Left Behind: The Movie (2000)
The great tribulation of my childhood
THE FIRST TIME I MASTURBATED I WAS 13. I frantically shook my penis from left to right until I exploded. A painful explosion of cum came out, and both my glans and foreskin were red. I studied the gluey liquid that sprung on my navy-blue bedsheets[a and immediately recognized it as la leche, the infamous secretion that the heathen boys in my class boasted about excreting. As I drained the bathtub, the milky goo traveled along the force of the drainage until getting stuck in the satin nickel of the drain tip.
This unclogging of sorts brought up deep-rooted shame, but mostly I feared that I had unknowingly invited a demonic presence into my being.
I dreaded the possibility of being found out by my mother, my father, and the twins. I got up and checked that the bathroom door was locked. I took the soap dish from my shower and picked up a bit of the goo that stuck to the drain. I would use the sample to investigate the cells and try to see what my sperm looked like in my new digital microscope, which I had gotten de Navidad.
I came out of the shower and noticed how eerily calm the house was. Kenneth and Kevin were not in their room, as I once remembered, nor were Mami and Papi. I called out for all of them. "MAMI, PAPI, KENE, KEVIN, ¿dónde estááánnnnnnnn?" My hands clenched the towel as my ears searched for a human voice. As I ran to the front of the house, droplets of water dripped, making the shiny cement even more slippery, until I tripped.
I opened the door and inspected the street that traversed my neighborhood. It was usually a busy street, full of reckless teenage drivers, chillando gomas (squealing tires) and creating a commotion with boom-heavy bass perreo. This time there were no cars in sight, unusually silent, except for the sound of our chickens and my dog Pinky, a white Chihuahua, who immediately greeted me. There was no perverted reggaetón blasting from my neighbor Omar’s speakers, nor did I hear the normal sound of the vecinas spray-washing their driveways. Through the silence, the rustle of leaves and ruiseñores foreshadowed my biggest fear. I remembered the new neighbor next door recently had a newborn. I walked towards the front of that house’s driveway and tried to check if I could see the baby being breastfed from the living room. I remembered Pastor Laurentino preaching that God would not allow a newborn to be left behind.
I held the towel that was draped to my waist. As I tiptoed to the street in front of the house, at that moment I was convinced the Rapture had come. It’s hard to explain the heartache that ensues when one thinks they’re left behind. It feels like an imminent death. As a child, this feeling mortified me, especially as Pastor Laurentino dwelled on the Rapture, his overarching tenet that kept the Asamblea de Dios in Aguada scared shitless, docile, away from reality, and ever-so-loyal. Usually, the first minute felt like witnessing your future death. "Dios mío, no, ¿por quéééééé?" I screamed at the top of my lungs and stopped holding the towel.
Me quedé. I stayed for being a sucia del diablo, a dirty dumb devil bitch. As the sounds of trumpets called for God's children to leave this mortal coil, my dumb ass had been stroking it in a bathtub mid-day.
“Pito, ¿qué tú has estado haciendo?" my father screamed at me. His presence did not bring the solace I expected. While seeing him shocked me, the first thing that came to mind was the realization that he had stayed too! As my naked, wet body lay helpless on the concrete driveway, I was a tad relieved that I would spend the Great Tribulation with my father.
"¿Qué tú has estado haciendo?" he screamed again. What had I been doing?
“Éntrate y ponte ropa.” I have to get inside and get dressed rápido. I got up on the concrete floor and ran with one hand on my penis and another one with a wet towel. I quickly put on clothes and ran to the bathroom to recover the soap dish with the semen and placed it underneath my bed.
As I approached puberty, my parents had been extremely suspicious of the state of my soul. It hadn’t been the first time my parents and I silently acknowledged the fear of being left behind. Ever since I turned five, silence, a lack of visible babies, and Abuela Rosa caused me to fear for the status of my soul. At any moment, God would take his church, and only those who were right in their souls would ascend with him.
Pastor Laurentino had prepared us for years about this eventual happening. He warned us about going to the movies, which, according to him, was full of fornication and heathens shooting up heroin. He also forbade us from participating in our town’s fiestas patronales (patron saint festivals), which in Aguada commemorated Saint Francis of Assisi, an Italian Catholic Friar who saw nature itself as the mirror of God and eventually was canonized as the patron saint of animals and the natural environment. For Pastor Laurentino, Catholicism was the devil’s work, the bastardization of Christianity.
