The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  Marijuana leads to heroin, they used to say. I don’t know about that, but after awhile friars just don’t cut it, you want something stronger, something that’ll really take you there. You want a priest. Ever see The Thorn Birds, the way Rachel Ward longs for Richard Chamberlain? Or Preminger’s The Cardinal, with Romy Schneider yearning for some other gay guy, it’s a thrill to think, y’know, with a little luck, this man licking my cock could turn out to be the Prince of the Whole Church, the Supreme Pontiff, in ten or fifteen years and right now, you can almost see his soul shining right through his thinning blond hair, already he’s godly—Again the dreaming self rises above the squalid air of the black back room, the hush of the confessional, breaking free into a world of pleasure and Eros and hope, all I continue to pray for and more. Out in the snowy East of Long Island I bent over Frank O’Hara’s grave and traced his words with my tongue, the words carved into his stone there: “Grace to be born and to live as variously as possible.” Another lapsed Catholic trying to align the divine with the human.

  And because I was so willful, I made spoiling priests a kind of game, like Sadie Thompson does in Rain. Under those robes of black, I would think, are the white limbs of strong men. I trailed one priest, Fr. Carney, from assignment to assignment. I was his youth liaison—encouraged to inform on my peers’ drug habits, I had first to increase my own. You have to be a little hard, a little speedy, to become what we then called a “narc.” He also got me to bring along other youths to retreats staged on isolated Long Island mother houses. When I graduated from St. A— I continued to traipse after Fr. Carney, like Marlene Dietrich slinging her heels over her shoulder to brave the desert at the end of Morocco, all for Gary Cooper’s ass. “You don’t have to call me Father Carney,” he would say to me. “Call me Paul.” I felt like king of the hill, top of the heap. Oh, Paul, I would say, why am I being treated so well? “Because you are who you are,” he told me. “You are someone special. You are Kevin Killian.”

  I grew more and more spoiled, and he must have enjoyed my ripeness, up to a point; and then he left me, in this valley of tears. I remember standing in his room watching the cold green spectacle of Long Island Sound, leaves of yellow acacia tapping into the window, with this pair of black gym shorts pulled down just under my buttocks, and thinking to myself, I’ll bring him back to me with my hot skin and my healthy boy type sweat. And him, Paul, slouched on his king-size bed, turned away from me, bored, extinguished, his breviary pulled next to him like a teddy bear. “There’s a list on my desk,” he said. “Some of them may be calling you.” So when I pulled up my pants I’d have this list to turn to, the names of other priests, next!—Like one of those chain letters, filled with the names of strangers, to whom you have to send five dollars each or Mother will go blind. “You’re trading me too,” I said, before the door hit me on the ass. Thump.

  So the next guy called me, Father some Polish name, and he turned out to be—really into the Rosary . . . Around this time I got to thinking that despite what they told me, I was not someone special after all.

  These men were connoisseurs all right. They pulled out my cork and took turns sniffing it. Meanwhile the sommelier stood by, a smile in his eyes, attentive, alert. Disillusioned, dejected, I began to read the whims of these men not as isolated quirks, but as signs of a larger system, one in which pleasure, desire endlessly fulfilled, jouissance, are given more value. Within the Church’s apparently ascetic structure, the pursuit of pleasure has been more or less internalized. By and large, the pursuit (of violence, danger, beauty) is the structure. I had to hand it to them! Under their black robes those long legs were born to can-can. Pleasure, in a suburbia that understood only growth and money. Aretha Franklin said it best, singing on the radio while I moped from man to man. “Chain-chain-chain,” she chanted. “Chain of fools.”

