The Temptations of St. Frank

by Anthony Bruno

  “Mr. Grimaldi! Are you with us, Mr. Grimaldi?”

  “Huh?”

  Mr. Kinney was frowning at him. “Please pay attention, Mr. Grimaldi.”

  “Sorry.”

  Mr. Kinney’s face was red, his mouth turned down like a pissed-off fish. “I want you to go to Mr. Whalley’s office and tell him about the intercom. And tell O’Keefe and Long to get back here on the double. Now go. Hurry up.”

  “Mr. Whalley’s office?” Frank was still coming out of his candy-colored daydream.

  “Yes. And hurry up. This is getting ridiculous.” Mr. Kinney scowled at the intercom box. The song had ended and the news had just come on, the announcer saying something about Henry Kissinger negotiating something about Vietnam.

  “Allez-y, allez-y, Monsieur Grimaldi!” Mr. Kinney fluttered his hand in a very French way as if he were trying to sweep Frank out of the room.

  Frank stood up slowly. He didn’t want any part of this radio prank because he was already in trouble with Whalley. If the walrus caught him wandering around out in the halls for no good reason, Frank would get jug for the rest of the year. Maybe for the rest of his life! Whalley was the fucking walrus, after all. Koo koo k’choob!

  “Plus vite. Monsieur Grimaldi!”

  Frank glanced around the room. Guys were straining to keep from cracking up. Gdowski clamped a hand over his mouth, tears spurting from his eyes. Larry Vitale turned around and mugged at Frank, rolling his eyes like a Blue Meanie.

  Frank started toward the door and glared at Bauerman, warning him with his eyes to keep his mouth shut.

  “Don’t tell,” Vitale whispered as Frank passed.

  “Get going, Mister Grimaldi!” Mr. Kinney said.

  Frank reached for the doorknob and glanced up at the crucifix hanging over the blackboard. The little brass Jesus was looking right at him, looking very disappointed.

  As Frank pulled the door open, treacherous thoughts ignited in his brain like a trail of burning gunpowder heading for a crate of dynamite.

  He imagined John Lennon chasing pigs with a gun as he stepped out into the hallway.

  Chapter 4

  Frank peered down the hallway, sunlight angling across the speckled green marble floors. It was deceptively quiet, not a soul in sight. But that didn’t matter. Mulvaney Hall was like a fun house without any fun. Assholes could pop out of anywhere.

  But Frank had a plan. All he had to do was make it downstairs to the students’ bathroom in the basement. He’d just go sit on a toilet for the rest of the period. If Whalley caught him, he’d say he had diarrhea. It was foolproof. No one could argue with loose stool. What was he gonna do? Check?

  Frank walked toward the staircase, but the rubber soles of his desert boots squeaked on the marble. He slowed down to minimize the squeaking because he wasn’t far from Whalley’s office, and as usual the door was wide open. Frank could see the Bench of Shame just inside the doorway. It was an Early American cherry-wood bench with carved spindles and a scrolled seatback. George Washington probably sat on a bench just like it to put on his riding boots, but this particular bench didn’t have a noble legacy. It was the dreaded Bench of Shame where the “bad” kids had to sit and wait for Whalley to ream their asses out.

  Frank’s heart thumped as he started down the staircase, his eyes glued to Whalley’s doorway, expecting him to walk out at any moment and let loose with the walrus roar—“WHY AREN’T YOU IN CLASS, MR. GRIMALDI?” But that didn’t happen, and Frank continued down the stairs, telling himself not to rush because he’d look guilty, but he rushed just the same. He wondered where O’Keefe and Long had gone even though he didn’t want to be anywhere near them. The three of them together would look like a conspiracy, and they couldn’t all use the diarrhea excuse.

  As he got to the bottom of the staircase, the air became moist and musty and smelled of ammonia and rotting brown-bag lunches. The vinyl-tile floor clung to the soles of his shoes, and humming fluorescent tubes on the ceiling replaced the bright sunlight upstairs. The basement of Mulvaney Hall was the student underworld, and teachers almost never came down here. Only the Walrus King ventured into the underworld.

