Sweetmeats (ROUND 34)
Let’s workshop this short story (which is embedded in the larger story "Mario Mangione") that details the step-by-step grooming tactics of a priest salivating over an obese and vulnerable altar boy.
scent of the day: Opus X, by Amouage.—A steel-and-steam-era take on a gothic-romance fragrance (here we get industrial-era vampire, as opposed to late medieval and early modern witch or warlock), Opus X—highlighting the clash between organic and artificial, sensual and metallic, floral and animalic in one of the most artsy and scandalous Amouages I have smelled—takes a green-pink-red rose mélange (especially the inky, waxy, plasticky rose of Imitation Man and Opus XII, with some dry-down hints of the daintier rose-water rose of Lyric Man and the full-bloom regal rose of Lyric Woman) and mixes in hyperrealistic blood (salty, iron-rich like menstrual clots or fingertips after handling coins or even rusted railroad spikes) to make for an extremely evocative impression (especially given the patent-leather-like leather and paint-thinner-like solvents, on the sterilized one hand, and the Laotian agarwood and musky-halitotic ambrarome, on the feral other hand): a lacquered coffin (wood reminiscent of Bowmakers) full of bruised roses (petals and stems more oxidized and clinical than dewy and delicate) and inside of which Dracula, removing his Londoner top hat, performs toothy cunnilingus on a ylang-ylang creamed skin of a woman at peak menstruation, a regal consensual lover (perhaps a baroness or a duchess or even a literal queen) in the Victorian era—imagine the rumble of carriage wheels and horse hooves in dusk streets just starting to glow with yellowish warmth as the lamplighter makes his rounds—when heavy rose perfumery was used to cover up pussy-ass funk humming under all the elaborate layers of dress materials (first the chemise to wick body oils; second the steel corset to trim the waist and support the bust; third the crinoline cage of steel hoops to give the skirt an doorway-fraught volume; fourth the many petticoats for warmth and fullness; fifth the dress itself with its own lace or buttoned bodice and show-stopper skirt billowing out over the crinoline; sixth the sleeves and shawls and cloaks and bonnets and jewelry and gloves to complete the complex ensemble)—the overall effect being perhaps the greatest ode to rose in its full-bodied beauty-terror sublimity rather than in its Valentine’s Day castration (think: the difference between biblical angels, those colossal spinning wheels covered in thousands of eyes, and Hallmark-card angels, those anthropomorphic guides with saccharine halos), an avant-garde fragrance of industrial-meets-organic severity that features (even if we disregard the ylang-ylang and its impression of lotioned female skin) too many rosey elements to call it a soliflore (from the more predominant battery-to-tongue tang of ferric rose oxide and the spiced-red-wine taste of the bloody rose accord, which is more prominent in the first few hours, to the full velvety blooms of rose centifolia and the springlike greenery of dewy rosebud and herbal-citrus carnation, which starts to rise in the more honeyed hours of the deep dry down).
* For those who are following each iteration, I bolded the paragraphs I worked on today. Thanks for your help.
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 even of 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 rarely seen on our planet—limits readily surpassed perhaps only in the algorithmic wake of our AI progeny.
Light-hearted interaction marks the first tentative taps on the jar of trust, its lid tight as the sphincter of a child in chronic fight-or-flight. 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 very bullying (from name-calling to double-team wedgies and titty twisters, the whole nine) 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 melted into forever memory; (2) only child starved as much for attention and belonging as for the skill boosts of sibling competition, his social instincts as blunted as his confidence; (3) fat as all honeybun hell (his spare tire and love handles streaked with the silvery-pink stretchmarks of a pregnancy hydrated by his mother’s Newports and Mountain Dew, a gas station—its milk priced too high not to choose the cheese puffs—the only grocery store for the carless family).
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 a feigned astonishment that quickly turns sincere. For even through his mock scrutiny of the boy’s pen drawings of ninja combat, the blood—red ink, school-counselor worthy in volume, warping and bleeding through the paper—screams like a first-date overshare of “daddy issues” drip-feeding erotic significance into an already telling choker necklace: loud 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 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. Watch it thwack 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 at the gift-wrapped impossibility of it all)—it is a miracle of synaptic plasticity that Father Peady does not yell out (as if to some Truman Show audience) what many men of his intellect and experience would have in his shoes: “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. Instinctive in his flair for courtship (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, crack showing over church-donation gym shorts—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! Yeah, there you go. Work it!”
