the clergy collar vodka run

jamie simons

IT WAS SPRINGTIME IN HAYWARD. Skis and snowmobiles were put away for the summer and the rednecks had long since unlocked the hubs on their four-wheel-drive pickups. I packed my wool pants and shirts in boxes and put them away in the basement along with my snowshoes and boots. My dad took the plow off of the green truck and set it over in the woods by the shop. All over town people were cleaning up their yards and raking leaves and detritus that they never cleaned up from the previous fall.

Dolora and I had broken up weeks ago. I got a phone call from her one night saying she wanted to end it. I could see it coming. After we broke up we didn’t speak to each other for seven years.

Dolora basically broke up with me because I was mean to her. One of the reasons I was so mean to Dolora was because I was starving all the time. Another reason I was mean to her was because I thought that’s the way she wanted to be treated. My idea of what it meant to be wanted was wrapped up in a need to be tough, and down inside I was anything but that. When I was going out with Jenny Henk, I treated her like a princess. Apparently she didn’t care for that type of treatment because after a month or so she turned around and dumped me for Ryan Magnussen. He treated his girlfriends like shit and they seemed to love it.

Ryan would pick Jenny up on a Friday or Saturday night for a date and then afterwards he wouldn’t want to drive all the way out to Stone Lake to take her home again, so he would beg other people to do it. He quickly dumped her for Katie Hess, whom he proceeded to treat the same way.

She seemed to like it too.

Everything I learned about how to treat girls in high school I learned from Ryan Magnussen.

It was a shame Dolora had to break up with me just when I really started to like her. I think the main reason she ended our relationship was because she felt she wasn’t important to me. Nothing could be further from the truth. I exercised compulsively and starved myself to look good for my girlfriend, whoever it was at the time (in this case Dolora). I thought that’s what she wanted. I felt that if I let my body get soft and fat she would leave me. I remember her telling me once that I didn’t have to exercise anymore. She liked me just the way I was. I didn’t believe her. By the time Dolora broke up with me I was in love with her. Of course, I didn’t express my feelings for her or tell her that I cared about her. I was trying to be tough. The only emotions I expressed were anger and lust.

I remember one Sunday afternoon Dolora asked me to go play basketball with her and Scott and Ryan. I told her no because I had to go running. She said “OK” and quietly hung up the phone. I knew that was the end.

Looking back on it I see now that she was trying to reach out to me and make an effort to actually include me in activities other than drinking. We never really did anything like that before. Our whole relationship consisted of going to parties and getting wasted. Read: I got wasted and she took care of me.

After Dolora and I broke up, I doubled down on my routines. Exercise had become such a huge part of my life that it was the only thing that mattered, besides drinking of course. I had to keep my weight down. My old methods of starving weren’t really working anymore. My body was adapting to my eating habits. When I first started starving myself, all the fat was stripped off of my body, giving me the look that I wanted. After months and months of repeated starving, my body started storing fat on my stomach because it knew I was going to starve it. Now I was just skinny with a layer of fat on my stomach. My muscles had been eaten away to provide nutrients to my malnourished body. Exercise, starving, drinking—they became the rituals that held everything together, my way of controlling the mess my life had become. I thought that if I kept my body lean and tough it would numb the pain of being unwanted. When I drank and partied, it was the one time I could escape and be loud and wild and most of all—someone else.

Since I didn’t have any girlfriend to go to parties with on the weekends anymore, I had to seek attention by getting extremely drunk. Every weekend I had to outdo myself by getting drunker and doing more outrageous things. Every chance I got I tried to attract attention. I cut my hair really short and dyed it red. This may not seem unusual now, but in Hayward at the time it was pretty radical.

It was hard seeing Dolora around since she was always at the same parties that I was at. She seemed happy. I tried to act happy, but I was lying. Dolora also started hanging around Ryan and Katie on the weekends so I couldn’t really hang out with Ryan anymore. He and I had been inseparable all winter and now we hardly talked to each other.

Ryan and Katie finally had sex, so he had no use for me anymore. I spent a lot of time with Scott and some other people I hadn’t seen much of since the fall. I kept going to parties on the weekends, but it just wasn’t fun anymore. I’d made a spectacle of myself enough times that it all felt empty, just a series of stunts—shaving my head, dying my hair, drinking until I puked. Each weekend I had to push further and try to outdo what I did the weekend before, but nothing made me feel any more whole. I had become a caricature of myself. Nothing was fun.

