By Ed Staskus

   “Mom, can you write me a note for school tomorrow saying I can’t be an altar boy,” I asked my mother after we had finished watching every minute of “The Wide World of Disney” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.” She gave me a sharp frown. I gave her my best first-born smile. I didn’t have a plan so much as a hope.

   Every Sunday night my parents snacked on sliced smoked eel while my brother, sister, and I munched on handfuls of popcorn from yellow plastic bowls sitting in front of our Zenith TV console in the basement. It was a family ritual. We loved Walt Disney, but ‘The Great Stone Face’ wasn’t a chip off the old block. He was the unfunniest man on TV. The circus acts and comedians were fun, but the opera singers and dramatic monologues were dull as turned off. None of us understood what the Little Italian Mouse was up to, either.

   I asked my mother for the note after we were out of the tub, in pj’s, and our book bags ready for the coming Monday morning. I wanted it to be short and sweet, as though it were no big deal, routine, really. I thought pleading something along the line of all my spare time was already being spent on my studies would be the way to go. I knew I was on shaky ground, though. My parents wanted me to be an altar boy. They went to mass every Sunday, which meant we all went. “Everybody went to church back then,” according to my mother. “There were two masses every Sunday. The church was full of people. We went early to get a pew.”

   My mother always went to church because she had always gone. “I grew up that way,” she said. My father, on the other hand, was a true believer. He was an accountant and counted on getting to Heaven. Even though he wasn’t a betting man, he put his money on Pascal’s Wager. The wager argues that a thinking person should live as though God exists and try to believe in him. If God doesn’t exist, there will only be a few finite losses, like good times with too much money and too many girlfriends. When you are dead and gone you won’t miss them. But if God does exist, there are infinite gains, like spending eternity in Heaven, and no infinite losses, like spending eternity in Hell. 

   After he told me about the parlay there was no arguing with him about whether I was going to faithfully serve out my altar boy time. “St. George is one of the Holy Helpers,” he said. The nuns at school thought George was a stud, the Trophy Bearer. I helped myself out by biting my tongue. As far as my father was concerned, I was going to be an altar boy, no doubt about it.

   The most embarrassed I ever was as a child was when my parents made me go to Sunday mass dressed up in a Buster Brown sailor suit. Something criminal happened to the costume before the next Sunday. It was never found alive again. I had to go to confession after telling my mother I had no idea what happened to it. The fashion show took months to live down at school. I had to fight my way out of several mean-spirited jibes. There will be blood in grade school.

   The St. George church, school, and parish hall were a three-in-one package, a rectangular two-and-a-half story brick building on Superior Ave. and E. 67^th St. The church was on the top floor, the school on the middle floor, and the hall on the half-in-the-ground floor. The hall doubled as a civil defense shelter in case of nuclear war, even though it was unclear what we going to do down there after the atomic bomb had blown Cleveland, Ohio to kingdom come.

   I was glad my mother didn’t down-press me about it, but wrote a note, sticking it in an envelope, sealing it, and finishing it off with my teacher’s name on the front. A small whitecap of uncertainty took shape in my mind at my mother’s readiness to do my bidding, but I put my doubts to rest and slept well that night. The next day I gave the envelope to my third-grade teacher, Sister Matilda, a gnarly disciplinarian who had press-ganged me and a half-dozen other boys the second week of school. I found out later it was an annual recruitment drive.

   She read the note, smiled, and said, “Very good, you start next Monday.”

   How could that be? What happened between last night and now? My own mother had tricked me, I realized. When I asked her about it, she said, “As a mother I do the possible and leave the impossible to God.” I had already heard God helps those who help themselves, but that didn’t seem to be working out for me.

   The St. George edifice was the biggest Lithuanian building in Cleveland. It was built in 1921. It was at the center of the ethnic district and many parishioners had businesses and institutions, like the newspaper and some kind of historical outfit, nearby. The east side along Lake Erie was full of Poles, Serbs, and Lithuanians.

   The parish priest, Father Ivan, short for his civilian name Balys Ivanauskas, lived in a seven-bedroom Italianate-style rectory a stone’s throw from the church. It had originally been built for a big family in the 1880s. Our teachers, the Sisters of St. Francis of the Providence of God, lived together in a slightly smaller house on Superior Ave. two or three minutes away. There were eight of them, not including the Mother Superior. They could have used some of Father Ivan’s empty bedrooms.

