Closing Time (26 page)

Throughout their collapse, my mother would send me two-day-old newspaper clippings chronicling the team’s latest misadventures. Even though I already knew what had transpired in these games, I devoured every word, perhaps hoping that if I pored over them long enough, Chico Ruiz would not steal home in a 1-0 Reds victory and manager Gene Mauch would reconsider his decision to start his ace pitchers Jim Bunning and Chris Short on two days’ rest, thereby wrecking their arms. Watching the Phils blow the pennant was the worst thing that would ever happen to me in my life as a sports fan; nothing ever took the disappointment away. It was a title the Phils hadn’t expected, and didn’t really deserve, but as it was right there within our grasp, the city felt that its guts had been ripped out when victory was torn away from us. As the well-traveled backup catcher Gus Triandos whispered tearfully moments after the season ended, “Some guys want to guzzle the champagne. I only wanted a sip.”

No sipping this time out. The Phillies were not going to the Fall Classic; matinee idol Johnny Callison, the club’s cannon-armed right fielder, was not going to be the Most Valuable Player; and I was now beginning to harbor vague suspicions that God might not be looking out for my best interests. The champagne would remain on ice for another sixteen years until the Phils finally did win the first championship in their long, stomach-turning history. But not even that could erase the heartbreak of 1964, an anguish I could share with no one at the time because, inexplicably, given that we found ourselves in the Keystone State, I was the only native of Philadelphia. Throughout the Phillies’ meltdown, fully aware that I had spent much of the past summer waving cars onto Len’s parking lot right down the street from Connie Mack Stadium, my new classmates never stopped reminding me what a massive tank job was taking place 125 miles to the south. This was not very Christian of them. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, I should have realized even then that none of this truly mattered. But if none of it mattered, why did I feel so bad?

All the normal rites of passage occurred in the seminary. I began to smoke the demon weed. I took up the guitar and, like many guitarists, quickly became as proficient on the instrument as I was ever likely to get. I added a full six inches to my height. I learned to play basketball, partly because my father hated it but mostly because it took my mind off baseball. Overnight, my hair went from being completely straight to being an unruly mess, and while this doubtless has a perfectly logical genetic explanation, I prefer to think that overhearing one too many anecdotes about massacres in the Belgian Congo may have been responsible for this sudden follicular eruption. From that point on, I made sure that my hair was always cut short, because Maryknolls equated wavy hair with unkempt hair, and unkempt hair connoted contempt for authority, a deplorable need for attention, and perhaps even a seditious temperament.

Now fourteen, I started to think about girls in a way I had not before, certainly not the way I had thought about them when I first set up that makeshift bedroom tabernacle so many years earlier. Girl-watching could be done only from afar, as the seminary was virtually monochromatic, genderwise. The only women with whom we had any regular contact were the cabal of French-Canadian nuns who did all the cooking and mending and washing for the priests but spoke no English. They belonged to an obscure order that did its recruiting in the most forlorn corners of rural Canada, and they served the same function as those tiny birds that hitch a ride on the snouts of rhinos, removing vexatious lice in exchange for protection from predators.

In recognition of their astounding self-abnegation—performing menial tasks for clergymen with whom they could not even communicate—the nuns were presumably assured a place in the Kingdom of Heaven. They were forever smiling, and a bit on the chirpy side, but what I remember most about them was that, even by the doleful standards of pulchritude one tends to associate with women who have taken the veil, they were pretty hard to look at.

I cannot say for sure how well they fared in the cognate realms of laundry and dry cleaning, nor what their seamstress skills may have amounted to; but turned loose in the kitchen, they were hell on wheels. The meals they served up were so hair-raising—charred potatoes, calcified string beans, hamburgers redolent of death—that they made me pine for my mother’s seventh-rate but not explicitly life-threatening cooking. The only thing they got right was baking bread, which was so crusty and sweet that some of us would sneak down and filch a few slices when they were not looking, even though we risked severe reprisals if we were caught. These slices tasted delicious when the bread was hot and fresh and right out of the oven but had no taste at all the next day when distributed for meals, by which time the individual loaves were solid enough to pinch-hit with. The nuns, so it would appear, had been planted in our midst to toughen up our intestines and prepare us for toiling in foreign climes, where we could expect even less agreeable food. Their approach to cuisine was overtly recriminatory; they were not so much bunglers as
saboteuses
. They swept into a room full of meat, fruits, and vegetables and made sure that no one came out happy. The rustic Canucks of marriageable age they’d left behind could not have been sorry to see them go.

