Sweetmeats (ROUND 18)
Let’s workshop this prose poem (which comes from the story "Mario Mangione") that details the step-by-step grooming tactics of priest salivating over an obese and vulnerable altar boy.
scent of the day: Cuoium, by Orto Parisi.—The dirty leather I have been on a desperate hunt for ever since I caught a whiff of Tom Ford’s Ombre Leather, Cuoium—which has one of the best openings I have experienced (salty leather smoked with such rabid animalism that it could easily connote a closeup sniff of human perineum cured by sulfuric farts)—should be considered a benchmark for the suede-and-saffron genre given especially its ability to capture the full life of leather: first, its most gritty and animalic—unguent boar funk, sweaty ambergris—in the earliest stages of tanning (where the saffron, violet, styrax, and cade oil bring out aspects of henna-ink, burnt rubber, gunpowder, and gasoline that reinforce an industrial context); second, the Tuscan-leather-reminiscent smokey-ashy suede portion (where it seems we are smelling rugged leather chair that has been fucked in and smoked in and ashed in for years to the point that it is crumbling); third, an Acqua-di-Parma-reminiscent finished leather portion (where the mandarin orange and the ambergris and the tobacco evokes images of satchels heated in seaside sun against the bodies of cigarette smokers); fourth, the rotten leather relics portion (where its seem, largely because of the dank patchouli, as if we just dug some sort of long-forgotten hide product out of the ground).
Sweetmeats
From the bearded seal bloodbaths of the Arctic’s ominous ice drifts, we shift now to the human world. For all our tea-time pretensions to civilization, tooth-and-claw instincts—undiminished, if not riled all the more, by the self-shame frenzy to conceal them—tinge the private nooks of even our most tranquil sanctuaries. Observe the delicate genesis of a chilling predation neither whose familiarity, nor whose stretches of boredom (too vast for real-time coverage), detract from its spectacularity. Rarely successful absent the foresight of a cunning mind (whose willpower must be rigid enough to plod onward for the long haul and yet nimble enough to course correct come the inevitable curveball), it is a calculated hunt that pushes delayed gratification to limits never before seen on our planet—limits surpassed perhaps only in the algorithmic wake of our AI progeny.
Light-hearted interaction marks the first tentative taps on the sphincter-tight jar lid of trust. Georgie—for Father Peady no more than a cherry-glazed sweetmeat in a confectioner’s pick-me window—stands out among the other altar boys. His trifecta of vulnerability, encased in sleepless eyebags dark as Halloween, draws in the peers whose bullying red carpets the way for our hungry priest, his belt too notched to need such a compass: (1) broken home pickled in enough alcoholic neglect for more than one cigarette mattress fire; (2) only child starved as much for attention and belonging as for the confidence and the skill boosts of sibling competition; (3) fat as all honeybun hell. Best-foot-forward compliments spill organically from Father Peady’s lips—bridled, of course, from love-bombing extremes (this is not, after all, amateur hour). “Oh wow, a true artist in the making!” he murmurs, the click of his loafers coming to an abrupt stop, in mock study of the boy’s colored-pen drawings of ninja combat, their school-counselor-worthy volumes of blood (warping and bleeding through the paper) enough to make Father Peady glance over his shoulder for rival sharks circling among the clergy—chief among them Father Phiely, whose dozens-of-deaf-ears nickname (“Touchy”) both adolescent and adult gossipers alike tuck with a chef’s kiss between the “Father” and the “Phiely.”