  I met Dorothy Day in a private home in Brooklyn, when Father Paul took me to meet her. She was seventy then, and had been a legend for forty years, both in and out of the Church, for her activism, her sanctity, her saltiness. I had read all about her in Time magazine. She sat on a huge sofa almost dwarfed by these big Mario Buatta-style throw pillows, gold and pink and red. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, as though she were groggy. The way to get closer to Christ, she asserted, is through work. Father Paul argued mildly, what about the Golden Rule? Isn’t love the answer? No, she responded sharply,—work, not love. Last night on TV I watched The Trouble with Angels, in which mischievous Hayley Mills raises holy hell at a Long Island girls’ school, till she meets her match in imperious, suave Mother Superior Rosalind Russell. At the denouement she tells her plain girlfriend that she won’t be going to Bryn Mawr or even back to England. She’s decided to “stay on,” become a nun, clip her own wings. I remember again wavering on the brink, of becoming a priest, saying to myself, why don’t you do the—Hayley Mills thing? Saying it to myself from the back row of this cobwebbed movie house in a poky town on the North Shore of Long Island, fingering the beer between my legs, all alone in the dark.

  Now I’m all grown, Dorothy Day is dead, and when I open Time magazine I read about altar boys and seminarians suing priests. One quarter of all pedophile priests, they say, live in New Mexico. I have no interest in pursuing my “case” in a tribunal, but I’d like to view such a trial—maybe on Court TV? Or sit in the public gallery, next to John Waters, while my teachers take the stand and confess under pressure or Prozac. I’d get out a little sketchpad and charcoal and draw their faces, older now, confused and guilty and perhaps a little crazy. Then their accusers would come to the stand, confused, guilty, crazy, and I could draw in my own eyes into their various faces, into the faces of my pals and brothers.

  Oh how I envied them their privilege, their unflappable ease, the queers of the church. If they were as lonely as they claimed, weren’t there enough of them? If their love lives were dangerous, surely they would always be protected by the hierarchy that enfolded them. I remember one monk who had been sent away years before to a special retreat in Taos and he said, I didn’t want to have to come back and see any boys. But then I wanted to come back, it must have been to meet you, Kevin. And I pictured this empty desert sky with nothing in it but one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s cow skulls staring at me through time. My face broke into a smile and I said, “That is so sweet.”

  I broke with the Church over its policies on abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, just like you did. Perhaps its hypocrisy angered you, but that’s just human nature, no? What scared me was its monolithic structure. It’s too big either to fight or hide within, like the disconcerting house of the Addams Family. I tried to talk to It, but It just sat there, a big unresponsive sack of white sugar. So good-bye. And yet I suppose I’m a far better Catholic now than then. I dream of this god who took on the clothes of man and then stepped forward to strip them off at the moment of humiliation. This renunciation for a greater good remains with me an ideal of society and heaven. I try to get closer to Christ through work. I tried love for a long time but it only lengthened the distance between Him and me.

  So I try to call the number of St. A— to see where the 20th high school reunion will be. So that’s when I find out the school’s now defunct, for the usual reasons: indifference, inflation, acedia. I continue to see the Church as the house of Eros, a place of pleasure and fun, and I continue to regard men in religious costume as possible sex partners, yearning to break free. Such was my training, my ritual life. I can’t shake it off, I’m not a snake who can shed its skin. Every time I pass a crucifix I wonder, what if it had been me up there instead, could I have said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do? I don’t think I’m so special, not any more. At the church here in San Francisco, I bow down and make the sign of the cross, the logo of the Church, an imprint deep within forces me to replicate this logo. Up, down, left, right, the hand that seeks, then pulls away frustrated. The hand tightens, becomes a fist, the fist is raised to the sky, on the desert
’s edge, angry and queer. Inside the Church burns incense, tricky and deep-penetrating, strong, perdurable, like the smells of sand cherry, silverweed, trillium.

  Hobbits and Hobgoblins

  by Randall Kenan

  The world whispers to those who listen. Secrets collide in the air with visions of truth and particles of fancy. Listen. Hear the murmurs of owls speaking of buried treasures, the sparrows conversing over great battles of yore, the squirrels telling tales in hushed voices of the time an angel lighted on the shoulders of a young girl and allowed her to see the ghosts of her future. The voices canter about unceasing, sibilant and silken and silvery in the ether, containing all the wisdom of the great world; all the knowledge ever needed floats about in the air simply to be heeded, contained in faint hummings slightly louder than the chiming of the spheres. Any boy can hear. If he only listens.

