TOBLERONE
When Jimmy was twelve, he went with his cousins Mike and Dominic to a party on Bell Street, down in North Deavers. All through the night he saw shit he’d never seen before, and when he was older, driving his car down the highway in Kentucky, with Ross Allan beside him playing “Livin; LaVida Loca”, he wasn’t sure if he wished he had that old innocence or not the innocence that looked in wide eyed horror at what he was seeing. None of that shit would have shocked the person he had become. There were girls just like the girls at the high school down the street, snorting lines of coke. And there was a boy who had taken something else and was now talking to himself and crying on the floor. As Jimmy passed him, the boy grabbed his ankle and Jimmy jumped.
“I’m an orange!” the boy bellowed, his eyes widening. “I’m a fucking orange! Please!” he demanded of Jimmy, gripping his ankle: “peel me!”
He smelled all sorts of things burning. There was that rubbery smell that lifted him up on his feet, that he now realized was marijuana. In a bathroom his cousin Michael was laid back against the old porcelain sink, staring into nothing while he puffed on a blunt, and his jeans were around his feet as a girl Jimmy had seen earlier sucked his dick hungrily.
“Ey, Jimmy,” Mike said, high and lazy, turning to look at him as if he wasn’t getting his dick sucked, “close the fucking door, alright?”
Jimmy had, and he wandered around the house, afraid. These were the days when he still believed in his father and honored the shit he said. This was not the world his dad loved. This was the heathen world, and here were his father’s own nephews neck deep in it.
“Dom,” Jimmy called, and he imagined himself narrow as a noodle, his voice still baby high, a little scared of this place now.
“Dom!”
His voice was too thin. No one heard him except for a fat dude in an old navy sweatshirt who mocked him wailing, “Dom! Dommmm!” before laughing and passing out.
Dom was in the living room amidst the sleeping and the half asleep. But he was awake, totally awake, the opposite of anything in this room except for Jimmy, whom he couldn’t see. On this night of quiet violence, the girl he had come with, Nicole, was passed out in an old chair, her neck lolling to the side and her mouth open, like a corpse, and her legs were over her head, one on Dom’s shoulder for, pants down, tee shirt hiked up, he was fucking her.
Her body jostled and Dom made little sounds. Her leg flew up like a rag doll, and her necked lolled about as he fucked her faster and faster, and Jimmy wasn’t stupid. He knew what this was. He should say stop. But what good could that do? He should run and pull Dom off of her, but he wasn’t strong enough. Dom was thick and played football, and he was seventeen. And… and Jimmy had never seen sex, never seen anything near it, and the truth was he didn’t want to stop watching his cousin fuck her.
Before Jimmy could think much more, his cousin groaned through gritted teeth.
“Oh… Holy shit! Shit! Fuck!”
And Jimmy, who’d had wet dreams and seen movies, watched Dom’s mouth widen as he came. He came inside the girl he was fucking…. Raping. He could be getting her pregnant.
This was bad. Jimmy knew it was bad, and he told himself it was bad, but he thought how every other guy at school would have not only watched, but cheered his cousin on, and now Dominic was looking at him as he pulled up his jeans and buckled them. Whatever he saw in Jimmy’s shame filled and terrified face made him grin and, looking rakish, like he had just stolen a candy bar, he winked at Jimmy and put a finger to his lips.
When his dad asked what had gone on at the party, Jimmy wanted to tell him everything. But even then he was beginning to suspect that this might not be wise. And he could not stop thinking about the party. He could not stop thinking about Michael in the bathroom, smoking a blunt and getting his dick sucked. He couldn’t stop thinking about Dom and that girl, about her mouth open like a dead thing, her limbs flailing about as Dom licked his lips and spent himself on her, and when he thought about it, he liked it. He knew he was gross and wrong and he told himself that he would never do it, but it excited him, and thinking of taking a girl half passed out and turning her face away from him while he plowed her surprised him, made him come in his fist, slick semen seeping through his fingers.
The wind through the windows made a very particular sound, and this afternoon as thy wound their way to the monastery where they would spend the night, Ross was asleep beside him, and there was no music at all, save the wind and Flipper’s snoring.
He had said he wished for innocence again, but he didn’t want to be innocent again. He wanted to be what he was now, unshockable, the guy that got blown in the bathroom while smoking a blunt, the guy who, maybe wouldn’t have sex with an unconscious girl, but would definitely have sex while he and another girl were half unconscious, was a better Jimmy than the trembling twelve year old. The Jimmy who smoked and drank anything, who did any sexual practice once, was better than the little boy so easily scared.
After that party, Cousin Dom said, “You saw something things you shouldn’t have seen.”
Jimmy said nothing.
“I’m going to have to swear you to secrecy.” Dom said.
“I swear I’ll be secret.”
“Not good enough,” Dom said. He grunted and pulled down his pants, and his DVDs were heavy with the penis he pulled out. Jimmy’s Dad was Irish and Portuguese and his sister had married an Italian, and Dom stood before him with this thick sausage of a cock and said, “Open your mouth,” and for all sorts of reasons that Jimmy never tried to unwind, he did, and Dom shoved it in his mouth. Dom taught him how to suck it.
“Teeth and I’ll hit ya. No fucking teeth,” he said, while he slowly fucked Jimmy’s mouth. Jimmy’s mouth ached while Dom’s cock grew bigger and bigger, hard. Jimmy gagged.
“Easy does it,” Dom told him.
It wasn’t long before Dom gave a soft groan and hot liquid like snot and popcorn butter, Jimmy imagined, erupted in his mouth, gagging him.
