TBT #49: And You Will Know My Name

I’m in a tiny little coffee shop in a tiny little town. I can’t stop tugging at my collar. It’s tight, you know. It takes a tight collar to do what I do. To talk so much about God. I pour sugar into my coffee and watch things dissolve into one another. The guy behind me is smoking and the smell hits me like cedar pines. Like mom’s cookies. Like August afternoons holding Jodie on the grass. It’s hard, even with this tight black-and-white collar, to keep my mind off the past. But somehow the collar works. When I find myself drifting too far away — when my mind starts flirting with drinking and smoking and screwing and all that’s passed — I start to feel my neck getting hot, feel the collar getting tight, and I remember. God, I just remember. And then I cross that old stuff out.

That collar, geez. It’s been The Best Thing for me this week. And for a lot of weeks.

He walks in looking like a holiday wrecking ball. He’s huge — seven feet tall with muscles that seem to emerge from other muscles, building on top of one another in a kind of (I suspect) chemically-induced tower of hard tattooed bulk — but he barely moves. He keeps a slow pace and holds his arms close to his body. People stare, of course, as he walks across the coffee shop towards my table, but he doesn’t acknowledge them. He just moves softly, inconspicuously: a behemoth on his day off.

The chair legs squeak when he takes his seat, a sound he ignores. He puts his elbows on his table, giving me perfect view of his dual forearm tattoos. They read “badass” on one arm; “destroyer” on the other. He explained them to me once — it’s a dual meaning thing.

“Hey man,” he opened, in his soft-spoken voice. It was an old man’s voice, filled with bass and gravel. It hit your heart before your head.

“Good morning, Andrew,” I said, being the priest.

“Hey,” he said again. “Could I call you padre? Do you go by that? Padre?”

I considered this for a second, studying his face. His long greased hair that hung down over his bright green eyes. He was made of lines, this man. Thick stands of hair that gave way to creases in his face that drifted downwards to muscle veins and barbed wire tattoos and scars on the side of his neck.

My collar tugged. “You can call me padre, I suppose,” I answered, truthfully. “Or you can call me Darren. I’d say we know each other pretty well by now, wouldn’t you?”

“Huh, yeah,” he grunted. “I guess I do.”

He pushed his hair away from his eyes and stared at me for a beat, waiting for me to talk.

“I saw you on TV this week, Andrew –,” I started.

“Hey, padre, you hungry? You like roast beef? I hear this place serves a good roast beef sandwich.” He turned and gestured over towards the counter. He wore a sleeveless shirt — though the rips at the shoulders indicated that it was not bought sleeveless — and on his bicep there was a tattoo of a snake wrapped around a naked woman. The tattoo was rather detailed, right down to the breasts, one of which was covered by the body of the snake. The other of which was free. I watched it as he pointed, and it all seemed to move, the snake tightening around the woman’s body and then…

Collar.

“I’m a vegetarian,” I responded, matter-of-factly.

“A WHAT?” he asked, kicking up gravel.

“A vegetarian…” I searched for words. “I, um, don’t eat meat.”

“I know what a vegetarian is but… I mean, shit, padre. We’ve been doing lunches for months now. How is it that I don’t know that?”

“It’s not something I advertise. There are no politics behind it. I just don’t really like meat.”

“Yeah,” he mumbled, and then spoke louder. “Yeah, okay. And that’s fine. I don’t care about that. But, Jesus, how did I miss that? You should notice a thing like that, shouldn’t you? When you have lunch with someone so often?”

“It doesn’t really matter, Andrew. Would you like a roast beef sandwich? Because you should feel free to order one.”

“No.” he said firmly. “No. I’m not hungry anymore. Shit, man… a vegetarian. Are you serious?”

I changed gears. “I saw you on TV the other night, Andrew. You escaped the cage. You’re the champion now.”

He grinned, and leaned back in his chair. “Yep,” he agreed, satisfied. “Got the belt in my car. I gotta tell you, I deserved it. I’ve been busting my ass for a long time and it’s about time they made me the big dog. And when I kicked the hell out of that prettyboy and slammed him to the mat and the lights went down that was… well, that was a great moment. But…”

His face fell.

“I’m going to hell, aren’t I?”

And so it began like it had with all my weekly lunch meetings with Andrew. Known on TV as the Night Embalmer, Andrew had been a professional wrestler for over two decades. His trademark was his connection to the “dark side” that gave him, I guess, awesome wrestling ability. He beat opponents with his “Funeral Pire” move that, near as I can tell, consisted entirely of picking a guy up and dropping him on his head.

The Night Embalmer had been worried about hell ever since he turned fifty years old.

He tells me stories about the things he’s done. It started during a wrestling story-line in which he was called to try and embalm one of his opponents alive. “It just didn’t seem right,” he explained to me, during our first encounter in which I spent most of the session staring at the giant man before me. “Not the embalming part, really — that’s kind of my schtick, you know — but that they had me yelling all this Satanic stuff. You know what I mean? Real nasty evil stuff.”

“Jesus wouldn’t like that, would he?”

He always asked that, and every time I give him the same answer. I gave him the same answer after he told me about the time he tried to suffocate a rival in an air-tight coffin, or the time his character was supposed to have “burned” the face of his own son or even the time he forcibly wed the sister of the wrestling commissioner in a dark wedding ceremony. I gave him the same answer, like I was supposed to do. Like I felt was right.

