Clearly the Wheelchair Woman did not appreciate my insistence upon sitting in the Handicap Area at the movie theater as my only visible handicap is being a bit taller than average and thereby appreciating the extra leg room. It's not like she was going to need it but for some reason she still felt it necessary to roll within an inch of my outstretched legs, glaring at me in case I missed the point. But I didn't care, I was there to see Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, the Feel Good Movie of the Millennium. With any luck me and the Wheelchair Woman would be walking out of there together.

It wasn't until after the lights had gone down and Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane being taunted by what looked like a SoHo crossdresser that I became aware of the guy three seats to my left, also in the Handicap Area. As the irrepressible Simon Peter wacked off the ear of some hapless extra the guy next to me yelped. One might even say he barked. I glanced at him, certain I'd misheard though frankly it's hard to mishear the word "fuck!" (Duck? Buck? Luck?) Okay, I thought, maybe he's impressed by the somewhat graphic swordplay, until it happened again. In an odd little flashback Jesus is seen hopping up and down on a wooden table he has built prompting the guy to bark "motherfucker!" Perhaps he was impressed by the table's strength.

I peer at him in the darkness and he is absolutely mesmerized, literally on the edge of his seat, completely and fully into this movie. And that's how he remained except for the occasional "shit!" and "fuck!" and, my personal favorite, "long dick suck off!" No one else in the theater appears to hear him, or maybe they're just more compassionate towards someone afflicted with what is obviously Tourettes Syndrome. The verbal distractions continue until at one point he bolts from the auditorium only to return seconds later with a huge bucket of popcorn. So now he's eating, barking and weeping. And he wasn't the only one, Wheelchair Woman's an absolute puddle. In fact, everyone around me was crying (though only one was occasionally yelping "cocksucker!") while I sat there wondering why Jesus' resurrection reminded me so much of Arnold's initial appearance in Terminator, hunched over, naked, grimly determined. Even the soundtrack sounded the same—pounding martial drums signify someone is about to get a serious ass whipping. My money's on the crossdresser.

I had an equally jaundiced response to the end of Mel's last faith-fueled movie, Signs. The audience I saw it with was sniffing, wiping their eyes as Mel dons his generic white pastor's collar, his faith in the Almighty restored. All I could think of was — so God killed your wife and damned near smoked your son just so that guy from Gladiator, not Russell Crowe, the other, creepy one, could take a baseball bat to a stuntman in an alien suit and you see that as a reason to believe? A sign of God's overfilling mercy? Granted I probably should not have been laughing quite so loudly, but come on. How can anyone take it seriously? On the other hand, I saw Signs twice. In fact, I see everything that has God and/or his Son above the title. From Passolini's Jesus to Kevin Smith's Dogma, from The Omen to Life of Brian (whose working title was Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory)—if it deals with religion, if it deals with faith, I am there. I even sat through the aforementioned Arnold's End of Days which went a long way in convincing me that there is no God. What sort of a loving heavenly father would allow that movie to be made and distributed?

To understand my obsession with these types of films and the answers they so often fail to provide, you have to know that I wasn't the only member of my family to see The Passion that day. Earlier, much earlier, 5:30 in the morning in fact, my father loaded his Southern Baptist congregation onto church buses and made his own pilgrimage to the local theater there in Nashville. My dad is a Southern Baptist preacher and the primary source of what friends call my "God issues."

I know the image that comes to mind when you read Southern Baptist preacher—big hair, Cadillac, Bible the size of a small child. My father is not that guy, never has been (though he does have some Bibles large enough to pull a groin muscle). My father would have understood much of The Passion even without the subtitles as he has studied Aramaic extensively which in turn allows him to read archaic Biblical texts in their original language. My dad got his doctorate in theology from Baylor University, decades before their basketball players began shooting each other. His emphasis was on the New Testament book of Luke which he studied in the original Greek. Yet this same man insists that the Bible is the literal, inerrant, undisputed word of God. He and Mel would get along great.

