Abramowitz 31

Our Lady of Perpetual Health

By Jay Abramowitz

Since they were Catholic and he wasn’t, Larry had argued, he could get away with it. “Good thinkin’, you skinny shit,” said Cilione. “Jesus wouldn’t bother strikin’ you dead, you don’t even fuckin’ think he’s God.”

“Plus since I’m a Jew I’m going to Hell anyway.”

Cilione had his ’68 Pontiac GTO tuned so its motor would announce his approach to everyone in the Tri-State area, so he, Bob and Larry sneaked through the woods instead of driving. In front of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, on a pedestal, was the church’s statue of the Virgin Mary, her hands outstretched in mercy.

Early in the wretched aftermath Larry believed it started with the Tòth thing, but later he realized it went back years further. Bob Amico had thought Larry was completely lame when he moved into town for seventh grade. Thick glasses, didn’t know who the Young Rascals were, painfully and obviously lonely. Bob had made up a song in Larry’s honor as they waited to take the field for their first gym class:

OH, LARRY SLOMOWITZ
OH, LARRY SLOMOWITZ
HOW’D YOU GET SUCH A CHRISTIAN-SOUNDING NAME?

But Larry’d shocked Bob—and everyone else in the class—by intercepting a pass for a TD and catching one for another. The next day Bob was showing Larry where his father hid his Playboys. The next week Bob was smuggling his new friend into afterschool Religious Instruction at OLPH, which many Catholic parents made their adolescent children attend once a week after public school when the kids wanted to be playing ball or surreptitiously applying makeup. Larry was petrified he’d be found out but Jews and Italians look alike, Bob said, they’ll never suspect. Outside the church Bob introduced him to his pal Danny Cilione, who, at twelve, wore motorcycle boots and had five o’clock shadow. Cilione didn’t bother to say hello.

Larry saw how anonymous he was in the back row of the class of thirty and calmed down. He was impressed at how little attention the kids paid to the nun trying to explain about venial sins. But when she turned to write something on the blackboard Cilione quickly ceased simulating masturbation and whipped a spitball past her shoulder onto the board. The nun ignored it, and the next one as well, but when a huge wad whizzed by her ear and splattered into her face she calmly walked out of the classroom. Cilione was still accepting congratulations when the principal stormed in.

Apparently Cilione had a history of nun abuse, as even though this one had never turned around to identify the guilty party the principal straightaway threatened to expel him from the class and his family from the church itself. Cilione, outraged, declared there was a Jew in the classroom and the Jew had thrown the spitballs.

Two seconds of shocked silence before the principal grabbed Cilione by his collar and hauled him out of the room. Larry spent the remaining seventeen minutes of class panicked that the nun and principal had identified the Christ killer in their midst and were waiting until after class to take him into custody so as not to traumatize the students with a ritual bloodletting. The next day in school an untroubled Cilione grabbed Larry by his collar, yanked him to an inch away from his face, and asked, “Pretty funny, huh, you skinny shit?” Larry managed not only to hold back tears but to meet Cilione’s gaze. As he set Larry back down on his heels Cilione smiled and told him he was just busting his balls. An uneasy alliance was born.

Senior year. Graduation was a month away and Larry’d already been working on his valedictory speech for two weeks. It was to be both a summing up of high school—not just his experiences but his classmates’, too—and an inspirational shove into their futures. Then the news: “Christ is risen! I am the Christ!” Làszlò Tòth cried in St. Peter’s Cathedral as he smashed Michaelangelo’s Pietà with his geologist’s hammer. The name alone made him sound crazy, LÀSZLÒ TÒTH, it sounded like the name of a mad scientist, which he was. He looked like one, too, and with the beard and the long hair falling across his face, indeed like the Christ as well. Fifteen times Tòth smote the Virgin Mary. Jesus, lying dead in the Virgin’s lap, survived unscathed.

Larry saw photos of the damaged masterpiece. The Queen of Heaven was lacking a nose, eyelids and a left arm past the elbow; her disfigurement reminded him of pictures of atomic bomb survivors he’d seen in Life Magazine. A few days later he made the grotesque mistake of telling Cilione about the attack on one of humanity’s greatest depictions of the mother of his God. Cilione smiled. Not particularly tuned into events that didn’t involve his family, his girlfriend or his GTO, he’d been unaware of the mutilation.

