Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [24]
Some of the priests were very cool. This one priest, Father Jacques, had a cool beard and kind of looked like Jesus. He used to hang out with the altar boys like we were his friends. He took us seriously. He didn’t talk down to us like the other priests. A year into his tenure at St. Mary’s, Father Jacques didn’t show up at our church anymore.
“Where’d he go?” I asked my teacher.
“He’s at another parish now.”
“Why didn’t he say good-bye? We would have said good-bye to him.”
“Father Jacques is needed somewhere else.”
“Will he visit us?”
“I don’t think he’s going to visit, but we have a new priest coming in.”
The new priest was Father Fauvell. He was fat and bitter. Whenever we’d ask him questions, he’d scold us. “You don’t have to ask about everything.” We heard through the grapevine that Father Fauvell loved to stay up late with the other priests, playing cards and drinking. Maybe he was tired from all that drinking? All I wanted was Father Jacques to come back. But he was needed somewhere else.
• • •
Church had its cool moments. Every once in a while they’d have a guitarist play with the choir. And I was like, All right! Rock and roll! And then she’d start playing “Simple Gifts” or “Hosanna in the Highest” and I’d be like, No! Play the good songs! “Time after Time” or “We Built This City”! C’mon!
Some of the altar boys got plush gigs like weddings or funerals. That meant the people running the event would throw you some cash. Wedding, maybe fifty dollars. Funerals, maybe ten. Or twenty. You could buy sixty-five packs of baseball cards with that kind of scratch, all because someone died or got married. I never got those gigs. You really had to be hot on the circuit to get those kinds of breaks. Matthew Sullivan got a lot of weddings and funerals. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t in it for the money. I was in it for the . . . Wait, I’m not sure why I was in it. Oh yes, the smell of incense. Love that burning smell. Also, we got to light candles.
The most frustrating part about being an altar boy is that you can’t speak or move. You just have to sit there. I wanted the priest’s job. I wanted to get up there, kill with a few jokes that aren’t funny, and then shake everyone’s hand like Jay Leno or Oprah. It always struck me how much laughter priests got for jokes that weren’t very strong. A priest would be like, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and . . . John Boy!” and people would be like, “Father Patterson is hilarious!” I thought, If he’s a priest, I should be a priest. I’m way funnier than him. Plus, I’m never going to have sex anyway, so what are the drawbacks?
I was a good Catholic kid, though. I knocked out all the sacraments. I went to confession when I was eleven, which had to be a real snoozefest for the priest. “Okay. So you stole a Jose Canseco rookie card from your brother, and when your mom told you to go to bed, you stayed up late and watched Alf? Anything at least a little exciting?” In retrospect, maybe we should have been turning the tables on some of those priests in confession. “So Father, what have you have been up to?”
I always felt that communion was kind of awkward. On one occasion I received a communion wafer from an elderly priest with hand tremors, and he missed my mouth and it fell on the ground. I was like, Oh no. It was as if we were in a seafood restaurant and a waiter had dropped three baked stuffed lobsters on the floor. But the priest was on top of it. He just picked it up and popped it in his own mouth. Like he knew that Jesus has a five-second rule.
The other thing that struck me as odd was when you drank wine out of that chalice. Because when I was growing up, during the AIDS scare, people stopped sipping wine from the same cup. Which is kind of weird, because if you got AIDS from Jesus, you would totally get into heaven.
I went to St. Mary’s School from grades one through six.