It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 37: Chapter XIII

Coarse and Offensive Language. Reader Discretion Advised.

When are we fully aware of ourselves?

At some point there comes a moment in time when the blissful ignorance of youth gives way to truth. Our eyes are open, and we see, we learn, we understand that in every right you will find a wrong; and in every wrong a justification. Black is white, up is down. The world, which has passed us by in vignettes and episodes, now grinds to a halt. What was once bright and filled with hope, turns grey and muddled. No one leaves untouched.

For Alfonso Ignatius Carr, now Bud, with Alan on the horizon, it was a trilogy of moments:

There was the Stage.

The Specter's Death.

The Woods.

It is not entirely accurate to say that Bud Carr and Edward Towne, having found a refuge in music, completely gave up on their misbegotten ways. Bud liked to think they had, but from his own recollections, the truth made an appearance. It is more precise to say that they split their time.

In the years since their playground formation, the Tiny Teamsters had taken their collective quest for acclaim to new heights. They had ascended the slopes of youthful hooliganism. They didn't just seek fights for glory and recognition, they were now forced to fight in defense of their reputations, to make sure their motto would not be lost on every shitpunk and wannabe delinquent who dared to think they were a match:

YOU DON'T FUCK WITH THE TINY FUCKING TEAMSTERS!

But the more bones they cracked, the more they smashed and caved, or had done to themselves, the less pride they felt in their purpose. Like the Donahues and Zielinskis before them, these children reflected back the sadistic ugliness of their neighborhood, and slowly they began to awaken to the reality of the world. They saw their streets plundered with potholes and trash. They saw the three-deckers, once prides of upward mobility, now rotting with chipped paint and crumbling porches. They saw Curly's, their fiefdom, for what it truly was:

A curse!

The neighbors and families who were supposed to be their mature idols and examples were nothing but failures, if even that. Vexed people with not a redeemable quality squandered between them. To a one, the Tiny Teamsters, excelling at imitation, emulated and damned these personalities with equal insistence.

For they were of the age when all St. Gregorites, all children of Mother-City, begin to feel the pull towards something better...

And they were awake!

And they could feel it!

Something had slipped through the Gates of Paradise.

It was uncoiling now.

Anger. Unmitigated, unbridled, unconscionable, unavailing anger.

Nothing made sense in the parish—in the world—anymore.

What happened?

How did they get there?

One day, everything had been as it always was supposed to be. 

Fine. 

But the next...they'd buried the Donahues and Zielinskis in their tombs, and so followed Wino Willy and Derek O'Grady, and what did they all have in common?

Smoke of Hell slipping between the cracks in the Gates of Paradise.

It didn't take a genius to see what had come to roost. The children certainly noticed. They could smell it in the halls of Curly's. They saw it in the eyes and on the arms of the teenagers long given up on by their parents and educational systems. Those teenagers, never acknowledged, never acclaimed, the Tiny Teamsters' future if someone didn't act fast...