Sky Pilot/1998

Years ago, my brother-in-law Michael, Moe’s husband, was a hang glider. The hang gliders were like a mass of Apollo’s gathered at the LZ field where they soared with the eagles to tremendous heights. They lived in the arms of the clouds for the hours they were in the air. It was wondrous to behold, watching them land back to the earth. When they landed they looked like angels, with strong wings, it was memorizing. It was an aphrodisiac.

My sister Moe and I would sit on the benches of the LZ field for hours, talking about our lives and our young children. Moe had been married for 4 years already she only had two of her three children, Tony and Amanda. I had my one and only child Emma, a 4 year old running around with anger issues smearing feces in her room during the day. We came to the foothills of L.A. to get away from everything. Emma’s behavior had gotten worse. I missed my younger sister she was the only one I could really talk to.

On the last day before I was to go back home, I met Doug Vaught, a hang glider at the LZ field. He was 37, and I was 33. I remember when he touched my bare arm with a chilled red wine cooler the touch on my slender brown arm gave me goose bumps. I turned around to look at him a “6” hang glider with a light brown mustache and wavy auburn hair smiled at me. Don’t flatter yourself I thought you weren’t my type, but he reminded me of an Australian adventurer with a ruddy face.

It had been 5 long years since the father of Emma had left me. I hadn’t dated in all of those years waiting for God to send me someone to be my husband. It didn’t happen; Gary only called me once when she was 3 months old. It was exhilarating being noticed by a man again. We sat drinking wine coolers. He asked for my number, while he flirted shamelessly with me. We had a banter going. Before, I left him he said he would call me for a date. Doug fixed air conditioners in the Valley. Doug called me the next day, after I had gotten home. The two of us made plans to go out when he got into town. I anticipated all kinds of wonderful things as I got dressed. Is this the one? Was he going to be the one or was he going to turn out to be another jerk. I don’t know why women, why we put so much pressure on ourselves to be loved.

When Doug came to the door, he looked different, of course we hadn’t seen each other in about 2 weeks, but had kept in touch by phone. I don’t know who I imagined would be standing at the door. It was like the mystery dating game, when you would open a door, and a handsome picture of a man would be there, a ski instructor, or a man with a tuxedo; only this man neither wore a tuxedo nor looked like a ski instructor.

After we went to dinner instead of go to pick up Emma at my brother Jimmy’s house like I should have, I went with Doug back to his motel room. I have to write of my disobedience to God as well, it has helped me to grow and to learn why He has given me boundaries. I wanted the comfort, the holding, the feeling that I wasn’t alone. It was an artificial love. But women, this woman had greedily taken whatever men callously threw at me. It wasn’t going to last, it was fleeting, like sand slipping through an hour glass.

I was angry at the Lord. I shouldn’t have been, but I let myself be with this man, there was loneliness like death courting me. My heart was hard. In my rebellion I wanted to get back at God for making me wait so long. I was the one who paid for my disobedience. I hadn’t realized I was angry at God until I fornicated with a man I barely knew.

The next morning, we sat in a park near my brother’s home. I was ashamed, and sat on the bench weeping.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“We won’t ever see each other again. You think I’m a complete slut.”

“I don’t think that at all.” He had tried to comfort me, and put his arm around me trying to be kind.

“I will call you again, I promise.” He said as his mustache briefly touched the corner of my mouth. _____________________________________________________ The following couple of weeks we talked on the phone nearly every day. I was already attached to Doug because we had been intimate. Doug would blow into town to fix air conditioners. Every time he came into town we would go out to eat or watch a movie. We would be intimate either before or after our date, but momma didn’t really want to stay with Emma. So we usually spent time together before our date. I’m not proud to write that I spent a lot of that time in his motel room.

