a short story by Fred Raimondi
From everything I’ve heard, Jesus is not partial to unclean souls.
It was around 3pm on a cloudy and brisk fall Saturday afternoon in Orange, New Jersey. Bluish hued, bare trees loomed over us like skeletons and contrasted the warm, comforting colors of the leaves that blanketed the ground.
Steven Zazzaro and I were going to confession.
Why? Because that’s what you did.
Had been for hundreds of years.
The deal was this. You went to confession on Saturday so that your soul was cleansed. This would allow you to receive Holy Communion on Sunday morning.
The rule in the Catholic Church is (for you heathens out there that don’t know any better) that in order to receive the physical manifestation of Jesus Christ (Holy Communion — which is actually a blessed wafer) your soul must be clean.
Sin free.
Which actually looking back on it, really only worked for kids because most of the adult sinning happened Saturday night. So it seemed like kind of a waste of soul cleansing if we’re just going to go out and dirty it up with Saturday night’s festivities. So yeah, it only worked for kids.
Steven Zazzaro and I were going to confession at St. John’s Church. At the time, I didn’t know that St. John’s was a predominantly Irish congregation. We’re Italian, and everybody knows that the Irish and the Italians don’t get along. It was shit that probably went back to when they were all immigrants coming into America and fighting for a place in this country.
We used to walk to St. John’s Church, which was really only two blocks away, but two blocks seems like a long walk when you’re a kid. Sometimes, depending on how early we were, we’d cut through the cemetery. This was one of those times. As we walked up the path, flanked on each side by gravestones — some of them very old as this area of NJ dates back to the Revolutionary War — we talked about the whole, “going to confession to clean your soul” thing. It seemed so abstract to both of us. It was raising questions that NO eight-year-old should be asking themselves: Was the soul physical? Did animals have a soul? Could you just hose it down or throw it in the sink? Most of which we never answered, or would never answer. But it killed the time on the walk for sure.
When we got to church, confession worked like this: everybody waited in line against the wall of the church to get into the confessional, which was also built right against the wall of the church.
There really must’ve been a lot of sinning going on because this church was packed. It was really crowded, and the line was really long, so instead of standing in line, we had to wait in the pews until the line subsided.
We found a pew, sat down, and started the ritual.
Well, our ritual.
Everyone knows that church is for praying, not for talking. So like all good Catholics, we did what everyone does when they sit down in church for the first time.
You prey for a while.
Or in my case, kneel down for a while and make believe that I’m praying. I used the counting technique. Now for me, I would normally count to 500. If I felt like I need a lot of help I would count to 1000. It looked really good to all the people around me because my lips were moving and I was praying.
But I was really counting.
When I sat back in the pew after counting, uh, I mean praying, I was thinking about what Steven Zazzaro and I were talking about on the walk to St John’s Church.
When we made our communion, nuns, priests, parents, older brothers, and everyone that had been there before, told us that the worst sin that you could possibly commit was to receive Communion without having gone to confession.
From everything I’ve heard, Jesus is not partial to unclean souls.
From everything I’ve heard, Jesus is not partial to unclean souls
Think about it. You go to confession the day before to cleanse your soul. If for some reason you take the physical manifestation of Jesus Christ and try to put him in an uncleansed soul, that has to be pretty bad.
That had to be the queen mother of all sins.
We had actually heard that if you did receive communion without confession, when the Host (which is what the blessed wafer is referred to — and why was it called that?) touched your tongue, it was like 5000 degrees. Way hotter than the fires of hell. Evidently, the second it touched your tongue, the 5000-degree searing heat propagated from where host touched your tongue through the rest of your body so that you burned from your tongue down to your toes. You flail around for about 10 seconds. (just like a burning guy on TV) Then you become a glowing ember for a second and then you end up in a pile of ashes on the floor.
Now for a kid in the third grade, this was a pretty scary proposition.
Especially because none of us had seen it happen before. We’d heard about it from the older kids that had seen it actually happen.
Although, deep thinker that I am, started to wonder why it had never been in the papers. You would think that something as significant as ”Kid Burned to a Crisp in Church” would be a pretty newsworthy headline. But who knows how far the tentacles of the Catholic Church reached? They were like the Mafia. They must have connections in the press. Surely they must have the whole media on the payroll.
