The moment he walked down the aisle of Carpenter of Calvary Church, slouching, sallow, and tardy Darius Wheeler III ignored and endured the righteous glares of Mrs. Sarkin along with the rest of the Church Lady Brigade.
Whether this is due to my casual attire, my timing, my well known recent run-ins with the law, or some enchanted stew of all of the above is a function of whatever happens to be squirreling under their hats of the bursting colors. Oh Lord may you protect these empty heads as surely as you do the vacant caverns of the moon.
He gave them his best adolescent slither: all wiry limberness. Any attention he might be paying to his soul was construed as out of character in the post-Vietnam late seventies, especially for a man of his fifteen years and prodigiously renegade reputation-an altar boy gone bad, who had run away from home in the bargain.
It was a given that any and all appropriate daughters had been warned, but this proved to be pure redundancy. His bad boy status had done nothing for his romantic life, because despite, or perhaps due to the nature of his intelligence, he was considered by all self-respecting daughters in the working middle class neighborhood of these said seventies to be a nut. He would have had more respect if he was a stupid car booster who didn’t have a clue about Shakespeare, or what T.S. Eliot was all about.
Of course, then he wouldn’t have been able to talk the nice Lieutenant into thinking he was talking Darius into a court ordered shrink instead of some quality years at the Mulenberg Correctional Facility, the state’s maximum security facility for the adolescent with prodigious criminal talent.
And, it was just my luck to commit a "crime" that wasn’t really a crime at all. Allright, they did fatten up the rapsheet a bit, but if anything, I simply did the closest thing to the right thing that I could find in life’s toolbox. And after three interviews even the Lieutenant who wanted to throw me into Mulenburg had to come around.
So much for the James Dean effect, but hell, he was a fag anyway. Girls all loved him, and he had no use for them. Sometimes I could almost wish I was wired that way. Could have pulled a lot more money off the street. They might never have caught up with me then.
But at this point. I really can’t stand fags. Especially after the one who tried raping me at knifepoint. Still hasn’t turned me off to those ancient Greeks though. It must have been different then.
I‘ll just have to settle for lusting after Maureen Neary from afar. She of the hazel eyes and goofy smile that make me tingle inside like I never have before. Hell, I‘d marry her even if she wouldn’t do anything with me.
I‘d give anything just to be with her and have her love me back, and hold my hand when we walk in the stupid little park. She could make me the proudest happiest guy in the world.. I feel like such a dumbass, thinking I’m secretly following her home whenever I can. She probably knows, and thinks I‘m a dork.
It was too bad for Darius that he wasn’t homosexual, because as he had learned on the streets of New York City, homosexual men found him very attractive. So attractive that within forty eight hours of his arrival there as a "runaway" he had been subjected to six potentially lucrative propositions as well as the rape attempt.
When the cops ultimately dragged him back home, that was one thing he would never have told his own father. The guy had suffered enough and blamed himself too much already. And he’d had almost nothing to do with it at all.
It was more than a third of the way through the eleven o’clock mass when Darius Wheeler III broke from his inner monologue and began paying attention to the weathered old dinosaur two pews ahead of him. This late June morning in north Flint, Michigan, had already skyrocketed from dawn’s cool promise to ninety degrees worth of baking heat and stifling humidity.
This is no place for hung over geezers. He should knocking back his first cold one right about now.
The old man emanated a genuineness to his piety that had been subliminally itching at Darius well before the god awfully interminable sermon had begun.
Funny how he looks like my old man, but it’s definitely not him. Way too old. Definitely the right nose though. Just a bit redder and more decayed. A definite full size rectangular honker.
His father had struggled with nasal inflammations since childhood, causing people who did not know his history to assume he was a drunk. He drank. But he was certainly no drunk. He’d never seen him out of control when he drank. Nor had he ever witnessed him complaining or acting on a hangover.
With a thick rectangular head cocked back towards his left shoulder, and a glazed look hanging somewhere between boredom and exhaustion, the man’s deep set and hooded intelligent eyes squinted not with arrogance or superiority, but pure "I made it through another bitch of a week at the factory" fatigue.
There is a rare and wonderful kind of piety which Darius first noticed as an Altar Boy working the early masses. It was the kind that brought the person in to worship, because the loved the prayer of the Mass.
