THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance

by Thomas M. Disch

  Lance considered himself a Satanist, and was surprised when Father Bryce professed to have no interest in the occult and its mysteries. “I mean, you dig us fucking right there in front of the big crucifix. And you did that thing with the wafers—that was your own idea.”

  “Well, yes. But I thought it was something that would turn you on. It did, didn’t it?”

  “You know what your problem is, Father—your problem is you don’t have faith. And I got the solution to your problem.”

  “Yes, I know you do,” Father Bryce said, ruffling his hair.

  “No, seriously,” the boy said, pulling back from his caress. “Acid. That’s what’s going to do it for you. You’ve never tripped, have you?”

  Father Bryce shook his head. The idea of using hallucinogens did not appeal to him. But Lance had persisted, assuring him that the sex that you had when taking acid was like no other sex in the world.

  A week later they had their trip, and it was a disaster. Father Bryce’s misgivings had not been without foundation. Usually, even when sex wasn’t the top priority, Father Bryce was able to turn in a creditable performance. But the acid seemed to short-circuit his sexual capabilities. He couldn’t get an erection, and couldn’t get interested in making the effort. Everything started to turn sinister, including Lance, whose acne suddenly became not just noticeable but increasingly a source of dismay and then of alarm. It had not occurred to Father Bryce until just this moment that the boy, with all his sexual contacts, probably was HIV-positive. He had to get Lance out of the rectory, but Father Bryce was in no condition to drive the car, and he couldn’t phone for a taxi to come and take Lance away, and Willowville was a good thirty miles from the video arcade, so Lance couldn’t simply be turned out onto the street.

  They reached a compromise. Lance was mollified with a sundae of vanilla ice cream swimming in crème de menthe and was given the use of the VCR and Father Bryce’s library of tapes while the priest went into the bathroom, poured himself a tubful of hot water to calm down, got into it, and promptly blacked out. When he came to five hours later, Lance was gone, along with the VCR, four of the tapes, and an expensive ivory crucifix from the vestibule. Lance had also drawn a pentagram in crème de menthe on the felt of the billiard table in the rec room.

  Father Bryce waited for the blackmail note that he was certain would be the next penalty to be exacted for his sins, but there was only silence. He considered returning to Fun Fun Fun and demanding that Lance give back the things he had stolen. But his was not a confrontational nature. He preferred to let sleeping dogs lie.

  He vowed to reform. In the future he would satisfy his sexual needs without taking the risks inherent in pursuing minors. He’d been assured that Papa Bear’s, the bar in Stillwater, was a virtual harem of hunky, available collegiate types. Not hustlers, necessarily, but young men who had a sense that there could be some long-term advantage to be gained by associating with those more mature. Networking, it was called nowadays.

  Papa Bear’s was not quite as agreeable as its admirers in Arizona had claimed for it. If one was not known to its regulars, one could spend a great deal of time drinking alone. The collegiate hunks seemed mostly to prefer the company of other collegiate hunks. There was also a large population of types Father Bryce found distasteful—the fat, the fruity, and those with bad skin or bad teeth or shabby clothes. He had just about given up on Papa Bear’s—indeed, he’d exited to the parking lot late on a slow Wednesday night—when he met Clay.

  He was sitting propped against the fender of Father Bryce’s car, smoking a cigarette. Even at that first glance the priest thought: It’s Lance, ten years older. Lance, aged twenty-four, with his acne cured, and the blond hair already thinner, and the body-builder muscles gone a little soft, like August tomatoes. In terms of the charms peculiar to youth, he might as well have been forty-eight as twenty-four, but he was there, leaning on the car, and there was something in the way he looked at Father Bryce—the long, cool, Clint Eastwood gaze—that signaled a different kind of danger, risk, excitement. Not until he thought about it later on did it seem strange that Clay, a stranger, should have been waiting for him there. That was somehow the assumption everyone made when they came to Papa Bear’s, that there would be someone there who would consider you his destiny, if only for that one night.

