But then I look in the mirror. And laugh bitterly. I’m not afraid to admit (privately) to being gay but I can’t tell the teenager I’m happy or celibate. In five years I may be phoning him for his sexual services: ‘20, vgl, hung, versatile...’ the honeyed words of seduction for predator bees like myself. Sucking deep, dying with the sting, and then like a scrawny alley cat back for nine lives more.
33 Fred Astaire
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Prostitution can be an easy way for a young person to make money. A wad of tax-free cash in hand without leaving the bedroom except to let in the punter. The best ones make you believe that they are attracted to you. They tip you over the edge to climax whilst either pretending to join you or sidestepping the moment like some Fred Astaire, leaving room for another dance later the same evening. They pretend that they find your flabby body sexy and the hairs sprouting out of your nose and ears endearing. They learn the technique of exhaling when kissing to avoid the retch of bad breath, or they manage to avoid kissing altogether. Speed is of the essence because most men, after reaching an orgasm, want to leave the scene of the crime quickly. An hour-long appointment can be cut short after fifteen minutes if climax is accomplished. The man with a premature ejaculation is a hooker’s delight — the engine of his car outside still warm, libido’s fast-food fix.
Many of the boys I see are students, textbooks laid to one side ready to be picked up again after pocketing the pound notes. An hour on the sweaty bed and calculus or chemistry or graphic design can be resumed with little effort. Not so the students who slave in the kitchens of dingy restaurants, arriving home exhausted after midnight on minimum wage or less. I feel that even if my boys are not enjoying it they are benefiting from it. I am the kind old uncle helping with the tuition fees, even if it pains me to think of myself as old in that situation.
How desperate it all is. How pathetic I know myself to be as I climb back into my car and drive home smelling of their cologne and their drying sweat and sometimes with even a whiff of faecal matter. I am in a state of constant denial, excuses on top of excuses, hands over eyes, torn in every direction, self-pitying and self-condemning in one desperate cry. I am the judge, the prosecution and the defence in a shambolic, tawdry equivocation. My soul is dead, a cheap cigarette butt ground to dust with a heavy heel.
34 Tenderness
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But just occasionally, in the post-coital cooling down, spent and lying in suspended time, I am overcome by a moment of tenderness. His finger traced down my arm, a sideways glance, a coy smile, something beyond the mere financial transaction, beyond stuffing when starving at a feast. The calm consolation of human contact. Lust’s fierce battle cry (the blaze of guns, the screech of bullets) finally quietened for a moment. A truce. It might only be for seconds, a mere mote on the lens, but there sometimes takes place a gentle sharing of vulnerability. Then a slow, reluctant getting off the bed, standing, stretching, resentful at the passing of time, at the loosening of the embrace. Another slow glance. Another slow smile. But then, the slow reaching for my wallet.
‘No. I don’t want paying this time,’ he says, leaning over and touching my arm affectionately. ‘What we shared was so special. It’s never been like that with anyone else. I really like you, you know... do you want to stay overnight? I want to wake up in your embrace, our legs entwined, our bodies joined together.’ He takes hold of me in his strong arms and lowers me gently back on to the bed and begins to give me a massage, long strokes, caressing gestures. Ha! In my dreams. However tender the boys seem it is always an act. Some of them are Oliviers of the mattress but the money always leaves my pocket and enters theirs. Our period of intimacy is measured as if an egg timer were trickling dust through the sphincter of its glass bulb. Lust’s tentative truce? No, this is Passchendaele and the battle is soon in full swing again. Soul’s gristle and gore. Affection’s infected wound. His arms reach out to me not to embrace me but (oh so gently) to guide me out of the door, safely on to the street, safely out of sight, so that his next client can mount the stairs. Back in my car, its engine sputtering fumes from a rusty exhaust, I make the steady, sad drive home in the sullen evening.
35 A note
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To my great surprise a short, handwritten note arrived from my bishop today by post: ‘I’m there with you in spirit and support, but Christ is there with you in reality and embrace.’ I was really touched by this. Twenty seconds for him; a lifeline for me.