I should have been clinging to Jesus instead of this man. But the flesh was such a strong desire in those days. I had stopped praying before I met him, I grew weary waiting on God. When I was with him, I knew I shouldn’t have been but there is that moment when the flesh and the Spirit struggle, and without submission the demands of the flesh are louder. Afterwards, the hurt little girl emerged, I chose to act as his lover, but I couldn’t fully commit this to my heart. _____________________________________________________ Weeks later when I didn’t start my period on time I thought I was pregnant again. In truth I wanted to be pregnant. I had thought about all the women men accused of getting pregnant to trap them. Doug’s friend Cindy warned him that I was trying to trap him into a marriage. Using a pregnancy to trap a man were the devices of a desperate women trying to hold on to a man that clearly did not want her. On the other hand, many times a woman trapped only herself, as a man had no problem with leaving her with child.

We spoke on the phone often and he’d ask me how I felt. I told him I still had to go to the doctor. He told me he would pay for my doctor’s visit. I thought that was rather generous. I needed to get back to him. I desperately wanted to take the Greyhound back to Sylmar where he lived. My momma thought I should just snap out of my madness. She used to say “Stupidesas”. Whenever I became involved with a man she made it her business. She was very protective of me. She didn’t think I could handle myself with men. She was right.

Despite her very strong objections, I took the Greyhound bus with Emma through the Grapevine. Doug picked us up from the station around midnight. I was elated to see him. He carried Emma to the car and drove us to where he had lived. _______________________________

Doug lived in a single bedroom in a hang gliders home across from the LZ field. He let us stay with him while we were in Sylmar. My brother in law Mike told me I was not welcome in his home, because of the altercation he had with my sister. I grabbed his arm because he started to strangle her. He let go of my sister, and then pulled my arm up high behind my back. My sister Moe thought he would break it. But he let go.

Doug was a bit of a large child he still liked Lost in Space. From the ceiling of his bedroom hung a plastic shark, a Dastardly poster on one of his walls, and the Robot from Lost in Space sat near the stereo, along with all of his Lost in Space VHS videos.

So Emma and I stayed with him. Emma slept in her little Rug Rats tent. I know I shouldn’t have stayed with him. But I did. We hung out on the field when he came home from work. It felt as if we were married, though I didn’t know what that would have been like, I was never married. This cohabitation only lasted a week. Michael softened up, and Moe said I could stay with her and her family. I was so grateful as I didn’t want Emma to sleep in a pop up tent. Besides he wasn’t that nice to Emma, he thought she was a brat and I was just an over indulgent parent. She once threw a milkshake on his truck that he had just washed. She crumbled a doughnut I had bought for her in the backseat of his truck. I used to tell Doug to stop acting like a child by arguing with her.

“Don’t scream at my child, you’re being a real jerk.”

I don’t think he was ready for a child of his own. But I wanted this relationship. I wanted a family of my very own. But there were times, we would all eat together, and we would all hold hands going into a McDonald’s or Carl’s Jr. I created this illusion that we were a real family.

I was grateful to be staying with my sister once again. I still continued to go out with Doug in the evenings. _____________________________________________________ A woman, always believes she makes love, after he had me, he turned away from me to go to sleep. I still wanted to continue to touch him I felt so close to him. I always felt like his wife. But that night he became angry. When he became irritated with me, I blurted out, “Then take me home.” If not partially I was spiritually sick over all of my sin, of all of the sex. I felt as if I would die without him. He was cruel to me and began to get angrily dressed. I stopped him and took off his boots. But I had already become like a schizophrenic, torn over my sin, and torn over my need to be with him.

I still loved him, and prayed even yet, that he would marry me, and make me his wife. But then he called me an “f—-g” idiot, and said that I babbled. So I began to pound on his hairy chest, deeply injured by his callous and cruel attitude towards me.

“You were just with me.” I said. I was utterly confused and my feelings devastated.

“But you were just with me”, I said. “Why are you being like this?”

He stormed out. I ran after him, still clinging to this man who had earlier emerged from my body. “Please…” I said running after him.

“Please!” “Don’t go!”

“Let me take you home, then”, he said with a scowl.