  “I’m Clay,” he said, flicking away the butt of his cigarette. “And you’re…?”

  “Damon,” said Father Bryce. Damon was the alias he’d been using with pickups since his first summer vacation away from the seminary.

  “Damon,” Clay repeated thoughtfully, as though it were a clue to be unriddled. “You want to—” He tilted his head toward the shrubberies bordering the bar’s parking lot.

  “Sure. Why not.”

  They went behind the shrubberies and had a quick, vigorous screw. When Clay was zipping up the fly of his jeans, and while Father Bryce was still enjoying the sweetness of the collapse that comes immediately after orgasm, Clay said, “I’ll be getting in touch with you again soon, Father.”

  Only after he’d walked off into the darkness did it occur to Father Bryce that he had not told Clay he was a priest. Clay must have known it beforehand. Which in itself was not too alarming. He’d had some embarrassing moments of mutual recognition in other gay bars. Usually the men who recognized him were married parishioners who were more embarrassed at having been seen in a gay bar than Father Bryce was. More than once he encountered men who had enjoyed their sexual initiation at his hands, but in those cases as well, the result was usually mutual embarrassment. One such no-longer-youthful young man, who was quite drunk, splashed his drink in the priest’s face before Father Bryce was able to recognize him as someone who’d served Mass for him at OLM almost twenty years earlier. The man became verbally abusive, and his friends had to drag him out of the bar to keep him from attacking Father Bryce with his fists.

  So he did not give much thought to the fact that this Clay knew him to be a priest. If all the priests in the diocese of Minneapolis who’d been seen cruising gay bars were to be defrocked, there’d be a lot of empty frocks and a lot of priestless parishes. By Father Bryce’s own estimate, something like forty percent. Indeed, in his own case, a videotape of his five minutes in the bushes with Clay would have actually been accounted to his credit, could it have been seen at the Chancery, for it would have indicated a preference for sexual partners of mature years—genuine consenting adults.

  The very next morning he received an Express Mail package that contained the ivory crucifix that Lance had stolen from the rectory six weeks ago, together with a brief handwritten note—“Thought you would want to see this. Clay”—paper-clipped to an undated newspaper clipping stating that the corpse of a teenage boy had been recovered from the Mississippi. The boy had been tentatively identified as Lyle Kramer, age fourteen, who had been missing from his home in San Diego for nearly a year. The boy had died by drowning and was believed to have committed suicide. Readers who might have information about the boy’s presence in the Twin Cities were asked to call a number at the St. Paul Police Department.

  Clay let Father Bryce think about this for two days before he phoned and told him to meet him at the Coon Rapids Econo-Motor Lodge in two hours. He refused to give any explanation over the phone. Father Bryce drove directly to the motel, and went to the room he’d been told to go to. The door was unlocked, and the room was empty. He’d been told to get undressed and he did. Then, also as per his instructions, he blindfolded himself and waited. He did not know how long he waited until Clay came to the room and told him what he would have to do. He had protested, but with a sense, from the first, that his protests would serve no purpose.

  “Here’s the situation,” said Clay. “We’ve got the videotapes you made with Lyle Kramer. And we’ve got his suicide note, which mentions you by name. There’s no way a jury wouldn’t send you away for a good long stretch. So that’s your alternative, if you refuse to do what we tell you. And don’t thin
k you can negotiate the price. We don’t want your money, Father. We want your soul.”

  13

  “How am I feeling?” Bing held the telephone receiver away from his ear so that it could see the expression of incredulity on his face. He echoed Father Mabbley’s question a second time, with a deadlier sarcasm: “How am I feeling? Furious, that’s how I’m feeling—epileptically furious. The whole thing obsesses me. I can’t think of anything else. I’d like to see demons drag him down to hell, and then I’d like to sit in the audience and watch him suffer eternal torments designed by Dante just for him. Though he wouldn’t be there by himself, of course—I realize that. There’d be a throng of other pedophile priests there with him, a thousand strong, with snakes in their fucking asses.” He took a deep breath, and then, in a tone of cool inquiry: “Does that answer your question?”