   The sisters were a hard-boiled bunch. They were flinty as could be about us taking our studies seriously and behaving in class. Those were rules number one and two. There were no other rules. They weren’t above hitting us with rulers, rolled-up Catholic Universe Bulletins, and their open hands. Nobody’s parents ever complained about it, so none of us ever complained about it to them.

   What would have been the point? They would only have asked, “What did you do?” There was never a good answer to that.

   The nuns never sweated getting the job done. In fact, they never sweated at all. Wearing thick bulky habits, they should have been the first to perspire whenever it got hot, but they never did. Nobody knew how they did it, if it was part of their training or some kind of black magic.

   Even though I hadn’t been baptized at St. George, I was an altar boy at many baptismal rites there. One time at the font a baby spit a stream of pea green apple sauce puke on my surplice and another time another one burped and farted and messed up Father Ivan. I had to run back to headquarters and get wet rags. I sprayed the boss with a new-fangled aerosol called Lysol a busybody had donated.

   I received my First Communion at St. George and was confirmed there. The First Communion happens when as a Catholic you attain the Age of Reason. I don’t know how any of us were ever awarded the sacred host when we were, because I definitely had not attained the Age of Reason, nor had anyone in my class, unless they were faking it.

   My reason was affected by reading boy’s books in my spare time, adventures about running for your life, spies, foreign lands, full moons, secrets, ray guns, tommy guns, spitfires, hooded supervillains, risky back alleys, conspiracies, and the bad guys foiled at the last minute by the good guys. The paperbacks seeded my nightly dreams and I cooked up twisty exploits every night, waking up happy I had survived. 

   Before we got thrown to the lions, we got trained in the performance basics, how to dress, the call and response, and how to arrange the corporal, the purificator, the chalice, the pall, and the big Missal. We learned how to hold liturgical books for Father Ivan when he was proclaiming prayers with outstretched hands. We brought him thuribles, the lavabo water and towel, and the vessels to hold the consecrated bread.

   We helped with communion, presenting cruets of wine and water for him to pour into the chalice.  When he washed his hands standing at the side of the altar, we poured the water over them. If incense was used, we presented the thurible and incense to Father Ivan, who smoked the offerings, the cross and altar, after which we smoked the priest and people. It had one flavor, a rotting pomegranate smell. The thurible was a two-piece metal chalice with a chain that we swung side to side. God forbid anybody got slap happy and swung it too high, hitting something with it, and spilling the hot coals, threatening to burn the church down. That was when Father Ivan became Ivan the Terrible.

   We rang a handbell before the consecration, when the priest extended his hands above the holy gifts. We rang the bell again when, after the consecration of the bread and wine, the priest showed the host and then the chalice. “Ring dem’ bells” is what we liked doing best.

   I started low man on the totem pole which meant the 7 o’clock morning shift. Even though everybody went to church, nobody went to church first thing in the morning Monday through Friday. At least, almost nobody. The man in charge was always there with one of his altar boys. I had to get up at 5:30 in the morning, pour myself a bowl of Cheerios and a glass of orange juice, catch a CTS bus on the corner of St. Clair Ave. and E. 127^th St., toss exact change into the fare box, stay away from the crazy people on the bus, run through the church to the sacristy, get into my uniform, and make sure I had my cheat sheet. I had to be on time, or else.

   The mass was performed in Latin, most of the time the priest’s back to the congregation, and we followed his lead. There were prescribed times we had to respond by voice to something Father Ivan recited. It was when we offered Holy Communion that I finally faced the nave and saw the only people in church were old, older, oldest, unemployed, worried about something, or simply in the wrong place. 

   One benefit to hardly anybody being in the pews first thing in the morning was whenever I made a mistake, it usually stayed between me and my maker. That is, unless Ivan the Terrible, who had eyes in the back of his head and whose hearing was better than a moths, saw and heard what I had done wrong.

   Moths have the best hearing in the world, next to priests, who are accustomed to listening to whispers in the confessional. I was waiting for my turn one afternoon after school when I heard Father Ivan bellow, “What did you say?” and the next thing I knew a red-faced boy burst out of the booth running, followed by the dark-faced priest. I quietly slipped away. There was no need to put myself in harm’s way for somebody else’s mortal sins.

   When I started, Father Bartis was in charge, but the next year Father Ivan became the parish priest. He was a burly man. None of us knew where he came from or how old he was, although we guessed he was between 30 and 60. He ran the parish until 1980. He smoked a lot, which we could smell on his breath when he got close to us, and sometimes we caught a whiff of spirits. We all knew what strong drink smelled like because almost everybody’s parents drank. They were Lithuanian, after all.