Such verbal nudges evolve to shooting netless hoops behind the rectory in what outwardly appears an overdue intervention to get the boy more physically active. Only a few bounces into their first game, however, the world beyond our man reveals itself as a co-conspirator, thwacking an already entrapping dessert with a sloppy-toppy of fortune so catastrophic to long-con restraint, so ruinous to the delicate dance of edging foreplay, that—by the too-good-to-be-true scrunch of his brow (pure candid-camera incredulity)—it is a miracle Father Peady does not yell out (as if to some Truman Show audience) “What’s the goddamn catch here?” Repeatedly defaulting—like a one-trick pony (but one hell of a trick it is!)—to the post-up play that would send even hesitant priests into game-on mode (clerical collar tightening with each carotid thump), look who becomes temptress Eve incarnate on the court. With an instinctive flair for courtship all his own (akin perhaps, but only perhaps, to the songbird flaring its plumage without conscious aim), the boy himself twerks an otherwise Hallmark scenario into something just shy of afternoon delight: ram-ramming his jiggly ass (back arched like a pro) into a bulging, but best believe unbudging (even slightly prodding), wall of pelvis jutted forward beneath hands high in hook-shot defense—the whole sweaty tango, the lip bites and the heartening affirmations, torn right out of an Atlanta nightclub (were not, of course, each promising flicker of synchronization ruined by the rhythm of Caucasoid hips). “There you go!” Only loosely paralleled in the nonhuman world (like when cleaner fish venture into the mouths that eat them), where else—sea or savannah, jungle or sky—does one witness prey offering themselves up like this? Such asking-for-it ass thrusts (which have Father Peady ever on the verge of going skins, no matter his flab)—thrusts violent enough to make any other defender reach for the jockstrap; hardcore enough to make a Goebbels out of any mother who suggests her daughter’s self-administered cocktail of molly and crotchless jeans were to blame for the bar-bathroom rape—nearly place the boy in the pantheon of nature’s most haunting oddities: a female serial killer videotaping each rape-decapitation; a black American in a suicide cult guzzling colloidal silver each day before the salvation comet; a giraffe stomping its own calf into a pulp of death on the just-in-case chance of injury after a brush with a lion. “Ooh, there you go! Yeah, drive it in!”
Then comes the flow of golden handcuffs. Augustus-Gloop chocolate bars (insurance, lest exercise stir any notions of escaping the loner shell), mega nougat-filled fuckers, slipped from cassock pockets (that worm-tongue incantation “KING SIZE” girthy and lurid with the weight of double entendre) and landing like a sly drug deal in the chunky little hand well below the neck-craning hyperbole of look-both-ways theatrics, unnecessary but precedent-setting, to ensure no one sees—eyes, always the eyes (groping eyes that really take you in), heavy with the weight of conspiracy as the middle finger of the hand-off hand strokes the sweaty palm of the recipient hand (the universal sign). Against such a calorie-dense baseline marquee gifts shine: a paperback version of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, a little nudge from Father Peady’s favorite author to prime the boy to enter Joseph Campbell’s heroic cycle (where answering the call of adventure requires status-quo-breaking bravery, not to mention a wise mentor to guide the hand down into the nether regions); a “sacred” rosary, talisman on the hero’s journey (kissed and handed over with a mysterious, because unwarranted, smile of conspiracy—a foreboding smile of stringy salivation, as if some covenant had just been made). Although not preplanned in fiddle-crab finger deliberation at some drawing board (but rather—like how God, too perfect to need any prior blueprint, created everything in an eternal instant of impromptu—simply an organic matter of tried-and-true instinct), so unbroken becomes the procession of courtship offerings over the months that anyone could predict the effect of its sudden cessation: agitation if not downright panic, the once-showered recipient driven from an inner need—a self-fueled furnace sparked into life like a nebula condensed at the protostar cusp of nuclear fusion—to figure out what he can do to return to the fold of good graces.
Ambush patience rivaling that of Sauron (a self-control conjured by some alchemy beyond just age-amplified phronesis and age-dampened gonads), soon enough one-on-one time extends beyond lap-twerk b-ball (where the cock-blocking eyes of nuns and rival suitors never seem to quit, some of those rival suitors no doubt nuns themselves given the history of clit-suckling forced upon native boarding schoolers slated for unmarked graves: “♪ One little two little three little Indians ♪”) and the occasional rec-room ping pong (where the boy, in what amounts to an erection-killer of frustration, cannot sustain a volley to save his maladroit life). Private Latin tutoring in the backroom becomes, in Father Peady’s words, “our thing” in “our little sanctuary where no one can bother us.” An excess of staged wine bottles, pushed out to the perimeter of the desk in a theatrics of making room (“Don’t mind these”), cannot help but draw the naughty eye in long-stretches of quiet concentration (especially whenever the priest dips out to relieve himself). Their forbidden allure might even coax out enough curiosity, if only through body language (“I see you have an interest in wine”), to warrant—more down the line, of course (and only under the groomed likelihood that the boy construes himself as the prime mover of the tipsy chain)—the first shared sip.