  “You do sound upset,” Father Mabbley replied. “And upset is a reasonable response to the situation. Hysterical isn’t. It won’t serve your purpose. If you’ve formed one. Have you?”

  “I want to make him pay.”

  “You couldn’t just leave him to God’s judgment?”

  “What I figure is that I am God’s judgment. For all these years I’d never given a thought to the loss of my cherry. And if I had thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have got riled. I wasn’t going to be a virgin all my life, so somebody had to get there first, and the fact that it was a priest seemed just the luck of the draw. The guy wasn’t cruel, he didn’t abuse me, except in the technical sense. Sometimes I did look back and wish I’d had a chance to fall in love with someone my own age and lose my heart and my cherry together, the way it happens in movies. But how often does that happen?”

  “It’s rare,” Father Mabbley conceded.

  “And it’s not the fact that he’s a priest that gets me fussed.”

  “I should hope not,” said Father Mabbley, who’d had a lot of cuddly sex with Bing over the years they’d been friends.

  “What gets me fussed is the fact that he’s a priest and a pedophile and this holier-than-thou crusader against abortion. The last straw was when he was out at the Catholic cemetery dedicating this memorial to the Unknown Fetus, which took place on the same day there was the story in the news about the Vatican’s latest mortar attack against gays. So the reporter at the unveiling of the memorial asked him whether he agreed that gays shouldn’t be allowed to teach in schools—not just parochial schools, but schools anywhere, public schools, universities, schools across the board—and he said yes, he agreed, that there should be laws to keep gays out of teaching jobs and out of public housing. He said that, on the TV news—the man who’d wiggled his fingers up my fifteen-year-old ass and told me that Jesus Christ is a god of love and so please, baby, give me some. I would submit that that has to be considered hypocrisy.”

  Father Mabbley sighed. Then there was a pause just long enough for him to take a sip of the wine that Bing was sure was there at hand beside his recliner. “Of course it is, Bing. But we’re all hypocrites nowadays. The Vatican has made it a condition of employment, so to speak. If we’re not hypocrites about being gay, then we’re hypocrites about birth control or abortion. We preach one thing in public, but in the confessional it’s another story. If every priest in every parish in the country were to insist that all his parishioners refrain from birth control if they wanted to receive the sacraments, instead of quietly letting people go their own way, we would soon solve the problem of the priest shortage by creating an even more impressive shortage of laymen.”

  “I don’t want to destroy the Church,” Bing insisted. “I just want to destroy him.”

  “Destroy him legally?”

  “Wouldn’t that be a good place to begin.”

  “If it were possible, but I doubt that it is. The statute of limitations ran out a long time ago.”

  “I realize I’m not an altar boy anymore. But I’ve read about cases where people suddenly remember things they’ve repressed for years and years because they were so traumatic.”

  “I’m not sure but I think it’s only murder where charges can be brought so much later. You’d have to consult a local lawyer.”

  “Even if there weren’t criminal charges, couldn’t he be sued in civil court?”

  “Again, you’d have to ask a lawyer. But the Church has a great advantage in cases like that. They have lawyers who do nothing else but pile up paperwork in order to make the cost of any litigation ruinous. You’d be bankrupt in a twinkling.”

  “So forget the law. Suppose I just went to the newspapers and told them what happened?”

  “They probably wouldn’t touch it. Unless you had some kind of proof to back up your charges. Letters, photographs. Do you?”

  “He may. I don’t.”

  “Did you ever tell anyone about it, when it happened?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “So it would be just your word against his. And what the Church would do is hire detectives to dig up everything that could be used against you. They’d find out you were active in Act Up. They’d say you are unbalanced and have a vendetta against the Church. And Bryce’s lawyer could sue you for defamation of character. That’s often done. The best defense is an attack.”

