Part Eighteen
To the editors at NONzine, Mike: There seems to be a forever-stream of toilet paper, does there not? I’m certain that, by now, you must be entirely exhausted with my story, at least as tired as I am with telling it. And yet, still, it pours forth. The roll never seems to run out, the pen wobbling back to the two-ply sheet, and you continuing to printit as far as I can tell. A force beyond my control compels me to continue, even though I am today at another of those junctures where, despite the compulsion, when my pen comes to point, my body defends my honor and the shaking and thrumming prevent any legible word from being printed. But I always come back. The pen always finds its way back to try again. When will it end? Soon – though probably not soon enough for you. I want to thank you again for your dutiful reticence of my story. If I can make it through this last part of my story, of my becoming, then perhaps the compulsion will end, and I will never again pick up a pen for any reason, and can be a man again.
I left that bum behind and moved back out to the sidewalk, refreshed, inspired, ready for action. Would you believe I got away with it? Apparently, the behemoth of a man was not only among the few in the world with the power to heal with a punch to the jaw, but also among the few whose temper flared over something so innocuous as one man placing a postit on the shoulder of another. And so I went, a superhero among the common, freely stamping with my calling card as many people as I could. And everyone just kept right on moving on in drone-like fashion, barely conscious of my presence or my acts. What a glorious day! Calooh! Callay! I danced among the people, between them and around them in waltz time, a butterfly with postit wings among a swarm of ants. I must have run back to the office supply store up the street at least three or four times to replenish my supply of postits, whereas I’d only been once the entire time before that. I was on fire. I was intense. I sweated out my efforts and strained to do better, to do more.
Toward evening, I took notice again of the church bells chiming out the hour, and they sounded quite near. I stopped and turned around, looking back down the way I’d come. Swaying and shifting up and down the sidewalk on the shoulders of hundreds of pedestrians my postits now moved with the rhythm of the crowd, and I was pleased. On the fifth chime of the church bells, it occurred to me that I should visit the church, perhaps go to confession. As the chime faded, I turned toward the sound and began to make my way toward it.
It did not take me long to find the church – just a few blocks south and there it stood in the long shadows of a city in evening. I stood across from the church and scanned it from steeple to cornerstone, assessing the elegance of its architecture and suppressing the immediate sense of guilt I had when I looked at the cross at the top of the steeple. What would I have to feel guilty about? I was doing nothing wrong, had done nothing wrong, and yet the sight of the cross wrought that feeling first within me. As the people on the sidewalk passed me (and I let them go, for the moment, unlabeled), I struggled with little success to suppress those feelings of guilt. Standing there, hands in my pockets, thumbing the top of my sharpie in one hand and the side of my depleted pad of postits in the other, I swallowed the guilt down only to have it well up again a moment later. It wouldn’t go away. I had only one choice. I would just have to go in and confess it.
With sudden and decisive movement, I started up the steps to the front doors. As I approached the final steps a man wearing a t-shirt, shorts and tennis shoes and carrying a black suit on a hanger over his shoulder came out of the front door. After locking the front door, he rushed down the steps, briefly smiling at me as he passed. For a moment I was unsure if he was a priest or not. I had not, in my experience, ever seen a priest not dressed in either his black suit or his vestments, and it took me a moment to realize that that was the suit he carried over his shoulder.
As he reached the bottom of the steps and was about to turn up the sidewalk, I called out to him, “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.”
He stopped mid-step, hanging his head a moment. Turning back and smiling briefly again, he said, “I’m sorry, my son, confession ended at five. Please come back tomorrow morning and I’ll be glad to take your confession then.” He waved and started walking away.
It felt strange to me to be called “my son” by someone who was clearly several years younger than me, and yet I cannot explain why it did not seem unusual to me to refer to the young man as “Father”. I was determined now though to get into that church, so I called out to him a second time. “But, Father,” I said, putting my hand to my cheek since he was getting further from me. “You locked the church. Can’t people just go in and sit anymore?”
“Not in this day and age, my son,” he called over his shoulder without slowing his pace at all.
