The Seal of Confession (conclusion)
Boston Outsider / Humor
I wondered how I could rid myself of this mother lode of filth, and I immediately thought of my uncle Sal, who dealt in dubious merchandise. After locking up Richie’s treasure vault, I called Sal and made an appointment to see him on the following Saturday night.
When Saturday afternoon came, I was in Braintree at the Dom DiMaggio Lodge, the local headquarters of the International Society of Garibaldians. The Cattivo family was descended from a long line of anticlerical agitators, and so a memorial service at the lodge would be the closest thing to a funeral Mass that Richie would have. In attendance were a handful of lodge members, about twenty people from the Bunker, Richie’s sister Marie, and his daughter Lucretia. Richie’s ex-wife was conspicuously absent, which cemented her image as an evil shrew in the minds of Richie’s sales colleagues.
At the front of the room was a table bearing Richie’s college graduation picture, along with an urn containing his ashes. As I took the lectern to speak, I recalled something Richie once told me, “If you’re going to lie, make sure that the lie contains a grain of truth.”
Thinking of Richie’s fondness for strippers, I told my audience that the departed appreciated the performing arts. Awed at how Richie had managed to keep his perversion under the radar while amassing all those magazines, I said that he was a quiet man who loved to read. And in light of Richie’s admission that he had spent countless thousands of dollars on lap dances, I lobbed the biggest bullshit grenade of my life.
“We all know that he was a great salesman,” I said solemnly, looking out over the small crowd. “And I believe this was because Richie, in this cold, impersonal world, truly knew how to develop a sense of closeness with people.”
In the front row of mourners, a buxom redhead named Eileen, who had been the favorite object of Richie’s covert ogling, began to sob loudly. I almost started bawling myself.
After the service was over, Marie thanked me for speaking and asked if I had had a chance to inspect Richie’s storage locker.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s full of books.”
“Oh, yes, like you said, he loved to read,” she replied, smiling sweetly. “Are you going to keep them?”
“I’m going to donate them to a library,” I answered, too timid to call her bluff, if it was a bluff. “I’ll have that key for you next week.”
“The library. Richie would have wanted it that way,” she beamed.
A few hours later, I was sitting at a table in the Honey Melon Lounge with Uncle Sal.
“Jesus, this is all that’s left of the old Combat Zone,” said Sal, looking around the room through thick eyeglass lenses. “I thought you were a monk or something. Why’d you choose this place to meet?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “Listen, Uncle Sal. You can have all those stroke mags for free. I just want them to go away.”
“Oh, they remind you of your friend who died, huh?” he replied. “Don’t worry, kid, I’ll throw you a few bucks. We’ll take a crew with a truck down there Monday night.” He turned to look at a dancer on a nearby stage, chuckling, “Look at the cantaloupes on that girl. Those boobs are harder than the ones on a statue.”
“They’re as false as everything else in the world,” I replied, pausing to take a sip of my twelve-dollar Budweiser.
“You sound really depressed sometimes,” said Sal. “It’s a sin to be so hopeless.”
Uncle Sal had studied for the priesthood before leaving the seminary to marry Aunt Filomena. He was correct in stating that Despair was a grave offense against the Holy Spirit, but since he had no objection to watching nude dancing or trafficking in secondhand pornography, he must have forgotten the teaching about Lust. Discussing theology with him was always quite instructive.
“Richie, the guy who left me all the dirty books, he was never baptized,” I said. “What happens to his soul?”
“Never baptized?” he asked with a pensive look on his face. “That’s like being granted a delay of a court appearance. He has to wait around somewhere with all the babies who died without being christened, and with all the non-Catholics. He has to stay there until the end of the world. It used to be called ‘Limbo.’”
I pictured Richie, longing for a massage or a peepshow, spending eons among billions of whirling dervishes, meditating gurus and wailing infants, and I started giggling uncontrollably.
“Hey, first you’re all down in the dumps, and now you’re laughing like a broad,” chided Sal. “You’ve always been a little goofy. I think you need to get married.”
Uncle Sal was right about my needing female companionship. I thought about Marie Cattivo, who seemed as if she still had some life in her, and I decided that I’d ask her for a date after Richie’s estate was settled. If she was as devious as I believed she was, she could probably teach me a thing or two.