Only loosely paralleled in the nonhuman world (like when cleaner fish venture into serrated jaws that could snap shut at any moment), where else—sea or savannah, jungle or sky—does one witness prey offering itself up with such tantalizing eagerness? Grinding enough in their violence to make any other defender reach for the jockstrap, hardcore enough in their fecal plumes to make a Goebbels out of any mother who suggests (if only in mere knee-jerk reaction she later regrets) that her daughter’s self-administered cocktail of molly and crotchless jeans played even a fractional role in the bar-bathroom rape—such asking-for-it ass thrusts, especially given their commando-indicative clapping sounds, suffice to place the boy inside (or at least just outside) the pantheon of nature’s most haunting anomalies: a female serial killer videotaping each rape-decapitation; a black American in a suicide cult guzzling colloidal silver each day in anticipation of the salvation comet; a giraffe stomping its own calf into a pulp of death on the just-in-case chance of injury after a barely-any-contact brush with a lion. “Ooh, there you go,” Father Peady says—on the verge of going skins, no matter his flab insecurity. “Yeah, drive it in! Wow, you’re good!”
Then comes the flow of golden handcuffs. Augustus-Gloop chocolate bars (insurance, lest all the b-ball 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 in that chunky little hand like a sly drug deal, the drop executed well below the neck-craning hyperbole of look-both-ways theatrics: unnecessary but precedent-setting mafioso swagger to ensure no one sees. Eyes—always the eyes, groping eyes that do more than take you in—heavy with the weight of conspiracy, the middle finger of the hand-off hand strokes (“fondles” or “diddles” might be the better word) the sweaty palm of the recipient, pulsing at kitten-biscuits pace: that universal sign—that cross-cultural clincher, which—even if George remains as oblivious to the meaning as a spider to its owner’s chirps of “Good boy!”—still thrums with the illicit electricity of a one-sided secret too swollen for a mere amuse-bouche.
Marquee gifts shine against such a calorie-dense baseline. A paperback of The Hobbit serves as a gentle nudge from Father Peady’s favorite author, priming the boy for entry into 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). Once reading-comprehension questions confirm that Georgie has reached the part where Bilbo acquires the elven sword Sting (as much a phosphorescent orc-killer as a symbol of Bilbo's growing nerve to defy the Shire’s safety-first dogma), Father Peady presents what he calls “a talisman for your own journey into the wild”: a “sacred” rosary, kissed (with a flick of tongue only slow-speed replay could catch) and handed over with a mysterious (mainly because unwarranted) smile of conspiracy—a foreboding smile of stringy salivation webbing his teeth like spider silk—as if some infernal covenant had just been sealed.
The steady flow of nuptial indulgences over the months is designed to create dependency. “Designed,” however, might be a misleading term. The ensnaring process, is it the preplanned fruit of fiddle-crab-finger deliberation? Or is it more like how God—too perfect to require any drawing-board blueprint—creates everything in an eternal instant of impromptu (an improvisation that makes Coltrane, even in the deepest pocket of heroin-suppressed ego, seem like a rigid technician full of nothing but clockwork gears, too uptight to welcome in the hesitancy-banishing babble of the holy ghost)? Might it all just be, to speak more appropriately for our realm (natura naturata), simply an organic matter of tried-and-true animal instinct, as in the case of male spiders presenting females with bug protein wrapped in silken packages? Whatever the mechanism, the impact is clear. So unbroken becomes the procession of these courtship offerings, these manipulative displays of skills and resources, that anyone could predict the effect of its sudden cessation: agitation if not outright panic, the once-showered recipient (now an addict to the rhythm of reward) driven—driven from an inner need, a furnace kindled into self-perpetuating heat (like a nebula condensed at the protostar cusp of nuclear fusion)—to puzzle out (index fingers steepled beneath his nose) what must be done 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 hear 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 engorging 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 (yes, even though the layers of late autumn)—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: first a “hard-work gift” (the Ultimate Warrior, Georgie’s favorite WWE wrestler, in the form of a thumb puppet action figurine) and then, with a cork pop “in honor of [Georgie’s] college-level facility with language,” shared sips sacramental zinfandel behind drawn blinds. 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: “Someone needs a nap!” 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—Father Peady Hulk Hogan, Georgie The Ultimate Warrior—morphs 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.