“Finally alone together,” so Father Peady commemorates each session after moving the wine. Shoulder to shoulder, the connection becomes much harder and hotter and heavier than pre-mass preparation of sacred vessels (where fingertips merely graze). The boy struggles as translation tests teeter toward too telling: “Puer est dulcis” and “Corpus est dulce.” His tongue prodding out ever so slightly as he tries to write out the gender-mismatch reason why it is wrong to say “Puer est dulce,” the struggle is good. Sometimes that tongue even curls upon surprise corner chocolate—as if the boy really were the “little heartbreaker” he has been called ever since that one time absentmindedness failed to reciprocate a high-five; the “little tease” he has been called ever since that one time reluctance rose in his face when asked for a “little nibble” of the gifted Milky Way. But however much the temperature rises to blue ball proportion, composure never falters. It is as if our man were after nothing short of gold—perhaps even that beyond-podium goal (that of entering the pantheon of untouchable legends) where aggressive claws, reaching back to claw open the prolapse, preempt the money-shot whisper (“Spread em for Daddy”) with timing too anticipatory not to fall in love. How monumental must be his discipline not to veer (just yet) too far from honeyed praise—honeyed, of course, in the civet-skank way of YSL Kouros (our man’s signature animalic musk): “Such penmanship, almost as handsome as the hand. Look how fast it stokes! Pick up the speed. Let’s see if it’ll ever get real sloppy.” All of us feel the Dionysian itch to smash what we have worked so hard to construct, especially when that red button (all caps “DEMOLISH” in white) nudges our side—teen-spirit tang, warmth palpable, leaving a huff-worthy ass-crack impression of fleeting dampness on the chair’s vinyl cushion. See what he goes through? Our man, strapping and grim as an owl (his breath reeking of carcass locked in the recesses of root-canals crowns, walks more bowlegged by the day. A gooey string of pre-cum dangles each time he unzips to take a piss. And yet he refuses to topple the tower of trust even though his prize sits mere inches away! Through gritted teeth, he busies himself instead with bricks and scaffolding meant to have the tower withstand nature’s most brutal pummelings. “I just really can’t believe the talent of your hands.” “You have a rare mind, and an even rarer heart—but boy, those hands!”
Kids are perceptive, though. They can sense, if only preverbally, whether the praise is all talk. Dumb as they so often appear (blushing and stuttering when the math teacher calls upon them), one must especially watch out for kids made insecure by homes of dysfunction. Like stray dogs circling the outskirts of a feast, those are the ones—savants of self-doubt—who possess an especially uncanny—indeed, false-positive-prone—radar for the falsehearted. Those are the ones, as in the case at hand, who see the clinamen-spoiling hidden variables, who with survivalist precision flinch at phantom warnings—yes, even through slack-jaw meditation in the glow of the nanny tube—long before the Newport unlocks the mattress’s acrid fumes or the vomit suffocates the airways of the mother mid-snore or—from what would seem to unweathered minds but a random swerve out of some Lucretian nowhere—the bottle shatters against the wall. Our boy, Georgie, turns his mother’s chin each night to the side (his own psyche still scarred from the gurgles of drowning) and hides the lighter from the wandering palpations of her mechanical hand (his own blanket still charred from putting out the last fire). Our boy, janitor of chaos, cleans up the shattered bottles, one eye on cartoons as he squats with his makeshift dustpan of “junk mail.” His plumber crack, ridiculous in length, only deepens the maternal grimace that, for all it swallows and spits out, overlooks the small rituals. For he has taken to squeezing a shard in these moments (near-twin grimace of his own) and, in the micro-privacy of a centering zoom-in, beholding the crimson arc of his own blood dribbling upon the pink and yellow envelops shouting “Past Due” and “Third Attempt”—a focus-nuzzling behavior (the candle flame or mantra of the meditator) completely understandable, just as is his chronic nail-biting (the asymmetrical ravage of his front teeth telling a similar overtaxed-system-turned-upon-itself story, vivid even for the quick glance of a stranger, to the dog’s ever-wet bald spot). But just as some degree of intrusive thoughts still render even the best meditator’s “single-point” focus more like the flatness of a table (that is, full of quantum nooks and crannies even if machine planed), the concentration on gathering up every rogue shard—even coupled with the cutter-game of redirection—never fully tunes out the tired barrage of introspection-spurring venom: “Shoulda neva had yo’ fat ass.” More often than not accompanied by another work-undoing bottle against the wall (dig-a-hole-only-to-fill-that-hole logic straight out of Dostoyevsky’s nightmares), these taunting slurs—superfluous guarantors of the boy’s baseline mania of hypervigilance—only further accelerate that neurotic feedback loop where headiness hypertrophies as confidence atrophies; where the lower the confidence drops the lower the threat threshold drops, which ramps up hypervigilance to such hectic proportions that eventually even what well-adjusted people take in stride as normal opportunities for growth become threats to avoid (but whose avoidance, of course, only ensures the lack of skills that corroborate the lack of confidence, perpetuating the cycle—that airless loop where fear is both architect and warden).