The “unclean soul/burning up” phenomenon is something I think we were taught in Sunday school, and we had heard it from the older kids, so it must be true. Look at Richard Gere and the hamster. That came right from an emergency room nurse! It HAD to be true.
But once again, I digress.
So Steven and I were sitting there and it was taking a really long time for us to get to the confessional. We finally started getting bored. And as little boys do in the third grade, they try to amuse themselves. First, one of us picked up the missalette, rolled it up, and started looking through it like it was a telescope. Then, one of us took two missalettes, rolled them both up, and starts to pretend we were playing drums. One of us (me) held it in our laps like a penis. Heck, we were going to confession anyway, so whatever we did here would get washed away.
When we got tired of amusing ourselves this way, we started to try to distract each other.
Now Steven had this odd talent. He could make a dribble of spit come out of his mouth and almost all the way down his chin, and then suck the whole thing back in. It was pretty amazing really. I thought that it had to be genetic because his brother Michael could squirt a perfect stream of spit — or some kind of fluid — through the space between his two front teeth. We’re not talking about your garden variety spit here, I’m talking a perfect stream. I thought it was fascinating.
One thing that Steven does know is that when he did the “spit down the chin thing” it was all over for me.
You see, I have this problem. When something strikes me funny, it’s all over. I laugh uncontrollably. Not a giggle or guffaw but a full-fledged belly laugh complete with doubling over and — in certain cases — falling on the floor. The loudest, most obnoxious thing one can do in church.
So he did it.
He did the “spit down the chin thing”.
And with that, I’m finished.
The horses have left the starting gate.
The toothpaste is out of the tube.
We’ve passed the point of no return.
I started laughing uncontrollably.
I tried to suppress it, squash it, push it down, kill it, but no dice. I was off to the races. And now so was Steven. And it was loud. Not a giggle; a full-fledged belly laugh. And I’ve lost it.
All the time, in the back of my head, I was thinking, “I wonder how this is going to play out?” Oh, of course, we could have just gotten up and left the church until the laughter died off and then gone back in, but no.
We just sat there laughing.
Father Thomas, who incidentally was giving confession, storms out of the confessional, and looks at me and Steven with the fire of hell in his eyes, and says, “OUT! OUT! OUT! BOTH OF YOU, OUT RIGHT NOW!”
So without missing a beat, Steven and I hightail it out of church.
As I walked toward the back of the church I was thinking, “Thrown out of Church while waiting to go into confession. This was a whole other level of sin. This was really bad.”
As I walked toward the back of the church I was thinking, “Thrown out of Church while waiting to go into confession. This was a whole other level of sin. This was really bad.”
Now, one thing that you have to know about me is that I’m a pussy of the first order. We got out of church and I was freaking out. I was babbling like an idiot, “what are we going to do…how are we going to go to confession, what about receiving communion tomorrow?”.
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Steven calmed me down. He said, “let’s wait about 20 minutes, and then we’ll go home. No one will know the difference”.
My inner voice said sarcastically and very loudly, “Oh right! No one will know the difference!”
I’m not sure if brainiac Steven Zazarro thought this all the way through, but we were going to have to go to church tomorrow anyway. And we were going to have to receive communion. And there was NO WAY OF GETTING OUT OF IT.
Why?
Because we went to church with our parents! And they received communion. Which meant we would have to receive communion. Which meant that I was going to be burned to a crisp the moment that host touched my tongue.
This sucked. Not just a regular suck. This sucked BIG TIME.
But there was a more important issue that needed to be addressed immediately.
We still had to kill time before we went home. If we went right home, mom would for sure know that we didn’t go to confession. So we had to kill at least 20 minutes.
We thought we could kill at least that much time by visiting Pop’s. Pop’s was a vintage candy store, You’ve seen it a million times. Picture the store where George Bailey worked as a kid in the film, “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Lined with dark wood shelves and a soda fountain, with wood floors that are probably from the 1900’s — and look that worn out — Pop’s was the place that EVERY kid went after church.
