by Caryl Rivers
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was two weeks ago. I, ah, I cheated on my math test. I disobeyed my mother two times. I, ah, had impure thoughts seventeen times.”
“What kind of thoughts?”
Cough. “About — girls.”
“And were these thoughts followed by impure actions?”
Swallow. “Yes, Father.”
“Alone or with others.”
“Alone.”
“You touched yourself in an impure manner?”
Cough. “Yes, Father.”
“Causing your seed to be spilled on the ground?”
“Not on the ground, exactly.”
“The sin of Onan. God gave you a temple, your body, and you defiled it. Hands, the same hands that make the sign of the cross, touching your sexual organs and defiling the temple.”
“I’m sorry, Father.”
“You drive another thorn into the flesh of Christ with your impurity. And if you cannot think of the agony you are causing Christ, think of the men who have been driven insane by such acts. They sit, in hospital wards, never to see the light of day again. Do you wish that to happen to you?”
“No, Father.”
“Make an act of contrition.”
“Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry, for having offended thee…
He was chained to a wall, in the insane asylum, next to an ax murderer and a paranoid schizophrenic. The hair growing on his palms was even longer than Rita Hayworth’s flowing locks. The doctor and the nurse came by on rounds. They stopped in front of the ax murderer.
“He’s looking pretty good, Nurse.”
“Yes, we’ve rehabilitated him. In a few days he’s going home. We don’t think he’ll do it again, but just in case, we took the carving knives out of the drawer.”
They moved on to the schizo.
“He’s doing well, too, Doctor. He had a hundred and thirty-seven personalities, and now it’s down to three. They can go home, too.”
“And this one! The self-abuser?”
“Oh, I’m afraid he’s a lifer. Sad, isn’t it? He was an altar boy once. Masturbation is such a tragedy.”
“No, I promise, ” he screamed. “I’ll never do it again, never!”
“He says that all the time“— the nurse sighed —"but of course, it’s incurable. He’d do it with anything: bedsheets, the morning paper, even once with a holy card.”
“No!” the doctor said.
“It was disgusting. Semen all over St. Christopher, on his halo, and even a few drops on the Christ child’s little white dress.”
“No, that was a mistake. I was doing it in bed and the holy card — it was in my Latin book, and it slipped out —”
“Oh, he was quite insatiable. He would go into the boys’ room and do it, and he’d keep his mouth closed tight so he wouldn’t make any nose, and he’d do it in the shower, and once he did it in a bus, under his raincoat, and at the Sylvan Theater, during Pagan Love Song while Esther Williams was swimming. He once did it while listening to The Rosary Hour on the radio.”
“My God, what a monster.”
“Yes, and when he finally went berserk, it was in the middle of trigonometry class, when he looked at his hands and saw the hair sprouting on his palms. He started to scream and scream, and Brother Benedict said to the class, “You see, boys, what happens when you play with yourself the way Satan wants you to! Now finish the trig problem on page twenty-three while we take him to the insane asylum.”
There was no time that he could remember, no one moment, when he stopped believing it. He just knew, now, that he could not believe that God would send people to hell for eating meat on Friday or using a rubber or masturbating — even during The Rosary Hour. But Catholicism had left a residue, thin and sticky as varnish, of guilt.
“I love you.”
But his father never heard, never knew.
Not loving enough isn’t a sin.
Yes, it is. It’s the worst one.
He was, he thought, like Lot’s wife, turned to a pillar of salt. Something in him had been crippled, calcified. The power to love had been forbidden to him. Sometimes he sensed the capacity for it inside, a subterranean river he had never been able to reach. He would always turn aside, run away, from anyone who asked him to love. He always had.
“I love you, Jay. Please give me a chance. I can make you happy. I know I can.”
He could still see her, standing on the dance floor in the enlisted men’s club, wearing the wide felt skirt, a good style for girls with hips, pleading with him. And all he could hear was a voice inside himself saying, I don’t want to love her.
Her name was Marilyn Krebbs; she had chunky thighs but a pretty face and nice eyes. He had met her at a mixer at the club, and she took him home to meet her parents, who fed him and were kind to him, treating him like a son. Marilyn yielded, button by button, in the backseat of a borrowed car, and finally went all the way in her parents’ parlor one night when they’d been at an American Legion social. This went on for three years, until Marilyn told him that her parents had saved up a thousand dollars for a wedding present. He looked at her and thought of waking up next to her every morning for the rest of his life, seeing the round face and the plump shoulders that were not at all like Debra Paget’s, and he stopped calling her and wouldn’t return her phone calls. He made the mistake of going to the club again one night, and she was there. She came up to him on the dance floor, her eyes bright with pain and shame, and begged him not to leave her. He tried to get away.
“Don’t do this, Marilyn.”
“Give me a chance, Jay, please!”
“You’ll meet somebody. Better than me.”
“I don’t want anybody else. I love you.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t love me.”
“I do. I do love you!”
She took his hands and put them on her breasts, and he yanked them away and said, “For God’s sakes, Marilyn!”
“I’ll always love you!”
