The Church and The Dime

The Church and The Dime
She prayed to the man with the twin in the mask
But the world is numb and cold
And the boy all alone casually wandering home
Unaware of sobering reality

Faster, save me, harder, I can’t

Breathe in, breathe out
Let them all fold, let them all fold
Breathe in, breathe out
Let them all fold, let them all fold

Hearts finish here, love decays while call girls perform
He waits alone, playing roles to suit lovers flue

The lust and the sighs, the church and the dime
The cryptic clientele all careening inside
The puzzling façade steers pure from the divine

Breathe in, breathe out
Let them all fold, let them all fold
Breathe in, breathe out
Let them all fold, let them all fold
Yeah

Many wishes of hunger were wronged
By the pimp and priest’s thirst for a fault
All the anger from a lover’s lament
Force fed in the stomach of sin
Welcome to the world

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
We’re introduced to our second main character, Ms Leading, who gives us a stark view of the City. Like Ms Terri, she is a prostitute employed at the Dime, and her disgust for how it degrades the warmth of the world has made her view life cynically.

What’s in a name?
‘The Church & The Dime’ — it’s what it says on the tin, pretty much. Ms Leading gives her thoughts on how these institutions, and their wicked owner, have corrupted the City.

Whose viewpoint?
Ms Leading. “Wait, not Hunter?” I feel some people questioning — this is one of those songs where most readings I’ve seen of it reads this as Hunter, but I’m sceptical about that, and find it makes a lot more sense if you read it as Ms Leading.

My rationale:

• The narrator of this song is far more personally bitter towards the City than Hunter, and aware of its shady practises, even though he has only just got off the train and sounded to be pretty okay with the City so far as of the end of Oracles, then is happy as of Bitter Suite I. The tonal shift of this song is very severe.
• The narrator of this song knows what a prostitute is, and the effect prostitution can have on relationships, while Hunter is so ignorant you can walk him through a brothel and he still won’t understand that he’s bedding a hooker.
• The narrator of this song knows that the Priest is also the Pimp, while Hunter is deceived by the Pimp in his Priest guise in act IV.
• Themes established in this song are raised again in Evicted, which is confirmed to be from Ms Leading’s viewpoint — particularly the world being ‘cold’ and a focus on the degradation of love to hookers.
• The Faster / Save me reprise and breathing motif are illustrations of the same thing they were in The Pimp & The Priest. Back then, it was to show Ms Terri hooking — here, it’s to show Ms Leading. How do we get to see that unless we’re following her?

It’s also thematically/structurally nice for us to get a view of what such an important character is like, as we have with TP&P and Ms Terri, before showing how they interact with Hunter.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:23 Instrumental
WOOOOOOW what a transition out of Oracles on Delphi! Exact same passage as we left off on there, only now it’s much angrier and bitter. Because we’re in the exact same moment and place, but have swapped heads into the viewpoint of someone much angrier and more bitter than Hunter in this moment — Ms Leading.

I imagine this transition as them both passing by the main square of the City (neither noticing the other yet), with one of them on one side of the square going in one direction, and the other going the opposite way, and the camera breaks off Hunter’s half-lost wandering to lock onto and follow Ms Leading, who strides with purpose.

>She prayed to the man with the twin in the mask
Much calmer and more sombre now. Ms Leading is in the church, which is finishing up its proceedings, well aware of the true nature of the Priest. If she knows the priest is corrupt, why go through the formality of attending church or praying?

>But the world is numb and cold
Perhaps it’s to try and feel something, anything, of the world’s essential goodness besides the Priest’s individual deviancy. But that doesn’t work, and no flash of warmth, strength, or inspiration comes to Ms Leading from attending these rituals. That being so, seeing the congregation pray so fervently to this conman is likely cause to regard the world as even emptier than it already feels. Everything is cold.

Ms Leading is jaded. You can hear the gloomy tenor in her voice and see through her eyes with a kind of washed-out low-contrast filter. She does not view the world as a good place, but rather a place where people are perpetually in some cycle of exploiting others or being exploited. The exploiters always win and whatever avenues look hopeful to escape them are traps. In her mind, people generally just don’t care, can’t be trusted, will believe what they like, and will use you.

Unlike Ms Terri, Ms Leading is probably more inclined to be an atheist in the sense of not believing God exists, or that if He does, it’s not in any manner that humans can meaningfully interact with. Her concern, and character, is more focused with the fidelity of individual relationships and people than the personal ramifications of spiritual good or evil. So before she’d worry to think about if her actions are right, (not to say she doesn’t care about that kind of thing, she just has less hangups about it), she’d worry about finding at least one person she could trust.

