Roads, Mills, Laps

No this isn’t what you think it may be; it’s not a legal brief, detailing the repressed memories of child sodomy. Rather, it’s a few innocent memories on a Friday night. Perhaps it’s a controversial write-up, so buckle your seatbelts or just flat-out ignore it if you are sadly looking for marathon drivel which is almost extinct on this space, being replaced instead by religion, raging sore throats, and rapacious, sycophantic Army officers. My apologies up front; how dare I speak my mind on an unsponsored website that I pay for. For shame! I wear my hairshirt; I wallow amid shanks of hackenfleish; I gaze sadly upon my atrophied legs. ($50,000 question spinning around in some of your heads: Should I hyperlink to this guy? One moment he’s normal, all runner-boring, the next he’s talking about altar boys! Arrgh!)

I guess I can consider myself one of the lucky few: I escaped the clutches of circa-1980 pederast priests and their slimy, covering-up bishops who wear the dainty robes and spooky miters of un-Christlike privilege. (In my opinion the rank of bishop and above = the Roman Catholic/New Testament equivalent of these guys. WWJD? I dunno, not hang out with them and their fancy garbs that’s for sure.)

I am writing about a few of my experiences as an altar boy at Saint Dominic’s Parish in Benicia, California. They are all good memories, so if you want to get mad at the Catholic Church, go somewhere else tonight. There’s plenty of people out there in cyberland who have a damn good reason to be mad at the mother church or whatever its called. But I’m not one of them tonight. I’m an apologist of sorts, I guess–but barely.

For the most part, the priests that I served with were saints. There was Father Carr. He was an aging Irishman who drank like a fish. He stumbled about in front of the altar as if he were in a pub. The altar itself: the bar. Me, at the beginning of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, when the altar boys are supposed to pour the wine into priest’s chalice for him to eventually bless, consecrate, and then drink: the bartender. Father Carr would quietly ask for more.

And I never cut him off.

He was stern, but fair, extremely conservative (he once preached in a homily that he regretted the viscous hijacking of the word ‘gay’) but loving. He called me his favorite altar boy; he taught me to pay attention to detail–a skill that would come in handy years later at West Point when I was folding my black dress socks into anal retentive little balls of misery on forlorn Saturday nights.

I have intermittent memories of Father Carr. He comes and goes, walking about the church, from the chancel, to the nave, up to the altar, on various Sundays; I was always in front of the his procession, holding the golden cross, making sure that the dying Jesus was facing the right way. Father Carr traipses about in my head, getting older, getting more frail–eventually dying while still serving at my parish.

I do know that he had a sense of humor, spraying me with his hands during the part of the Eucharistic Liturgy when the priest is supposed to cleanse himself of his sins by dipping his fingers into a bowl of water held by the altar server. He’d wink as he did it, absolving himself of his liabilities in his unique, ablutionary way–as if to say to me, ‘Tag, you’re it!’

Another memory of him was on a Good Friday in some vague 198X year. My mother, in a moment of supreme religious zeal, mandated that some of my brothers and I were to accompany her, in the middle of the school day, down to Saint Dominic’s to hear the Dominican priests speak about the gravity of this morbid day, this bleak day–this holiest of days for those who bask in the masochistic misery of the perpetually sinning scion of Adam. Dominican priests are a unique bunch: after all, these were the guys who were ordered by Pope Gregory IX, to enforce the eradication of the heretics during the infamous and ridiculously unjust Inquisition. They didn’t fuck around: Good Friday was their day. They were gifted speakers (their order: called ‘the order of preachers,’ their nickname: Domini canes, translated as ‘dogs of the lord’*) and even more so when the subject was a dour, morbid one–when all things were depressing guilt-trips meant to take each and every parishioner through the final moments of Jesus’ life, through his scourging, through his humiliation. We felt his nails in our hands; we fell three times.

We suck: we suck: we suck.

My last memory of Father Carr saying mass was the morning that he had his stroke. I was so hardcore that morning that I was serving two masses. My parents and family weren’t there. It was just me; I was the senior acolyte that morning. I was taking some neophyte 4th Grade wastoids through the mass. They were to follow me because I was in charge: I was Father Carr’s favorite. They poured wine when I told them to; they laughed when Father Carr sprayed them with his sins, but did it quietly, damnit.

Everything that day was just normalcy–Catholic masses thrive on normalcy. 99% of the people go there to eat the crunchy wafer and take home the bulletin, laying it on their kitchen counters to show family members their badges of zealotry–to sow grade-A GUILT across a house divided.

Well it wasn’t normal that day; those who where there didn’t get their little wafer, their little guilty seed to sow. Father Carr had a stroke. I think it was before the consecration of the Eucharist. He started speaking weird. His voice became pained and then it sounded surreal. Then it went out.

He stood there, completely confused.

The parish looked back uncomfortably; Father Carr moved his lips like an actor in a silent film. He eventually had to give up on it all, sitting down in his priestly throne next to me. He looked over at me with a helpless, far-away look. He moved his lips, but I didn’t know what he was saying. There was no comedy that day; I wasn’t his cordial bartender or the happy recipient of his showering sins.

I was pathetic.

I just sat there for what seemed like minutes. Eventually the lector went over and checked on him, concluding that he wasn’t A-OK. The lector asked if there was a doctor in the house; some lady wearing a large-brimmed hat stood up and walked down the nave, her head looking down in embarrassment. And that’s all I can remember about that day.

The rest of it is shoved into some dark pocket of my mind. I can remember that I faced Jesus on the cross the right way that day; I can remember that I led some yearlings, showing them how to bow and kneel, how to ring the bells properly, letting them peal themselves beautifully to silence. But I don’t remember the most important thing: I don’t remember how the audience of wafer-seeking, block-checking cattle concluded that all was not normal that day. I don’t remember how they reacted to Father Carr’s stroke. That to me, is the most important part.
I assume now, almost twenty-five years later, that at some time they must of gotten up and just left the church in silence, making damn sure that they got a bulletin on the way out.

Father Carr died a couple weeks after that. I last saw him in the garden outside the church shaking people’s hands after mass on a bright, cloudless California morning. He was a typical stroke victim-half paralyzed, speech slurred and all that. He shook my hand and said goodbye to me: He told me that I was the best altar boy he’d ever had.

I have never forgotten him. I hope he’s in a good place, bellied up to a bar, toasting happier, less-lonely times.
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*If you don’t believe me about these guys then how about this:

Last year I took my daughter to a CHILDREN’S MASS at St.Dominic’s on Xmas eve. The kids were all happy, decked in their fancy dresses, dreaming of their materialistic Santa and their sugarplums. The post-Vatican 2 Manson-clan-looking choir had their bongo drums and their tambourines ready for the mother of all Age of Aquarius-like Lord’s Prayers. All was happyland, until the priest, a menacing man with scouring pads for bushy eyebrows, a man looking like he himself collected dry tinder for the heretics’ roasting stake, Eagle Scout-style, rose from the sanctuary and proceeded to say the following prayer: “For sowing seeds of RANCOR in our families, Lord have mercy.”

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Res Gestae. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.