My name is
Arturo Gomez, and I am not a Catholic. Catholics
eat bread, and call it flesh; they drink wine, and call it blood.
I eat hotdogs and drink whiskey, and am content.
But there’s got to be something about those big bright Catholic
churches—or at least the one on Tenth Street—that’s beyond human
understanding, or at least mine.
I hear that my father was a Catholic.
My mother told me that he once brought me to a Catholic church on my
first birthday, which was on a Sunday. Who
knows? It was probably the one on
Tenth Street, I always thought to myself. Wouldn’t
that have been a great omen, or a sign, or premonition, or fate, or just bad
luck—whatever you want to call it—that was nudging me on my shiny baby
forehead, to not ever set foot in that place again.
But I have
never been one to follow signs: my mother told me to become a Catholic, my
landlord tells me to pay last month’s rent, my ex told me to get a life, and
my father... though he never directly said it, but, as the only connection in
the world that I have between my infant past and my phantom father, I should
have known never to step a toenail into that church.
Especially not on a Sunday.
People rest
on Sunday. Sunday is the day that
God got tired after six full heavenly days of Creation, and took a nap.
I was actually feeling pretty tired myself, after a full night-shift
hauling open and hauling closed the entrance gate after every wild, drunken car
of college kids pulled up and showed me their “U of T” IDs.
By eight o’clock the next morning, I usually drove the fourteen miles
back to my own apartment, where the gateman at my apartment checks my
“Resident” ID and lets me in. But
for some reason—call it the beginning of my descent, or religious ascent,
however you like to see it—I decided to stop by the only place that I knew I
could find a few shots of whiskey to sink.
My friend, Bacco, owns the only bar-by-night, and alcohol-serving
breakfast diner by day, in the state of Texas.
He says, they aren’t too strict about things like that so close to the
Border; and anyway, “Wat’ de beeg’ deal, a litthle Bud wit’ de
breakfast!”
That was probably the last thing Bacco said to me before I finally turned
him down sternly after the eighth or ninth generous shot—with each drink
before, Bacco easily blew off my every courteous, no, no that is enough,
with a powerful and gracious scoff of laughter (I have known Bacco since our
days in middle and high school; he is a good friend, but extravagantly
generous)—and left the diner.
I knew my bed
was not more than ten miles away, but it could have been ten meters away for all
that mattered, and I still would have had to first stop to relieve myself.
I did not know what, or where I pulled into, but it sure was hard as
broadside to a boat to find a parking space.
So I parked near the closest entrance of that monstrous building, right
alongside the sidewalk pavement. It
was not until I reached the door, that I realized how ridiculous and fanatical
my frantic and jerky movements must have looked to the other people (which I
suddenly noticed there were many, nicely dressed) around.
So I inhaled, exhaled, and composed myself briefly.
The steel
doorknob felt cold like wind and the large oak door felt like opening the gates
to heaven. Actually, it more so sounded
like the opening of the gates to heaven because it was not until I fully stepped
into the empty narrow hallway that I realized I was standing in a church.
The full harmony of chorale shook that backstage hallway as if it was a
giant wooden trachea, and I was a flint of bread stuck in the giant’s
resonating voice. I picked a side,
and stumbled down the hallway, half-supporting myself with hands on walls.
Luckily, I picked right, saw a stick-figure man painted in black on the
surface in front of my eyes, and stumbled in.
I never like
the exposure while using urinals, and there were two stalls, the further one of
which had a dangling door inviting me in. It
was a tiny stall, so I stood there for about a full minute with one hand
outstretched against the blue tile wall to balance myself.
I read all the self-proclaimed ads for a “gOOd TIMe” and declarations
that so-and-so “wuz here,” to myself. But
while I was finishing up, amidst the scorings of words, I made out a faded
carving that I couldn’t help but vocalize as I read curiously, “Art HATES
me.”
“Oh, that
one, huh?” appeared a bold voice from next door as I almost wet the toilet
bowl.
“JesusChristman!
Don’t you know not to scare a man while he’s calling to nature!”
“Con
permiso, Senor. But I just
couldn’t help but overhear that you noticed that ‘art hates me,’” said
the voice sitting down. “I’ve
stared at that carving myself for the past twenty years every time I use that
stall.”
“Good,
I’m happy for you that you have such very interesting toilet reading.
Just keep it your own prize unless someone asked you to tell!” I
zipped up, and turned to fumble for the door latch.
I wanted cold water splashed to my face, and went towards the sink.