I pleaded, “ Just tell me then, that you never cared for me, and that you used me!”

“Tell me, just be honest, look at me and tell me.”

He said dispassionately, that he never cared for me and just used me.

Doug turned to me, his hazel eyes directly upon mine. “I never cared for you, and I used you!”

I disintegrated in that moment literally ripped as a piece of paper into shreds, my hopes blowing away into the wind. I felt all of the veins in me removed, ripped as if they were mere plugs in a wall. I heaved, breathing rapidly. My heart exposed, and I had no place to hide my shame, the torment of being a woman, used by a man who did not even care for me. I became desperate. The demon of desperation gripped me and hugged me as if to strangle me. As we drove back in the blackness of what felt like my life, at that moment, the extreme emptiness and bruised expression that rejection tattoos upon its victim was mine. I tried to talk to him but he would not even answer. The awkward silence pierced and stabbed my heart from the redundancy, the stupidity of trusting this man rather than the Lord. Despair murdered me for a brief second. I felt physically slashed across the heart by his apparent indifference. I loved him, and he made no move to console me.

When he parked the car, I tried to talk to him some more. He would offer me no more affection though I had begged him to.

“Can I see you on the field tomorrow?” I timidly asked.

“Yeah” He answered tersely.

“Please, please,” My injury begged. If my voice could bleed it would have. I felt my voice sob, still clinging to his clothes. Saying his name over and over, as if it would have healed what had transpired, as if my saying it were the key trying to open his stone heart by my weak words and even weaker questions. The past two weeks we had spent together and the three months we had known each other disappeared simply because he wanted it to. Everything, all of the time we had spent together, everything all the phone conversations all the love-making, all feelings that had seemingly passed between us, everything was blacked out, voided that very evening. When yesterday he told me we would be together always. When yesterday he told me he never wanted to hurt me again. But his heart was stone towards me, impenetrable, as he mercilessly began to lift my petite body off of his truck because I didn’t want to get off, onto the sidewalk without concern or pity for the woman he had entered only hours before.

Suddenly his large hands grabbed me by the back of my hair, and by my panties, throwing me on the hard cement. I landed hard against the pavement with my dress up, my panties exposed. I sheepishly pulled the short dress I had worn for him down. My nylons had been ripped by my fall. He told me he didn’t want to see me anymore. And I was left, shivering, moaning like a wounded creature, left to struggle and figure out the meaning of life, of my life on the cold, hard pavement with the skin scraped off of my knee. I could not accept the way it ended. My sanity lost itself and broke loose. I followed him back to his pick-up truck and before he could drive away, I jumped in the back of his pick-up, as if I had gained a temporary victory by doing so, as if my clinging to him could have changed his heart toward me. I was overwhelmed by the irony and the sheer reality that slapped me coldly across the face as if to wake me up and mock me, and haunt me all at the same time with the veracity of rejection.

“You were used again, for your body, all along he only thought of you as a dumb bitch.”

Doug sped along the cold dark freeway for miles. He knew I had stowed away. I sat in a corner of the pick-up, shivering. I could feel the speed increase, as if to break me down; then it began to rain. It was comical if it wasn’t so pathetic. As the rain spilled on my face I wondered what I was doing here. I raised my white flag, and tapped on the back window for him to take me back to my sister's apartment. I limped back to Moe's apartment in the early morning hours. My tears chewed me up inside, like an alien burrowing out of me. My face was stained with the same dirty tears I had shed before. Always the same dirty tears that assault the face harder each time.

“You’re stupid!”

I fell into my sister’s arms when she opened the door. I made up a lie, to vindicate myself and punish Doug for being so cruel.

“I want you to call the police.” I told Moe and her husband Mike. “He raped me.”