Why did Larry go along? He’d agonized over the question before deciding it was because he’d avoided trouble most of his life. Goody-goody first in his class. Respectful to girls, which he figured was one reason they ignored him. It was time. Explore the dark side, live a little, transgress. And he’d actually taken a few swallows from Bob’s bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine; Larry had learned in biology that alcohol destroyed brain cells that would never grow back.

Bob placed a stepstool beside his church’s statue of Mary Mother of God. Not up to the Pietà’s artistic standards but similarly defenseless. Cilione handed the sledgehammer to Larry. It was Cilione’s older brother’s, Cilione had insisted on it instead of one from the hardware store, he wanted to bask in the glory of their transgression every time he went to his toolshed. And it was a ten-pound hammer instead of the standard eight. The guys would be showing no mercy.

Larry lifted and weighed it without enthusiasm. Tried a practice swing, found the sledgehammer considerably heavier and more unwieldy than a baseball bat. He breathed in deeply, found the odor of the rotten leaves covering the ground oddly pleasant. He looked up at the church. Larry hadn’t been here in the nearly six years since he crashed Religious Instruction. “Our Lady of Perpetual Help?” he read. “I thought it was Our Lady of Perpetual Health.”

Cilione shook his head in pity. “Jesus, Mary and Ernie you’re a moron,” he said.

“She won’t be healthy for long,” said Bob.

Larry mounted the stepstool and regarded the statue. That little smile. Mary seemed so...nice. Not remote and mean and harsh like the biblical Jews he’d been force-fed. Fuck, he hated temple, praying in a language he didn’t understand to a god he didn’t believe in. Mary was looking downward modestly. Obliviously. What if I get caught? Am I stupid? Am I crazy? What will my parents say? What if I get a police record? Can Brown University rescind my early admission? Put down the hammer, face the insults from guys who will soon disappear in the rearview mirror of my life. Walk away.

“Stop stallin’,” said Cilione, “and commit the fuckin’ crime.”

Larry strained to lift the sledgehammer, used his whole body to wind up, twisted forward and swung as hard as he could. Direct hit, Mary’s head flew off her body. Larry, who’d studied the fifteen-blow attack on the Pietà and expected more resistance, couldn’t control his momentum and flew off the stepstool, his hip smacking into a corner of the statue’s pedestal. He landed hard, Bob and Cilione hit the ground laughing as he moaned in pain. “Shut up, asshole!” Cilione hushed.

Bob pulled Larry to his feet and whispered, “Let’s take the head!” Its progress halted by a nearby maple, Mary’s face smiled up at the boys.

“No,” said Cilione, “let’s get the fuck out of here.”

The predictable outrage ensued. Many church members, including Cilione’s and Bob’s moms, wept upon seeing the violated Lady of Sorrows. The Virgin decapitated—who would do such a thing? Cilione and Bob actually managed not to brag about it, kept their mouths shut. Kids in the school had a pretty good idea about the two but, terrified of Cilione, kept their suspicions to themselves. The same Catholic school principal instinctively blamed Cilione but no evidence could be produced. Not one person imagined for one moment that Class Valedictorian Larry Slomowitz had swung the hammer that sent The Queen of Heaven’s head flying off her shoulders.

Larry took hits to his conscience but was pleasantly surprised by his ability to rationalize his offense. A regrettable one-time deviation in a life defined by accomplishment, modesty, and respect for the wishes and rights of others. He’d made his transgression. He’d experienced the dark side. Larry was free. Free to move past Bob and Cilione and high school and small-mindedness, into college and a luminous future. He decided to radically revise his valedictory speech. Fuck being the voice of his generation, he wanted to make people laugh. “God said to man, Eat not of the Tree of Knowledge. And the Class of ’72 obeyed.” He tried out the speech on Bob because he knew Bob wouldn’t bullshit him about whether it was good or not. Bob laughed in many of the right places and told him which stuff sucked. The morning of graduation Larry was still polishing the speech when the phone rang and his mother shouted that it was for him. He called out that he was busy but a few moments later she gave his door a perfunctory knock, pushed it open and said It’s Valerie. She needs to talk to you. I think she’s crying.

