Chapter Forty-Three Self-Taught 3 page

Suddenly though, this consistency of my father’s values had vanished into thin air. He wasn’t even staying behind in the house to do his own type of worship – he was forgoing the activity all together. He was going to work instead. I couldn’t believe it. I stretched my mind far and wide to try and think of any logical reasoning behind this, but only came back with shame. He probably didn’t want to sit in the pew and hear about how much of a sinner I was. And maybe, he had begun to realize that all that time and loyalty to this institution had not gotten him anywhere. He was still in the worse predicament he had seen in a while. He was having revelations now, but it was only that he had been praying in vain.

“No, he’s not,” my mother cut in, rousing me from my thoughts. “Some things are more important to him.”

There was a small hint of somber bitter resentment in her voice that I had not heard my mother use in ages. Not since I was thirteen years old and I had declined the offer to attend once and for all. When I was barely a pre-teen, I couldn’t distinct the tones in my mother’s voice. The way she talked was the way she talked – I had better things to do with my time than analyze each word that had come out of her mouth. In my childhood negligence, I had overlooked how disappointed she had been. I could see the disenchantment hidden behind her eyes in the kitchen, her hopes for my acceptance displayed all over her face, and decorated with the clothing on her back. This really meant a lot to her.

I glanced from her worried eyes to my cereal and then back to her. I weighed the options in my head and didn’t really come back with much.

“All right, I’ll go,” I gave in.

As I finished my cereal, I saw my mother smile for the first time in weeks.

***

I was having a hard time deciding what had been more awkward: the tension in the kitchen or the actual car ride to the place. I had many episodes of panic and rehearsed many scenarios of what would happen once I set foot outside the house. This was the first time I had really left for an outing I wanted to go on – not one I had to like the lawyers and police, or needed to like the library. The real want for this action didn’t even center around the place of worship itself, but my mother. I just wanted to make my mother happy, as corny as that sounded inside my head, I really didn’t care. She had been torn down and built back up so many times, I wanted to give her a break, something to look forward to. She had gone to church once before the previous week and she had looked a lot better when she had returned. She wasn’t one hundred percent (I didn’t think she ever would get back there, if she had been in the past), but it had been an improvement. My mother went to church to alleviate her problems. I went to Gerard’s. I could never let her fully into my world, but maybe if I got a taste of hers, we could both somehow understand each other more.

Though I hadn’t seen the actual church itself since I was thirteen, it looked relatively the same. It consisted of a tall and wide gray building, branching off into separate parts, separate areas of worships, and topped off with a white roof. Most of the shingles were missing, others discolored from age and time. The billboard in the front displayed the same message that had been there since after Christmas, telling people that Easter was the next holiday that they should mark down for special worship. There were only two stain glass windows, not visible from the back road we were driving on to get to the church. I could still picture the faintly rose and violent hued shades in my mind, and the way their patterns just seemed to fit together like a puzzle. It was a small artistic detail I could now appreciate about this place, where it had once been overlooked. The windows were at the top of the main area, too far too touch and almost too far to appreciate its beauty. I couldn’t remember if there was any design on them; probably some bread or fish or something equally religious. The other windows were small circular things sparse and incompletely bordering the building.

From the outside, the cathedral was unimpressive. I began to feel doubts creep their way into my system as to just why I had come. I didn’t want to spend time in this desolate place, and I couldn’t understand how my mom loved it here so much. We drove at least fifteen minutes to get here; there were other, nicer churches we had passed. I didn’t know why my mother, a clean freak like Martha Stewart, had not upgraded her place of worship. It was only until I stepped inside that I began to comprehend that you could upgrade buildings, but not religion.

Just walking into the place, I felt something different come over me. Half of it was good, the other half was bad. I could feel the warmth of the building, not all in temperature, as I stepped inside. There was a small buzz of chatter before any service started, people clinging together in groups and mingling with others. Home owned Bibles were held in people’s hands like badges of honor, and like it was a completely normal accessory to their person. Everyone was smiling, everyone was loving. Well, almost everyone. Most of the affection was spread out in between groups of people who already knew each other, and had their faith in.

