Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [46]
He signaled the bartender and ordered us another round. He was drinking something red, which I teased him about. “Is that the blood of Christ?”
He smiled at this but politely, letting me know he’d heard that one before. “Not quite. Just a Cape Codder.”
I leaned in. “I thought you guys weren’t supposed to go to gay bars. Or be gay, for that matter.” Or drink, but I didn’t say this, because really, anyone’s allowed to be an alcoholic.
Here he laughed wickedly. “Oh, we do a lot of things we’re not supposed to do. Trust me.”
And who wouldn’t trust him? A priest!
And that’s how I ended up in his car, now parked in neutral behind a restaurant in a scummy alley in Chicago.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. I said this after my penis refused to become erect. I was upset by my impotence, at twenty-six, but also didn’t want to disappoint Father Bill. He was such a nice guy. “I’ve had way too much to drink,” I told him.
Here, he pulled his face up from my lap and sat back against the seat. He said, “You know, you should really go to rehab.”
This was a stunning thing to hear, especially from a man who had, not an hour ago, bought me five drinks. “Really? That’s an interesting remark. Do you think so?”
“I think so,” he said, closing his eyes.
I tried to size him up. I decided that perhaps he was being passive-aggressive, sort of punishing me in some clever priest way for being too drunk to get hard, thus spoiling his free evening. Catholics were the world’s foremost experts at applying guilt in subtle but damaging ways. “So why do you think I should go to rehab?”
He turned toward me on the seat, which was an awkward position for him because the steering wheel was in the way. It struck me as a pose he used often in his work, one of accessibility and compassion. Body language that says “Here I am, open to you.” Father Bill continued, “Well, now that I get a better look at you outside the bar, there’s something in your eyes that makes me think this is not a one-time event, like you told me at the bar? When you apologized for being ‘loaded.’ I think that’s the word you used. Because you had a lousy day at work? Anyway, now something—call it instinct—is telling me you do this a lot. Like every night.”
He was right, of course. My drinking was quite out of hand. And the fact that he was now able to see this impressed me. “Well,” I said. And then we sat silent in the car, and I noticed he didn’t have air-conditioning or a CD player, and this humble fact made me feel tender toward him. I felt strangely connected to him at that moment and became instantly aroused.
He noticed. And this is when I got one of the best blow jobs of my life. Along with, at the end, a piece of paper with the name of a rehab hospital scribbled on it. “It’s in Minnesota. It’s the best. Lots of celebrities go there.”
He seemed to think that this would be something that might impress me, and he was sadly correct. The possibility of seeing Elizabeth Taylor or Robert Downey, Jr., in withdrawal would be enough to make me want to go to rehab whether I was a drunk or not.
I left him then, parked there in the alley. He offered to drive me home, but I told him my apartment was only a few blocks away.
Of course, I never saw him again. I left Chicago and moved back to New York City and went on with my life and my drinking until my drinking was my life. Then one day I opened an old date book and came across Father Bill’s scribbled note. I’d apparently tucked it away for later, forgetting. And then later came. And I called the number on the paper and checked myself into rehab, which, in fact, did save my life.
So you could say he was a scumbag priest who drank,