Valerie, Bob’s sister. Cilione cracked up the GTO. Last night. Bob was in the passenger seat. They skidded off Meadowland Road into a tree. Cilione walked away, he’s fine. The cops said he had to be doing at least 90. Bob was “no longer living.” It took Larry a while to take in “no longer living.” Valerie told him she needed to make more calls and they hung up. Right away the phone rang again.

Cilione said, “You hear?”

“Valerie called.”

“What’d she tell you?”

GTO, skid, Bob’s gone.

“That’s it?” Cilione asked.

“That’s it. Were you drunk?”

“Fuck you.”

Cilione wouldn’t say anything more, insisted Larry come over, now, he had to tell him something but not over the phone.

When Larry showed up Cilione was waiting outside. He had four hoodlum brothers and a sister and when he had something personal to say he’d never say it around them. He led Larry to the wasteland behind the house where he liked to drink beer and shoot rats with his BB gun. Danny Cilione, whom no one could ever shut up, kicked an empty beer can and watched it arc into the air and back down to the ground, then silently studied the dirt at their feet. “What?” Larry said.

“His fuckin’ head came off.”

It took Larry a while to take this in, too.

“Did you hear me, you skinny shit? We crashed into the tree and his fuckin’ head went through the windshield. They had to search for his fuckin’ head.” Cilione looked away, looked back at Larry. “God is fuckin’ with me,” he said. “With you, too.”

Most kids assumed Bob was the one who swung the hammer—why else would God cut off his head instead of Cilione’s? Larry, however, was pretty sure the accident was a tragic coincidence, that these things tended to happen when you drove a car nearly a hundred miles an hour on curvy roads in the dark. Wasn’t that actress Jayne Mansfield decapitated in a crash a few years back? She hadn’t knocked the head off a statue of the Mother of God.

The school decided to go through with that evening’s graduation and dedicate it to Bob. Larry didn’t know what he’d say in his speech until he mounted the podium and he almost blurted out that he was the one who smashed the statue. He composed himself and talked about what a great friend Bob was, his first friend in the school, a friendship that gave other kids permission to be friends with a shy, skinny new kid who kept to himself. He wept and many in the audience wept with him. He sang the song Bob sang to him that first gym class, got a laugh. When he finished there was no applause, just pregnant silence and sniffling. Kids hugged him. Larry was comforted.

Cilione was a no-show. Kids wondered, Was he too broken up or feeling too guilty? Larry knew he was both of those, plus terrified. He tried calling but Cilione wouldn’t come to the phone.

Summer. Larry washed dishes at a local deli. Cilione got Catholic. He went to church on Sundays. He prayed the Rosary. He apologized to the OLPH school principal, by this time also the parish priest, for the atrocities he’d committed through the years, except for one. He went to confession, although only that same priest knows what he confessed. He married his girlfriend Teresa and they started trying to make a baby as, not being a student of history, Cilione figured God might balk at killing a guy who was responsible for a family. Larry did get together with him, once, ostensibly to see the used Volkswagen Bug Cilione’d bought to replace his beloved GTO. “It’s not just the Bob thing,” Cilione told him. “We’re not kids anymore.” When they parted they shook hands for the first time. Cilione said, “Good luck in college, you skinny shit.”

College. Larry was relieved to get away. He immersed himself in his studies while consciously opening himself to new people and experiences. He liked being around kids as smart as him but wasn’t sure about those who were smarter. He loved the sausage parmesan grinders in Providence; Larry’s family wasn’t kosher but he’d never eaten a sausage. And he’d never heard that term: grinders. Much cooler than “heroes” and especially “sandwiches.” Once a week he’d walk into town, treat himself. He hated the townie accents, though—worse even than New Jersey.