The sermons often lost them though. Once they had become anesthetized by the hypnotic drone, built word by ever hammering word of sermonic commentary on the words of the Man of few words, Christ, the equally stupefied altar boy could hot help but notice how these congregants’ heads’ bowed in silent prayer.
You also tended to experience this air in very old priests who had put in decades of selfless devotion. You saw it a lot in the masses they held in the parish Poor House, where they kept people who had worked their entire lives and were dying of cancer.
These priests were the ones Darius had liked to serve mass under. It was for them, and their quality of company he stayed on as an Altar Boy, long after the glow of the Altar Boy role’s celebrity had dimmed, and virtue‘s reward was the sweetish nauseating stink of the necrotizing flesh of the terminally ill and indigent worshipers. Father Ignatius used to smoke Kools and expect extra wine in the chalice. He sometimes would tell a joke instead of give a sermon. But the joke always made you think about Christ.
As he watched, he thought he saw the old man’s lips, haloed with a salt and pepper scraggle of unruly hair, seem to mouth the words "Our Father." Something about this guy reminds me of the poorhouse priests like old Iggy.
Probably just my imagination. He probably doesn’t even speak English. He’s got an off the boat quality to him. Eastern Europe maybe, with those sea blue Slovak eyes. Maybe an ancient peasant from another Polish century. Now here in Carpenter of Calvary Church, wearing K-mart sneakers, a captive of new fangled freedoms, and celebrating the ancient feast of the lamb.
He envied the old man, and yet immediately emulated and imitated him, or at any rate what he thought the fellow was doing. Darius envied the man for his tested quality. The stiffness of every movement was that of someone who has passed through a harrowing. Someone diminished in body, who through harsh experience, has become greater in spirit. Not the walking wounded, but more like the wounded and still walking.
And in my envy I behold the fear that I would meet whatever his test was and be wanting in the trial. Envy sure is one ugly two headed sucker. Insults the color green.
Oh for the love of God, look at this crap! Mrs. Sarkin and Co. are making hand signals among themselves about the way the poor guy smells!
Heh heh, thank you God, for putting him closer to them. And yeah, I guess he is the source of that rancid cheesy aroma. Guess we won’t see any of them exercising their Christian Charity over at the poorhouse. Not if they find this aroma too tough. Maybe good for a bake sale though. A cookie for the dying.
Darius began silently reciting the Our Father to himself. He had noticed long ago what a difficult prayer it was to repeat with constant focused attention on the meaning of every word it contains, and how each word interacts with every other.
Despite the brevity of the prayer, you usually lose the continuity before the time you’re half way through.
"Who art in Heaven." And what if the old fellow over there was reciting the very same to himself? He certainly did not seem like the gibbering rosary type. This is a genuineness that shames the gaudy working class finery of the parishioners around him.
And not to diminish that finery and the simple joy it brings to the toilers of the paper mill and the Biscuit company. These are no Fifth Avenue Christians themselves. When the line about it being easier for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, not one among them sees themselves.
Nor perhaps should they. Or should they? Self righteous about being poor because they are not as rich as the wealthy? Think upon the wretched of the world. The uncounted thousands upon thousands who live and die in squalor.
Hell, we’re all rich, even the poorest among us here in America. Think upon the ones we never think of, and wonder. Half a world that lives on less than a week’s paycheck across a year. Half a world. Half a world I can barely comprehend a hundredth of. Half a world living on less than $500 a year.
The stifling air grew even closer with the scents that commingled around him.
A little Arpege here, a waft of Chanel there, a sudden updraft of Old Spice brutally swatted down by the indestructible Aqua Velva. And oh God the women and girls in their glorious diaphanous whatever they wear.
All flowers, colors, and delicious aromas that conspire together to hold at bay the ancient scents of horror. Stale blood, sweat, and the urine reek of terror . If God had an eleventh commandment, it must have been for pink ruffles and lavender lace. The air was alive with their rustlings.
The thickening heat in the church coagulated around them and made them grow palpable in the gathering humidity of the impending afternoon. Darius’s skin goose pimpled with a sudden rush of pleasure. But the pleasure had the tickling thrill of a host of moist earthworms at clammy play on the fields of his naked chest and throat.
And here he is, as sturdy as a well worn combat boot in his plaid shirt, plain blue slacks, scuffed shoes. The smell of work still clings to him, no doubt. He almost looks like my old man could look in twenty years, if he doesn‘t heart attack out.