Dom did this to him all that summer, and Jimmy never let himself reflect on it. And then Dom went to Annapolis, and four years later, when he graduated with a buzz cut, a sword, a gun and a uniform, everybody loved him, and he spoke in full sentences with no accent.
“It’s good to see you, James!” he’d said brightly, embracing him, and Jimmy knew that as far as Dominic was concerned, the dark past had never happened.
“I want to talk to them,” Flipper said.
“I don’t,” Ross said, truthfully.
“Didn’t you and Ani go to that one monastery?”
“Yes, and I’m sure we’ll go there again. But that doesn’t mean we should trouble these men with our stupid questions.”
Flipper opened his mouth and Ross added, “Or the hope that somehow they’ll make us holy.”
“I can’t help myself,” Flipper shrugged. “I’m an Episcopalian. We have a very schizophrenic relationship with the Roman Catholics.”
“Like that parent you think is behind the times, but you still want to impress?” Jimmy said.
Flipper cackled quietly and put out his hand.
“A little.”
Ross had informed them that the Abbey of Gethsemani, where Thomas Merton had lived, was almost on the way, and they could easily get in and stay the night in the guesthouse.
“You don’t have to check in?” Jimmy said.
“You should, but you don’t have to. There too far from a real town to be worried about break ins and stuff. You gotta really want to come to this place. We should be able to park and find a spare room.”
White even in the night, and immense the abbey was set back into the hills and approached by winding roads. Signs that simple said: MONKS popped up with arrows pointing the way and soon, off a country road, a long paved road had led them to the abbey where, sure enough, in the darkness they found there way into a white, plain three story guest house on the other side of the wall that enclosed the monastery proper. Between them was a lane that led up to the glass doors of a modern church.
“The air feels different here?” Ross took a deep breath.
“Holier?” Jimmy quipped, as with his free hand he opened the door into the air conditioned lobby of the guest house.
“Cleaner.”
“We’re in the South,” Flipper said, as if that settled things.
Now, having put their bags away and arrived in the chapel, they whispered back and forth in a little balcony overlooking the monks who were chanting in the long white walled chapel of Our Lady of Gethsemani, early in the morning, for Jimmy and Ross and Flipper had arrived late in the night, walking around the place in the dark, and after a fitful sleep, the boys had followed the whirring of the great motorized bells to the first office of the morning.
Downbelow monks chanted. One side to the other:
“How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself for ever?
How long will your anger burn like a fire?”
“Remember, Lord, the shortness of my life
and how frail you have made the sons of men.
What man can live and never see death?
Who can save himself from the grasp of the grave?”
“You’re so lucky,” Flipper whispered to Ross. “You all grew up with this.”
“I certainly did not grow up with this,” Ross pointed to the monks.
“But like, it’s in the water. It’s yours. We don’t have this.”
“Where are the mercies of the past, O Lord,
which you have sworn in your faithfulness to David?”
“Remember, Lord, how your servant is taunted,
how I have to bear all the insults of the peoples.”
“I know Episcopalians have monks and nuns and shit. I once heard a professor who was one talk about it.”
“Yeah,” Flipper admitted. “But its on a much lower scale, and a hell of a lot more recent. It’s…. different. This is like the motherland.”
Despite much or Ross’s problems with Rome, and his desire to be egalitarian, he could not help a bit of Catholic pride. But he’d been to Church of the Atonement, and he’d been with Flipper to Mass at the Episcopal church back in Walter, and he couldn’t quite let Flipper get away with what he was saying.
Bowing toward each other and the center of the room, on both sides of the chapel, the monks intoned: “In the Name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”
Downbelow, one of the monks came to the podium and began to read:
“I, John, watched and the sixth angel blew his trumpet, and I heard a voice coming from between the horns of the altar of gold in God’s presence. It said to the sixth angel, who was still holding his trumpet, ‘Release the four angels who are tied up on the banks of the great river Euphrates!’
“So the four angels were released; this was precisely the hour, the day, the month, and the year for which they had been prepared, to kill a third of mankind. Their cavalry troops, whose count I heard, were two hundred million in number—a number I heard myself. Now, in my vision, this is how I saw the horses and their riders. The breastplates they wore were fiery red, deep blue, and pale yellow. The horses’ heads were like heads of lions, and out of their mouths came fire and sulphur and smoke. By these three plagues—the smoke and sulphur and fire which shot out of their mouths—a third of mankind was slain. The deadly power of the horses was not only in their mouths but in their tails; for their tails were like snakes with heads poised to strike…”
While the words rolled, Ross looked past Flipper, watching Jimmy’s face. Jimmy, always a little sad, looked sadder still, his eyes turned inward on some old secret, and Ross didn’t feel sorry for him, or impatient of the sadness. Jimmy’s sadness always went somewhere, and he wanted to know it better.
“It’s sort of like how at my church there’s this little mass on Friday and sometimes evening and morning prayer. But at the Catholic Church, there’s mass every day.”
“You know what it is?” Flipper went on, “Episcopalians are…”
“Lazy as fuck,” Jimmy said, and Ross choked on his laughter.
Ross put a finger to his lips lest anyone look up, but this gallery was above the part of the church where the visitors watched from a great distance, and monks were nowhere near them.
“What were you looking so glum about?” Ross asked Jimmy.
“Huh?”
“Just a moment ago. What were you so glum about?”
“Oh,” Jimmy shook his head. “I was just thinking about the past. I’m only twenty one, and I’ve been a bad man.”
