The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
Page 18
On the way to the cemetery our Volkswagen stalled at a stoplight and Charles Sapp’s daddy had to push us with his Impala.
We stood under a canopy held up with poles and when I sat down in the metal chair one leg sank into the ground so that I was tilted. The casket was lowered into the dirt on nylon straps between brass poles. I remembered that Tim had said if everybody that ever lived was buried, there wouldn’t be room left on the earth for the living. When they began to shovel the mound onto him, I started to panic. What if he was in a coma and wasn’t really dead, what if he woke up and found himself packed into solid darkness with only a few horrible hours of air left? I had to tell someone! They had to pull him back up and check, wait a few days. And then I remembered about embalming. That’s when Tim really died for me.
An aunt of Tim’s was there, a woman he’d once told me hated his guts, and she cried so hard that Tim’s parents had to support her all the way down the hill into the black limousine.
I followed my parents slowly to the car, and my father was unlocking it when I noticed a pretty blonde girl in the distance, saw that she was looking at me, and then knew that it was Margie Flynn. She said something to her mother. My parents ducked into the smell of overheated plastic, and Margie ran towards me holding the hem of her white dress against her legs. I hadn’t seen her since before. She was beautiful.
Margie hugged me and drew back and said, “Oh! Did I hurt you? I forgot.” She looked at me and hugged me again, carefully, nice smelling and soft, the only pleasant thing I’d been conscious of for days. She said, “Call me whenever you feel like it,” and, so my parents wouldn’t hear, she moved her lips without sound, saying I love you.
She walked away then, turning back twice to wave. I could see her when I got home if I wanted. I realized that, and realized I wasn’t dead. Tim was behind us, underground. I’d had it wrong for days. I got into the car and cried like I was having a seizure.
For a long time everyone was very, very nice to me.
Not Approved by the Comics Code Authority
The adventure actually had the effect we’d intended, though Tim’s death crushed any possibility of satisfaction. We did not return to school after the accident, Kavanagh never again mentioned our comic-book obscenity, and Blessed Heart graduated us, though I didn’t attend the ceremony. Our gang became legendary. The local TV stations sent crews to Marshland Island and interviewed Paul Steatham. There were wobbly close-ups of a stain on the wood of the observation platform, supposedly from Tim, and ominous shots of the empty bobcat pen. The cats had all been destroyed by the police. A group of citizens got very angry about that, and I agreed with them. It was our fault, not the bobcats’.
I spent so much lonely time in my room that summer that I became very good at drawing. That and Margie Flynn sustained me through the miseries of high school, after most of my friends had moved away. A couple of years ago I stopped in Tennessee to visit Rusty Scalisi, who was working for his father, running a contracting company. We got very drunk at a hamburger bar, and I suggested that if Tim was alive he’d either be some kind of folk-hero artist or a radical crusader. Rusty said, “He wouldn’t be alive now, even if he hadn’t gotten killed when he did. People like that die young. They have an influence on other people that lasts, but they don’t.” I was inspired by that observation to create a comic-book story about Tim.
Margie and I lasted through most of high school. Until I was seventeen, she was the only girl I had ever kissed, and I began to feel cheated a little, and suggested we date other people for a while. Most other girls were uninteresting after Margie, and I was thinking finally of asking her to marry me. But during our separation, which had sent her into a depression I still feel guilty about, she started dating a variety of men and didn’t want to stop. When I suggested an engagement, she was going out simultaneously with a married forty-year-old bank manager and a baseball player who hit her when he was drunk. It became difficult even to stay friends. When we went off to different colleges, I heard she had gotten involved with an older girl, and I was so stunned by this at the time that I lost touch with her. By the time I’d gotten over it, there didn’t seem to be any reason to get in contact with her. She’s one of my biggest regrets. I’m still in love with her memory.
After art school I created an underground comic book called The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, about a group of teenage anarchists who battle hypocrisy, injustice, and eternal bullshit. Their leader is a long-haired skeleton with a halo, a boy who died and rose from the dead to remake the world the way he thought it should be. I got a lot of letters, unusual for an underground magazine. Most of them were from adults, and most of them were very encouraging. A few were shocked by the rough language and outrageous ideas and the drugs. I threw those away.
Last time I attended a comic-book convention in Atlanta, a man from DC Comics in New York came to my booth and asked me if I’d be interested in mass marketing Altar Boys now that the Comics Code Authority was dead and they could do whatever they wanted. I’m going up to sign a contract next month. I want people to see and hear the things I can see and hear. And I want them to remember how it was when they were children. I don’t want them to grow up entirely.
Every adult is the creation of a child. My own signature, that identifying scrawl required by parcel postmen and valued by a handful of comic-book fans, that signature was devised by a thirteen-year-old boy who thought I’d want to seem important one day. I am stuck with it. My life is the result of that boy’s dreams and limitations, and of the company that boy kept a long time ago, back when things could still happen for the first time.
Chris Fuhrman grew up as a Catholic in Savannah, Georgia, where he was born in 1960. He attended Armstrong State College and Yale University before receiving his master's degree from Columbia University. Fuhrman died of cancer in May 1991 while working on the final revision of The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.
The life this novel enjoys as a published work is due in large part to the dedication and tireless efforts of the author’s friend and peer,
DAVID ELLIOTT KIDD
Table of Contents
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
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