by John Grogan
Neither was my mother’s. She was physically incapable of receiving Holy Communion without bursting into tears. I don’t mean tearing up a little; I mean bawling. It was as predictable as the sunrise. She would file up to the altar rail, hands folded, eyes respectfully down, but looking just fine. If she recognized someone in line, she would smile, even wink. Then she would swallow the host, and by the time she was back in the pew and on her knees, the tears would be streaming down her cheeks like she had just been informed her entire family was lost at sea. Everyone knelt after communion; that was expected. But Mom knelt in a pose of utter surrender, her face buried in her hands resting on the back of the pew in front of her, fat tears falling to the floor.
The Lord was inside her now; she was helpless to resist.
Communion would end, and the priest would work through his ritualistic chalice cleaning as the congregation continued to kneel. When he was finished, he would announce, “Let us stand.”
And everyone would stand. Everyone except Mom, who would
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remain in her kneeling position, head down, face buried, snorting and sniffling away, lost in her communion with Christ. When I was little, I found great amusement in Mom’s boo-hooing, but as I grew older the last thing I wanted was to stand out in a crowd.
I just wanted her to get up when everyone else got up, and to try to keep the waterworks to a minimum. Sometimes she stayed there with her head down right through the recessional hymn, and even as the church emptied around her. It was an amazing thing to watch. She was totally swept away, oblivious to anything around her. I marveled at how something so simple—swallowing a small wheat wafer—could bring such an emotional reaction. I tried to share it. I would swallow the host and squeeze my eyes shut and try to feel Christ inside me. But I felt nothing, nothing but a low burn in my stomach, the host’s reminder that I had fasted and was hungry for breakfast. Why, I wondered, was I not able to experience the same blissful magic? Maybe I was doing something wrong. I concentrated with all my might, burying my head in my hands like she did and beckoning the Lord into my soul. Still nothing. If he ever visited, he certainly was stealthy about it. I didn’t waste any energy worrying about it, and soon I learned the art of daydreaming while appearing to be deep in prayer.
When Tim was home from college, it never occurred to me why he always chose to attend a service other than the one my parents attended. Then one Sunday shortly after I graduated from Our Lady of Refuge I tagged along with him and found out.
As we walked over, he asked, “Are you going in or coming with me?” At first I didn’t know what he meant, and then it struck me: He wasn’t going to Mass. He never went to Mass. Tim, I found out that day, had stopped attending years earlier, at least whenever he could get away with it, carefully covering his tracks to keep it from our parents. He knew it would crush them.
Part of his cover was to swing by the church and peer in the doors just as the service was starting. He had learned that Dad
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always asked what priest was on the altar, not as a way of checking up on his kids but because he was genuinely curious. He followed the priests like a gambler follows racehorses. By getting a positive ID, Tim could nonchalantly answer, “Father Schroeder,”
or whoever it happened to be.
“We need to spot the priest, then we’ve got an hour to kill,”
Tim said. “I usually go over to Saint Mary’s and walk around.”
Saint Mary’s was a Catholic prep school, college, and seminary directly across Commerce Road from our neighborhood. Its primary purpose was to train future priests. It might sound coun-terintuitive, skipping Mass to hang around a Catholic seminary, but the grounds of Saint Mary’s were breathtaking; it was one of the most serene places on the planet. Situated on a bluff overlooking Orchard Lake, a smaller, more bucolic twin to Cass Lake, the campus long ago had housed a military academy and was studded with castlelike brick buildings and oak trees that had stood there since before the Civil War. Tim and I strolled the shady paths and sat in the grass looking out over the water. With his slightly longish hair and quirky taste in clothes, Tim was impossibly cool in my estimation, and I was honored that he had trusted me with his secret. Getting caught skipping Mass, we both knew, would be tantamount to an act of family treason.
It was one of those perfect summer days that made all the lousy Michigan weather worth it. The marvels of nature were everywhere—in the sun on our faces, the breeze in our hair, the birds surrounding us with song. Tim squinted across the water, its rippled surface dazzled with a million shards of sunlight, and said, “Now this is my kind of religious experience.” His words took me aback. It had not before occurred to me that there could be any religious experience other than the one drilled into us at home and church and school. I thought about that for a few seconds and decided it was my kind, too. From that day forward, whenever he was home from college, Tim and I sneaked off each Sunday morning to spend an hour communing with nature—and
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each other. Brother to brother. We jokingly christened our new faith the Church of Tim and John. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that summer was a turning point for me—the point at which I stopped trying to feel the same religious fervor as my parents.
I rarely skipped Mass without my brother, but from then on I attended in body only, reciting the words from memory while my mind roamed to the far corners of the planet.
That September, Tommy and all the others started at West Bloomfield, and I headed off to Brother Rice. My friends were now free to wear jeans and T-shirts and grow out their hair; I reported to school each morning in dress shirt, navy slacks, tie, and loafers.
I settled into my new routine without complaint, going from class to class and sitting quietly during study hall, staying beneath the brothers’ radar. I became friendly with a few boys, but it wasn’t the same as with Tommy, Rock, or Sack. My new classmates had all grown up together at Saint Regis, the Catholic elementary school next to Brother Rice. They were clubby, and I was a stranger peering in from the periphery.
