Chaplain Chris: Part II

Chaplain Chris: Part II
By James Osborne
Contributing Writer

We talked for a while longer. I started telling her a story about going to jail in Toronto. As soon as she heard Toronto, she stopped me and said “That’s Canada. They’re having a lot of trouble up there”. I asked her what she meant and she said “Gays……they’re going crazy up there, and they’re just lettin’ ‘em”. As soon as she said that, I envisioned thousands of flamers in hot pants and half shirts, tipping cars and throwing Molotov cocktails fashioned from pinot grigio bottles through store front windows. I imagined the J Crew and Crate and Barrel on Queen and Spadina would be looted and burned. I kept that thought to myself.

I asked her what she meant by going crazy and apparently she had read a Guideposts article or something about gay marriage in Canada. I thought it was cute that her idea of “going crazy” was two men standing calmly at an altar surrounded by flowers wearing formal attire. 

A sidenote: I’ll never understand how people ever saw evil in gay marriage. I understand that a lot of the world’s goodness and charity is brought about by the faithful, but making laws that apply to everybody based on personal belief make these cute little quirky ideas that Chaplain Chris has dangerous. Despite this, I still liked her. I thought she was feisty and smart, just from another world.

We went back to the chapel and she said “It’s going to be a chilly night, but you’re in luck.” I looked at her with a slightly confused look and enough time to finish and she said “There’s a place for you to stay in the holy hotel.”

The holy hotel is the aisle between the little pews in the chapel. She brought out a cot and let me know that it was time for bed, it was 9:30 and I’m an alcoholic who is used to going to bed drunk at three in the morning. These facts in addition to Chaplain Chris’s minute-long coughing bouts meant sleep would have trouble finding me that night.

I laid sleepless in between the pews for hours tossing and turning. I got up to use the bathroom out of boredom and found her brush with an unhealthy amount of bright red hair entangled in the bristles. I counted Christs to help. There were seventeen Jesi in statue or painting form, all staring down at me with disapproval.

I drink because my brain never shuts off. If I go to bed sober I lie awake with a stream of thoughts that have no end. I remember the one I had at the holy hotel while counting Christs being this one:

[‘Jesus has a really sensitive, pretty face and thick, lustrous hair. Just look at those sea-blue eyes but I know he couldn’t look like that because he was an Israeli peasant who lived in a world without tanning booths and exfoliating scrubs where regular bathing was uncommon and Christ’s image was fabricated to look like someone who pleased the eyes of medieval Europeans by narcissistic Anglo artists because they wanted their god to look like them but directing our admiration and prayers at the wrong dude is false idol worship and anthropologists have proven that human life began in Africa and if god made man in his own image then god would most likely resemble a black man, and he’d look just like the grandpa from the Cosby Show so, if Christ is god anthropomorphized then it’s not so silly to think Jesus was black but white people would hate that and then there was that “Like a Prayer” video/Pepsi commercial by Madonna that was controversial because it was “blasphemous” with burning crosses and stigmata on Madonna’s hands equating her to Christ but I think all of those things would have been overlooked had they not made Jesus black but the Pope and the Eagle Forum just had to find reasons to boycott Pepsi and have the commercial pulled that didn’t make them look like racists. God, what was the point of that video anyway…’ ]

It’s a curse.

There was a bright flood lamp pointed directly into the chapel. I grabbed a pen out of my bag and started writing the story that you’re reading. Eventually, I got some sleep with occasional interruption from Chaplain Chris’s minute-long calls for the reaper.

The work Chaplain Chris had me do the next morning was clean out the “Church Bus”. The Church Bus was a tan 1978 Ford Econoline. The thing that separated it from a van was that it had the word “CHURCH” followed by the word “BUS” crudely stenciled onto the side of it. It was filled with books, pamphlets, photos and chip bags about a foot high at its summit. It was a mobile garbage can. The only parts of the van floor that were visible were the areas around the driver and passengers feet.

I’m not an archaeologist, but the presence of a McDLT carton led me to believe that the Church Bus had not been cleaned out in years. Chaplain Chris stood at the opened back doors and talked to me for a while. I had an odd crush on her, not sexual, I just liked her and wanted her to like me, and she did. I saw her trying to hide smiles which might make our relationship more personal than she would have liked.

I could tell by all of the photos I found in the van that Chaplain Chris was liked by a lot of people. I found old pictures of her at different small towns, church-related events like picnics and fish frys. I could tell that people liked being photographed with her because she was the central focus in almost all of them and everyone was leaning in towards her. She was someone people respected.

The Church Bus didn’t take too long to clean after I started shoveling everything into the garbage bags, regardless of value. I found some disgusting things like soiled underwear, a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul in paperback and a Gatorade bottle full of urine.

Chaplain Chris was pleased with my performance. She drove me into town, gave me $20, a bus ticket to Boston and a copy of the Good News Bible. We gave each other an awkward hug and I got on the bus. The bus didn’t leave right away, but she sat in her newly cleaned van and waited like I was one of her grandkids. It was very sweet. The whole experience was no miracle, but worth considering.

Anyway.

[When I eventually got around to editing this story years later I tried to find her just in case she was still alive. It took a while but I did track her down. She had been moved to a “convalescence home” a few weeks after our encounter. She was still sharp mentally but her double pneumonia left her unable to run the chapel. It eventually did kill her. This is according to the woman I spoke with, who now mans the Trucker’s Chapel in Milford.]

I wish I could have spoken with her one more time. I’d ask her if she ever had doubts about her faith, if she’d ever regretted what she’d devoted her entire life to.  I’d ask if she had ever been riveted with uncertainty about her faith the way I was about mine during the Sinner’s Prayer recital. An ideal situation to contemplate this stuff would be dying alone with a healthy mind and an ailing body in a convalescence home.

[It’s funny that convalescence, L convalēscent, meaning to grow strong, is a word used to describe a place where someone goes to die.]
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