Bird’s Nest In Your Hair

Chapter Nine

Diana was working another night shift. It was a slow one, even for a Tuesday. She was cleaning out the refrigerator at the far end of the bar when Allen came out from the back office.

“Didn’t I leave the keys out here?” he asked, to Diana as well as himself. In order to clarify the first part, he then said, “Hey, Diana, have you seen my keys?”

“Haven’t seen ‘em Allen. Sorry.”

“Can’t see much of anything in this mess back here,” he said, beginning to sort through the menus, an old copy of the Stranger and various CDs piled around and on top of the stereo equipment on one of the back shelves behind the counter.

“Hey, I always loved this one,” said Allen, picking up the DVD copy of The Sound of Music. “Do, a deer, and all the rest of those songs.” He looked at the back cover for a moment. “This one is a classic,” he said, waving the box for Diana to see, and then opening up the cover to pull out the disc.

“Yeah, somebody left it on the bar last week,” said Diana. “I’m waiting for him to come back.”

“I’m gonna play Edelweiss. Haven’t heard that song in years.”

Diana was putting bottles of white wine back in the fridge when she heard, instead of the Captain von Trapp’s gentle baritone, the sound of a synthesizers and a drum machine. She assumed was one of those awful sequences accompanying the display of the production company’s logo, but after another few seconds she heard Allen say, “Hello, what’s this? Some kind of home movie?’

Still crouching down by the floor, she looked up at the television over the bar and saw a crowd of people filing through a pair of double doors. In what looked like a disproportionately expensive title sequence, a particularly nasty double entendre appeared on the screen in what appeared to be liquid soap.

“It’s a friggin’ porno!” said Allen. “In a church!” His lower jaw hung open as he stared up at the screen, having apparently forgotten about Edelweiss and My Favorite Things.

By the time the letters had been cleared from the screen, it was clear to Diana that it was indeed a porno, and that it was in fact in a church. To her horror, she saw that the church was St. John Bosco’s, where she’d been going up until just a few weeks ago. The crowd had moved past several rows of empty pews and the people leading the procession were already approaching the altar. There were half a dozen men and women wearing robes, while perhaps 25 others were dressed in regular clothes, a few in suits or dresses, the rest in various types of casual attire. Several people wore masks – one guy had on what appeared to be hunting attire, complete with some kind of mosquito netting hanging from the bill of his cap. At first Diana thought he was trying to look scary, and then she realized he was probably trying to hide his identity.

The overall mood was festive; many were giggling and a few were stumbling. The men and women wearing robes walked up and stood in the area around the altar. The man in the center was wearing what looked like a cartoon version of a bishop’s mitre, like those big foam hands distributed at sporting events. It was tilted slightly off kilter on top of his head, while the rather attractive woman at his side had her hair tied up in a red ribbon. Both were wearing white robes with red stoles hanging down from their shoulders. A couple stood on each side of them, smiling benignly out at the crowd that had taken its place in the first few rows.

Other than a few murmers and whispers, the people in the video were almost completely silent. Then the man in the big, foam mitre raised his hands and spoke to the rest of the crowd.

“We are here to celebrate the greatest gift we can give to each other!” said the man wearing the tilted hat.

“With each other, and for each other,” said the woman at his side.

“Amen!” said a few members in the congregation. “Hallelujah!”

The man and woman then walked hand in hand to the table at the center of the altar space. With the aid of a footstool she climbed up on the altar, opening her robe only after she had lied down on her back, her knees bent slightly and pointed up towards the ceiling. Her partner stood and looked down at her for a moment, smiling, and then disrobed completely and climbed up onto the altar himself. Taking hold of his erection she then uttered the only intelligible words in the rest of the movie: “Oh yeesss. Long and hard, baby. Give it to me long and hard.”

After they had been fully engaged for a moment, the couples that had stood at their side began assuming various positions of their own with the aid of chairs, the organ and its bench, and a large potted plant in the corner of the alter.

From everyone there was the expected moaning and groaning that sounded neither completely fake nor entirely real. After a minute or two of attention passed back and forth between several couples, the view was expanded to include other partners, in some cases multiple, scattered throughout the church. They were on the steps, they were in the pews, and they were on the floor. There were men with women, men with men, and women with women. There were groups of threes, fours, and more, in various positions and states of undress.

Then Diana saw someone she knew, or at least someone she was sure she’d seen before. A very short man with extremely hairy legs strutted up wearing a flowing, purple robe made of silk and spangled with yellow crescent moons, ringed planets, and stars. It was obvious that he wore nothing underneath the robe because of the truly massive tumescence jutting out between the folds of silk. He obviously suffered from priapism. On his head he wore the kind of diadem usually worn by contestants in beauty pageants, and, somewhat incongruously, a pirate patch on the over his right eye. She also noticed that in a vain attempt to appear taller he was wearing platform shoes. With an unimaginably large penis held in his own, somewhat elfin hands, he clambered up onto one of the vacant sedilia and began to fellate himself. At this point Diana was able to break the spell she’d been under, although Allen continued watching, mesmerized.

Up on the screen, the focus remained on the little man in the chair. After wrapping his left arm around an enormous, hirsute thigh, he began repeatedly shoving his thumb up his ass in a lunging effort at massaging his own prostate. After a moment saliva began running down his enormous member. Then there was more than saliva. His good eye closed while his head rocked to one side, and then he looked as relaxed as a dog taking a break from chewing on a bone, or, for that matter, like a dog that has just finished licking its private parts. Which for a dog really aren’t private. Either.

“What a bunch of crap,” said Diana, finally.

Allen continued staring, mesmerized.

“Good grief, Allen turn it off.”

Allen was startled for a second, having forgotten that she was even there, but he reluctantly obliged by pointing the remote down at the DVD player underneath the counter and clicking it off. The television set exploded with noise and the screen went white. Then he found the other remote and turned the television off as well.

“Yikes. Who’d you say left it?”

“Who cares? Throw the damn thing out.”

“That was pretty raunchy,” said Allen, shaking his head and chuckling slightly. He took the disc out of the player and put it back in the case. “What’s it doing in The Sound of Music? Some kind of disguise, I guess.” Holding the cover with a couple of menus at his side he began ambling back towards the office. “Whaddya say, Di? Fifteen minutes until we’re outta here?”

“Twenty,” said Diana, “at least. I need a drink.”

She felt ill. She couldn’t help but wonder about the people in the movie. And what about the makers of the video? Was it just for the money? Obviously the little guy held some kind of grudge, but what could the others have possibly been thinking? Was it just their idea of fun, or had they meant to insult believers, or even to strike out at the church? At God Himself? For there He had been: on His cross on the back wall, and never had He looked more defiled, more deserted, more crucified. Weren’t the people in the movie and the people making the movie at least a little concerned that they might call down the wrath of heaven on their heads? Weren’t they worried about going straight to Hell? Eventually to Hell?

Despite her recent decision not to go through with her own baptism, she found watching the video all the more distressing because of her recent decision. She even felt a little guilty, as if by her decision not to join the church she had somehow contributed to this mocking display of pornographic impiety.