The best see courtship not as a caveman’s straight line (moving from shoulder to thigh to crotch), but as a hypnotic’s spiral (pushing only to pull closer). Backing off—and yes, quite suddenly is the trick—from physical contact (“I’m sorry Georgie, but Father Peady’s been too busy for basketball”) is, however counterintuitive, effective. It keeps the boy squirming in hunger for redemptive touch, his mentor’s musky nearness radically heightened in perceived value (as if it were a beloved fragrance abruptly discontinued by a market-savvy perfume house). The gnawing wait breeds brooding. In the mesmeric tic of clock hands (slowing and slowing, subject as they are to general relativity, as the center of the gravity well of grooming nears), only those whose monk-meets-navy-seal willpower could avoid sifting through memories in a pathetic attempt to discern what sin might have cost them their special status. And when Father Peady times an over-the-top scene of guffawing and back-patting with another altar boy, the ride around the mental spiral of push-pull manipulation takes a sudden gravitational plunge toward the infinite center of wondering who else might have captured the man’s attention. After the months of priming, how could the extended withholding of touch, coupled with the sight of the priest laughing like this (as he leans over the other boy, in fact, with one arm against a wall like some bad-boy greaser courting a girl in a poodle skirt), not culminate in Georgie’s desperation to put and end to the withdrawal himself—a desperation sharing at least kissing-cousin kinship to that desperation that has dope-sick mothers renting out the suckling mouths of their infants to drug-dealer testicles?
Just as the mania begins spilling into the public sphere (tipped chalices, silly translation mistakes, eyebags intensified alongside the scream of halitosis), Father Peady—his actions, as always, easy to regard as proof of nominative determinism—slides back in as abruptly as he dropped away. The quick touch—a bit of neck-kneading (light, painfully light)—serves, however, mainly as the counterintuitive prelude to something far less corporeal but far stickier. For the sake of ramping up deeper-than-physical connection, Father Peady plunges them into the diary hinterlands of doubts and dreams. “Georgie, what’s been going on with you buddy. . . . What’s really been going on?” Like unsupervised detectives leading the child to say what they want her to say (simply by means of responding even to truth with “No, I want to know the real truth”), no answer seems good enough for Father Peady. Still holding back on the roughhousing and the basketball and even the hugs, day by day he refuses to let up until finally the juicier bits start flowing: every struggle at home (“What did you see the man doing to your mom?”), every locker-room anxiety (“How much bigger were they?”), every—you can bet your bottom dollar—pubescent dream (“Did it feel good, though?”). The priest thereby positions himself as “the only one who truly understands.” 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”), soon Georgie will be whispering the line himself like a hypnotic echo: “Father Peady’s the only one who gets me.”
All the while the sexual undertow strengthens, dragging even the most reluctant ankle-waders into the darkness of mature needs. Bawdy jokes about the darndest things brothel parrots say, and about shaved vaginas being busy vaginas, and about how the yeast infection looked like the mouth of a bulldog who got into the mayo—these ramp up in graphic detail. The most sexual parts of the Bible take centerstage: the moans of the Song of Solomon; the veiled voyeurism of Bathsheba bathing under David's gaze; the penetrative violence of Tamar’s assault by Amnon (all dissected under the guise of scriptural insight). The most graphic Latin epigrams from Catullus and Martial become the material to translate, our maestro of escalation having the boy parse some of the lewdest imagery—all the while making sure (“for the sake of historical sensitivity”) lines like “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo” are rendered neither in their kid-friendly form (“I will humiliate your butt and have you taste it"), nor even their more literal form (“I will sodomize you and make you perform oral sex"), but in a way that conveys the shock intended by the author (“I will ram your shit in with my cock and then rape your face”).
Movie-night—yeah, that is where the real magic begins. Grade-school gossip after the Christmas break had centered on Hogan’s villainy in the recent Royal Rumble: how, in a move that reeked of cheap-shot betrayal, he had used one of his 24-inch pythons to clothesline The Warrior out of the ring despite The Warrior being caught against the ropes in a two-on-one beatdown by same two guys (The Barbarian and Rick Rude) from whom he had just saved Hogan—refusing, in effect, to do unto Hogan what Hogan ultimately did unto him. So when word spreads of a showdown in Wrestlemania VI (a match promoted less as a clash of wrestlers than as a spiritual battle between the two fanbases, the Hulkamaniacs and the Ultimate Warriors), Father Peady orders the event on pay-per-view—the feed of intermingled flesh finding smooth and fast sailing from there.