The door to enter the church was lower than where the people gathered before the sermon, my mother and I having to take stairs to reach the main landing. As soon as we stepped up, I felt the eyes turn to us, graze over my mother welcomingly and then lock on me. I was a foreigner in their land of God, and I knew it wasn’t just because I was a seventeen-year-old kid in a church with his mommy. They knew about me, whereas I had completely forgotten about them. Most people that filled the deep purple carpeted hallways had been there all their life. There were generations of families gathering for worship, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, and babies. There were a few scattered teenagers, but none of them looked as uncomfortable as I was. They all had perky smiles on their faces, dressed in clean ironed skirts or dress pants, with fancy shirts. They clung to their parents because they wanted to, not because they felt like they were going to be condemned if they didn’t.

I heard my mother’s breathing suddenly beside me, and it took me the longest time to realize that she wasn’t sighing, but taking in a deep invigorating breath. She loved it here. She felt at home and I could see it. Her eyes changed; they opened up. She looked at the high lights scattered along the hallway as they cast their amber glow. She looked to the other people, smiling and giving small waves and head nods in acknowledgement. And finally, she looked at me, and I realized her eyes were blue.

I had never seen her this happy before. In all of my seventeen year existence, I didn’t think my mother was capable of this much positive emotion. Her eyes almost appeared to water a little, but I couldn’t tell if it was from extreme happiness, or me standing in her way of viewing the rest of it. I tried to move, shift my weight uncomfortable, but I felt her arm grip my side.

“Don’t run off, please,” she spoke, almost begging in her octave levels.

My tongue felt swollen in my mouth or I would have answered her. Instead, I seized my body to the ground, and nodded my head. I wasn’t going anywhere, as much as I wanted to escape the glowing eyes on me, I would stay. It would be one sacrifice to the thousands my mother had made for me.

“Oh, Lyn!”

A women, about my mother’s age, hair ravaged by time a little more, and her face a little more chipper and plump, wedged her way in between my mother and I, knocking that hand off my shoulder she was using for support. The woman wrapped my mother in a hug, leaving me to feel extremely exposed, staring at the back of her light yellow suit jacket.

“How are you? How have you been? It’s been so long since we’ve talked…” the woman began to talk in a blur, her arms still extending and gripping my mom’s shoulders. My mom’s eyes grew wide, but not with shock like mine. She was happy to see this bouncing ball of a woman, and I couldn’t fathom why.

“Oh! This must be Frankie!” the woman noticed my presence, turning her large and chubby body towards me.

“Frank,” my mother corrected, losing her cheerful demeanor slightly. “He’s not thirteen anymore. Frank suits him more now, don’t you think?”

My mother’s gaze cast over my eyes briefly before they settled on the other woman. In that split second of looking, I saw something within her eyes that I didn’t know existed. There was that same bitter resentment, a pain, and a longing borrowed so deep within her iris. Her words, her renaming of me Frank and just Frank, conveyed what her eyes couldn’t. She was no longer my mom – she was back to just being a mother.

Despite how much I hated the nickname Frankie, it was her nickname to me. It was a term of affection, something to give me a youthful quality in her eyes so I could always remain a baby. Her baby. Her Frankie. When you named something, you owned it, Gerard’s words filtered through my mind. My mother had named me Frankie, and suddenly, didn’t want to use that term anymore. She, just like my father, was renouncing any possibility of parenthood. My father had become Anthony to me, and though my mother’s name change wasn’t as drastic, she was removing herself from the situation. She couldn’t remove herself completely – I still needed some kind of parent to give me shelter and food (I was still a child after all). She still had the capability within herself to remove herself emotionally, and she was taking it. She had bled so many feelings within herself over the past few weeks, maybe she had nothing left to give. The lack of emotion, the lack of compassion as a parent, and just transforming into another person lost in the sea of parishioners had been what I saw when her eyes scanned over me, and onto the other woman.