These two lines can also be saying more generally that she trusted TP&P, but she didn’t benefit from him in any fulfilling way.

I envision this line as her pausing to stand outside the church, over the street, watching people going about their day, and feeling that it’s all fake or empty.

>And the boy all alone casually wandering home
Meanwhile, Hunter is still wandering around the City. Ms Leading can’t know that this is his ‘home’, so this is omniscient knowledge slipping in, but I can envision her spotting him here and discerning just from how lost he looks/how he’s still ‘exploring’ the place that he doesn’t have any friends or company with him. On one hand this is sad, on the other he may be a good mark.

>Unaware of sobering reality
From omniscient viewpoint, it’s saying that Hunter is ignorant to what’s going on in the City and how badly the things he’ll uncover here will affect him.

Reading it from Ms Leading’s viewpoint, it’s basically the same thing but a little more meaningful. The way the Hunter is innocently wandering around the City strikes Ms Leading with a kind of… not contempt, but clearly this is not someone experienced with navigating the reality of the world, which she’s familiar with. Again, this seems to strike Ms Leading as sad, but only vaguely so. Another grain of grist for the mill…

>Faster, save me, harder, I can’t
Leaving Hunter aside for now, Ms Leading returns to her work at the Dime. This is the sobering reality — the wicked, tempestuous cycle of the Church and the Dime, where everyone involved is a pawn (and the girls especially get a bad straw). As we’ve seen with Ms Terri, it’s enough to wear even the strongest and most purehearted individuals down, break them, smother them, and in the end…

>Breathe in, breathe out
…NO! Ms Leading will not allow herself to suffocate and shatter before this cruel world. Unlike Ms Terri, who felt herself completely ripped down by the Dime, Ms Leading has found a perspective that almost seems to give her strength, and power…

>Let them all fold, let them all fold
…and its name is, total contempt! If these people will be corrupted, then so be it, let them be corrupted! Ms Terri begged her clients to treat her nicely — Ms Leading has no such expectation or demand, and instead lets her clients’ behaviour validate her perspective of them as human garbage, and the world itself as wicked. Understanding this seething vengeance as what Ms Leading’s really thinking when meeting her clients, all while she wears her summer smile and tends to them so sweetly, drives home how Hunter (naivety aside, and many others I imagine) got misled.

We’ll see the motif of folding, in the sense of a poker game, appear again through the acts — I read it as shorthand for people giving up any attempt of fighting TP&P or evil/corruption in general. The second they reach Ms Leading’s bedroom, certainly, most would become complicit…

>Hearts finish here, love decays while call girls perform
Buttoning herself back up after a session with a client, Ms Leading gets up to depart the bedroom. As she does, she considers the nature of her work and its wider implications.

Ms Leading feels that prostitution cheapens love. People will fool themselves into thinking an easy relationship with a prostitute is the same thing as committed love, when for Ms Leading it’s just a job with people to whom she has no attachment, and who don’t really know or have any meaningful attachment to her. Simultaneously, people will betray the real relationships they have with partners or suitors for the secretive relief of indulging themselves on a proficient hooker. Everyone involved is using each other, yet some delusion persists that a lay substitutes for love? If the client doesn’t simply devolve into preferring women as sex dolls, they’ll fool themselves into thinking that the lust they feel truly is love.

Ms Leading, we can figure, has never felt genuine love from or for anyone she has bedded during her time at the Dime, and this grates at her. She is starved for it.

>He waits alone, playing roles to suit lovers flue
Tricky. I’d assume the ‘he’ is TP&P, and Ms Leading sights him while she makes her way downstairs at the Dime. If so, she has a couple interesting observations of him.

For one, she zeroes in on him being alone, which is a weird frame to regard TP&P through, though it’s true. He doesn’t have anyone intimate or special to him, and doesn’t involve himself in groups except to prey on them from a distant position of superiority. Combined with the ‘buh-buh-buh’, I get the image of TP&P chatting up some patrons all friendly and jovial-like, but Ms Leading sees through this and knows the charm is totally fake, and what’s underneath is cold. Hence, seeing him act like that makes her regard his life as empty, too. (That she’d care to think this of TP&P of all people is really giving the feeling that Ms Leading is very, very lonely (and very, very cynical).)

