Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  Maybe that’s what drew Brendan to Notre Dame as well. It may have been the first thing he ever saw me invest myself in, and so wanted to encourage that. He had that way.

  So, Day Zero—no Notre Dame

  Day 30—Notre Dame

  Day 45—Brendan notices me reading Blue & Gold in the living room and says, “What’s that?”

  Day 60—We are both bigger Notre Dame fans than someone whose alumni attachment to the university predates Reconstruction.

  It was true that we had talked to each other before this. I suppose we must have, since we slept in the same room for many years. We certainly fought, often viciously.

  When he was very little, I had terrible nightmares. Most often, they involved being locked in a basement with a barred window that looked out onto a long, dirt road. After a bit of fretting, I’d hear footsteps coming toward me through the dark. It was a garden-variety Freud/Jung/Jaws mashup.

  Every night, I’d make my way into my mother’s bed. One night, she tired of this routine. She yelled at me to get out. So I went back into my room, picked Brendan out of his bed and carried him into mine. I made him my only stuffed toy.

  It didn’t last long, since he didn’t enjoy being smothered for half the night by someone twice his size. Though he’d done me a favour, I resented him for that.

  He wasn’t a tagalong kid brother. He was just always sort of…there. He had his life and I had mine. They rarely intersected.

  Until Notre Dame.

  The problem with choosing to root for a team from South Bend, Indiana, when you live in Toronto, Canada, is that you have no one to impress with your knowledge. What’s the point of committing to memory a detailed biography of Ara Parseghian (b. Akron, Ohio; briefly a member of the Cleveland Browns) if no one knows or cares that you did it?

  Brendan became that person. Without prompting, he read the same books and learned the same obscure trivia and, honestly, was better at it than I was.

  We would trade Blue & Gold between us and have long, deep discussions about the seventeen-year-olds who’d just committed to Notre Dame. We had intense opinions about whether four defensive linemen was too many in the freshman class, if it came at the expense of the receiving corps.

  We knew the names of these kids, their stats, how they were doing in school. (In the ugly world of U.S. college athletics, Notre Dame handicapped itself by insisting its student-athletes actually pass their classes. The team was often critically short of big, stupid people.) We knew which states produced the best players at specific positions. We knew which high-school programs mattered in Florida and Texas.

  If we had applied a fraction of this passion for learning to our day jobs, we’d both be nuclear physicists. Instead, we can tell you a lot about Lou Holtz’s tactical devotion to the read-option.

  It made sense at the time.

  We’d missed the high point. Notre Dame won a national championship in 1988. We came in the next fall, fresh to the fight and ready for more. It wouldn’t work out.

  We started to watch the games together on Saturday afternoons. I bought Brendan a shirt. We would sit in front of the television and scream at it—evoking shades of my early childhood and Mickey Hamill. It was glorious. We were together and of one mind.

  The tribe I’d found at school on the football team was replaced by the smaller, more important one I’d discovered at home. I’d always loved Brendan. That sense of mutual responsibility for the other’s well-being was drilled into us by our mother. But now we had something to talk about, and I realized I liked him.

  For men who do not know each other or have much in common, sports is a shared language.

  I am not going to belly up to a hotel bar in Savannah, Georgia, and begin talking politics with the stranger sitting next to me. That won’t end well. But if there’s a game on, that’s an invitation. You watch for a while. One of you says, “Nice catch.” The other nods. You spin off to a game you saw the other day or something you heard about a trade. If you have a basis of sports knowledge—very little will do the trick—it’s an endless well of conversational foreplay.

  A couple of years after Brendan and I had found this common ground, I moved away for school. I came home to work in the summers, but those reunions were awkward. He was changing. The lightness in him was giving way to something more shopworn and dented by life. He was becoming a man. I didn’t know about the daily goings-on in his life. I was consumed by the minutiae of my own.

