YOUR BOYFRIEND WANTS to become the Pope but there is already a Pope. Your boyfriend doesn’t want to wait for the Pope to get sick or die or retire in disgrace, and decides he’s going to be the Trash Pope instead.
Your boyfriend the Trash Pope goes out to live in the landfill outside of town. It’s about as gross as you expect, but your boyfriend is optimistic. He nails two boards together for a cross and hangs it on a shack he builds out of discarded sheet metal.
Initially there is some trouble because your boyfriend has never read the Bible and has only the vaguest idea of what Catholics do. He doesn’t speak Latin, so he tries Pig Latin instead. He burns the discarded stubs of candles. He blesses pools of stinking, rotten water.
I’m not sure what you’re going for here, you say to your boyfriend the Trash Pope.
He finds a lot of dead bodies abandoned in the muck. He consecrates the remains and buries them behind his cathedral. He tries to fancy the cathedral up a little bit but it’s still a metal shed draped with stained cloth with some broken wind chimes dangling off of it.
I don’t remember there being a lot of wind chimes, you try to explain. You grew up Catholic but your boyfriend doesn’t listen to your advice.
I’m the one who’s Trash Pope, he says.
You start going to regular, non-trash church. It’s comforting how clean the stained glass is, how bright the light on Sunday morning. Incense smells nicer than garbage, you say to the priest at confession.
You don’t know how to explain this to your boyfriend. Everything here is so much nicer, it’s enough that you just believe.