It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 17: Chapter IV (Cont'd)

Coarse and offensive language. Reader Discretion Advised.

As with all of St. Gregory's, an Intruder's opinion of Curly's would have been sorrowful and derisive. The buildings, with walls thick enough to survive a bomb blast, but thin enough to hear every neighbor's cough and complaint, were appalling places to behold for anyone but a St. Gregorite from Curly's. The smells that hung in the hallways and stairwells, smells of fluids, corporeal and chemical, conspired together to burrow deep into nostrils and burn forever in memory.

Curly's, like so many housing projects of their time, was constructed after the War by someone who thought of Soviet architecture as the apex of style. The apartments were crammed places that trapped the radiating heat, and made the apartments nearly uninhabitable in the winter time. But the summers were worse. The buildings boiled then, suffocating all, and even claiming souls like old Mrs. Irene Jancowitz, who went down in the lore of St. Gregory's with one of the most gruesome demises in August of '59. She died of heat stroke in her chair, and was not found for two whole weeks. The smell from her quarters was horrendous, even by Curly's standards, and by the time her neighbors kicked in her door, Mrs. Jancowitz's remains had cooked to a fine Sunday roast. 

Inside, the apartments' designs contrasted violently with the uniform exterior. Yellow, linoleum floors in the kitchen clashed with the peeling, green, godforsaken wallpaper the Housing Authority received on a bulk discount when they'd first built. The best apartment—according to the only man who was left to remember them—was that of the Carr residence. Apartment 33, Building No. 8. It was identical to all others, except for one saving grace. A perfect, unobstructed view of the Bunker Hill Monument, a luxury few in Curly's could claim. It was why Colin preferred to spend his latter days up there, rather than down below in Apt. 23—his and Mary's residence—where all he had to look at was Margo Kane, hanging out her kitchen window, aiming gobs of phlegm at the children playing below. Not a very pleasant sight. But upstairs...he loved that view! The older he got, the more lonely his life became, the more Colin Malone waisted hours  in front of that living room window, gazing wistfully out towards the monument, fantasying about all the Red Coats' who died in that fateful battle.

'The English!' he often stated without provocation. 'Goddamn bastards. All of 'em!' He was born at the turn of the century, January 2nd, 1900 to a pair of middle-class Dubliners, who took their tea in saucers and attempted their conversations in faux-posh accents. They expected great things from their only living son. Great things being an education. A proper job. The bank where his father worked would do fine for a career. It would afford him a strong, robust family and the many grandchildren Mrs. Malone anticipated. 

Instead, they were saddled with Colin.

Like Bud after him, the older Malone possessed a shrewd intelligence that could never overcome the fantasist in his heart. From the day he was born until the day he died, there wasn't a simple idea in his head, nor an uneventful day that wasn't turned into some Odyssean epic.

For example:

Colin Malone didn't go to the grocery store. He WADED through a sea of dragons, while simultaneously  fighting off a bevy of fanged sirens, who screeched and clawed at his eyes, trying to prevent him from acquiring his treasure—usually the last package of two-ply toilet paper. He liked his two-ply. It was the only thing he ever took upon himself to shop for.

But as it is with all great epics, just as his prize was within reach, Colin would be thwarted by some tall, six foot, usually mustache twirling, always bucktoothed Englishman, who would sneer and cackle as he claimed the final roll from the shelves.