36 Leaving
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I should have left the priesthood years ago. But what would I do? I haven’t enough money to retire, to potter around in the garden of a home I don’t own and couldn’t afford to rent or buy. And my friends? So many of them are priests or involved in the Church. To sever the chain would be to leave them behind and leave me out in the cold. It’s as if I’m married to the Church and a divorce would cause my social circle to disintegrate. But if I did have the courage to walk away what could I do? Teach? I have my old English degree just like thousands of others (younger, and with better degrees), but my experience has been exclusively teaching religious studies in a Catholic setting. An older ex-priest, disgraced and faithless who has worked for no money and who now needs a salary is hardly going to be inundated with job offers. Psychotherapy? I know of priests who have hung up their stoles and trained to be counsellors — the potted plants, the carpet tiles, the cutesy posters blu-tacked to the walls, yoga classes in the next room. I couldn’t face that smiling world of self-worth. I need to see a counsellor, not become one. If I could borrow some money I suppose I could open a club somewhere like Pattaya with barely-legal go-go boys dancing on a makeshift stage, for sale by the hour to middle-aged lechers like me. Counting cash as the sun rises, hauling empty beer bottles to the bins, sweeping the rancid floor, cockroaches swilled into the disinfected morning. No, better to die.
I stay a priest because although I am paid a pittance I have a house, a housekeeper, a car, respect, a reason to get up in the morning — although I long ago shifted the 7:30am Mass to 10am. We still get the same number of (dwindling) communicants. For me now, in the middle-aged wasteland leading up to the scrapheap, there’s nowhere else to go. I’m stuck, imprisoned, behind bars. A cleric in fancy dress. A dummy in a stained-glass window. A plaster manikin all dolled up in silk and lace. One push and I’d come crashing down, shattered into smithereens. To walk away presumes feet but I have stumps; it makes it easier to crawl into the cesspit. And anyway it looks as if I will have no choice and will soon have to be ‘let go’. This retreat is basically an exam for which the results have already been calculated, a lottery ticket from last month’s draw.
But that’s not the whole story. I actually feel a priest to my core. I can’t really explain it except as an instinct, of care, of protection: an arm around the parish; a mother with her cubs; a conduit for blessings not my own; a bringer of joy not my own; a Jupiter for Planet Earth. Sometimes I’m more like a battered punchbag against which people can vent their rage at life, at God, at the Church. That’s fine. I don’t mind.
Do I believe in Orders as a sacrament? I don’t believe a bishop has the magic power to give me magic powers by the laying on of his hands. Ditto Baptism. God’s ‘Let there be Light’ was said once. Our sacraments retell, not rewrite, that foundational, continuing story. Creation as the Tree of Life has no need to be replanted, only to be pruned and cared for and enjoyed. But I’ve come to believe in ‘priesthood’ as a way of transmitting grace. Perhaps it all came from the villages in olden times when the folk took a man from their midst who was spiritually-minded and wise and bestowed on him the authority to be their mediator — a bridge, a connector, with each other as well as with the gods. The priestly office is always above and beyond its holder. And if I refuse to take the medicine it doesn’t mean that it won’t cure others. The wounded healer again.
Although I’ve thought of leaving the priestho
od and even of leaving the Catholic Church itself, with its rigidity, its fussiness, its excuses, its plain wrong-headed way of looking at so many things, I’ve never wanted to walk away from Christ. I have recurring questions about who he really was and who he thought he was and who his disciples thought he was, but for me he is still irreplaceable. Suffering, disgrace, death — the three major fears which overshadow human life begin to evaporate in the company of the man from Nazareth. There is no barrel I can scrape where his scratch marks are not there before me.
But beyond the high drama of the Passion is the manger. On a chilly night in a dark place, whilst a busy world was feasting and strutting in decadence and arrogance, a baby bawls and drools and shits in the arms of his unmarried mother. I can’t walk away from this. ‘It’s only a legend,’ they say. Maybe. But their confident, dismissive words are inaudible the next street over, never mind beyond the cloak of the one hundred billion stars which glitter across the night sky. Every human life is a legend, but only one outside my own is so personal and so all-encompassing that it seems to share the very blood in my veins, the very air in my lungs.
