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solemnly mouth the words: “Gonna grab some afternoon deliiight . . .” No one mocked piety like Chris.
    He was also immune to Catholic guilt, despite St. Jude’s doing everything in their power to break his defiance. He had been in school there from first to eighth grade, and the one person who seemed to be on his side was the hip young priest we all loved because he related to us kids. And it turns out, he did, but not in the way we thought. We later discovered this priest was actually a pervert (the extent of his misdeeds have only recently come to light when he was removed from public ministry in 2005 ). He’d targeted Chris at one point: when he was in seventh grade, the guy had tried to show him his underwear drawer at the rectory, asking him, “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” (hopefully unintentional in his quoting of Peter Graves’s line in Airplane ) . Before he could get any further, Chris said, “If you touch me, my father will kill you,” whereupon young Chris was sent on his way. Christopher John Patrick would not be intimidated by anyone.
    My whole family adored Chris, but no one more than my sister, Julie, who loved it when he made fun of her dumb-blonde ways. She begged him to mock her. He had heard the tape of her attempting to sing “Edelweiss” and was merciless in his imitation of it. She loved it. “Do it again!” she’d plead. She also loved that he colored his hair and cared about how he looked, and he played it up for her. A few years back, my dad was battling that awful lung cancer and we were all so devastated. But Chris called and said, “Tell Julie I had a full face-lift.” She belly laughed hard for the first time in a long time. He knew just what to say. (He lied. He’d actually only had a partial one. . . .)
    One Ash Wednesday, Chris convinced me to cut choir, my favorite class, and go with him to the Chicken Unlimited across the street. Over Cokes and fries, we used cigarette ashes to make crosses on each other’s forehead, intoning, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” When we got back to school, we told the campus cop we had been at Mass. Nothing was sacred.
    On the flip side of this disregard for our family faith, Chris had a love, a reverence even, for the pageantry of the Catholic Church. On Friday nights, when most of Thornridge High was drinking itself silly at a kegger, Chris and I, plus our pal John Carr, would do what we called a “church tour.” John was another sly and witty fellow, soon to come out of the closet. His other big secret was that he wanted to be a priest.

    John Carr hearing confession in Man of La Mancha .
     
    Back in the late seventies, some churches kept their doors unlocked because they were supposed to be a place of refuge, a place you should be able to enter at any time to escape whatever was chasing you. We knew which ones on the city’s south side were kept open, and we high school snots snuck in. We were usually drunk and doing poppers and giggling our heads off, but there would always come a moment when it got absolutely serious. We would perform the Mass, and we’d mean it. If Chris could unlock the organ, he’d play the entrance hymn, and if not, he’d hum it solemnly. My role was to lead the imaginary congregation in song. John would play the priest, making his ceremonial walk up the aisle toward the altar, kissing the good book and performing all the other ritualistic gestures, and begin the Mass.
    If we could get into the confessional booths, we would take turns playing priest to the others’ confessor. We would mostly goof around pretending to be people from our own parish. We had them coming clean on ridiculous sins like having VD or something. Chris told me that John would actually confess to him. Of course, Chris wasn’t really a priest, so he told me everything. John told him that he was afraid he was gay; that he missed his dad, who’d died when he was a kid; that he feared he wouldn’t get