come to daddy

by Dodge Zelko

Rupert had walked in on them once. It was the same night Andy showed him The Passion of the Christ.

Upperclassmen were watching it at Catholic school (Andy’s alma mater, Immaculate Conception) and his son expressed disappointment at missing out, curious to see the oppressive fourteen murals painted on I.C.’s campus walls brought to life, given that Hollywood razzle-dazzle.

Andy had seen a few biblical epics growing up — The Ten Commandments was an Easter staple — so there was a certain sentimental appeal in carrying on the tradition. Yet what he screened for his son that night was less Cecil B. DeMille than Clive Barker. Not since Hellraiser had he seen so much flaying, whipping, and gouging, though to be perfectly honest, Hellraiser hadn’t made him half as queasy. Maybe it would’ve if he’d watched it with a twelve-year-old.

They held their breath for the entire film. Andy fidgeted. Rupert sat motionless and erect. Andy could practically see beams of trauma ripping into him. Trauma. The unspoken Sacrament. The last rite of passage where you either jumped ship or went full-bore Catholic. He privately hoped it would be the former, that the film would have a Reefer Madness effect on Rupert’s faith and scare him straight.

In one sense, Andy had to admire the purity of vision. It was easy to take for granted the actual insanity of Christ’s demise. Boots on the ground, it would’ve been like bearing witness to an ISIS beheading, something Andy had also sought out once, on a site called BestGore, in a moment of morbid curiosity run amok. Rupert hadn’t been present for that. Not really. He’d been in a playpen with no direct line of sight.

Andy’s wife was out having dinner with friends. When she returned, he and Rupert were both tight-lipped and pale. Andy felt like they’d gone to war together, that no civilian back from happy hour and a Cajun buffet line could understand their travail.

The film’s gratuitous propaganda had affected him, gotten its barbs in, so to speak. He did feel more religious. He did understand, on an academic level, the idea of transcendence through suffering, and even supposed that, while Jesus may not have been  born to a Virgin, may  have been nothing but an eccentric carpenter-turned-cult-leader for all thirty-three years of his life, at that final juncture where he was tortured like an insect, perhaps only then did God legitimate the man’s delusions of grandeur and say, “You know what? You’re in. You earned it. If I had a Son, I’d want him to be like you. So come on up. Come to Daddy.”

To be sure, Andy’s brief affair with piety was exactly that. He wasn’t thinking of Mel Gibson’s horrorshow hours later as he fucked his wife, not until he heard Rupert behind him, ten feet from his thrusting buttocks, sobbing and sniffling over bloody nightmares.

Photo of Dodge Zelko

BIO: Dodge Zelko is a mailman and a Midwest lifer. When he's not jamming bills in your box, he's hard at work on his novel.