“Who cares what the Catholic Church thinks?” Scott asked.
Neil stared at Scott open-mouthed. “Some people think God is important in their lives.”
“Yeah, but the Catholic Church? Who can take a church seriously that declares some man to be infallible. He’s just some guy.”
“The Pope is not just some guy. And he’s only infallible in faith and morals,” Neil corrected.
“I don’t care if he’s only infallible in balls and strikes. He’s just a guy,” Scott reiterated.
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” Pity for a poor, ignorant jock dripped from Neil’s voice.
“I’m not the one going to hell for my sexuality,” Scott retorted.
Touché, I thought, but I didn’t want to hear them bicker. I wanted data. “What happened after the letter?” I asked.
Neil told the story. Bishops around the country started throwing gay groups out of their churches. In spring 1988, events came to a head in Chicago. The gay Catholics held meetings—chaotic was Neil’s mildest term for them. Tears and recriminations, shouts and threats, compromises and desperate attempts at reconciliation all proved futile. Out they had to go. The Faith group splintered in three. The largest, retaining the Faith name, kept most of the leadership and moved to the old dance studio. They kept close ties to the national organization, which declared—probably heretically, Neil thought—that being gay was okay. The other groups named themselves Hope and Charity.
The Hope group, as far as Neil knew, was still trying to work within the current church structure. The Charity group, smallest of the splinters, had something to do with the Council of Trent and Latin masses. Neil didn’t know any more about them beyond that. Personally, he was glad the two groups split off. The people remaining in the Faith group now had a much easier time moving on their political agenda.
He went on. “We even got the chancery to send over their big-deal troubleshooter, Bishop John Smith, to a meeting. I think he came because he and Sebastian were old friends from seminary days. Did no good. Smith was a total arrogant snot, and you know it takes a lot for me to accuse someone of that vice.”
“During these meetings,” I asked, “did Father Sebastian take sides, lead any fights, make any enemies?”
Neil paused and thought. “Not that I remember. No.” He said that Sebastian had sat back, tried to help each speaker clarify his thoughts or express himself, tried to get people to listen to one another.
“What kind of trouble could he get in from the Cardinal by staying with you guys?” I asked.
“Hard to tell. If the Cardinal learned about it, he could get suspended from priestly duties.” Neil shrugged. “Sebastian never seemed to worry about it.”
“Are all priests gay?” Scott asked.
“All the ones I know are,” Neil said. “It’s an extremely closeted homophobic society. The most closeted ones being the most homophobic.” Neil harrumphed and returned to describing his fellow board members.
Bartholomew was exactly as he seemed: a lonely old man terrified of offending anyone, especially Priscilla. Neil hadn’t known of the weekly visits from Sebastian, yet found this typical of the priest’s kindliness.
Clayton, a new board member, little known to Neil, was given to non sequiturs and drooling over sports heroes.
Prentice we all knew. “I think you should get behind his flighty queen exterior. That boy knows secrets, I can feel it. I didn’t know Sebastian met someone secretly.”
“I thought you knew all the dirt in town,” I said.
“Not like I used to. Plus he’s a bartender. They have a network all their own. Besides, I know he went downstairs after Mass before Sebastian died.”
“You haven’t said anything?”
“No. I saw him only because I was down there too.” Now he looked sheepish. A first in our relationship.
I demanded an explanation.
“Every Sunday I went to confession after Mass.”
I gaped at him.
He drew himself to full queenly erectness in his chair, almost knocking over the tray of desserts the waitress was offering him. He chose his dessert, a double helping of chocolate cream pie, looked at us, looked at it, and proceeded to devour it before he spoke. “I will not be called to account even by you, Tom Mason, dear friend that you are, and I know you don’t really want to know my lists of sins, unfortunately far fewer than they once were.” The point was that he’d gone down, confessed, and left a smiling Sebastian. On his way back up the stairs, Neil had passed Prentice going down. He hadn’t noticed Prentice return.