   He liked to take walks and mind his own business, unless he was minding ours. We were always under the gun. He was irascible to begin with and screwing around with his life’s work brought out the worst in him. Our school janitor said he never met anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible, like Father Ivan. He was short-tempered, but his bark was worse than his bite. The nuns put him to shame when it came to crime and punishment.

   All of us carried cheat sheets at mass. Latin was a foreign language, as well as a dead language. None of us were taking classes in it and none of us knew what we were saying. Our responses during mass were rote, except when something went wrong, when we improvised with mumbles. It wasn’t speaking in tongues, but Father Ivan warned us exorcism was imminent if we didn’t learn our lines.

   The Eucharist was the high point of mass. It got us off our knees and on our feet. We helped in the distribution by holding a communion plate under everybody’s chin when the priest gave them the wafer. There would have been hell to pay if there was an accident, the wafer falling out of somebody’s mouth and landing on the floor. It would have meant saying a million Hail Mary’s and a thousand turns around the Stations of the Cross.

   After acquiring seniority, I was promoted off the morning shift and started serving at Sunday masses, funerals, and weddings. Sunday mass was more of the same, only longer and more elaborate, but at least I got to sleep in and go to church in the family car instead of the city bus with strangers.

   Funerals were usually scheduled on Mondays and Fridays. I began to think weekends coming and going were a dangerous time. At one Friday funeral Father Ivan spoke glowingly of all the good works the deceased had done and how he was sure the man was going to heaven. “The way to the brightness is through good works,” he said. “The first thing we all have got to do is do good.”

   The other altar boy and I were standing on either side of the dead man. He leaned over the open casket and said to me, “What you got to do first is to be dead.”

   The corpses looked like wax figures. They didn’t bother us over much, but the mewling coffin sounds freaked us out. None of us especially enjoyed funerals, not because we were near at hand to the dead, but because they were dismal, and on top of everything else we rarely were gifted with cash. It dismayed us to see the family light twenty candles at a votive stand and push folded ones and fives into the offering box.

   Weddings were a different story. They were always festive. Everybody was in a good mood. It was always a sunny day. The brides looked great in their white dresses with trains. Heaven help the altar boy who stepped on a moving train and yanked it off.

   The number one perk of serving at a wedding was we were always rewarded in hard cash. The best man was usually the man who slipped us an envelope and told us what a great job we had done, even though we never did anything great beyond kneeling and standing around, like we always did.

   Weddings in July and August were often hot and humid happenings. Before one of them the groom himself paid us in advance in silver dollars, ten of them for each of us. It was a windfall. I wrapped mine up in a handkerchief. Everybody was sweating during the ceremony, and when it came time for communion, I reached into my pocket for the handkerchief to dry my hands. It would have been bad if I let the cruet slip. 

   When I did, a silver dollar fell out from my handkerchief, rolled down the two steps in the gap between the altar rail, past the bride and groom, and down the center aisle of the nave. A man stuck his foot out and corralled it with his shoe. I was relieved when I saw it was my uncle, who was an accountant like my father. He knew the value of a dollar.

   One time Jon Krokey, a colleague at Holy Family Church, dropped the Roman Missal, which was very bad. It is a large heavy book that includes all the words and prayers the priest uses during the mass, except for the readings. “I was low man, so I got to get up in the middle of the night to serve at morning mass,” he said. “While transporting the giant book I dropped it and it bounced down the stairs all the way to the communion rail. Father Andrel chewed me out in front of the congregation, which was ten elderly women in the front pews, all wearing babushkas. When he was done spewing, I quit. After that all the nuns at school mean mugged me like I was the Antichrist.”

   My tour of duty ended at the end of sixth grade, when my parents moved out of the neighborhood and I transferred to another Catholic school. They already had a full complement of altar boys, so my services weren’t needed. I was happy enough to go back to being a spectator.

   When St. George Catholic Church closed in 2009 it was the oldest Lithuanian parish in North America. At the last mass three priests presided and there was a host of altar boys and girls. Back in the day we would have welcomed girls to our ranks. They were better at cleaning than us and we knew we could boss them around, although they were also getting to be nice to have as friends.

   The altar was given away to another church. The playground and parking lot were sold, and the grounds converted to greenhouses. The rectory was boarded up. The convent was already long gone, since the school had closed long before. A chain link fence was set up all around the building, and that was that. 

   There were no more dragons real or imagined for the soldier saint to slay. The day of the Holy Helper was done. St. George took a knee.

Ed Staskus posts feature stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com.. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”