Callous

I became a priest

Because of Naïveté.

I stopped being a priest

Because of Despair.

                  If you saw my CV

It would read like this:

Ex-priest.

Ex-cop.

Ex-ile.

My father was a cop.

And one of the 9/11 first responders.

My mother was Irish.

A seamstress.

Who works at that anymore, outside of the Eastern sweatshops?

My sister, Kate, part-time junkie, full-time missing person.

She was the much-loved niece of her aunt who lived in Galway, and she was heartbroken to learn of this lady’s horrible death.

My dead brother, Patrick, had Down syndrome.

My elder brother, Colin, was a marine and deployed in Afghanistan.

I don’t believe in ghosts.

I do believe in hauntings.

My name is Tommy Mitchell, but I’ve always been called Mitch. Even in my time as a priest, I was Father Mitch. I was born, raised in Brooklyn, with my mother’s heavy emphasis on Ireland riding point.

Shamrock cushions, stew for Sunday dinner, spuds and cabbage most every day, John F. Kennedy, interchangeable popes in tired frames on the tired wallpapered walls.

The Clancy Brothers on the turntable.

Irish dancing for my sister, hurling for the boys. The soft t barely lurking in our Brooklynese, a tiny lilt in our narrative.

Alongside hurling, we played baseball. Hurling gives you an edge for that, except no Irish sport focuses on throwing the ball so we washed out automatically as pitchers. But boy, I could bat like a banshee.

And did.

My father, he’d been attached to Brooklyn South and his squad was in Manhattan on 9/11 as a team-building exercise. When the North Tower came down and that maelstrom of dust came rushing up the street, people fleeing in terror from it, my dad and his buddies rushed

Into

It.

Years later, he developed the respiratory disease from the gases, fumes, toxic waste, and he and the other responders had their benefits stopped. The heroes were forgotten.

The day we buried him was the day I joined the cops.

Came out of the academy near top of my class, got assigned to a beat in Williamsburg.

I lasted barely a year, my final call-out a domestic, a man was bent over his wife, who was lying on the floor. First, I thought, He’s applying CPR.

He wasn’t.

Using a blunt tin opener, an old-fashioned one, he had managed to sever most of her head, turned to me, wailed,

“I can’t cut through the bone.”

I had my Glock out, fired point-blank into his face.

It jammed.

The force had long complained of this weapon being likely to do just that. My partner pulled me away, screaming at me to

“Get a grip.”

The man got off the floor, sunk the tin opener in my partner’s carotid. He bled out in minutes. My Glock worked on the next try and I emptied it into the man.

End of my career.

                 From a cop to a priest?

I mean

Really?

Like this:

Kate, my beloved sister, recently weaned from heroin, simply disappeared.

Colin, my elder brother, was MIA in Fallujah. Patrick, my Down syndrome younger brother, died of a heart defect and my mother lost the plot.

Utterly.

Spun off into a madness consisting of leprechauns, Jameson, séances, hysteria, and a dark fundamental Catholicism. In one moment of rare clarity, she lamented,

“Oh, Mitch, if only you’d been a priest.”

I became a priest.

Madness?

Or perhaps the great Irish tradition of sons joining the priesthood to please mothers who could never truly be appeased.

Those days, the hierarchy was having a serious shortage of recruits. The scandals had seriously battered the usual influx of novitiates.

So they literally fast-tracked my, let’s be sarcastic and call it vocation, and, in jig time I was a curate in the small parish of my neighborhood.

I was a lousy priest.

Lack of belief.

Though that has hardly been much of a stumbling block to the high-flyers in the Church.

Confessions.

They fucked my head entirely.

I felt like I was just killing time as a witness to domestic abuse and, whereas as a cop I could kick the shit out of perpetrators, now I had to suck it up.

I quit.

Told the bishop,

“I quit.”

He was outraged, near spat,

“You can’t quit, there’s a process.”

I threw my clerical collar on his huge, adorned desk, said,

“I just did.”

My mother said,

“You’ll burn in hell.”

Maybe.