  After two more years, I came home to go to school and moved in with my girlfriend. I’d come to the house to use the washer/dryer on the weekends. If Brendan was around, we’d talk about Notre Dame, but he wasn’t around that much.

  But I reassured myself that we still had this connection. I’d tell him we should go to a bar and watch the game. Not this weekend. I was busy this weekend. But maybe next?

  The next never came.

  Since he was less fickle in his loves, Brendan maintained his loyalty to the Irish—he still watched every game, he still wore a sweatshirt I’d gotten him in Indiana, made a point of putting it on when I came over. But my own was flagging. I couldn’t bring myself to keep up with the goings-on, the new recruits, the gossip. There was too much of it and it felt like work. I wanted to read about other things.

  My girlfriend’s older brother, Bobby, was a Florida State fan. In the early nineties, that program was on the rise, while Notre Dame’s was in descent. We went over to her parents’ house to watch a bowl game at New Year’s. That family was everything my own was not—large, moneyed, tight-knit. They were a Rockwell painting. I envied their ease in the world. They knew they belonged.

  Florida State and Notre Dame played each other in that game. It went badly for my side. I’d had a few drinks and was in foul humour. Ruthless teasing is central to a good sports friendship, but I was in no mood. Bobby whooped at every play.

  I started to swear theatrically, knowing it would offend the room.

  Eventually, my girlfriend’s father said tightly, “Mrs. Haggert doesn’t like that sort of language.”

  “Then Mrs. Haggert can tell me herself.”

  It was a churlish thing to do. That’s why I did it. My girlfriend was eyeing me with mounting horror.

  The game turned on one play. I don’t remember the play. I remember bringing my fist down so hard on the coffee table that it cracked.

  For a surreal moment, there was the genuine possibility of a fist fight. You could feel that. The women—my girlfriend, her mother, her sister—rose instinctively from their seats and moved into the centre of the room. Blocking the path. Obscuring the sightlines. Once you can’t see someone’s eyes, your rage fades. The moment passed.

  We left quickly. My girlfriend was furious. After four years, that relationship was coming apart. This was a symptom.

  I didn’t apologize, but I was humiliated.

  After that, rooting for Notre Dame stopped making sense to me. I’d used that team as camouflage to fit in. I didn’t need it anymore. And just like that, I stopped paying attention. Today, I couldn’t tell you who coaches the team, how they’re doing or where they finished last year. I couldn’t name a single player from the past decade off the top of my head.

  Brendan and I are middle-aged men now. When we get together for a coffee or a drink, one of the first things he’ll say is, “Did you see the Notre Dame game?”

  And I lie.

  THE CHURCH

  WHEN SHE WAS A GIRL IN RURAL IRELAND, my mother’s family went to church on Sundays as a community obligation and on sufferance. It was three miles by horse and buggy. The neighbours, most of them farmers, had built their own house of worship. It didn’t bear a saint’s name. It marked the nearest village—Renanirree Church.

  They brought in a priest named Father Murphy from a nearby parish to mind God’s business. In Ireland in the fifties, one parish over might as well have been an ocean away. People did not warm to this pushy foreigner—but they dared not say anything about it.

&n
bsp; At the time, the Catholic Church in Ireland was more of a shakedown operation/guilt factory than a place of sacred healing. You paid for your family pew. Where you sat said a great deal about your social standing. In order to goose donations and discourage thrift, the weekly offerings were read aloud during the service—“John Buckley, seven (shillings) and six (pence)” and so forth.

  To make the sermons relatable, Father Murphy framed them around whatever was happening in the village. Who’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock, for example. No names were used because, in a parish of just a few dozen families, none were required—everyone already knew what was what. But this was an opportunity to sit through an excruciating rhetorical stoning in what passed for the public square.

  Some of the village men didn’t embrace Father Murphy’s take on community relations. They’d linger outside as mass began, watching the women pass and gossiping amongst themselves. This was a non-starter. If anyone was missing at the outset, Father Murphy would rush out and harangue them into the building. If that didn’t work, he would take bodily hold of objectors and throw them into the church. He was a sort of bouncer in reverse and, by the sounds of it, a terror.