Nudity starts small. A topless scene in Airplane (1980), just a quick bounce in the airplane aisle, Father Peady chalks up with a sheepish grin to a vetting oversight: “Didn’t know that was there.” After the apology, however, he makes sure to toss in that telling-through-asking question, that tool of the trade so foundational that a film spliced from all their instances throughout history would go on for years: “But you’re okay with that kinda stuff, right?” From there, the descent quickens—always with veneer of education legitimacy. Soon enough the rustle of popcorn fingers suddenly fall silent, suspended against the glow of bush and shaft in Quest for Fire (1982): “an unfiltered depiction of early human life.” In what no doubt sends Father Peady’s inner homunculus into a Tiger Woods fist pump (driving the elbow down in victory celebration), the popcorn bowl—although salted and buttered to all fat-kid hell—goes forgotten altogether, on the verge of spilling off the sofa even, as the screen plunges into the fever dream of violent clit-suckling and cum-shooting orgies in Caligula (1979): “a cautionary depiction of paganism run amok.”
As cliché as the rusty blue van with the porthole window and the oily man offering candies or asking for help to find his dog, suddenly it comes: the unmarked VHS. 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 disequilibrium sexual assault victims feel as nauseating orgasms gush forth “involuntarily” from their bodies: “Ooh, you wet now huh bitch!?”): a hyperrealistic anal rape scene in an unmarked VHS, a nearly ten-minute and nearly nudeless sequence that—especially with the moans and tears coupled with the punches and taunts of the assailant (“I’m gonna rip that ass” and “Get any shit on my dick and you're dead”)—would have the response needle on any penile plethysmograph jammed at the upper limits of red. As frame by frame whirls its over-green viewer through the disorienting hydraulic jump (shame, arousal, helplessness; shame, arousal, helplessness), Father Peady—one quantum twitch from the internal “Fuck it” that means jacking himself right out in the open (close enough in fact, for candidate justifications to scramble through his head)—all the while keeps his vision divided: one eye on the screen, the other on the hand-guarded lap of the boy (gauging the reaction, reading the body’s hesitant flickers of permission).
Discussion of sexual topics, framed as guidance (as “talking through some of the heavy stuff from the other night”), proves crucial here. It feeds right into the priest taking that leap (relatively small, given how much priming work he has put in)—that leap that, however close one gets to it (however much one has made sure that it does not entail the cracking of trust), is always going to be a leap, is always going to involve the wince of Band-Aid removal (there is no other way to cut it): getting the boy to expose his genitals. Despite any visible unease in response to his “Let’s see what you got,” Father Peady—disarmer of even farfetched discomfort that he is—unbuckles and pulls his out first as a show of good faith (as if he were taking communion first to assure the boy that the bread and wine are safe to consume): “Here’s what I got.” No, the “Here’s what I got” does not spill out with a lecherous rush. Nor does it dip into the greasy and bassy tones impatient audiences might naughtily expect. His voice, seasoned with matter-of-factness (albeit in a paternal envelope of coziness), delivers the pivot as though it were no biggie really—even though, yes, in the physical sense it is quite a biggie: long and girthy (albeit nearly completely flaccid rather than the rocksteady phallus of divine authority we might have expected, his parts draping around each thigh), long and damned girthy enough not only to curbstomp the stereotype about those with a sweet tooth for the young, but also to make any empathetic soul applaud the man all the more for having chosen a relatively unworldly life of relative celibacy. “A return to shamelessness of Eden, the way God intended us”—that is how he packages the gargantuan package, the bearlike wilderness of hair covering his lower body affecting the perfect visual for the prelapsarian framing.
Now might seem the time to repeat: “Let’s see what you got now.” But aside from the fact that the first iteration of this expression still flutters in the air, it is important to read the room. Duteous rehearsal goes a long way to prepare you. But when the moment arrives the best tear up the notecards. That frees them to use what they have studied in a more organic way, in response to the environment. Perhaps more importantly, tossing the script is a more moving and symbolic way to say to yourself the self-loving words “I trust myself,” words whose real impact on confidence involves no New-Age woo. Our man knows this and practices this. He is no slave to a script. With Georgie watching with erect curiosity how the mounds of flesh pool like a waterbed, with Georgie clearly intrigued by the slap sounds each time Father Peady picks it up and lets it drop, it would be an example of not rolling with the orchestra’s tempo for Father Peady to try to divert the attention to the boy’s lap. “Look,” he says instead (and referring back to the topic they had been circling around before, in the literal sense, things got hairy), “wet dreams—that’s what they call them. Wet dreams are completely normal. The process is automatic, nothing to feel shame about. . . . You understand?”
