Ch1: Soft Parade

Pants, shoes — sixteen hundred dollars — ruined!

At a crisis moment of life and death — his life and his death — Reverend Lawrence Schmetterling found it ludicrous that such a thought should jump into his head. Two o’clock in the morning on Ash Wednesday, on a service road that ran along the Grand Central Parkway, Pastor Larry found himself staring into the business end of a crazy woman’s handgun.

And he was terrified.

A flood of biblical proportions cascaded down the pants legs of his Giorgio Armani midnight blue seersucker trousers. Hot urine poured into his Prada Saffiano black leather loafers and soaked through finely woven black woolen socks. An expanding puddle of piss wet the grass beneath those expensive Italian shoes.

To be shot in the face was not how he expected Lent to begin — or his life to end.

“Please, take my money,” he begged, humiliated by the squeaky panic in his voice, “just don’t hurt me.”

“This isn’t about money.” The woman’s determination for murder was fierce.

What could he possibly have done to this Daughter of Eve to make her hate him so much? He didn’t even know her name! They were two strangers whose paths had crossed on Fat Tuesday in a jazz club on the Upper Eastside of Manhattan.

Why did I leave with her!

Why? Such a stupid question to ask even inside the privacy of one’s own mind: he’d gotten inside her little red Geo because she was young and beautiful, and he desperately wanted to begat a multitude of sins with her. All his life Pastor Larry truly believed he had ordered his life according to Scripture. But did tonight’s one trespass wash away all the temptations he had so virtuously avoided and made Him of the uppercase turn against him of the lower?

Lyrics from an old song from one of Larry’s favorite rock bands tumbled into the mix now swirling in his mind:

When I was back there in seminary school/

There was a person there/

Who put forth the proposition/

That you can petition the Lord with prayer/

Petition the Lord with prayer/

Petition the Lord with prayer…

And then Jim Morrison’s screamed: YOU CANNOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER!

What if The Doors were right and Pastor Larry’s faith was wrong?