The only other females we ever saw were girls from a nearby reform school. Even from a distance, they looked less errant than pestiliential, not like naughty girls who needed to be grounded but like molls who needed to be executed. No more than a handful of my classmates at the Venard grew up to be priests, but I am sure some of the girls from the reform school grew up to be criminals. In its stated objective, neither institution was terribly successful.

 

I became much more intrepid during this period, sneaking off campus during recreation period one afternoon and wending my way down the hill to a W. T. Grant’s department store in amorphous Chinchilla, where I bought a copy of the Beatles’ 45 “Eight Days a Week.” This earned me the gratitude, if not the respect, of the handful of upperclassmen who did not view the Beatles as a threat to Christian values. The junior and senior classes, mostly effete, anglophobe traditionalists, took the position that folk music (Peter, Paul and Mary, Odetta, Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio, the New Christy Minstrels) was a force for social good, while rock ’n’ roll was a depraved art form that celebrated carnal lust. Underclassmen made no attempt to challenge this view, conceding that folk music boasted infinitely more intellectual content than rock ’n’ roll. But folk music’s merits notwithstanding, we preferred the harsher, less moral, less cerebral genre epitomized by the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Rolling Stones, not only because it was a socially acceptable way of thumbing our noses at our elders but because it did not involve the banjo.

I learned the art of diplomacy in the seminary. I was compassionate toward a boy who was afraid to let anyone in the locker room see what he believed to be a grievously undersized penis—a gallant gesture on my part, considering how mercilessly he ridiculed my sad, arcless jump shot when we were out on the basketball court. I was less compassionate toward a boy who refused to bathe. But in neither case did my compassion extend to actually intervening when the upperclassmen lowered their sights on the two unfortunates. In the first instance, they ripped the towel away from the young man’s hips, causing him to erupt in tears, though in the long run the assault was probably good for him, as it immediately became clear that his penis was no more undersized than most. The upperclassmen’s ministrations were less well received by the boy who refused to bathe, a Rust Belt stalwart who literally stank to high heaven. Though many felt that he was only getting what he had coming to him, this did not make his howls of protest any less searing when a gang of seminarians overpowered him, stripped him naked, forced him into an industrial-sized sink, and scrubbed him down with a bath brush. This was painful and humiliating; they enjoyed it and he didn’t. He felt betrayed that none of us had defended him, and even though he smelled like rancid cheese, he was right to feel that way. We were supposed to be Soldiers of Christ, and Christ would not have abandoned even the smelliest adherent in his hour of need.

The priests didn’t always behave so well, either. The first weekend of every month was brightened by Visitation Sunday, when parents and relatives were free to enter campus at one in the afternoon and stay until five. They were also allowed to take us off the grounds to a restaurant or a department store if they liked, but because it was usually my mother who came to visit, and because my mother did not drive, and because we didn’t have a car anyway, the two of us generally spent the afternoon wandering around the seminary. I recall no details about her visits, other than that she made them, which my father did not. He never visited the seminary the entire time I was there, a warm-up for never visiting the university I would attend four years later, not even on the day I became the first person on his side of the family to graduate from college.

Visitors could bring in as much food as they liked; the cargo was then carried by students to their assigned table in the refectory. Here, six of us broke bread together three times a day. Seating arrangements changed each month, but I used my influence with a couple of upperclassmen to get myself assigned to the same table as the Italians, because they had the best food. Though I had been raised to mistrust, if not actually abhor, Italians, there was no denying that the cuisine favored by this reputedly shifty ethnic group had ours beaten hands down. So I stopped hating them at an early age, deciding to hate Episcopalians instead. One boy stands out in memory: Every month his parents brought him huge aluminum trays overflowing with lasagna, prosciutto, capicola, foot-long salamis. I did not especially care for the boy, who hailed from New York; we did not have much in common. But I sure liked his mom’s cooking. Meanwhile, my mother would turn up with her statutory, store-bought pineapple cheesecake. Until I went away to the seminary, I honestly believed that the pineapple cheesecake was the most sublime of mankind’s wondrous inventions and also assumed that it was the most universally revered. Now I learned otherwise.

