for us all.

Two weeks ago Bill Yusk fronted me an ounce of hashish. I’ve yet to sell any of it. I can’t even be a drug dealer and worse I’ve smoke a quarter ounce. Ann brought home Sherry. I have slowly acquire a taste for the British liquor, although sherry tastes too much like altar wine for me to like it. Too many memories.

As an altar boy the priests required our wearing cassocks and surplices, so we looked like devotees to Jesus headed for the black cloth. Latin was the language on the altar, until Vatican II changed the Mass’ litany to the worshippers’ language. The magic of mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa lost its magic in English. I still remember ‘forgive me, forgive me, really forgive me’ as one of the Latin phrases I didn’t have to mumble.

I stayed an altar boy into my teens, because my services were required at funerals during the week, whihc meant my brtoerh and I went to St. Elizabeth’s at 8 instead of St. Mary of the Foothills. We could go through the motions. The mourners weepy before the close coffin. They were never open in the church.. That was only for the funeral homes. The priest rambled through the liturgy with a short testemonial for the departed. Mostly old people. The exit procession is very solemn. Priest leading the way with us carrying urns of burning incense. Sometimes rich families had the parish organist play a dirge for their loved one. We stood aside for the casket and the priest sprinkled a blessing of holy water of the casket. We never saw anyone arise from the dead. THe dead stayed dead. Even as a proto-atheists I respected the solemnity of the service.

I was a virgin then.

Somehow I abandoned holiness for libertinism.

Maybe when I first touched Ann McCellan’s tits. She was one of a set of identical triplets. Her sisters Beth and Cathy were also fondled freely in their basement. Having impure thoughts was an easy sin to confess, until the thoughts became deeds and lust a goal for the ages. I wasn’t a sinner. Just one in the making.