The Priest, The Rabbit, and Doing the Right Thing

It didn’t seem sacrilegious to wear the priest costume. We had to dress up. Direct orders from the corporate office. My usual, a life-like cow suit, was gone and I missed it. They didn’t bring it back this year, so I figured the priest was a good second choice. Cows and priests were considered holy figures, so there was some correlation.

            “That’s just wrong,” Joe, my boss, said as I posed in the doorway. I was trying to look like a fashionable servant of the Lord, with my arms above my head and one leg up. The black cassock ended just short of my ankles and a scarf-like cloth with black fringes at each end hung around my neck.

            “At least loose the handcuffs,” Joe said, laughing. I guess they were a little much, dangling from my left wrist. I put them back in the adult novelty section.

            Halloween was more than a month away, but the true enthusiasts shop early. Because we cater to those enthusiasts — the ones who come into the store in early August asking about the zombie props and life-size caskets — our store goes all out. Hence, it wasn’t even October and I was already in costume.

It didn’t seem fair, but that was work and I had to do it or work somewhere else. Somewhere where they may not laugh so freely at dressing as a priest and handcuffing yourself to the six-foot Freddy Krueger motion-activated doll in the doorway. There was a certain appeal for me, a horror-movie fan, here too: undead ghouls screamed as they decapitated themselves, random chainsaws sounded around the store, singing witches and cawing crows went off like fire whistles, and the wife and son of Chucky, the killer doll hung behind the counter.             “I can’t wait to scare my grandson,” the man said as I put his newly purchased Chucky in a bag. “He stays at our place for the weekend sometimes. He always says, ‘I wanna watch Chucky. I wanna watch Chucky.’ We’ll see what he does when he goes to bed that night and Chucky’s under the covers waiting for him.”

            We both laughed. This guy, with his pencil-mustache and old-man limp, seemed like a cool grandfather to me. I could imagine my own father pulling pranks like this on my son when he was old enough to wet the bed from fear.

            “I’ll let you know how it works out,” the man said. “Cause I know I’ll be back before the holiday. I just love this time of year.”

            He wasn’t alone. Ever since we set the store for Halloween, in the second week of September, people have been excited. I flicked the cheap, plastic cross around my neck.

            “Bless you, my son,” I said, as the man slid his hand through the plastic handles of his bag.

            “Thank you, father,” he said, laughing again. It was a pleasant laugh..

            Joe shook his head. He had watched the whole scene.

            “You’re not right,” he said. He then went around the store, ninja-like, straightening any merchandise touched during the last wave of costumers. Joe felt, after 15 years in the retail business, no human could touch anything in a store without messing it up. Most of his days were spent hawking 16-year-old shoplifters and rearranging shocking pens or folding rock-band tee shirts. Sometimes, I’d be mid-sentence before realizing Joe was gone, off positioning something again, and I’d be left with my own story.

            Joe, being agnostic, enjoyed my interaction with the public in my priest’s garments. When I’d make a quick sign-of-the-cross in the air instead of waving goodbye, he’d fill the store with laughter. Then he’d go look for things to clean.

            Joe’s religious upbringing was similar to my own. Catholic parents make Catholic children (sometimes too obediently) and it’s off to Catholic churches and schools. Joe was fine, until he realized he was gay. Between that and his parents’ divorce, he kind of stopped doing religion. His mother, devout and God-fearing, stayed close and they were better off without his old man who disowned his son somewhere along the way.

            I had my own ultra-religious parents who, despite many economic problems and multiple relocations thanks to the military, managed to send me to Catholic school most of my life. Every Sunday I was at church and all the other days I listened to my mother repeat the priest’s catch phrase from that week’s sermon.

            “Adam,” my mother would say in a tone most people take with disobedient puppies. “What would our unseen guest say?”

 My mother was a nagger. She could complain and whine and scold so badly I’d often contemplated pulling a Van Gogh, just to stop her preaching.

            While some phrases and sayings lasted only a week, until the next service, some were more permanent. I vividly recall her saying “Do the right thing,” for over five years to every person in our family. This was long before Spike Lee’s film of the same title. His movie explored racial injustice in urban America; my mother was trying to grow decent young boys.

            When I had two pieces of candy and one of my brothers had none, my mother’s mantra would call from the kitchen.

            “Adam,” she would say. “Share with your brother.” I would explain I still had candy because I didn’t devour it as soon as it touched my palm, but my mother didn’t care.

            “You always have an explanation for everything,” she’d say, never leaving the kitchen to see the chocolate around my brother’s mouth. “Just do the right thing.”

            Unfortunately, this would embed itself, much like tapeworm, in me. Once, when I was in high school and one of the football players, who seemed to have no neck, was holding a milk carton over the head of the kid I copied from in my Honors Biology class, I heard my mother’s Western Pennsylvanian twang in my brain.

So I did the right thing.

I went over and pushed that neck-less lineman in the small of his back, causing the opened milk to spill in the hallway. I escaped an ass kicking because the commotion brought our Biology teacher into the hallway. I just lived under constant threat for the rest of year, but no physical beatings. That year I wasn’t so much worried about my mother’s unseen guest as I was about walking certain hallways, where my guest could be seen and once smashed me against a locker, nearly popping my ribs, and told me how he’d make me shit my own teeth for a week if I ever try to act tough again. I took his suggestion. After that, the Biology kid was only too happy to let me look on his test papers.

