The Empty Chair by Bruce Wagner Read Free Book Online

suicides along the way, oh yes. Some of the man-boys were just too damaged to hold out.
Their hearts flew off like little boys after butterflies.
You’d think it’d be easy to sit at the depot and wait for the money train. It wasn’t. The lawyers went for the gold but for all we knew, we’d get the call one morning telling us the gold had turned to brass, tin or dogshit. And there wouldn’t be a thing we could do about it. Settlements were coming in from churches all over the country, seemed like every day it was on the news or in the papers. And some
of these payouts came in low, I’m talking
very
low five-figures, which was
not
the outcome our guys were shooting for. No one knew the formula, how they arrived at the numbers, it seemed so random. One fellow from Cincinnati used his money to go to Club Med—five times in one year. They found him in the bathtub of his room in Cancún. Overdosed. After he took the pills he slit his wrists and wrapped a plastic bag around his head. What they call overkill.
    I was in the choir with a boy named Ramón. His family moved from Santa Ana after only about six months so I didn’t get to know him that well. But I’m sure the heavenly fathers got in their licks. O they were jackals! Ramón’s family settled in Covington, Kentucky, God knows why, must have had relatives there because
no one
moves to Covington, Kentucky. And that’s
where the
real
damage was done—the diocese in Covington. They fucked, sucked, diced and sliced that poor little Mexican kid to an inch of his life.
When he was of age, he was
pissed.
It’s good to get angry. It’s healthy. He sued the shit out of ’em. But the trouble with Ramón was he jumped the gun. I don’t know how he found his lawyers. Wound up settling in ’93, before all the public hue and cry. At that time, see, people still were saying it couldn’t be true. That it was all hyperbole or plain bullshit. I think he got $25,000. What’s that, 15,000 after the lawyers get theirs? Good representation—
stellar
representation—is essential. An attorney has to know his way around these lawsuits, it’s become a very specialized
area. The attorneys learned from the mistakes of those who preceded them. Poor Ramón! Goes and hires a fellow who’s an expert in marine law! How about that! And they just sue too early. See, back in the day anyone who made an accusation got tarred with being fringy or perverted. The Church had the total upper hand. They were moving priests around like musical chairs, we only found this out later, it all came out—to Mexico,
Scotland, Manitoba . . . hell, they were moving them around in
California.
To Fresno and Riverside from LA, what have you. The early bird most assuredly did
not
get the worm, not with these lawsuits. The
priests
got the worm, boy did they ever! Sucked the come right out of it. So you see it literally didn’t pay to be too far ahead of the curve. Failed suits like Ramón’s paved the way. They were the pioneers. The “visionaries” who went blind to spite their face.
    Ramón tried to sue
again
but got his case thrown out. That was just a few years ago. Waited too long! No, that wasn’t it . . . there was a double jeopardy issue. A new lawyer promised he’d find a way around it but didn’t. We still keep in touch, sporadically. He sends me these wacky, hypersexual novelty postcards, the type you can buy in a porn shop. He doodles tiny hearts and cocks on them—oy. I never had the heart to tell him I walked away from the courthouse a wealthy man. If he
does
know, he’s never mentioned it. That kind of discretion is actually typical Ramón. He’s never asked me for money, anyway, though if he did I wouldn’t deny him. It’d make me feel good to help. The last I heard (it’d be comical if it wasn’t so heartbreaking) was that one of the