  The locker rooms were down in the basement—St. A’s wasn’t like a normal high school that had lockers lining the walls in the hallways. No, their locker rooms were in the basement, dark caves where young males were relegated, like angry baboons in a cruel zoo. The boiler room, the janitors’ “office” where they catnapped in the afternoon, and the Photography Club’s dark room were also down here. It was a grade-A hellhole, and Frank was willing to bet that a female hadn’t ever set foot down here, but it was all theirs, the students’, and he felt a little safer being there. Well, as safe as a person could feel with Whalley stalking the building like a douche-bag Grendel.

  Frank pushed through a battered, black-painted door with “Lavatory” printed on the front. The bathrooms at St. A’s weren’t designated by gender. It was a boys’ school so all the bathrooms were men’s rooms, except for the tiny one up on the fourth floor near the physics lab, which had become a women’s room this year and only for first period when the girls from Mother of Peace were here. After first period the janitors locked the door to keep it clean. A lot of guys still peed with the seat down.

  The black door closed behind Frank with a dull thunk. As he expected, no one was in there, not even a stray shit-bird freshman. The bathroom had four sinks with mirrors on the left-hand wall, three stalls straight ahead, and six urinals on the right, the old kind that went straight to the floor, each one with a melting blue deodorizer doughnut over the drain. They smelled like mothballs and reminded Frank of his house. His mother put mothballs everywhere, even in the living room under the couch. To her germs were the devil’s children. She threw mothballs everywhere the way vampire hunters make rings of garlic to ward off the Undead.

  Frank went to the middle stall, closed the door, and turned the latch. He started to sit down but saw that there was no lid on the toilet, just a seat. He thought about sitting on the edge, then figured he should pull down his pants just in case Whalley stormed in. The Walrus King liked dramatic entrances. If Frank planned to go with the diarrhea defense, he had to make it look real, so he unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, pulled down his underwear, and sat down, aiming his dick over the water and peeing a little just to get into character.

  He scanned the graffiti on the walls.

  Billy Riggins is a faggot.

  Whalley sucks dick.

  Your mother’s cunt is where it’s at.

  Most of it was done with blue or black ballpoint pen. Over the toilet-paper dispenser someone had drawn a pretty realistic picture of a woman spread-eagle with her knees up. Her head wasn’t visible because she was lying back, but her bush was as thick and scraggly as Allen Ginsberg’s beard. Richard Nixon’s head hovered over her, his nose a big penis. A dialogue bubble sprouted from his mouth: “Bless me, Father, it has been a LONG time since my last confession…”

  Frank shook the last drops of pee from his dick as he read more of the graffiti. He’d seen most of it before, but sitting here in the quiet and really taking it in, he wondered why the priests didn’t have the janitors clean it up. It covered just about every square inch of space inside the stall, and some of it had been there since September. They must have just given up on keeping it clean. The stalls were painted only in the summer, and whatever the kids wrote on the walls stayed there all year until the next summer.

  Frank wondered what would happen if a giant meteor hit the earth and destroyed all civilization, and hundreds of years from now alien archeologists found these stalls. They would be the Rosetta Stone of smut. What would that say about human society on earth in 1970? Maybe scholars would theorize that this was what people sank to when they didn’t have the Beatles anymore.

  He scanned the crowded, haphazardly place
d drawings and phrases, looking for a new entry, and spotted something on the back of the door in red ballpoint.

  If you want a good time, call Tina. 505-1124. The writing had been traced over a few times to make it stand out. He wondered if this Tina was his Tina. Yolanda’s friend Tina.

  He wondered why it was in red. Nothing else on the walls was in red. Was it a sign? Like the stigmata? Like Christ’s Blood? Like Tina having her period? Was this a message for him? 505—he didn’t recognize the exchange, and he had no idea what it was in Tina and Yolanda’s neighborhood.

  Frank could feel his dick moving by itself, getting ready to get hard. He closed his eyes and remembered Tina lounging on the couch in the yearbook office that morning. Tina’s top button unbuttoned. Tina’s parted lips as if she’d just gotten some. Tina’s thighs. Olive Oyl from the knees down but much sexier from the knees up.

  “Not that bad…” he murmured.

  His boner was almost at full mast, and he had to stand up a little to get it out of the bowl and give it room to stretch.

