Edmund has finally retired. He's finally turned in his robes--let a younger, more agile man take his place. Finally gave in to the old creaking bones of a lifetime farmer and fearer of God. Gave in to arriving at church just on time and leaving as soon as the mass ended.   No more showing up early; not finishing his coffee and sausage and eggs to rush out the door, combing his hair on the go. No more staying late to fold used cloths or dry the stained Eucharist from spilled wine. The wafer budget is tight and parishioners will be getting a spiked body of Christ in the next mass.

From here on out, Edmund would finish his breakfast and comb his slick, white as a dove hair in front of a mirror. He would ride with his lady, his wife of a million years, under his arm to church in the freshly charged golf cart and not separately in the car--he hated putting all those extra miles on the Caddy. From here on out he'd watch instead of lead and sleep when there was a lull in all the kneeling. Never would a homily be so enjoyable.

Regretfully, I didn't make it to Phoenix for the retirement party, couldn't witness his last genuflection in white and black, but heard it was quite the affair for it's not everyday an eighty year old man calls it quits from service as an alter boy.

My brother Michael and I are finally visiting to make up for it. Before church, we're eating my grandmother's usual breakfast menu: sausage and eggs, around the large round oak table they've had since I was a baby.

After cleaning up the dishes the four of us load up in the Caddy. As we pull out of the driveway I ask my grandfather why he decided to become an alter boy in retirement.

"For the same reason I became a bagger at the grocer." He replies in his matter-a-fact midwestern tone--says he was bored with all the extra time.

As someone who started working the fields before his first erection, which age that was I've never inquired (we're close but there's only so bold brunch Bloody Marys can make you) but I assume since he's of my gene pool, it was probably age five or six. Therefore, a life without work was an insane phenomenon. And though I could see what he was getting at, I still assume he was doing it to make up for some earlier misdeeds in life. Perhaps some crazy trip to Brussels in his twenties that no one ever talked about. Maybe he'd left his family behind for a week and spent the previous summer's yield to go nuts in Belgium--eating mussels of the sea and muscles of the flesh.

I picture my greaser grandfather in his white v-neck and blue jeans, his dark brown hair uniformly slicked and parted with the precision of a soy field, glimmering in the bar lights of a foreign land. He couldn't speak the language or convert currency so he paid in dollars outright making him the toast of every bartender and waitress and woman looking to have a good time with a strapping young farmer from the states.

When he returned to his family, still only half as large as it would become, three kids where there would be six, he put his head on my grandmother's shoulder and asked for forgiveness. To which she replied, "It's not I who will judge, but the Lord."

Forty some years later and an alter boy Edmund became. The true reason he became a bagger we'll never know though I like to think it's just as scandalous.

Looking out over the passing landscape of rock and cactus I realize I'm approaching the age in which my grandfather presumably "made" his licentious trip to Brussels, and I wonder if I'll one day have to don the penance of alter boy robes. I have no wife or children yet but my sins are a laundry list and I haven't attended church regularly in years, making me exponentially behind on the forgiveness scale. I see my salvation measured on two chalkboards side by side and the chalkboard for sins is filling rapidly with checkmarks while the one for my good deeds and penance is still a crisp new green. Not even the use of colored chalk, blue and pink and orange, can make the judgment seem somewhat even.

I feel that applying at the local diocese for an alter boy position to try and level the playing field could be in my best interest for by the time I'm eighty the "sin" chalkboard will simply be colored in. But what are the pre-requisites for an alter boy? Will I need to be able to recite the bible by heart? Be able to name every apostle, every saint, and every pope? Will I need past experience?

I had no experience in retail when I got my first real job at Target but serving soccer moms and students on spring break is different than serving the Lord, isn't it? I've never had fantasies of helping a thirty-three year old "Lord" with sculpted tits and a high blonde ponytail carry a desk to her car where I proceeded to ravage her, ass high and back low, in the trunk of her Range Rover. Let alone the eight girls on spring break from Tennessee whom I fanaticized kidnapping me while I gathered red shopping carts and swelled me up in an orgy of bacchanalian proportions at their hotel room on the beach. If I had been forced to be an alter boy like my two older brothers, Michael and Stephen, when I was kid, I'd already have the experience necessary to compete for the position now.