They saw the scrape on my leg, a streak of blood that was dried. At my insistence Mike called the police, while my sister made me some hot chocolate to drink. I couldn’t stop shaking my sister put a blanket around me. I was tired of all of these men getting away with using me. I sipped the hot chocolate knowing that what I was doing was no better than what he did to me. I knew better than this. This is not who I was. Once again, I was all tangled in the thicket of my sins, cut up and scratched, suffering from my poor decisions. Being abandoned made me cling harder to the person who was abandoning me. It reduced me to my basest instincts like an animal. Even an animal was smarter than this. It was the pain of being smashed by a rock like an insect. I always thought of the original “Fly” movie when Vincent Price saw his brother about to have his blood sucked by the giant spider, his brother’s high pitched screams, made him smash the whole web with a rock. Being left was not an option; it was like hanging on with exhausted hands that would soon be slapped for holding onto the cliff. It was like expecting your worst enemy to care. When all they did was loathe you. There was a physical pain to this a crushing blow to the chest, where the heart resided. I wasn’t suffering from a heart attack I’d had this pain before I knew what it was. Every time I’d felt it I vowed that would be the last time.

Before the police came, Mike asked me to think about what I was doing. “Don’t do this because you were hurt.”

How many times did I have to have glass crushed into me? It was always the same, men have the option to walk away, sex doesn’t mean the same thing to them, it was just a physical reaction, but for me, it was something much deeper, without meaning to, I made a promise when he entered me, the tears ran down my face, I was terrified.

Soon the police would come to file a report. But if I lied, then what did he mean to me? I was beholden to him. The bones in my body ached from the turmoil I had created. This would be the biggest lie I could tell. Someone I believed I loved would go to jail. Worse, God reminded me that I wasn’t a liar.

There was a knock on the door, it was the officer, but I couldn’t lie about what happened. He just didn’t want me, and I had to find a way to live with that.

“I’m sorry, I called you.” “My boyfriend threw me out of the car, but he didn’t rape me.”

“You could file assault charges.”

“No, I just want to go home.”

The officer seemed to understand that I had been dumped. He seemed to feel sorry for me, smiled kindly and left.

The relationship I had pinned my hopes on was over in 3 months. I laid my head on the pillow for a night strewn with tears.

In the morning Emma and I caught the Greyhound bus home there was no more relationship. I looked outside of the fogged window, while my child laid her head on my lap to sleep. The majestic mountains began to fade as we reached the Grapevine back to the dreary valley. _____________________________________________________

__________________________________________

“Create in me a clean heart, O God,

And renew a steadfast spirit within me”

(Psalm 51:10)

We must wait on the Lord always. I didn’t wait on the Lord. “Wait on the Lord; Be of good courage, And He shall strengthen your heart. Wait, I say, on the Lord!” (Psalm 27:14)

I was impatient and chose a man who was going to hurt me. I learned God’s timing is not our timing God is beyond the realm of time. It seemed long to me, as a result I grew impatient and became angry with the Lord, when He only meant me good. He was still healing me, and I didn’t trust Him to heal me.

“Trust in the Lord with all of your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all of your ways acknowledge Him and HE shall direct your paths. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

The devil offered this temptation of an adventurous man who appealed to my flesh. I took my eyes off of Jesus and accepted the rotted fruit from a tree that was forbidden to me as I was not married. God makes boundaries to protect us and sanctify us, to draw us closer to Himself and to draw us away from this world. God is holy, and we are to be holy as well.

I suffered because of my rebellion against God, and His ways.

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts nor are My ways, your ways, for as the heavens are higher than the earth so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

________________________________

I should have clung in faith to my Savior and not some random man. I thought of the sash in Jeremiah 13 how the prophet buried the sash in a hole in the rock and after many days God instructed him to dig it up. The sash was ruined. The Lord said the house of Judah was to cling to God as the sash clings to the waist of a man. My sash too was ruined. The Lord offers these illustrations to teach us to trust and cling only to God. I had made an idol of this man.

Even through all of this, even though I fornicated, my Lord was merciful and forgave me of my sins. The Lord was a gentle and loving presence when my heart was broken. He gave me His hand while I was on the cold pavement, and helped me to move on.