  A significant part of Father Murphy’s influence stemmed from the local belief that he had both the ability and the inclination to curse people. Not just wish you ill or rubbish your good name, but actually cast a metaphysical hex that would bring very tangible disaster to your life.

  My grandfather lived in fear that he would run afoul of Father Murphy and have the evil eye turned in his direction so that his crops would fail or his cattle would die or someone in the family would get sick. My grandfather also believed that if you built a house at a crossroads, anyone who stayed there overnight would perish. And that his own mother had heard the banshee—another portent of death—just days before an itinerant salesman showed up unannounced at the farm, walked into the barn and dropped dead.

  But the church was the focus of his dread.

  Whenever my mother or her siblings misbehaved, they were reminded of this awesome and capricious power that lay in wait only three miles away, watching them. My grandfather was not one of the men who refused to take his seat on Sunday morning.

  As he aged, his faith intensified. Whatever he’d been afraid of during the prime of his life consumed him as he neared the end.

  In the best tradition of Irish miserabilism, this all sounds vaguely charming now. But it doesn’t explain why they did it at the time. “Why would you put yourself through this?” I once asked my mother.

  “Going to church is good for you,” she said. “You have to get up. You have to make yourself presentable. You have to talk to your neighbours.”

  That makes sense, though I don’t remember it sounding that reasonable when I was a kid. I do recall the obligation part. Ours was not a household in which the art of explaining was much practised. Things happened, and you accepted them. My mother brought that much over from County Cork.

  As a child, it would not have occurred to me to resent going to church. I can’t say how it goes down in other religions, but most Catholic indoctrination is a function of rote learning. You memorize and repeat the words. Your lizard brain does all the work. That was 90 percent of how I worshipped, and I did it happily. I enjoyed the rigour, things happening in a set and unchanging order. The key to unlocking the rhythms of life is figuring out the patterns—when I do this, this subsequent thing happens. Later, you’ll begin fiddling with the order, trying to break up the monotony of existence. But when you’re a kid, it’s hard enough trying to keep everything straight.

  Church was easy that way. Sit, stand, kneel. Sit, stand, kneel. I didn’t enjoy the kneeling. Even as an eight-year-old, some part of you understands that supplication diminishes you. And it is difficult to get comfortable on a knobby wooden kneeler. I still recall my mother’s head turning whenever I tried to lean back and rest my ass on the bench. She’d lay those Manson lamps on me and I’d lurch back to vertical. No sloth in church.

  But I always liked a day out and the feeling of going to our church to sit in our pew and listen to our priest. It’s the last vestige of tribalism and, if you turn it a certain way, true ownership.

  As a high-school kid, that changed. I would like to say that I chafed at the authoritarianism, but really I just wanted to sleep in on Sundays. I did try the tack of moral outrage. But as a not-terribly-devout devout Catholic, my mother was able to deploy a logical jiu-jitsu that no amount of teenage angst could overpower.

  “But don’t you think that there should be women priests?”

  “Yes, there certainly should.”

  “Then doesn’t that mean we’re supporting a corrupt organization?”

  “Yes, probably. But you’re still going.”

  So I went.

  My mother and younger brother would go Saturday nights, when I was busy drinking with friends or at work. I went alone the next morning.

  Our priest at St. Cecilia’s, Father Manley, did a nice, quick mass—a half-hour start to finish. The sermon often amounted to something along the lines of “Well, what is Matthew trying to say here? Who’s to say?” He believed in mysteries and the result was what an uncle of mine called “the McDonald’s of Catholicism.”

  Though short, his mass was not short enough for me.