Testifying to what—like the magic of the wandering eye itself or, perhaps more fittingly here, the sinister genius of the spider’s web—renders divine design difficult to deny, in Father Peady even the most skittish of such high-strung boys meet their match. Actually walking the walk, Father Peady elevates his flattered prey through “duties only for the select few”—rationed privileges designed to feel like ascension into a maturer fold. Beyond helping count weekly donations—again among the wine bottles—in the backroom (where the boy once, in heartbreaking innocence, thought they burned all the money), Georgie even gets to assist in the blessing of holy oils. Here he is commanded to “blow” over the oils, the stage director’s voice dipping (tenor, baritone, bass) into the kind of tone that blurs prayer and perversion, the kind of cadence that make it seem like the commands will only intensify even once Georgie learns enough to initiate the blowing all on his own: “Blow it good. Don’t be afraid. . . . Harder! Make ripples. Make ripples like the holy spirit hovering, yeah, over the sea.” Rougher knife taps of edging foreplay escalate through compliments on how well these duties (these “well-earned privileges”) are being carried out, how the boy has “defied all expectation.” As if he were not aware that Georgie stood in hearing distance, he tells other altar boys to “be more serious like Georgie.” And look what snare our boy walks into (“Georgie, I’ll meet you in there in one minute”) smackdab on the Latin desk. Splayed open under the weight of crucifix (one that has Georgie’s name all over it, right up to the hilt) reposes a diary, its red ink underscored too many times to ignore: “Georgie is downright AMAZING! I don’t think I could have found a better helping hand.” Such smooth operation would make anyone not under a rock think they had before them the muse of Sade’s hit: “♪ His eyes are like angels but his heart is cold ♪” Sure, all this talk of being “special” comes straight out of the groomer’s guidebook. But there is good reason why it appears in every edition. Whispered benedictions of chosenness—no doubt coupled, if only we could take a peek behind the priest’s composed smile (especially with the benefit of hindsight), with the fantasies that would curdle holy water—slide like communion wine down the throat of a drunk parched for divine approval. “What hands! Such natural grace must make the archangels blush.” “God himself must have guided such a pure servant's heart to our parish.”
Ingratiation with the boy’s family (mother, mutt with countable ribs) is a chore, but a must. Ecce homo, nostrils yet to stop flaring against the native reek of a low-grade gas leak, as he chokes down dinners of mystery meatloaf streaked with generic ketchup too cold to confer dignity, dinners of Hamburger Handyman™ sopping through paper plates—the mother’s attempt to act like the home is not a daily-dollar-menu disaster, a counterproductive attempt (much like the air freshener, which only adds an industrial aftertaste to the tearjerking trinity: methane, shit-bleached carpet, oniony vagina). Behold his smile, a rictus of strained cheer, as he doles out applause for the “remarkable parenting of this special boy.” Having offered on one of these nights to tinker with the fritzing furnace (“Long as my little helper’s willing to get dirty with me”), he has found himself changing a fanbelt down in the earthen-walled basement (where, although he avoids saying anything to get too over his head, the pipes to and from the main water valve he clocks as lead: flathead screwdriver scraping up unmistakable silvery flakes). Household savior, he has even dipped into donation pots to cover the back rent: “Oh it’s nothing, but I do expect”—he shoots the boy a wink—“this young man here to work off some of the debt!”
