PRAISE FOR
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
“Heartbreaking yet hilarious … By marrying the earnest to the ridiculous, Fuhrman captures the sublime intensity of adolescence.… This book … can be compared to many of the classic coming-of-age novels.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The freshness of Chris Fuhrman’s novel comes from his ability to squeeze out of a time of transition universal evocations of rebellion against growing up…. Fuhrman provides his story and characters with enough originality to keep the narrative clipping along and his reader totally absorbed.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Sad and beautiful… captures wonderfully the vulnerability and overdone cynicism of adolescence.… there is an edge to the irreverent humor in this book … distilling the mix of innocent and corrupt, sacred and profane … into a poetry of the quotidian.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“The moral of the story … has so much gravity and grace.… This is the real thing, writing done with everything on the line.… The death of Chris Fuhrman is an incalculable loss to this generation of writers. We should be glad to have his testimony.”
—Boston Globe
“The author’s real triumph lies in his ability to plumb wild young minds, to reveal the ardent, romantic hearts that beat within wisecracking boys. Their wild, unselfconscious beauty permeates the book…. We may never know what a loss [Chris Fuhrman’s death] was. Who knows how many other brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking books he might have written?”
—Boston Book Review
“Here’s a book for anyone who wants to be reminded, with humor and compassion, of what life was like, as Francis puts it, ‘back when things could still happen for the first time.’”
—The Atlanta Journal
“A rollicking story set at a Catholic school in Savannah, Georgia… develops a series of sometimes hilarious vignettes on rebellion. [The] antics are not mere games, but life-affirming acts of defiance.… Imaginative and delightful.”
—Los Angeles Reader
“Delightful debut… conceived with the most artfully humorous language.”
—LIT: Chicago’s Literary Supplement
“Fuhrman is especially successful in capturing the awkwardness of first love and the fierce, blind loyalties of pubescent boys.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This book deserves many, many readers. … a memorable, funny, and poignant depiction of a glorious boyhood chased down and brutally terminated. … A story as odd, vivid, painful, splendid, and sad as adolescence itself.… Fuhrman’s posthumous debut invites wistful speculation about the sort of career which might have followed it.”
—Commonweal
“One of the most strikingly original novels of recent memory.”
—Creative Loafing
“Fuhrman’s only novel shows him to have been a writer of enormous talent and skill…. This novel… is a portrait of the real Savannah. Smart, funny and beautifully rendered, this book deserves a wide audience.”
—Knoxville Metro Pulse
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
A Novel by Chris Fuhrman
Published by The University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
© 1994 by Chrisanne Fuhrman
All rights reserved
Designed by Erin Kirk New
Set in 10.5 on 14 Berkeley Old Style Medium
by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence
and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines
for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Printed in Canada
08 09 10 11 12 P 11 10 9 8 7
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book as follows:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fuhrman, Chris.
The dangerous lives of altar boys : a novel / by Chris Fuhrman
viii, 187 p. ; 23 cm.
ISBN 0-8203-1632-6 (alk. paper)
1. Boys—Fiction.
2. Catholics—Fiction.
3. Savannah (Ga.)—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3556.U3245 D36 1994
813’.54—dc20 93-41113
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-2338-1
ISBN-10: 0-8203-2338-1
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
“Thirteen,” “The Usual Gang of Idiots,” and “A Priest with a
Girlfriend” were first published in Columbia: A Magazine of
Poetry & Prose, no. 17 (Fall 1991): 201-30.
ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-3585-8
This book is for
the FUHRMAN family
for CHRISANNE
and for the gang
Contents
Thirteen
The Usual Gang of Idiots
A Discipline Problem
What Happened to God
Where the Wild Things Are
A Priest with a Girlfriend
Did You Think I Was Tame?
Southern Gothic
Precipitation and Anchovies
Shopping on a Budget
Rebels of the Blessed Heart
Pets
Food Chain
A Test of the Emergency Broadcast System
Welcome to Horrible Movies
Another Color
Bwana Tim
Banshee in the Woods
Underground
Not Approved by the Comics Code Authority
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
Thirteen
By eighth grade, Jesus Christ had been bone meal and rumors for most of 1,974 years, but we were only thirteen. We were daredevils, gangsters. I had a girl’s name, Francis, and a hernia.
School and church occurred right down everybody’s street at Blessed Heart, the two buildings joined at the shoulder by a glass bridge. My best friends, Tim and Rusty, were serving Mass that Sunday, kneeling on each side of the priest in their cassocks and wayward purple socks. I watched from the farthest pew, beside my mother. We’d been late again. To see the altar, I had to rock side-to-side behind the orchard of shifting heads.
Father Kavanagh was praying, his Irish mumble amplified by the PA system into the voice of God. He pinched the Host out of the chalice and raised it like a man admiring a silver dollar, Tim’s cue to shake the bells. He thrashed them, brass clashing brass so harshly that heads flinched. Kavanagh flung Tim a thunderbolt glare. Tim stiffened his face.
Jesus hung crucified on the pink marble behind them, rolling up plaster eyes.