Georgie’s nod of understanding (no fear in his eyes), whether a matter of coercion or transcendence, means it is a solid go. “Liquid comes out even in daytime,” Father Peady says matter-of-factly. “You believe that? . . . Ah, you probably know all that, right?” Georgie shrugs his shoulders, but not in that way kids do when feeling too overwhelmed (like when the police officer—in an awkward stab at kid tones—asks, all the neighbors outside watching the domestic scene, “Has Mommy been drinking tonight?” “But still,” Father Peady continues, “I can show you.” The flip-flopping of the penis, done until that point with a nonchalant tick-tock (no more meaningful, according to the orchestrated impression, than absentminded thumb twiddling), has begun to stiffen things in its conjunction with such a furnace revving statement. The metronomic back and forth continues even as the radical engorgement (fingertip to elbow) has put an ominous end to the tick-tock. “Would that be okay with you?” he asks—the thumps of blood pressure in his chest interfering ever so slightly with the usual steadfast poise of his voice. The boy not having spoken but not having said “No,” means Father Peady can take the boy’s fat and sweaty hand to his balls. “I want you to feel how it all just spasms.” He says it like it is science. “Watch.” He pulls some spit from his mouth, observing—with a downright all-tens use of both the royal “we” and the “huh?” of complicity—“We should probably get it wet a bit first, huh?”
As Father Peady reaches the precipice (quickly, no doubt, after all these months), 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?” As if this were a scene of a father teaching the son the basics of an oil change (held-back frustration reflected in his voice), Father Peady makes things explicit. “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.”
In the wake of the blustery eruptions, whose correlated moans and taunting mumbles he holds back with a composure meant to show that this is as normal as eating, Father Peady—surprised himself by the volume of the load and its fish-and-bleach tang (a near match to the church’s Callery pear trees in bloom)—takes care to preempt darker interpretations of the sofa scene. “See how you helped? You got it all out. That’s a big, big help. It helps me focus—.” He lets out that all-too-human post-cum exhale: “pfhhhhhooo,” savoring the release. “It helps me focus”—he points up at the crucifix—“on what matters. . . . We have to eat to focus on our studies, right? Well, guys like us have to get this all out. Otherwise we find ourselves distracted. . . . So before we clean this up, you’re gonna let Father Peady help you. . . . No, watch. Just a few kisses should do the trick, like little smooches on the cheek. I don’t think you’re ready for any of that squeezing! Here, take the oil—yep, just like that—and go back and forth. I’ll just kiss down here. Right here, see?”
From Father Peady’s own splats of exudation (splats, despite former squid-like coagulation, now weeping down chest and thighs and furniture), the aroma of indoor swimming pool has taken on, at least with nose up close to one of the splotches as he prepares to deliver his “smooches,” a zinc-like edge of stagnant saliva pooled in a rusty spoon. Signature Kouros, stirred into civety animation by the sudden surge in pulse-point heat, adds a pissy twang to the heady mix (which now, although still mainly chlorine, almost seems to give off a lactonic twinge of blood-and-pus breastmilk gone sour). Father Peady, swooning from his own aromas, considers pulling out the old thirst-trap trusty: “I’ll make sure none of your mess spills anywhere.” Post-cum sobriety, however, reins him in. He simply says, “Don’t worry about making a mess. We’ll clean it all up after.” To frame any reluctance on Georgie’s part as nothing more than worry about making a mess, Father Peady—ever the master of psychological positioning—fills the stillness with a slimy red herring. “No worries, I’ve got a dishtowel right over there,” he says (as if the mess in question were nothing more than bubbling splats of stovetop tomato sauce). The way Georgie glances back toward the kitchen, reminiscent of a naïve newlyweds scanning (as directed by the car salesman) the monthly-payment line on the sale’s contract instead of the grand total, confirms the quiet triumph of the normalcy-making diversion.
It cannot be all “See, how we can help each other?” In an ideal world of seamless complicity maybe, but not here. The unspoken bargain cannot be built solely on whispers of mutual uplift. Serving as the duel elements in the epoxy glue meant to fill any cracks in trust, guilt and fear have long proven to come in quite handy (or perhaps we should say “handsy” here): from the old resin “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 old hardener “Who’d believe you over me anyway” and “I’ll make sure Momma knows just how dirty her little chocoholic can be, maybe some school buddies too!” Whatever the case, none of it is just plug and play. Creativity, a sense of timing, empathy, discipline—these are crucial. The whole thing is an uphill marathon as it is. But then you have to make sure you instill fear and guilt in doses small enough not to scare anyone off. On top of that, every case is different. Every case is different just as every kid is too, each as distinct in their vulnerabilities as fingerprints in the ash of a burned-out cathedral. Some require more of a drug angle, whether to get in the mood or to prevent the sense impressions (the smell of balls, the scrape of stubble, all of it) from haunting them into tattletales ten years down the pike. Others require just a lot of camaraderie and heartfelt discussion.