Larry declined to go home for the High Holy Days, seriously disappointing his parents. Rosh Hashanah was a gorgeous sunlit day, and after his Bio class Larry threw down a blanket on the Main Green, dropped his textbook and luxuriated in his freedom, in not being stuck in temple, gazed at the sky and for the first time felt he appreciated that he was starting a new life. It was truly a New Year. When Yom Kippur came around after ten days—the Days of Awe—he decided to fast and ponder instead of reflexively rejecting those traditional behaviors on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar as he’d always done before. At home he used to fake fasting, upon returning from temple he’d slip himself some potato chips he’d stashed, or Hershey’s Kisses, which was maybe why, as today he was taking fasting seriously, he was spaced out by early afternoon. So when he got word that Cilione had been decapitated by an errant sheet of glass that flew off a truck while he was on the sidewalk minding his own business, Larry truly thought he was imagining things.

By evening Larry knows he wasn’t imagining. He made a call and confirmed it. He made another call and confirmed it again. Cilione really is dead and Cilione’s head really got cut off. The case is closed on the statue incident, he’s told again and again. Both guilty parties have been punished in a most horrible, if appropriate, way.

Larry vomits on the floor and doesn’t clean it up. He can’t think. His teeth are chattering. He doesn’t sleep that night. The next morning he doesn’t leave his room. He doesn’t go to Bio even though there’s a test. He doesn’t go anywhere. That afternoon he forces himself to go to the mess hall, The Ratty, for lunch. He forces himself to swallow and vomits in the crowded cafeteria. He goes back to his room and prays. Larry prays. Should he become a Catholic? It didn’t help Bob or Cilione and wouldn’t it be worse if he does it just to save his ass? He wishes he’d studied Latin. Jews make you learn Judaism, Catholics gladly accept you on the spot. But this is a God you obviously can’t fool. Maybe Larry does believe, now, in the Catholic God anyway, if not in all the bullshit that goes with it, because the Catholic God has shown Himself to exist. And to be powerful, omniscient, and not forgiving like He’s supposed to be. Did he say “bullshit”? He apologizes to God, over and over, he didn’t mean it. Jesus—he corrects himself, Fuck, what can I do so He doesn’t cut my head off? In a moment of cogency Larry realizes he can’t be forgiven if he doesn’t confess. How, and to whom? He won’t leave his room. He can’t leave his room, he can’t get up from his chair.

If he were Catholic he’d go into a darkened booth, confess his crime to a faceless voice, be told to recite a bunch of Hail Marys and be forgiven, right? Sure, like Cilione probably did before he got decapitated. But Larry has nothing to lose by covering that base. He forces himself to get up and urinate in the bathroom instead of where he sits, doesn’t brush his teeth, drags himself outside, trudges to a church he passes on the way to the sandwich shop but this time he goes in. Scans the place, spots the booth and slips inside, it smells like his grandmother’s bedroom. He knows the drill from movies: Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. How long has it been since your last confession, my son? Two years, two months. The priest says nothing so Larry tells him he vandalized a statue in front of his local church, hesitates, tells him it was a statue of Mary. The priest tells Larry his crime is serious but absolves him, although Larry has to recite three Hail Marys and an Our Father, whatever that is. Larry smells alcohol through the screen. He knows he’s being ridiculous. He almost laughs that he’s confessing in a Catholic church on the Day of Atonement. He knows he’s panicking.

Does he have to convert? A commitment, not just wandering in and out of some booth. Why bother. If Cilione could spawn a Catholic baby, go to OLPH and pray seven days a week and still get his head cut off, maybe it isn’t worth breaking his parents’ hearts by giving himself to Jesus. He could do it secretly! Forget it, God would know he’s full of shit. He remembers a newspaper article, something about some lady seeing the Virgin Mary near Shea Stadium. Seeing the Virgin Mary near Shea Stadium. But Larry walks briskly to the library, hoping not to encounter anyone who knows him, especially God. He passes up the respectable New York Times microfilm because the library has the tabloid Daily News. Forty minutes later he’s reading about Veronica Lueken, “the Seer of Flushing,” whose followers make pilgrimages to Queens because they think “Our Lady Herself” appeared to Veronica in her home on April 7, 1970. Fuck it, he’s wasting his time and he might not have much. Is this woman a con artist or insane? Is this more insane than Bob and Cilione getting their heads cut off, with him next? Could this possibly be real, be a miracle? Could Larry go to Queens and apologize to Mary in person? He’s stalling. Please get off this Seer thing. He has to take a breath. He has to act. On his way back to the dorm he runs into a kid from Bio. The guy sees Larry and exclaims, “Holy shit, are you okay?!” Larry can’t answer. He can’t talk. He tugs at his hair, sees he’s pulled out a handful, freaks some more about his head, mumbles an excuse, splits.