“Father,” I called out to him a third time, to ask why, to ask about trusting God and turning my life over to him and all of that, to do anything to extinguish this guilt the church had now imbibed in me – but there was no answer. He couldn’t hear me, or he was done with me.
I went to dinner up the street and relaxed for a few hours at a coffee shop, comforted and pleased to know that I would soon have my way, that I would be in that church before the night was through.
I left that bum behind and moved back out to the sidewalk, refreshed, inspired, ready for action. Would you believe I got away with it? Apparently, the behemoth of a man was not only among the few in the world with the power to heal with a punch to the jaw, but also among the few whose temper flared over something so innocuous as one man placing a postit on the shoulder of another. And so I went, a superhero among the common, freely stamping with my calling card as many people as I could. And everyone just kept right on moving on in drone-like fashion, barely conscious of my presence or my acts. What a glorious day! Calooh! Callay! I danced among the people, between them and around them in waltz time, a butterfly with postit wings among a swarm of ants. I must have run back to the office supply store up the street at least three or four times to replenish my supply of postits, whereas I’d only been once the entire time before that. I was on fire. I was intense. I sweated out my efforts and strained to do better, to do more.
Toward evening, I took notice again of the church bells chiming out the hour, and they sounded quite near. I stopped and turned around, looking back down the way I’d come. Swaying and shifting up and down the sidewalk on the shoulders of hundreds of pedestrians my postits now moved with the rhythm of the crowd, and I was pleased. On the fifth chime of the church bells, it occurred to me that I should visit the church, perhaps go to confession. As the chime faded, I turned toward the sound and began to make my way toward it.
It did not take me long to find the church – just a few blocks south and there it stood in the long shadows of a city in evening. I stood across from the church and scanned it from steeple to cornerstone, assessing the elegance of its architecture and suppressing the immediate sense of guilt I had when I looked at the cross at the top of the steeple. What would I have to feel guilty about? I was doing nothing wrong, had done nothing wrong, and yet the sight of the cross wrought that feeling first within me. As the people on the sidewalk passed me (and I let them go, for the moment, unlabeled), I struggled with little success to suppress those feelings of guilt. Standing there, hands in my pockets, thumbing the top of my sharpie in one hand and the side of my depleted pad of postits in the other, I swallowed the guilt down only to have it well up again a moment later. It wouldn’t go away. I had only one choice. I would just have to go in and confess it.
With sudden and decisive movement, I started up the steps to the front doors. As I approached the final steps a man wearing a t-shirt, shorts and tennis shoes and carrying a black suit on a hanger over his shoulder came out of the front door. After locking the front door, he rushed down the steps, briefly smiling at me as he passed. For a moment I was unsure if he was a priest or not. I had not, in my experience, ever seen a priest not dressed in either his black suit or his vestments, and it took me a moment to realize that that was the suit he carried over his shoulder.
As he reached the bottom of the steps and was about to turn up the sidewalk, I called out to him, “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.”
He stopped mid-step, hanging his head a moment. Turning back and smiling briefly again, he said, “I’m sorry, my son, confession ended at five. Please come back tomorrow morning and I’ll be glad to take your confession then.” He waved and started walking away.
It felt strange to me to be called “my son” by someone who was clearly several years younger than me, and yet I cannot explain why it did not seem unusual to me to refer to the young man as “Father”. I was determined now though to get into that church, so I called out to him a second time. “But, Father,” I said, putting my hand to my cheek since he was getting further from me. “You locked the church. Can’t people just go in and sit anymore?”
“Not in this day and age, my son,” he called over his shoulder without slowing his pace at all.
“Father,” I called out to him a third time, to ask why, to ask about trusting God and turning my life over to him and all of that, to do anything to extinguish this guilt the church had now imbibed in me – but there was no answer. He couldn’t hear me, or he was done with me.
I went to dinner up the street and relaxed for a few hours at a coffee shop, comforted and pleased to know that I would soon have my way, that I would be in that church before the night was through.
© 2006Labelman
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