Not to downplay his craftsmanship or discipline, but Father Peady—and he would be the first to admit it—lucked out with Georgie. Who could have asked for a more pliant hunk of clay, as pliant as that jiggly gut (innie belly button deep enough to serve the purpose if need be)? Even so, Father Peady is not God. It would be a stretch but for all he knows Georgie plays his cards closer to the chest. For that reason, Father Peady doles out here and there some doses of preventative shame and terror—his tinctures, however, watered down just right for his boy (a shockingly low dose for the boy’s bodyweight). “Wow, you can get pretty dirty,” he observes with casual precision—leaving out, explicitly at least, the whole “What would Momma think?” part.
Guilt and fear, of course, should never run unchecked. That kind of tyranny frays, risks rebellion. How to keep them in check is part of the difficulty, a difficulty often underappreciated from the safe remove of the living room (where it is easy for us so scoff “Shit, I can do that!” as we eat out TV dinners). Injecting counter-narratives, happier and supportive ones that soften or blur the anxious edges, often prove useful. But neither the dosage nor the timing is clear. Seduction is not baking, where the paint-by-numbers blueprint of measurements and temperatures and operations and time lengths leaving little room to veer. Like a grandmother’s instinctual stove-craft (recipes unwritten but alive in the head, too elusive to pin down for posterity), what makes seduction—especially one as dangerous as this—skew more toward an art than a science is that you just have to feel it out.
Father Peady himself leans more on the allyship angle. Although he has not thought out all the reasons why (it takes, after all, mental firepower enough just to strategize), his emphasis on making the boy feel seen and heard and connected and worthy seem quite sound considering how mildewed with shame and fear Georgie’s foundation must be from the jump. Father Peady, then, leans harder into lines 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?” Notice the “right?” here. Notice, in particular, the tone. It is not rhetorical, not leading. Introspective (almost as if he did not mean to let it escape his lips), the tone—driven home by the imploring gaze—is one of someone seeking counsel (albeit, let us be clear: one of a shepherd, breaking script, humbly seeking the insight of his lamb). Who would not feel singular, chosen when an ordained priest looks to you for answers? Who could resist the subtle thrill of holding the answer that even a man of God seeks?
If the hunt is successful, if the hypnotic spiral of push and pulls tightens until there is no question left in the boy’s mind about where love ends and he begins, what does that mean exactly? We can explore what that looks like, the shit and blood and viscous 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, these forays for Father Peady were more about getting off, getting away, from himself. They were 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—a metonym for himself—shot farther away from himself (the greater the distance, so it seemed, the longer he got to stay 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.
The key takeaway, to put it crudely, is that Father Peady wants more than a pocket anus. He wants his catamite to take the lead sometimes, surprise him. To that end, he tries hard to reign in the old authoritarian approach of mentorship. “Do this” and “Do that” accompanied by a “Now, or else” has its place. No one would doubt that. Like a good choke or a slap, it can intensify the bluster of the vinegar strokes. It also serves as good tool, in need be, for renewing the vows of the power dynamic. Especially now with the evolution of Father Peady’s goals, however, the authoritarian approach has severe limitations. For when the Father orders his little boy to give his grandmother a hug the next time he sees her (orders him an “Or else!” and even an “I don’t give a fuck how you feel about it”), that grooms the boy into acting more so out of externally-imposed duty instead of out of internally-imposed duty (let alone out of the more-preferable inner desire). But notice that we achieve a more Peady-approved result with a more po-mo permissive approach, as Father Peady himself does over the ensuing weeks when it comes to getting Georgie to play with his oil-drenched balls. Notice, that is to say, that the boy starts acting out of guilt and fear of inner lashing, out of a harsher psychological necessity, if the father takes a more liberal approach, so to say. “You know it’s your choice completely. I would never want to make you do anything you don’t want to do. But I will remind you that Grandma’s old. She doesn’t have much more time, to be honest. One little hug, maybe a kiss too—that would make her day. And yet not giving her anything, not showing your appreciation for all the cooking and the gifts (for giving us both our lives)—that would hurt anyone, and it could very well kill Grandma.” So to the end of cultivating an inner inkling to hug grandma or at least an inner shame-avoidance making him hug grandma (which from the outside looks just the same, and so allows the wishful-thinking recipient to take the most favorable interpretation), Father Peady mostly adopts that permissive style—that anti-authoritarian guise, which he often twists with the please-show-pity logic of courtly love (so as to drive even deeper into Georgie the feeling that he is a bad person not just for not hugging Grandma, but even for not wanting to). “Please be kind. Do you know the suffering just one little gesture can ease?” Only here, of course, “hugging Grandma” is a euphemistic analogy for “juggling balls” or whatever—a euphemism all its own.
