Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (17 page)

Are you there, God? It’s me, Scott. Than,’ you for this yarmulke-sized tonsure, Thank you for all its wonderful advantages: not having to wash my hair, not worrying about high wind, and not having to be concerned about having to date girls anymore. Speaking of which, please don’t male me gay, either
.

God did not take the theological bait. It proved maddeningly difficult to pull one over on the All-Knowing, so prayer slipped by the wayside for a decade. When I arrived at Saint Anthony Shrine, I met people like Sherwin, a gay former member of Opus Dei, who regularly dropped Sorrowful Mysteries and Glory-Bes and Liturgies of the Hours into conversation. Sherwin had a rosewood rosary with carved roses for beads that stank of rosewood oil. (Overkill much?) He also had a finger rosary for driving. Filled with energy and not the least self-consciousness, he rattled on about morning prayers, evening prayers, prayers in the car, prayers with song, and blahblahblah.

“What are you talking about, dude?” I asked. “You pray in the morning
and
the evening
and
in the car
and
… ?”

“Yeah,” he said brightly. “How about you? How’s your prayer life?”

He might as well have asked me what my boccie life was like. “Well, I do try to squeak a short one in after I brush my teeth,” I said.

The smile on Sherwin’s face froze.

“Also after communion,” I said, “if I’m not planning an afternoon of trying to put people in jail for securities fraud.”

The light in his eyes went out.

“Belly-button-lint gazing.” I begged. “Does that count? That I do all the time.”

Poverty comes in many forms. The look on Sherwin’s face told me I had found mine. If the government ever got into the business of doling out spiritual welfare, I’d be first in line.

A few years at the Shrine and a steady campaign of saintly intercession by people like Sherwin produced minor improvement: good old-fashioned beseeching came back to me. I prayed that the networks cancel Ye Olde Piety Show on account of its low ratings. I prayed for the conversion of Bay State politicians on the same-sex marriage issue. My most fervent requests went skyward for the gay conversions of Brad Pitt and Jerry Falwell — each for a different reason, of course.

Dealmaking also re-entered my repertoire: If God permitted me to survive this lightning-stricken hike in the Rockies, I’d devote myself to a porn-free life of charity and chastity. I offered to swap three-quarters of my everlasting soul in return for President Bush getting caught soliciting police officers disguised as underage boys in the public rest-rooms on the Capitol Mall.

Over time, dealmaking and beseeching gave way to occasional thanksgiving and, of course, prayers for others. My parents had always been big on bedtime prayers. They began with the ghoulish standby:

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take
.

followed by
God Bless Mommy and Daddy
and litanies of siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, godparents, babysitters, schoolteachers, garbage collectors, old ladies who lived alone, and starving children in Africa. I had approximately 3,700 Irish cousins, so it took an hour each night just to get through the list. In the interest of efficiency, I developed a clever shorthand; I just prayed for Ireland as a whole — and Africa.
God bless Ireland. God bless Africa
. That way, no one missed out, and I skipped to the all-important beseeching portion of my prayer program.

At Saint Anthony Shrine, my greatest concern was keeping my prayers for others fresh. I constantly sought people I hadn’t yet prayed for or hadn’t prayed for lately. I wanted to keep it interesting for God, and be a sassy, unpredictable petitioner, pulling in a soul from left field that He hadn’t heard about in a long time.

Soon, I was resurrecting people from my distant past, those whose acquaintance was so short I didn’t catch a name, those who had always annoyed me, fraudsters bound for the Big House, those who were going to hell no matter what I did, and the little children who lived next to my grandparents in Ireland and woke me at dawn like a firing squad, shooting relentless questions at me in hopes that I would say something — anything at all — in a Boston Hahvahd Yahd accent I did not actually possess.
God bless Ireland
.

A heavy workload and my perennial tardiness gave rise to the following prayer:

Now I arrive in church so late,
I pray the Lord not stride my pate.
If I forget the words to read,
I hope that He will intercede
.