  “Whatever happened to turning the other cheek?”

  “I think that went out with the invention of gunpowder.”

  “So you’re telling me not to do it.”

  “I’m telling you how the Church deals with those it perceives as its enemies.”

  “But I love the Church. I need the Church. And I feel sorry for the priests in your position, who get caught in the gears of the machine. And I don’t believe in outing every gay priest in the country. Although, the way things are going, that may happen.”

  “A lot of the older hard-liner types among the priests I know are praying for exactly that. They’d love a witch hunt. And sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing in the long run. For us, the forty or fifty percent of priests who are gay. It wouldn’t be an unbearable martyrdom: They don’t burn heretics at the stake anymore. Though, speaking of martyrdom, I had such a nightmare the other night… did I tell you? It was a lulu.”

  “So tell me,” said Bing, who realized that he’d been hogging the conversation, even though it was Father Mabbley who was paying for the long-distance call all the way from Las Vegas.

  “Well,” Father Mabbley said, easing into storytelling mode, “it started with me delivering a sermon in this really creepy Gothic chapel. It was a Hammer horror film’s idea of the High Middle Ages, with a gigantic polychrome crucifix over the altar with a Christ all ripped to pieces and writhing in agony. I’m in this pulpit at the top of a windy staircase, and I’m preaching to this congregation that looks like the Living Dead, and the subject of my homily is the unspeakable sufferings Hell has in store for anyone who masturbates. And then, this is so ridiculous, someone starts playing the organ—”

  “Oh, Mabb, come on, you’re making this up.”

  “No, I swear to God. The organist was a cross between Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera and the evil monk in Alexander Nevsky. I became petrified. Then out of the darkness at the back of the church comes this very solemn procession of figures in pointy hoods, like Klansmen, but also like heretics being led to an auto-da-fé. Some have whips, and others have torches, and as they come down the center aisle, the zombies in the congregation get up out of their seats—which is a terrible anachronism, since medieval churches didn’t cater to creature comfort with furniture—”

  “That’s okay,” Bing assured him. “We’re not responsible for what we dream.”

  “Well, the dream starts to blur at this point, and the Klansmen start using their whips and torches on the Christ up on the crucifix, but it’s not a crucifix anymore. It’s like a suspension harness in some very kinky after-hours club. I’d been reading that book about the Crispo murder case, you know the one?”

  Bing nodded, and then had to explain, “Yes, I nodded
my head yes. I haven’t read the book, but I read about him in the papers. The boy who got picked up at a bar and was tortured to death. There but for the grace of God, and all that.”

  “Exactly,” Father Mabbley agreed. “It’s a very distressing book that way. So in my dream I expressed that distress and tried, from the pulpit, to stop the Inquisition that was going on, with predictable results. The Klansmen stopped torturing the crucified man, who wasn’t Jesus anymore, just some trick from a bar—and came over to the pulpit. And I realized they were going to set fire to it, and I was going to be burned at the stake.”

  “Just like Joan of Arc. But in which version? Preminger’s? Or the one with Ingrid Bergman?”

  “Bing, really! There’s only one Joan. Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc.”

  “Oh, another one of your musty old silent movies. I’ve never seen it.”

  “Then do yourself a favor and rent it. It’s one of the great movies of all time. If it’s available at video stores in Las Vegas, they must have it in Minneapolis someplace.”

  “You’re always putting down Las Vegas and making out the Twin Cities to be some kind of Athens. Believe me, when it comes to entertainment, it’s more like Sparta here. Anyhow, don’t keep me in suspense. Were you burned at the stake?”

  “That’s when the dream turns into something out of George Romero.”

  “Now you’re in my century. Oh damn, wouldn’t you know it? I’ve got another call. Can I put you on hold? I told you I volunteered for this suicide hot line, and though I’ve never had a single call (which is a blessing), I should pick up. If it’s not something important, I’ll ask them to call back. Okay?”