That is, until 1972, when things took an unexpected twist, and I would never look at church the same way again.
I was eleven and was at that awkward stage where I felt like neither a boy nor a girl, and I liked it that way. Some people never get over that—David Bowie and Prince both spring to mind. I studied, I fantasized about kissing nonthreatening powder-puff rockers like Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy, and I cried at the end of Black Beauty. Today, I still cry at the end of black beauty, but now it’s in reference to a penis. I was just rolling through life, keeping my nose clean, and suddenly, the edict came down: All three of us kids would have to attend church with my mother for all forty days of Lent every single night at five o’clock. I had never loved church in the first place, always feeling embarrassed at the way my mom and my sister sang just a little too loud during the hymns, dreading the moment one of them would toss in a prayer “for the safety and health of our families” during the part where you were allowed to pray out loud (fuckin’ show-offs!). Church had always been a chore, but now that we had to do our “forty in forty,” church became a punishment, like Chinese water torture or sitting through anything that stars Steven Seagal.
As Lent came to a close that year, I was more than a little relieved. I endured Holy Thursday Mass, which was a little more tolerable ’cause, as a more special Mass than those ordinary, dreary daily ones, it was a prime people-watching opportunity. Holy Thursday is the warm-up Mass for Easter; in fact, the congregation’s clothes became nicer and their hair grew higher as the big day approached. After Holy Thursday, we geared up for Good Friday. For those of you who don’t know, Good Friday is the most ill-named holy day in the Roman Catholic religion. It is the day that Jesus died on the cross, so when you think about it, it really wasn’t a very good Friday for Jesus. Good Friday in our house was the day that we had to sit in silence—that’s right, no TV, no playing, no nothin’—from noon to three P.M. because, according to authorities, those were precisely the three hours that Jesus died on the cross. Fun stuff, huh? Now I know how people must feel when they see Tracy Morgan perform live.
The absolute worst thing about Good Friday was a torture ritual known as the Stations of the Cross, a bizarre routine where you sit, kneel, stand, and circle the inside of the church to replicate the hell Jesus suffered during his last few hours on earth. In short, it’s aerobics for the devout. Up, down, up, down—the Stations of the Cross are so boring, it’s like doing the StairMaster without your iPod. To make matters worse, they blow incense in your face—not the kind you burn so your parents don’t smell pot, the kind they burn to kill the smell of rotting corpses.
Luckily, the day wasn’t all doom and gloom—on Good Friday we were rewarded for our sorrow with a trip to McDonald’s for the Catholic-friendly choice on the menu, the Filet-O-Fish, since the “No meat on Fridays” rule was especially important during Lent. And does McDonald’s ever cash in with the Catholics during Lent! I remember one year I ate so many Lenten Happy Meals, I collected a Pontius Pilate action figure and seven of the twelve apostles.
Possibly due to our bitching, whining, and moaning, my mother let the “forty Masses in forty days” go the next Lent. In ’73, she had a better idea. In some kind of weird outreach program, churches started offering Masses in the home. Of course, after the movie The Exorcist, most people stopped having priests over. But not my mom! She figured why drive those excruciating five minutes up the street to Most Precious Blood—finally and mercifully renamed Christ the King Church, thereby nominally reducing its creep factor—when you could invite a priest into your home, practice your best manners, and serve him ziti afterward? Guess who’s coming to dinner? No, not Sidney Poitier, motherfuckers! It’s Father Doro.
As priests go, Father Doro was pretty cool. An old guy of around thirty-five—when you’re twelve, everybody seems “old”—he said a rather uneventful Mass at our house for our immediate family. The Mass was in the evening, thank God, because the usual pressure to stay awake during the service was on in full force. Nobody noticed when you nodded off at Sunday Mass when you were surrounded by three hundred people, but when you’re one of five, you better keep your eyes open or a beat-down is comin’ your way.
A little later that year, puberty was in full swing for me, and everything was hot. When you come from a repressed Catholic family, sex seems to pop up everywhere, and nowhere was it more present than at church. I had always found Jesus pretty attractive—his muscle tone was beyond reproach and he had died for my sins (that’s commitment)—but now hotness in church came in the form of a visiting Latino priest, Father Guilliani, and he was muy caliente, indeed.