Today, he was telling me about what they had taped last night. “I crucify him,” he told me. “I beat him up, knock him out, and then tie him to this cross-like thing. But, shit, you know, it’s not really a cross ’cause they said that would piss everyone off. It’s my symbol. Have you seen my symbol? Hell, probably not, a guy like you. But it’s cross-like but more, well, evil. And I tie the poor guy to it and raise him above the arena.”

I digested this for a second. “Okay,” I answered. “And how does that make you feel?”

He didn’t miss a beat. “Feels like I’m going to hell,” he said somberly.

And so I launched into my answer — my typical answer. “You know you’re not going to hell. You’re a character, Andrew, on a TV show. An actor, really. And there were actors around back in Jesus’ time and, while the Bible doesn’t really mention it specifically, I’m sure he enjoyed a good play now and then. He certainly had nothing bad to say about them, anyway! So, Andrew, I’m going to tell you this again, and I know it’s hard for someone who acts as much as you do, but your character is not you. I can sit here across from you, and listen to the things you say, and I know you’re a good person.”

He started to speak but I decided to keep going.

“You are!” I said emphatically. “You have a family that you’ve told me a lot about. You’ve helped a lot of people and, more than anything, you’re willing to sit here and talk to me about Jesus which shows me, if nothing else, that you have accepted Him into your heart. And that’s it, Andrew. I know it and you know it — that’s all you need to go to heaven.”

I smiled, sipped coffee, and added, “I can quote scripture if you’d like. But you know it, Andrew. You know all of it.”

He sat silently for a moment, bringing his hand to his face, leaning his chin on his fist. He wore a tattoo ring of thorns on his finger — a symbol, he had told me, of undying love. And I go and I think about ring toss games and carnival tricks and screwing them before you even learn their names. And running up dirt paths, swinging from ropes above ponds. Youth, you know. I never was into tattoos, even before I heard the call, because they seemed to me as much about permanence as they were about growing up. Each one a symbol that says ‘I’m not like that anymore, and I never will be again.’ I didn’t… I will not say that.

And there’s a collar, pulling at my neck, and he is talking again in his low voice. He never even ordered coffee.

“You talk a lot about character,” he said. “And I get that much but, I mean, okay. Character. What does that even mean? I’m a character but what else am I? You know, I notice how you go out of your way to call me ‘Andrew.’ You don’t call me ‘Night.’ You don’t call me ‘Embalmer.’ And that’s nice of you, but it doesn’t change the fact that no matter where I go — as I sit here right now in fact — everyone else in this god damn room is sitting in their seats, stealing glances at me, thinking ‘Hey, look over there, it’s the Night Embalmer!’ So what am I, if not that? If not how everyone out there sees me? I am the Night Embalmer. I am all that bad shit I do. I am the guy crucifying the good guy on National TV tonight. And I have a tattoo that says “Satan” right above my asscrack that’ll prove it.”

I breathed deep. Took more coffee. Let him finish, and the took my turn. “Your character is not you, Andrew. Your family doesn’t think of you like a, uh, Night Embalmer, right? Your family or your friends? Or me? Or God? Don’t you think God can see through the character you play, for your job?”

He shifted his chair back, making a screeching sound on the floor that brought glances from other people in the room. He slowly brought one of his legs over the other, crossing them. His boot stuck out the side of the table.

“I don’t know, padre. That’s why I keep coming to see you and shit. I understand what you tell me every week but then I think about it more. Think about character. You say my family and my friends don’t see me as the Night Embalmer but, thinking about it, maybe they do. Not exactly like TV, no, but, hell, the Night Embalmer has been a good guy on TV before. He goes back and forth, you know? Good to evil and then back again. And I can’t… I don’t think I ever separate myself from that character, even when I’m home. Even when I’m here. Even when you call me Andrew. I mean, shit, man, look at me. There’s no costume I take off at the end of the day. This is me. I am him.”

Good to evil, I thought, staring at his boot, and back again. I remember saying things like that in reverse, rejecting evil, rejecting Satan, rejecting my humanity in favour of something else. I remember holding her at a bus station, kissing her once, and again, calling that my last kiss, and boarding a bus. I remember leaning against fogged windows, watching trees go by, thinking of myself running so fast, beside the bus, surfing on power lines, jumping over obstacles, keeping pace. I remember thinking about that time when I was 14 when me and some friends found a little skinny boy in the forest by the ravine. I remember taking his money and kicking him. Then kicking him again.

“And we all play characters, don’t we?” he asked, and I couldn’t breathe under that tight collar. “We all play characters every day, projecting versions of ourselves out on the world. And mine is…” he pointed at himself, his hair, his tattoos, his size, “this. I am this.”

The sound of groaning springs, the softness of a woman, bad pop music being the soundtrack to holy sacraments, crossing from street-corner to street-corner. I used to be this, I thought.

I couldn’t take it. I tugged at my collar haphazardly, hoping for release. “But you have Christ,” I croaked.

“Yeah,” he said quickly. “I guess that helps.”

We sat in silence for a minute. I pulled at my collar, he ordered coffee finally, I finished mine. I looked at him for a long before he started looking at me.

“Shit, man,” he said finally. “I can’t believe you’re a vegetarian. I can’t believe I didn’t know that.”