One weekend afternoon I was over at Scott’s house. His new girlfriend, Jill Capice, was over there too. There was nothing going on in Hayward and Scott’s parents were out of town for the day so we decided to do the only thing there was to do: get drunk. But there was nobody around to buy us any alcohol. It was com-mon for us to try to buy beer at places in Hayward, but we usually weren’t successful. More often than not, we would have to end up stealing bottles of liquor from Price Rite gas station. After debat-ing where we could get some alcohol, I came up with a plan.

“Scott, you should put on your dad’s clergy collar and go try to buy some alcohol.”

Scott and Jill looked at me with blank faces.

“Do you really think we can get away with it?” Scott said in a whisper.

I nodded and smiled. We spoke in hushed tones while we ironed out the details, as if God wouldn’t hear us if we talked quieter. To this day, I’m not quite sure what the reasoning was behind my idea. Maybe it was the fact that in order to actually be a pastor, one would have to graduate from seminary which would make Scott at least twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Of course, the success of our plan assumed that the barkeep knew this. I guess I just thought it would make Scott look older to have him wearing his dad’s pastor clothes. When I suggested Scott wear his dad’s clergy collar, it was mostly a joke, but there was something deeper there, too. There was a certain comfort in imagining him wearing that disguise, like maybe in pretending to be someone else, he’d make it through unnoticed. I had actually been formulating this scheme for quite some time, but we never had the right opportunity to put it into action. Now was the time.

Scott disappeared into his parents’ bedroom. I could hear him opening and closing drawers and digging and shuffling around in there. He appeared wearing his dad’s long-sleeved, black pastor’s shirt. He had the white clergy collar in his left hand. I had to help him put it on. The collar was just a white piece of plastic, a little over an inch wide and just long enough to fit snugly around Scott’s neck. Inside the shirt there was a sort of sleeve where I slipped the collar into and worked it around so it came out the other side. I arranged the collar so that it was nicely displayed in the previously empty space in the front of the shirt, not unlike a father adjusting his son’s tie. I stood and faced him. I had been building my own disguise, starving, exercising, doing everything to keep from looking like the soft, needy person I was inside. Part of me wondered if this pastor act was just another version of my own routine: trying on a persona, hoping it would keep people from seeing what was underneath.

I slapped Scott on the back and complimented him on his handsomeness. “Time to go,” I said. Jill and Scott and I got in his Caravan and drove to Ron and Alma’s, a bar in the little town of Springbrook, just south of Hayward. We always heard that a lot of high school kids would go there and drink. None of us had any interest in actually sitting in the bar and drinking; we just wanted to buy a bottle of alcohol, rush home, and drink it. On the way there we were all kind of nervous about the whole thing, especially Scott, since he was actually doing the buying. I was nervous too, but I knew it would work. Chances were that we could probably just go in there without any pastoral get-up and buy some liquor without any problem. Now we had the extra security of Scott’s disguise on our side.

The story played out in my head as we drove along. Scott was disguised as a pastor in crisis. Maybe he had a hard day with his congregation? Maybe he was suffering the trials of Job? Maybe he was doubting his faith? Maybe he was having an affair with his church secretary? It was an excellent story. Anyway I thought about it, I knew it would work. Even if the bartender suspected Scott was underage, he would probably just serve him anyway because of his outrageous attempt. Hell, the bartender would probably get a kick out of it unless, of course, he was a God-fearing man.

Ron and Alma’s was in sight.

Scott slowed down and we pulled into the driveway. “Ready, Scott?”

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

“Act mature.”

Scott got out of the van and disappeared into the dirty, tan-colored, battered building. Jill and I waited in the van in silence.

After a few minutes a figure of a man emerged from the smoke and darkness of Ron and Alma’s. It was the figure of a pastor. He was tall and skinny with a rather small head and round wire-rim glasses. He was wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a brown leather jacket unzipped so that one could see a black pastor’s shirt with a white clergy collar peeking through. His eyes darted from side to side and he walked rather fast with quick, short steps. In one hand he had a six-pack of Blatz beer and in the other he had a bottle of vodka. As he approached the van he broke out in a nervous smile.

When he got into the van, Jill and I broke out into uncontrollable laughter and congratulations. Scott didn’t waste any time. He threw the van into reverse, backed out of the parking lot and punched the accelerator. We were home free.

Scott turned to me and smiled as we were driving away. “You know, Jamie, we’re going straight to Hell for this one.”

“Yeah, I know,” I smiled back. I couldn’t have been happier.