Over the years, when Catholic school was clearly just as bad as any other school (except there were more rich kids, to further alienate me) and church had gone into some holy syndication and eventually off the air for me, I prayed.

I’m not sure if it was hope or fear or a thoughtless routine. Like brushing my teeth and going to work. I just seemed like the right thing to do.

Then one day, I stopped. It was encouraged by my parents and their constant reminders to thank God for everything.

When I got straight A’s in college, after failing out twice and a poor high school history, my parents said I should thank God. When I won a writing award, my dad said the same thing.

“Just remember to thank God for giving you these gifts.”

I felt indignant. I worked hard for those grades and that award. I stayed up late, after working an 8-hour day or tiring myself out with my toddler son. God didn’t have anything to do with it.

When I tried to explain this to my parents, they seemed confused.

“I’m sure you busted your ass,” my mother said. “That’s why it helps to pray.”

“Well sometimes you have to stop sitting on your hands and actually do something,” I said. I tried to explain the relationship between philosophy and religion, how Thomas Aquinas claimed they were two paths to the same thing. How you can live morally and be kind to others without the kneeling and singing and incense every Sunday.

“You know,” I said, eyeing my mother, “it’s all about doing the right thing.”

“I’ll pray for you,” she said. And that was it. There was nothing more to say.

So I had no problems dressing as a priest at work, it was actually quite timely with reports from all over the country about the sexual misconduct of priests. Some people didn’t find it so funny.

“I’m keeping away from you,” one woman told me, “so when the lightning strikes I won’t get hit.” I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. She was chuckling, but she made a point to say it to me, completely unprovoked.

“I’m more concerned about cute altar boys,” I said. The woman wasn’t chuckling anymore.

“You better hope God doesn’t smite you for that one,” she said and left without buying anything.

“Smite?” I said to Joe. “Who says that anyway?”

I found you could get away with saying things in a priest outfit you could never say in jeans and a tee shirt. I’ve told people whiskey and root beer is a good mixture in my holy clothing, I told one girl she had to learn to tell people to fuck off more often while shimmying the red, fringed cloth across the back of my neck. I even explained the working features of an $80 vibrator, “The Rabbit”, to a curious guy.

“They call it The Rabbit because of these two little ears right here,” I said, tapping two extended prongs shaped like rabbit ears. The barrel of The Rabbit was intimidating: phallic and filled with pearl beads, the girth the size of a roll of half-dollars.

The man shook his head and let out an exaggerated breath. He was looking for his wife, something he made clear to me immediately. Just in case I thought it was for him. His wife heard of The Rabbit from the popular television show “Sex in the City.” It even had the red “As Seen on TV” label on the packaging. This is what the guy needed; he just wanted some filler details from me, a salesman dressed as a priest, playing with the control panel of the 10-inch vibrator.

“So this,” the man, touching the ears as if they were the fangs of a Black Mamba, “would stimulate the … uh … clitoris?”

“Yes,” I said. “The clitoris.”  I didn’t need to repeat him; I just thought it was funny. I was aware he was uncomfortable: his quick explanations, his inability to say certain words, how he wouldn’t even look at me. It was all kind of empowering. I felt more like a guru than a priest.

“Watch this,” I said, increasing the speed, causing the tip — or The Rabbit’s nose — to twirl counter clockwise.

We watched, almost hypnotized, until I realized there was a woman waiting in line. The man tracked my eyes and began to apologize.

“I’m sorry,” he said, moving out of her way. “You can go … I … uh … just looking.”

The woman didn’t move. She just smirked and looked at The Rabbit.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I was watching the demonstration.”

“Step up, my child,” I said, reasserting myself as the leader of the situation. “These are merely matters of the flesh.”

She had three items for somebody turning 50: an oversized pillbox, neon green and a separate compartment for each day of the week, a card with a big 5-0 on the front, and a gift bag. As I rang, she stared at The Rabbit which was turned off and laying on the counter.        

“You can check it out if you want to,” I said, nodding to The Rabbit. She laughed.

“No thanks,” she said. “I’d have to ask for forgiveness for my sins.”

“It’s okay,” I said, displaying my tawdry gold cross as if it were a detective badge. “I can take care of that.”

She smirked again and picked up The Rabbit. I showed her where the power button was and as soon as it started twirling and vibrating, she dropped it on the counter.

“I think that’s enough,” she said, handing me her credit card. The guy was still watching.

“No problem,” I said. “As for your penance, have a good day.”

The woman laughed, signed her receipt, and left. The man came back up to the counter and grabbed The Rabbit.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

I nodded and rang him up. I even left the $3, sold separately batteries in there. I think my mother would have understood. 

Adam Matcho writes true stories for the New Yinzer. Names have not been changed and distinguishing characteristics have not been altered. They are all just as guilty as Adam.

Tim Brown can build houses and fill boxes with his teeth. He may fall asleep while conversing, but that will not bring his spirit down. Tim is currently working on a comics series called Gumption.