He walked away from her, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. To blot out the memory of her eyes, he went on a fucking spree, coupling with women who lived on the periphery of the base — waitresses, bar girls, even the wife of a captain who was bored and lonely. It seemed absurd, after a while.
“Jay, there’s somebody who wants to meet you.”
He looked up. Sam had a pretty young girl, with a cascade of chestnut hair, in tow.
“Ann Smithton. She’s a fan of yours.”
“I’ve seen your pictures. It must be exciting, your job.”
“Sometimes it is.”
She slid into the booth beside him. “What do you take pictures of, mostly?”
“Murders. Birds. Worthy Matrons of the Eastern Star.”
“Did you ever take pictures of anyone famous? Like the president?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, how exciting. Where?”
“At the White House.”
He could see she wanted to talk to him, but his laconic answers discouraged her. A young man came up to the booth and motioned towards the dance floor, and she looked at Jay. He stared at his drink. She got up to dance with the young man.
Jay traced the swirling pattern of the table with his finger again.
You are now a Hot Shit, for the rest of your life.
Her palm had felt cool and soft beneath his lips. The gesture had been, to him, shockingly intimate, not what he had intended. It seemed more erotic, somehow, than the image of her naked on the bed. Once again, the thought of her eased him, filled him with quiet. He sat, staring at the table, letting her fill his thoughts.
Sam slid into the booth. “You muffed it, Jay. That click really had the hots for you. Cute, too.”
Jay shrugged. “Didn’t know Alger Hiss. Too bad.”
“I’m going to order another round.”
“Not for me, I got to get up early and print
some stuff.”
“You and Mary have really been churning it out. You like working with her?”
“Yeah, I do. Jeez, she’s bright. She’s got one of those kinds of minds, closes in on the target, like a laser.”
“Knows Tom Dewey isn’t an expressway.”
Jay looked at Sam. “No, it’s not like that, I just … like working with her.”
“She’s separated from her husband, you know.”
He felt, for an instant, the breath catch in his throat. “Some months now, I understand. He drinks.”
“Oh,” Jay said,
“You guys from the Blade?”
Jay looked up. A middle-aged man, beer in hand, was standing by the edge of the booth.
“Yeah,” Sam said.
“Nigger-loving bastards.”
“You got a beef,” Sam told him, “write a letter to the editor.”
“Nigger-loving cocksuckers.”
“You have to admit,” Jay said to Sam, “his vocabulary is impressive.” He said to the man, “Look, pal, we’re not bothering you. Why don’t you go back and sit down?”
“Nigger-loving Jew bastards.”
Jay saw Sam’s fists clench. He reached over and put his hand on Sam’s. “Come on, he’s just a drunk. Don’t pay any attention to him.”
“Jewboy.”
“You want to step outside and say that?” Sam had half-risen in his seat.
“Oh shit!” Jay said. He pulled out a bill and tossed it down on the table. “We’re leaving,” he said to Sam. “Now.”
“Dirty Jews,” the man said again. Sam grabbed the man’s arm, but Jay pulled him away.
“That’s what we don’t need,” he said. “You on page one for assault and battery.” He bragged Sam across the floor to the door.
Outside, Sam took a deep breath and said, “You should have let me clobber him.”
“This is just starting. You’re not going to be able to punch out every guy that makes a crack.”
“Doesn’t take long for the Jew stuff to pop out, does it?”
“Right after the nigger stuff. Come on, we’re going home.”
“What a night. I’m still horny and I didn’t get to put out the lights of a guy who said ‘Dirty Jew.’”
“Nigger-loving Jew bastard, to be exact.”
“Maybe I’ll hit you.”
“You can hit me, but you’re going to have to stay horny. That good a friend I’m not.”
“Just as well,” Sam said. “My mother would kill me for fucking an Irish Catholic.”
It was oppressively hot in the laundry, as usual. The dryers generated so much heat it was impossible to keep the place cool, especially on a warm night. Harry walked to the machine that had been repaired, checked the circuits. It looked OK. He had gotten good with these machines; it wouldn’t be long before he could repair them himself. He closed the back panel. The smell of detergent curled into his nose — God, he hated that smell.
The scent lingered in his nostrils, tickling the small hairs and making him want to sneeze. He tried to sneeze but couldn’t, nearly gagged. The sensation triggered a panic inside him. Was this where he would spend his life? In this hot, damp room, with the fluorescent light bouncing off the garish yellow of the machines, smelling the stink of bleach and Tide? Had it all shrunk down to this?
They used to do a special cheer for him, each girl with a red and a white pom-pom, spelling out his name a letter at a time, waving the red pom-poms, the people in the stands picking up the cry until it seemed to fill the air itself; other towns went mad for football, but in Belvedere baseball was the game, and he was the best in twenty years. They told him that.
They promised him specialness; he was special, then. He had felt it, and carried with him a certain pity for ordinary boys. Everyone had conspired to make him feel that way - the girls with the pompoms, the sports columnists who wrote about him as if he were Ty Cobb, not only a high school athlete, the men who clapped him on the shoulder to relive a double play, touching him as if the feel of his flesh could peel back the years and bring them face to face with their own lost youth. They lied. They all lied. He was never special. He just thought so.