He came
towards me in the reflection when I looked up, my chin and sideburns
dripping—his outfit was tailored a smooth black, with a square white patch at
his Adam’s apple glaring out like one white rose against a plot of dark moist
soil. My shoulders tightened.
My tongue stumbled, “Didn’t.... Sorry, I didn’t know I was talking
to... I apologize, Father!” My
chin still dripped, and I grabbed motionlessly at all my thoughts like strings
of a dozen loose helium balloons. My lips closed to hide my breath.
“It’s
okay. No need to talk to me any
different than you talk to any other man. I
was the one who disrupted your moment with nature, eh?”
His rigidly side-parted black hair bounced as he spoke.
He scanned me with raccoon eyes. “You
weren’t here for the mass, were you?” I
wondered for a moment if he meant for me to answer.
“Well, that’s good, it wasn’t my greatest one in recollection.”
“You… you
just said mass?”
“Yes, I
did, and I had to come straight here after the choir began; been thinking about
the stall almost since the beginning of mass—no wonder the lousy
performance.” I could only stare
at him blankly. “What!” he
exclaimed with a stern laugh, “You know, even we priests have to move the
bowels once a while.” My cheeks
felt chilled from the earlier splashing now air-dried.
“You from around here?”
I wondered if
I was from around here. “...
Yeah, I grew up down on Thirty-third Street.
Now I got an apartment down by the docks.
I was just passing by—”
“No need to
explain. I myself was once a young
man ‘passing by’ here; back then, a young man, full of life, and lost in
full.” He paused, and I stared.
Then between our eyes, he lost hold of his gaze in the midst of sudden
recollection: “The priest back then was an old man, quite tall, and much
better looking than me now. I would go to mass every Sunday, and that would be the only
routine in my life: the only part of every week that I knew for sure, the only
place I knew I would be... you know what I mean?”
I didn’t quite know. “No
importa. Anyway, the priest
then, there was something about the way he talked, the things he decided to say
in his sermon, and the way he said it. I
spent much time during that period in my life talking to myself about what am I
doing every week, what am I doing in the time between one Sunday and the next
Sunday—I just knew—like I knew that what he said every Sunday was the
truth—that if I asked, he would know. So
I got to know the old priest over time, and without him ever really telling me,
or me ever really asking him, I slowly realized that his place was where I was
meant to be, that the great Tellers of life told God from the start to put me in
this place, where I ‘passed by’ every Sunday, and for an old priest to be
there waiting for me all of his life, for me to come along one day, lost, and
one later day to take his place as the Teller of this church.”
The recent
whiskey slowly diffused in my veins in spiral motion and a whirl of dizziness
distorted my sight for a brief moment. Had
I asked him for all this story?—I questioned myself inaudibly.
I did not move; I had not even yet fully straightened my stance from
hunching over the cracked porcelain sink minutes ago.
He continued,
“So here I
am. And he is long gone from this
church, and from this world that he once spoke to with such sharing purpose.”
He paused, continuing to look into my eyes, but as if seeing them for the
first time—“But why do I tell you all of this story?
You are just passing by, and I am just in this room to do privately in
the stall what nature intended.... Although you did notice out loud that carving
of which I have always taken note of ever since I took the place of the old
priest.” He turned, not turning his shoulders, swiftly behind like an
owl’s head towards the stalls, the white square collar beneath his Adam’s
apple not shifting at all in space.
I was about
to ask, but he started again: “Yes, on the last Sunday that the old priest
spoke in this church, and after he exchanged final handshakes and departing
words in the vestibule with his parishioners, he and I walked down that hall in
a somber conversation, as I recall, outside of this door, and came in here to do
what is meant to be done here. However,
after he finished in the stall next to me, he called for me, stepped out of his
stall—the one in which you have just been—and pointed for me to go in to
take a look.
“As I
stepped in, he said to me, ‘You see that carving?’
Back then the walls of this bathroom, like all the walls of the bathrooms
in this church, were just recently tiled with glossy new tiles of blue.
The words of the carving stood out clearly like seeing a deep scratch on
your own eyeglasses while they lie over your nose.
“He told me
from behind, ‘Well those words were never there before last month.’
He and I looked at each other, and I
understood.” I incrementally
stood upright from crouching over the sink, and now stood straight up with my
head turned towards the priest. I
realized I was a few inches taller than him.
“Understood
what?” I asked.
The priest
continued: “You see, a man named Juan Carlos, a very, very pious man, used to
attend this church many, many years ago during the old priest’s service.
I remembered always seeing him as one of the first to arrive, sitting in
the front few pews every Sunday morning. It
was known that his family life, though, was not as pious as his dedication at
the weekly mass—he was young, and became an early father by a woman that not
many of the parishioners knew or heard much about.