God bless, uh, um
…

By virtue of proximity rather than by virtue of virtue, the Hale Marys received thousands of requests for blessings. The friars received fewer, because they had a head start in the salvation game, and it was time to give someone else a fighting chance. My skinflint prayer for O’Malley went something like this:
Lord, may You not cause Sean to catch typhoid pneumonia
.

Chewbacca always proved easy to pray for. His arm had atrophied. One leg drew up into his hips. He held his oversize head at an angle so that he appeared to be an aquatic creature surfacing from the deep. An insulated canvas lunch box hung over the back of his wheelchair. He usually parked near my pew, leaving just enough room for me to exit to do my readings. During the introductory rite, his bellows and grunts were like the ill-timed, incoherent snorts of a beached whale — a vast, proud, dying animal — and they regularly threw me off my rhythm, which made me realize how much I depended on others to recite my prayers in the same measured tones as me.

But God had left Chewbacca the ability to laugh, provided Francis the Franciscan Friar had decent homiletic material
God bless Chewbacca God bless every snort and bellow. God bless all of us who race to shake his crimped hand at the sign of peace, hoping that his holiness might rub off
.

Tabernacle Sports

Racing to touch the hem of Chewbacca’s wheelchair wasn’t the only competitive sport at the Shrine. Welcome to the Saint Anthony Regional Ultimate Tabernacle Fighting Championships.

Our contestants, two fellow lay ministers, were replacing one of the Hale Marys who was playing hooky. In one corner was a black man with a Bill Cosby face, a pear-shaped body, and a sport jacket matched with basketball sneakers. In the other: the Cape Verdean queen whom Father Abraham had reduced to tears. Her Highness had a gorgeous accent, sensible heels, and a magnificent booty.

Before the presider had finished his homily, Cosby and Her Highness jumped the gun. They leapt from the pews, dodged Chewbacca, and sprinted toward the tabernacle faster than the disciples to the tomb of the risen Lord. In front of the tabernacle, Cosby and Her Highness jostled for advantage like a couple of basketball players beneath the rim. Her Highness went for the bread. Cosby boxed her out. She feinted left for the cruets, but Cosby’s bulk prevailed. Loading up on bread, chalice, water,
and
wine, Cosby downshifted his smug expression into servility and barreled toward the altar, conveying the ciborium of consecrated hosts as if it were the platter bearing John the Baptist’s head.

Muttering to herself, Her Highness returned to her pew. Had she a Cosby doll in hand, she would have riddled it with hairpins. She prayed fiercely for Cosby to screw up — chalices to fly, the body of Christ to hit the floor, communion wine to stain the altar linens.

At the sign of peace moments later, she turned to me and said, “Peace be with you.”

“And you, Your Highness.” I said, and I damn well meant it. Her Highness may not have the same moral underpinnings, but she had the heart of a womanpriest — and infinitely more booty.

The sanctuary filled with distractions: the clamor of delivery trucks in the rear of the church; an impatient taxi driver blaring his horn; the mutterings of Her Highness; the siren of an ambulance come to pick up the body of a homeless man; the pre-Vatican II rosary whisperings of participants in Ye Olde Piety Show; and Chewbacca’s grunts. Secular musings overwhelmed my prayer experience:
How many copies of
Hot Sauce
did we sell at the Castro reading?
…
Is Her Highness a closet lesbo? Could she be recruited if I found her the right girl? How could Scott and I put new life in the naughty-altar-boy game?

The communion line arrested my vagrant attention. Parishioners moved toward the altar like boxcars in a railroad yard. Their steady, mechanical, inevitable motion reassured me, as did Father Francis’s murmuring “Body of Christ,” the communicants’ responding, “Amen,” the squeak of shoes on marble, the flutter of hands at the sign of the cross, the bob of genuflection, and the beatific expressions.