I asked why he hadn’t mentioned this before. Too ashamed to tell in front of the group, he claimed. That sounded lame to me after knowing him all these years. He answered by reiterating that he knew of no reason any of them had to kill Father Sebastian, including Prentice. He didn’t want to make public accusations in a group still emotionally upset by all the recent changes and divisions.
“Did Sebastian ever talk about this Father Clarence guy?” I asked.
“Nope. He seldom talked about himself, much less anyone else.”
I repeated that I wanted to talk to Monica’s source in the chancery. If we could break through the church silence, I was sure we’d find out what, if anything, had happened in the basement of that dance studio. He said he’d try his best.
Before leaving, Neil told us Prentice had the nine-to-two shift that night at Bruce’s Halfway There Bar. We might stop in and talk to him about his trip downstairs.
We decided to drop the car at Scott’s and walk to Bruce’s, a couple of blocks down North Avenue just past Wells Street in a building that looked as if it’d been put up the day after the Chicago Fire. On the way, Scott asked about Catholics and confession. I explained as best I could for someone raised in a vaguely Protestant home, but who’d grown up in a heavily Catholic suburb. He shook his head. Reared Southern Baptist and knowing few Catholics as he grew up, he found it foreign.
“I don’t see Neil doing something like that,” Scott said.
“Belief makes people do weird things, I guess,” was my only comment.
Bruce’s Halfway There Bar is a very discreet, high-class bar. It used to be the only gay bar Scott would go to, for fear of being exposed as gay. Now he’d enter any of them, as long as he didn’t have to put up with obnoxious gay fans who wanted to know the secret sex lives of all major league baseball players. I’ve never asked. I’m only interested in our sex life.
It was a quiet Sunday night, with all of six patrons, four of them seated at least three stools apart at the long bar that ran the length of the left-hand wall as you walked in. Two sat in the front booth discreetly holding hands under the table, knees touching, sixty years old apiece if a day, eyes only for each other, very much in love, it looked to me.
After getting a couple of Watney’s on draft from Prentice and asking him to join us when he got a minute, we checked into the back booth. A semicircular affair with high-backed walls, it offered all the privacy a frightened closet case could want. I liked it because it would ensure privacy in our interview. One company must make the cushions for all such booths. Otherwise, how could all the seats be the same dull red color mixed with a multitude of matching rips and tears in the fabric?
As occasional hairdresser, bartender, and hustler, Prentice Dowalski lived one of the more unconventional lives I knew of. Whimsy and chance seemed to be his ruling passions. On a given night he might turn down a thousand-dollar hunk of a trick for some little old man who’d saved for a year to pay fifty dollars for half an hour. Prentice talked about his two arrests as if they were a lark, claiming he’d seduced two or three cops each time.
Instead of lifting the partition and walking over to us, Prentice hopped to the top of the bar, twirled his legs over and around, and jumped down. He’d changed clothes from church. Now his pants clung tightly to his ass, hips, and legs, clearly outlining his dick and balls. The modified muscle shirt emphasized thinness rather than muscul
arity. Thin combined with cute can cover a multitude of sins.
We got breezy greetings and slaps on the back. He sat with his right arm draped around Scott’s shoulders, body intimately pressed close, left hand disappearing under the table.
Scott gave him a mild look. “Sorry, I’m taken, and if you don’t move your hand in two seconds, it’ll come back broken.”
Prentice whooped with laughter, moved a discreet six inches to his left, and folded his hands primly on top of the table. His tenor voice existed just this side of an annoying whine.
“You guys are so married. I bet you’ve never cheated on each other.”
Nine years we’ve been together. At the beginning we promised each other we’d be faithful. I never have cheated. Neither has he, or I’d like to think I’d know if he had. Now, of course, any sane gay couple didn’t cheat, or had to cheat so very, very carefully it was hardly worth it.
As a hustler Prentice had told us numerous times quite sanctimoniously how careful he was to do only safe sex. I hoped for his sake he wasn’t giving two guys in their late thirties a line he thought they wanted to hear.