The investment of time and energy—every brick in the wall of trust (or at least of silence)—proves worthwhile. Aside from making the world seem as if it really were run by a grand justice (an upshot not to be underestimated for quivering mammals), the real payoff comes in the form of extra-ecclesiastical one-on-one time with the boy: unfettered access (bowling and pizza, late-night movies) emerging as a natural outgrowth, an organic unfolding too lubricated to raise any eyebrows. At the very worst, any family members would feel weird enough about finding it weird that they would never open their mouths. But let us not kid ourselves. What family members were there anyway, aside from the disempowered mother? It is unlikely that any warnings whisper up from within Mrs. Vidalia. But even if her battered intuition had yet to be drowned twitchless by gratitude (soused in the jug wine he never forgets to bring), she knows better—no matter what she might hears in pre-dawn reckoning—than to bite the hand that feeds.
So much depends, of course, on the finesse of the priest. But our man of the cloth, knowing the importance of the first few setting taps of the hammer, is nothing if not talented. He waits to strike down upon the wedge of isolation full bore only after enough of these special outings—these “date nights,” so he starts to call them (aware of the transubstantiating power of words). Duties multiply bigtime, gaining an appearance of weight and urgency that no one relevant to his designs would have the courage—let alone the vocabulary, or even the requisite other-focused awareness—to question. What little remains of the boy’s outside world begins to dissolve, eclipsed by the throbbing shadow of his Gandalf. This is where manufactured emergencies come in: like asking the boy to “drop everything” to help cleanup the “overnight vandalism,” vandalism conveniently sexual in orientation (penises painted on statues and other fodder for salacious conversation in alone times to come). These emergencies not only test and stretch the boy’s pliability, but also doublecheck for hidden angels in the boy’s sparse network (some unknown good-apple aunt or some nosy teacher) willing to disrupt the atmosphere of silence.
And what grooming story worth its Def-Leppard sugar would skip the secret-keeping? Each complicit transgression shoots out another thread in the spider's web: sneaking an extra slice of pizza, watching a movie few parents would condone, whispered jokes lacing scripture with innuendo. The just-between-them naughtiness must ramps up in boldness in preparation for the big leagues. That explains why Father Peady, as if out of the blue, ends one Latin lesson not with a “Goodbye now” but with a locking of the door—one bolt two bolt. He makes sure the clicks of finality are loud both to underplay the strangeness while also to gauge where the boy’s instincts land on the spectrum of fight or flight. Surely the gauging here dips into worrywart territory, given the way Georgie—as if trying to set a record on number and intensity of flesh-clapping sounds—has only gotten more aggressive with his posting up in the paint: spine ridiculously arched and forehead ridiculously close too the asphalt (like an HBCU cheerleader, or like one of those autistic spilled-milk slurpers ever on tippytoes). And so it comes: the pop of the cork followed by sips of sacramental zinfandel shared behind the drawn blinds “to honor {Georgie’s] college-level facility with language.” Sips taken so willingly, straight out of an after-school special, is one thing when it comes to “things falling into place.” But when the boy asks “May I have a bit more?” (his tone hard for the priest not to read, dump everything, into), is there not at least some recessive part of us that cheers—knowing, after all, the behind-the-scenes devotion of painful bowlegged hours—in empathy for our man (however woozy we feel in our vicarious celebration)?
In what might almost seem like coy hesitation (a flicker of shyness at the prospect of courtship tables turning), Father Peady holds back from feasting on the wine-glazed pork belly served up to him on a platter of privacy—slurring, yawning, and everything. But over the ensuing weeks, the physicality ramps up with calculated precision. Hands linger too long under the guise of adjusting altar robes. Hugs multiply—extra-long ones that sometimes leave Georgie’s Payless pro wings dangling (the red-faced priest, clearly drugged on that conquer-the-world surge of love, nearly biting off more than he can chew). Shoulder massages creep into quiz time. Compliments shift toward looks, nuzzling into smells even. These are the basics, groundwork stuff. But given Georgie’s aggressor antics on the court, anyone in Father Peady’s shoes would find it crucial to communicate who the boss is. Roughhousing—“just some wrastlin’ men”—proves the perfect stage. Armpit-tickle sadism morphes into nipple-twisting that lingers well past “Uncle,” which sets up—in the wake of heavy breathing—a gentle spike: a reassertion of just how good Georgie smells. “Need to get these nostril all up in there,” he says and then delivers one of those restrained nibbles usually reserved for the too cute to stand: the fingers of a baby, the cheeks of a puppy.
