It’s getting so a mackerel snapper can’t pray in Detroit.
Much to the delight of Lutherans, Baptists, the affluent Catholics of Oakland County and atheists, the Archdiocese of Detroit has closed or merged nearly sixty Catholic churches in the past year, leaving the city’s downtown black, Hispanic, elderly and poor Catholics feeling abandoned by a church they had prayed in and tithed to for years. Now, the people who’d suffered the most during Detroit’s perpetual slide into financial insolvency felt even more marginalized and afraid.
Sitting tenuously on the threshold of closure were Old St. Anne’s, a grand Catholic cathedral built over three hundred years ago, and St. Aloysius on Washington Boulevard, with its rose-colored marble columns and semi-circle “well” revealing the downstairs altar and pews.
Today I went to St. Al’s—one, because I like what the Franciscan Brothers do for the homeless and elderly; and two, because, hell or high water, they persist in holding daily afternoon mass regardless of whether one or one hundred worshipers show up. With downtown’s recent revitalization, more young white suburban Catholics in Donna Karan and Pierre Cardin suits were taking time out of their lunch schedules to kneel, bow their heads and take communion. Not enough new blood to move the church safely off the closure bubble. But enough for the dioceses to pocket a dollar or two.
At the end of mass, Father Grabowski took me by the elbow and led me to an alcove.
“Good to see you back, August,” he said, a smile forming somewhere inside the thick tangle of his full white beard. Grabowski had known my family for years and he was one of the few priests my father actually trusted. “You know you can’t buy your way into heaven, though, right?”
I took it he was referring to the two grand I’d dropped into the collection plate, very nearly giving Mr. Lokat, an elderly black layman, a heart attack.
“You need it more than I do, Padre,” I said.
Grabowski nodded enthusiastically, then said, “Oh, I didn’t say I wasn’t gonna take it. In fact if you’ve got any loose change left, I’ll take that, too. I just said you can’t buy your way into heaven.”
I told Father Grabowski I’d just returned from visiting my parents’ graves. Big Jake, the cemetery groundskeeper, a grizzled black bear of a man, had caught me laying down a bag of cashews, Mom’s favorite snack, and pouring out a dram of twenty-one-year-old Auchentoshan single malt scotch for Dad on the grass covering his grave.
The old priest nodded. “They’re always in my evening prayers, August.”
I said, “For what I just dropped in the collection plate, Padre, I’m thinkin’ maybe they should be in your morning and afternoon prayers, too.”
“‘And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’”
“That’s pretty good,” I said playfully. “You should write that down.”
“Matthew, 19:24,” Father Grabowski said with a wide, yellow-toothed grin. “Yet another reason why you’ll never be on Jeopardy, jackass.”
Like most nuns and priests I’d known, Father Grabowski dreamed of being welcomed at the pearly gates by Alex Trebeck.
I pulled an errant ten-dollar bill out of my pocket and shoved it into Father Grabowski’s hand. “All I got left. Get yourself a shave, old man.”
Unlike the twenty or so other faithful who emerged from the Thursday afternoon mass, I discovered there was a car waiting for me outside. The car—a new, brightly gleaming navy-blue Ford Taurus with blacked-out windows—came equipped with an equally bright and gleaming black driver.
“I prayed for you,” I said to the tall, slender and well-dressed driver leaning casually on the hood of the car. His expensive cologne, carried on the early fall breeze, had a nose-tingling, eye-stinging cheapness to it. Any cologne smells tawdry if you bathe in it.
“Oh yeah?” the driver said as he scanned me from head to toe with eyes shielded by a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. “Must not’ve worked. I’m still alive.” The movie-star grin on Detective Lieutenant Leo Cowling’s chiseled Abyssinian face disappeared, replaced with a well-practiced scowl. Cowling had been practicing this scowl for upwards of twelve years, ever since we were at the academy together. It still needed practice. “See you’ve been spendin’ all the taxpayer’s money on threads.”
I was wearing a pair of slightly scuffed brown Bjorn loafers, nicely broken in black Buffalo jeans, a grey Nike sweatshirt and brown leather motorcycle-style jacket that had once belonged to my father.
Hardly haute couture, but comfortable as hell.
I was also wearing a stylish Glock nine-millimeter semi-automatic that was secured by my belt in the small of my back. My mother would have been appalled that I’d brought a gun to church. My father, however, would have considered it necessary any day of the week in the city and twice on Sunday.
In the year I’d been away from Detroit, I’d never felt the need for a gun, save for two very interesting weeks in northeastern India. Back in Detroit, old habits reemerged quickly. My Glock was one of several items I reluctantly retrieved from the storage unit I’d packed my life into before I left the country in a concerted effort to die from self-pity and cirrhosis of the liver.
“Danbury wants to see you,” Cowling said. “Get in.”
“What’s Danbury want?”
“How the fuck I know?” Cowling’s eyebrows creased over his sunglasses and he took several aggressive steps toward me. “Get in the car, Tex-Mex.”
Cowling was maybe an inch or so taller than me and in good shape. I’d seen him in the gym at the 14th Precinct. He was quick and could handle a speed-bag pretty well. On the heavy bag, though, he had nothing, his fists buckling at the wrist.
A solid jab to his solar plexus, a right to his jaw and Cowling would be on his ass watching Disney bluebirds flutter around his head. But it would have been a shame to put him down only a few feet from a house of worship.
“You know,” I began, squinting up at the diamond-blue early fall sky, “it’s such a nice day, I think I’ll walk.”
“Don’t make me—”
“Do fucking what?” I said, taking a couple steps to close the gap between us. I was already fuel-injected with adrenaline. The key was—and always had been—to know when to fire up the engine and hit the gas. After a couple seconds of hard stares, I smiled at Cowling, then turned my back on him and began walking west on Washington toward Campus Martius.
What’s the old saying about not being able to go home again?