The article was called “Canada’s Hot Southerner,” and here’s the quote: “A few months later Fenerty underwent more tests. ‘We did the arteriograms, CAT scans and myelograms again. They were all normal,’ says neurologist Vincent Birbiglia. ‘The significance was that there was no underlying structural or vascular abnormality that would be likely to rupture again. I didn’t think Gill was at any greater risk of having this occur than any other player.’”
Which begs the question When did Sports Illustrated get so sciencey? Nowadays if you read an article about a football player, they write, “And his brain got smashed around like a sponge, you know, like the kind you use to wash your truck.” And then there’s a picture of a truck.
All I knew was that Vince carried his case of medical tools out of the house every morning and returned home around seven for some quiet time. In third grade we had an extracurricular event every Sunday called “science club.” That’s just what I needed in my life. More science. Every week a different parent would come to one of the classrooms at St. Mary’s School and talk about how their job related to science and teach some sort of lesson. We had people who worked in computers and physical therapy.
Toward the end of the series my dad agreed to come in and speak. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Was he going to set up a chair in the corner of the classroom, read a war novel, and scowl? Yell about how people had taken certain sections of the newspaper? I was extremely nervous. It was the closest I had come to public speaking myself. I told my friends it would be pretty boring and uneventful. I was managing expectations.
My dad showed up with the mysterious case of tools I had seen in his car for all those years. He took them out and put them on the teacher’s desk in the front of the room. He had the kids gather around and he went one by one through all of them and described what each of them did. He seemed very comfortable. He even pulled out some charts of the body and the brain and had all kinds of explanations that were confusing and impressive. At the end of his speech he took questions and it was clear that he knew exactly what he was doing. It was amazing. I had the smartest dad. I couldn’t believe how smart he was. And I couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t told me any of this stuff sooner.
LIKE HELL
One thing about my mom is that she makes up sayings or at least uses phrases that people no longer use. I realized this when I entered the adult world and I would repeat expressions that my mom uses and people were like, “What are you talking about?” When I was a kid and I wasn’t allowed to do something, my mom would say, “Like fun are you doing that.” Which was really confusing because it seemed like she was encouraging me. She’d say, “Like fun are you going to the mall!” I’d be like, “Yeah! Like fun—pizza, buddies, arcade games!” At a certain point, I figured out that “like fun” is a euphemism for “like hell” because my mother is Catholic, and for Catholics, hell is fun.
I love talking to my mom. I’ll talk to her on the phone for hours but regardless of how long the call is, at the end of it she’ll always say the phrase “one more thing.” But it rarely deserves to be “one more thing.” It’s always like, “One more thing—Ellen from my swim class bought a rice cooker.” I’ll say, “Mom, that’s not a ‘one more thing.’ In long division that’s called a ‘remainder.’ You save up ten of those, we’re gonna give you a conversation!”
For a while it looked like I might become a priest because I was really good at being Catholic and it was this thing that my mom and I had in common. Of anyone in my family, I relate most to my mom. Like me, she’s a talker. She’ll say anything to anyone in any context. I was visiting my parents recently and I met my mother at the bank and she had been talking to the bank teller for fifteen minutes about really personal things, and I walked in at the end and all I could hear her say was, “. . . And here he is now!”
My mom and I are kindred spirits, so when she sent me to Catholic school, I was thrilled to join the team. And I loved being on the team. Being Catholic was fun. When you’re seven years old and your parents send you to Catholic school, your world makes a lot of sense. You wear your little plaid bow tie every day, and your blue button-down shirt with the short sleeves. Every girl in your class wears the exact same patterned plaid skirt. And you assume that everyone in the world is named Fitzgerald, Murphy, or Sullivan.
At Catholic school a lot of your teachers are nuns, and they’re always talking about this guy Jesus who everybody’s afraid of but everybody loves, because he loves everybody. And a long time ago some people killed him, and it’s not totally your fault, and don’t be scared or sad, because he’s living forever, next to God, who’s his dad, even though he is also God. And also there’s this Holy Spirit part too, that no one really understands. But all three of these guys are everywhere, at all times, just in case you need to talk anything out.
“Am I going too fast for you, seven-year-old boy?”
“Oh, you have questions?”
“Oh, we don’t know the answer to that, that’s part of the mystery.”
“No, he’s different than Santa. That’s just some horseshit we made up. This is the real deal.”
And it’s funny how they roll it out to you when you’re seven. They’re like, “There’s this guy Jesus, and he totally loves you.”
And you say, “Oh, okay, great.”
And they say, “And you love him too, right?”
And you ask, “I’m sorry, do I know that guy?”
And they say, “You know, from the picture of the cross? That guy loves you . . . and you love him.”
It starts innocently enough, as innocently as man-boy love can start. You just accept that you’re in love with a long-haired dude who loves you and spends most of his time nailed to a cross, as far as you can tell from the statues around school. You’re seven. What are you going to do?
Then it starts to get a little heavier. When you’re eight they just casually throw it out there: “You know, he died for your sins.”
And you think, Oh man. I thought I’d gotten away with stealing that Brach’s candy at the supermarket. I guess that Jesus guy took the fall.
