It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 49: Chapter III (Cont'd)

Coarse and Offensive Language. Reader Discretion Advised.

If ever there was a cure for an ill-tempered day, if ever there was a much needed repose from the dourness of a suicide's funeral, surely it was the Stripping of O'Toole's, which began nine and half minutes after the first pile of dirt had come thundering down upon the coffin. The Saturday nights of Alan Carr's youth had been an atmosphere of marginally controlled chaos, but the Stripping was sheer bedlam:

There was Luna Halak rolling about in the muck of the floor, Karen Dougherty in a chokehold, all over a single bottle of malt; Marie Lynch had her heels off and was brandishing them about with one hand as she used the other to hurry nips and bottles of bitter into her purse, which seemed to have no depths, until all at once it spilled over, and there was a mad dash from Marina, sister of Lena, and Marla, Marina's sister-in-law, who both came flying over the bar and descended on the spilled contents like a pack of frenzied magpies; Mark, who had long given up on both his assumed name of Marcel, and his dream of owning a French Bistro, had gotten to the eggs and had taken to using them as missiles whenever anyone got to close to the intractable till that he had claimed for himself; Joseph, who was the father of Virgil, the husband of Marla, proud soloist in the often tuneless choir, had taken the straps of his oxygen tank and begun to use them as a whip to anyone that had ever dared slander his voice, which meant a considerable number of St. Gregorites were flayed alive that day; Benjamin, who once played professional baseball in the age when it was acceptable to murder umpires, had taken up his old habit of bloodlust and had fashioned a garrote from his own necktie, which was being used on Mitch, who never said much, and whose undershirt was now soaked with sweat and blood that still did nothing to hide his psoriasis; Martin, married to Julie, who was the sister of Jerry, the self-appointed documentarian of the parish, had taken his brother-in-law's 8mm camera and used it to bludgeon some sense into Other Jerry, with the no longer debatable limp, for indeed, he had a peg leg, which had come off in the initial scrum that took O'Toole's reinforced door off its steel hinges and had been lost in the subsequent brawls that had broken out all around the establishment; Helen, still not related to any of the above, had recently lost her dear husband Ray and was now expressing her poorly repressed grief by standing up on the only upright table and chugging from two bottles of vodka, one from each hand; Father Peter had not attended, he was still dealing with the dead barkeep, but Mikey, rather Father Michael, son of Virginia and the Other Joseph, who had begged his parents to show some restraint, was there to condemn the hooliganism of the event, and when that castigation fell on the stone ears of his former parish, he vowed never to return to St. Gregory's, for, as he put it, 'the men in Walpole have more humanity than—' but 'than whom' was never actually stated for Charlie Kelly, CCD teacher, broke a bottle over his crown; Larry Bianchi, husband of Robin, and John the Jeweler, managed to barricade themselves in a booth, where they happily shared shots, while their wives fought their battles for them; Theresa, one of the teachers from the deckers, managed to hold back two of her siblings, yet another Joseph and Christina, from embarrassing the family name too much, but she was enraged to see her third sibling, Paul, arrive with his chainsaw to deal with that so-far indestructible till—Mark, not Marcel, had run out of eggs by this point, and he was no expert with hand-to-hand combat, and when presented with the come-to-life chainsaw, he threw himself through the bar window with a shriek; Rose, the hat lady, and Doom-and-Gloom Madeline had formed a cohort and were taking turns laying out across the bar and were pouring beer from the taps into each other's mouths; Ralph Kane, who had lived too long with his sister, Margo, had punched her full in the face, and Margo, being Margo, had responded by sticking her lit cigarette up her brother's nose; but his screams were lost on all except Raphael and Horace, who stood nearby relieving themselves on the back wall; and when Ralph Kane screamed, Horace had twisted about with such fright that he finished his business all over his best friend's leg, but what is a little urine in the face of such obdurate companionship, and they laughed and Horace was good enough to promise that 'next time, you can have my other leg,' and off they went to pick Olga, the Romanian's pocket, and box the ears of Bernard, who was not a favorite of anyone in the parish, and who was, at the time, not sure which of his wives he wanted to stay married to—Bella, the organist was a better fighter, but there was something wild about Teresa—and as he watched his women tearing at each other's flesh with their long, sharpened, acrylic nails, he lamented the fact that a man had to choose in this modern world; and through all of this, Harry, husband of Lena, was trying to do the sensible thing by attempting to corral a semblance of a queue, but his efforts, conducted with two bottles of cognac in hand, were ineffective to say the very least, and it was that cognac that proved his ultimate undoing, for Deacon Connelly, learned Harvard man that he was, had a strong penchant for cognac and was so overcome with want that he launched himself through the air and tackled Harry to the ground: