FRERARD Haven't Got a Prayer boyxboy

part 1

                I would have rather been hanging from the edge of a cliff by my fingertips.  Giving a blow job to a 300 pound, 40 year old DnD player.  Cleaning my grandmother’s underwear.  Kissing Sarah Smith, the girl with a unibrow and mustache from French class.  So basically, I would have rather been doing anything else besides going to church. 

                Okay, maybe it wasn’t just the fact that I was going to church.  I used to go to Catholic school, attend Sunday Mass religiously, do confessions… blah blah blah.  Church didn’t exactly bother me.  What bothered me was that my uncle was making me go to ‘youth group’ before church.  Possibly the STUPIDEST idea on the face of the Earth.

                First off, I had to wake up earlier.  Then I have to dress up in clothes I hate wearing.  Then I get to walk my snot nosed cousin, Tiffany, to Sunday School.  And then, the icing on the ‘kill me please’ cake, I get to sit in a room with a dozen other teenagers who gape at me like I’m the spawn of the devil. 

                I’m not even kidding you.

                I think it’s because I have a lip ring, but I couldn’t be certain.  It’s not like there’s anything completely off about me.  I mean, sure I’m wearing a lip ring, and I’m wearing converse instead of church shoes… but it’s not like I drew the antichrist symbol on my face or flipped every cross in the room upside down!  By the way- there are seven crosses.  Just in case you were wondering.

                I used to go youth group when I was in sixth grade, and I actually enjoyed it at my old church.  The group leader, Bob, was young- college aged.  He told us to call him by his first name, gave us donuts and had us act out scenes from the bible.  He didn’t even get mad if we acted silly or sarcastic.  That was a good youth group.  I had friends there.

                But I’m not in sixth grade anymore, and this isn’t Queen of Saints Catholic Church.  This is St. Paul’s Missouri Synod Evangelical Lutheran Church.  I don’t get why they have such a long name.  What are they trying to prove here?  Maybe God spoke to the priest- I mean pastor (weird Lutherans) and told him to have the longest fucking title in the whole Christian community for his church.  Who knows!? 

                So I sat in the basement of St. Paul’s Missouri Synod Evangelical Lutheran Church, (Let’s just call it Luther Land) on a ratty old couch, next to a kid with legs longer than the Mississippi river and watched everyone stare at me.  Except for the kid with the legs.  He just ignored me. 

                Eventually an adult showed up, but they were old, and they didn’t have donuts.  It took her a while before she noticed I was there, and then she stopped whatever she had been doing to ask me who I was.  Then she had me stand up and introduce myself. 

                Lutherans don’t know how to use humor.

                “Hello, I’m Frank Iero and I’m here to possess your souls!” I said, smiling wide and clapping my hands together.  Silence.  Complete silence.

                “We do not joke about those things, Franklin,” the woman, Mrs. Berk, said gently.  She gave me the disappointed eyes, and maybe I would have felt bad if I actually gave a care.  She then started talking about our souls, our relationships with God, and temptation. 

                I don’t remember ever talking about temptation this much at Queen of Saints.  They talked about hell a lot… and liked to use expressions like “Mother Mary, save our worthless souls from the fiery depths of hell!”  But we didn’t talk about temptation.