Drama

I always had a flare for the dramatic. And many of the dramatic events in my childhood were the product of my need to keep things interesting. I always loved to be entertained.

When I decided to get baptized Pentecostal Christian at the age of 16, my mother and sister were politely, but obviously, stunned. Not so much because of the act, but more because of the surprise: I was baptized at my birthday party in August, and the ritual was not in the program. I also chose the confluence of two rivers in Lewiston, Idaho as my holy bath, and chose the bearded zealot Preacher Ron as the proctor of my new salvation. There I was, blameless and naked, being dunked into a river by a stranger who most closely resembled an artist’s rendition of the Apostle John with the addition of beaded dreadlocks. My friends and family aghast, standing sunburned at the riverbank, holding their paper plates full of hot dogs and barbecue potato chips, I smiled.

When I decided to convert from the church of Christianity to that of Sodomy and Pleasure Seeking, there was even more drama. Only this time it was tempered with relief. My family wasn't receptive of my teenaged, Benny Hinn badgering of their sinful lifestyles full of premarital sex. Full of cable television. Full of Budweiser.

My dabbling in Christianity was probably the least offensive of my dramatic playings-out. In hindsight, my mother compares it to normal, youthful experimentation with cigarettes or french kissing. Remember that time when little Kevin was a razor-tongued evangelist? In contrast, she remembers with a bracing chill the time I was nine years old and told her that her boyfriend had been sexually molesting me. This was untrue, but it seemed a fitting possibility to me, and provided an interesting twist in the story. My mother’s boyfriend, Officer Phil, was a poor and corrupt inner-city cop who tried his best to create a feeling of home for my sister and I, while sating my mother’s need for smack with confiscated methamphetamine. More than damaging me emotionally, Mom’s boyfriends and various addictions served as a sort of real-time muse for my stories during those balmy, bleary-eyed, blameless Los Angeles 90s.

I realize now that children tell lies for all kinds of reasons. When I was young, I tried to make things worse than they were because it gave me the feeling that I controlled the storyline of my life. As an adult, I often wonder if my frantic reaching for the truth and desperate need for a footing in reality developed because of or in spite of my mother’s behavior. Conversely, I wonder if she’s as crazy as I think she is, when she wakes me at 4:00 a.m. to share the message of her internal universe, because or in spite of my flare for the dramatic.