“Yes, I do imagine so,” the woman agreed, nodding vigorously. She turned to me, smiled genuinely. “He’s a big boy now.”

I heard a cough from behind me, and I turned to face a rather large man, in girth and in height, who I could only assume to be this mystery woman’s husband. As if my hopes were already crushed enough by my mother’s lack of use of my name, hearing this man obviously forced coughed did it. He glanced down at me, trying to fight the look of disgust on his face.

I knew what he was thinking. I knew what all the other people around here were thinking as their eyes scanned me over as they went into the sermon area. I was Frank – the poor, poor boy being molested and raped by the artist down the street. I was here to be saved – or condemned. Whatever was easiest in their eyes. This new woman was the only one who didn’t look at me with those glares. I started to realize why my mother liked her, even if her over-zealous personality was too much to take in the somber ambiance.

The pointless banter and chitchat died down just as quickly as it had started, and soon enough, we were all being led into the gigantic sermon area. We all seemed to branch and break off into different groups and segments, just seeming to know where we all fit in the hierarchy of God. I followed my mother, hoping there would be enough room for me.

I sat down in the chair, and was greeted with the back of the very large man from before sitting in front of me. He didn’t seem that comfortable, but his wife carried on, grabbing his hand and talking like there was no tomorrow. He was silent, and shifted in his seat.

“That’s Beth,” my mother informed me, noticing I had been staring intently. “She’s really nice if you get to know her.”

I glanced over to my mother, realizing how rude my gawking had been. She clasped the Bible stowed away on the back of the seat and began to open it. I figured we had no family legacy to pass on in a Bible of our own so we had to borrow our faith. I was surprised when she cracked the spine to a page and, instead of keeping it for herself, passed it to me.

“Don’t you want it?”

“I have my own,” she mentioned easily, and pulled out this small, worn down light leather bound book. The pages had a gold seal to them, making the book appear more valuable than I thought possible. There was a bookmark in it, the tail end frayed with years of use. As she pulled back the cover, I noticed an inscription on the inside in fine black handwriting. I didn’t have to think too hard to know that the Bible had come from her family, most likely her mother, years ago. I had never seen this object before, and I continued staring, studying it fixedly. I didn’t know we had this much history to our family.

“I don’t know what to do with this,” I confessed, realizing I still had my own dead weight of borrowed devotion in my hand.

“You’ll learn,” she replied, and I couldn’t help but feel shunned. Her voice was a lot colder than it had been only moments ago when she was talking to Beth. I started to feel my own mother’s eyes on me, like the ones that had been staring, cut right through me.

I suddenly didn’t want to learn how to use a Bible, especially if all people did around here was to hold them idly in their laps and stare at the most recent victim. I didn’t want to be pitied by them, and more importantly, I didn’t want to be just like them. If I didn’t believe in it, it was only making things worse by pretending. I had done enough lying in the past month over things that needed to be covered up. Did I really need to hide my lack of faith in humanity and supposed God around me?

I wasn’t sure exactly when my faith in God had dwindled down into nothing, but it was probably soon after I decided to stop going to church. Before then, I had always held onto some kind of composure that my faith and acts towards it were helping. My life wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t the best either. I thought that by not attending church, I would further damn myself. So I always shut up and forced on itchy clothing every Sunday, going with my mother and father by my side. I didn’t think I had any other option, and I had to make the best of it. When I was given that option, I had been surprised and how not afraid I had been. I could turn my back on my religion, not worshipping all the time when I needed to, and I had been okay with that. I had always found the idea of one building where our prayers were only valid a little trivial, and sometimes prayed at home when I was really desperate or afraid. I liked that alternative a lot better than smelling shoe polish, moth balls, and feeling itchy fabric against my skin, so I had declined. And when nothing relatively bad happened, I supposed my faith started to become more and more malleable, until it finally faded away.