Pop’s had a long counter where they served Ice Cream and Sodas. . . and CANDY. Dark wood trimmed glass cases held the candy. This place was a candy paradise. Everything you could think of: full bars, penny candy, bubblegum…everything. The deal was, after church on Sunday, every kid would stop at Pop’s and buy whatever they could with the money they had. Sometimes it was only a nickel, dime, or fifteen cents. But that went a long way in 1966.
It was your typical type of candy store in 1966, but they also sold (which I thought was a shameless profit grab from Pop himself to make money because his store was near the church) religious artifacts. Pop’s sold crosses, holy water vials, even religious postcards. They even had those postcards where when you moved them, the picture actually moved. It was magical.
My favorite was the one with Jesus where when you moved it, his hands were down, and then he raised one of them with his special Jesus sign where his thumb and middle finger made a circle and the remaining fingers stood up. It was like Jesus’ spin on the classic “OK” where your thumb and forefinger touched and the middle, ring, and pinky stood up.
As we opened the door to Pop’s, we heard that familiar, metallic, “ding” that happened every time we opened the door. Only this time it was different. This time “ding” reverberated around the wood walls and glass cases of the empty, cavernous store.
Yes. The story was empty.
Why?
Because everyone ELSE was in confession!
Steven and I grabbed a couple of stools and we each ordered a soda. I decided to walk around the store while he was waiting for the sodas to come. Really, I wanted to go see my favorite postcard where Jesus gave me the “special Jesus sign” when I moved the card. I made my way to the rotating rack where all the postcards were, and I picked up the Jesus card. I moved it and his hand rose. Cool. I did it one more time. Still cool. The third time I did it, Jesus came to life! Did I see that? I panicked and dropped the card. I was freaking out. Did I see that?
After I gathered myself, I picked the Jesus card up and moved it once. His hand came up. Cool. I did it again. Still cool. It must have been my imagination. There’s no way Jesus came to life on the card. I moved the card a third time. HE CAME TO LIFE AGAIN!!
But before I could drop it he looked at me and said, “Please don’t drop the card again, that floor is filthy, much like your soul”. WHEN JESUS TELLS YOU “PLEASE DON’T DROP THE CARD”, YOU DON’T DROP THE CARD.
At this point, I was freaking out inside.
Jesus looked up at me from the card and said, “You had better not take communion tomorrow. You didn’t go to confession. And you know what that means.” There was a long pregnant pause, He looked down, and then He looked up at me with a slight smirk and Jesus said, “Poof!” His hands broke out of his special Jesus sign and made a motion that looked like an explosion.
Holy shit. Jesus himself said Poof! Poof means UP IN FLAMES. Poof means 5000 degrees on my tongue. Poof means heat hotter than the flames of Hell! Poof means setting me ablaze in front of the whole congregation! I hastily put the card down and hightailed it back to Steven Zazzaro at the counter.
I was shaken to my core.
We drank our sodas, bought some candy, and by now we had killed plenty of time. There was only one word that kept repeating over and over in my head the whole way home.
Poof!
So when I got home, nobody was the wiser. But I had to deal with the fact that tonight’s steak (we always had steak on Saturday night) might be the last one of my life. As usual, the family gathered around the table, and we ate dinner.
I wasn’t there, though.
I was still in Pop’s where Jesus was saying “poof” to me from the confines of a lenticular postcard. Following dinner and TV, it was bedtime. I knew it was going to be hard to sleep, but finally, I drifted off.
When I woke up all I could think of was receiving Communion. Suddenly it came to me. The Loophole!
The general knowledge — much like the bursting into flames when the Host touched your tongue — was that 100 Act of Contritions was enough to get you (and, in turn, your soul) in the clear if you missed confession. Clean your soul just enough so that you wouldn’t burst into flames at 5000 degrees.
With that, I said a hundred Act of Contritions, although I knew deep down that 100 Act of Contritions was no substitute for confession.
And really, I think I lost count after 27
In the car on the way to church, I was silently freaking out. When we got to church, I went and sat with the Sunday School kids. The Sunday School Kids always sat in the first 5 pews. I was right next to Steven Zazzaro. He knew and I knew that we were in for trouble. We went through the whole service. When it was time to get up and go to Communion, we were angling to see who would go first in line. I kept pushing him in front of me, and he kept pushing me in front of him. Finally, Sister Delores saw what was going on between us and gave Steven a shot in the head and told him “Keep your place in line!”
