Lunch Break
2
Once, Darius Mc.Cready had been a very different person. He had been one of those people who wanted to be good and right, a virgin in Catholic school who didn’t touch drugs in college, who didn’t even smoke a cigarette till senior year. He had been late to sex, and when it had finally come, his new adventures were interrupted by falling in love. Whenever he fell in love it was with someone from church, a choir leader, a lector, an organist. They never spoke to him, but he always longed for them, thinking if he looked at them long enough they would see something, approach him. They never did. And while he was in the midst of this deep love, he foreswore all affairs. It was if the unattainable altar boy was around the corner, and he couldn’t sully that with actual fun.
He thought of the summer he could have easily had sex with Sean Bermea, when Sean was still hot, and how he never took advantage of the situation because he was swept up in an infatuation with some organist at DePaul. When he looked back there was also the matter that he didn’t quite believe Sean Bermea wanted him, but that was another talk for another day. He missed a lot of fun thinking of holy boys who were never going to see him, and had turned out to be not so holy in the end.
All of that flashed through his head when he met Michael. All that, and how he hadn’t been to church for years. He’d planned to never go again. He had seen Michael for the first time the second time he had come back to church, and he barely knew what he was doing. What had brought him to the doors of Saint James Episcopal was a series of the most fucked up of coincidences and they didn’t’ resemble a road to Damascus at all unless of course, Jesus had been wearing leather when he’d appeared to Paul, and Paul had been being ridden as a donkey by a dominatrix.
Things had begun early summer two years ago, or three years ago. The less Darius liked aging, the harder it was to count back. He had approached a boy much too young for him, but attractive = comely, and started to talk and talk about everything. He was from out of town, and he wanted to come and visit. The last thing he told was that he was a seminarian, studying to be a priest and the diocese had sent him under the sponsorship of Saint James, Darius’s old church. When he and Noah had finally met, they’d talked for a half hour and were naked after that. When he was fucking him, surprised and exhausted, Darius found himself swallowed up, ejaculating inside Noah after the ten minutes he’d spent crying under him. Noah boldly gave him his number, but they never talked again. He saw him online, preaching in Virginia, not particularly good, looking pale and penitential, but that was some time later. That was after he’d spent the day on the train with Michael.
The truth was he had been on his way back from South Bend and back to Chicago, not so much to get home as to get to the bath house and find whatever wickedness there was to be had. He was thinking of getting his dick sucked, not of the long conversation he found himself in, and it was only halfway through it that he remembered who Al and Ronnie were, and they remembered him and they started laughing and he thought, well maybe I should go back to church. He didn’t, but he thought it And later on, in a booth in a dark bath house filled with pulsating music, while his head was swimming from drugs and he was ferociously slurping on a stranger’s cock, he forgot about them completely.
For his birthday, Jamal came over. Kayla had sent him and said Jamal was bringing his birthday present. The boy had taken two trains and walked three blocks and showed up in thin baggy jeans and a baggy sweatshirt he took off when he entered the apartment, put down his book bag and took from it his offerings, three little boxes and a bag with the shrooms he had grown. He directed Max and Darius in how to take them, and that was how they found themselves, a couple of weeks later, floating ten feet in the air while minding a stall for Family Pride in the Park, the dullest thing either one of them had been too. Floating ten feet in the sky, Darius had bumped into a good looking sixtyish or late fifties man in a tie dye who looked equally confused, but was his old pastor, Father Hill from Saint James, and this was how he’d had the long conversation that had ended in a promise to come back.
That drug induced promise stuck with him some time even after Max quite wisely pointed out, “Even on the best of days, in the most usual circumstances, Father Hill was never the sort of man to remember things like that.” And he wasn’t. Father Hill was the sort of man people felt close to, but that no one really was, and Darius thought, “Well, no, but I said we would. And you know, even if he can’t remember I made a promise… still, I made it.”
For good and for ill, Darius was a man of his word.
Before he had made the final move from his old place to share the apartment with Max, his last night in Wrigleyville was spent trying to get laid. He noted that people only talked about how shallow sex was, and how unworthy wanting it was when, in fact, their sex lives were not happening. When they were happening, when things were popping off, it was electric, but he had spent all of this Saturday night in dead ends with fake promises and things that hadn’t turned out. He was not worn out by sex, but by the frequent promises of it ending in assholes who never showed up and time he’d spent tapping his fingers online and walking up and down to this and that place. You couldn’t always go to the bathhouse or the bookstore, and even there, there was no promise of fulfillment or ecstasy or even fun.