My Sunday mornings were eventually filled with alcohol, dirty parking lots, and liquor stores, waiting around and only praying for someone to save us by buying Sam, Travis, and I beer. It turned into a whole different type of ritual, and a whole other type of religion when I really thought about it. I had always been devoting my life to something that was out of my reach. God, my parents, Sam and Travis. I was never the one taking responsibility for my sins, my good deed, or the rest of society. I never through I had that much power, and I thought it was futile. I drank away any kind of humility in anything.

Ironically, if it were not for those early morning and afternoon waits for redemption around the blinding light of the liquor store, I would not have had half the faith I did at that moment in time. Gerard, coming from the depths of the supposed hell in a high-rise, had saved me. He took me from my mundane existence and threw me into color. I didn’t believe in anything until I walked into his doors, and even when I first did walk in, the only thing I could believe was that this was unbelievable. He took my whole world, and violently shook it. He made bright bruises form, and told me to marvel at their color, shape, and specific meaning. He made me see things different, do things different, and subsequently, act different. Act better. I no longer needed to drown myself. I no longer needed to worship things I didn’t need or want or would help me in the long run. Gerard was reinforcing my belief in the world around me, but as I sat in that church, I realized that I was still so far behind.

Gerard had turned into some God-like feature in my mind. He wasn’t not sub-human or immortal or anything like that. He was just like me. He was just like my parents, and even Sam and Travis in the positions they had held before. I was still shifting my devotion to something that was not within my reach. I was still not leading my life to my expectations. I thought I had been. I really did; I knew I had changed and grown, but I was still stuck in his garden. I didn’t want to leave completely, I still knew I wasn’t ready to leave completely, but I had to realize a lot. He had been taken away from me, and though I knew I would get him back (I just had to), there were some things I could do on my own. There was a lot I could do on my own, actually. I just had to tell myself I could.

Looking over at my mother, her nose into the book, I suddenly felt sorry for her. She didn’t seem to realize that she could break free from all of this. She didn’t have to associate with Beth if she didn’t want to. She didn’t have to get dressed up and come here every Sunday just to save herself. She was in charge of doing that.

I wanted to tell her, but I knew I couldn’t without making her more upset. And since the sermon was about to start, the man in a long white robe walking onto the podium and stretching his arms, I knew this was the wrong time. Perhaps after I could explain to her, and try to help her more. For now, I had to just help her by shutting up and doing what she asked.

“Good morning, everyone,” the pastor started, looking around at everyone with a smug smile on his face. He took a luxurious breath in and out, pushing his glasses up on his nose before he started.

He was a very eloquent speaker, it almost made me sad that I just didn’t appreciate or comprehend what was coming out of his mouth. He spoke with a presence and a loud voice that penetrated, shaking the whole room. Everything was so scripted and rehearsed, even the things that some parishioners chose to ask him about during the middle of the sermon. He was too quick with his words; it made everything sound to forged. Everything revolved and related around God, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t get that. It was too much for me at some times. While the people around me were closing their eyes with intensity of his words affecting them, I was closing my eyes because I just wanted it to be over. I wished I could scan through all of his thoughts, and just pick out the ones that were halfway decent. Not everything he said was bullshit, but he tried too hard, spoke too pretentiously, and it just ended up a mess of lies and visions I could not grasp. It was almost a shame; he had a lot of potential engrained in his voice. He just needed to find a better topic, or a more concise way of saying it.

There was a lot of getting up and down constantly during the service, and one of the dreaded elements I had forgotten about from my youth: singing. I hated singing in church. I used to hate singing in general, but I had managed to overcome that fear a little in Gerard’s apartment when he forced me to play guitar for him, and sing the small verses that I had written. The singing in church though… it was too obligatory. Too gimmicky. It didn’t feel real or with some passion. Though some people started to sway from side to side with the words, it just didn’t sink right with me. I glanced my head to the side, and noticed that though my mother was shifting her weight on her feet to the beat, her mouth was pressed shut, not letting any kind of cadence out.

