Redemption

The women in the office keep telling me that I’m not sentimental enough. So to prove them wrong, I thought I’d try writing something romantic for a change.


Mr. Morris Jellenick was the ultimate nobody—the kind of fellow who inspired contempt in others because of the utter pointlessness of his life.
.....Every morning for the past thirty years, his wife, Costanza, would remind him of just how insignificant he actually was. “If you were any less of a man,” she’d say to him, “you’d have breasts and a vagina”. Or, “I’d tell you to grow a pair of testicles, but they wouldn’t be any use to you anyway.”
.....And every morning, he would try to ignore her rants, focusing with studied intensity on the high fiber, low fat breakfast cereal he was forced to eat to keep his cholesterol levels down. “I’m just going to eat my breakfast quietly and, as it is written in the Good Book, turn the other cheek,” he’d say to himself. But every time Morris tried to turn the other cheek to his wife’s incessant abuse, she would slap him across the face with her meaty hand.
.....At his job, working as a quality control manager at the local bubble-wrap factory, Morris was subject to similar abuse. “Hey, Morris, “ his colleagues would joke, “what sort of sick stuff do you do those rolls of bubble-wrap you’re always foolin’ around with in the back office?…I hear there’s a lonely roll in the warehouse that keeps askin’ for your telephone number. Har, har, har….”
.....But Morris ignored their cruel barbs and offered his sufferings up to Christ. “If our savior could endure the cross,” Morris would remind himself, “then surely I can suffer this with equanimity.” And he would go on examining roll after roll of bubble-wrap for defects, reciting the rosary in his head to drown out the endless insults of his coworkers.
.....Every Saturday morning, Morris would go to confession at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows Church in Perth Amboy to confess his sins to Fr. Marchese, the local parish priest. The problem was that Morris didn’t have any really interesting sins to confess and this irritated Fr. Marchese considerably. One day, Fr. Marchese had more than his normal usual amount of scotch for breakfast, and was feeling particularly sadistic when Morris came into the confessional.
.....“Bless me father for I have sinned,” Morris began as usual. “It has been one week since my last confession.”
.....“Lemme guess,” Fr. Marchese slurred, barely able to hold his head up from all the booze he had consumed. “You weren’t as understanding as you could have been with your bitch of a wife and you bought yourself a cup of coffee at Starbucks instead of putting the money into the collection plate.”
.....“How did you know father?” Morris asked with amazement.
.....“Because, you pathetic piece of shit,” snapped Fr. Marchese, unable to control himself any longer, “you come in here every week, and every week you have the same goddamn idiotic sins to confess. And the sad part is that they’re not really sins at all. I know 70 year old Italian widows who have more sordid things to confess than you do!”
.....“What are you trying to say, Father?” Morris asked completely befuddled.
.....“What I’m trying to say,” said Fr. Marchese, doing all he could to prevent himself from sliding out of his chair and onto the floor, “is that I don’t want to see you again until you have something to confess that is going to provide me some legitimate titillation. You think it’s easy being a priest. This is all I have—well this and the occasional altar boy—and if I don’t get to hear something really juicy, then, goddamn it, you are going to be banned from the confessional.” With that Fr. Marchese slumped over in his chair and began snoring loudly. Confession was over for that particular day.
.....“Well I guess that if a holy man like Fr. Marchese thinks that it would aid my spiritual life to commit some flagrant act of sin, then I suppose I should consider it,” Morris postulated. “Men of God always know what’s best for members of their flock.”
.....When he got home after Church, Morris locked himself in the bathroom to avoid being disturbed by his wife and thought carefully about all the possible sins he could commit. There were a number of options that he though might satisfy Fr. Marchese’s need for titillation. He quickly ruled out murder, blackmail and larceny, because he was just not that kind of person, and eventually settled on adultery as a suitably offensive choice. But who to have an affair with? He married his wife right out of college and hadn’t had much experience with women before or since. Mrs. Castorini, one of his neighbors was a definite possibility, but he struck her off his list when he remembered that she was a heavy drinker and he normally passed out after one or two glasses of wine.
.....But thinking about Mrs. Castorini made him think about another member of her family who might be open to his advances: Zoey, yes, sweet Zoey. Zoey, that wild young creature, whom he had admired for years from across his picket fence as she lounged in the sun on his neighbor’s lawn. Sure, she was a bit young for him, but that just made it all the more enticing.
