I was the child who feared vomiting in Mass but I am not that child anymore. He retched every time he ate the communion wafer. At his First Communion he gagged but managed to swallow. The next Sunday, same deal, but it flew back up from his gut and into his mouth with a bit of breakfast before he gulped it all down again.
He was a good eater everywhere else on Earth. No adult knew what to say.
So he woke up with a dreadful stomach ache each Sunday. Sweat pooled on his pale cheeks in the church pew. One hundred twenty-six consecutive weeks and counting. He never puked centerstage. Kid had a masterful internal grip. Still, the threat was real: every Mass could be the Mass where he finally loses it and pressure-washes the priest with a warm stream of church wafer, skim milk, and corn flake mush.
Thin as a chip, that wafer. Flavorless as styrofoam.
Body of Christ.
Amen.
It slid on his tongue to the back of his palate and here came the throat convulsions. Stomach heaving, shoulders jerking. From a distance he appeared to have the hiccups. He could have crushed tin cans with those choke muscles. Up close in the pew, his siblings stared and laughed, silenced only by their mother and her threat of more Church.
Some weeks the vomit overpowered his grip. Yet the lips always clamped shut long enough for the boy to take measured steps up the aisle and out the heavy doors. He dumped his guts on the front lawn with full-body grunts while the walls of St. James parish shook from the music within. A pipe organ and three hundred voices singing, Hosanna in the highest and peace to His people on Earth.
The boy grew to be a constriction artist. A prodigy. Trapped it all down low: his bile in church, his voice at school, his fantasies at sleepovers. On the Little League field he swung the bat and missed every pitch and after every strike-out he’d start to cry but that throat shut it down before the sobs got out. His shoulders jerked in the hiccupy way while the kids in the dugout and the parents in the bleachers pretended not to watch. Every game. Every Saturday, he woke up with a stomach ache.
He never got a hit but one day the ball hit him. A wild pitch. Hit him in the ribcage and knocked him into the dirt. It didn’t actually hurt much, he realized, as he trotted to first base. These balls were thrown by children after all. So, the next time up to bat, he lurched forward. Way forward. Clogged that strike-zone with all the torso, arm, and thigh he had to offer.
Success: a fastball to the helmet.
He walked to first base three times that game. Four times the next game, and the next game, and the next. He put points on the scoreboard. His batting average remained .000 but his on-base percentage rose to a legendary .933 and the bruises mostly healed before each game. He saw the ball differently now. As it left the pitcher’s hand it grew wide and weightless, looking too large to miss.
The coaches discouraged it but they could not stop him from giving his body to the cause. Amen. His throat and gut had never felt so calm.
The Presbyterians held a Halloween carnival in their parking lot. The boy arrived Saturday night on a freshly bruised ankle in a carload of neighborhood kids who ran off without him. Ecstatic squeals from mechanical rides with flashing lights and menacing names. Whiplash, Krazy Kups, Zipper, Gravitron. The boy happily limped alone through the crowd of goblins, witches, Bill Clintons, Marge and OJ Simpsons, mimes, black cats and, onstage, the B-52s.
Way out at the farthest edge, where the action and noise thinned, church volunteers lined up slices of pumpkin pie on thirteen styrofoam plates. The boy had never even seen a real live pie-eating contest. Teenagers and adults in twelve aluminum chairs invited him to take the thirteenth seat. The referee called out, 3-2-1… Eat! Half a minute later they yanked the boy’s hand upward in victory and awarded him a t-shirt. Adult XL was the only size available. The frontside had a simple jack-o-lantern. It commemorated this year’s carnival in comic sans. On the back were logos: car dealerships, pizzerias. The hemline extended down past the boy’s knees but might fit his dad. His mom could wrap a belt around the waist to make a dress.
He successfully defended his victory in the next round and the next. His throat dilated wide enough to swallow entire pies. He accepted each victory shirt with a silent nod and a slight smile. Varsity linebackers, extremely stoned, stood up from the table in disbelief. Free from want, the boy awaited his next slice of supermarket pumpkin pie. 3-2-1… Winner and still champion. By round 8 the volunteers stopped inviting him to stay. Still he stayed. Stood up, undefeated, after round 14, thanked them all, and got no response.
He sauntered back to the midway with seven bright white shirts laureled over each shoulder. He pictured his mother and father and brothers gathered around a Thanksgiving dinner table alongside his aunts and uncles and older cousins, everyone dressed in their bright, new, ample jack-o-lantern shirts.
A pod of neighborhood kids called his name from the funnel cake truck. His brothers asked, Where have you been? He tossed a shirt to every kid. His tale of speed-eating glory was cut short by the shirts flying back at him. The children laughed at the largeness of his gifts and silenced him with their own heroic carnival tale. They had engineered a way to spin the Krazy Kups at even krazier speeds. Their voices clashed in the air, muddling the facts. The boy humored these sugar-high children. He agreed to join them in their little Krazy Kup.
Less of a cup, more a tin bucket with a bench inside. Heavy metal music marked the start of the ride as the kups started to spin in a creaky, clockwork way. The children leaned outward and pushed the other kups so their own kup spun at double speed. Triple speed. The boy protested but not loud enough. His vision swirled and blurred. His choke muscles flexed and the lips clamped shut but the force of the kup was too much. The mush of fourteen pumpkin pie slices shot forth from that fearsome throat and whipped around the spinning bench. After the pie came Taco Bell. His lunch streamed out with raw tangerine from the afternoon’s ballgame and gallons of swallowed tears, a lifetime’s worth, spraying like a firehose, followed by the tears of his ancestors and the love that his great-grandmother had sown in the Mojave desert eighty years before this night. His throat was the universe and his throat spewed the universe. Nachos Bell Grande, Mountain Dew, and stomach acid positively bathing his companions who had engineered a way to speed up the kup but not to slow it down and could now only scream.
This did happen. The proof was spackled on the faces of the children, tangled in the children’s hair, and puddled in the children’s laps as the heavy metal music ended and the kup slowed to a stop. They wiped their eyes and reared up to shame the boy out of existence, but could not locate him. For lo, the messy-mouthed creature before them was not the boy anymore. It was I, Josh The Wretched, holding up the bright white shirts that the carnie had been holding for me at the Krazy Kup control booth.
I stand now before you all, woozy from the journey into being. Follow me, children, into the church restroom. Dry your bodies with the gentle Presbyterian paper towels. Take these commemorative garments and wear them. They are my winnings, which will be given up for you. They will warm your hearts and loins and I will lead you to the distant parking lot where my minivan awaits. No ticket required. I am purged, I am clean, except for maybe my shoes and socks. I am peacefully tired and I am ready to rest for tomorrow is the first Sunday of my life. Let that Catholic priest feed me his body wafer. I fear no man, god, or pressure wash.