Then a couple years later, you’re eleven, and you get the word that Father Grady wants you to be one of his new altar boys. He’s seen your work at recess on the kickball field, and he thinks you’ve got what it takes to snuff out candles, hold a chalice, and not trip and fall on your robe. You’re excited. No one’s told you that being an altar boy is like being a priest’s AV guy, that church is just as boring when you’re watching the back of the priest’s head as it is watching the front of his head. It’s like watching a concert from backstage.
But church was also kind of glamorous. The priests have these multilayered robes. As an altar boy, even you have a robe. A real simple, white one. It’s like karate, where you start with white belt and then you get some different color belts once you start kicking some devil ass. I was proud of my robe. I was thinking, Check it out, ladies. You want one of these? Not so fast. It’s going to be a few years before the Church comes around to having altar girls.
Some of the priests were very cool. This one priest, Father Jacques, had a cool beard and kind of looked like Jesus. He used to hang out with the altar boys like we were his friends. He took us seriously. He didn’t talk down to us like the other priests. A year into his tenure at St. Mary’s, Father Jacques didn’t show up at our church anymore.
“Where’d he go?” I asked my teacher.
“He’s at another parish now.”
“Why didn’t he say good-bye? We would have said good-bye to him.”
“Father Jacques is needed somewhere else.”
“Will he visit us?”
“I don’t think he’s going to visit, but we have a new priest coming in.”
The new priest was Father Fauvell. He was fat and bitter. Whenever we’d ask him questions, he’d scold us. “You don’t have to ask about everything.” We heard through the grapevine that Father Fauvell loved to stay up l
ate with the other priests, playing cards and drinking. Maybe he was tired from all that drinking? All I wanted was Father Jacques to come back. But he was needed somewhere else.
• • •
Church had its cool moments. Every once in a while they’d have a guitarist play with the choir. And I was like, All right! Rock and roll! And then she’d start playing “Simple Gifts” or “Hosanna in the Highest” and I’d be like, No! Play the good songs! “Time after Time” or “We Built This City”! C’mon!
Some of the altar boys got plush gigs like weddings or funerals. That meant the people running the event would throw you some cash. Wedding, maybe fifty dollars. Funerals, maybe ten. Or twenty. You could buy sixty-five packs of baseball cards with that kind of scratch, all because someone died or got married. I never got those gigs. You really had to be hot on the circuit to get those kinds of breaks. Matthew Sullivan got a lot of weddings and funerals. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t in it for the money. I was in it for the . . . Wait, I’m not sure why I was in it. Oh yes, the smell of incense. Love that burning smell. Also, we got to light candles.
The most frustrating part about being an altar boy is that you can’t speak or move. You just have to sit there. I wanted the priest’s job. I wanted to get up there, kill with a few jokes that aren’t funny, and then shake everyone’s hand like Jay Leno or Oprah. It always struck me how much laughter priests got for jokes that weren’t very strong. A priest would be like, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and . . . John Boy!” and people would be like, “Father Patterson is hilarious!” I thought, If he’s a priest, I should be a priest. I’m way funnier than him. Plus, I’m never going to have sex anyway, so what are the drawbacks?
I was a good Catholic kid, though. I knocked out all the sacraments. I went to confession when I was eleven, which had to be a real snoozefest for the priest. “Okay. So you stole a Jose Canseco rookie card from your brother, and when your mom told you to go to bed, you stayed up late and watched Alf? Anything at least a little exciting?” In retrospect, maybe we should have been turning the tables on some of those priests in confession. “So Father, what have you have been up to?”
I always felt that communion was kind of awkward. On one occasion I received a communion wafer from an elderly priest with hand tremors, and he missed my mouth and it fell on the ground. I was like, Oh no. It was as if we were in a seafood restaurant and a waiter had dropped three baked stuffed lobsters on the floor. But the priest was on top of it. He just picked it up and popped it in his own mouth. Like he knew that Jesus has a five-second rule.
The other thing that struck me as odd was when you drank wine out of that chalice. Because when I was growing up, during the AIDS scare, people stopped sipping wine from the same cup. Which is kind of weird, because if you got AIDS from Jesus, you would totally get into heaven.
I went to St. Mary’s School from grades one through six. And I only got hit in first grade by Sister Mary Elizabeth. She was of the old guard. Smacked you with a ruler if you talked in class. I talked in class. I’m a talker. Actually, the experience that stigmatized me the most was these fund-raisers they used the kids for every year. I’m not making this up: every year they’d hand us a cardboard suitcase full of trinkets to sell door-to-door to strangers. If we sold enough they’d give us a pair of aviator sunglasses. Because that’s what third graders need: sexy eyewear.
I’d walk up to people’s houses, carrying this box that’s the size of my body. The Church was like my knickknacks pimp. I’d knock on doors, and when people answered, I’d say in a high-pitched voice, “Hello! I’m from Saint Mary’s School! Perhaps you would like to buy a Daffy Duck pencil sharpener or a ‘Kiss the Cook!’ pot holder!”
And they’d typically say, “We’re eating dinner right now.”