The bell signaled that the bread wafer in Kavanagh’s fingers was now the flesh of Christ. You’re supposed to be amazed, but I was an altar boy too and had suffered Mass about three times a week for the last two years. It was no more mysterious or astounding to me than delivering newspapers had been. We called this the Magician’s Assistant Syndrome. We were something like atheists by then.
Gathered behind a microphone to the left of the altar were two men with beards and guitars, an obese guy hunched over a piano, and a woman dangling a tambourine. They were there to make music for what the church was calling, in those days, a Folk Mass, an attempt at timeliness which I considered as pitiful as an adult using teenage slang.
Kavanagh raised the wine chalice in front of his face, gold cup haloed by steely hair, and turned it into Christ’s blood. Tim rang the bells again, reasonably. I stopped listening. Some numb part of my brain answered the prayers for me.
Marjorie Flynn was kneeling in the pew ahead of m
e. Her wicked brother Donny was in my eighth-grade class. Margie had grown steadily beautiful all year without alerting the popular boys, and I’d been falling in love with her although we’d never spoken. I only knew that she’d been an honor student and shy and that last summer she had sliced her wrists with a razor blade. Something in her life was more important, more terrible, than anything in mine.
Margie wore a sleeveless white silk dress so fresh and pretty it caused my stomach to ache. She was pale, but rosy around the eyes, nose, and cheeks, as if she stayed indoors all the time, crying, an image I found appealing.
The rear doors of the church were open, and a honeysuckle breeze came in and proved itself on Margie’s hair. She wore it curly and wild. All the other girls wore their hair straight, rolling it around orange juice cans or ironing it somehow. Margie’s looked careless, gorgeous.
Across the aisle Melissa Anderson, head full of bows, spread the fingers of both hands and admired her nails. Our athletes bloodied each other’s noses over this specimen, that year’s May Queen, as if I cared, and she certainly never wasted a thought on boys like me. But for Margie I would’ve done anything, though she didn’t seem like the type to require that. I wanted to protect her from something, anything. I bowed my head and inhaled, trying to smell her, but the aromas of church interfered, incense, flowers, and perfume.
Beside us, the windows caught sunlight and thickened it into burning colors, stenciling the carpet with sacred symbols in reverse and the names of dead patrons thrown backwards. Serpents and winged lions and unicorns fell from the glass, sprawled in the aisles. The dragon window was my favorite. I knew the air bubbles in every jigsaw pane. Saint George, in armor, had sunk a lance into the dragon’s belly and rested his booted foot on its back. I pitied the dragon, but I envied his slayer’s heroics.
In an elaborate, blood-spattered daydream I rescued Margie Flynn from an alligator that crawled out of the pond across the street. She tore a strip from her hem, baring her thighs, to clean my wounds.
Meanwhile, Father Kavanagh had arrived at the part where he told us to “offer each other a sign of peace” and you shook hands with people you ordinarily ignored and said, “Peace be with you.” I began praying for Margie to turn and take my hand, godless convictions suspended for the moment. I angled slightly towards my mother to appear unconcerned. The old man on the other side poked my arm, and I was obliged to pump his soft, damp hand while he stared at my mother.
I turned back, and Margie was glancing at me, then the old man reached over in front of me and caught Mama’s hand and petted it, grinning. There would’ve been an awkward, desperate stretch to get to Margie. She turned forward. My heart flattened. Then Mama gave the old guy a shame-on-you wink and retrieved her hand. She touched Margie’s shoulder, and then they shook. Margie’s eyes bumped mine. She held her hand out to me, her wrist fragile as a swan’s throat and crossed with a thin white scar which caused that pain in my sinuses like I was about to cry. I took her hand. She looked away. Then she looked at me, and our eyes locked, and the tiniest smile possible passed over her face, barely entering her eyes. My mind drained. She said, “Peace be with you,” then my name. I watched her say, “Francis,” and liked hearing it for the first time in my life. Her hand in mine felt like something radioactive.
Her fingers slid away, and she drew back and turned towards the altar. My eyes fell from the golden hair, along the bare shoulders and down the new curves of her hips to the whitestockinged, rounded calves. I bunched my hands in my pockets to disguise the embarrassing extra. I wanted to run out alone and spend hours thinking about her, carve our initials into something. Her actual presence seemed like too much to bear for now. Every time I looked at her, my heart went off.
My mother was smiling at me. I frowned. We chanted with the priest, “Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us,” three times, rapping our breasts at each mention of the lamb. I was vigorous, producing a healthy thump.
Kavanagh unclipped his microphone necklace, causing electronic thunder.
The folk musicians began the Communion hymn. It was a popular folk song that I liked, and they played so well it startled me. The plump guy’s fingers rippled at the keyboard, the bearded men started strumming, chords chiming in and out of the wood with the piano’s sweet notes rolling all around it, then one man began to sing crisply, the girl rang the tambourine against a swaying hip, and behind the singer the other three mouths moved with a single shape and harmony, and I thought, God, what wonderful creatures humans are. My neck hair rose like a thousand needles.