I first noticed Father Guilliani when I joined the folk group at Christ the King. Always craving attention and having figured out the three guitar chords every good song was made up of—C, F, and G—I signed up to practice twice a week and play at ten o’clock Mass every Sunday. From the folk group’s spot on the altar—three steps above the congregation—I could scan the crowd for cute guys, have a clear view of the hot Jesus statue, and gawk at Padre El Guapo. Since our folk group was allowed to play “cool” music, I serenaded the visiting priest with renditions of “Both Sides Now” and “The Impossible Dream,” imagining that he would follow his impossible dream of leaving the priesthood and running away Thorn Birds–style with a twelve-year-old former tomboy.
Looking back, I think this fantasy made my penchant for black men a natural transition. Dating a black guy is a lot like dating a priest—they’re forbidden, they don’t want kids, and if your family catches you banging one, they kick you out. I was snapped back to reality one day when my mother casually mentioned that Father Guilliani was no more. Alas, he was going back to his native Guatemala, Panama, or whatever Third World country he hailed from to help the financially bankrupt people of South America instead of the spiritually bankrupt middle-class folks of Trumbull, Connecticut. Either that or he was offered a job saying prayers at the beginning of the cockfights. I forget which.
Things had really changed for me since my days of playing nun with my sister in our backyard when we were six and eight. I had gone from wearing one of my brother’s cloth diapers on my head and pretending to take Communion with a most pious look and heavy-lidded eyes to bawling over a departed man of God whom I could never have. But by then, there was no turning back. As my mother made a small sign of the cross on her forehead every time we passed a church, I crossed my fingers that another piece of eye candy like Father Guilliani would make his way to us. But no matter how many times I listened to “If” by Bread, my prayers went unanswered and another paunchy Irish priest with a gin-blossomed nose took his place. It is not surprising that I eventually lost faith.
Church became something to avoid, and the minute I turned sixteen, I was licensed to skip. My partner in crime was my little brother, Leonard, who by thirteen was cooler than I’ll ever be. Our church became the video game arcade of the Trumbull Shopping Park—also ironically five minutes from our suburban home. The church and the arcade each five minutes away! There might as well have been an angel and devil on my shoulders. Every Sunday, my brother and I would jump into my grandfather’s old Plymouth Duster, look at each other, and say, “So, where’re we going?” and off we’d go to spend fifty minutes with Ms. Pac-Man, Asteroids, and Moon Patrol. With a quick stop at church to pick up a weekly bulletin—written proof that we’d been there—we’d get home just in time to spend the day with the family, silently praying that no one would ask us, “So, how was the sermon?” Luckily, at that age, kids are known to be sullen and shrug a lot, so whenever the question came up, we got through it by grunting and, if all else failed, storming upstairs and slamming the door. And if my folks pushed for an answer, I could always say, “I don’t remember because someone ripped one and I couldn’t stop laughing,” which no one would question because there is nothing funnier than a fart vibrating off a wooden pew during the homily.
Once I went off to college, church became a moot point. Sin
ce all my life my mother had served as our alarm clock—providing us with some rude awakenings—I’d lay awake every Sunday morning and watch the minutes tick by, waiting for her to rustle me up for that morning’s service. The first week I came home from college, there was no knock at my door. As the departure time for the family approached, I was still “sleeping” and no one had made an attempt to rouse me. As the door quietly shut behind the rest of the family, I realized that I had won the fight. My mother had given up—she would no longer struggle to get a scowling, sulky teenager to Sunday Mass. A slight feeling of being left behind washed over me and for a moment, I felt totally alone.
Hallelujah! My prayers had been answered!
Oh, c’mon—it’s not like they weren’t coming back.
In the thirty years since then, I have only attended church a handful of times—once to get married, a half-dozen times to see people get married, and a few times to participate in confirmations, baptisms, funerals, and other rituals. I have proudly held my nephew Luke and my niece Eve, serving as their godmother, which gives me the written, church-sanctioned permission to spoil them for the rest of their lives. Also, in those thirty years, I have only dined with one other priest, Father John, the priest who performed my marriage and my nephew’s baptism and was later dismissed because of his, ahem, infidelities. I like to think that Father John is happier now that he’s out of the priesthood, and I have to think that while he was eating with us, he was entertaining only the purest of thoughts. Hey, I can dream too.