  Shit, he thought. He couldn’t jerk off here in school.

  His eyes fluttered closed. The Tina in the slideshow in his head looked awful good. Too good.

  “Fuck!” he whispered.

  He didn’t want to do it here, but… He looked down at himself. It was looking pretty inevitable.

  His balls tingled, and he could feel something moving inside of him, like mercury rising in a thermometer.

  “Shit!” he whispered, sucking in his breath. “Tina, Tina…”

  He didn’t want to do it, but it was beyond his control. He grabbed hold of himself. Groaned. “Oh, man…”

  He reached for the toilet paper and yanked off a yard’s worth. It was the cheap stuff, thinner than thin. You always needed a lot with the cheap stuff.

  He tilted his head back, eyes closed. Shouldn’t do this here, he thought. Really shouldn’t.

  He was rock hard, a bird’s nest of toilet paper bunched up in his left hand, the stick shift in his right.

  “Shouldn’t fucking do this… Tina, you bitch… this is your fault…”

  He started to stroke himself.

  “Oh, shit…” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Shit… shit…” He stroked faster. “Shit…”

  “That you, Grimaldi?”

  Frank’s eyes shot open. Fuck! He knew the voice. Fucking Molloy. On the other side of the stall door.

  “You jerking off, Grimaldi? In school? Way to go, man.”

  Frank stood up fast and tried to stuff his boner into his underpants, but it didn’t fit. The head poked out of the waistband like a dog with its head out the car window—stupid, happy, and oblivious to all danger.

  “That’s gotta be a mortal sin, man,” Molloy said. “Extra-penalty mortal sin. You are the man, Grimaldi.”

  Frank pulled up his pants and tucked in his shirttails, but he was so hard it hurt. Masturbatus interruptus, the absolute worst. Sperm was on the loose inside his body. He could die of cum poisoning.

  “You done?” Molloy asked. “You want me to leave?”

  Frank didn’t say a word. He shrugged into his blazer and opened the door.

  Big fat slob Molloy sat on a sink with his legs dangling, a lit cigarette wedged into the corner of his thin liver-colored lips. His shirttails were hanging out, and his tie was so loose the knot was in the middle of his chest. His greasy, uncombed hair sprouted from his head like a crown of thorns, and he was about three days past a shave. A camera hung from a strap around his neck, and a set of black headphones covered his ears. A thin wire ran from the headphones to a gray plastic disk about the size of a small pizza that he held like a gladiator’s shield.

  Frank frowned at him. “Can’t a guy take a shit in peace around here?”

  Molloy shrugged. “I guess.” He seemed puzzled by the concept of taking a dump because anything that could be done without a gadget made little sense to Molloy. He was Mr. Gizmo. James Bond had Q, but St. A’s had Molloy.

  Frank pointed to the plastic disk. “What the fuck is that?”

  Molloy’s eyes lit up. “An electronic ear. I just got it. You can hear a whisper from half a mile away. Under the right conditions.”

  “Terrific.” Frank’s dick hurt.

  “Yeah, it can even pick up sound vibrating off flat surfaces. Like windows. And doors.” Molloy took the cigarette out of his mouth and pointed at the stall door. “So who’s Tina?”

  “Who?” Play dumb, Frank told himself.

  “Tina. You kept saying ‘Tina, Tina, Tina.’ I heard you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Frank went to a sink and turned on the water.

  “No really, I heard you through the headphones. Loud and clear.”

  “Hope you saved the receipt for that thing. It doesn’t work for shit. You must be picking up radio signals.”

  “No, man, it works. I tested it.”

  Frank picked up a dirty bar of soap and lathered his hands. “Oh, yeah? How did you test it?”

  “I hid up in the choir loft in the chapel and aimed it at the confession box. I heard Tim Curtis telling Father Sheehan that he had thought about reading a Playboy. Thought about it. Big fucking deal! Where’s the sin in that?”

  “Tim’s thinking about going to the seminary next year.”

  “Then he’s gonna need a subscription to Playboy. Penthouse, too.”

