Taking after the old pulp tradition, badbadbad starts off on a sharp note: A man has been left by his wife, taking their son along with her. The prose is as razor sharp as you’d expect in old hardboiled paperbacks, with the same juxtaposition of opposites creating the same tension we’ve come to love from the genre, and the cover is designed with the same campy grittiness in mind. badbadbad, however, isn’t a pulp novel, but a taut psychological examination, a blueprint into madness, all wrapped up in a nice pulp package. This is an important distinction to note because the novel is shot through with this sentiment, this idea of covertness, of hidden layers, of people masquerading as things they’re not.

The Artifice of Media

Jesus Angel Garcia, the narrator, has just been left by his wife, who took their son with her. Looking for money in order to hire a divorce lawyer, he’s hired by the Reverend Puck to be webmaster for the First Church Before Church, helping build their online presence. The community grows so large that he’s picked up by other area churches. Around this time, he meets Cyrus, the ex-communicated son of Rev Puck. Cyrus and JAG bond over music on almost a molecular level. They are fluent in punk, jazz, soul and communicate through in the innate language of aesthetes. He also introduces JAG to fallenangels, a website forum created as a safe haven for fetishists. It’s this site that triggers a revelation for Jesus, that it is his calling to be a sexual messiah for these broken women, fulfilling their needs.

The institutions of church and chatboards—assuming the interwebs can be labeled an institution by this point—are ripe for exploitation, especially if crosscut. In the hands of an overwrought undergrad, this could quickly become tired and the motives transparent. Garcia—the author, Garcia—has a steady, old-fashioned storyteller hand, though, and makes even small elements like the First Church’s name feel more organic, clever maybe, instead of twee. The storylines of each venue are beautifully thrown against each other, informing the next while never outright commenting on either, rather letting the reader draw their own conclusions. At First Church, the Reverend’s passionate sermons—with the help of JAG’s photography and podcasting—begin to attract an increasingly large amount of parishioners to the website, where they discuss sermons, Christian living and local politics. This conversation, though, is monitored and even stoked by JAG himself under a variety of names. When conversation veers to the unchristian, the posts are deleted; when discussion lags, an incarnation of JAG starts talking, sometimes even conversing with himself. During his evenings, he trolls through fallenagels, chatting with numerous women, recreating himself to fit within their pleasure’s parameters in order to satisfy them. At points, he has so many different names and women—each with their own screenname and Christian name—that it nearly requires notes. Keeping all of these straight in his head is a feat unto itself, much less devoting himself, morphing into whatever it is that they need.

All of the varied media address one of the major themes in the book: communication and intimacy in the digital age. Namely, is communication—real communication—possible with all our social networks, and if so, how does this impact our ability to connect and be intimate? Digging further into the novel, peeling back more layers of Jesus Angel Garcia, we start to see his thoughts on this materialize.

The Artifice of Man

All of these personalities and facets dictated by the various media begin to wear on Jesus. He becomes increasingly distressed by the inability to connect with people, despite overextending himself to meet their needs. This is where I began to wonder about the book, reevaluating my understanding of it and starting to consider that I was slowly wandering into unreliable narrator territory. The prospect of this was especially interesting as Garcia’s voice is so confident I hadn’t had any cause to question him.

Structurally, badbadbad is an epistolary novel, told to JAG’s younger brother. Recounting events, particularly ones as intense as these, is already subject to revisionist tendencies. It’s a nice corollary, too, that the veracity of the events mirrors Jesus’s constantly changing identity. This kind of revision is apparent any Friday night at a bar, where we put forth only the best of ourselves. He takes it a step further, though, even streaking his hair with grey dye and using colored contacts for women with specific needs. Regarding his sexual God complex, I understand that he believes it’s his purpose to satisfy women’s urges, to be a martyr of the mattress, but at points it began to feel like he was actually thriving on these missed emotional connections. He seems to constantly point out these superficial interactions, but they all occur in a venue that is impersonal itself. It was almost like he was trying to atone for something in his past by offering himself as a sacrifice, to heal the sexual wounds of these women in order to heal himself. The naivety with which he approaches many of these interactions calls into question his actual intentions as well.

At various points, JAG dips into asides to his brother, hinting at an abusive household that he fled, leaving his brother behind to fend for himself. This could be the wound he’s trying to heal, but it also made me wonder from where he’s narrating the story. To try to avoid (more) spoilers, I won’t go into it, but again it made me question JAG as a narrator, which then led me to look into the son storyline. The issue of the ex and missing son, though being pretty much the inciting incident of the story, plays a surprisingly small role in the overall story. The lack of focus—bordering ‘tacked on’—on an element so large in a novel that is so well told sent alarm bells clanging inside my head. This possibility of unreliability casts some of his other trysts in a very different light after the book is finished.

badbadbad is one of those novels that requires more than one reading, the kind that forces you to consider and reconsider its implications for weeks after reading. It’s a constantly morphing novel, with prose that is (could be?) deceiving in the best possible way. It’s a beautiful debut by Jesus Angel Garcia, and sets the bar high for his next.