And then something ran past our pew. A black dog.
This large, slippery-looking mongrel padded up the aisle along the wall. The ushers were surprised out of their hands-behindthe back poses and began to walk after the dog. The dog slipped through rainbow pools of light, tags clinking, then rolled near the altar rail and paddled its ribs with a hindleg. It was obviously male. The priests and deacon ignored it. The heads were all bobbing, and I could see between them, the dog panting, cartoon eyes wide. His tongue melted out over his teeth and slobber trickled off. Rusty and Tim’s cheeks hollowed and their lips disappeared.
An usher with an overgrown mustache grabbed for the dog’s collar, and the dog torpedoed down the center aisle, pausing halfway to insert his snout under a woman’s dress and throw his head. The usher’s mustache stretched in amused apology. He genuflected at the altar rail and came towards the dog, the others following, bent over as if that made them invisible. I watched Margie watch them. Her eyes narrowed into bright slices.
The dog leapt past the crouching ushers and ran towards the altar again, and the men turned like a wave. They would’ve had to sprint to catch him. The dog slunk under the altar rail, swinging his head back to watch for them. Father Kavanagh and young Father O’Leary stood over the dog, ready to give Communion. People began to rise. The dog put his nose to a railing post and snuffled, spun around, crooked his hindleg, and the priests skipped aside, and the dog squirted a glittering stream that spattered the marble, darkening a circle into the creamy carpet beneath. He stared gloomily out at us, mouth open. The congregation hung back. There was nice music underneath all this.
Tim jammed a fist against his mouth and sputtered behind it. Rusty turned his back, vibrated. Kavanagh shifted the chalice, stepped forward, and swept his hand back like a bowler and slapped the dog’s rump so hard that the animal jumped the railing and slid into the aisle yelping, popping his eyes, and bounded past the ushers and out the doors. The ushers closed them behind him and the wind died.
Father O’Leary’s eyes slid towards Kavanagh. Kavanagh’s jaw was rigid. O’Leary squeezed the smile from his own lips.
I laughed in an excruciating whisper, the edge of my watery gaze on Margie. My hernia was aching. I opened my mouth and breathed. My mother was peering over a missalette, eyes huge, then she snorted and pressed it around her face. Margie’s hands were steepled over her mouth, hiding, I was sure, a grin. The musicians had used up all their lyrics and were playing instrumental. The first-row people began to kneel along the altar rail as a line formed in the aisle.
I rose, leaving two craters in the cushioned kneeler, and squeezed past my mother to follow Margie up to Communion. A man wedged between us, poisonous with after-shave. Twice I saw the corner of Margie’s eye, as if her attention was directed back at me. The people kneeling left a gap, marked by the deacon’s handkerchief, where the dog had puddled. I shuffled up and kneeled one place down from Margie and tilted my face up. Like a celebrity, her presence made everything else small.
Kavanagh sidestepped to me, held the Eucharist out like a tidbit, and said, “The body of Christ.” Rusty, holding the paten under my chin to catch holy crumbs, had blanked his face, but his neck swelled with plugged-up laughter. I said, “Amen,” and the priest laid the wafer on my tongue.
I followed Margie back to the rear. Her style of walking made me feel weak. I kept my head bowed while an usher slid the seco
nd collection in front of me, full of paper money and envelopes with families’ names on them. Mama had dropped our single quarter in the first basket. Daddy, broke, had stayed home with my brothers in protest of the church’s materialism.
I held the Eucharist in my teeth, away from tongue and saliva. We played this game to see how long we could keep it from dissolving. A strange thrill resulted from keeping the alleged Jesus trapped in your teenage mouth.
The folk song ended with the guitar picks scratched slowly across the strings, and a final chord shimmered out and died beautifully with the piano trembling down around it into a final humming that seemed to make sense out of the world. The microphone whined briefly. Margie’s shoulders lifted, with a breath, and relaxed.
Kavanagh sliced a cross into the air with his hand, blessing us in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost (younger priests always said Spirit). Two-hundred voices amened. I didn’t, because I still had solid Jesus in my mouth, breaking all my records.
“The Mass is ended,” Kavanagh said, “go in peace.” Then he hugged the podium and made announcements, asked for money and volunteers. Rusty and Tim carried cruets of water and wine into the sacristy. Out of sight, they’d suck down most of the wine. They’d be pouring a few innocent drops into the storage bottle when Kavanagh got there.
The musicians began to play “Dominique,” a silly tune from the movie The Singing Nun, but instead of singing the words they exchanged guarded, ironic looks.
The rest of the day belonged to me. It was paid for now.
Everybody paraded towards the doors. They dipped two fingers each in the font of holy water at the vestibule and dabbed themselves with the sign of the cross: forehead, breastbone, left shoulder, right. I reached into my pocket and palmed my rabbit’s foot, dunked it into the water as I passed, increasing its magic and trade value.
Outside was so bright my eyes ached. Sun blazed up from honeysuckle shimmering with bees, from yellow brick and palms and old grass, and in front of me, Margie Flynn’s hair bouncing with each click of her heels on pavement.
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