Read Part 1

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Katrina was thrilled. We spent weeks talking about how we reacted to this skit, that sermon. It was the same program for both of us, naturally – they had this show down cold. My mother was disgusted. She hardly said a word to me for months – which was a long time even for this champion of the cold shoulder. By now the program had been discovered by several of the local churches, so there’s two dozen of us running around town with big silvery crucifixes around our necks, failing to discern any similarity between them and albatrosses even though this was the year they were teaching Coleridge in English class, proclaiming that we were saved and singing the songs from Jesus Christ Superstar. For a short round ugly walking dictionary, it was a miracle. I had a group. I had a girl. The Son is shining and life is good. It was a wonderful feeling.

Which lasted until the day, about six months later, I was chatting with a bunch of my “brethren�, and discovered that they were hosting a pot party. “Wha…� was the extent of my eloquence on the subject. They were unrepentant. “We’re saved, we can do what we want.� For this I’ve been coming home to a deep freeze since Lincoln’s birthday? Nono, Nanette, rock and roll may have been part of the program that weekend in Boston, but sex and drugs most certainly was not. That promise was all that kept me from becoming a homeless statistic. The crucifix came off that night. I have no idea what has become of it.

Katrina had already left town; her stepfather had been transferred to Haverhill. We got together on weekends for awhile, but it wasn’t all that long before she dumped me for a black guy who’d been elected Governor at Boy’s State. For awhile she was trying to play me off against him. I was having none of it. I have no idea what has become of her. Their house was knocked down; they put the expressway to Cape Cod through the property. There’s a “99� restaurant on the site now.

In the aftermath, I thought the self-centeredness, not to say selfishness, of my “saved� classmates (who, me included, did nothing about their “salvation� except celebrate themselves) was something new and particularly repugnant in the annals of religious experience. Until a few years later, when I was in college and I could open a Bible again, with proper guidance and without puking. And I found in the letters of Paul, especially the ones to the Corinthians, exactly what I thought was so new in outer-suburban Massachusetts. That Paul had gone preaching to the four corners of the known universe only to discover that the “saved� thought that they could do exactly as they pleased. He wound up hollering at them and setting all sorts of rules to get them back on track with each other and with him - not to mention to keep them from being exterminated by the Roman authorities as amoral cult freaks. My God, it’s déjà vu.

So I learned my lesson and lived happily ever after, right? Um, not really. Remember that “best friend� I mentioned about a thousand words ago? I married her, many years and trials and suspensions of better judgment later; I was Henry #2. And it worked. For awhile … “I’ll do anything. Anything you say. But like I asked you, please don’t get us pregnant until I have a real job and something vaguely resembling an income? I’ll get a vasectomy … no? You’ll take care of it? Righto then, but this is really important to me. OK? OK. What??!!??� Then, circumstances brought us back together with her parents. The “my way or the highway� types. Whom I watched empty a church just like the one in Massachusetts, sending a liberal pastor with a Ph.D., and the unfortunate fantasy that he could get Appalachian New Hampshire to accept gay marriage, scampering back to Seattle with his tail between his legs. And breeding rubber patches in the parking lot. Déjà vu all over again, Yogi. When they let me know that it would be just as well if my patches joined the rest, I took them at their word.

Anyone out there want to try her luck with an old fart, with scars around his neck from the chain of a silvery crucifix, who clings to a fading hope: “third time’s the charm�?

  - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

This story is a fictionalized account of real occurrences. I have changed or omitted names, and altered the details and sequence of events.