Pain, Roberto A Robles [best classic novels txt] 📗

I was present on the evening the Dobbs sat down to eat dinner together, as a family, for the last time. I wouldn’t have been there, had any of us known that.
I used to want to be a priest. I honestly believed that was my calling. When I was a child I attended mass regularly, and I was a fixture at church retreats, youth meetings, and community events organized by the church in my neighborhood.
I didn’t stop wanting to be a priest because I lost my faith, let’s get that up front. Actually, I never consciously made the decision not to become a priest. I never reneged on my religion; I still go to church on Sundays.
What happened was I discovered life. I never had many friends growing up, but then I found a few and discovered that life could be fun. Girls had something to do with it, too, to be honest. Never before my teenage years had I considered what I would be giving up if I packed and went to the seminary. A priest’s life looked different when considered from the point of view of a child and from the point of view of a horny teenager.
Still, I don’t want you to get the idea sex was the reason why I didn’t become a priest. Let me put it like this, it just didn’t happen. Long after I would have had to make the decision to enter the seminary, I found myself enrolled in high-school.
Some kids I knew wanted to become doctors when they grew older, or airline pilots, or professional soccer players. One of them wanted to become a nature photographer. I wanted to be a priest. As far as I know, all of us entered different fields from those we had envisioned, and nobody calls those guys “Pilot”, “Player,” or “Photographer.” Yet, everyone who knew me when I was a kid calls me “Priest.” Go figure.
I could say my first real friend was Jesus, but I would only be perpetuating a joke I find tiresome already. So, my first real friend was Trenton Dobbs. We met in the seventh grade. While not a fixture at church, he did participate in some events organized by our parish. So we had seen each other on ocassion, before we got into a real conversation and became friends.
Whereas I was quite by nature, he seemed only comfortable when talking about every little thing that sprang to his mind and, let me tell you, his mind must have been filled to capacity with loaded springs, because he couldn’t seem to shut up. We slept in the same room many times throughout our friendship, and I speak with authority when I say he even talked when asleep.
So, we complemented each other. We must have, to become such good friends. We were always together from then on, and got to know each other’s families quite well.
I was welcome with love by his family from the very first day. On the other hand, my parents always resented him a little. They never quite got over the idea that he was the main force behind my abandoning the priest idea. Who knows? Maybe he was. He certainly introduced me to a few things that my parents frowned upon.
They may have blamed him a little, but I never did. If I started smoking after we became friends, it was my own fault. It’s also true I never had a drink before I met him, and we got caught a few miles down the road from drunk together, on more than one ocasssion, but it was my own decision if I took those drinks, not his. You see where I’m going? He was not a corrupting influence in my life. He did those things and he looked cool, so I did those things and I felt cool. Looking back we both agreed we felt cool but must have looked like a couple of morons playing with fire. Uncool.
As far as I know, I was never judged by his family, although his mom did feel understandably pissed off the night we decided to see how many shots of tequila we could drink before calling ourselves offically drunk, and I ended up puking on her rose garden.
When you’re embraced by your friend’s family, they become your family, in a way. They take you in and they feed you, they let you in on their jokes, their suffering, their little idiosyncracies. As the years go by, you almost become a part of the family, and you love them as much as you love your own.
You understand, then, that when he gave me the news that his dad was diagnosed with prostrate cancer, I embraced him and we wept together.
He called me on the phone and told me he needed some company but didn’t want to leave the house. I climbed on my rattler, that’s not a snake, by the way, nor is it something as cliché as a motorcycle. No. It was my old beetle volkswagen, whose muffler was as noisy as a drummer on speed practicing in the shower. Anyway, I got on my car and drove to his house. When I got there he was waiting for me on the sidewalk, finishing a cigarrete. He gave me one as I walked up to him, took out a new one for himself, and we lit up.
“What’s up, dude?” I asked.
“It’s bad, Priest,” he said.
“Your old man?” I asked. I knew his dad had gone to the doctor that morning, and since that had been the main concern of the family since the day he had made the appointment, I knew why he had gone.
“Yeah,” he said.
“It’s the C?” I asked already knowing.
“The fucking C,” he confirmed.
