For everything that lives is holy

At the top of a winding ancient staircase on the Via Dolorosa is a lovely roof garden from where the splendor of the Old City stretches out before you, catching the last glint of sunlight of the golden Dome of the Rock. Just below, in the narrow stone sunken streets, Christ carried his cross, falling three times to our salvation, so the story goes. The evening breeze brought us back through millennia of faith to the present – a lone soldier poked through the quiet street making sure the ancient faiths kept their distance. My new husband, an executive and a business traveler by nature, never quiet felt comfortable in old or oriental places – any place without a Holiday Inn Conference Center he found absurdly discomforting – this city no less so for its prominence in the news. But I had wanted to see what all the fuss was about, what spiritual gravity could move men to such emotions, such spillage of blood; never before had I known this feeling and perhaps I wanted some faith, some part of the holy place to inspire me to pilgrimage or intifada of the heart.

We sat sipping tea and eating sandwiches, our companion on the trip an Italian priest who knew everything about the Holy Sepulcher and had been a childhood mentor of my husband. It was immediately clear from his demeanor if not his dress that he was a priest, his eyes were direct and engaging, searching souls not so much for sin or forgiveness as for exploration. You could read him like a book, or at least, it seemed, he wanted he wanted to be read that way – perhaps sitting down and cracking open an old volume of Dante or Boccaccio. He twisted open a vino named Buttafucco (there must have been an ‘O’ in there somewhere. The men were somber, as if meditating over their wine and this strange woman found between them.) My mind wandered off amidst the lost souls and the conversation slowly turned to dinner. “And you know which one I’d choose...”, Father trumpeted, turning to me for an answer I later realized was designed to glean as much from me as I had absorbed of him. I realized this afterward, but at the moment, I fell for it and spontaneously called out like a schoolgirl “Yes, you would choose the chicken, because you hate lamb”. I had learned and remembered. Like a Boccacio story. Then, in silence as I felt exposed, frozen between the strange glances of my husband and a holy man whose food preferences I’d unwittingly memorized, I searched for conversation.

So I asked him if he’d ever heard about my chalet, my own sacred place where roads never bothered to go, nor pipes or electric lines. I embellished here and there, but I wanted to get the feeling right. I’d been wanting to grace him with my knowledge of unspoiled, peaceful places and now seemed as good a time as any. As I dreamed would happen, I saw for a split second a light in his eyes as his mouth fell open in the recognition of something not of this world - something closer to God - that my words conveyed to him. For the moment it seemed he was standing on that old railroad bridge with me high above the deep, ice gorge on Easter Sunday. But if there was a flicker of this, it didn’t last. Father wasn’t impressed but now he had been exposed, as I had been moments earlier by my knowledge his eating habits. He poured our glasses, splashing wine around a bit and asked with a clever grin, as a general inquiry to all at the table (that is, me and my fidgeting husband) “What was the strangest drug experience you’ve ever had?”. He was looking at me, of course. My husband sat blank, impassive. I took the bait and began my confession:

“The strangest experience I’ve ever had on drugs was finding myself tripping on LSD in the home of pro-life militants. I remember it was full of Bambi figurines and pictures of cute little fetuses.” They were staring at me with something more than feigned interest, so I continued. “Hah, you’re probably wondering how I got there, well, haha, funny story, I was walking on the college campus one day with some friends and we had just taken some hits of acid. That’s when I saw this really hot guy who was the lead singer in a funk band driving up. I mean – he was really hot, and he asked us if we’d like to drive out to Cleveland with him and see the Grateful Dead concert. So I said ‘when?’ and he said ‘right now – get in, let’s hit the road!’. And so – I mean this guy was really hot – and I was reallllly into him at the time, so there was no way I was going to say no, but I told him ‘hey, we just took some hits of acid – they haven’t even kicked in yet’, and he says ‘so what? you don’t have to drive the car. We’ll get some more acid when we get out there from my friend Vidalia Onion out at the Campfire’.

There was no way I could say no, right? So I jumped in. The other guy I was walking with, who I was actually dating at the time, so he wasn’t gonna let me take a trip with this funk guy alone, he jumps in too. And then my friend Grace – she would have been left tripping all by herself, so she gets in too. She and the funk-guy ended up hooking up and getting married much later on – maybe this was the weekend that bonded them, who knows. But what our driver didn’t tell us was that he was going to stay the night at his parents house at this little redneck town outside of Cleveland, and that his parents were militant pro-lifers, having been involved in the ‘March on Buffalo’ where teenage girls were grabbed from outside Planned Parenthood and educated about the dangers of pre-marital sex in the back of an old blue van.”

“Ah yes,” offered my husband astutely, “the ‘Compassion for Life’ movement of ’91.” My groom was up on all the fringe groups.

“Yes, that’s right, they were followers of Handell McRamsey, the famous State Senator. Anyway, it turned out his parents were exactly these people and weren’t ‘cool’ to a bunch of acidheads crashing around there pad. Luckily we arrived in the middle of the night and they were asleep. Bruno said he was tired of driving and went strait to bed too. We were like ‘hey man, what about the Vidalia Onion guy?’ but he just walked right up the stairs and into his room and shut the door.

“So what did you do?” Our Italian priest was getting interested.

“Well”, I obliged, “we started to explore the house, turning over all those millions of little Disney figurines and getting freaked out by all the fetuses...fetae, whatever. So we tried to escape, but the goddamn town was so redneck that a cop picked us up after two blocks because we were ‘foreigners’ and was about to take us to some redneck cell when we told him that we were friends of Bruno O’Riordan and and boy that set off bells. So the pig became all friendly and dropped us right off back there again. Then, to rebel against the oppressed state in which we’d found ourselves, we piled up all the furniture in the living room into a big mountain and put a big hunk of cheese on top with a postcard of fetuses sticking out. Then, when we were bored with playing in our ‘fort’ and the sun was coming up, we figured we’d better get the hell out of there. This time, we headed towards some woods we’d seen on our last excursion right before the pigs caught up to us. Lept over a few fences and wouldn’t you know it, on the other side there was a big campfire and a guy sitting at it all sneaky-looking and overgrown, kind of overweight drinking cheap beer. We'd found Vidalia Onion! So we said, ‘hey man, give is some good shit and we’ll be really grateful. And he sold us six hits of acid that were complete duds – I mean absolutely no effect at all. Thirty dollars down the drain – down the throat of ol’ Vidalia Onion and his Genesee Cream Ale.”

Back on our Holy rooftop, there was silence - only the call to prayer of the evening faithful in the distance. My new husband regarded me, lids down, with a kind of pity. I found myself welling up on our Italian companion with something not much less than complete desire, and he laughed a little bit at seeing this, said something in Latin. We drank our deep-red wine referentially under the deepening sky and the song of the muezzin.