Like my grandfather, my older brothers were forced to the cloth for unspoken indiscretions while my little brother Kevin and I were simply made to understand that such a fate could be ours if we didn't shape up. Fearful of what indiscretions those were, I refrained from any further announcements to the family of my sexual advances, such as French kissing Jessica Button at the park or keeping a diary of the breast growth on Erin Hucks, Tina Laraquente, and Jill Keklik.

So fearful was I that I might be made an alter boy, I swore off snapping bras and spin the bottle, both of which I was quite good at. (I could always spin the bottle just the right amount to land on Jessica Fiorillo no matter the bottle used. I was a physics savant in middle school but once spin the bottle was no longer played I became a retard in science.)

Birthday parties quickly found me outside jumping on a trampoline by myself or discussing local politics with the hosts' parents to avoid any temptations. Monroe, Connecticut was a small town so keeping up with the who's who of the school board and city council was easy enough and worth the effort to ward off debauchery.

While friends were enlisting one after another as if conscription was upon us, my nightmare of a draft caused by the Gulf War of the early 90's was nothing compared to my fear of becoming an alter boy. Kuwait be damned--Iraq and Saddam were forgotten. If I were forced to go to war at least I'd be on TV and get night vision goggles, I thought. All I got from being an alter boy was dipping my fingers in the fresh melted wax of the candles, but even that grew tiresome after a couple weeks it seemed.

The first of my friends to be called to duty was Peter O'Karma and seeing him up there on the huge alter of St. Jude's church was a frightful reminder of what was possible.   The horrors of nuclear energy were finally being realized. Poor ol' Peter holding the book of gospels for the priest was my Chernobyl.

When he was sitting down we'd make faces back and forth--do silent impressions of fat little Father Sabia--anything to try and cheer the poor soldier up. And I did so at a huge risk to my own sovereignty for such actions at church could just as easily have me shipped off to this new holy war in a day's time.

After Peter O'Karma was Erik Soto. After Erik, Ken Engledrum and Marty Ginnan. Every month someone from my football team, my basketball team, soccer or baseball team, depending on the season, was dropping, as if a plague was taking over Chalk Hill Middle School.

Each week I lived with the fear of coming home from CCD to learn that my mom had talked to Ms. Paul and found out I had flooded the bathroom, that I had called the teacher a dick, that I had been kissing in the stairwell, exchanging notes, or cheating on a test about Jesus' sermons, which I could never remember.

But I pressed on, fearlessly reading the Monroe Courier to keep up with the issues for any future parties I'd have to attend. Seven minutes in heaven was slowly being introduced and such temptation of a dark closet and breasts, even those still in a training bra, was too much and I avoided being in the house all together, trampoline or not. I'd play in the dirt or ride a girls' bike if I had to.

My brothers were even pressing for my membership into the fraternity, and not for reasons of character, but of spite. They'd already witnessed the time pass when each had been inducted and they wanted retribution. I was finishing up with eighth grade and I still hadn't been enlisted. How unfair. How unjust. The two cried out as my little brother and I feigned reading an encyclopedia. The odds were against us, the two elders had a solid case, but time and Sundays kept passing and I was no closer to being an alter boy than I was three years prior.

Then in March of that year, at a time when all was perfect, school was winding down and summer break, though still two months away, seemed just around the corner, it all changed. My friends and I were already getting release forms to be signed by our parents for the big eighth grade trip we looked forward to since sixth grade. It would be where I felt and sucked on my first bare breasts, off in the woods on a rock wall from the revolution. But it was all cast with a somber light because it was also one of the last times I'd ever hang out with all my friends--the last time I'd ever fondle those perfectly rounded thirteen-year-old breasts. For in March I found out not that I was to join the Local 640 Union of Alter Boys, but that I'd be moving to a far off place called Kentucky.   A place where my older brothers were able to turn in their resignations and where Kevin and my own fears of becoming them were finally cast aside forever.

I awake from my daydream to see our church just past the next light. "So what's life like after being an alter boy?" I ask my grandfather somewhat sarcastically.

But before he can answer, Michael interrupts, as if still angered with my draft dodging of fifteen years prior. "Sorry, Asshole, but that shit's privileged."

My grandfather and Michael laugh at this, sharing in a commonality we could never have, like war veterans decades after they returned from the front. I feel completely separate from their connection, completely alien to their bonding laughter. So I let them carry on while my grandmother and I look out the tinted windows and over the desert morning.

Perhaps a trip to Brussels would help.

© 2008 Tyke Johnson