‘Playing roles to suit lovers flue’ -> TP&P will adapt himself and say whatever it is his conversation partner wants to hear, provided it justifies them to patronise the Dime. The Pimp’s job when he’s front of house is disarming whatever scruples a john may have about sleeping with a prostitute. It’ll be fun, nobody will know, we’re a trustworthy establishment, plenty of people do it, it’s healthy for you, just once won’t hurt, these ladies are incredible, your wife sounds like a shrew. Whatever pitch works.

Flue is an interesting word choice — the opening through which smoke escapes from a hearth. I read that as TP&P is either stoking patrons into resentment against their existing partners (fire), or convincing them that the Dime girls make the best special lovers (flame). But the result of listening to him is not flame or fire, just smoke. Presenting the prostitutes as a means for the clients to vent.

The ‘buh-buh-buh’ in the back of this line is reprising something/pointing to something, but I’m unsure what. His Hands Matched His Tongue?

>The lust and the sighs, the church and the dime / The cryptic clientele all careening inside
Lovely word choice on that second line. Not too much to say here, just giving us a view of the main floor of the Dime and underscoring that Ms Leading is aware of its relationship to the Church. ‘Cryptic’ might denote that patrons of the Dime have some means to hide their identity, probably with aliases if it’s not a literal thing of wearing a mask like the Pimp.

>The puzzling façade steers pure from the divine
Ms Leading comes to her final conclusion about all this business. Using his charming tricks, TP&P is actively twisting good or well-intentioned people away from any kind of godliness, and instead into evil.

There’s an interesting distinction here between what’s good and what’s holy. If people were able to be holy, they could probably be good in a manner that isn’t corruptible, but the Priest obviously prevents that. The ‘essence’ of holiness isn’t something necessarily accessible through the church, though that begs the question of how else a regular joe could hope to touch this unpervertable goodness.

Secondary meaning applies to the building of the church itself — this church is the last place to find virtue or God, but you wouldn’t know that from the outside.

>Chorus Repetition.
Ms Leading gets back to work, letting her resentment power her through this dark reality.

Given that Hunter’s able to sign on as her driver later, we can figure she has regular clients booked to particular timeslots whose homes or getaway-houses she’ll travel to for work, as well as receives calls to summon her out to clients’ abodes, rather than always staying at the Dime. Further, Hunter is able to encounter her before entering the Dime, so either he catches her on her way back, or she spends her time when she doesn’t have a dedicated client outside the Dime, finding customers to invite in.

>Many wishes of hunger were wronged / By the pimp and priest’s thirst for a fault
Really nice verse. Ms Leading furiously condemns TP&P and the horrible world that lets his schemes thrive.

‘Wishes of hunger’ -> People have desires and needs, many of which are innocent and genuine, that they perhaps can’t fulfil by themselves. They either turn to TP&P, or he finds these weak points of his own accord, only for him to exploit them and hold these desires over the person’s head as a way to manipulate them. If someone doubts they’re a good person, TP&P will tell them they can be. If they are lonely and looking for love, TP&P will hook them on a prostitute. If they are literally hungry and have no money for food, TP&P will employ them so they are dependant. Basically, he finds people’s drivers, and fulfils them in an easy way that serves him at their expense. Routinely. (Literally.)

‘Thirst for a fault’ -> But even more vigorously than these people pursue their needs, TP&P pokes and prods to find leverage. He sees a person, he becomes desperate to find their weak point. Whatever makes an individual frail, vulnerable, or indefensible is the golden key that will keep them in TP&P’s grip, too scared or powerless to resist his exploitation, even should they come to know him as evil. He both enjoys having this power, and is anxious about not having it, hence his desperation to find it.

>All the anger from a lover’s lament / Force fed in the stomach of sin
TP&P encourages people to resent their partners, exacerbate the discontents they have with them, or relieve the frustration of having no partner through plain sex, so that they’ll instead try a prostitute. This feeds into a loop that only makes existing relationships degenerate further into lovelessness.

>Welcome to the world
And that’s life, baby! Pretty bad gig, huh? The bad guy just wins? Well get used to it. That’s how reality is. You adapt to the mud on your boots or you shatter.

These are Ms Leading’s thoughts, but the line works as a powerful pronouncement of the environment Hunter’s in, now that he’s left the River and the Lake.

>3:42 – 3:55 Instrumental
Reprised somewhere?

>4:00 – 4:58 Instrumental
Ms Leading finishes up with her client and sets to walking back to the Dime, when…

The Oracles on the Delphi Express | Act II | The Bitter Suite I & II: Meeting Ms. Leading/Through The Dime