It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 13: Chapter II

Coarse and offensive language. Reader Discretion Advised.

There are some smells that never leave you. You can be anywhere in the world and there will be the faintest odor in the air, and suddenly your memory will burst with want. Your heart ticks faster as your breath catches in your throat. Places of youth, long dead, come to mind—and faces! Smiling faces. Happy faces. Faces without pain. Faces perpetually caught in time. Whatever came before, whatever comes next, here they are, these ageless faces in those undying places, floating in scent, calling for you, beckoning...waiting.

To Alan Carr, it was the smells of peeling varnish on a bar top, and cigarettes stubbed in ashtrays. God, he loved the smell of cigarettes—and beer! Beer foaming in glass. Beer fermenting on the sticky floorboards that squelched under foot like wet cement—and sweat! Not all sweat, but the specific sweat that rolls off foreheads. Sweat of toil and release that lodges in the clothes of those who wash, but never shed themselves of stink. These smells, common enough, only meant one thing to our man. One memory.

O'Toole's.

Mr. O'Toole, (he only ever gave a family name, and no one thought to ask for his given), was a dutiful servant of the parish, so dutiful that the good St. Gregorites couldn't remember a time that he hadn't been positioned behind his bar. To them, he was like Peter. The gatekeeper with the keys to paradise. Paradise in a bottle. A more tangible salvation than ever was hinted in the gospels and tales of resurrections.

O'Toole, unlike the actual Peter, was quite liberal with his allowance for entry into this kingdom. All were welcomed, with no requirement for age or social status, religious affiliation, or number of sins committed. Money, the most vexing issue for St. Gregorites, was never an obstacle. Never once did O'Toole have to chase down a patron who'd stiffed him. It wasn't that he was a pushover, it was just that no one ever thought to stiff the man, and this was the parish where a man kept a pet lion to scare off his creditors. But you always found the money for O'Toole, you don't stiff him whom you depend on, body and soul.

Monday through Thursday, there were stragglers and regulars. On Friday nights came the part-timers, Mr. Donavan and his ilk, and then Saturday—

And suddenly here was the whole of the parish! 

Men, women, children, who, six days a week existed, out of work, out of service, useless to society, would now pack O'Toole's. The music would blare. There was a jukebox over near bathrooms, but that's not music. That's noise. Real music came from the St. Gregory's Cèili band, propped up on the raised platform in the center of the room, each member three sheets to the wind, except for their valiant leader, Freddy McKinny, whose teeth, after years of biting down on his tin whistle, were ground to stubs. Freddy was never three sheets to the wind, he wasn't such an amateur. By the time the party really got going on a Saturday, he was swaying between the fifth and sixth sheet. He couldn't stand straight if you tied him to a lamppost, but by Christ, he could play that whistle. The whole band was like that. The drunker they were, the better they played, and they played everything and anything. The Irish favorites. Elvis. Sam Cooke. The Beatles. Motown! (There might not have been a black person within 30 blocks, but that didn't mean St. Gregorites couldn't appreciate their tunes. When all is said and done and the history books are completed, it may well be that Americans could never quite overcome the differences in skin tones, but it should never be written that the pastier complexions didn't flock to the music of the darker. Stole it too, but before they figured out how to steal it, they flocked.) And the audience, crushed together, sweaty body clinging to sweaty body, pounding down glasses and pins and full bottles of their favorite off-brand labels, were carried away by the music. They danced and they sang and they screamed out their troubles to the heavens, until their screams turned to whoops and hollers of drunken exultation.