I had never met any Catholics until I started kindergarten. I was perhaps the only Pentecostal in that classroom, and I was taught that Catholics needed to repent. "Se tienen que arrepentir." It was only a matter of time until I began sharing La Verdad (The Truth) with my classmates, identifying their Catholic and heretical ways by their wearing of gold rosaries. I would correct them when they said they would talk about praying. See, a Catholic prays from a book of prayers or recitations. In Spanish, the verb rezar is used to describe the way a Catholic prays, and orar is used to describe the way a Protestant prays, which is more of a direct and instant form of prayer. I would correct their verb usage, telling them to speak directly with God instead of regurgitating their demonic texts. Laurentino warned us that our purpose in this world was to share La Verdad with everyone and to evangelize everyone so that they would be saved and given eternal life. But the Rapture daunted upon all of us, especially me, who felt that my mission as a six-year-old was to make sure none of my school friends stayed.
Growing up, my cousin Stephany, who lived miles away in Toa Baja, near San Juan, and I would call each other to check if the Rapture had occurred.
“Hey, ¿estás bien?
I mean, no. Definitivamente no. Me quedé. I stayed.
“Sí y tú? ¿Paola está por ahí?” Paola was still a baby, there was no doubt in my mind that she would have disappeared from Tití Noemí’s breasts at the sound of the trompeta with a milk mustache still on her.
Being left behind became a constant fear for much of my childhood; it was the most significant thing I was living for. I never slept alone in my own bed. I slept with the twins, whose tiny, long legs would kick me as I would tuck myself next to them. I always prayed for one hour every night, and when I worried about the state of my soul, I called out to my father, who always woke up to comfort me and pray for me.
When I came out for the first time at 19, my father told me, "You’ve always been sought after by Satan." We were driving on I-10 in Houston, and immediately I opened the door of the 2007 Highlander and threatened to throw myself out if he didn’t take back what he said because, I mean, why had he declared beef with me at such a young age?
But even now, I ask myself: has Satan always been after me, or have I been after Satan to leave me the fuck alone?
What I know is that being Pentecostal was a full-time job. We went to church every Sunday at 10 AM and 6 PM. There was a fasting and prayer service on Mondays at 6:00 PM (though we never went to them). Thursdays was a prayer service at 6 PM. Fridays at 6 PM was usually Children’s service, which was usually lit because they would always sing the corito (hymn), "Los israelitas le dieron 7 vueltas a Jericó," which involved little kids reenacting the story of the Wall of Jericho when it was destroyed when the Israelites walked around it for seven days.
“Los israelitas, los israelitas, le dieron 7 vueltas a Jerico” would be one of the few times children in church got lit. Most of the time, the services focused on the battle of the flesh and Children’s services focused on instilling wholesome values such as not lying or being yoked together with el mundo, the world of the flesh, the mundane world with unbelievers.
Singing along to this song was the closest we got to dance. While dancing was the devil’s work, we formed a long, processing line, which would usually turn into a circle. The song would be repeated seven times, and it was always joyful to see the faces of the young congregations looking at their children safe from poverty, drugs, premarital sex, and shows like No Te Duermas, the freaked-out nightshow which would play at night featuring young women in bikinis and horney-eyed men with dad-bods.
Satan incited both tremor and deep hatred within me. Like, why the fuck did he have to pick my dumb ass to tempt? I was not fit. My spirit was weak, and if anything, I did not have the spiritual fortitude to pray against demons and spirits. Even worse, when pastors, traveling evangelists, and my youth group mentors would place their hands on me so I could receive the Holy Spirit, I always prayed that the Holy Spirit leave me the fuck alone! I was terrified at the thought of being slain in the Spirit. Anytime I was invited to let the Holy Spirit fill my being and lose all awareness and let my body collapse to the floor, that felt scarier.
My cousin Stephany was one slain in the Spirit, and I remembered feeling shock that she had collapsed before my own eyes. It happened during one of the yearly youth retreats in which our parents sent us to shabby and moss-covered cement buildings built in the middle of nowhere, usually in a mountain range, to get familiarized with el espíritu santo, which for whatever reason did not touch or want us.
