The following is a excerpt from my auto-fiction sex addiction/punk rock memoir, I Can Only Give You Everything. Just yesterday (05/29/26) I awoke to find a email from a publisher who was not only reading my memoir but very much interested in discussing the possibility of publishing it! 80 queries later, a star of hope was seeded in my inbox. To celebrate, I am sharing a funny and sad story from my book based on a desperate dream I once had to make a film about The Second Coming of Jesus.
I will share this story in 2 parts. Part 2 will post on 06/06/26. So be sure to subscribe (if you have not already) because you wont want to miss it!
All through my teens and early twenties I would go through long bouts of depression. My best friend, Freddy would try to get me out of bed to go see an old movie with him at the Hollywood Theater or take me to the drive thru at Wendy’s so I wouldn’t have to get out of the car. When that didn’t work, he gave me a book called, Depression Is a Choice. I used it as a door stop until one day, I ran out of bathroom reading material and discovered within its pages that even if I felt like I wanted to die I could still go outside and make myself useful. So, at twenty, I decided to start volunteering at KBOO, Portland’s very own community radio station.
After only six months, I got my own radio show called “The Rock till You Drop Show,” in which I would spin underground garage and punk records in between reading R-rated poetry and offering unsolicited mental health advice to my faithful listeners, mostly middle-aged men living alone in studio apartments, drinking flat beer after midnight.
But then one day, after being on the air for a year, I showed up at the station to check my mailbox for fan mail, and I was cornered by Shane, the red-headed station manager, who informed me with absolutely no pity that I would no longer be djing on Wednesday nights from one to three a.m.
“I’m loved and adored by hundreds of gas station attendants across the Portland Metro area.” I pleaded with him.
But it was to no avail. He had been trying to get me off the air for months.
“You never hit the dump button fast enough to cover up your obscenities, and besides your empty promise to play exclusively dance hall reggae, you have missed your required pledge drive hours.”
“Please, Shane, I can raise tons of money. I can do a pledge drive every week.”
“This isn’t about that. Every volunteer at this station wants their own show. You have to earn it. You can’t come off the streets and do whatever you want. This isn’t a damn circus.”
But I had “earned it.” I made coffee every day for a year in the newsroom. I pulled depressing stories off Reuters about US soldiers growing opium in Afghanistan, and genital mutilations in Uganda, and Julia Butterfly living in a tree to protect the last Redwood Forests. I had let the neurotic Evening News Manager, whom everyone worshipped because he used to work for NPR, tell me I was an idiot for not knowing how to type on a keyboard. Never once did I complain. I kept my head down and did what they asked, expecting nothing in return. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that just because I read The Manifesto for the Society of Cutting Up Men on the air, and I let a homeless fiddle player sleep in the music library, did not mean I hadn’t earned my slot. But it didn’t matter, because once people had their own ideas about what kind of person I was, there was nothing that could be done to shake it.
Take my ex, Noel’s old roommate, Millet, for example. An hour after my show on KBOO was cancelled, I ran into Millet on the bus.
“Shit, Delia! This is crazy, I was just looking at your picture in a magazine.”
The fool shouted this at me in front of everyone on the bus, and let me tell you, he was the last person I wanted to see. The last time I spoke to him, he was threatening to call the cops on me because I wouldn’t stop coming by his house looking for Noel.
“Are you staring at my tits?” I was pretty damn sure he was staring at my tits, because he sure as hell wasn’t looking at my face.
“That’s what I want to tell you. There is a topless photo of you in Exotic magazine.”
“You must be mistaken,” I said, sitting down in the seat behind him.
“No, I’m pretty sure it’s you. Look,” he said, flipping past the centerfold of Ms. Suicide Girl of the month till he came to an advertisement displaying several tastefully taken pictures of, mostly, bikini-clad women, besides the one photo, front and center, of yours truly. I was topless, looking a bit confused with the words, Model Call, and Natural Breasts ONLY, printed under the photo.
“Mother Fucking, Jerry,” I said, snatching the magazine away from Millet.
“Hey! I was reading that!”
Later that day, as I stared into the abyss of my dirty living room floor, I called Jerry on the telephone. Six months before this phone call, I had needed to buy a vacuum, new shoes, a real bottle of maple syrup, and cigarettes with filters. The kind of things most people take for granted.