He certainly needs a shave, which makes him a stand-out among the attending men, all of whom are pretty much buffed to the eyes.
There was a good two days of growth over the thick jowls that looked like gravity had ripped from some long forgotten jauntiness of youth.
His stomach overhangs his belt, but it is not the fat of gluttony. It looks more like it too has been pulled from his guts by the incessant spurs of care and toil.
And those eyes. Even from the side and two rows away, it’s like looking into a furnace ablaze with a knowledge that most of us shy away from like startled horses.
Dark, lapis lazuli blue with a touch of Malachite. A hardness there, not like the rigidity of scornful judgment, but adamantine with a compassionate acceptance of the tragedies and joys that have composed his life. The eyes from a mosaic from Byzantium.
That intersection where there resides something that is neither faith nor knowledge, and yet strides both like a commanding rider, who brings the certain confidence that only humility can provide. A wise rider who has studied , listened to, and sometimes even obeyed his horse.
Dendriting from the tightly convexed corners Darius could see that there even seemed to be crows feet inside the man’s crows feet. The deeply placed sockets were ringed with orbits of purple circles that reminded Darius of a Durer woodcut.
There was nothing about the man that suggested self indulgence. Nor was there anything of the glow of the zealot in him. This seemed more the demeanor of an ancient toiler of the sea who, has found among and despite the hypocrisies and one-upsman gauderies of the participants of the Mass, solace and shelter from a storm of which the other participants might barely comprehend. And one which he prays they never have to.
Like someone who has stepped through an invisibly open door.
He watched as the old man went painfully to and from his knees in the postures of the sacred ritual. There was nothing of the theatrical suffering and wincing that he often had witnessed as an altar boy among certain mincing elderly practitioners of the mass.
Those whose sidelong glances made between themselves had the wince of competition. He used to notice it serving the early mass. Miserly even in misery. Covetous of suffering that one supposes they suppose will boot them to the upper tiers of the celestial payback. As if whoever hurt the most going through the motions had somehow walked a step further in the gory footprints of Christ’s Passion.
He thought of Thomas a Kempis’s An Imitation of Christ, and how dangerous words can be when misinterpreted and perverted through the lens of spiritual ambition. He sometimes envied the kind of certitude that inhabited a person who believes that to sit at the right hand of God is somehow superior to someone who sits behind the side door.
But hey, it’s easy for me to see in terms of that philosophy, being the kind of bastard I am, I’ll be lucky to get into Purgatory. Always figured I’ll be lucky if they let me into old Harp Town at all. The back row will be fine by me.
Hallowed be thy name. The lad wondered what this old man’s name might be. His movements showed the anticipation of much muscle memory practice, but creaked with the pain that the daily teeth of labor have always chewed off the body of man.
Decades of wear and tear. Decades of going into something that ground out the daily bread. The kid shuddered at this conception of the premonition of his own future, and simultaneously was awe inspired by the obviousness with which this was the reality of the old man’s past. Nevertheless, he radiated a surrender that was not resignation.
And that is no small thing, and could be the only and ultimate victory for that fallen creature we call man. No matter how it is acquired across one‘s life.
Darius thought about his own father, and how much this much wounded, ugly, and sturdy specimen reminded him of him. Thy kingdom come. And specimen of what animal? It is too easy to call the human an animal and leave it there. No animal thinks of God. No animal has hunted down another of its species and killed it in God’s name either.
He thought of one of the stories his dad had told him about the life of St. Anthony. The monks were all in a lather trying to outdo each other as to what they might do if they got the inside dope that old Gabriel was about to blow the trumpet of doom on all mankind. You got the predictable rounds of penances, prayers and all manner of holy whatnot, until finally not a lick of work was getting done around the monastery with all the tedious holy speculation going on.
Finally, they went over to Anthony himself for consultation. He happened to be engrossed in a game of chess. Without missing a beat, he said, "I’ll keep looking for the best move."
If nothing else he was certain that if the Kingdom of God were to burst through the garish clerestory of the "New" Church, this man, defiant in his piety and physical erosion, also would barely notice. In some way he was already there. Darius thought of Christ’s own advice, "let your life be a prayer."
After eight years of college he might think of phrases like "universal resonances. At fifteen, the next few moments of his life felt like a fist of terror, dissipating and transmuting into awe and vision.