37 Shame
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Was I ever recognized? Well, Greater Manchester is a large area but safer still was to go out into Merseyside, up into Lancashire, even over the Pennines in the warm summer months when the ride back into a radiant sunset made my melancholy strangely sweet. My safeguard was that the young men I met were unlikely to attend my Masses, especially miles from their home towns. These were the lank-limbed sinners who never darkened the doors of a church, the lost ones who passed by with barely a glance or thought as they lit another cigarette or shuffled to a new song on their smartphones. But there was one time.
I had made contact with a lad in Salford through a website and we’d made a plan to meet. When I arrived (‘there’s plenty of parking outside’) it was a surprisingly fancy building and I suspected that he was being kept by an older man. I punched in the code he’d given me and the video camera lit up, followed immediately by a buzzer. I pushed against the glass door and entered the sparkling lobby with its marble floors reflecting intricate chandeliers which drooped down from the high ceiling. There was a shoe-shining machine next to the lift, one of those electrical contraptions with three rotating balls (black, brown and buffer) and a cream dispenser. I pressed the button to summon the lift and then pressed each of my scruffy shoes against the nozzle. A white smear oozed on to them and I activated the whirring brushes. My right foot was quickly clean and shiny but then the lift door suddenly opened and I could see that it was controlled directly from the apartment because the bright sixth-floor button was already illuminated. I hastily stepped inside as the doors brushed together, my left shoe still scuffed and still smeared. The lift glided upwards in a smooth swoop, pinging cheerfully as it passed each floor. I spent the ascent in a sweat, rubbing the cream off my left shoe with the back of my trousers.
I preferred the grungy bedsits with their stained carpets and flimsy walls. This place intimidated me, as if I were about to be interviewed for a job for which I was unqualified. I stepped out of the lift into a corridor sweet with the smell of new paint. It felt just like a hotel and I would not have been surprised to see a room-service tray outside one of the doors, a silver lid hiding a half-eaten dinner with a plume of white linen smeared with ketchup resting there like a dead bird. Why would someone want money for sex with a stranger if they lived in a place like this?
I walked along the hallway, found the apartment and rang its ding-dong bell. The door opened and instantly I recognized Jimmy Cruz, and he me. In a second there took place, like two live electric wires, an exchange of potent energy — amusement on his part, horror on mine. I couldn’t have sex with Jimmy Cruz. He’d been in my parish choir as a boy and sung the Christmas solos (‘In the Bleak Midwinter’). I’d heard his first Confession. His mother used to help out with my accounts. He fixed my printer once. More recently I’d written him a reference letter when he was applying to university. My body pricked with mortification and shame.
‘I... I think I’d better go. This is... oh God. This is so embarrassing. I’m so sorry Jimmy. I ...’ I mumbled and stammered in a terrible confusion. There was nowhere to hide, physically or morally, and I simply shrivelled into a shell of humiliation.
‘It’s OK, Father, don’t worry,’ he said kindly, smiling. ‘Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea at least.’
‘Oh thanks Jimmy, but I’ll just take off.’ I was red and hot and I started walking back towards the lift. ‘I hope everything’s alright. It’s... been a while,’ I said, turning slightly back towards him, my voice sounding strangulated and squeaky, my steps feeling lopsided and awkward. I was going to ask him about university but I didn’t really want to know and I certainly didn’t want to make our connections any clearer. Would he say anything to anyone? I thought he was decent enough not to make this public but how could he resist at least mentioning it over a drink with his mates?