Larry is eighteen and wants to get older. That’s all he wants.

He resolves to go straight to OLPH to publicly confess to knocking the head off their Virgin. Then he understands that confessing would not be enough, that he’d have to pay for the statue’s restoration and repair, which means his parents would have to, just before they were all driven out of the community like lepers. He fears Jew hatred, he’s afraid the angrier and less lawful members of the Catholic community might target him. The Mafia just beheaded a horse in The Godfather, they could cut off his head as easily as God could.

What if the punishment the Catholic God might have in store for him is not decapitation but fear of decapitation, for the rest of his life, being thirty or forty or fifty waiting for a car crash or a sheet of glass or an escapee from a mental institution with a meat cleaver? Or what if He teases Larry by taking other body parts, a leg here, an arm there, until Larry’s in a sideshow like that guy he just saw in that midnight movie Freaks, he had no legs or arms and they showed him rolling and lighting a cigarette with his mouth?

Living the rest of his life in anxiety and terror with no rest, no respite, ever. Is that worse than getting his head sliced off? The night after the day after he found out about Cilione, Larry decides not to make any move until he calms the fuck down. He bums a Valium off the guy in the next room and gets two hours’ sleep.

He cleans yesterday’s first vomit off his floor. He does deep breathing, refers to a yoga book his crazy grandmother gave him for his most recent and possibly last birthday. He goes back to the cafeteria, eats a bowl of oatmeal and manages to keep it down, although on the way back to his room he runs to a bathroom with diarrhea. He blows off Chemistry and does more deep breathing. He prays, out loud, “I am weak, I surrender, help me, I don’t believe in you but I’m desperate.” Larry drops to his knees and reminds himself he’s doomed.

He settles on a routine, a desperate ploy for control. He does everything in order: bathroom, dress, eat, class, study, eat, study, eat, study, sleep. He gets no satisfaction from those studies. He drops out of the promising weekly touch football game he’d joined. Tuesdays he walks for a sausage grinder but usually forces a bite then throws it away. No way he’ll ride in a car, he takes the train home for the holidays. He lights Hanukkah candles with his worried parents and accepts gifts but gives none. He takes a train to Queens and accepts a rose petal “BLESSED BY JESUS AND MARY FOR CURES AND CONVERSIONS AT APPARITION SITE OF OUR LADY OF THE ROSES” and watches Veronica Lueken bug her eyes out as she falls to the ground and cries out the message she’s hearing from Mary Cause of Our Joy. Larry mumbles an apology to the Virgin for smashing her statue but swears never to go to Flushing again, not even to see the Mets.

On the train ride home Larry asks himself, Am I really sorry or just terrified? He focuses as hard as he can, he knows he has to be honest about this. He can’t think, he has to break through his fog of fear first. Deep breaths. He is sorry, knocking the head off the statue was a terrible thing to do, a crime against the state but, more significantly, a crime against his neighbors and their faith and love. He stares out the window. The train passes cemetery after cemetery, Queens is a cemetery, somewhere among these thousands of headstones are three grandparents and who knows how many great-aunts and great-uncles.

It was just a statue. Larry is not Idi Amin and he’s not Hitler. He’s not even Raymond Elias, the kid who beat the snot out of him in fourth grade. Does the entity that beheaded Bob and Cilione care? Doesn’t look like it. Larry’s fear is everything, it’s quite o’ercrowed his spirit (he’s reading Hamlet). But why is he so afraid of death, he wonders, when he’s stuck in this fog of fear and making so little of his life?

