Fragment 17: Mount Royal

Goddamn them...

They always had that huge cross towering over that Catholic city of theirs. Projecting their grasp down the sides of Mount Royal.

Jesus...Jesus...Jesus...

For the love of fuck, why are all you religious people so fucking insecure? Was it not enough to dominate a society for three hundred years? Must we really manifest cocksize with this massive and imposing statement of oppression?

If that is what it is.

Maybe I am just angry.

Apoplectic.

Even now.

As a kid and then a teenager I had been a choirboy.

Early on I realized that I liked the other choirboys more than the girls that they seemed to like.

I was the one with the angelic voice. Ages after puberty hit. It was the '70's though. Long hair, loose jeans, sad beard.

I was unduly proud of that hair. Down to almost my waist. Thick. Wavy. Beautiful.

Even when I was eighteen I was still, despite all, enamoured with my faith. With the choir.

I knew the Pope, whatever love he may have had, had no love for what I was.

But I felt the Lord in the teachings of the Catholic Church.

I felt the Lord in the joy promised from redemption.

I felt the Lord in the idea of the child who would save the world.

And I felt the Lord when Sammy and I made love. His presence in what I did. What Sammy did.

Fucking Sammy was as close to pure epiphany as I would ever get. I longed for how he was inside me and I longed for how I was inside him. He was an Expressionist painting. He was a home run. He was my hat trick. The man I wanted.

Despite the fact that we were, in the end, barely men at all.

Hard to believe. He seems, in memory a true man. Lying there with me, majestic chest, perfect ass, fine, downy hair.

He lacked all pretension. He had raw purity.

I was in awe. I would have stayed with him forever.

I suppose the Father must have known.

Approaching me one day after practice he gently asked me back to the office. He told me, peering out over spectacles that appeared lifted off some expired Crimean War soldier, that, for me, it was the hair or the choir.

There was, in the end, no more room in God's house.

I was stunned. Disoriented.

Be Thou my vision, oh Lord of my heart,

Nought be all else to me, save that Thy art...

I went to Danny's.

Sat in the chair.

As the hair fell away I could not stop the shaking.

I got that hair cut.

But I never went back to church again until Sammy's funeral in 1987.

I never saw the Father again until the scandals hit a decade later.

And I never sang again...

well, that is not quite true...