Oh, and Father Guilliani, on the off chance that you’re reading this and have left the priesthood, give a bitch a call. I think the two of us could have uno goodo tiempo, Papi!
CHAPTER SEVEN
School Daze, or I’ll Have an Honor Roll with Extra Jelly, Please
Every class has a fat, smelly kid who eats paper, paste, and boogers. In my class, that kid’s name was Dominic.
Dominic is always blamed if there’s a fart smell in the room. Dominic always looks a little dirty. And he usually has dandruff, zits, and greasy hair—and sometimes all of that’s in his ears.
Oh, and one more thing: Dominic is the kid you never, ever want to sit next to in class. ’Cause in Catholic school, seating assignments are for life—or at least what feels like life, an entire school year. Sitting next to Dominic is the grammar school equivalent of being stuck next to the fat guy on an airplane for almost ten months—only worse, because you can’t pretend to be asleep.
Fourth grade was the grade my luck ran out. I sailed through my first three years at Most Precious Blood grammar school with no problems that I can remember. In fact, I floated through my first few grades in a state that can only be called delusional. I liked everyone, everyone liked me, and I thought it would stay that way forever. Then came Ms. Haas’s fourth-grade class and my seating assignment next to Dominic.
“Offer it up as a sacrifice,” said Ms. Haas.
That was every Catholic school teacher’s stock answer: “Offer it up as a sacrifice.”
Don’t like playing kickball in gym class? Offer it up as a sacrifice. Don’t like having religion class every single day? Offer it up as a sacrifice. And don’t like your seating assignment next to Mr. Stink for the entire year? You better damn sure offer it up as a sacrifice—and hold your freakin’ nose. Every time I heard those six infuriating words, I felt like screaming, “Hey, Sister, if my parents really wanted me to sacrifice, they would’ve sent me to public school.” I mean, here we were shelling out big bucks for this bullshit—so I figured they either owed me a new seat or Ol’ Smelly a bar of soap.
Soon after entering the classroom that September, I discovered the entire year would be one big sacrifice. But unlike the typical sacrificial lamb, I had a little something in me that said, “We’re not gonna take it,” long before Twisted Sister was a twinkle in Dee Snider’s mascara-lined eye. I may have been a scrawny nine-year-old with crooked teeth and even crooked-er bangs, but I wasn’t about to lie down and accept it. Like my grandpa in the nursing home used to say to the nurses, “Hey, bitch, if I wanted to smell shit all day, I wouldn’t be paying you to change my Depends.”
After being shut down by Ms. Haas when I tried to plead my case for a new seat assignment, I silently decided that she was the enemy. This bitch couldn’t be trusted. One of the few teachers at the school who wasn’t a nun, Ms. Haas was a rebel in her own right—she wore pants—but her rebellion benefitted only her. She lounged at the front of the classroom, her chubby legs and cankles extended under her desk, her arms folded behind her head, elbows akimbo, while we sat with hands folded and ankles crossed under our desks in uncomfortable, poly-blend, plaid sandpaper uniforms. We stared in disbelief, our mouths watering, as she cracked open one of the many boxes of Girl Scout cookies she kept in her desk—cookies that she devoured one at a time as we licked our chops and tried to calculate how much longer it was until lunchtime.
And what I would have given for that kind of lunch—a lunch of Thin Mints, Do-Si-Dos, Tagalongs, and Trefoils! But no, my mother had different ideas when it came to nutrition, and they were a source of misery and embarrassment on a daily basis, which coincidentally is the theme of the entire Catholic school system.
Let me explain: To this day, I love a nice bologna sandwich. Yep, a bologna sandwich—and not just to attract the black men either. If you asked me what would be my perfect food day, it would consist of a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast, a bologna sandwich—on Wonderbread, of course—for lunch, and a Swanson’s fried chicken TV dinner for supper. “Why such bland, processed food?” you might ask. ’Cause as any amateur shrink will tell you, you always crave what you never got in childhood. And what I got in my lunch bag at school was anything but bland, anything but bologna.