***

– Nik Korpon is the author of Stay God, Old Ghosts and By the Nails of the Warpriest. He is an Associate Editor with Dirty Noir and Rotten Leaves magazines. He lives in Baltimore. Give him some danger, little stranger, at nikkorpon.com

In the Louisiana neighborhood where I grew up, we were always looking for ways to get out.

Barry Shinder found a way out when he was just seven, by jumping off a pier into way too shallow water off the Williams Bridge and paralyzing himself from the waist down.  Chrissy Shaw found a way out by getting in a car with strangers when she was just twelve years old never to be heard from again.  And there were countless others, including Jason Fillmore and Thomas Edgars who managed get behind the steering wheels of cars long before they were old enough for licenses and wrapped themselves around trees and telephone poles.

Later on, many of the people found their ways out by selling drugs and committing crimes that people would later make famous movies about.  It seemed as if they would do anything to end up in prison.  In fact, where I grew up they talked about “how this one went to Angola” and “that one’s gonna wind up in Angola” the way other families talk about getting into a good college.

Also later on, many of us found our way out by drinking Jack Daniels straight out of the bottle, taking blue Valium, shooting cocaine.  We weren’t all brave enough to do it all at once, so we found our own slow ways to creep out of the neighborhood.

But when I was seven and eight years old, before I discovered the typewriter as an automobile to anywhere, before I discovered the various sizes and shapes of pill and liquor bottles, I found another way out.

I would like to tell you that it was all hellfire and brimstone, and terrifying, full of snake-handling and scary preachers, but that would be a lie.  It would also be a lie to tell you that I ever saw the light or that I really accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior.  I’d like to be able to say that the preachers, including my grandfather and my uncle were perfect men who showed us the way to salvation by being the role models that so many of the boys in the neighborhood needed. But none of it would be true.

The Pentecostal Church on the edge of my neighborhood was an escape.  And considering the crime and danger that was going on in every other house in the neighborhood, the Pentecostal Church was one of the few places our parents would let us go.  And there was a time in my youth, when I loved it.

***

My grandfather whom I never met was a Pentecostal preacher and a sharecropper.  He was the pastor of his own church far north from the neighborhood where I grew up, way up in a Parish even we hicks referred to as “the country.”  I don’t know how much of a drinker he actually was, but I do know that in my family when they say things like, “he used to drink” that usually means “he used to drink most of the time.”  But I never knew him, and all accounts I’ve heard were that when he sobered up, he was a fine, non-judgmental man, not like the preachers who later on would exist solely to tell us that the Pope was the anti-Christ.  But like so many people in my family, he didn’t last long.  When he was forty-eight, he had a spell of some sort in the pulpit, got dizzy, passed out, depending on who you ask.  People do get dizzy.  People do pass out.  People also get brain tumors, which is what was going on with him.  He was dead within a year, leaving my grandmother to raise a crop of children in the Pentecostal tradition.  They grew up to be lovely and flawed, the way that all people are.  But none of them stayed in the church.

But my father had a brother, Uncle Wilson, who also “used to drink”  and he became a pastor of the church in our neighborhood.  We loved him.  He had an auto shop behind our house, had a great presence, and was always on like electricity.  And when Brother Lambert wasn’t delivering the sermons at the church, my Uncle Wilson did.  And yes, he used to see the devil in everything.  I used to just listen.  Over coffee in the morning, he would tell us that the Iran hostage situation was a sign of the end, and that barcodes were what were going to be put on everyone’s forehead as the mark of the beast.  Cousin Frank, a Baptist in New Orleans, told me the same thing a few years later.  He also told me that the video games I played were going to send me straight to Hell.  Anything electronic meant I was touching the devil.  If I was, then I liked the way the devil felt.  He felt totally alive to me.

They warned me when I was eight that KISS stood for Kings In Satan’s Service and that idolizing Gene Simmons was like worshipping the devil.  I listened to Revolver more and more.  Not to be rebellious, but because I knew they were wrong.

My older, New Orleans Baptist cousins really used to get to me. They were the new fundamentalists, terrifying in a way that the Pentecostals were not.  I wasn’t sure why, but they seemed dangerous whereas the Pentecostals seemed kind of harmless.  They told me that Hotel California was going to send me to Hell. And when I was eleven and they sensed something about me that wasn’t exactly what they wanted to sense, my New Orleans Baptist cousins took me to church and showed me a passage that said something about men lying with men instead of women.   I knew what it meant.  It meant that I was doomed.  But they had been telling me that there was something wrong with me and that there was a fire waiting for me ever since I could remember.  The images sometimes scared me, the refusal to be like them alienated me, they added to my already deeply rooted shame.  They were pouring more gasoline on this boy almost on fire, and I was always waiting for someone to toss a lit cigarette or torch my way.