And the asses —
Mea culpa
. Here’s where the vagrant mind causes trouble. Her Highness wasn’t the only person blessed from behind. God had been generous:

God bless the intense student with blue eyes, a strong nose, tight buns, and a heavy backpack who gave twice as much as I did to the collection basket. God bless the salt-and-pepper investment hanker, a dead ringer for Anderson Cooper, who plopped his plow able posterior in a pew near the right-hand aisle. God bless the Latino with blue-collar biceps, a bubble butt, and thighs like an Olympic speed skater
,

I was head-over-heels in love — with the student, Anderson Cooper, the Latino — every one of them. And not a mere crush, not a catch-his-eye-he’s-kind-of-cute-I’d-do-him-on-a-slow-night passing fancy. I’m talking Love with a capital
L:
immediate, 150-proof, throw-your-Armani-coat-on-the-ground-so-he-can-walk-over-puddles-and-not-get-his-feet-wet, please-walk-across-my-chest-in-your-stiletto-heels-and-make-me-carry-your-suitcases, this-alone-would-content-me kind of love; love that makes you put aside breathing and nutrition in favor of showering the object of your tumid affections with fistfuls of expensive rocks and bright shiny bling of every description; love that made me realize what I had previously called love was mere turds in a toilet, a tissue of indiscriminate lies, a maggotry empty of substance or meaning.

Was it sinful to check out the other communicants? Would it have been more godly to block them out, to pretend that I was eating alone, to keep my eyes closed and my hands clasped and my face tilted toward the floor? No, gazing at them became a form of wordless prayer, a raid on the inarticulate as pure as Chewbacca’s grunting, an expression of gratitude for the richness of the world He had created.

God bless the Shrine, Amen
.

Baltimore Catechism Apocrypha

Q, Does God hate fags?

A. No, that’s an unfortunate misspelling. God hates fats. And flags, too, Mindless patriotism that results in hopeless wars on foreign people does not please Him. Anyway, God couldn’t hate fags as much as I do when a pair of dime-a-dozen, bleached-blond, impossibly gorgeous, smooth-chested, plucked, pouting pretty boys with pipe-cleaner arms sipping Cosmos and texting madly about Paris and Lindsay put themselves between me and’ my martini, goddamnit
That's
 hate.

Q. What caused the drop in religious vocations among straight men?

A. Gays. Bishop Wilton Gregory, former president of the
US
. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has blamed a frightening “homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexual young men think twice” about entering the seminary,

Q. What are the rules of the eucharistic ministry?

A. Start with a centering prayer. Then wash your hands. (God only knows where they’ve been!) Set out the bread, water, and wine in their respective containers. Get the key to the tabernacle. Reverence it. Make sure spare hosts are available in case there’s a rush. Sit in the first pew. Make eye contact with the communicants, Deny communion to the gay ones. Say “Body of Christ.” Place wafer in whatever body part is offered. Bring unused hosts back, to tabernacle Kneel,’ Lock them up. Put the key in the sacristy. Return to pew. And if you screw up, well turn you over to Father Bear-Daddy.

Q. What’s with all the holy dishwashing the priest does with the goblet and little brass cookie plate? Can't the Church exploit illegal immigrants to do that like the rest of us?

A. You’re going to hell just for asking that.

Q. What does a cry out to heaven sound like?

A. Lots of kissy noises, snuffles, grunts, and aaahhhs. Not unlike straight sex, actually. But without a woman’s voice asking, “Are you done yet?"

Q. Why does eyebrow plucking invariably cause a gay man to sneeze?

A, This is one of God’s enduring mysteries.

Captain of the Team

A few weeks after the showdown between Her Highness and Mr. Cosby, Father Bear-Daddy summoned me and the other members of the Lay Ministry Committee to a cramped fifth-floor room at the Shrine. The first order of business: the bait-and-switchers, a new breed of wayward communicant, who were rumored to approach an unsuspecting eucharistic minister with tongue lolling, only to stick out cupped hands at the last minute. Or they came with hands out, but opened wide with no time to spare. The Lay Ministry Committee discussed the phenomenon at length, but all I could think about was a filthy parochial-school joke about pedophile priests that an old girlfriend recently told me. You know the one — it ends with the immortal punch line, “In the mouth or on the tongue?”