He is an Acres boy. Even though he left The Acres for good when he was a kid, he will always be an Acres boy.
Chris, not his real name, lived across from me on Maebeth Street. When we were little, we dug a hole in his backyard every day for a few weeks, trying to reach China, until his mother made us fill it in.
We both went to Montessori School as in pre-school and kindergarten, which in the late 1960s—before the Parker Street Montessori was built—had rented space in the educational wing of the Bethesda Lutheran Church on Island Pond Road (below).
Chris and I always looked at this mosaic of Martin Luther at Bethesda with a certain amount of interest—and trepidation. We knew it was some important religious dude, but that was about it. Why was this guy looking down at us so disapprovingly and ready to hit people with a hammer?
“Look! Worms!” he said. “Why does it say that?” Indeed, the word “Worms” is halfway down the right side of the mural.
“That’s the Diet of Worms,” said a teacher. “It was a big religious meeting in the sixteenth century.”
“He ate worms!” said Chris. “A diet of worms! That’s why his face was like that.” We both laughed. The teacher sighed.
There was another kid at Montessori, Tom, who ate the occasional insect for attention. So for Chris and me, the possibility of Martin Luther eating worms wasn’t out of the question. Did Luther kill bugs with a hammer before he ate them, we pondered, or did he gobble them alive, like Tom?
Luther was indeed called to the Diet of Worms in Worms, Germany in 1521 to appear before Emperor Charles the Fifth, but he refused to recant his “heretical” views in the scene in the right side of the mural.
The mosaic was created by Thursten Munson (no, not Herman Munster, even though Luther seems to have Munster’s flat head in this artwork). Munson’s architectural firm designed the parish building, which opened in 1960. It measures 12 x 22 feet and took eight months to complete.
How intricate is this work of art? It’s made up of 140,000 pieces of Venetian glass. In the center is a depiction of Luther about to nail his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Castle Church door in Germany in 1517. Hence, the hammer.
Chris and I also went to Ursuline Academy together through grades one to three, and once in a while, when our bus passed by Bethesda twice a day, we’d mention the worm-eating guys—both Martin Luther and our former classmate Tom. “I wonder what ever happened to Tom?” I asked. “Do you think he still eats bugs?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “I hope not. He probably has other ways of getting attention. Like turning his eyelids inside out or something.”
Chris is the guy who I punched on the steps in front of the OLSH’s Bishop O’Leary Social Center after a Communion practice in the previous blog post. We had gotten in an argument over something stupid (I forgot what) and I split his lip. His mother was mad as hell at me, but we didn’t let it come between our friendship.
Here we are getting Communion from the child molester OLSH priest Alfred Graves—Chris is fourth in line.
Chris and I even stayed friends when he told on me after I nailed a car with a snowball on Sunrise Terrace. He pointed me out, the woman drove up my driveway after me, swore, backed up, and drove away. All was forgiven, though.
A Montessori School field trip to Forest Park to see Morganetta the elephant. Chris and his sister on the left of the middle of the gate.
Then came the most serious test of our friendship: at an Ursuline class picnic at Look Park, my mother was looking after his five-year-old sister, Nancy, while Chris’s mother was away doing something. Nancy wanted to join a bunch of kids at the paddle boats, so my mother left Nancy with a mother named Sam (Samantha). When Chris and Nancy’s mom returned to the area, my mother told her Sam was watching Nancy. But Chris and Nancy’s mother saw one of my friends, also known as Sam, and assumed that’s who my mother meant.
“Where’s my Nancy?” she screamed. “Where’s my Nancy?” she shook Sam like a rag doll.
“I don’t know!” cried Sam. He started bawling.
The whole mess eventually got straightened out, but my mother and Chris’s mother got in this stupid feud over it. They said mean things. They could not and would not recant. Our moms banned both Chris and I from going over one another’s houses. After that, we managed a little strained small talk at the bus stop, but we stopped sitting next to one another on the bus.
And then Chris’s family soon moved to the eastern part of the state. I never saw him again. Here he is a Xaverian Brothers prep school:
He went to a couple of colleges, but never graduated, and developed a drinking problem. He was a cook and manager at several restaurants in New Hampshire. He played guitar in rock bands.
There was also the occasional DUI. And then, in 2016, there was this Facebook post from his sister:
“Let me begin by saying, I am not writing this so that friends can comment, ‘So sorry for your loss.’ I am writing this as a statement to anyone that knows someone or has a loved one who has an alcohol problem. For years I was irritated by the view that alcoholism is a disease. I thought of people who had cancer and how they didn’t choose to get cancer, but people who drank clearly made the choice to drink alcohol.
“As my brother lay in in the intensive care unit at the hospital, he looked at me and said, ‘I’ve always had my drinking under control.’ (Because that is what he needed to believe.) ‘When I get out of this hospital, that is it. I’m too old for this. I don’t want to die.’
“With each passing hour, the doctors explained to me in detail what was happening to my brother’s body—as each new medicine, blood bag, electrolyte bag was hung, as he was hooked up to yet another machine—and finally as I sat and watched him take his last breath, knowing how much he did want to live, I finally understood. Alcoholism is indeed a disease.
“Cancer is a poison that attacks the body’s organs; alcohol is a poison that attacks the body’s organs. We don’t sell cancer in pretty bottles at the local liquor store or convenience store. So why, pray tell, do we sell alcohol? Oh yes, I forgot. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, and in our society, money trumps life.”
I hadn’t thought of Chris in years, but he came to mind when my son had a basketball game at Bethesda a few years ago. I gazed at the Martin Luther mosaic, and remembered simpler times.
And then I started Googling, wondering whatever happened to Chris, and discovered his demise. What message could I have possibly sent to him if I had ever found him when he was alive? "Sorry about punching you…Sorry about the whole Look Park thing—our mothers were idiots…We never did finish digging that hole to China.”
Chris was an Acres boy. He wasn’t the only Acres boy who drank himself to death, and he certainly won’t be the last.
His obituary said he had loved literature, and was, as his favorite writer Hunter S. Thompson described, sought “The Edge” in life. Here is how Hunter Thompson described “the Edge”:
“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others— the living—are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.”
Hunter was actually writing about doing 100 MPH on his motorcycle, when “the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears.” But The Edge can apply to a lot of things in life. Yes, if you want to live past 52, don’t get too close to The Edge, because even if you want to live, you might not be able to take a step back or turn around, even if you have everything "under control."