As with so many areas of life, Aristotle’s golden mean (the Buddha’s middle path) is the answer. Father Peady knows that too much of the permissive approach is no good either. More than just an aid to climax (“Mouth on it now, boy”) or to put Georgie in his place (“Do what the fuck I say, boy!”), commands remain necessary for a deeper theoretical reason. Commanding, after all, drives home the difference between Father Peady and Georgie. That there be a clear difference is important. Otherwise, such as if Georgie always perfectly anticipated the right moves (tightened, sped up, slowed down, licked this, slapped that, or so on) without having to be directed, Father Peady would not feel like he really spread himself into an other. He would not feel, at least, that he spread into an other with an otherness robust enough for his victory not to feel cheap.
Such background context lends a cruel logic to what we see, months later, when we zoom through the vestry keyhole to find, in the mood lighting of votive candles licking shadows up the walls, Father Peady sprawled like a toppled cornucopia on a makeshift altar of ceremonial garbs. It helps explain why, despite Father Peady wanting to stretch himself into more than just a three-holed board, there is no contradiction in his hissing commands—no dissonance, for example, in the breathless demand (even when delivered through snarled teeth) for the second chubby arm, with all its lanugo fuzz, to be plowed up the pipe. “All the fuckin’ way. . . . Ooh yeah, little piggy gonna play in that slop.” It explains why his next demand (“Fuck those balls up good, little pig!”)—his demand, in effect, that there be no disruption in the rhythm of roughhousing that now undeniably shitty scrotum (face-butt to slurp, face-butt to slurp)—coheres with his deepest desire: someone devoted enough to spice things up with self-initiated surprises of pleasure, surprises born not out of obedience to “Show me what you working with, boy” but rather out of a self-satisfied awareness of just how tight (murder-worthy tight) of a brown snapper they have on offer; someone immersed enough that their spontaneous devotions not only anticipate the recipient’s cravings, but also prove innovative enough to unlock new ones. (And as far as this deepest desire is concerned, it is something we all can relate to. Is it not true—at least for our kind, whose hearts swell more at the prodigal son’s return than at the steady loyalty of the faithful one—that the most thrilling gifts are the unbidden surprises? Is it not true, for instance, that the never-before-seen and never-before-asked-for cobra spits (“Tua, tua”) Georgie delivers to Father Peady’s testicles (“Ooh, just what the doctor fuckin ordered!”) evoke a deeper satisfaction—eyes rotated up like in dying—than anything compelled by micromanagement?)
As far has his goals—his wettest dreams of consummate possession—are concerned, Father Peady has struck one hell of a chunky motherlode. Short of heaven (on our Earth of compromise), the best satisfaction our man could have hoped for is what he has secured in flesh and blood: a thick honeypot of hormones in the form of an acolyte obedient enough to heed every order (even if in desecration of the terminal transcendence) and yet self-starter enough to initiate unscripted gestures of tie-me-up surrender all his own—ready to stank up the house of God of all places, the sour yeast of his fat folds guiding the truffle-snuffling snout right to the radix of highest fecality. Something about the way Father Peady behaves as he closes in on the point of no return, that point where “I” and “Thou” melt into “We”—behold the mountain-moving animation of the man: finger knotted in the boy’s hair, scalp-lock ferocity straight out of German smut. Something about how he lets himself treat the boy’s mouth as a headbanging stroker toy, a mechanized pleasure sleeve, without even a smidge of the usual worrywart pausing (either to check in or to spoon in another verbal dose of grooming) seems to indicate more than just his unblemished faith that he has finally won his prize. But this is not just victory’s abandon. Study the eyes: how—if you catch the right moment—they morph from bloodthirsty daggers into puppy-dog tremblers of hushed reverence. His body language broadcasts a fact no one with any ounce of empathy could deny: that he does not take his prize for granted—that, unlike the Satan he could easily be made out to be, he is grateful (achingly grateful).