When you are burning up, and you know it, and you aren’t asking for water  you feel free.  That was one way I learned to get out.  To get away from the crime-ridden world I was growing up in.  To burn.

***

My parents never re-enforced any of this.  In fact, they’d stopped going to the Pentecostal church years earlier when Brother Lambert had nearly gotten arrested for stealing some meat from the local A&P.  It was also around the same time, when my cerebral-palsied brother wouldn’t stop crying in church and Brother Lambert got mad.  That’s all it took for my parents to become backsliders for life.

Still, they liked it when my sister and I went to church.  By the time I really started going on a regular basis, there were only a handful of regular members.  Maybe fifteen.  There was a strict dress code, women with their long skirts, not allowed to cut their hair; men with short hair, clean-shaven.  Anything that didn’t look like Little House on the Prairie was pushing it.  In fact, Michael Landon’s hair would have been enough of a sin to get him into serious trouble with Uncle Wilson.

Sometimes, even today, at six o’clock on Wednesdays and Sundays, I feel like I’m supposed to be somewhere.  Like I’m missing an important meeting.  Those are the times when, as a kid, I was in church.  So my sister and I would go with some of Uncle Wilson’s nieces from his wife’s side of the family.  And we would show up in that cool, brick church, which smelled brand-new and ancient all at once.  It wasn’t a fancy church, but it was well kept, even the scratchy carpet had a welcoming feel to it.  It was our home during the time we were there.

People think you speak in tongues, or that you get the Holy Ghost because you are so devout.  I never was.  After all, I had already been doomed according to the way they said I should be living my life.  I knew that something as innocent as watching Battle of the Network Stars earlier in the week and staring too long at both Jimmy and Kristy McNichol was enough to disqualify me from me being saved.

But when the music would start, Cousin Hester, who wasn’t as messed up as my brother, but was never like an adult even as an adult would start waving her hands in the air.  And someone would have the tambourine. And my uncle, would be working us up into a frenzy, every word, whether it was “praise”, “Jesus” or “hallelujah”  was said at a decibel that would make me think some of the church bricks must be tumbling onto the grass outside.

And I’d watch it all.  Like a concert, or like a show where I knew the actors.  Except they weren’t acting, they meant it.  And because I loved them.  And because I could see them being carried some place far away, I wanted to go with them.  So I would begin chanting, “Dear Jesus, save me from my sins,” “Bless you Jesus, reach down and touch me,” and this would go on for minutes, this chant.  And it felt great.  It felt like I wasn’t even there.  And then my uncle would come over and place his hand on my head, “God, bless this child, reach down and touch this child!”  A shot of electricity would go through me like I had been touched by Jesus himself.  I would find myself dancing what probably looked to be a ridiculous dance, or sometimes I’d wander around with my eyes closed, blinded by the energy.   Sometimes, I would wake up in the front of the church even if I started at the back.  Sometimes I would find myself near the pulpit.

And for those moments, which seemed to go on forever, I was not there, not in that neighborhood, not in that town, not in this world.  This, I learned was my escape.  And I didn’t have to believe anything they said, didn’t have take the sermons to heart, all I had to do was repeat after them, and feed on their energy, and I could suddenly not exist.

And unlike Barry Shinder, or Chrissy, or Jason, or Thomas, my escape would not make my mama cry.  Wouldn’t get my dad upset.  Wouldn’t be in the papers.  If it was sensational, it was my own private scandal.

Years later, after Uncle Wilson got thrown out of the church for having an affair with a sixteen-year old church member the church would stand empty.  Brother Lampert had died by then.  His wife and kids were far away.  Weeds grew around the church.  And when I’d go back home to visit, I’d wonder what was going on inside.  Maybe the ghosts of Jesus and Satan were having wrestling matches, maybe it smelled even newer; maybe the hymnbooks were still in their perfect wooden places behind the pews.

Later, after the church was no longer the church, I’d find other places, other people in the neighborhood to escape with, other ways to get out.  Sometimes it would be on a Greyhound bus for a run of the streets of Los Angeles, sometimes it would be a bottle of whiskey, a needle in the arm, several intentionally skipped meals.  But I never found a way out as safe and pure and simple as speaking in tongues and getting the Holy Ghost.

I was never a believer, and yet I believed in the believers.  I believed that they could take me away.  And when I was just a kid seeking escape, they did.

- Martin Hyatt was born just outside of New Orleans.  His novel, A Scarecrow’s Bible, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association.  In addition, he has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, The Ferro-Grumley, and The Violet Quill Award. NY Magazine named  him a “star of tomorrow” in their Literary Idol feature.  He is the recipient of an Edward F. Albee Writing Fellowship and The New School Chapbook Award for fiction.  He has taught writing at such places at Hofstra, Yeshiva, The New School, and  St. Francis College.  He is the Founding Coordinator of a Writing Center in  New York City where he currently resides.  He has just completed a new novel entitled Beautiful Gravity.
www.martinhyatt.net