It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 9: Part 1: Allegro 1957-1968/Chapter I

Coarse and offensive language. Reader Discretion Advised.

In the story of a person's life, there are many central characters. There are the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, and the brothers. The friends, the thieves, the children, and the lovers. But above them all, at least in regards to the story of the Great Carr, there is no more important a character than the place of birth. The hometown. It had many names and meant many things to many different people. The Puritans' Dream. The Metropolis of Enlightenment. The Incubator of Revolution. The City on a Hill.

Or as Mr. Alfonso Ignatius Carr, in time christened Bud, and then Alan, and then Bud again, called it:

Boston, Massachusetts.

God smiles on ye, oh Citadel of Cities! Crown Jewel of Americana!

Go on and search! Scour the wide and vast expanse of modernity! See with keen eyes! Squint and peer with all your might, but you will never find a place quite like Boston. For this is a city unlike any in all of Columbia. It is no New York, for she is but a wife. Not Chicago, a bloviating sister, nor Los Angeles, a paltry and stale mistress.

No.

Boston is a mother! A matriarch of enormous strength, and no matter the persistent whims of her spoiled and lamentable children, nothing can ever break her hold. And try these children do, always striving for freedom, always succumbing to their inevitable failure. No matter how they curse Mother, no matter the rails and rants they pile at her feet, the quivers and tears and racking guilt they feel at her stern admonishments, the souls of the children and the city are forever entwined. Unbreakable! For they may dream of greener pastures, but they will never be brave enough to go far from her shadow. They cannot bear to part for long!

But Mother-City is cold and desolate, with nary a kind word to say about anyone, least of all her children. She is entitled and vengeful; selfish and vain. Her intelligence knows only the limit of her ego, and no amount of scandal and derision can clip the wings of her self-worth. The greatest of her children, the sons and daughters of note, all flee to far flung corners of the globe, onto greater endeavors! Anybody who wants to be 'somebody' flies the nest, but they are few and far between. Most stay trapped and cornered and smothered. They are a desperate and despondent majority! The things they could have been, could have done...Ah, but those are things that live on as nothing more than faint whispers of a long-forgotten dream, always tickling at the periphery of their conscious. They are the price for comfort. The sacrifice for the always needy Mother.

But do they hate her? Do they scorn and resent her fickle demands?

Never!

They love Mother with all of their hearts. To them, those poor, befuddled bastards and bitches, Boston is the center of the world.

Are they delusional?

Yes.

And could this devotion be unique to Bostonians, or is it a trait of all Americans? Perhaps, could it be a human characteristic not especial to geography, but a symptom of the race? That is to say, do all peoples feel such a debt of servitude to the location of their birth?

Yes, of course!

Understand this: Boston is no anomaly. It is merely a representation of all that we hold to, that afflicts us! In Boston, as in every society and culture, there is a bondage of place and time, a term to be served. There are scars to acquire before you may dub yourself a scion. To be a child of Mother-City, most anointed, highest praised of all, you must devote yourself. You cannot count among the offspring if you are just born in the confines, nor if you come to Mother as an 'adopted'. You do not count as one of her's if you are born and soon flee, even if your flight is not your sin. To be a true Bostonian, you must live out your life from conception to decay nestled in her bosom. Not part of your life, not a majority. 

No. 

Life!

But there is more!

 First! You must be born in Suffolk County. Not Worcester, Middlesex, or some other hellish place within the Commonwealth that likes to pretend they're as good as Mother. Suffolk County, and Suffolk County alone.

Second! You must live long enough to become sufficiently jaded, and your accent devoid of properly placed 'Rs'. Until the pictures of the Sacred Heart and Jack Kennedy and Ted Williams hang on your parlor wall; and when you have accomplished all of this, truly accomplished it, not just playacted, then, and only then, may you move onto the third and final and most important stipulation:

The Day of Reckoning!

It happens without warning. You wake, you stretch, you look out your window, you smell the salt air, you shiver in the rigid, cold wind. Then, compelled by an unseen power, you find yourself suddenly on your hands and knees, and you grovel and scrape and beg God: 'Dear Lord Jesus, please. Please! PLEASE! Get me the fuck outta here!'

Ah, but you are not done yet, for now there is a fork in the road presented to you, and you must choose wisely for here wait dark angels of sin, ready to rend all your hard living useless should you choose wrong.

Turn left, and take the guileful road most traveled. Leave. Leave Mother and be forever a jilted bride destined to wander the Earth a Brutus to all nations...or turn right and stay within her crushing embrace until you turn to dust and are lost in the obscurity that is the center of the world. Turn right, and God help you then, for you may stand true and call yourself a Bostonian.

Of course, not all Bostonians are created equal, and a debate has raged for many a generation on which locale—neighborhood—within Mother-City is the most central part of the center. The heart, so to speak. Some say it's South Boston, Southie for short, but only the people of South Boston would say that, and they are a rather...silly...lot. Stupid, in fact. Practically Neanderthals over there. So we'll consider their opinion as nature considers the opinion of a Gulf Coast home builder, and say no more about them here. 

An argument has also been made for Beacon Hill, home of the gold domed State House, but those who make such a case are predominantly White Protestants, so their opinion, neither asked for, nor appreciated, doesn't count. 

There are others  too who would have you believe the center of the center is located in Dorchester, or Jamaica Plain, or Roxbury, or, God forbid, Charlestown. Let it be known here and now that those people would be right if they weren't so very wrong. (It must be noted that there have been claims that the center resides in the affluently youthful sections of Cambridge, but those people are far too intellectual to realize that Cambridge isn't in Suffolk County, but rather across the Charles River in Middlesex, which means, as appreciated as their educated views are, they can take said views and, politely as possible, go fuck themselves!)

The correct answer, known only to a few, is actually a small parish, not even a neighborhood, north of Downtown, crushed between the Mystic River and the Bunker Hill Monument. If you're lucky enough to locate it on a map, bravo to you, but to the rest, you will find nothing of significance or notoriety here. Even when the parish is spoken of, it is done so with a mixture of disgust and superiority, and so it has been since the very beginning. To Bostonians of a lesser class, that parish of six cramped and cobbled streets, a lawless kingdom unto itself, has never been anything more than a cancerous mole upon Mother's face.

But those people are blinded by their own conceit. For, ugly and unvarnished as it might be, here lies the beating heart.

Friends, Americans, and the rest of you unworthy, unrepentant heathens of worse off nations, here lies:

St. Gregory's Parish!

Or, as Alfonso Ignatius still called it:

'Home.'

Footnote:

Just so there is no confusion, it must be noted that there are actually two St. Gregory's in Mother-City. The nice one in Dorchester—nice being relative and defined by regularly flushing toilets and lace curtains—and the St. Gregory's of Alan Carr's youth, which is the only St. Gregory's hence forth to be mentioned.