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"A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity."
Charlie didn't believe in God. Well, okay, maybe he did. He wasn't sure. The whole religion thing was just too... overwhelming for him. For as long as he could remember, people had told him to believe in God. His mother prayed to God every night that he wouldn't die, his teachers in school wove God into their lesson plans, every Sunday as a child, he sat in church, sandwiched between his mom and Mac, listening to whoever drone on and on about God. Songs were about God, movies were about God, the shitty TV in his living room seemed to always be showing some person talking about God. Charlie just couldn't escape the guy. He felt like he'd never really been given a chance to decide how he felt for himself.
Plus, the Church did bad shit. Charlie knew the stories of priests hurting little boys. Dee had made them all watch some movie about it with the guy who played the Hulk, much to Mac’s dismay. He'd seen the protesters with their brightly colored signs around his city and in the news, claiming to represent God and know who He hated. He'd heard Dennis go on plenty of rants about "the evils of organized religion” and Frank had vehemently agreed. Even Dee was against capital-C Catholicism, and although he'd never admit it to the guys, he often looked to Dee as a moral compass. There was so much negativity and violence in the Bible that some of the verses Mac would read aloud made Charlie uncomfortable. Could the word of someone who was supposed to love everyone really be so hateful?
But the Church did good stuff, too. There were Bible verses that Charlie really liked, and even a few he'd committed to memory as best he could. Most, if not all of the clothes he had owned in his life had come from church run thrift stores. Some of the best meals he'd ever eaten had come from church dinners. Growing up, they were sometimes the only dinner he would eat all week. During the summer, the youth groups would host all sorts of fun activities that he and Mac would sneak into as kids. Aside from boring sermons that dragged on forever, nothing bad had ever happened to Charlie in a church.
Then there was the way Mac had always talked about God and the Bible. It didn't quite sync up with how Charlie felt. For as long as he could remember, he'd listen to Mac rave about how badass David was for kicking Goliath's ass, how he would take off his shoes if God ever asked him to and how amazing it was that Christ rose from the grave. Mac talked about these things like they were real stories about actual events, but to Charlie, they felt more like fairy tales. Not that fairy tales were necessarily a bad thing, he just couldn't really wrap his mind around the idea that Jesus's friends had written this book that had somehow made it to the present day.
To put it simply, Charlie had a hard time believing that there was a big man with a white beard somewhere up in the sky controlling everything the way Mac had said there was so many times. But maybe Mac was right. Maybe the Jews were right, or the Muslims, or the people who believed in hundreds of different Gods with elephant heads and a bunch of arms. Or, maybe, no one was right, and God was something else entirely.
Charlie, of course, had no idea. And that wasn't a big deal to him.
The one thing Charlie was sure he believed in was Mac. He believed in how much Mac believed, and in how hard Mac prayed. He knew Mac prayed for him, his mom and for everyone in the gang. He'd heard Mac praying for his own parents quite often when they were younger. And for himself, one Saturday night, when Mac thought he was alone in the bar.
As Charlie came up from a particularly rough session of rat bashing in the basement, he heard the things Mac was saying to God in the back office. How he wished God would change him and help him get rid of thoughts of men laying together. How he begged not to be sent to Hell since he never acted on his urges except that one time, but he'd confessed, so it didn't count. How he'd give anything not to be himself, anything not to be gay, he'd spat, as if saying the word itself was a sin. Charlie even thought he might have heard Dennis's name somewhere in there.
Mac was very drunk. Charlie could tell by the way he spoke, slower and stuttering, and by the way he repeatedly paused mid-sentence, presumably to take another drink. Mac's misguided prayers got darker and angrier as Charlie listened. It had dissolved from praying into blatant emotional masochism. Mac wasn't even mentioning God anymore, just verbally crucifying himself. Charlie couldn't take it anymore.
"Mac?" he said, pushing open the door to the back office.
Mac jumped out of his skin and nearly toppled head first into the wall in front of him. He turned around to face Charlie, bloodshot eyes wide like a deer in the headlights. "How long have you been there?"
"I just got here," Charlie lied. "I left my apartment keys and Frank wasn’t answering the door so I had to come back."
"Oh," Mac said, trying and failing to inconspicuously wipe tears off his cheeks.
"Are you okay, man?" Charlie asked.
"Yeah, bro.” Mac braced his hand against the wall as he pushed up off his knees. He knocked over the empty bottle of Jack next to him with his elbow but didn't seem to notice. "Just dropped something. I found it, though."
They both knew he was lying, but Charlie went along with the charade, for Mac's sake.
“Cool. Do you want me to walk you home?" Charlie asked quietly. Mac just nodded.
Once the bar was shut down and locked up, Charlie wrapped an arm around Mac's waist and slung Mac's arm around his shoulders. He laced their fingers together to hold Mac's arm in place. Slowly, they walked back to Mac's apartment in a comfortable, sad silence. After Charlie helped Mac out of his clothes and into pajamas, he poured him into bed and turned to go.
"Wait," Mac slurred, trying to grab his friend's wrist and missing by a mile. "Don't leave, Charlie. Stay with me."
"I don't know, dude," Charlie said, looking down at his feet.
"Please?"
Mac looked so small, his eyes already closed with a frown on his face. Charlie couldn't say no. He shrugged off his army jacket, switched his jeans for a pair of sweatpants he pulled out of Mac’s dresser then crawled into the bed. He left a small space between them, but they were close enough to feel each other's body heat — a well-practiced distance leftover from twin bed sleepovers in their youth. It had been years at this point.
"Thank you," Mac said, the second word running into a soft snore.
"You're welcome," Charlie whispered.
He laid there for a while, looking at the back of his friend's head, hearing his earlier words over and over. It hurt Charlie, killed him, to hear Mac call himself a "disgusting faggot" and beg God to punish him until he changed. Mac loved harder than anyone Charlie knew, and Charlie wished Mac could love himself the same way. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, folded his hands and prayed for the first time since elementary school.
Hi, God. Is 'hi God' how you start a prayer? I hope it is. So, uh, hi. It's me. Charlie. Charlie Kelly. From South Philly. But You probably know that.
Um, You know my friend Mac? He was talking to You earlier, saying all this awful shit about himself. Stuff. Sorry, God. Anyway, I wanted to ask You to like... help him? He thinks being gay is bad, and he beats himself up for it all the time and won't even admit it to me, his best goddamn friend. Oops. Sorry. Didn't mean to say that. But I don't get why he thinks being gay is so horrible, especially since he thinks You made him that way. If You made everyone the way they are, why would You make people You hate? Aren't You supposed to love everyone? And doesn't that same part in the Bible he’s always talking about also say you can't grow a beard? Or... maybe it's you can't shave your beard. Either way, Mac has done both and he doesn’t think You’re gonna send him to Hell for that!
I just... I wish Mac could see that, God. I wish he could see that it’s okay and that we all still love him even if he is a total homo and that he doesn't need to feel bad about it. So, um. I guess my prayer is... for Mac to be happy. And for him to realize one day that he doesn't have to hide from us. So. That's it. Thanks for listening, if You are really out there somewhere. And if not, then... I don't know.
Charlie opened his eyes, then realized he'd forgotten to finish his haphazard prayer.
Um. Amen?