Seeing her lying on the pebbled porcelain tile had disturbed me so much that I blocked my mind and spirit from engaging with the Holy Spirit as rough and frankincense-scented hands pushed my forehead.
II asked Stephany later that night if she had actually been slain by the Spirit. "¡Claro que no! Esa cabrona me empujó," the evangelist had pushed her, and to avoid embarrassment, her scammed and vulnerable body lay slain on the floor, waiting for the service to finish. They usually will cover you with a blanket, but while she sat on the dusty and gloss-painted cement floor, she lay there with no cover, just the sheer length of her long denim skirt.
I vacillated between accepting the possible damnation of my soul and becoming paralyzed by the very thought of spiritual warfare which I was definitely not fit for.
Los aleluyas (the hallelujahs) was the name Catholics in Aguada gave us, making fun of the Tourette-like blurting of random words of praise such as "¡Santo! ¡Cristo vive! ¡Aleluya! ¡Amén! and ¡Poderoso!" Pentecostalism was still relatively new in the '90s, and it had grown out of the charismatic movement from Southern white men who saw financial opportunities when they decided to open sects such as Assemblies of God and Mission Board in these already spiritually attuned communities. Aguada is still regarded as the Vatican of the Island of Enchantment known as Puerto Rico. The Avilés and the Soto’s had been Roman Catholic through centuries in Puerto Rico until the late '70s, which brought not only family strife but caused my racist great-grandfather Manuelito Avilés Avilés (a product of first-cousin incest) to call us moros (moors), as if the Pentecostal was that different from the Catholic one.
But the fact is, the Pentecostal God was terrifying. Growing up, our Pastor Laurentino Crespo, whose time-traveling voice and endless screams scared the shit out of his congregation (except his wife Herminia, who happened to sit in the very back of the bancas). Rumor had it that Laurentino himself had placed her in disciplina, which meant she was ostracized from the congregation, but I always like to think of her as a woman that really hated her clown, false prophet of a husband and was secretly reading erotic novellas and smut conspicuously covered in a leather Bible cover.
Laurentino would scream abuses to his congregation who had fallen for his demagogue speeches. The worst of them all was when a demon-infested drunkard entered the church, and Laurentino warned us all that our iglesia had been infiltrated by a demon. The crazy thing is that this type of occurrence happened regularly to our church members.
One thing was believing in God and being a good Christian, but my frail and gentle Pisces soul could not cope at the thought of a spiritual world in which demons searched for spiritually-straying bodies to infect. Laurentino had informed us that all of us were always prone to demonic possession, even children.
When the drunkard entered the church, it came from the back entrance. The congregation was singing one of these orientalist-sounding hymns that sounded like Hava Nagila. I know his drunkenness led him to the syncopated sounds of tambourines, off-tune guitar vibrations, and the top-line of hits such as Este corito es para alabar a Dios (This Hymn Is To Praise God).
