Cracked Roots & Roses 36: I’m not impressed 

It’s amazing how reliving your past helps you see where it all began and how things happened. While at the spa, I started talking to a musician from my church. He was the first narcissist I had ever met. I see it now. At the time, I had no idea what the word meant, nor that they all have the same characteristics, no matter the age, race, or background.

The first time I saw him, he was on stage playing the piano and singing at church. I was mesmerized. I had never considered dating a Christian man. I never thought I was worth someone like that. I was too “saved” for the stone heathens but not “saved” enough for the choir boys. I also knew myself and didn’t want to hurt or damage a son of God. After church that Sunday, I went home, found him on MySpace, and friended him.

At the time, I was hanging out with a girl named Monica. She encouraged my foolishness by helping me find information about him online. To my surprise, he had a whole CD and had worked on many secular and gospel music projects. I thought he was a big deal—until I listened to the CD. It was below average at best. I got it online for $2.99, which was $1.99 too much, in my opinion. From that day forward, I stalked his page. I read everything he wrote and liked it.

I was really looking to see if he was married or in a relationship, but there were no signs of a woman in his life—like most narcissists. Monica said he wasn’t married, had two teenage children, and was very active in ministry. Her description caused me to create a narrative in my mind about who he was as a man, but I was way off.

When I think of myself in my early 30s, I cringe. I wouldn’t do anything like that today. I’d sooner get a man out of my face completely than stalk his page or tolerate mixed signals. Recently, a very handsome man reached out to me for my number. We talked on the phone for over an hour, went out, and texted a bit—then he fell off the face of the earth, resurfacing two months later. He would tag me in obscure messages from time to time to “keep the door open” while taking my temperature.

I helped him make a decision by unfollowing him. I REFUSED to ruminate about some man adding me to his string of fools. I don’t see anything he does or says, so I’ll never have to wonder what happened. Because in reality, what happened doesn’t matter. I want a man who is done playing high school games and who knows me by the Spirit. I now believe if a man wants you, there is no confusion or inconsistency. Boy, I wish I knew that back then.

The guy at the church finally messaged me after weeks of me acting like a lovesick schoolgirl. He asked for my number but didn’t contact me for a whole month. When he finally reached out, he texted to see if I wanted to go to dinner and a movie. I agreed because I was a clown who had built him up in my mind. Even after asking me out, he didn’t call or text until the day of the date.

I drove downtown Chicago, parked, and walked to the bistro to meet him. He was standing outside in old jeans and a black suit jacket, looking down at his phone. When I walked up, he barely greeted me and held the door open. While waiting for our overpriced soup and dry sandwiches, he talked about himself nonstop. According to him, he was a great guy who lived a simple life, but everything around him was “complicated.”

He was so full of himself it was off-putting, but I excused it because, in my mind, he was someone else. He was also a vegan—I know this because he told me twice and frowned at my French dip with gravy when it hit the table.

He was much older than I thought. At the time, he was 51, and I was 34. I didn’t care much about that because he looked young (and still does—I found his IG while remembering all of this). After the movie, I drove home thinking I might just let him fade to black. I wasn’t sure, so I called Monica to see what she thought.

She heard everything and said, “Oh, that’s small stuff. You’re just not used to good men of God. Oh, and I had a dream y’all were married.”

That was another spin. Maybe she was right; I wasn’t used to good men, and I was big on dreams. Nothing in me said she was lying—but she was. I found out later she lied about everything that passed her teeth.

So I actively changed the way I saw the situation and rearranged his words and actions to fit the narrative in my head. Today, I roll my eyes at the very thought. Who he is, IS who he is. Ain’t no sense in me painting a clown as a king. It only hurts me in the end. As usual, he didn’t call for weeks. He was “oh so busy” with gigs, writing, and composing music. He said he doesn’t make calls when he’s in the studio, and that could be many days at a time.

The next time I saw him was at a café in Oak Park. He was talking to me about marriage and claiming that God told him I was his wife. I had no reaction because his words and actions were incongruent. I was too busy staring at that same black suit jacket from the date-with filth on the lapel. He was saying all this, but his actions didn’t match. In the end, I still didn’t know much about him. After we left lunch, he walked me to my car. While walking, he held the side of his nose, shot snot on the ground, and wiped his hands on his jeans. I was disgusted. There was just no way. I noticed he wore the same couple of shirts, his socks and shoes were dirty, and his jacket looked cheap. It was like he climbed out of a dirty clothes hamper.

I didn’t want to be so superficial, but a part of me just wasn’t as enamored with him after seeing him up close. His image in my head was all but gone. On stage, he had lights, a microphone, and a captivated audience. In real life, he wasn’t glamorous-or even a decent man. I tried to get to know him by going to recordings and listening to tracks he would send me, but in the end, I just couldn’t. I wasn’t interested. It was all ultra-boring to me. I didn’t like sitting on hard pleather couches in a cold studio until 2 a.m., listening to him record runs to C-list gospel songs nobody would hear-but there I was.

One day, I went to pick him up for a gig he was playing at after church. That was when I learned he didn’t have a car. The car he had been driving was a rental. Then it all made sense—he was inviting me to these events because I had a car.

At this particular church, the minister was his ex-girlfriend. I didn’t know this until afterward. She had everyone in this church of about 20 people get up and come to the altar for a word. She said something to me that I can’t remember because it was inaccurate, and I saw the spirit on her.

While driving back, he told me how he and she had slept together after a conference she hosted last year. The more he spoke, the more I wanted to wretch. He would say things like,

“Women in the church are the easiest because they’re desperate for a man.” He bragged about having sex with women wearing choir robes, among other things.

He said, “Before they get saved, they use their common sense. After, they leave that in the world and take any man they can find as long as he’s in church.”

Then he told me how a famous prophetess came to his hotel room one night in lingerie while at some

convocation. I frowned at all of this and argued the point of the woman.

I asked, “Do you think this is impressive?”

He said, “I’m not trying to impress you because you’re already impressed.

You just can’t be that naive, Kim.

Everyone is sleeping with everyone— even in the church.”

He went on, “The prophet Elijah was at the widow woman’s house because they were having sex.”

I said,

“I disagree. You sound like you

need deliverance.”

He said some other vulgar mess about prophets in the Bible, and I closed the conversation with, “You might be having sex with everything that moves, but I do not, and I am not impressed.”

After I dropped him off at his dump of a studio apartment by the train on the west side of Chicago, I drove home trying to understand what just happened. I didn’t like him as a man or a friend, so how was I supposed to marry him?

Instead of just not talking to him, I tried to fix myself. That was my first mistake

—and it led me down a road of repairing broken, angry men.