He saw the thousands of feet that have marched this round world’s corners leaving rutted paths etched in sweat and blood. And his paltry self here at Mass in his slacks, wishing he had a girlfriend.
Far from the madding butcher’s knives of human history and progress. Blades that were perhaps necessary instruments of progress. Alien to atrocities occurring at that very moment in numberless places all over the world.
Equally far from the blood rituals of the older practices. Rituals of unspeakable brutality, perhaps also necessary to the final human teleology. And like many other terrors it passed with a velocity equal to its intensity.
This much criticized Catholic religion, with which he was full of the natural doubts of adolescence, provided nevertheless a shelter from a storm of terror that the history books so quiet and boring on the shelves, give the lie to.
But you can’t pervert it into a narcotic based on power and thwarted yearnings.
There was a sudden assault of frankincense in his nostrils. Yet this was no high mass. Juvenile delinquent or not, he was an ex-altar boy, and knew without thinking that his mind was playing with his senses, or his senses were playing with his mind. For the love of God, this is a church! This is no place for having visions!
Thy will be done. The kid felt a momentary liquid of the knees. But the fellow had the smell of the old country and the stink of labor in redolent contradiction with the congregations perfumery, and it felt like a spear tearing through his nose and skewering the guts of his bewildered brain. Pure life itself stinking and reeking and claiming all as its own, because the stink is the mark of one of the greatest characteristics of all that life has ever been. The mammalian refuge: safe, warm, and stinky. The origin of civilization during an Ice Age.
Like a sudden erection in the middle of a wedding, the humanity of the sturdy old man’s gamy scent sang in the boys nostrils like a choir of angels.
On earth as it is in Heaven. The hardest lines to pray. What do they mean? Is it a plea? May thy will be done on earth, which it seems not to occur as a general rule? Is it referring to some undetermined point in a yet to befall future time? Is it saying that it is already happening, and that the fault lies in our willful failure to comprehend and act on that understanding?
Is it a measure of our own lack of measure, where it is our own idiocy that has created a torrent of unnecessary suffering on an otherwise innocent orb? How can a prayer mean different things to different people? Doesn’t that belie the nature and purpose of it? Isn’t it our first, last, and best pipeline to the Big Guy, so to speak?
Good God, surely prayer can’t be like these idiotic classes in poetry, where everybody gets to vomit out their own interpretation?
Of course, if ever there was a specimen who was out of touch with "thy will, it would have to be me. A lousy son. A natural born thief. Lies come more naturally to my lips than truth. That’s how I survived my weeks on the streets. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he came down to the precinct at three in the morning, when they finally caught up with me.
No reproach. Something almost beyond any one word. I saw suffering and a delighted relief battling in equal measure on his face. He will always be a part of me.
He was the only one I worried about when I made the decision to split. He’d been killing himself to hold the whole thing together. But what do you do when you’re married to a woman who is undeniably either a genius or something very close thereto, but also capable of episodic rages of a terrifying and pernicious character?
I never minded the beatings, and as long as she just kept it to spankings with my little sisters, I figured, what’s a kid to do? But on the day she drop kicked my sister Meg, that changed everything. I was ready to murder the woman.
Not that I’m mister saint. Hell, more than once I felt aroused seeing my little sisters in the tub. That’s the kind of piece of garbage I am. But many I time I took the beatings for them, and with, well not pleasure, but certainly no small sense of pride and responsibility. I figured he was taking his fair share of beatings for us.
The neighbors all blamed him. There was a "what do you expect from that mad scientist mentality. They kept expecting the house to explode or something. And then I was a note of symmetry into their flat earth vision. He’s got a mutant school smart weird son. Trouble all the way. His cross to bear for the arrogance of science. All of them struck ignorant by their judgments of he humility that is the anchor of any true scientist.
Give us this day. And still every moment of every day is still a gift. An opportunity for adventures that only our self imposed pre-conceptions divert us from. Look at this guy. Smells like three day old cheese, needs a shave and looks like he toweled off after swimming here form Poland or Vietnam or something like that. But the eyes. The eyes so clearly set on God, that I can see God from here as if right through his.
And what about the bead driven babblers? The ones that look down on him and me? I can’t play the superior. It could all be our fault for failing to make clear the values that we adhered to. But then, how do you talk to the alien people clutching their idols, now that you’ve returned to your welcome back as an outsider?