Este corito es para alabar a Dios
Si tú lo alabas también
Sientes lo mismo que yo
Este corito es para alabar a Dios
Si tú lo alabas también
Sientes lo mismo que yo
Siento que el Espíritu Santo
Se está derramando en mi corazón
Y que una nube del cielo
Se está vislumbrando en la casa de Dios
Este corito es para alabar a Dios
Si tú lo alabas también
Sientes lo mismo que yo
Este corito es para alabar a Dios
Si tú lo alabas también
Sientes lo mismo que yo
Siento que el Espíritu Santo
Se está derramando en mi corazón
Y que una nube del cielo
Se está vislumbrando en la casa de Dios
Yo siento que el Espíritu Santo
Se está derramando en mi corazón
Y que una nube del cielo
Se está vislumbrando en la casa de Dios
Estaban todos unánimes en ruego y oración
Estaban todos unánimes en ruego y oración
Y desde el cielo bajó el Espíritu Santo
Y desde el cielo bajó el Espíritu Santo
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname, lléname
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname de tu amor
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname, lléname
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname de tu amor
Estaban todos unánimes en ruego y oración
Estaban todos unánimes en ruego y oración
Y desde el cielo bajó el Espíritu Santo
Y desde el cielo bajó el Espíritu Santo
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname, lléname
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname de tu amor
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname, lléname
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname de tu amor
Yo me siento pentecostal
Yo me siento pentecostal
Yo me siento pentecostal
De la cabeza a los pies
De la cabeza a los pies
Yo me siento pentecostal
De la cabeza a los pies
Yo siento que el Espíritu Santo
Se está derramando en mi corazón
Y que una nube del cielo
Se está vislumbrando en la casa de Dios
Yo siento que el Espíritu Santo
Se está derramando en mi corazón
Y que una nube del cielo
Se está vislumbrando en la casa de Dios
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname, lléname
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname de tu amor
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname, lléname
Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname de tu amor
Espí-ri-tu Santo (Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname, lléname)
Espí-ri-tu Santo (Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname de tu amor)
Espí-ri-tu Santo (Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname, lléname)
Espí-ri-tu Santo (Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname de tu amor)
Lléname de tu amor
(Espíritu Santo lléname) Lléname de tu amor
(Espíritu Santo lléname) Lléname de tu amor
De la cabeza a las pies, lléname de tu amor
Llena mi corazón, lléname de tu amor
Derramate con poder, lléname con tu amor
Espí-ri-tu Santo (Espíritu Santo lléname, lléname, lléname)
Espí-ri-tu Santo (Espíritu Santo lléname, ___________________)
"¡PAREN LA MÚSICA!"
Laurentino intercepted the choir singers, and immediately everyone’s muscles became tense.
Because I was eight, I would sometimes try to dissociate and use my childhood as a guise to ignore such calls for attention. I was a child. Clearly, a demon would prefer my mother’s emotional volatility or Herminia’s IDGAF nonchalant seat warming. My mother looked at me and asked me to stand up and listen to Laurentino.
"This man is endemonia’o. He is with demon! I need everyone, including children, to pray right now and stay in communion with Jehová because this demon will try to find a new cuerpo the moment it loses this one’s hospitality," Laurentino warned
The demon would possess me; I was sure of it. It was only a matter of time. I had felt this fear after watching Scream. I did not have the spiritual conviction to let it escape my soul.
The drunk smiled; his eyes moved up and down as they usually do when one is lit. His shirt was held buttoned by the penultimate button, which exposed a set of gold chains, including a rosary, that burrowed in his gray chest hair. I recognized him because he would hang out at Patrio’s liquor store, which always had old men drinking bottles of Palo Viejo, and with every passing car they would peep out their heads and unbuttoned shirts to make eye contact with those passing by.
Patrio’s liquor store was also next to the Panadería La Estrella, which always carried leche, fresh pan sobao, habichuelas de lata, and pastelitos de guayaba. When we ran out of milk or bread, or when Mami didn’t want to cook, she would send me to get half a pound of jamón y queso de papa, which she would turn into pan pobre (little pressed ham and cheddar cheese sandwiches). Anytime she would send me to the Panadería, it was always too dark, and because I was deeply afraid of the drunkards, I would scream as I ran down the hill.
"¡FUEEEEEERRAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" Laurentino screamed as he grabbed the bottle of frankincense oil he had purchased on his last trip to the colonized land of Palestine. As he prayed for the demon to leave the body, my body became tense, and my heartbeat accelerated with the commotion around all of us. I looked to the left of our seats, and Chinto, who sat in the front seat, had begun speaking in tongues. "IMA, IMA, IMA BABABANDO!" he yelled, his body choreographing with the intensity of the clamoring spirits around him.
Carmen Valentín had begun doing her tornado dance, and while I could never interpret the sounds of her tongue, her hair bun pins began to unravel and reveal strands of her gray hair, which she had not been allowed to cut as only heathens could do that.
"¡FUEEEEEERA EN EL NOMBRE DE JESUCRISTO, FUERAAAAAAAAAAA!" Laurentino’s screams were desperate and animalistic, which meant the demon was holding on for dear life.
"I need all of you to pray and clamor to God right now. We must be in communion as this demon leaves this man’s body. IT WILL FIND A NEW HOME."