Jerry was a photographer. He took photos of me to show to his client, so that he could hire me. But I had cut all my hair off, or I was too young, or my nose was too big, who really knows why this “client” never hired Jerry to take my photos for his S and M coffee table book.
“I didn’t sign a release form, Jerry.”
Jerry was out of shape, and he was bald, and I could hear him wheezing on the other end of the line, “I don’t have any money, but I could give you some LSD.”
“Did you hear me? I could sue you; I could put your whole amateur porn operation out of business.”
“I got a new video camera, it’s Japanese.”
“So what? You want to give it to me?”
“Didn’t you say you were trying to make a movie?”
“You mean the Second Coming?”
“Yeah, the one I said sounded like a smut film.”
“It’s not a porno, Jerry. It’s an art film, and you can’t cast any of your porn models in it, so don’t even think about it. I want real actors. This is going to Cannes or Sundance. This is going to make me a big-time director.”
Casting the female lead for The Second Coming proved to be difficult because the script was about a call girl who thought she could save the souls of her tricks through the act of fornication. While there was no nudity, there was a lot of simulated sex. To make matters worse, we had no budget to the pay actors. In the end, I decided to play the lead role, which only left me with the problem of casting the male lead, who was to play Jack, a homeless schizoid who believed he was Jesus Christ.
After only two auditions, I found the perfect guy for the role. His name was Juda, and his claim to fame was a minor speaking role in the movie Magic Mountain. Needless to say, that was fifteen years ago, when he was a kid, and he hadn’t had much work since. But I didn’t care because he was Jewish like Jesus. And he was hot. So, of course, I took that as a sign from God.
The first shoot day came, in which Mary professes to Jack that she is pregnant with their child. Since we had no budget for production design, Jerry dragged a cast-iron bed frame he had found in the dumpster and placed it in the largest area of his studio. Some art students I found on Craigslist cut a hundred stars out of aluminum foil and hung them from a canopy of sheer fabric draped over the bed frame. Jerry had his assistants, some former models who owed him money, blast hot lights through the fabric.
It was magical. A world of twinkling stars and white light surrounded Juda and me as we looked into each other’s eyes. Juda was twitching and shaking with his hands on my belly as he whispered in my ear that this imagined child inside of me was going to be the Second Coming of Christ. A tear fell from the corner of our production assistant, Sandy’s eye as Juda took my hand in his and said, “You are the Omega to my Alpha, the darkness to my light.”
And then the moment came when Juda was going to kiss me. The kiss was significant because it marked the transmission of the Ruach Ha Kodesh, as Juda liked to call it, or the initiation of the Holy Spirit into the unborn child.
I closed my eyes and waited for Juda’s lips to touch mine, imagining that when he kissed me, my body would be overtaken by the Godhead.
“Rolling!” Jerry shouted from the other side of the camera.
Silence. Beautiful. Shivering. Silence. Nothing but silence.
Seconds felt like minutes.
Minutes like hours.
Something wasn’t right.
I opened my eyes.
“I’m sorry.” Juda got off the bed and headed to the door to put on his shoes.
I followed him outside onto the fire escape. He had forgotten his coat and was standing on the ledge shivering with his shoes in his hands. I handed him a cigarette as I had been doing for weeks during rehearsals. He had been living in his car. I felt sorry that I had no money to pay him.
“I can’t do this,” he said after taking a drag from his cigarette.
I would have given him anything he asked for. I had no idea why. I didn’t even like him. He was an overgrown baby.
“You’re doing great, though. Everyone was watching you. You got Sandy to cry.”
“I can’t kiss you. Don’t take this wrong, but I like blonds with small bones.”
“But it’s not real. You’re an actor. You don’t really have to like me.”
“But there’s no chemistry. And I know from Meisner that there needs to be chemistry. The audience will know. It doesn’t matter how good the actors are. What if we tried it again, but this time with Sandy?”
“But she’s a porn model from the San Fernando Valley!”
Well that’s all for now folks! Stay tuned for Part 2 of 2 and in the meantime check out the trailer for the movie that this story was based on:
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Peace, Love, and Anarchy, your pal,
Border Land Delia-Ann
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