Revenge is an awesome thing. Especially on the big screen. If you’ve not watched Lucky Number Slevin, you have to. It’s slick, smart and a great whodunnit. Yes, it’s a bit contrived, but it’s a Hollywood Movie ™, therefore it should be watched for what it is: a good way to burn two hours or so.
Fave line: “I’m a world-class assassin, fuckhead.”
Uh huh.
*
If you have a family, and you know you’re about to kick the proverbial bucket, what sort of preparations would you make? I got a taste of at least one person’s answer a day or two ago, and I must tell you: it’s both unsettling and very “it’s-the-order-of-things”.
“It’s-the-order-of-things”. What the hell does that mean? I asked myself the same question the first time my big boss told me, to paraphrase: “get settled in your job, get a wife, a house, start a family, feed your kids and put them through school, and then die”. That sort of normality reeks of a kind of lemming-like consistency: I live, I procreate and then I die.
(When my big boss said that I wanted to laugh in his face. I didn’t, of course.)
And what about the time in-between? You get educated for a job, you get a job to feed yourself, and then you slave away at said job to feed your kids, pay the mortgage, the school fees and such. And then, men in the similar predicament will pat your back and say: “You have responsibilities, now” followed quickly by, “You have come of age” or other such mummery.
It’s like a stupid, male ritual initiation into some post-pubescent state of Manhood ™. And it’s utterly crazy. And the women aren’t helping!
*
“So what you do is, you open a bank account, and then you leave the rest to me,” said my father. I became suspicious, immediately. It was 2pm and in a restaurant not far from church on Saturday. He had his chicken rice and I had mine. We had beers, as usual. In the bloody afternoon. People were looking at us like we were crazy or something. I know I thought we were crazy.
My dad swallowed a spoonful of rice, chicken and chilli sauce, and smiled. I drank my beer fast, for want of anything better to do. My dad extolled the virtues of the chicken rice he was eating. Honestly, it was the driest piece of shit chicken rice I’d ever eaten. The bite-sized chicken pieces looked starved, blow-dried and stringy.
“So you open the account as soon as you can, and then you give me the passbook,” he said. I felt there was some scheme behind this, but I didn’t say a word. My dad loved his little intrigues, and I wasn’t about to begrudge him some fun in his retirement. I smiled gamely.
“So how old is the bishop, again?” I asked.
“He’s 84 already, but still active,” said my dad. I remembered that old coot. He was nice, if a little short on patience with little young boys claiming to have lost their faith in God. An eminently wise old man, he once admonished: “you either believe or you don’t. And if you don’t believe, then you don’t. But whether you believe or you don’t, at least God believes in you”. I’m sure it was a heart-warming moment for little boys to hear that, imagining a big, impersonal deity deigning to pay attention to the yearnings of pre-pubescent little boys. I’m sure I was lost in the irony of it all.
I then remembered it was a few days into Lent.
I stared at my beer for a long while. I re-filled my glass and took a big, long gulp.
No point getting caught up in the misery of it all. I saw enough misery in other people’s lives, so I understood the Lenten correspondence between the Lord’s suffering and our own meager existence. I never understood the need for 40 days each year to take some time out to consider the misery of the Passion when most adults probably think about misery every other morning of each day.
I imagined myself in the confessional, kneeling on old, worn PVC on debilitated foam. “Father, I have sinned. It’s been an ungodly length of time since I’ve confessed anything, but I am contrite.”
“Tell me your sins, my son,” says the shadowy, obscured priest on the other end. At this stage, I will probably consider the effect of the Church’s makeshift therapy down the ages and I go for the less obvious and more obscure.
“My conscience has become habituated to the sinful, father. I have become, like all things, a person of my times: disconnected, skeptical of the moral structures with which I’ve grown up with and uncertain of my own identity. Am I human or am I christian? Am I christian or am I an appendage of an antiquated ritual? I do not know, father. I am lost.”
“Very well, my son. For your penance, say three Our Fathers and three Hail Mary’s. Bless you. Go with God.”
If screaming solved problems, I probably would have.
I was brought back to the present by my dad’s comment on the colour of my hair. His was white as driven snow, sort of. Mine was approaching that state, and for the nth time, I wondered if I was going to go bald. Old men seem to have all the same lines: lines around the eyes, around the mouth, on the forehead. Lines on the skin like little marks confirming your passage through time.
Then, when your time comes, those lines are all that’s left of you.
Fast forward through the discussion and a few more bottles of beer, and I found myself sitting in the car, waiting for my dad. I load up my iPod and turn up the juice. I skipped past BRMC’s ‘White Palms’, a little tired of more religious imagery, and locked on to ‘Passive’. It fit the mood, and it fit the drive back home.