  Frank took his time washing his hands. He wished the fuck Molloy would beam himself back to the Starship Enterprise. He wanted to go back into the stall and finish the job he’d started, but he knew that wasn’t gonna happen. He looked at his watch. The bell would be ringing any minute.

  Molloy pushed back his sleeve and checked his watch, which was a diver’s watch that weighed about a pound and a half and had all kinds of features normal people would never use. “Two and a half minutes,” he said, the cigarette bobbling between his lips.

  Frank looked at his crotch in the mirror. He had two and a half minutes for his dick to go down. This was gonna be bad, he thought. Nothing worse than an unfinished whack-off. The sperm would be stuck in there all day, begging him to let them out, driving him nuts. And he wasn’t sure when the hell he’d be able to take care of it. Especially because he was probably going to have to do walking jug after school.

  He flicked the excess water off his hands and reached for a paper towel. “You cutting class?” he asked Molloy.

  Molloy shook his head and pulled a blue excuse slip out of his shirt pocket. “I’m supposed to be taking yearbook pictures of the Chess Club.”

  “So what’re you doing here?”

  “What’s the point? It’s the same six turds as last year. We can just use the old photo.”

  “We can’t do that.”

  “Why not? Same kids, same uniforms. Who’s gonna know?”

  “Go take the picture.”

  “They’ll thank us, Grimaldi. They have more zits now than they had last year.”

  Frank checked his own complexion in the mirror. Molloy had a point.

  “So who’s this Tina?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Molloy.”

  “Is it the Tina in the special physics class? The skinny Ukrainian girl with the short hair? You gotta be kidding.”

  Ring, bell, Frank pleaded in his head. Ring, goddammit.

  Molloy took a deep drag off his cigarette, then flicked it across the room and into the toilet Frank has just used. He pumped his fist in triumph. “Yes!”

  “I’m impressed,” Frank deadpanned.

  “You know what your problem is, Grimaldi? You are the only guy I know who’d fuck a girl for her SAT scores. Most guys want a perfect 10. You want a perfect 1600.”

  “Get the fuck outta here.”

/>   “You got the hots for skinny Tina. I know it. You got a thing for nerd girls. Look me in the eye, and tell me that’s not true.” Molloy had a smoker’s laugh, hoarse and slimy like a perv in a raincoat.

  The bell rang. Thank you, God.

  Molloy pulled out a fresh cigarette from a pack of Pall Malls. Frank knew to lean back when Molloy pulled out his chrome Zippo and ignited a two-foot flame. Molloy inhaled, clicked the lighter closed, and sent three perfect smoke rings sailing through the air. As usual he was in no rush to get to class. Frank had no idea how Molloy got away with the shit he did.

  “So is it her?” Molloy said. “Am I right?”

  “I gotta get to class.”

  Three sophomores banged through the door, dropped their books on the tile floor, and ran to the urinals. Frank headed for the door.

  “Hey, where ya going?” Molloy called after him.

  “Later,” Frank said.

  Or maybe never, he thought.

  He opened the door, and a stampede of underclassmen rushed past him to get into the bathroom. He turned sideways to let the little shits pass. He felt cranky and mean because his dick still ached, and he knew it was gonna ache all day. But no matter what fucking Molloy thought, he did not have a thing for nerd girls. He headed for the staircase, his desert boots squeaking.

  Chapter 5

  Mr. Dalton, Frank’s English teacher, bent over the waste-paper basket and stubbed out his Tiparillo along the inside rim, but the cherry-scented cigar smoke lingered in the classroom.

  “Boys,” he said, “I am disappointed.” He spoke with a Midwestern twang that to Frank’s ear indicated no place in particular other than not here. He was the only non-Catholic teacher at St. A’s, though Frank had no idea what religion he was or if he practiced any religion at all. Frank assumed he was some kind of Protestant, but that was pretty murky territory for Frank. He knew there were a lot of Protestant religions, but he wasn’t sure what the differences were, and in all his years of Catholic education from kindergarten through high school, it wasn’t something that was ever taught except in World History, and they only touched on Martin Luther and his 99 Theses nailed to the church doors, which Frank always thought of as the 99 Feces for some sick reason, probably because it was the first time he’d ever seen how the plural thesis was spelled and it was close enough for a joke.