For example, there were the stuffed pepper sandwiches. Yep—as if stuffed peppers weren’t fatty, greasy, and smelly enough the night before for dinner, my mom figured we’d love ’em the second time around at lunch. Now, it’s one thing to eat stuffed peppers when they’re hot. It’s quite another to eat them when they’re slimy enough to make a frat boy puke. On a weekly basis, my mother would wedge this dinnertime “treat” between two slices of thin white bread that were hardly a barrier to their seeping, oily goodness. By the time lunchtime arrived, my sandwich would be a wet, soppy mess, and the brown paper bag was nearly see-through, the shiny, slippery mass a beacon that screamed, “I’m Italian! I’m different! No wonder I sit next to smelly Dominic!” In a grade where fitting in is everything, I stood out, and I wasn’t happy about it.
And speaking of which, yes, I was stuck with a brown paper bag. I didn’t even get a cool lunch pail—like one with the Fonz on it. I had a ratty old bag, although for almost two weeks, I convinced people it was a Sanford and Son lunch box.
Needless to say, with my lunches, there were no trades from my classmates. Trust me—nobody wants to swap their raisins or cupcakes for a stuffed pepper sandwich. The only thing I ever got in exchange for one of my mom’s meals was a “Yeah, right, bitch!” You know how sometimes mothers send little messages in the lunches they pack? My friends’ moms’ messages were things like “I love you.” The message I got was “Your father doesn’t like leftovers.”
Fourth grade was also the first time I remember standing up to authority, the one theme that has been constant throughout the rest of my life.
My first opportunity to look the higher-ups straight in the eye and flip them off came in the form of my little brother, Leonard, who had started first grade that year. He was my pride and joy—I thought he was adorable and perfect—and when I found out he was cast to play the lead in his class production of Casper, the Friendly Ghost, I couldn’t wait until the day of the show. As Halloween approached, I grew more and more excited to show off my little brother—after all, I knew him when he was nobody—and witness him in the starring role.
Well, one thing or another happened in class that day, and Ms. Haas threatened our unruly class: “Keep misbehaving and you won’
t be allowed to attend the school play today.” My head shot up from the penis I was doodling in a school library book. If this bitch wanted my attention, she had it! In my first ever “Do you have any idea who I am?” moment, I asked to go to the girls’ room and marched directly across the hall into the principal’s office instead. This was my first recollection of ever going over somebody’s head, and I remember it felt great!
“My brother is the star of that show, and I’m going!” I told Sister Catherine, our principal. Rightfully taken aback, Sister stared at me in disbelief. “Ms. Haas is saying we can’t go to the show, and I’m going. If she won’t change her mind, I’m calling my mom.” Whether she was impressed by my ballsy attitude, afraid of the famous Lampanelli temper, or just wanted to get the smell of old stuffed pepper sandwich out of her office, Sister Catherine did the job and told Ms. Haas that yes, indeed, our grade would be attending the performance. I beamed happily from a pew in the church-cum-auditorium as my brother made his entrance covered in a sheet and said his lines, “Booo” and “Oooo,” in the right order. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It would have been perfect if I didn’t have to sit next to that smelly ass Dominic.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to high school. Either it is the best time of your life or the worst time of your life. My high school experience, however, was somewhere in between. My high school years were consumed with boys, tennis team, drama club, and a relationship captured perfectly in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.
Like Romy and Michele, I thought I was having a blast. I thought everyone liked me. And I thought there were no cooler people in the school than me and my best friend. Only instead of palling around with another girl, my Romy came in the form of a boy: Jimmy Pantelones.
Jimmy absolutely defied category. I had never met anyone like him before. A mischievous, short, sexually ambiguous guy who seemed to be balding from the age of ten—and by the way, if you’re reading this, Jimmy, I mean that in the most complimentary of ways—Jimmy was smart but cool, rich but relatable, studious but dabbled in pot. (And by the way, if Jimmy’s kids are reading this, by “pot,” I mean…oh, fuck it! That bald hermaphrodite couldn’t possibly have any kids!) In short, the guy was beyond description. And we were inseparable for four solid years.
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