Like those poor Jesuit point men who returned from Tibet to report no logical contradiction between an axiom of reincarnation and the tenets of Christianity as taught by Christ. For bureaucratic reasons alone, one must suppose, they had to be burned at the stake as heretics, or apostates, or whatever.
As the lieutenant said to me, "waiting for vindication can be a long wait, son. Be careful of taking the high road to low places. Who else was in on it? You couldn‘t have done it all on your own." The truth was I had.
Our daily bread. I was smart lucky and stupid all at once on the streets. Only shoplifted when I was hungry. Stole smart. I think more than a couple of times the security guys let me by looking the other way and hoping I wasn‘t obvious about it. I never stole stupid. I never stole greedy. But for crying out loud, some of those stores I hit like clockwork. A pack of Baloney and a big one of Chunky Chocolate with the raisins. I walked in with the athletic jacket open, left with it closed. The guy in the suit getting paid minimum must have known.
And forgive us our trespasses. It’s funny how we think the age of miracles has passed, maybe it’s more like our sense of time has altered and with that our ability to comprehend the miraculous. Who could give a shit about turning water into wedding wine when we have technology that can vaporize cities, poison oceans, induce mass lunacy through well executed propaganda, and leave behind a generation of cancer wracked children?
Now come along and top that, Rabbi Nazarene. Or as Blake wrote in Milton, "There is a class of men whose only delight is in destruction. " Or Pliny the Elder, "For some the highest joy of all is in the exercise of power." Damn, better than sex? Then Kissinger turned the whole thing on its posterior. It’s not a substitute, it’s an enhancer. "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."
I read he said that in the paper just last week. The rat bastard killed half the big kids in the neighborhood if you ask me. There were the ones who didn’t come back at all and the ones like Dennis Callmen, who was shot up so bad from a mine that I didn’t even recognize him. The war is over, but the bastards who perpetrated it just keep making money. As we forgive those who trespass against us.
It’s eerie how much that old Lithuanian, or whoever he is, reminds me of my old man. It just keeps coming back at me. What is it about him? I’d almost think it was dad, but he never once caught me looking at him. And that’s definitely not like my old man.
Too paranoid for that. He’s got a nose for eyes on him. Of all people, I should know. When I think of all of the crap I put him through, it would make anybody that way. Much less a disciplined and dedicated, if underpaid, scientist.
There was a familiar buzz and shuffle. The faithful, having done their faithful duty, were shuffling off to the rest of their Sunday with an attitude of relief all to familiar to the ruined Altar Boy.My God, the Mass is over, and it feels like the whole second half took all of an instant.
Darius looked around for the old man, but it was as if he had vaporized. Darius headed for the Soda Shop with the collection money he had palmed out of the box. The day was shaping up as a perfect one for a milkshake and a little pinball.
He got half way to Pete‘s Soda Stop, and went back to the church and dropped the money into the poor box. Father Claude did a double take. Hooligans putting money into the box was a rare problem. He gave Darius a double look to be sure it he wasn’t somehow back dipping. And lead us not into temptation.
The image of the old man haunted Darius all the way back home. He couldn’t shake the sense that the whole thing was somewhere left of the hallucination and right of the vision. Maybe it never happened at all.
Where did that old guy just disappear to? Saints, and madmen. Visions and stinkery. Home again home again. Darius went up the stairs to the cramped little apartment in the two family clapboard house. The kitchen reeked of coffee and cigarette smoke. There was the old man, sucking on a Camel in his underwear, smelling like he always did after another week of overtime at the lab. His eyes fixed Darius with a suspicious stare.
"So did you make it to mass this morning?"
"Yeah, I was at the eleven o’clock mass."
"Who was serving?"
"Father Claude, like always."
"Funny, I didn’t see you there."
"Hey, well I didn’t see you either! What is this some kind of a third degree? "
"Nah, forget it. But let’s face it, son, you’re not exactly throwing a Boy Scout resume on the table, are you?"
But deliver us from evil.
"I’ll bet you were no angel either."
"Far from it. I guess the fruit won’t fall far from the tree…."
"Not this side of paradise, Pops. But I really was there."
"Good enough. Now why don’t you get on top of some homework or something, will you?" BACK TO THE CONTENTS