Spring semester he drops the science courses he’s decided he hates and plans to combine the study of Religion, Philosophy, History, Mythology, Anthropology and Literature in a major of his own creation. In a seminar on Edgar Allan Poe he reads about The Imp of the Perverse. “And because our reason violently deters us from the brink,” wrote the man who married a cousin when she was thirteen, “therefore do we the most impetuously approach it.” His monstrous defacing of Mary’s statue, Larry is led to believe, is a flaw, a human stain, simply the kind of thing people do. Larry is relieved, ecstatic—the Imp gets him off the moral hook, “God” surely understands and appreciates the imperfections in the creature He created. Hey, Larry tells himself, weeping, I’m just a human being. The deaths of Bob and Cilione were a warning, He has literally thrown the fear of God into Larry but surely He’ll forgive him, if He’s there. Larry looks forward to a life of study and teaching at a small college in a quiet town. He catches a touchdown pass that weekend but takes an “accidental” blow to the head that knocks him unconscious for three minutes. Talk about a fucking warning. Who says he’ll be beheaded? Maybe it’ll just be a harder blow to his head. Maybe someone will stab him to death and then cut his head off. As Larry tramps back to his room he sees the glint of a knife from behind a bush and flinches. Or is it an ax? He stalks the bush, leaps behind it but no one’s there. Larry’s afraid he’s psychotic, that he no longer knows what’s real and what isn’t. Tomorrow is his birthday, if he lives that long. He’ll be nineteen and he’s going home for Passover. He knows this year it’s Easter, too.

Larry’s walking to the train station, a bird craps on his head. He understands this is funny, God’s having a bit of sport. He doesn’t believe in God anyway. The next day he fakes that he knows how to ride a motorcycle and borrows a friend’s. Come get me, motherfucker! Look, no hands! He survives the ride and understands this God is patient. This God will take His sweet time. Still, Larry tries to avoid pissing Him off more than He’s already pissed off. At the Passover table, while singing “Dayenu” he silently congratulates Jesus on his rebirth.

Back at school he lives in books. He reads a story in which a rabbi decides to “celebrate” Yom Kippur every day of the year, for his pleasure. Every day becomes the Day of Atonement. Larry finds this amusing, too, because for him every day is the Day of Decapitation. He recognizes that he’s a slave to his emotions and that nothing rational, no study of literature, philosophy or anything else, will free him from his fear.

He imagines returning to the scene of the crime, retracing the route to the church that he, Cilione and Bob took that night. It’s early spring this time, the trees are starting to bud, winter’s dry twigs crack beneath Larry’s feet. Luckily there’s no moon, he ignores the howl of a wolf, trips twice, twists his left ankle, soldiers on. The statue has been reconstituted. It is well cared-for. Mary is more beautiful than he remembers her, her smile more forgiving. He places the same stepstool under the same maple tree that halted the progress of the Virgin’s head, mounts it, remembers his friends Bob and Cilione, ties the open end of a noose around the maple’s strongest branch and tests it, places the noose around his neck, tightens it, smiles bravely, closes his eyes, feels sorry for his parents and stops worrying. He’s about to step into freedom when he hears a woman’s voice.

“Larry?”

The voice is high-pitched but tender and soft. Larry pauses mid-step, opens his eyes.

“Larry? I know you hear me.”

He watches the statue’s lips move. Mary Mother of God is talking to Larry Slomowitz.

“Don’t you think I look even more beautiful now?” she says. “And more merciful?” Larry teeters on the edge of the stepstool. “I’m glad you came back. I’ve wanted to thank you.” Larry steps away from the precipice. Tears flow down his face. “To thank me?” he manages to say.

The Queen of Heaven moves her stone head, looks up into his eyes. “And to tell you to live your life.”

How long will he go on like this? How long can he?

Jesus Fucking Christ, this is a lot for a teenager.

Jay Abramowitz was born in The Bronx, New York. His novel Formerly Cool (written with Tom Musca) was published in 2019, and his short stories have been featured in the literary journals 34 Orchard, Catbird Lit and Honeyguide, and on the website HollywoodDementia.com. Abramowitz was head writer on the animated PBS series Liberty's Kids, an account of the American Revolution that blended fact, fiction and comedy and featured the voices of, among many others, Dustin Hoffman, Annette Bening and Walter Cronkite. He has written and produced a dozen situation comedies as well as pilots for Warner Bros. Television, CBS and ABC, and has conducted comedy-writing workshops at the American Film Institute.