.....“It’s set then,” he said to himself. “I’ll have an adulterous affair so that I can have at least one decent sin to confess to Fr. Marchese, and it will be with Zoey.” She was young; she was fresh; she was cute; she was feisty. She was everything that he could possibly want in an illicit sexual partner—the complete opposite of his wife in almost every way.
.....The fact that Zoey was the Castorini’s pet Shih Tzu made the prospect even more intriguing. “When I got married, I settled for a woman who was beneath me. If I’m going to have an affair,” he though, “it might as well be someone classy, someone with proper breeding.” And Zoey was definitely a pure breed through and through.
.....He wasted no time making his advances, treating Zoey to gourmet packets of Alpo’s finest treats, and buying her extravagant gifts, like a new diamond studded collar and designer lavender-scented flea powder. Although she resisted at first because of their obvious age difference, Zoey eventually became as smitten by Morris as he was by her. She was even willing to defy Mr. And Mrs. Castorini, who were dubious about the long-term prospects for the relationship. “He’s a married man,” Mr. Castorini would remind her. “And a member of a different species besides,” his wife added. But nothing the Castorinis said could dampen the ardor that had developed between Morris and Zoey.
.....When Mrs. Jellenick found out about the affair, she was shocked that someone as bland as her husband could attract an obviously upscale type like Zoey. “How can I possibly get him back from her,” she wined to her friends. “She’s so sophisticated. Her coat always has such a fine sheen.”
.....“Don’t worry, hon,” her best friend, Magda, counseled. “He’ll get tired of her kind eventually. She may be cute, but I hear from the girls in the neighborhood that she can be a real bitch.”
.....The guys at work were similarly amazed that a devout fellow like Morris would be bold enough to flaunt his adulterous liaison in public, and tried as best they could to downplay Zoey’s considerable charms.
.....“Everyone keeps talking about how hot she is,” said Tony Saccamano in shipping with utter contempt. “But personally I think she’s a fucking dog.”
.....“If I was going to have an affair,” added Bill from accounting, "it sure as hell wouldn’t be with any Shih Tzu. I wouldn’t settle for anything less than a Yorkshire Terrier. Now, that’s real class.”
.....But as much as everyone kept trying to downplay Morris’ achievement in bagging a foxy young thing like Zoey, they really couldn’t help but notice the changes that had come over him as a result of his affair. Even Fr. Marchese was suitably impressed when Morris confessed his flagrante delicto to him during their next session in the confessional. “Well,” Fr. Marchese admitted grudgingly, “if you had to commit a sin, having an affair with an under-aged house pet is probably as good as any. I don’t remember any specific prohibitions against interspecies intimacy in either the Old or the New Testament, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that this does qualify as a legitimate act of adultery. I’m giving you a 9/10 for the effort. Now say ten Hail Mary’s, five Our Father’s, and make sure to come back and see me next week to fill me in on any new developments.”
.....I wish that I could report that Morris and Zoey’s relationship remained as passionate as it was during the first few blissful weeks of their courtship. But Zoey, I’m afraid, was not by nature the monogamous type. One day, while Morris was out getting his morning newspaper, he accidentally spied her sniffing the crotch of a hunky neighborhood pit bull. And that was the end of their relationship.
.....Morris’ story did not turn out as badly as you might expect, however. Following the advice of Fr. Marchese, Morris started cruising the neighborhood in search of a new object for his affections. Although he had a few dates with a sultry iguana he met in a local pet store, he found kissing someone with such a long tongue surprisingly awkward. A blind date with a pot-bellied pig from the local petting zoo proved equally disappointing.
.....Then once day, when all hope seemed lost, Morris bumped into a pious little Chihuahua name Carmen during a novena he was attending at Church. Once they got beyond the language barrier and the obvious cultural differences, they discovered that they had an awful lot in common. Like Morris, Carmen had a special devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe and a sad history with prior relationships. She had dated a German shepherd, named Gert, off and on for many years, but her mother forced her to break off their engagement because he wasn’t Catholic.
.....Although she was a bit old by Morris’ standards—she had just turned eight in August—Carmen had the kind of maturity that someone like Zoey (for all her considerable charms) lacked. Besides, she made amazing churros. The two were married by Fr. Marchese on the Feast of the Circumcision and have been together ever since. You can often find them sitting hand-in-paw on the front porch together, lazily sipping tequila and lime, and, when the mood strikes them, howling at the moonlight in between decades of the rosary.