In the opening weeks of the school year, the old gang would still convene each afternoon down at the beach or at the smoking tree or behind the football field at Saint Mary’s. They told me all about their new world and the cast of characters that in-habited it—the desirable girls and cool older kids and druggies who showed up high every day. In great detail, they described various romantic pursuits and failures. And I told them what I could about my new world. Honestly, there wasn’t much to tell.
The only bright spot was that Barbie Barlow’s parents had sent her to Marian next door, but she might as well have been at the Sorbonne. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of her in the distance across the moat, playing soccer or waiting for her ride, but I never got any closer. She was like a mirage, shimmering in the distance.
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One day after school, Tommy pulled a cigarette from his pocket and ran it beneath his nostrils. It was different from other cigarettes I had seen, fat in the middle with twisted ends. “Time to smoke a doobie,” he said brightly and lit up. The joint worked its way around the circle, and when it came to me I hesitated only briefly before sucking in a mouthful of smoke. I had no desire to try marijuana—it scared me—but I was more afraid of losing my friends. Somehow they had all graduated to pot without me even knowing it. I held the smoke in my mouth, acrid and musky, and consciously tried not to inhale it into my lungs. I believed what the Christian Brothers told us in health class, that a single puff of marijuana could lead in short order to ever more dangerous drugs. In no time you would be a desperate heroin junkie breaking into homes.
Tommy caught me. “Don’t just hold it in your mouth,” he chided. “Inhale it.”
“I am,” I lied.
As the leaves fell and autumn surrendered to winter, my old friends slipped a
way from me. There was no drama or confrontation. They merely forgot about me by degrees. They had new friends now and new social ladders to climb. Gradually they stopped calling, stopped dropping by, stopped inviting me to tag along on Friday nights. I spent most of the rest of that year alone.
Alone at school. Alone at the Our Lady of Refuge rectory each evening, where I earned a dollar an hour as the office boy who answered the phones. Mostly I spent it alone in the basement with the headphones on, listening over and over to Bob Dylan sing
“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and “Desolation Row.” Mom and Dad noticed.
“How’s everything at school?” they would ask at dinner. By now it was just the three of us.
“Fine,” I would say. And I meant it. Things weren’t bad; they weren’t good. They were just . . . flat.
“So, anything new?” they would prod. I had always been the
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chatterbox of the dinner hour, regaling my family with rapid-fire tales of every aspect of my day, even my misdeeds, at least those I thought would draw a laugh.
“Not really,” I would say.
In the spring of that year, 1972, Mom and Dad sat me down.
Mom did the talking, as usual, with Dad nodding silently beside her. “We’ve been thinking, honey,” she said. “If you want to go to West Bloomfield next year, you can. We’re good with that. It’s your decision.”
Dad chimed in: “Whatever you choose, we’ll support.”
I could hardly believe my ears. I knew how important a Catholic education was to them, how much they believed it was the ticket to building character and strong faith. Yet they had also watched Brother Rice turn Tim inside himself, like a turtle retracting into its shell to seal out the world. Now they saw me withdrawing, too.
The joy had gone out of my life; my spirit was nearly suffocated.
In the end, their fear of losing me as they had lost Tim seemed to outweigh their fervor for a religious education.
Now the decision to leave was mine. Brother Rice was not without its merits. Even as a fourteen-year-old, I recognized its academic excellence. Two teachers in particular had found a way to connect with me. There was Mr. Stark, the track coach, who taught Freshman Math for Dummies. That’s not what they called it, but that’s what it was. For the first time in my life, I experienced the thrill of conquering an algebraic equation.
Then there was Brother McKenna, my English composition teacher, who had all the warmth of an Arctic winter. Students loathed him. His standards were ridiculously high and inflexible.
We had to write a personal essay every week, and if it had one misspelling, we would receive zero credit. A scratched-out word or sloppy handwriting would cut the grade in half. He drilled into us the seriousness of our craft and the need to edit our words, to take pride in them, to polish them like gemstones, not presenting them to the world until they were as perfect as humanly pos-
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sible. Writing had always come fairly effortlessly to me, but I was sloppy and undisciplined. He returned paper after paper marked with failing or near-failing grades. Then midway through the school year, he handed back a paper marked with an A. Not a single word of encouragement, just the letter. It was all I needed.
For the first time in my life, I saw there was something I could do as well or better than the other, smarter kids.
Yet the choice to leave was ridiculously easy. After thinking it over for a couple of days, I told Mom and Dad my decision. True to their word, they held their tongues and arranged my transfer.
The school year wound down, and I said good-bye to Mr. Stark and Brother McKenna, who encouraged me to keep writing with these measured words: “When you’re willing to work at it, there’s actually something there.” The last day of school was dedicated to cleaning out lockers and turning in textbooks, and then I was free. The next day would mark the start of vacation and a lazy summer of swimming, sunbathing, and hanging out. It would also mark an event that would make my parents rethink the decision to let me transfer to public school before I even arrived.