So I’d say, “I’m so sorry, but this will only take a few minutes!” Then I’d just walk right into their home and open up shop. I’d offer, “Perhaps you would like a desk set organizer or a popcorn-of-the-month club!”
And they’d say, “Please leave our home.”
So I’d start putting the stuff back in, but it never fit in the way they’d initially packed the case. So I’d be smooshing these items on top of each other and scissor-holding the whole thing together and apologizing, “I’m so sorry, I’ll be out of your way in just a minute!” After all that I didn’t even get my sunglasses. I wasted all this time hawking third-rate goods when I could have spent the time figuring out what the hell the Holy Spirit is.
For a while I thought that I would become a priest, right after I finished my careers as a rapper and a break-dancer. I was always considered the most religious of my siblings, the kid with promise in the pursuits of Catholicism. We had family friends named the Barkers who started making regular trips to Yugoslavia because they heard there were miracles going on there. They would come over for dinner and tell my parents all about statues of Jesus bleeding real blood and statues of the Virgin Mary crying. First of all, these didn’t seem like miracles. They just seemed showy. If Jesus had a revelation, I thought, he wouldn’t choose to show it through some gimmicky tchotchke you can buy for ten dollars. Second of all, I just didn’t buy it in a general sense. In my gut I felt like, This isn’t real. None of this is real.
I kept it to myself but then Mr. Barker got a public access TV show where he talked about Catholicism, and he was doing an episode about the youth. Knowing from my mother what a Catholic soldier I was, he asked me if I wanted to come on the show as a guest and talk about my faith.
I said, “Sure,” but I had serious reservations about it. He asked again and left a few messages, and I kept dodging his calls. I just couldn’t make the leap. Sure, I could believe that Jesus was watching me masturbate to Candy Stripe Nurses and listening to my sins regarding baseball cards through Father Fitzpatrick, but I couldn’t buy into this miracle thing. I wanted to so badly because it was this one thing that my mother and I had bonded over. For a short period of time, we both believed in Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit. All that stuff. And it was amazing. And I felt closer to my mom than I ever had. And then it faded away. So why couldn’t I just suck it up and believe?
Shortly after I finished college, my mom developed a condition where, as far as the doctors could tell, part of her spine was pushing into her spinal cord. They weren’t one hundred percent sure of what was happening, but she was experiencing chronic pain throughout her body. The best idea this team of doctors could come up with was to perform an operation where they shaved off a small, suspicious-looking piece of her spine. Unfortunately the pain still didn’t go away. So my mom was faced with both the original pain and the pain of the invasive operation. She was laid up for months.
I came home and stayed with her. My dad worked long hours, and someone had to be there to administer her pain meds and get her meals. So I did that and it was one of the hardest months of my life. Not just because of all the housework, which I’m not so good at. But because my mom was prescribed Ativan. She was supposed to take it three times a day, but pretty soon she wanted to take it five or six times a day because, as she told me, she was “dying.” It’s hard when your mother tells you she’s dying, because my mother has been the most stable and dependable voice throughout my entire life. She’s an eternal optimist. The roof could be caving in and she’d say, “At least we have a floor!”
So when she told me she was dying, even though I didn’t think she was dying, I tended to believe her. I said, “I’m not sure you’re dying, Mom. Why do you think that?”
And she said, “They know what’s wrong with me, but they’re not telling me. They know I’m dying.”
So I called her doctor. “When my mom says she’s dying, is there any validity to that?”
“No, Michael. There’s no reason to believe she’s dying. She’s just experiencing a lot of pain and jumping to conclusions. This is very common. Just make sure she doesn’t take too much of the Ativan. It’s just feeding her delirium.”
So I hid the Ativan a
nd made sure she didn’t take too much. And this made her furious. When she noticed this, she started looking around the house in every possible hiding space, saying, “Michael, where is the Ativan?”
And I’d say, “Mom, I can’t give you the Ativan.”
And she’d look me in the eye with a sternness I had only seen when I was very young and say, “Michael, I am your mother. And if I say get me the Ativan, you get me the Ativan.”
And I’d say, “Mom, like fun am I getting you the Ativan.” I’d try to make her laugh. But it didn’t really work.
The situation got worse. Where at first she had told me she was dying, over time she became philosophical and started theorizing about the afterlife. She pulled me aside on a number of occasions and, as though she had just been given some secret news that she wasn’t allowed to share, she said, “I’m going to hell.”
And I said, “Mom, you’re not going to hell.”
She looked at me as though I was naïve. “Yes, I am. You don’t understand these things. I’m going to hell.” And then she’d start crying. And I’d hold on to my mom like she was my kid, like she had held me all those years when I was a kid and I fell down or had my pride trampled on by a bully at school.
And holding back tears, I’d say, “Why would you possibly go to hell? You’re the kindest person I’ve ever met.”
And she said, “There are things that you don’t know about that I’ve done. And now there’s nothing that can be done because I’m going to hell.”
I’d try to make light of it. I’d say, “If you’re going to hell, then we’re all going to hell because I had you as the front-runner for heaven. You’re heaven’s number one draft pick.”
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