A fragment in progress, from decades ago
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(Authors note: F Scott Fitzgerald had a famous short story called Absolution. This is its worthy successor.)
Jimmie Halliday
Jimmie Halliday was still mad that when he had gone to confession when he was 15 some priest has told him to stop masturbating. Hell, he had gotten cushy priests in confession at their suburban church all the times before who told him softly that they knew that the temptations of the flesh were strong and that really they were a gift from God and that God had some woman out there for him someplace someday and that sex was a really a beautiful thing and not to feel too bad because just confessing showed his heart was in the right place and Jesus never gives us more than we can bear and helps us every time we fall and blah blah blah, but this time he had been some middle-of-Advent/pre-Christmas-crowded-church-assembly-line absolution and they had like eight priests there running as many ostensibly private booths for all the members of the crowded parish who had put off confession until the last minute and they must have carted in some crusty old padre from the sticks and Jimmie did not get the soft suburban priest treatment he expected. Instead he got,
"Dang it boy, keep yer hands off yer wiener. Gawd made it fer higher things. You want a joystick, play one of them vidya games. Say 15 Hail Marys and think about the purity of the Virgin Mary. All the saints and angels can see all the stuff you do."
Jimmie Halliday was stunned. He said about four of the Hail Marys then stomped out into the snow to the family car and sat and sulked with his whole face burning until the rest of his large family climbed in. When they asked him what was wrong he said it had been too hot in there and it made him feel like throwing up. That answer put them all at ease because although they thought it was a lie it made them assume he had just been drinking earlier that day.
But it had made Jimmie kind of sour on religion ever since. It didn't know what it was talking about. Those old desiccated priests sure didn't. It had been that day that he decided to become worldly wise. The church had taught him all it could, which gave him precious little armor or experience for tackling real adulthood. Church was for what you did AFTER you had gone out into the world and done stuff. He decided to become street-wise Jimmie and do stuff.
Well, street-wise in the suburban sense, on his parents' dime, at a semi-exclusive semi-private college where they taught Great Books and turned out lofty and all, though nonetheless useless liberal arts grads in the mold of Cardinal Newmann but with a higher blood alcohol content.
Late junior year he sobered up enough to think he oughta consider his next move to be law school since it more or less suited his declining morality skills and would not require a major change in his socio-academic lifestyle. So in law school he humped his way through many girls as shallow as himself but could never quite shake the scalding lecture of the priest. He thought that maybe by 21 he would surely have been worldly enough to have proven that desiccated old celibate wrong. But the memory always of the scolding always returned post-orgasmically when he lay in the dark after doing the deed with some gal he didn't know who was now laying asleep on his arm in the bed and everything was too quiet. It would set the tips of his ears burning. Something in the back of his mind was still looking for a way to let that old fool (probably now dead) know he had won and didn't give a damn about him.
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Later...
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"Fuck, you're not dead?"
"Fuck, you're still a stupid shit? Look kid, I'm blind - I got super-hearing to make up for it. I can remember a voice. Sheesh son, anyone who think a kid's gonna stop wanking off at seventeen is a sap. My job was to put something in ya that'd make you come back."
"And what was that?"
"The knowledge that you can't win but can't stop trying."
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