There was Jame and Luna Halak, she being best friends with Marie, the daughter of Nora Lynch, and he the parish choir master, who was as deaf as a doornail, and therefore was unbothered by the tunelessness of his choir; Harry, husband of Lena, who was once tasked to rewire the electricity of the church, and ended up shorting out the entire neighborhood for what became known as the 'Spring of Darkness'; Lena had a sister, Marina, who married a Manuel from Italy, who came to this country with his father, Joseph, the lead tenor of the choir, (the only one that knew what pitch was); Joseph was first cousins with Paul, who was the father of Virgil, who married Marla, who was second cousin to Connor Kelly, a fourth cousin of Mrs. Donavan; there was Mark, who went by Marcel, for he dreamed of owning a French Bistro, despite thinking that olive and canola oils were brand names; there was Tanned Bob, whose even tan was, he  confessed one Saturday night, not a tan at all, but the skin stains of high blood pressure; Tanned Bob had a best friend named Bob, or Other Bob for short, who lived with his mother, Beatrice, who only dressed in black, despite never having been widowed, and who was determined to see her son married before God called her home, but who was spurred by Other Bob, who didn't marry until exactly one year to the day that Beatrice choked to death on her rice pudding; Bella, the organist, married Bernard, who may or may not have been divorced from Teresa; Benjamin, who once played professional baseball in the age when it was acceptable to murder umpires; Mitch, who never said much, and only ever wore undershirts despite his psoriasis; Martin married Julie, and she had a brother named Jerry, who fashioned himself a documentarian, and always carried an 8 mm camera with him to record the life and times of the parish, he married Annie, a pianist, and together they had a son, Henry, who took up the violin and made his fortune in Cleveland; Helen, no relation to any of the above, once convinced a DMV attendant to renew her husband Ray's license with the excuse that her eyes 'work just fine'; Ingrid had the most incredible head of natural, red-flaming hair, and was married to Other Jerry, who also never said much, but had a respectable mustache and a much debated limp; Ralph Kane smoked five packs in a day and looked like a camel, while his sister, Margo, smoked eight packs and spit like a camel; there was Tall Madeline, neighbor to Rose, whom everyone called Hat Lady on account of her many wide-brimmed and colorful hats; Little Madeline married Ash, (the residents outright refused to call a grown man Ashley), the world's worst coffeemaker; Doom-and-Gloom Madeline, whose face said it all; Robin married Larry Bianchi and they lived with their four children in the three decker next door to the Lynches; the eldest child was Lauren, who married Christian, who had a good business doing the (legitimate) books for Sammy the Pollack and O'Toole; David came next, he was a firefighter, who married Caitlyn, who taught the second grade at the local school; Jeffery was third line, and he went to work for Spiros, the owner of Spiros' Diner, father of Edith, whom Jeffery married; Elizabeth was the final child, and she also worked at the school, and was married to a construction man named Anthony; Charlie Kelly lived below the Bianchi clan and taught CCD after Mass and had the patience of a saint; Theresa, another teacher, lived below Charlie with her siblings Joseph, Christina, and Paul, the last of whom always played Santa at the Christmas pageant; then there was the ethnic enclaves, starting with the Finnish brood led by the matriarch Helga, and followed by her children, Richard, Alan, (from whom Alfonso Ignatius thought to steal his famed name), and Melinda, who was known throughout the parish for her cheerful and infectious laugh that filled any space she occupied and always was genuine; Olga, a Romanian woman, who dressed in the most glorious clothes, and may have been somehow related to a warlord; Diane, an Armenian, married John, a jeweler by trade, and they had two children, Angel and Sara, who accidentally discovered that the light switch in the church kitchen caused the fire alarms to ring, (Harry, husband of Lena, eventually took the blame for this catastrophe, though he did deny for longer than was necessary), Michael Connelly, a Harvard man, (not that anyone believed him), served as Deacon and was married to Marta, daughter of Austrian immigrants; there was Mikey, who now went by Father Michael, who worked in prison ministries and didn't live in St. Gregory's anymore, but liked to come back on Saturday nights to chase his elderly parents, Virginia and, another, Joseph out of the den of sin; there was Avery, who was proud of his daughter Rita, an optometrist, who got out of St. Gregory's as fast as her scholarships would take her; George married Annette and they had two children, Rainer and Hugo; Karen Dougherty married Howie Bernstein, and they had Amanda and Alexander; Raphael and Horace, best friends from childhood, and perhaps more than that, were wanted in thirty-six states, plus Guam, Puerto Rico, and the cities of Venice, Paris, and Aleppo for crimes ranging from petty larceny to (allegedly) a disappearance or two; and between all these, just some of the neighbors that frequented O'Toole's, here remains our protagonist.