After our visitors left, we were allowed to polish off as much of our bountiful harvest as we liked, with the proviso that at the end of the meal, the cornucopia of delights would be commandeered, mixed in with the booty amassed from all the other tables, and redistributed to the entire student body throughout the coming week. My lifelong aversion to socialism probably dates from this moment. The lasagna, the sausages, the prosciutto, the brownies et al. rarely reappeared on the seminarians’ tables; more often than not, they surfaced the next night on the table at the front of the refectory, where the priests sat. The salamis, the brownies, the capicola sat up there on the head table, taunting us, teasing us, serving as cruel, tantalizing symbols of our impotence before our masters. This was exactly the way I imagined things happened in Outer Mongolia and Cuba and Albania and the Ukraine: The commissars promised the masses that the fruits of their labors would be pooled together and redistributed so that everyone got their fair share, but instead things always ended up with the Central Planning Commission stealing all the pastries.

Realizing that we were being royally screwed, some of the seminarians told their parents to bring less food. Not the Italians. Every Visitation Sunday, I would sit there with my olive-skinned
amici
after our parents had left, and we would force-feed ourselves everything in sight. Down our adolescent throats we would jam hot sausages, fettuccine drowning in seven cheeses, potato gnocchi, spinach ravioli, fresh cannolis, and even Mom’s pineapple cheesecake, consuming these delights in no particular order. Like detainees in Stalag 17, we were not going to let our treasures fall into the hands of the enemy; we’d rather puke up our guts for three days running. Admittedly, walnut-laden brownies and overcooked Genoa salami served with a heaping portion of greasy pineapple cheesecake—all washed down with a vatload of RC Cola—made a disgusting combination. But if self-induced nausea was the only way we could keep our rightful property out of the mouths of the clergy, then nausea it would be.

One youth from the Buckeye State was even more daring than the rest of us; he used to hide his foot-long salamis in his closet—inside his shoes—doling out a slice at a time to bunkmates, both to keep us happy and to keep us quiet. Someone must have ratted him out, though, for one spring evening, our hall monitor came sweeping through the dorm room on a surprise inspection. This was unfortunate timing, because at that moment we were all clustered around a contraband transistor radio listening for reports from the second Sonny Liston-Muhammad Ali fight, which was taking place in Lewiston, Maine. As soon as the priest flicked on the lights, we shut off the radio and plunged beneath our covers. The priest found the stash—I always suspected that the Lord of the Sty had informed on the Boy with the Golden Salami, though this may have been more because of the obvious olfactory link between the two than because of any clear-cut evidence of betrayal—and by the time we turned the radio back on, the one-minute-forty-two-second fight was over. We were not at all happy about this. Shortly after that, the boy who never bathed got held down for his brutal scrubbing.

 

Almost no one who passed through the Maryknoll Junior Seminary between 1964 and 1966 became a priest; the institution was padlocked in 1967 and sold to the Baptists a few years later. This is not surprising. The decline of the Catholic Church in America had begun in the early 1960s, when the nation was torn apart by political, racial, generational, and cultural conflict. The Church was being challenged on all fronts—it was reactionary, it was insensitive, it was too dependent on hoary ritual and archaic mumbo jumbo, it was not sufficiently consumer oriented—and in an attempt to short-circuit these criticisms, a bevy of mutton-headed attempts at modernization was put into place. One was deep-sixing the Latin Mass; another was deemphasizing the organ in favor of the guitar; a third was the introduction of a sinister camaraderie among parishioners, manifested in compulsory handshakes and prefabricated words of mandatory cheer. In the essay I had written the previous year, the prize-winning composition whose admonitions the Vatican had inexplicably chosen to ignore, I had singled out the repudiation of the Latin Vulgate as an innovation that would destroy the Church in America; had I written the same essay just a few years later, I would have thrown in a few choice words about the threat posed to Catholics everywhere by the introduction of folk masses. In my opinion, no institution could long survive a rupture from its ancestral cultural moorings; by encouraging feeble young clerics to array themselves against the forces of Lucifer armed only with the instruments of cabaret, the Church was attempting to achieve with the hootenanny what it could no longer achieve through faith. In these assumptions, I was proven woefully prescient.