“Sad about Father Sebastian,” I said.
“A great old guy. I’ll miss him. I mentioned I sold my body for a living to that other priest, that Larkin guy. I thought he’d have a stroke. Didn’t faze Sebastian. Asked me if I made a good living and if I was happy. Never brought it up unless I did first. Neat guy.”
I asked if he agreed with the older people’s idea that there was something strange about Father Sebastian’s death.
“Yep, sure, they’re real adults. Stuff like that’s important to them.”
He returned to the bar to fix a round of drinks and did his jump, twirl, and hop routine coming and going over the bar. Youthful energy can be nauseating at times.
“What’d you go down to see Father Sebastian about last Sunday?” I asked.
He tried feigning confusion, threw in a little indignation, and settled into a pout. “Who says they saw me?”
I gazed at him levelly. He turned to Scott, whose blue eyes have bored through tougher defense mechanisms than Prentice ever dreamed of. Mine in particular. Scott stared calmly. Prentice gave a guilty gulp and said, “Okay, so I went to talk to him.”
“About what?”
Prentice evinced a pronounced stutter as he blushed and squirmed out his explanation. He’d been talking every week for some months with Father Sebastian about going to confession. His chosen profession provided the major obstacle. Prentice wanted to make a real confession. As he put it, “A get-into-heaven no-strings-attached deal.” Father Sebastian sympathized, but he wanted a commitment about quitting or at least cutting back on the hustling. He himself had no special problem with Prentice’s job, but he thought the church and God might. Prentice saw the logic in that idea and agreed to meet with Father Sebastian each week, at least to talk over his sins, working up to a confession. Prentice had gone down to set a time for later that night. He claimed he left the priest humming quietly.
He looked at me head down, eyes and lashes raised à la Lauren Bacall. The effect was less than enchanting. He couldn’t pull it off. I couldn’t picture him going to confession either, but I didn’t detect any lie in his voice. Maybe the kid wanted to get out of the life. Maybe he’d found someone who’d listen to him and take him seriously as something beyond a sex object.
“There is one thing I should add.” He smirked.
I encouraged him with a nod.
That night he’d seen Bartholomew enter the john, heard the old guy cough and spit. The john was a four-by-four cubicle across the hall from the sacristy. When there weren’t a lot of people or noise you could hear men’s or women’s piss hit the water. Prentice reported this last with great relish.
So at least three of them had made unadmitted forays to the basement a short time before Father Sebastian’s death. With the john so close, any number of people could have come down and used it.
Prentice interrupted my reverie. “What you really want is the totally deep dish I know on all the board members.”
I raised an eyebrow.
He did the round of drinks routine and returned. “You’re ruining business.” He pointed discreetly to a well-dressed elderly gentleman alone at the bar. “You’re looking at a thousand-dollar trick,” he said.
“Talk,” I commanded.
Mainly he knew about Priscilla and Monica. The younger woman had made a play for the older. Monica’d rejected her, none too gently. According to Prentice’s source, whom he wouldn’t name, Priscilla still had the hots for her. “I think it must be Monica’s tits.”
I gave him a questioning look.
“They’re huge,” he informed me.
I hadn’t noticed. I don’t pay attention to a woman’s endowments. Now, a guy’s crotch I can talk about fold by crease. There’s nothing like a hot basket, tight ass, broad shoulders, and solid stomach muscles.
He continued. “Anyway, just recently dear Priscilla got pitched from an all-woman’s commune apartment house after only three weeks.” Prentice heard they’d got fed up with her more-politically-correct-than-thou attitude and ditched her. Monica let her live in the back half of the third floor of the house they used to put the newspaper together. Prentice had been to Monica’s mansion, too, actually three houses on Wellington Avenue between Broadway and Clark that she’d bought and had renovated into one huge place. “Furniture to die for. Each room better than a showroom. Class from floor to ceiling. Ten-foot Art Deco sconces from Vienna flanked the front door. The main fireplace was faced with bird’s-eye maple applied in a grid.” He went on to describe numerous other examples of chic elegance. He’d taken a number of the gentlemen he entertained to parties there, explored every crevice, and promised himself he’d have the same someday.
