifling the ancient practices of the people who have cared for the land since time immemorial, we have choked the forests with dead wood, drought and record temperatures, and then acted surprised when they burn. Tension and catharsis, build up and release: it felt so inevitable, in a way that coiled inside me dark and feral and frustrated and bad. It felt like the only way out was to lean into that badness, to find someone who would let me act it out and still hold me, with open legs and open arms, someone who would, for a second at least, cosplay a kind of sacramental purity that would wash me clean. Because that’s what you were supposed to do, right? Take refuge in Christ. I just happened to be the kind of girl who took things literally.
A few weeks after my experience in the church I moved to Portland, Oregon, where my Jesus pegging quest began. I made a post on a local online fetish board, and sat back as the Jesus applications rolled it. The post gained some serious traction; both with people commenting on the thread and messaging me, and before long I had fifty or sixty responses. One Jesus applicant offered to make water into wine (If I gave him grapes and six weeks). Another said he’d steal cuttings from the rose garden to make a crown of thorns. The men’s motives ran the gamut, for some it sounded mischievous and fun, for others, it looked like a way to unwind repression of religious upbringings, or a chance to bottom while still embodying something archetypically masculine: I’ve always been told I have a lord and savior vibe. Another began his message, as if I wasn’t already violated enough by the cost of housing around here…
Unfortunately, most of the men didn’t look anything like Jesus. Some of them were long-haired and wore sandals, sure, but most of those guys were crazy-eyed, crackling with Charlie Manson energy—the man I wanted to nail needed a gentle gaze, a warm, loving smile, and the ability to look holy when in pain. I wanted a martyr. I wanted a lamb. I wanted to feel saved. Eventually, I narrowed my list down to Three Christs, and messaged them accordingly.
The first Christ was a carpenter who lived in his van with a dog. A carpenter! That was canonical. I don’t like banks, either, he said. He let me tie him up with his rock climbing equipment in the back of his van in a winery parking lot. He smelled like sawdust and coffee and weed and wet canvas. Outside, the wind skirmished through the rows of grapes. His forearms were trellised with veins like vines. When I eased my strap into him he said O Fuck, and then, O God.
The second Christ was the one I really remember. Driving out to his apartment in the suburbs I passed a billboard that read No One Below or Above You which I thought was profound, until I realized they meant the condos. Jesus Two walked out on the veranda slow and serene, wearing a crown of thorns and some kind of tunic fashioned out of what looked like a curtain.
Inside the apartment, he served me fish and wine and flatbread he’d made by hand. I didn’t have any yeast, he said, it’s a kind of exodus. We giggled. He was a geology grad student moonlighting as a stripper at a Stag club: he showed me his rock collection, and then he showed me his body. He had hair you could take by the fistful like a mahogany tassel. In bed we grappled, squirming in and out of each other’s grips. Finally I wove my fingers into his and pinned him down, and felt as his body relaxed and his smile became peaceful. I felt my way up, running my hands up from the soles of his feet to his calves and quads and the gutters of his hips, his up his svelte torso rising and falling with each breath, up the channel of dark hair like a silt deposit in a riverbed, up his pecs, his biceps, his wrists, his hands, his neck and face and through the roots of his hair.
I coated his ass in honey and licked it off. He invited me inside him. At first he whimpered, which rang a chord inside me I hadn’t expected to hit, and I suddenly felt a deep sense of tenderness and responsibility, as if I had been asked to transplant the seedling of a rare flower. So I was gentle, pushing in and out with nothing more than clenching my core. From there we found a rhythm, slow and hypnotic. Then he wanted it harder. Rocking back and forth, I found an exhilarating pace, like I had hit my stride on a hard run. There really was an unmistakable sense of speed, of traveling forward at some great pace. My legs cramped, my heart pumped, my pussy throbbed as I watched him tightrope the line between ecstasy and pain. I placed my hands on his waist and lifted his hips up to meet me, grinding my apparatus inside him deeper. He gasped and closed his eyes. From there he entered some kind of private pleasure, something I was both instrumental in and not a part of.
Afterwards, he said he couldn’t explain what exactly it was like. But I can give you the sparknotes.
Oh? I asked.
Yeah. He smiled, cheekily, and rolled his eyes. I died and went to heaven.
I should have left it at that. But I’d tasted the wine now, and I got greedy. Due to a bizarre set of circumstances, someone stole my strap-on out of my parked car, and so on my way to meet Jesus three I had to stop at one of those 24-hour adult novelty shops. It was located off the side of the highway, under a billboard that read SHACKLED BY LUST? JESUS SETS YOU FREE.
Nice try, I thought. But I don’t think you understand my dilemma
Sorry, the third Christ said when we met, gesturing to his ankle monitor, I’m sort of a fuck up. He explained that he’d gotten in a bad habit of robbing plaid pantries as a teenager. But he was doing his best. He’d gotten a steady job and had been working out a lot. He couldn’t leave a mile-square area and didn’t have privacy at his home, so the only place we could do it was in the back of my Subaru outback in a Church parking lot in the suburbs.
He’d worked on the fireline too, on an inmate crew for teenagers. He said he also remembered dragging armfuls of logging slash away from the burn, dragging bed frames from ghost houses, dragging fallen trees from roads, being washed clean by sweat.
He shivered as my lips found his collarbone.
Bite me? he asked. And I bit.
He had the word SINNER inked across his pecs, and, when I turned him over, found a portrait of the Virgin Mary on his back. My tongue traveled over those lines, that pussy-shaped mandola and the moon at her feet, over the scapula and down the spine.
I entered him thumbs first, the way you would break open a pomegranate.
Afterwards, shadows of palm trees danced through the windows and onto our skin.
Do you believe in redemption? he asked.
I don’t remember what I said. I remember laying with my head on his chest, listening to his heart, which was its own kind of answer.
I have a confession: fucking Christ did not set me free. I ended up no holier, no wiser, not bathed in light. I did not escape the human cycles of want and shame, I did not fix the national forest management crisis, I’m placing no bets on heaven. A hole is not the shape of a person, but the shape of a hole. A stranger from the internet can give you their body, their muscle and skin, their heat and tongue, their trembling orifices: they cannot give you peace. But I did learn one thing, precious and obvious as an olive branch: If you can imagine it, you can ask. Someone out there wants it, too.