I knew this much, but then after the old priest—on his last day in this
building that he served for the most of his life—pointed out the recent
engraving on the stall’s wall to me, he further explained,
“ ‘Juan
Carlos has confided in me a few things of which I feel I should tell you, in the
case that he one day comes back here after this past month that he has suddenly
ceased to come—you must have noticed his absence.’
I humbly replied to the old priest that I had. ‘I know that it is not polite to restate out loud what is
shameful and already silently known amongst people, but: do you remember the
final time Juan Carlos attended mass, a bit boisterous, smelling of alcohol,
eyes glazed?’ My eyes downcast, I
gently nodded my head. ‘Well,
that was not without reason—as you will someday understand, nothing
extraordinary is without reason. The
week before his drunken appearance last month, (though you may not have observed
because of the many other crying infants that many ladies bring) Juan Carlos
brought his baby son, cradled in a blanket in his arms, to mass. It was the first time he had ever brought anyone with him to
church, and it was exactly his son’s one-year birthday on that Sunday.
“
‘However, Juan Carlos had confided in me before then, that a large trouble of
his role as being a new father that scared him, was that the few times he would
go visit his son and its mother, when he reached down to pick the child up into
his arms, the baby would without waver immediately start crying.
I don’t know if that was maybe because the baby could sense the
unfamiliarity in its absent father’s touch, or whether Juan Carlos just
physically held the baby awkwardly because of inexperience.
Either way, the baby always cried when he held it, which did not help the
already meager number of times Juan Carlos appeared in the home to fulfill his
responsibility and role as father. However,
on the baby’s first birthday a month ago, Juan Carlos built up his courage and
in a surge of guilt and responsibility, took his son to church with him. The baby did not once cease a long, continual moan, and
briefly into the start of mass, Juan Carlos had to walk down the aisle with the
crying baby in his arms, pass the doors and into the vestibule, and wait
throughout the entire mass, sitting on a bench against the far wall, trying to
feed and calm the wailing baby. After
the mass, when most of the church members had left for their homes, Juan Carlos
reappeared and approached me, and asked me if I would baptize his baby
immediately, explaining that this would be the last time he would ever bring his
son with him to mass and that he did not want his son to be without the Lord.
Sensing his urgency, I wholeheartedly agreed, and he quickly grabbed the
nearest acquaintance around to be his child’s godfather.
We—Juan Carlos, his baby son, the acquaintance, and I—together went
to the private room in the West wing of the church to baptize the child.
Oddly, the closer we got towards the room, the louder the baby in Juan
Carlos’ arms cried, and when I began the ceremony, the child’s restlessness
increased to the intensity of physically throwing its small arms wildly as if it
were a caterpillar trying to free itself of a mortal spider web.
So I had to stop, and in order to proceed, I hesitantly asked Juan Carlos
to hand over the baby to the only other person present, the acquaintance, to
hold. Something in my words stunted
something in Juan Carlos’ eyes; as if the candle that was the life in his eyes
was suddenly blown. When Juan
Carlos handed the baby in its blanket over to the acquaintance, the baby’s
cries, almost magically, subsided, like a violent thunderstorm run dry.
Then, Juan Carlos watched from the side, as I recited to the baby, and
asked the acquaintance, as the baby’s godfather, “Do you reject Satan...”
and so on, and Juan Carlos just stood expressionless, as if watching heaven and
hell all as one, as I poured the holy water of the baptismal font onto the
baby’s forehead, which then ran past the baby’s peacefully silent mouth, and
dripped down and past onto the cradling arms of the godfather.
“ ‘The
following week is when, you remember, he came to my mass in a stupor, and the
last I ever saw of him was him stumbling out of this bathroom door. That was the day when the carving on this wall first
appeared.’”
The priest
paused in his story and blinked reflectively.
“This is what the old priest told me almost twenty years ago.
That is why I have always since stared at that carving, and have always
thought about that last day that the old priest was here, and the story of the
acquaintance, Juan Carlos, and his son, Art.”
The spiral
motion in my blood diffused rapidly towards my stomach, and the movement of
ingested liquid from before felt tangible, as if my stomach lining were two
cupped hands playing with a hot ball of wax, as I violently pushed the priest
out of my sight and ran-collapsed in one motion through the far stall door where
I caught hold of the rim of the toilet bowl, and the hot ball rushing up, as my
head hung blood-gorged, humbly, underneath the engraving that told words out
from above like a tombstone.
-by Abraham Young