Mass of the Faithful by John T. Hourihan

Author:John T. Hourihan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blue Fortune Enterprises LLC
Published: 2022-03-01T21:19:21+00:00

I told my sister Patty what was going on at my job, and I told her I had a problem with it. She told me it was because I had a brain, and something about this “avoidance-avoidance-conflict” thing.

I was a pinsetter. I had been for a week or so. It was before the machines. When I took the job, no one told me the rest of the pinsetters, who were all from out of town, were like cartoons. I was sure they were normal people outside the alley, but when they came to work, they were not like people at all. What I was explaining to Patty was a questionable activity called the cigarette game.

Just a few days with Larry, Big Meggy, Davey Dave, and Mel, and I was having visions of Pinocchio being surrounded by the likes of J. Worthington Foulfellow while trying to become a real boy.

Big Meggy was, well, big. At sixteen years old, he was a full six foot four with a black Fred Flintstone mop, weighed at least twice as much as I did, and seemed within the confines of the alleys to sport half the IQ of a mollusk. Larry was skinny, my size, with a face twisted by a hard birth, tiny green eyes, sparse blond hair like a baby chicken, and a crooked laugh. At seventeen, Davey Dave was a small, bald boy with a big head full of bruises and bumps, a phrenologist’s dream.

And Mel was an over-dressed, slicked and oiled black DA hairdo, collar up, camels in the sleeve, bona fide 1950’s juvenile delinquent with a gold tooth. Cartoons.

We were paid ten cents a string to climb on a perch between two alleys right beside the pins, wait for the ball to go rumbling through, and scatter the wooden missiles everywhere. Then we’d jump down and pull out the Ten-Pin dead wood or reset the pins.

Candlepins were the worst because the pins would spin through the air and hit you a lot.

Davey wore a football helmet to protect his head. It didn’t work. On Fridays, the pin boys would put up a few bucks of their pay, and three strings later, someone took all the money. The first time I won, Mel told me about the cigarette game.

We each stood at the end of our alley, faced off, extended our right arms and placed them firmly on the pit perch so my fist was beside his elbow and vice versa.

Meggy lit a Tareyton and wedged it, filter first, between our arms about half-way up. Whoever moved first would lose. It would continue until there was a winner or the cigarette went out. At first it was easy. You could feel the warmth and still act cool.

We stared into each other’s eyes. I noticed there was nothing behind Mel’s eyes at all. There was no sense of a single synapse, just vacant space. Slowly we started feeling the heat, but no one moved. It got a little worse, and we started to sweat.

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