The priest shocks me just by being here, on the subway, in the wee hours, wearing his Roman collar.

It's not often these days that you see a man sporting such a tangible emblem of his private commitment in a public place. No, I take that back: isn't the subway typically aflame with hellfire preachers, shaved-skulled Hare Krishnas, or sleepy Jehovahs Witnesses palming their Awake! pamphlets to even sleepier passengers?

But a priest, for God's sake? In this day and age? At this ungodly hour when all good priests should be--er--in bed?

And look at the fearless way he is keeping a stiff upper collar, flaunting his white badge of courage for all the world to see, come hell or high scandal. Inviting promiscuous thoughts such as the ones I am now having. I wonder if he is one of them, I think. Of course, I know that only a tiny fraction of the nation's Roman Catholic priests are involved in that.. I look back on the sentence I have just written and realize, with a start, that after all these years I am still using the euphemisms of my Irish Catholic past--a past I thought I had long since smothered--to talk about matters of the flesh.

The lights flicker in the A train as we hurtle into the bowels of Brooklyn, and I see the priest in dim, shadowy profile, as through the grille of a confessional. It is 1961.I am kneeling in the late-afternoon darkness of a church in a smoky Pennsylvania coal town, in hell. For the first time, I am aware that I had committed an unpardonable sin. The catechism gives me no words to describe the sensations that had just begun to pour through my body, no script for explaining it to the priest. All I know is that they are wrong, frightfully wrong. I stutter.

"Father, I--I--. . ."

Omnisciently, the priest takes up my thread and weaves it into words that reveal all, conceal all.

"You did that?" he scolded. "Do you want to be one of them?"

"Yes, Father. No Father."

In a frightful instant, I knew what I had done and who I was going to become..

The lights blink on in the A train, jolting me back to the present. The priest is nodding off to sleep. I pity him. Here is one of a long line of anointed and terrified men from a culture that permitted them words no more graphic than "them" or "that" to describe some of humanity's deepest and queerest intimacies, which I have long since welcomed as part of my own blessed lot in life. None of the priests I served as an altar boy ever engaged in the most innocent pillow talk with us, let alone spanked us or poured ice cubes down our shorts, or masturbated us. But I now see that this sanctimonious rigidity can itself be a form of abuse, a denial of flesh, of incarnation, a perverse breeding ground of scrupulosity and self-hate.

In the confessional, the priests of my adolescence were pillars of propriety and masters of euphemism. But what is good about a priest being so relentlessly covert about his--and my--sexuality, thatting and themming youngsters into reading sinful nuance into the most innocent of experiences? For years, under their shadow, I felt like a perverse King Midas, seeing everything I touched turn to guilt. Once, I felt compelled to confess to a priest that I'd been "reading those kinds of books" even though I had done nothing more lascivious than allowing my eyes to linger over the the town of Cockeysville, Maryland on a road map. Laughable now, but not when you are a teenager in the hands of an angry God. Though I am not now a practicing Catholic, I wonder if the legions of priests now being hauled into courtrooms around the country are phonies. Real priests, after all, are the holy ones who kept their hands off us, using no four-letter words except for a that orthem they could hiss over abominations that dare not speak their names. The "good" priests so lauded by the Holy See and the American cardinals.

Suddenly, the train lurches and the priest bolts upright. For the first time, I look him straight in the face and see a Father Shapeshift staring back at me.. A chasm of doubt suddenly opens up between us. Yes, hes still in his full clerical drag: black suit and shoes, Bing Crosby straw hat, spanking white Roman collar. But I notice things I hadn't noticed earlier.

"Father" is wearing dark glasses just a tad too small for his unshaven face. His shoes are scuffed and their heels worn, and his nerdish, pegged pants are short enough to reveal the dingy white socks he is wearing. His straw hat is sufficiently askew, and his chin sufficiently stubbly, to suggest that this mans faculties are a little less than pristine. I speculate that he might have dressed himself from a jumble sale--perhaps with the cast-off garments of a defrocked peccant a size or two smaller than he is. When I notice that he is carrying his possessions in a plastic bag from Virgin Records, I conclude that he is either a derelict who is trying to upgrade his image but who hasnt been reading the newspapers as closely as the Pope, or a performance artist making a wry and timely statement for the edification of late-night commuters hurtling through the bowels of the Diocese of Brooklyn. By their suits ye shall know them, as a terrified hierarchy knows only too well in these litigious days of despair and deposition.

I am thankful that the train has finally reached Lafayette Avenue. The train car is suddenly too small for us, like a cramped confessional in which we are wedged, privates touching privates. I bound up the stairs, to the stifling platform, yearning for the exit, up, up to a night of fresh air and fluttery nuns, starched but guileless. I think of the pair I'd spied winging their way up Fifth Avenue a couple of weeks earlier, on a bright spring day. Two sisters in glorious, pre-Vatican II plumage, full habits with ground-level skirts, starched wimples, rosaries rattling reassuringly. One of them laden with purchases from Labels for Less, the other bearing shopping bags crammed full of shoeboxes--all bearing the EasySpirit label! Encouraged by their joyful nonchalance, I think luscious thoughts about the man of my life waiting for me at home, and, without knowing why, I offer a silent absolution for this dubious priest slumped on the A train, hoping he'll make it in one piece to Liberty Ave., or maybe Shepherd.

Edward Moran is a writer who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.