IT WILL FIND A NEW HOME. IT WILL FIND A NEW HOME. ME. HOME. MY HOME. MY BODY: THE HOST. IT WILL FIND A NEW HOME. IT WILL FIND A NEW HOME IN ME!
I tried to pray to God to protect my soul, especially as I was not strong enough to endure the mental and spiritual chaos of demonic possession, but mostly because I was too young to endure demonic possession. "¡Por favor, Dios, no a mí!" I prayed, and I held my mother’s hand, who peeked through her eyes and saw my desperation as I battled the possibility of my eventual possession.
"¡SE HA IDO!" The demon had left, and immediately I felt strange. I couldn’t feel my heart trying to escape my rib cage. I fell asleep in the car when we went home, and when I opened my eyes, I couldn’t move or speak. Years later, a late-night Wikipedia wormhole would reveal this as sleep paralysis. That night, as I fought to wake up, I screamed at the top of my lungs and cried for my dad to get me. Eventually, Kenneth opened the car door and shook me, and I was able to regain control of my limbs.
I recount these stories to my white friends, and they’re always shocked at what they call mental and spiritual abuse. There were good times too, involving the congregation cooking, which would sell food or hot chocolate with María digestives after the services. In these communal gatherings, people would share details about their own lives, and for an hour, they would exist in the world without the existential dread of demonic possession. Sometimes we would go on family gatherings to a nearby river and spend the afternoons inhaling the sweet and smoky scent of oregano and garlic, lechón asao (roast pork).
As I got older, the overbearing nature of church forced me to escape the services and to play behind the church’s monte to play hide-and-seek, which was not as terrifying as I always felt that God must clearly have some force shield in place in churches. My parents would always scold me or send the twins after me when they realized I had escaped.
When I was thirteen, we left Assemblies of God for the Mission Board sect of Pentecostal churches.
At the Mission Board of Aguada, women were allowed to wear pants, earrings, and color their hair. I had never seen my mother so eager to embellish her face with jewelry, which she hadn’t done since the mid-'80s. We were also allowed to go to the theaters, although that had never been a problem for us. Laurentino had always warned us that movie theaters were places where people fornicated under the celluloid’s shadows.
Pastor Laurentino hated anything that had to do with El Mundo. He would always say things like “Esas cosas son del mundo” meaning that they were of the world, Satan’s world! He told his congregations that if we were ever in a cinema during the rapture’s trumpet calls, we would be left behind.
It was always a risk to go to the cinema. I still, to this day, don’t understand why my family disregarded this rule compared to others, and I’m thankful for it because the cinema is one of my one true pleasures in life.
At the Mission Board denomination, there wasn’t a maniacal, fear-mongering pastor like Laurentino Crespo, but there was someone even more threatening: Dárida, the church oracle who would go up near the end of service and exclaim things like, "The spirit tells me that someone in this conversation is having lustful thoughts, and someone in this congregation is gay." Either me or Abraham, the slender, white, and green-eyed twink that had plucked his eyebrows to smithereens.
Dárida was worse than Laurentino. She would expose these allegations to the church as a way to keep us surprised. Her spiritual proclamations were exhausting, as there was always a new sin that she needed to expose, and so many followed her leads. Instead of two-hour services, with Dárida they would be three or four hours as she solicited us to go up to the altar and plead to God for forgiveness and spiritual strength.
I was not about to get exposed by anyone. She did not know my life or the fact I had gone on rented Pedro Almodóvar’s La Mala Educación and had lusted after Gael García Bernal singing Sara Montiel’s rendition of "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás." How dare you expose me in front of this congregation of sheep!?
For the next three years, I would wait until the sermons finished and would spend it in the men’s bathroom, waiting for the service to end and for Dárida to cease her useless vitriol.
Today I think about my father and what he said about Satan wanting to take over my spirit. Why would Satan choose me? That same night, when I threatened to throw myself out of my car, I locked myself in the bathroom for hours, hoping he would think I had killed myself. When I opened the door, I found him crying, and while he did tell me I had been tainted by evil since a newborn, I had no choice but to accept that Laurentino, Dárida, Mission Board, and Assemblies of God had colonized our thoughts, and we saw the world much differently now.
So many of us were left behind
Our spirits, broken by the inevitability of our innate urge to sin.