  I’d heard somewhere that you had not technically missed the sacrament if you were present for the beginning of the blessing of gifts—where the bread and wine are turned into the metaphorical body and blood of Christ. Was this true? No way of knowing. Pre-internet, rumours were facts as long as you repeated them often enough. (And, come to think of it, post-internet as well.)

  This holy wrinkle bought me ten extra minutes in bed while the suckers sat through the prelims.

  On one awful occasion, I fell out of bed at the last moment, felt around half-blind on the floor for something to wear, pulled it on like a slug tugging on a body sock and left the house without looking down. On that day, I schlepped out of the house—I was fifteen—hungover and truly careless. I got on the bus. I got a couple of looks, but as my teenage hairstyles got weirder, I had gotten used to the looks.

  My routine was to enter the church quietly, then stand in the foyer at the back rather than sit down. I would watch the proceedings through a doorway. There were always a couple of stragglers back there. After twenty minutes of boredom, I’d walk up to receive the host, swing back up the aisle and march out of the building. If things played out right, there’d be a westbound bus pulling up across the street as I exited.

  When I got there that day, an older lady I did not recognize was also standing in the back. She gave me a look. And the look did not end. She openly gawped at me.

  I gave her an appraising glance in return. That usually worked. No effect.

  I turned away for a couple of seconds, then turned back. Still staring.

  I escalated things—raised eyebrow and slight sneer. Still staring.

  Finally, I threw out my hands—“What?”

  She pointed at me. I looked down.

  Oh.

  I was in the midst of a pitiable phase of wearing nothing but rock t-shirts. The one I now had on inside the house of God was a reprint of a Dead Kennedys album cover. It featured a chalk outline of a body with the screaming caption “Too Drunk to Fuck.”

  I am trying to imagine something more offensive I might have put on for a pleasant Sunday morning of worship. Maybe a belt of human skulls. Or the words “I AM HERE TO KILL” smeared across my bare chest in pig’s blood. But it’s hard to get there. This was pretty irredeemable. If you have any doubt, read the lyrics.

  What would Father Murphy have done? Beaten me to death with a crucifix in front of a cheering mob, probably. I can’t say he’d have been wrong.

  In the moment, the best I could think to do was misdirection. I pulled the shirt away from my body and regarded it thoughtfully, trying to pantomime mild surprise—“Oh jeepers, how did this get on me?”

  The lady
wasn’t buying it. She bugged her eyes out and gestured toward the door with her head. I looked back, caught somewhere between petulance and humiliation.

  Had I my wits about me, I might have gone to the bathroom in the basement and turned the shirt inside out. But I have not been gifted with many wits and didn’t want to have gone to the trouble of having gone to church without having officially gone to church. More importantly, I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. So that meant I’d have to make the long walk up to the front.

  I stood there for another fifteen minutes, angling the front of my body away from the view of passersby. I could have folded my arms across my chest, but that seemed too much like submission.

  The lady continued to helpfully stare, her alarm settling into disgust. Which meant I was winning. I pictured her going home later: “How was church?” “Uneventful. Wait, there was one thing. I stood beside the Antichrist.” The time eventually came to go up and receive the sacrament from Father Manley. I waited for the lady to go first, lest she try to rip the shirt off me as I entered the church proper.

  St. Cecilia’s was never quite full. There were perhaps two hundred people there that day. I folded myself into line, pressed up hard against the man directly in front of me. I repeatedly tripped over his heels as he sighed with increasing irritation. Everyone was facing forward, obscuring my apostasy.

  Only Father Manley could properly see me. He had the priestly habit of giving everyone a good hard look as he said, “The body of Christ,” then pausing for a long beat after you responded with “Amen.”

  Of course—of course, of course, of course—he spotted the shirt straight off. The cup held up chest-high dropped slowly as he read it to himself a few times. His face slackened and his eyelids fluttered. This was beginning to feel like a miscalculation.

  He looked at me. I looked at him. He shook his head very slightly. I was too stubborn to feel genuine shame, but I did feel awfully stupid. He said his words, and I said mine back.