  Malcolm sits in his grandmother’s chair, a great chair it is. In truth, a throne once owned by an Egyptian empress. Malcolm knows. She sat here, as he does, nibbling peacock’s brain and honey-covered hippopotamus eyes, fanned from behind by a Nubian, naked but for a blindingly white turban and gold bracelets. He fans Malcolm now, an idle coloring book in Malcolm’s lap while the gossamer plumes create an imperial breeze. Malcolm sighs.

  “Brandon, I’m really tired of discussing it.”

  “Don’t call me Brandon again, Denise. It’s Fetasha. Fetasha Yakob.”

  “Jesus, Brandon—”

  “Denise!”

  Malcolm’s father cannot see it, but a cobra slithers about his feet. Malcolm can see it. He does not worry. Malcolm knows it will not harm his father. The snake has a bright red hood and is striped like a barber’s pole in orange and black. It has no venom; but it can breathe fire when it is angry.

  “You have no respect for me or my beliefs.”

  “Brandon, you have no respect for you or your beliefs. You’ve changed your damn mind so much you don’t even know what you believe.”

  “Don’t use language like that in front of the kid.”

  “Jesus, Brandon. He’s six.”

  “Exactly. Set an example.”

  “Mother, can you believe this?”

  “Hm.”

  Malcolm grins when he sees that his grandmother, who sits ignoring his quarreling parents, trying to read a magazine, has a hobbit on her lap. The hobbit’s name is Fidor. He winks at Malcolm. Fidor’s orange hair is pulled back in a long ponytail and he wiggles his big toes in contentment, enjoying the grown-ups’ argument.

  “You are the one who hasn’t held a job in ten fucking years.”

  “Denise. The boy.”

  “Don’t come into my house and lecture me on how I should raise my son, Brandon. My god, you haven’t seen him in three months and suddenly you’ve decided you can’t live without him.”

  “He’s my son, Denise.”

  “You noticed. Finally. Took you six years.”

  “Don’t be mean, Denise. There’s no reason.”

  Malcolm is pleased to see that the blue cockatoo—a very rare creature, with the ability to fly through walls—is perched atop his mother’s head. The blue cockatoo sings in a Tibetan dialect taught to it by the great pirate Yeheman, a friend of Malcolm’s who invited him onto his flying pirate ship, the galleon Celestial, once. Yeheman wanted to take Malcolm on an expedition to the other side of the sun. But Malcolm had to go to school. Yeheman left the blue cockatoo with Malcolm as a bond of friendship. The cockatoo is named Qwnpft.

  “The answer is no, Brandon. No.”

  “The name is Fetasha, Denise. It means ‘search’ in Amharic, the Ethiopian tongue.”

  “I don’t care. No. You can’t take him.”

  “Only for a month, Denise.”

  “Not for a day.”

  “I have rights, you know.”

  “Sue me.”

  “Denise. I am his father.”

  “Brandon, I was there. For both events. The conception and the delivery. I know who the father is.”

  “You’re trying to be funny, Denise. This is not productive.”

  “You’re being flaky, Brandon. This is not sane.”

  The curtains are covered with speckled lizards, they chirp like birds and create melodies in eight-part harmony; gifts from the Maharajah of Zamzeer. He keeps sending gifts to Malcolm to gain his hand in marriage for his royal daughter, the ugly Princess Zamaha. Malcolm plans to hold out.

  “Mother, do you hear what your former son-in-law proposes to do?”

  “Hm.”

  Fidor giggles and slaps his knees; Qwnpft trills in Tibetan. Yamor, the black winged horse, another gift from the Maharajah, wanders into the room, up to Malcolm, and nuzzles him softly behind the ear. Yamor is lonely and wants to go for a fly. But Malcolm can’t right now. His parents are arguing.

  “Denise, I know how to take care of him. He’ll be well looked after.”

  “Brandon—”

  “Fetasha!’’

  “Whatever. You can’t even look after yourself. How on earth do you expect me to allow you to take my son to Jamaica for a month? Has this Rastafarian bullshit really messed your mind up that much?”

  “Denise. Your language.”

  “I cussed like a sailor when you met me, remember? That’s what you liked about me, or so you said.”

