HUMAN WRECKAGE

Fleeting Crossword Soul Searching

I was standing at the kitchen sink, a waffled tea towel in my hand. I’d decided I’d give Jesus the morning off from drying our breakfast dishes, what with Easter chocolate on grocery store shelves and Facebook’s “memories” function prepping to remind Him of the worst-ever long weekend of His short life. Ann was seated at the counter, the Crooked 9’s command centre: phones, paper, pencils and pens at hand, the bulletin board and wall calendar hanging to her right. She was studying Sunday’s New York Times crossword: always a themed, expanded grid (21x21 as opposed to the other six days’ 15x15) and generally “Thursday” difficulty.

Ann said, “You should know this one, 98-across: ‘Letters on a crucifix.’”

I said, “Four letters?”

Ann said, “Four letters.”

I wiped my Who logo coffee mug dry. Pontius Pilate’s mocking acronym was just beyond the tip of my tongue, floating there by the cupboard door handle. Oh, God, I thought, I should know this one. I really should.

My father’s parents were both British; they met (in church, as it happens) and married in Montreal. My father was raised in the Church of England. Speaking with him late in his life (and much later in my own), I came to understand that any faith that had been ingrained in him did not withstand night fighter sorties over the Continent, nor even the shocking toll exacted on his squadron by training flights over Scotland and the North Sea. My mother grew up in a Roman Catholic family. Her father was of Irish extraction and her mother was French-Canadian. When my parents married in 1950, the in-laws agreed that the grandchildren would be raised Catholic. I doubt my father cared one way or the other.

There were religious icons in my childhood bedroom, co-existing with the bogeyman in the closet and the monster under my bed. My guardian angel was a little boy in a blue robe with unnaturally large eyes. He had wings of course, and a prop, maybe a harp. He never struck me as entirely fit for the night watch. Beneath his portrait was a wooden crucifix with a bronzed Jesus nailed to it. Above his slumped head was an unfurled though curling scroll of bronzed vellum inscribed with some abbreviated Latin. Four letters.

Judas! It wasn’t long before my guardian angel and the decent fellow who died for the sins I committed even before I was born were replaced by an even bigger superhero, rendered almost half the size I actually was. I don’t know who inked and coloured Spider-Man in the late 60s; Stan Lee, I presume. Spidey was coming to my rescue, on the run. His blue, red and black costume popped from a plain white background. Decades were to pass before I came to appreciate the use of negative space in art and design, and to a certain extent, music and writing. Allow the viewer, listener and reader to fill in the blanks as (and if) required.

The web-slinging, wall-crawler’s flaw (because every hero has one, tragic or otherwise) was his inability to skate. He did not appear on the hockey posters I could get by saving up Coca-Cola bottlecap liners nor was he present on the hockey collectibles my father was handed at the Esso station for putting a “tiger in the tank” of our maroon Beaumont. Spidey did not play for the Montreal Canadiens. The hockey players on my wall had short careers – as most athletes do; Mick Jagger was waiting to go on, coked up and jittery.

I said to Ann, “Can you cross it with anything? I’m wracking my brain.”

She said, “No, but I think there’s an ‘I’.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

IRAE: “Dies – (requiem hymn)”; IRIE: “A-okay in some slang”; INXS: “‘Listen like Thieves’ band”; INRE: “Memo abbrev.”; NIHI: “Bygone grape soda”; INTO: “Fan of”; RANI: “Hindu queen” …

FUCK! (Crude, inappropriate and inarticulate exclamation often indictive of poor education and limited vocabulary.)

When the Tuesday Night Beer Club convenes Stats Guy, Ted and I often stump ourselves talking hockey players, baseball standings, epic war movie casts and celluloid Bond girls. Stats Guy always says, “We can googalize it.” Ted pulls out his phone. I always demure; hungover Catholics instinctively understand instant gratification is sinful. Safer in the long term to wait, believe in the payout at Saint Peter’s heavenly wagering window. I can’t imagine a devoted Roman Catholic signing up for Amazon Prime.

Ann said, “Got it!” She’d crossed the rubric. “INRI.”

“That’s it!” I cried.

“What’s it mean?”

Yessir, that’s my unbaptized pagan baby! I said, “Ah….” The ancient Roman alphabet consists of just 23 letters. Perfectly adequate for writing Latin, I suppose (their numbering system is unwieldy – the concept of zero as a digit in Western mathematics was still centuries hence). “'King of the Jews' or something like that,” I continued. A reminder of Rome’s absolute authority in Judea. Cut to Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

I could and still can see the faded green and yellowing Palm Sunday frond up against the wall in my pale blue bedroom, tucked behind the crucifix. I had to googalize INRI: Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum.

INRE to INRI: Unless 98-across comes up again in the next couple of weeks, I’m not going to remember any of this. Storage capacity is limited and there is more meaningful arcana to retain. Like the running order of It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll. Is “Luxury” on side one or side two? I knew that. Or I did.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is available in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did remains in print. Collect the set! They're moving faster than gas station hockey posters. While supplies last!