After pastoring in Texas his entire life he and my mom relocated to Nashville so he could write and edit Sunday School lessons for the Southern Baptist Convention. And he has his little church. Once a month he sends me a devotional called "Our Daily Bread" which I promptly toss. He used to forward e-mail homilies and devotionals from Charles Colson (of Watergate break in fame). I finally told him I wasn't interested in instructions on how to live the Christian life from a convicted felon. When that didn't deter him I changed my e-mail address. When neither my brother nor my sister would reveal it to him he asked, as he always does in times of crisis, what would Jesus do? Apparently Jesus would break into his son's computer while he was visiting over Christmas and steal the address. The e-mails began again. He's big on anything remotely connected to living as a Christian in the godless pagan world of show business. I don't even open them anymore, I simply hit delete. My brother does the same thing. My sister stopped speaking to my parents five years ago. Recently my dad has begun sending me notes in the mail to let me know that each morning at 5:30 (his favorite time of day apparently) he is praying for me and while I appreciate it, I'm still searching for some sign that God's listening.

If my rejection of my well intentioned father appears a bit harsh, you should know that growing up my parents' version of an ideal Saturday night consisted of gathering us kids around the piano while my mom played and we all sang "Are You Washed in the BLOOD of the Lamb" as my brother insists on calling it. We prayed before every meal, including when eating out, my father droning on and on while the food grew cold. We were expected to be in church each time the doors opened—Sunday School, Morning Worship, Training Union, Evening Worship, Wednesday Prayer Service, any and all revivals. I'm not so sure this was to better our souls or simply because my parents were too cheap to spring for babysitting but I do know I hated it, absolutely hated it. We were required to sing in the Youth Choir, take the leads in every Christmas pageant, I even preached on one particularly mortifying occasion. We felt like freaks and in a sense we were. Being a preacher's kid was a stigma we carried with us into every social interaction. It's not that I necessarily craved to hear the dirty jokes, the exaggerated sexual exploits of my peers, to hoist a brew alongside my pals, I just would have appreciated the opportunity to decide on my own. Each of us was held to an impossibly high standard not just by my parents, but by their church members and the community at large. And when we failed to meet that standard, which was fairly often in my case, the punishment was swift and Old Testament in origin. The rod, or more specifically my father's belt, was not spared.

We learned early that church always took precedence. I'm four years old, waiting eagerly for my father to come home. He had promised to take me to my first football game as soon as he finished painting the church. I remember how he looked when he finally showed up, the horn rimmed glasses that would later rotate back in style, his blue jeans and t-shirt spattered with paint. So young, so virile, not at all resembling the cliche of a Southern Baptist minister. He scooped me up, assured me there'd be plenty of time left in the game. On cue the doorbell rang and my dad answered it, still carrying me in his arms. It was one of our church members, Johnny Deatric who would later be killed in a car crash. My dad told him we were on our way to the game only to learn the game was long over. And though my dad promised we would go to the next one I couldn't stop crying, not only due to the missed game but because for the first time I realized where I stood in my father's list of priorities.

This would extend into junior high and high school. My parents never seemed to make it to any of my basketball games, too much work to be done at the church. Granted everyone has a story of their parents failing to show for one or more important event in their lives, but I was made to feel selfish because, after all, they were busy saving souls from the eternal torments of hell. What was a basketball game compared to such a noble mission? It's no wonder my mother recently said to me "you were always the independent one." I had no choice.

The radio in our house played constantly, KSKY-AM out of Dallas. It wasn't even gospel music which might have been semi-palatable, it was hardcore hellfire and brimstone railing from a cadre of twangy evangelists interrupted frequently by their hectoring pleas for monetary support. Send them enough cash and God was sure to heal, don't and you're gonna remain crippled forever. And for those of you who did make generous donations and remained unhealed, well, clearly you just don't have enough faith. As I grew older I began immediately turning it off whenever I came into the house. My parents would turn it back on. I was never allowed to change the station. The first time I heard a rock song I was at a friend's house and he stuck a pair of headphones on me and cranked up David Bowie's "Space Oddity." I thought my head would explode. Rock became my salvation with Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, The Who as my new gods. Quadrophenia became my bible with its songs of teen alienation and despair. "Tell me who are you" my new mantra.