The best priests, of course, take care not to let the flow of touch become too lopsided. Interwoven, then, with these displays of dominance are masterclass moments designed to reinforce the boy’s own active agency, showing that he too is free to have a turn at the mount position. Father Peady, to that end, first massages Georgie’s plump little hands with blessing oil, opening another crucial juncture on the path of seduction where lesser predators, especially hearing Georgie’s unprovoked blurt (“That feels good”), might have faltered (“Wanna fuckin’ know what else feels good?”). No, not our man. He massages until the hands are hot. Then he guides those hands over his own fantasy-wrinkled forehead. Wordless as a Zen master putting to shame the neurotic logorrhea of US teachers and coaches, he guides until the boy gets the hint (reciprocation becoming self-propelled). Only then does Father Peady let go, his hands shifting to grip the boy’s shoulders in false prayer—tightening just enough to make resistance feel unholy.
Backing off from physical contact (“I’m sorry Georgie, but Father Peady’s just too busy for basketball”) has long proven a solid tactic at this point to keep the boy squirming in hunger for redemptive contact: combing through memories to discern what sin might have cost him his special status, wondering what other boy might have the man’s attention, until perhaps—granted sufficient drawing out of touch denial—the desperation to put and end to the withdrawal himself becomes too much. During this calculated distance, the priest—if there is anything to nominative determinism (and assuming, of course, he has the courage to pursue his prize beyond fantasy)—will be adding even stickier threads to the web of dependency. Confidant for every locker room anxiety, every struggle at home, every—you can bet your bottom dollar—pubescent dream, the priest will position himself—with the help of double-entendre endcaps on each confession (“I’ll always try to get you, Georgie” and “You’re safe with me, no matter how dirty it gets” and “You can always open yourself for me, even if it hurts”)—as (and soon Georgie will be saying the line himself) “the only one who truly understands.”
All the while the sexual undertow strengthen, dragging even the strongest swimmers into mature needs. Bawdy jokes ramp up in graphic detail. The most pornographic parts of the Bible take centerstage. The most graphic Latin epigrams from Catullus and Martial become the material to translate. Movie-night nudity begins with the quick topless scene in Airplane (1980), which Father Peady chalks up to a vetting oversight: “Didn’t know that was there”—adding after the apology the telling-through-asking question (a foundation tool of the trade): “But you’re okay with that kinda stuff, right?” Soon, always with veneer of education legitimacy, the rustle of popcorn fingers suddenly settles in the glow of bush and shaft in Quest for Fire (1982): “an unfiltered depiction of early human life.” In what no doubt results in Father Peady’s internal homunculus performing a Tiger Woods fist pump (driving the elbow down to his side in a victory celebration), the popcorn bowl—despite being buttered to all fat-kid hell—is forgotten altogether, on the verge of spilling even, during the on and on of violent clit-suckling and cum-shooting orgies in Caligula (1979): “an unfiltered depiction of paganism run amok.” Then suddenly, in “a film that illustrates the disastrous consequences of not turning the other cheek,” the two “couch buddies” find themselves—at least one of them does—swept in a vortex of titillation and revulsion (a mild approximation perhaps to the emotional confusion sexual assault victims feel as nauseating orgasms gush forth “involuntarily” from their bodies: “Ooh, you wet now bitch!”): Monica Bellucci’s drawn-out anal rape in Irreversible (2002), a ten-minute sequence that—especially with the moans and tears coupled with the punches and taunts of the assailant (“I’m gonna blast your ass” and “If you get shit on my dick, you're dead”)—would have the response needle on any penile plethysmograph jammed at the upper limits of red.
