Even the Wicked

I've thought about it, and I can't say for sure what the tithing was all about. During those years I didn't keep records or pay taxes, or even file a return, so it's possible I thought of my tithe as a voluntary tax. It couldn't have amounted to very much, anyway, because I went long stretches without working, and when I worked I never made a great deal of money. My rent always got paid on time and my tab at Armstrong's got settled sooner or later, and when I could manage it I sent money to Anita and the boys.

But the sums involved were small, and you wouldn't see any priests riding around in Lincolns on ten percent of my gross.

When I got sober I began spending my time not in the sanctuaries of churches but in their basements,

where my contribution when they passed the basket was limited by tradition to a dollar. I rarely lit a candle, and I stopped tithing altogether, though I could no more tell you why than I could explain having begun the practice in the first place.

"You cleared up a little," my sponsor suggested, "and you realized you had more use for the money than the church did."

I don't know that that's it. For a while I gave away a lot of money on the street, hi essence tithing to the homeless population of New York.

(Maybe I was just cutting out the middleman, making a collective poor box of all those empty coffee cups and outstretched hands.) That habit, too, ran its course, perhaps because I was daunted by the ever-increasing profusion of cups and hands. Compassion fatigue set in.

Unable to stuff a dollar bill into every beseeching cup or hand, I stopped it altogether; like most of my fellow New Yorkers, I got so I didn't even notice them anymore.

Things change. Sober, I found I had to do many of the chickenshit things that everybody else has to do.

I had to keep records, had to pay taxes. For years I charged clients arbitrary flat fees and saved myself the aggravation of itemizing my expenses, but you can't work that way for attorneys, and now that I have a PI license much of my work comes from attorneys. I still work the old way for clients who are as casual as I am, but more often than not I save receipts and keep track of my expenses, just like everybody else.

And Elaine and I give away a tenth of our income. Mine comes from detective work, of course, and hers is primarily from her real estate investments, although her shop is beginning to turn a small profit. She keeps the books—thank God—and writes the checks, and our few dollars find their way to the dozen or so charities and cultural institutions on our list. It is, to be sure, a more regimented way of doing things. I feel more like a solid citizen and less like a free spirit, and I do not always prefer it this way. But neither do I spend much time chafing at the collar.

The church I went into on this occasion was on a side street in the west forties. I didn't notice the name of it, and couldn't tell you if I'd ever dropped in there before.

I was lucky to find it open. While my own use of churches has diminished in recent years, so too has their accessibility. It seems to me that the Catholic churches, at least, used to be open the whole day long, from early in the morning until well into the evening. Now their sanctuaries are often locked up between services. I suppose that's a response to crime or homelessness or both. I suppose an unlocked church is an invitation, not only to the occasional citizen looking for a moment's peace, but to all of those who'd curl up and nap in the pews or steal the candlesticks from the altar.

This church was open and seemingly unattended, and it was a throwback in another way as well. The candles at the little side altars were real ones, actual wax candles that burned with an open flame. Lots of churches have switched over to electrified altars. You drop your quarter in the slot and a flame-shaped bulb goes on and stays on for your quarter's worth of time. It's like a parking meter, and if you stay too long they tow away your soul.

It's not my church, so I can't see that I've got any rights in the matter, but when did that sort of logic ever keep an alcoholic from nursing a resentment? I'm sure the electric candles are cost-efficient, and I don't imagine they're any harder for God to overlook than the real thing. And maybe I'm just a spiritual Luddite, hating change for its own sake, resisting an improvement in the candle-lighting dodge even as I resisted TJ's arguments for a computer. If I'd been alive at the time, I probably would have been every bit as pissed off when they switched from oil lamps to candles. "Nothing's the same anymore," you'd have heard me grumbling. "What kind of results can you expect from melting wax?"

* * *