Several new customers came in. He swung over to serve them.
The last of the newcomers proved to be Brian Clayton. He spotted us and hurried over.
“Neil said I might catch you here,” he said.
We invited him to join us. He grabbed a Heineken and sat down next to Scott. He dithered a few moments, being the shy fan, but Scott’s used to that and put him at ease. They talked curve balls and strikeouts for several minutes. Brian had a great deal of advice on how to pitch to certain hitters. Scott bore it all with equanimity. He’d gone through that before.
Prentice saw Brian and didn’t rejoin us. Brian said, “I wanted to talk to you guys. Partly because of Scott. I still can’t believe you’re gay. Are there other—”
Scott cut him off. “Sorry. I’ve never asked how many gay athletes there are, and I don’t care.”
“Sorry. Curious, is all.”
Scott nodded noncommittally.
Brian also wanted to talk murder. After a wary glance to see that Prentice was at the other end of the bar and couldn’t hear, he said, “I’m not in with the other board members. They’re real cliqueish. A bunch of my buddies got together. We wanted somebody on the board from those of us who were newer so we wouldn’t be ignored anymore.” This was one of the reasons he paid close attention to new members each time. He wanted to get to them before the other faction did. Eventually he and his group wanted to vote the others out. Seems Neil had ignored them, and they were totally fed up with Priscilla. I could picture Neil freezing them out. The old A-list gay syndrome from years back lurked very near and dear to Neil’s heart. The old queen considered class and custom the cornerstones of western civilization.
“That Priscilla’s a bitch.” Clayton continued, listing her many sins and slights. “I never knew so many ways a person could be rude. At one meeting I counted her nasty comments: none directed at Monica of course, four at me, three at Neil, eight at poor Bartholomew, six at Larkin, two at Prentice, none at Sebastian.”
He never saw any of them socially. Bartholomew and Prentice followed the lead of the others in treating him as an outcast. He resented it. He explained that he told us all this because he had know
ledge of their movements that Sunday. “I want you to know I’m prejudiced against these people from the start, so you can judge fairly when you hear what I have to say.”
I gave a nod of encouragement.
He took a sip of his beer, wrapped his hands around the green bottle, and looked again to see where Prentice was. Leaning closer and continuing in a whisper, he told us that after Mass on Sunday a week ago he’d been waiting for his lover, Arnie, whose parents were in town, making him late for church. He’d watched the door continuously in anticipation of his imminent arrival. He emphasized this several times. Then, after Father Sebastian had gone down to change, all six of the others had at one point or another gone downstairs, Priscilla being the last, before Brian himself. No one else from the congregation had descended. None of them knew he’d been watching.
When he’d gone downstairs to go to the washroom, he’d heard noises in the sacristy. “I went in and”—he gulped, then continued—“I saw him die. It was terrible.” He paused to pull himself together.
“That must have been awful for you,” I said, to break the silence.
“Yeah,” he said weakly. He took a sip of beer, shuddered, then resumed.
“You seem like okay guys. I think I can trust you. Sometimes with those others it’s a fucking zoo. They don’t have to be outrageous or obnoxious every minute. Even Monica and that damn cigarette holder are stupid.” He didn’t know what to do with his knowledge. He didn’t want to go to the police. He felt a certain loyalty to protecting his own. He also was afraid the cops might think him stupid or might even suspect him. After our meeting with the whole group, he wanted to talk to us. So when Neil came back and told them we might be going to Bruce’s, he decided to stop by.
“How did you get along with Father Sebastian?” I asked.
“He was always good to me. Went out of his way to make me feel welcome. If someone killed him, I’d like to see them caught. I can’t believe anybody would murder him.”
The Only Good Priest Page 4