Discussion of sexual topics, disguised as guidance (or just “talking through some of the heavy stuff” of movie night), is crucial here. It feeds right into the priest taking that leap (relatively small if he put in that work) of getting the boy to expose his genitals and, as a show of good faith (if there is reluctance), pulling his out first in what is packaged as a “return to the shamelessness of Eden, the way God intended us.” “Look,” the priest (Father Peady) will say, “wet dreams are completely normal. Liquid comes out even in daytime. The process is automatic. It’s nothing to feel shame about.” He will then at that point take the boy’s hand to his balls. “I want you to feel how it all just spasms. Watch.” And then as Father Peady reaches the edge (quickly, no doubt, after all these months of foreplay”), he will convey—in a tone that ever so sightly crosses the line (from clinical distance into oohing-aahing surrender)—one hell of a command in the form of a question: “How you gonna feel it if you don’t squeeze? Really get in there. There we go. Squeeze. Ooh, here’s where you squeeze hard”—his tone here, restrained by nothing but whisper, shifting momentarily deep into oohing-aahing surrender—“hard as can be.” And in the wake of the wild eruptions, whose correlated moans and taunting mumbles he holds back with a composure meant to show that this is just as normal as eating, he will say “See how you helped Father Peady? You got it all out. That’s a big big help. It helps me focus—.” He will give a post-cum exhale: “pfhhhhhooo,” savoring what he just received. “It helps me focus,” he will point up at the crucifix, “on what matters. . . . Just as we have to eat to focus on our studies, we gotta get this all out. Otherwise we find ourselves distracted. . . . So now you’re gonna let Father Peady help you. . . . No, watch. Just a few kisses should be good enough. I don’t think you’re ready for any of that squeezing! Here take the oil and go back and forth and I’ll just kiss down here. Right here, see?”
It cannot be all “See, how we can help each other?” In an ideal world maybe, but not here. Guilt and fear need to be instilled: from the old “We’re both sinners but we at least have each other” and “You wouldn’t want to disappoint God or me, would you?” to the equally old “No one would believe you over me anyway” and “I’ll make sure your family knows just how dirty their little boy can be”). Every case is different just like every child: some require drugs, others just a lot of camaraderie and heartfelt discussion. Regardless, it is often good to intersperse confusing counternarrative—saying something like: “In a way, as long as we ask to be forgiven, it can’t be so wrong. It’s love in the end, right?” The procedure is not fully linear. The priest often needs to circle back to earlier steps. He does so expertly, for example, by asking the boy “right?” at this point. Who would not feel special when an ordained priest looks to you for answers?
But however much the path might involve loop-de-loops, the jar—in what seems, depending on one’s perspective, no time—is fully pried open if the hunt is successful. We can explore what that exactly looks like, the shit and blood and gag mucous it entails. But first it seems important to clarify. Calling this a “hunt”—while no doubt true—can be somewhat misleading. Less than a decade back, it was more about getting off, getting away, from himself. It was more about that ecstatic moment of leaving himself in the explosive release of glandular buildup. The power imbalance, the taboo violation, were in service of better ensuring that the aching load—himself—shot farther away from himself (buying him more time in that zone of Dionysian disindividuation). Now things are different. The glands no longer swell like they once did. And, perhaps because he has accepted his tastes, the focus has become more so about spreading himself—being fruitful and multiplying, if you will—rather than escaping himself. Much less about getting off in the most salivating way possible (the typical thing we associate with a sexual hunt), his moves are about hope. He hopes to become everything to his underling. He hopes to become so everything that the boy will initiate the unbuttoning without any guidance, that the boy will drop to his knees with unblinking eyes steady upward without having to be push on the head—as if the boy can no longer contain himself; as if his soul would meet annihilation if it did not have his everything inside where that everything belongs; as if all the nuances of his inner life, from his concerns (his mom’s welfare, his drawings, his homework, his fat gut held in two heaping handfuls in the mirror) to his memories (his dog chewing on his dead grandmother’s hand, his one photo of his dad burned in a mattress fire), were scooped out of him like pumpkin guts only to be filled with whatever the priest could shove in of himself. Father Peady’s hope, in short, is that he has won Georgie even from God, but that the winning was not a taking but a gifting—a surrender. See before, with all the other sweetmeats, hardcore debauchery—rosary beads turned anal beads—served to help shoot farther across the room like his load. But now the grinding ass-to-ass on the holiest of icons is not because taboos raises the heat and intensifies the contractions. Rather, it is because it is the surest proof he can get as a human that the boy, all for him, has turned his back on God.