How desperate I felt as I pressed the button for the lift and sensed that he was still standing in the doorway watching me. Should I say something else? The light above the lift was harsh and unforgiving, like a torch shining into my mouth in a dentist’s chair. I looked down at my unevenly polished shoes and listened for the distant mechanical whir, willing it closer. I stood there cringing with awkwardness as if puberty’s pimples had all erupted at once on a gawky cheek. I felt as if I were the adolescent and he the mature, confident, successful adult. Finally the lift arrived and the doors opened. ‘Bye’ I called out as I stepped inside, but there was no response. He must have closed his door and so didn’t hear me. It was a quiet, smooth ride down to the ground floor.
38 Library
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The library is the one beautiful room at Craigbourne. Even without reading anything I enjoy its quiet atmosphere, the smell of must and old paper, the gentle chafing sound as I extract a volume from its neighbours.
It has a predictable collection of theology, philosophy and history with some sensible fiction thrown in as a concession to leisure. Fine, hand-tooled books sit next to cheaper hardbacks, originally published with dust jackets but now unclothed — lines of faded spines in washed-out blues, greens or blacks. The classics are here of course, the multi-volumed Summa of Aquinas and Butler’s Lives of the Saints, but there’s a wide choice of thoroughbred theological and devotional volumes too, Garrigou-Lagrange, Alphonsus Rodriguez (not the saint), Grou, Dom Chautard, Dom Marmion, Venerable Louis of Granada, St John of the Cross, St Francis de Sales. The mid-20th century lighter-weights, Vann, Chesterton, Sheed and Sheen, sit alongside the heavier, later 20th-century German-language theologians, Rahner, Balthasar and Ratzinger. Surprisingly there are some early Küng and Curran volumes too, flowerings of Vatican II quickly plucked out of the ground by curial authorities in the 1970s and now seeming almost old-fashioned in their earnest modernism. Strange to think of the present silence of books whose contents had fueled decades of vociferous debate. On a separate shelf there is a selection of novels, Mauriac, Bernanos, Undset, R. H. Benson and, curiously, half a dozen beaten-up Tridentine Missals amongst the fiction, their frayed rainbow ribbons betraying a long-past liturgical sell-by date.
I noticed a fat biography of St Alphonsus de Liguori sitting on one of the higher shelves and I climbed the ladder to extract it, taking it to the central, maroon, leather-top table to browse through. My mother kept a prayer-card dedicated to this saint tucked in her missal, a souvenir from a Mission by the Redemptorists in Cork in 1949. I remember it well because the card often used to slip out during Mass and flutter under the dusty pew from whence I had to retrieve it. Many of its creases and scuff marks were formed by my youthful fingers as it was scratched off the stone floor. On the back was a prayer and on the front a picture of a kindly-looking, ascetic-looking, gaunt old man — the 18th-century founder of the Redemptorist Order. His strange, foreign name stuck in my young mind fro
m this card and from the frequent singing of one of his hymns at Sunday afternoon Benediction (‘Had I but Mary’s sinless heart’), incense billowing, candles flickering, organ tremulating, Host aloft. I knew when we’d finished singing St Alphonsus we could go home in the dark for buttered crumpets and tea by the fire.
I later learned that during the controversies of the centuries following the Reformation he had helped to make some aspects of theology flexible again — a spiritual osteopath of sorts. Jansenism’s harsh teachings had laid a heavy weight on frozen shoulders, God as an iced-over lake rather than living, life-giving waters. By passionately refuting the idea of predestination, as well as his writings on moral theology, Alphonsus had helped make limber and loose again the Body of Christ. As I scanned the book I was completely amazed at the scope of his life and his boundless energy as a founder and a bishop. Then I came across a chapter called ‘The Tireless Worker’, which described his daily schedule: ten hours work, eight hours prayer, five hours sleep, and one hour for eating and recreation. Three days a week only water, no food, and never eating or drinking between meals, not even a sip of water during a Neapolitan heatwave. All the food he ate was laced with bitter herbs to make it taste foul, and the fruit he rarely ate was doused with salt. ‘I digest it better,’ he claimed. He scourged himself daily and it appears he never took off his spiked hair-shirt, even to sleep. Oh, and in his spare time he wrote over a hundred large books — some of them were on the shelves behind me.
The Final Retreat Page 8