He tried to tell the other members of the AA group what it had been like to feel special. None of them could understand, because none of them had experienced it. It was so real, he said, he had this specialness inside and he knew it would never go away. It was like a part of him, an arm or a leg. And Marge, the old broad, had said, “High school ain’t life, kid.”
But nobody had ever told him that. If he hadn’t felt so special, if he couldn’t remember exactly what it felt like, his life now wouldn’t be so bad. It was the loss that was unbearable.
Suddenly he hated them all, for lying to him. He hated them with a fury he didn’t know he owned; hated his father, who had puffed up like some tropical fish when everyone loved his son but backed off when he stumbled. Even his father couldn’t forgive him for not being special anymore.
There was a basket filled with bras and panties on top of one of the machines, and he grabbed the basket and began to hurl its contents piece by piece around the room, cursing them for not telling the truth.
“Damn you! Damn you to hell! Damn your fucking souls to hell!”
When the basket was empty, he threw that, too, and it hit one of the machines and skidded across the floor. He looked at the room; the bras lay scattered across the floor and the tops of the machines, looking like small, dead birds that had fallen from the sky. He stood and looked at them, the tears rolling silently down his cheeks.
He went and picked up the basket, and wiped his face with his forearm. He stooped and picked up the bras and panties one by one and put them back in the basket, neatly folded. He put the basket where it had been, on top of the machine. Then he turned out the light, opened the door, locked it and walked, slowly, out to his car.
St. John’s AME Zion Church was a white wooden structure, built in the manner of small-town Protestant churches everywhere, except that it ended abruptly where the steeple should have been. Unhappily, the building fund had run dry in midconstruction. The absence of the steeple gave the church an aborted look. There was no railing beside the cement steps and no handsome, glass-encased sign to let the faithful know of the events and the sermon topic of the week. St. John’s was the church of the Belvedere Negroes, and it was here that many of them had been baptized and married and would receive a last blessing over their coffins.
Jay walked into the church and looked around. The pews were carved up and chipped from years of use, and exposed metal pipes hung below the ceiling; a strip of flypaper curled down from one of the pipes, festooned with the soft black corpses of flies. A small table stood in the foyer, with a box that held cardboard fans. Jay picked up a fan that had a picture of Niagara Falls on it. His grandmother used to have a fan just like it. She had flypaper, too, on the porch in the old house on U Street, and he remembered the delicious revulsion of risking a horrible, germy death by poking the bodies of the flies with his finger. He had not seen cardboard fans and flypaper in years; they had disappeared from the white world of air conditioners and aerosol sprays. Here, in the old church, time seemed, suspended.
“Mr. Broderick, good evening. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
The Rev. Raymond Johnson, pastor, was a small man with a broad and amiable face. “Things may be a little slow getting started. Sunday night, people have family dinners.”
Jay and the minister were not strangers; he had been in the Johnson home many times to photograph church socials. Charlie delighted in publishing three-column pictures of the potluck suppers at St. John’s while giving fancier dinners at white churches only two columns. The white ministers were annoyed, but how could they complain without displaying a noticeable lack of Christian charity? Their discomfiture could make Charlie smile for an entire morning.
“Excuse the condition of this place,” the ministe
r apologized. The building fund’s been suspended because of the urban renewal plan.”
“I like this church,” Jay said. “It doesn’t look like a fucking bank. Uh, I mean —”
The minister was used to Jay’s frequent lapses into the vernacular. “No, it does not look like a bank.”
The door opened, and Mary walked in, wearing her khaki raincoat, her hair ruffled from the night breeze. She smiled at Jay, an artless, unconcealed smile. It warmed him. When a smile split the seriousness of her face, it made her seem very young, and playful.
She introduced herself to the minister, sticking out her hand energetically, like a man would. There was no coyness about her. She went straight at things.
“Reverend, I understand that some members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee will be coming tonight.”
“Yes, my nephew, Donald Johnson, is coming from D.C. and bringing a couple of people with him.”
“And he’s been active in the civil rights movement?”
“Yes, he was on several of the early Freedom Rides, and he’s been working on voter registration in the South.”
“That takes guts.”
“Yes, especially in the early days. Not much support, no white reporters around. Just a few people going it alone.”
“How many people will be here?”
The minister shrugged. “Hard to say. It’s tough to get the people here organized. It takes all their energy just to survive. But I hope we’ll get some.”
Jay and Mary took seats in one of the pews in the rear as people began to straggle in. Jay’s eye was drawn to the face of one old man, which was seamed like welded metal and held a pride the years had not erased. He had the face of a tribal chief, Jay thought. He scanned the room. There were quite a few middle-aged women wearing print dresses, a few children, but not many young people. One man walked in, and Jay tried to remember why the face — full lips, strong features — was so familiar. Then he remembered, he was the son of the woman in the wheelchair he had photographed, who worked for the Sanitation Department.
