It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 106: Chapter VI

Coarse and Offensive Language. Reader Discretion Advised.

How do people go about their lives sober?

No wonder they're such miserable pricks all the time!

No wonder they all end up killing themselves.

Sad, sober, fucking bastards.

And good riddance to them!

Alcohol, Alan Carr had come to believe, was his saving grace. It was the saving grace of humanity! Without it, no one was happy. Without it, he was not sure that he would have survived the sage and aftermath of Father Peter's murder.

And what a fucking saga it had been, with him, through no fault of his own, square smack dab in the eye of the hurricane!

But alcohol, booze, that glorious, wonderful, tasty, burning, fantabulous mother's milk, which proved that God could be a merciful entity when He bothered to put some effort into it, had kept all those worries safely distant. Alcohol, a true, noble, and constant, had kept dismay and angst neatly and thoroughly packaged in the dark and forgotten tomb far better than any socially approved method. So what if there was a dependency—not that he would call it as such. Alfonso Ignatius, (the Second), once Bud, safe as Alan, would never be so modest as to call it that. But so what if You would call it that? So what? A new dawning had come upon the man. The most wondrous thing had been born of startlingly constant consumption:

Silence.

Loving silence!

If he could have wed and bedded it, Alan Carr would gladly have bought the bag of rice and given himself wholly to handsome silence. It was the best of friends. Un-opinionated! Coddling and maternal! It didn't sneak off into someone's arms. It's eyes never wondered—Faithful! It demanded nothing and reminded him that all was just a lark.

Loyal!

Life, it told him, is one big set up. You know what the punchline is, Alan Carr?

Death?

Bright boy!

And Alan Carr could—would!—no longer stand for humorless situations. Grim faced and sober people. Fuck 'em! Fuck 'em all! All that guilt, all that fear that had haunted him since the murder of Father Peter—

Ha-ha!

His grandfather's orders to bury all he had seen and lived? Quite impossible without his new and faithful companion. 

And with me, what do you say to the impossible?

Hardy-fucking-har!

But it had not stopped there. Then had come the sounds of gunshots, and the wail of ambulances; the screams of his mother, as she knelt on the wet ground, clutching that fat, limp figure of sister in her arms; the circus that had resulted from that nonsense, the violent and perplexing swings between grief and joy, and the people, who for weeks would come and clutch and grab onto him, wanting to share in his sorrow.

'We're all here for you,' they said, the St. Gregorites who slunk from their craven hidey-holes, onwards in glee to bask in his supposed misery. 'We're prayin' for you, Bud. You and your whole family.'

It would have felled the strongest man, this accumulative weight of bullshit crushing down on his soul.

But Alan Carr is better than the strongest man. He makes Hercules look like spineless. Bud could not have handled this.