But we both knew was a crapshoot. You never knew which way the priest was going to be moving as he served Communion to us. When we finally got up to the rail, I knelt there to the left of Steven. I looked at which way the priest was moving. FANTASTIC! The way it was working out, he was going to receive Communion before me! This was working out great. As soon as Steven burst into flames I could high-tail it outta there. Forget ‘love thy neighbor’; this was every man for himself! And, even though my buddy would have ended up a pile of ash, I would live another day to go to confession and square it with Jesus next Saturday.
I could hear Father Thomas (who incidentally was the priest that threw us both out of Church the day before) making his way down the Communion Rail toward us, “The Body of Christ . . .The Body of Christ . . .”
He finally came to Steven Zazzaro. Father Thomas held up the host, looked down at Steven, and said, “The Body of Christ”. Did the pupils in Father Thomas’ eyes REALLY just turn to flames for a second? Did I just see that?
Steven stuck his tongue out. I never saw anyone shake so much. I looked over at him and the second that the host touched Steven’s tongue, it happened! From the spot where the host touched his tongue, flame spread down his head and body. I looked over and there he was in the middle of the church. On fire and flailing about, just like a burning guy on TV!
I looked behind me to see if other people in the congregation were seeing this too. And — much to my chagrin — they were. Mrs Gilhooly, who always sat in the front row leaned over to the woman next to her, said calmly, and like she had seen it a million times, “Poor kid, he didn’t go to confession”.
Miss Burt, our teacher, leaned over to Mr Clampett and said, “Too bad, he didn’t go to confession, he was a good kid”.
I looked at the other altar boys and they were looking at a flailing, burning Steven Zazzaro and just shaking their heads.
Snapping my head forward, I looked up to Father Thomas, who looked me in the eye and said with a sarcastic smile, “what a shame, he didn’t go to confession”. I looked over to see a still burning Steven flail about when a final Poof from his feet rises up and engulfs him completely, leaving a pile of dust on the ground.
I was frozen. I couldn’t move. No high-tailing it out of there, no squaring it with Jesus next Saturday, and no more steak on Saturday night!
I looked back at Father Thomas, who was now in front of me, holding the host out over the chalice for me to take.
Instead of saying “Body of Christ” he smiled an evil looking smile and said, “Do you want some of this?” Frozen with the fear of the impending heat, instinctively I said, “Amen”. I closed my eyes, put my tongue out preparing for the 5000-degree heat, and . . . nothing.
Yes, nothing.
Just the host.
No burning, no fires of hell, no 5000-degree heat! Nothing. I looked over and Steven Zazzaro was giving himself the sign of the cross and getting up. I did the same. And while still rattled, I was very relieved. I thought to myself, this is really just a rumor. A myth. A story. Complete BS!
As I walked back to my pew I passed the niches where there were statues of all the Saints. The last one was Jesus and, of course, Jesus’ niche and statue were much bigger than all the saints. After all, he was the Main Man, the Son of God, he was Jesus for Chrissakes!
This particular Jesus sculpture had him standing in a pastoral setting among the creatures of the woods. He was standing there with a calm look on his face and he was making his (special thumb and middle finger) Jesus sign.
As I passed the life-size statue of Jesus, I thought to myself, I can’t believe that I got so shook up over this burning up stuff.
Still looking at the statue, Jesus’ head started turning as if it was following me. Jesus’ hands broke out of his “Special Jesus sign”, looked me right in the eye, and made an explosion motion with his hands. As he made this motion he looked me right in the eye and mouthed the word “Poof”.
He had a raised eyebrow “you’re not out of the woods” look on his face.
His face then changed to a smile, his shoulders bobbing up and down as he was giggling and then, just as quickly, transformed back into a statue.
Transfixed (and still a little shocked) I continued to look at the statue as I walked back to my pew.
At which point the statue of Jesus came back to life for a second, looked at me with a smile, and. . . winked.
