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Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
“It’s a holy day.”
“No it isn’t. It’s a regular day.”
“Why are they marching us off to church then?”
“So they can film us. They’re perverse.”
One of the reasons I’d chosen Gerry Richards as my friend was because he used words such as perverse. He also read books for fun and listened to Frank Zappa. Gerry was an evil genius. A few years later he would be killed in a war. No one was sure which war. We just heard he was dead.
Brown pants, yellow shirts, plaid ties no tropically fevered Scotsman could’ve conceived of.
“Check out Dalfino,” Jeff LaFlamme shouted. I watched a lot of sitcoms and knew Jeff was going to grow up to be a maitre’d.
Perhaps due to the encroachment of a nearby swelling city St. Paul Junior High was experiencing a pigeon infestation. Effortlessly triumphing daily over larger pests, spitefully clogged pipes and untimely bodily discharges, our stalwart custodian Dalfino crouched sniper-like, one Dickied knee to the tarmac, pellet gun trained. His aim was true as evidenced by the metal peppered corpses and stray gray feathers littering the fading-lined sloped parking lot that doubled as a playground. The girls, though sporting oppressively modest skirts the same color and demoralizing pattern as our loosely knotted nooses, didn’t bother with icks. Most of them smoked hash and dated high school dropouts who tooled around in Bondoed Camaros rocking to Sabbath in fingerless gloves.
I
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nodded toward the alley we always ducked down to ditch the Holy Spirit.
“No,” Gerry said. “My faith has returned.”
“Sister, does brimstone smell like rotten eggs?”
“Ssshh.”
You weren’t supposed to talk in church unless you were saying what God wanted to hear. But even God had to know how bad it stunk in there. Everyone, including the camera crew sent from a local television station to preserve our Roman voodoo ceremony for posterity, showed visible signs of a barely repressed ingrained response to flee the deadly stench. Sister Ernestine and her brood were the exceptions. Nuns always pretended not to notice anything although the priest conducting the service was obviously quite pained.
The inescapable aromatic assault caused delightful ritualistic chaos. Hymns were forgotten. Choreography wiped from memory. When participants were expected to kneel, half stood. When standing was required a quarter sat and a dizzier portion dropped into genuflection only to bounce quickly upwards, cartilage popping like an underwater Fourth of July. As I made my way to the pew after communion I tripped on a cluster of cables.
“Somebody’s going to break their neck.”
Gerry showed Bob Fish, our beloved bus driver, the small blocks of roofing insulation that when rubbed together created a nauseating odor. “Fart rocks.”
“Fart rocks?”
“Then I spotted the extension cords. One lighting truss toppled onto the other and the crew, numbed by lugubrious organ, couldn’t rouse themselves in time.”
Bob cackled, puffed twice on his Lucky and swerved our yellow ark into a shiny new garbage can left by some fool on the sidewalk. The gleaming dented projectile sailed majestically, bouncing off an armored mailbox before committing a smirking gnome to that Enchanted Glade in the sky.
We cheered and passed around the last of the blackberry brandy.
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