Maybe for once this day, we could agree on something.

Near the end of the service was when things actually started to get interesting. After taking to a few parishioners about things they wanted to confess or talk about for this past week, the pastor furrowed his thick brows, ran a hand through his dark hair, and looked at the crowd.

“This week seems to have been one of the hardest for a lot of you. I am forever grateful that instead of using more harmful ways of solving your problems, you have chosen to come here. No matter how bad things may seem, know that you can always come here.”

I felt like I was going to gag as he spoke, and I rolled my eyes. He droned on and on for a few sentences more about the great healing power of religion as I tried to block out his voice. Once I did, I noticed the smallest sound emitting from the space my mother occupied next to me. It was small hushed breathing, followed by something like a shy whine. I had to look over at my mother beside me to fully grasp the fact that she had started to cry.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, then flung my hand over my mouth realizing the error of what I had said. I was pretty sure it was bad etiquette to say something like this in a church. “I mean, are you okay?”

We were sitting down at his point in time during the service, and I angled my body in the seat so I could look at her directly. She was still sitting forward, her back hunched over her legs, face in her hand. Her tears weren’t too evident unless the light from the front cascaded off a drop and caused them to glisten against her face. She wasn’t sobbing or bawling, just crying. I hadn’t seen my mother cry since the police station, and it scared me. I had not been expecting her to cry here of all fucking places. Wasn’t it supposed to make her feel better? They didn’t really look like tears of joy with the way her eyes crinkled and mouth cringed.

“Are you okay?” I repeated quietly when she still had yet to respond. I touched her shoulder gingerly and though she moved under the touch, her face still remained lowered and into her lap. There was no one else in our row close enough to actually see what was going on. It felt as if she and I were in our own little world at that time, the pastor’s voice successfully blocked out in my mind.

“Mom?”

Finally, she stirred. She took in a deep breath and tried to compose herself enough to talk and look at me. “Yes?” she queried, trying to force a smile. Her eyes had this cracked glossy appearance to them, like she was broken in more than one way.

“Are you okay? Is there anything I can do?” I spouted, my voice probably louder than it needed to be.

“Oh, Frank…” she sighed, shaking her head. “Remember what I told you about lying?”

I raised my eyebrows, tipping my chin in acknowledgement. I could feel the guilt creep into my system; I thought this topic of discussion was done.

“Well, I know you don’t have to tell me everything, but there is still one person who you can tell everything to.” She paused, letting me decipher the answer for myself. I was too concerned with her tears and anguish to focus properly, and it took her motioning to the front of the church for me to realize she was talking about God.

“You can always talk to Him, and He’ll listen,” she stated soundly, a romanticism to her voice I had never heard before.

I winced, taking in a breath through the slits of my teeth. I didn’t know if I liked the sound of that too much. “He may listen, but he also judges.”

Almost as suddenly as the tears had started, they stopped, and my mother’s voice grew rigid. “Sometimes judgment is necessary,” she enunciated me, and then turned back to face the front.

My mouth hung open, remnants of what I wanted to say hanging off of them. I wanted to defended myself somehow, tell her about all I had realized while sitting in this pew, that I didn’t need some God I never saw to save me and neither did she, but my words remained dormant, logged behind my tongue. I couldn’t say anything, even if the pastor had not started talking loudly again, blocking off any form of communication between my mother. I couldn’t say anything because I knew deep down, she was right about everything.

There was a reason that we all couldn’t be in charge of our own lives. There was a reason that real freedom could never happen, and why we were all stuck feeding off each other’s lives. Taking care of yourself, fully and completely, was too daunting of a task. There was too much to do, too much to cover, and ultimately, you could never get it right. The opinion of yourself was subjective, you couldn’t see the things that other people saw. You weren’t able to see your own talents, but then again, you also weren’t able to see your flaws.