“Oh, Squig…” I started to say. I called him “Squig” because he used to want to learn to scubadive. He said he wanted to see a live octopus, up close. That night, when we got officially wasted with tequila, I meant to call him squid, but what came up was “squig”, and it had seemed so immensely hilarious to both of us, it just stuck.
His eyes got all watery then. We’d been friends long enough that we could hug on the street without fearing anyone would feel compelled to look away, in case we decided to make out in public. Not long ago, many of those neighbors had watched in trepidation as their daughters evaded our raging hormones. They wouldn’t think us queer.
The trash you think at times like those.
“Step back, Priest,” he tried to joke, “don’t get all mushy on me.”
“Tell me, pal,” I said. “What did the doctors say?”
“It’s his prostrate,” he explained. “Advanced, but not completely without hope. They’re talking about an operation.”
“Thank God.” I whispered. “The C blows, man, but there’s things y’all can do, then?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It hasn’t spread, so the docs think they can cut and root the thing out.”
I looked at him as I inhaled cigarrete smoke, feeling the rush of mindless death enter my lungs at huge speeds, and said “Squig, there’s hope. What about chemotheraphy?”
“He’s not young,” he explained. “His heart might not stand for that.”
“But the doctor said he might do well after an operation, right?”
“It’s what he said.”
“So there’s hope,” I repeated.
“Ain’t gonna lose that,” he said.
“Can’t do that,” I said.
“Ain’t no mountain high enough…” he sang.
I followed his lead, “Ain’t no valley low enough…”
“Ain’t no one as full of shit as you, Priest,” he finished.
“Sure hope not,” I played along. “You know me, gotta be number one at something.”
We usually did this when things got too intense. Young boys can’t take too much reality without resorting to jackass comments sooner or later, even in the company of real friends.
We went inside his house. I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome today of all days, a thought which had never before occurred to me, but I would have understood. His mom, though, greeted me as always. She’d been crying discreetly in the kitchen, and she didn’t try to conceal it from us, but she didn’t comment on it either. She simply offered her cheek so I would greet her as I’ve always done, and then we climbed the stairs to the second floor. His dad’s bedroom door was ajar, and Trenton led the way into his room and closed the door quietly, so we wouldn’t disturb his father.
That house was never in silence, and it was weird playing old black vynils at such low volume, not hearing the usual, loud TV in his dad’s room and some other noise in Ginny’s bedroom.
Ginny was Trenton’s kid sister. Both Trenton and I were seventeen at the time his father was diagnosed with the C, or cancer if you prefer, and Ginny was fifteen.
As it’s often the case with best friends and beautiful sisters, Ginny was my first love. I should say, my first platonic love; I’ve had a few. I also had one or two that were not platonic, but you get the idea, I hope. Ginny was off limits.
“I won’t have that best-friend-loves-my-sister shit with you,” Trenton had half-jokingly said one day back in the eight grade, after I allowed as to how I found his sister truly beautiful. “C’mon priest, that’s too weird. There’s all sorts of things you’d have to tell me about your girl, us being best friends, and I couldn’t help but think that those slinky, dirty, juicy tidbits of information you lay on me, were performed on my sister! Uh uh. Nope, no way.”
He had a point.
I’m not sure whether Ginny would have been interested in me or not. I never tried, so I never knew. She was beautiful, though, and sometimes during meals my friend’s family shared with me, I’d find my eyes straying towards where Ginny was sitting, and then down to my soup an instant before she caught me looking. On those nights when I stayed overnight at his house, I would think that I was sleeping in the same house as Ginny… Okay, I’ll stop. You don’t want to know, and I don’t want to tell you.
Besides, if I go into every possible detail of our friendship, I’ll never finish telling you this story.
This horrible story.
Damn. Wait. I’m crying again.

I’m sorry. I realize I could have omitted that last part, but I don’t want to edit too much what comes out once I’ve written it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do justice to the things that happened. I want to be as honest as I can, but I don’t know if it is in me to describe the horror of what happened at my friend’s house, to tell of the pain, the desecration...
I’m getting ahead of myself and that won’t do any good, either.

Back under control.
Trenton’s was a small family – Mr. Jackson Dobbs, paterfamilias, Mrs. Marion Dobbs, loving mother and force behind the moving parts of that particular machinery, Ginny, and Trenton – but, Lord, they were a noisy bunch! There was always some noise in their house. Trenton’s dad liked to watch baseball games on the TV, and he cranked the volume up because he said it was the closest he could get to being at the ball park. Besides, having married Mrs. Dobbs a few years after the death of his first wife in an accident, he’d been over forty years old when Mrs. Dobbs got pregnant with Trenton, so he