It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 59: Chapter VIII (Cont'd)

Coarse and Offensive Language. Reader Discretion Advised.

The friends planned to arrive in Cambridge in the evening. The Woman had told Ed that the event, held in a pub called Evelyn's, in a place named Inman Square, usually began around six o'clock. Bud was glad to hear that it would be a pub, for he imagined, and was comforted by such imagination, it a place much like O'Toole's had been in the heyday of his childhood. He missed O'Toole's. In the long months since the infamous suicide and Stripping, Bud had found a piece of himself taken and thought that Ed must share in his sentiment. There was no other explanation he could find for his friend's sudden taking to irrational behavior. Going to a pub to sing, whatever the reasons may have been, was a good way, he reasoned, of trying to reclaim whatever it was that was lost. Admittedly, it was better than standing in an unemployment line. Besides...he could drink. If he was going to go along with this charade, full of smiles and supposed support—

Not supposed, I do support it!

—he would need a drink. Some courage.

'We should be fashionably late,' he told Ed.

'What's fashionably late?'

'I dunno...six-thirty?'

'Why?'

'So you don't look like an eager fuckin' puppy!'

'But she strikes me as a person who likes to be punctual.'

'She strikes you as...how long did you talk to this woman again?'

'That's not the point, Bud. In the dream she was very punctual—'

If I have to hear about some fucking dream one more time...

'—and her name is Liza. Remember that. Liza!'

This isn't fair...

They left St. Gregory's at a quarter to six, Ed carrying the old guitar case he'd failed to return to Colin, Bud in his best and only suit, and they arrived, via Medford and Malden, in Cambridge nearing ten that night. 

If you, dear reader, are unaware of the geography of surrounding vicinities, do take note that, as with all places in the Commonwealth, Medford, and its farther cousin Malden are not localities of great and expansive distance. They are, however, not apart of the City of Cambridge, nor are they, by local distance, anywhere near to the intended location. Alfonso Ignatius (the Second), and Edward Joseph Towne, never having had any reason to venture as far as Cambridge—just across the water—did not realize for the longest time that they'd taken the wrong bus and only realized they were in the wrong place when, coming off the bus, Ed clutched at Bud's arm and cried: 'This looks nothing like the dream!'

Kill your Edwards!

Several hours later, lost in that desolate, suburban landscape—suburban to them, for they thought anything with decent amounts of grass and shrubbery in front of houses to be suburban—the friends managed by happenstance to track down a bus with the word 'Cambridge' attached to its heading. Yet, when they did at last come to Cambridge, being men of St. Gregory's, they took for granted the seize of the metropolis, and, not having asked the bus driver for specific directions, spent another hour wandering the various streets in search of the mythical pub. They might have kept wandering for all eternity and then some had it not been for a policeman, suspicious at first of their loping demeanor, who stopped them and asked for which school they belonged—

'School?!' repeated Ed. 'We don't belong to a school!' and then in total despair, he grabbed Bud's arm and implored, 'let's just go home. This wasn't in the dream. It wasn't! It's all hopeless! Hopeless!'