As much as I hated to admit it, judgment was fucking necessary. It was the only way we learned how to do things right in the end, it was the only way to become a better person in other people’s eyes if they told us what was wrong in the first place. God, though invisible and sometimes futile in my own mind, was necessary to my mother. She needed him so she could live her life properly. She needed him to tell her when she was going off the beaten path, when she wasn’t being as good as she could be, and also, she needed him to be there for her when things went wrong. She and I were a similar being, just using a different person. Gerard had been to me what God was to her. Only this time, he wasn’t around when I needed him the most. I had to seek out other vices, and if I had opened my eyes sooner, I would have realized my mother was trying to help me the only way she knew how. If God was helping her, she wanted him to help me too.

But I still had a mental block. I wanted to help my mother in any way I could, and I wanted to have myself helped as well. I was beginning to understand that judgment was necessary, but I had no clue to what type of ‘judgment’ my mother wanted to be fulfilled. Was she just like all the other people in this church with their demon eyes possessed on me, bearing into my soul and just knowing what I did with Gerard? Was she wanting me to be judged for being gay? Having sex with a man? I knew that sodomy was a sin, and being gay was frowned upon in church, but it was who I was. Even if I wasn’t gay completely, I was in a gay relationship. I was proud of it, and I loved Gerard. I didn’t care if he was a man, and honestly, if I ever had the guts to tell my mother about all of this after it was all over, I really hoped that she wouldn’t care either. I knew my dad was a lost cause at that point; he would never understand no matter how many ways I would explain it to him, or how happy it may have made me. He would never understand.

My mother was always such a different entity from my father. She was his completely polar opposite, hence why they worked and melded so well together. She was quiet and passive, he active and loud. She bended to fit everyone else, but still had opinions, just quieter, hidden. My mother was so much more fragile than my father, and this was displayed by the tears she shed during the sermon. But she was alike him in a lot of ways too. She was denouncing some kind of parental role just like he had, and now, she wanted me to be judged.

I knew I deserved to be judged, but not for that sin. It wasn’t a sin. Love couldn’t be a sin, and any sexual act that was bred off of love could never manifest itself into a sin in my mind. Though Gerard and I never spoke of God or anything of the sort, I knew he would back me up there. Even if he didn’t, this was the one thing I could look at subjectively in my mind. Love could only be subjective; no one else knew how you felt. This was not a sin, and not something I was going to beg for forgiveness for. If that meant I went to hell, or disappointed my mother, as much as it hurt, that was what I would have to face.

There was still one thing, something small and seemingly insignificant that I forgot about. Though it was nothing spoken on the Ten Commandments, I was pretty sure that lying was a sin. And fuck, I had been doing a lot of it recently. My mother beg came back into my head; the only thing she wanted from me was to stop lying. She didn’t care if I didn’t tell her everything in my life, so long as what I told her was the truth. I couldn’t even do that right recently. I knew then, in that church, surrounded by people who stared at me like I was the devil himself, that lying had been my worse sin. That had been where my guilt came from, and that was why watching my mother cry was hurting me to much. I had caused those tears, and nothing I had ever said to her in the past few weeks had been what she wanted.

The pastor started to speak, and ruptured me from my complex thoughts.

“In our recent world, there is never enough forgiveness. People have made enemies for years because they have not allowed this virtue to come into their life. Many of you have come from situations like that, and though you can never change them, or yourself on some instances, there will always be someone who will forgive you. He’s here, and He’s all around us, so let us take some time to talk to Him. I know we have all done things we are not proud of, but it is up to you to seek the rightfulness to your sins. Let us bow our heads and pray for redemption; you may be surprised at how soon it will come.”

Within an instant of the words being uttered, there was a small shuffle, and everyone’s heads were poised down in prayer. I hadn’t done it in years, but I was taken in by their actions, and mimicked them the best I could. I folded my hands together and watched as they shook from lack of contact in this position. I breathed deeply, and it took me ages to figure out what, if anything, I wanted to say.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 491