  A green orangutan hangs from the ceiling lamp; giant fire-red Amazonian toads play leapfrog in the thick carpet; a yerple sea turtle swims the length of the room, turning somersaults as he completes laps over everyone’s head. Underneath the coffee table perch three demons, Ksiel, Lahatiel, and Shaftiel, whom Malcolm caught a week ago trying to punish a knight. He has made them his slaves. They smoke long pipes of blue tobacco, which puffs up in pungent clouds of pink.

  Today is Malcolm’s sixth birthday. Jerome, Sheniqua, Perry, William, Davenport, Clarise, Sheryl, Tameka, Yuko, Bharati, John, Björn, Ali, Federica, Francesca, and Kwame came to his party. School will be over in three weeks, his grandmother says, and he will be taken from his Kingdom in the Land of New Jersey to his summer residence in the Land of the Carolinas, to rule with his Imperial cousins at the Imperial Palace at Tims-on-the-Creek. But now his father, who used to be a sorcerer named Mahammet al-Saddin and has now become this Prince Fetasha Yakob, plans to steal him away to the island principality of Jamaica, where rules, Malcolm has heard tell, the sinister Lord Jam-Ka. His father must need him to do serious battle. But Prince Fetasha must convince the Empress, his mother. Malcolm is worried.

  “Just stop asking, Brandon. You are not going to let my son smoke ganja and commune with Ja and fiddle with some crystal around his neck. And what on earth are you wearing anyhow, Brandon? You look like . . . Jesus, what does he look like, Mama?”

  “Hm.”

  “What’s that around vour neck?”

  “Cowrie shells. And the name is Bran—I mean Fetasha.”

  “Your name is Brandon Church Harrington, okay? And that’s what I’m going to call you.”

  “You continue to disrespect me, just as you always did. That’s what ruined our marriage.”

  “O Lord, here we go. How dare you—”

  Prince Fetasha came to Malcolm’s party as a surprise. He tiptoed around back, in through the wood, and made a grand entrance in the backyard, coming through the hedges. He scared Malcolm’s friends. Malcolm was surprised and happy. Malcolm’s mother was angry. They fail to “communicate,” his mother once told him. They’re just from different worlds, child, his grandmother said. His grandmother likes Prince Fetasha. He likes Prince Fetasha too.

  “How can a man, a black man, with your background, with a degree from Morehouse with Honors, no less, with a J.D. from fucking Yale, fucking Yale, go around with his head twigged up like a reggae singer, wearing—what the hell is it you have on, Brandon? I liked last year’s getup much better—Do you know how
much you’d be pulling down if . . . ? I have to take a Valium every time I think about it—’’

  “It’s always money with you.”

  “You were the one born with a trust fund, okay? Don’t talk to me about money. I worked my way through med school, fool. You don’t even pay alimony, which I could still contest.”

  “I don’t caaarre about money, Denise. Can’t you get that through—”

  “You don’t caaarre about anything. Except your hair.”

  Malcolm’s mother, the Empress of the Kingdom of Orange, in the Land of New Jersey, is a baby doctor, a pediatrician. Her office has walls of tangerine and licorice and lime and lemon and blueberry. Grandmother, the Queen Mother, takes him there sometimes. All their subjects, waiting for an audience, sit in the candy-flavored room playing with blocks and trucks and rainbow-assorted animals—toys Malcolm now finds boring. The Empress doesn’t have any video games there.

  “Okay, for the last time—now I’m going to say this slowly, Mr. Rasta, so you can possibly, perhaps, maybe, understand me: Under. No. Circumstance. Will. I. Allow. You. To. Take. My. Son—the one who’s sitting over there in that chair. With. You. Any. Where. Not Jamaica. Not Ethiopia. Not Newark. Not New York. Not to the convenience store down the road. After your last escapade, Mr. ‘I’ll-have-him-back-Sunday-night,’ Malcolm is OFF LIMITS. If you want to see him, you do it here. There he is. Now look.”

  “Denise. You’re being unreasonable again.”

  “Unreasonable? Again? Need I remind you that you kidnapped—”

  “Kidnapped is unfa—”

  “You were gone for a week—”