Whatever underlying tenderness might lull us into the warm-fuzzy bosom of Disney, Father Peady’s command—“Stretch it, boy!”—snaps even the girliest of romantic voyeurs back to the body: to the glandular truth of flesh, here a gooey snake-tangle of flesh rank with halitotic mucous, cumin, civet, and that g-spot ass gelatin. “Stretch it way the fuck out!” Hissed with the rare curse from Father Peady’s lips (a curse indicative of serious business, of go time), the command here—while on the surface leaving room for personal pizzaz—can be fulfilled in one way only: Georgie must press his fingers together inside for fulcrum leverage and drive his palms and forearms outward, prying open contractile bands of meat puckering involuntarily from the gates of entry to the throbbing depths of the colon.
The boy’s head game says it all: this half-a-minute fury, a steady pulse of “eghck eghck egchk” punctuated by the priest’s snarling taunts (“Ooh you’re going to fucking hell for this, pig”), has surely become ritual—no mere novitiate could ever flex a throat so yielding it is ravenous. But the bar of depravity always finds a way to inch lower, does it not? And on this particular occasion, so we might assume, those peach-fuzz lips are driven, in the ultimate stroke, so deep into middle-aged mons pubis fur and unguent fatty tissue that Father Peady’s love effluvium—fermented in curdling patience—erupts from the boy’s gasping nostrils in twin streams of gak. Ungodly gags muffled in the petechial prolonging of a leg-reinforced pin-down, jugular veins distend out from that mandible-unhinging panic of snake regurgitation—until the body, convulsing for freedom, snarfs forth mandarin orange segments (grotesquely large for holes so tiny) and sinus-filling crumbles of brown, which anyone who knows what day it is (Tuesday) would recognize as lunch-lady taco beef.
Such torrential delight, cleaned up (more like smeared around) with low-capillary-action chalice linen by the apologetic boy (trembling hands unable to contain his shame)—such an ecstatic baptism of bile will likely welcome, for a tango team that has gone this far, two big downstream changes. First, the pinching closed of Georgie’s leak-prone nostrils to ensure no more waste—that will be a thing from here on, an irreversible new standard: “I want my love swallowed, pig!” Second, the dawning of a kinkier hunger, a new necessity: vomit-blasting grand finales of chef’s-kiss throat convulsion (those same penis-milking panic contractions we get, to cite the old Parisian brothel move, inside the frenzied cloaca of neck-wrung hens)—how can that not also take root, the body's rebellion turned ritual (each retch, each gag, a perverted sacrament)? We know our man by now. Absence of vomit will be framed as disloyalty. And even if the boy does not make provisions for the expected mess (chugging milk beforehand perhaps), Father Peady still wins. For disloyalty invites escalation. The shattered relic of a boy will be assigned ramped-up devotions. He might have to keep a Mary figurine up his ass throughout the school day (a g-spot twist on hairshirt asceticism). Or he might have to endure purification in holy water, face held down in the bubbling bird bath while Father Peady pumps out anal vinegar strokes. Surely we can picture such waterplay rituals going sideways: perhaps, for example, the head pinning lasts too long, the fat body rescued from blackout hinterlands by prison-averse CPR huffs—Father Peady, rock hard again not even a minute after the cortisol surge of death-sentence panic, more of an earthly savior than ever before!
And yes, all of it will be caught on camcorder: from the first mutual masturbation session (which, in comparative hindsight, will play like a Molly Ringwald romance) to the wood-creaking shit-and-blood fuck sessions to come (where Father Peady, like clockwork whenever “that fat back” arches just right enough for a moan of “Fuck yeah,” will start mumble-singing, in sync with a pounding rhythm whose every breath-hitching piston plunge has sweat lash off his forehead in what would have otherwise seemed the fanciful unreality of Rocky 4 or WrestleMania, “♪Something tells me I’m into something good♪,” the Harmans Hermits classic repurposed for something much more intimate than a TV commercial)—all of it will be caught. In the grand impermanence, who could resist recording even the grainiest footage (no matter how warped by the white-line jitters of unstable playback)? Father Peady, with his bookcase-hidden archive, this way ensures himself spank-bank material that doubles, just in case (because people do change), as blackmail: “What would mom think, what would your buddies think, seeing this little cum-drinking, shit-eating, piggy?” And so the tape will keep sliding home, the screen swallowing the light.
https://www.celebritymoviearchive.com/tour/source.php/5205/p
https://forcedcinema.net/video/irreversibles-rape-scene/