Context matters. It helps us make sense of what we see when we zoom into the anechoic vestry to find, in the flickering light of votive candles, Father Peady spilled out like a cornucopia on a makeshift blanket of ceremonial garbs. The background explains why he would demand another baby arm be driven up the pipe: “Ooh yeah, little piggy gonna play in that slop.” It explains why he would demand, and yet why such demanding is for him a letdown (especially given the threat of violence implied by snarled teeth), that there be no disruption in the sadistic rhythm of hard headbutts and stretchy slurps of the shitty scrotum—headbutt to slurp, headbutt to slurp: “Fuck those bad balls up good, little pig.” And yet it also suggests why the letdown of having to command comes with a silver lining. For were Georgie for him the prime mover of it all, making of the priest his everything, the difference between the two would vanish and so it would feel to the priest that he did not get anywhere on his mission to spread himself. “I” and “Thou” effaced into “We,” he—well, the royal we—would need another boy to pursue.
Short of heaven (on an Earth of compromise), the best satisfaction he can hope to get is—and he ought to be grateful—what he has (which happens to be, since spreading into requires an other in which to spread, pretty much the purest for of spreading into and owning there is (whether inside or outside of heaven): someone willing to follow his demands and learn to do some initiation of his own—all against even the most transcendent authority. The news for Father Peady is better than it might have otherwise seemed, then, as he closes in on the point of no return and yet must clutch the boy’s hair—that scalp-locked stuff of dark-web rape porn—and use the little mouth as a headbanging stroker. “Stretch it boy. Stretch it way the fuck out.”
The command here, hissed with the rare curse from Father Peady’s mouth (indicative of serious business, of go time), is for the boy to drive his palms and forearms outward, his fingers pressed together inside for fulcrum leverage, against the various contractile and puckering and speculum-fighting structures from the anus on up. This half-a-minute fury—and all the priestly taunts (“Ooh you’re going to fucking hell for this, pig”)—we can assume, at the point, the boy is already well familiar with. The bar of depravity does, however, tend to recede. And on this particular occasion, so we might assume, those peach-fuzz lips are smooshed in the final stroke so deep into middle-aged mons pubis hair and unguent fatty tissue that Father Peady’s love effluvia—over a week in the building, we can also assume given the tremendous patience show hitherto—burst from the boy’s nostrils. Held down without breath, a surprise chucks up and out as well from those same gasping nostrils: the mandarin oranges and grade-B beef of Taco Tuesday.
Such an ecstatic crescendo, cleaned up with low-capillary-action chalice linen by the boy himself (ashamed for losing his stomach), will likely have—for a tango team that has gone this far already—two big downstream implications. First, the pinching closed of those nostrils—that will be a thing from here on: “I want my love swallowed, pig!” Second, the dawning of a new kink expectation: vomit-filled grand finales of chef’s-kiss throat convulsion (the same penis-milking panic contractions that, to cite the old Parisian brothel move, come from the cloaca of the neck-wrung hen)—that will also be a thing. And guess what? The non-appearance of vomit, once an aberration and now a norm, will be framed by Father Peady as disloyalty and so as grounds for ramping everything way up: forcing the shattered relic of a boy to keep a Mary figurine up his ass throughout the school day (a sort of modern twist on hairshirt asceticism), or holding the boys face in the bird bath of bubbling holy water while Father Peady pumps out anal vinegar strokes that on one occurrence, so let us assume, draw out so on and on that the boy needs CPR rescue breaths—Father Peady becoming more of an earthly savior than ever before!
And yes, all of it will be caught on video: starting from the first mutual masturbation session, which almost seems sweet in comparison to the wood-creaking shit and blood fuck sessions to come (where Father Peady, like clockwork whenever “that fat back” is arched just right, will start mumble-singing in sync with his rhythm (as sweat drips from his forehead) “♪Something tells me I’m into something good♪” from the Harmans Hermits’s classic hit “I'm into Something Good")—all of it. In the grand impermanence (and now that footage is no longer grainy), who could resist? Father Peady, this way, gets later spank-bank material that doubles as blackmail material: “What would mom think, what would your buddies think, seeing this little cum-drinking, shit-eating, piggy?”
https://www.celebritymoviearchive.com/tour/source.php/5205/p
https://forcedcinema.net/video/irreversibles-rape-scene/