My parents didn't notice. It's not that they didn't care, they just had no connection to popular culture, on any level. As long as I kept my headphones on, cranking up the volume only when they weren't around, I could listen to decadent androgynous Englishmen all I wanted. The same was true when it came to my reading material. In elementary school I was already devouring Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike. As far as my parents were concerned it was don't ask, don't tell. I've never seen my father read a book in his life that wasn't religious in orientation. I'm not sure he knows they exist. Ditto motion pictures. The only films they ever took us to came from Billy Graham. My favorite remains the achingly awful The Cross and the Switchblade. As a kid I had no interest in emulating the humble, cheek-turning street preacher played by Pat Boone, I wanted to be the bad ass Puerto Rican gangleader played by Erik Estrada. True he gets wacked in the end but what a ride. Naturally his homies don't want to end up like him and so embrace Jesus. In Billy Graham movies the supporting character always dies so that others can come to Jesus. It's the evangelical equivalent of the ensign's red tunic on Star Trek.

All of my life I was continually asked if I intended to become a preacher like my father. My original answer, "oh hell no," usually caused more trouble than it was worth. I fell back onto a blandly safe "I haven't felt the call." That always worked because how could anyone argue? (My uncle had felt the call after failing at everything else in life including a commercial venture that involved raising chinchillas. He went to Seminary, even pastored a church for awhile before figuring out it wasn't the easy money he had thought. He finally did find his calling as a minister to families arriving in Huntsville to visit their loved ones in state prison.)

You might expect such a fundamentalist upbringing to result in a complete disavowal of everything I was ever taught but in fact the opposite has proven true. I've never smoked, never had a drink, never done drugs though as I grew up and got into sports this became more health oriented than religious. The one area I continually, eagerly strayed was sex, and even that was in some perverse way facilitated by religion.

I encountered my first female breast in the Prayer Garden at Latham Springs Baptist encampment (thank you, Shannon). Youth Camp was a volatile mix of earnest Christian testimonials and repressed sexual longings. The key was to be sure you were next to whatever young thing you had your eye on during the evening bonfire service. At some point we would be told to join hands and sing. I wonder if the adults had any idea of the immense sexual thrill, the electricity that would surge through our hormonally overactive bodies when flesh met flesh. How many erections were being produced while we sang "Lord I want to be a Christian in my heart, in my heart?" Ten minutes were allowed following the service to walk the girls back to their cabins. We were willing to endure any manner of torture—preaching, hymns, wall-eyed missionaries to Kenya—for those precious ten minutes. Everyone detoured through the Prayer Garden and if not touched by God we were at least getting touched.

And it appears I wasn't the only one. Here's the obligatory moment I realize my father is human, as flawed as the rest of us. Only at the time it wasn't nearly so dramatic. I was in junior high, went over to my dad's office (we always lived next to the church which is a whole other thing). I tried his back door, the one we always used, but it was locked. I went around to the front, but it was also locked. I finally went in through his secretary's office, noticing that she wasn't in. As I approached I heard giggling. Female giggling. I walked in to find my dad with "that Grimes woman," a young divorcee. Whenever I stopped by to collect for my paper route she would answer the door in her nightgown. Blonde, a great body, she was the object of most of my sexual fantasies. And now she was standing inches from my father, giggling. There was no touching, nothing untoward but I sensed I was intruding on something private. My dad saw me and said hello with this sort of sickly smile on his face that I'd never seen before and would never see again. That Grimes woman gave me a look that seemed to say "hey, we're all adults here" though clearly one of us wasn't. Was anything going on? Honestly it never crossed my mind. It wasn't that I considered my dad a saint, I just didn't think he had it in him. I left and it was never mentioned again until a couple of months ago when my mother said something cryptic about needing to leave that particular church because of "that Grimes woman." My brother and I looked at each other but we didn't pursue it. The reason they'd always given for uprooting our entire family and moving us seven hours away my senior year in high school was because they'd surmised my girlfriend and I were sexually active. We'd never considered the possibility that I wasn't the only one.