So, irritated from the night before, and Feeling slightly dirty and cranky and confused, in the cool misty Sunday morning, he had gotten his ass up, and walked the four blocks to the little brick church and entered in the midst of a sober, quiet, Episcopal mass, perhaps the most sober mass there ever was. Episcopalians were not more Catholic than Catholics, that was not so. They could be more sober than sober, though, and this was where he needed to be. He had made the promise. He listened to the end of the Gospel, and to the sermon, and heard the prayers and saw the faces of those who were glad to see him back, He knelt at the altar and received the bread and then the wine and wasn’t sure if he believed in it, or even sure of what he was still supposed to believe in. He didn’t think he was a Christian. He wasn’t even sure of what a Christian was. But he had made the promise to come here, and so he came.
When next Sunday happened, he came again. He envisioned them all there, him, Max, Kayla and Jamal, his little family. Through the cooling October into the growth of winter, he came, and though Kayla and Jamal never did, Max joined him. At least in spirit, since he preferred mass at the far grander, grey stone structure of Saint Ita’s Catholic Church on Broadway.
But it was on one particular Sunday that he had seen ahead of him. broad shouldered and brunette, with something in his face that Darius could not name, a man who was talking to Father Hill about what the readings were and… such and such …and.. he wasn’t really hearing him, just looking at he way he stood, the blue in his eyes, the light beard around his chin. He wanted to follow him down the steps and into his car. He was the first man Darius had been genuinely interested in for some time.
Some time later, when Darius had to admit he was now a parishioner again, he came to the end of the week Friday afternoon mass and saw that young man, the set of his shoulders, the little diamond stud in his ear. The young man Shook his hand. He said, “My name’s Michael.”
His mind drifted. No, his mind didn’t drift. It was firmly on Michael. He could still feel Michael’s hand when he’d handed him the cool jug of milk. He could still remember last night, at the Walmart way out on Diversey, the fluorescent light too bright, the feeling that Walmart was never made for Chicago, and Michael had those little spectacles of his on, and he could hear Michael say, come on. Let’s go back home. Let’s start all over again. Something he had, in fact, not said that day. And there were thoughts of Michael’s apartment with the hardwood floors and the plants. He had plants and white curtains and blond furniture from Ikea, like a grown up. There wre posters and bookshelves with neatly organized books, like a grown up, and the bathroom was a mess, the sink pelted with his body hair, like a grown white man, the memory that perfection was only bathroom deep.
He should write poetry today, or make something. Do something. He was shrinking in his skin, forgetting who he was. He was almost relieved by the phone call, and picked up.
“I’m downstairs,” Jamal said. “Can you let me in?”
Jamal was always so courteous. Always asking even when they were the ones dependent on him. He forgot, they’d never called and told him he didn’t have to drop off packages. It didn’t matter. It was just as well to have him.
“Do you want me to go?” Max asked.
“No, I will.”
Darius took the heavy set of keys, left apartment 514, and took the elevator down to let the skinny boy in. He was adorable. Like a big pretty puppy even when earnest faced, his hair down to his shoulders. Two days ago, tripping on acid, Jamal had brought Max home, and they’d always been friends, like a nephew and uncle, and then there was the matter of Kayla, Jamal’s girlfriend. Darius never delved too much into anyone’s business, and he was already pretty high when he realized that something was going on between Jamal and Max in the bedroom, and now here he was, and now here Jacen was, and… it wasn’t his business.
“How goes it, young Jamal?”
“It goes it decently,” Jamal said. “I don’t go into the restaurant till eight.”
“You look mildly exhausted,” Darius noted as they waited on the elevator.
“I could sleep.”
“How about you sleep on the couch, then. We actually have a guest. I meant to tell you that. He can do the runs.”
“No, I like doing it.”
“You like the money. And we’ll be sure you get some, but you need a nap. Or something.”
“I’m worn out from the first two days of the week.”
“Well, that’s our fault.”
“No, that shit was the most fun I’ve had in a long time. I was exhausted, but it felt great.”
As the elevator shuddered and came to a halt before the doors opened, Darius said, “I won’t deny you that. But after a time, one does just want a nap and a glass of orange juice.
“One thing,” he said.
“Yeah?” said Jamal.
“Jacen’s here.”
“Jace?” Jamal began, then said, “Oh… And you thought…”
“I had thought.”
“Look,” Jamal said, “I love Max, and what happened is what happened. And I’ve got Kay, and I like Jace. And it’s all cool.”
Darius shrugged. He wasn’t sure it if would all be cool for him.