Chapter 12
o
Dodge Park was located directly across Cass Lake from Harbor Hills, about a mile away as the crow flies. From The Outlot we could see its large sandy public beaches bristling with lifeguard towers, and the acres of parked cars glimmering in the sun beyond. Dodge Park covered several hundred wooded acres crisscrossed by hiking trails, but its beaches were by far the park’s most popular feature. Teenagers flocked from every school district around to spend summer days there. It was more than just a place to swim and sunbathe; it was a scene. And a huge part of that scene revolved around illegal drug use. Every sunny summer day, Dodge Park took on the feel of a mini-Woodstock. The beaches and sidewalks and picnic areas were crammed with thousands of sunburned teenagers and young adults, most in cutoff blue jeans, the boys bare-chested, the girls in halters or bikini tops. Amateur musicians formed knots, strumming on guitars and banging out rhythms on congas and bongos. Marijuana smoke and the smell of patchouli oil hung in the air, and dealers openly plied their wares. Kids tripping on LSD and hal-
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lucinogenic mushrooms, or merely stoned on pot and hashish, lay on their backs staring up at the sky. The newspapers had begun writing about the park’s growing drug problem; some arrests had been made, and there were community calls to crack down more forcefully so parents could again feel comfortable bringing their children to swim.
Even though Harbor Hills had its own beach, every kid in my neighborhood considered Dodge Park the destination of choice.
In stiflingly boring southeastern Michigan, it was like having our own Haight-Ashbury right across the water. I had managed to make it over there a couple of times the previous summer before Dad caught wind of the mushrooming drug culture and forbade me to enter the park. I tried to argue the point, but he was firm.
“I don’t care if all your friends are going,” he said. “You are not.
We have a perfectly good beach right down the street.”
Now it was the first full day of summer vacation, and everyone who was anyone was heading to Dodge Park. I had run into Tommy the previous day after arriving home from Brother Rice for the last time, and he predicted, “It’s going to be the party to end all parties.” They were all getting a ride there with Doggie’s older brother. “You should come with us,” he said. It was the first invitation I’d gotten from him in months, and I wanted desperately to go. “Nah,” I said. “My dad won’t go for it.”
The next morning I instead headed down to The Lagoon. Four years earlier, when I was ten, Dad had surprised us with a sailboat. Although he was a landlubber at heart, he decided a boat would be the perfect vehicle for summer family togetherness. Besides, our house came with dock privileges. It seemed a shame not to use them.
The boat was a sleek little sloop of British design with oiled teak floorboards and varnished mahogany benches that comfortably seated five. He and Mom (who never once set foot on it) had christened it Mary Ann after my stillborn sister, and Dad jumped into the learning curve of sailing the same way he jumped into
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any other life challenge—with nose-to-grindstone determination.
He read books and manuals, scoured magazine articles, and attended workshops. Dad somehow managed to turn even the leisurely pursuit of sailing into an awful lot of hard work. Marijo and Michael never really took to the sailboat, but Tim and I did with gusto and in a way my father never could—with seat-of-the-pants confidence. We did no reading or studying; we simply felt the wind and let it carry us. Soon Tim and I were taking it out on our own, often with Tommy or Rock or Sack along for the ride. Tim would skipper and we would crew, trimming the jib and hiking out over the high side to provide human ballast. By the time I was in ninth grade, I had honed my sailing skills to the point where not only coul
d I skipper the boat, but I could skipper it singlehandedly.
On that first day of vacation, knowing everyone was gathering at Dodge Park, I grabbed the sails and headed out for a solo cruise.
I didn’t set out to disobey my father; this I can say truthfully.
But I was only on the water a few minutes when I began rational-izing my way across the lake in the direction of the party to end all parties. He didn’t say anything about going near the park, I reasoned. What’s the harm in sailing past for a closer look? And then, once I was skimming by just outside the swim-area buoys, I took another tack: Maybe I’ll pull up on shore for a few minutes, just to stretch my legs. That’s not actually in the park, just on the edge of it. I spotted a muddy flat off to the side of the beach and headed for it. Once my bow hit the shore, I figured: A quick walk up the beach and back, and I’m outta here. He’ll never even know.
How could he ever know? I dropped the sails and headed off into the sea of hippie humanity. It was not even noon and already marijuana smoke hovered thick in the air.
The wide sand beach was on a man-made island separated from the rest of Dodge Park by a stagnant canal. Visitors parked on the mainland and walked across a wide pedestrian bridge to the beach. I had landed the boat on the mainland side of the canal.
As I began to cross the bridge I realized I was wading into a giant,
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bustling drug bazaar. Dealers lined each railing, nearly shoulder to shoulder, rattling off their offerings in singsongy stage whispers: pot, hash, Quaaludes, mescaline. Money and packets were changing hands in plain sight. Marijuana no longer scared me, but harder drugs did, and I had no intention of buying anything, even if I had thought to bring money. But the walk was so thrill-ing, so forbidden, that when I reached the other side I turned around and headed back across again. Back and forth I strolled, absorbing the scene.