The church they moved us to was in West Texas where people are out of their minds. I was miserable, missing my buds, my girlfriend, my life but the move proved to be the beginning of my liberation. I got a job on the local radio station and asked for the Sunday shift so I couldn't be in church. Unfortunately the radio station carried my father's sermons and I couldn't turn it off because I had to be ready when it ended to plug in commercials, etc. I could, however, turn it way way down. For the first time in my life I wasn't expected to be in church for every moment of every service.

The night before I left for college I had my car packed. I was up early and out the door. There were no hugs, no tears, just a "call us when you get there." Where? Baylor, the small private Southern Baptist university both my parents had attended (and that my brother and sister would soon attend). I checked into Penland dorm, did not call home, then lay down to take a nap. It's the only time in my life I actually blacked out. The weight of getting out of that house came crashing down and I was unconscious for nearly seven hours.

Baylor was like falling down a Baptist rabbit hole. My first roommate had a cleft palate and an obsession with pornography. I told my parents I intended to move out but they forbade it on the grounds that it wasn't the Christian thing to do. I did it anyway. The following semester my then ex-roommate was arrested and charged with two counts of child molestation. His name was initially withheld then printed by the campus newspaper. Immediately letters from the pious Baptist boys and girls of Baylor began flooding in defending his right to privacy and saying we should be praying for him, not persecuting him. He got off with five years probation.

While at Baylor I joined the Baptist equivalent of Harvard's Lampoon, called the NoZe. We were ultimately kicked off campus for our sins, which included being written up in Playboy, Esquire and Texas Monthly, defacing campus property and putting out a duplicate campus newspaper canceling homecoming. The administration claimed it was because of the uproar this had caused but the real reason was the back page which featured the women of The Two Minnies, Waco's only strip joint. We'd cut a deal with the owner in order to finance our evil enterprise. I was told personally by the president of Baylor that there was a bus heading south one hundred and five miles and I should be on it. One hundred and five miles is the distance from Waco to Austin, or Baylor to the University of Texas. The distance from repression to ultimate freedom. When I told my parents I was transferring to UT my mother's exact words were "Austin is a den of iniquity." My reply, God I hope so, did not go over well. But I'd done it. I'd escaped.

All of these conflicting emotions finally surfaced this past summer in my first play, titled Jesus Hates Me. It's a dark comedy about four young people undergoing an existential crisis in small town Texas. The lead, Ethan, lives with his mother in an Airstream on the grounds of the Blood of the Lamb Miniature Golf Course. She has taken mannequins from Wal-Mart and recreated various tableaus from the New Testament at each of the holes. A cross with a Jesus mannequin hanging from it dominates the stage. At one critical juncture Ethan yanks the mannequin down, kicks and punches it, leaves it lying in the dirt. People who've read it, from the lit department at the Taper who said it contained a "melancholy stoicism" and "the ring of truth" to my New York theater friends, have been supportive. The single exception was a producer who suggested rather than pummeling the mannequin that my lead hug him in love. Yeah but see that would be someone else's play. Someone else's story. I'm now working on the second of what I call my Jesus Trilogy, titled Drive By Jesus.

I envy my father and Mel their absolutes. Life would be much less complicated if right and wrong were so clearly delineated. If that blessed assurance I used to sing about was real and tangible. It wasn't always like this, I used to see what I thought was the hand of God at work in my life but now when I look for signs of God's mercy, of his favor, I come up blank. Maybe the things I attributed to him in the past were simply fate, chance. I still attend church on occasion but the rituals leave me empty, numb even. It's become harder and harder to make the effort.

When I was five years old I sat next to my dad on my parents' bed one Saturday night and asked Jesus to come into my heart. Something happened, a sensation like nothing I've felt since. In the intervening years I've sat through countless sermons, studied the Bible, prayed. I've walked for AIDS, breast cancer, Alzheimers, the environment. I put in four years working with at risk teens in East Austin, and continue to do so here in Los Angeles. Nothing has succeeded in recapturing that feeling of joy, the overwhelming sense of peace I remember. Maybe the radio evangelists of my childhood were right, maybe I don't have enough faith. It's not that I don't believe in Jesus, I worry Jesus no longer believes in me. My first waking thought this morning, the first thing to come to mind after I realized I was no longer asleep was, I wonder if there really is a God? The fact that I still care enough to ask is evidence that I am truly my father's son.




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