by John Waters
We do need a signature look, though. Black is always good. But never all black the way male movie stars do it at the Oscars. A black tie with a black shirt and a black suit isn’t black tie, it’s bad formal. How about we add a subtle hint of devil red to our cult black outfits? Socks that only reveal their shocking hue when you sit down and cross your legs. Or red stitching around the pocket of your jacket. The tight red collar of a deranged priest? Or an all-black uniform accessorized by a satanic red handkerchief you whip out to blow your nose? Better yet, wear black rags. Rags dyed black by the hardworking cult members who will add a touch of their own red blood to show their commitment to the cause.
Both men and women can add to their threatening glamour by the creative use of eye makeup. It doesn’t have to be used just for your eyes; try sketching on the stigmata of show-business celebrities who died for your sins. Paint in terrible deep lacerations at the nape of your neck to properly honor the wounds the hustler Pino the Frog inflicted on the holy man–film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Diagram on the top of your forehead the horrible scalping Jayne Mansfield went through in that fatal car accident. Draw on the violent incisions actress Capucine must have experienced after jumping out the window and impaling herself on that fence in her successful suicide attempt. Or just imagine the “invisible” stigmata that some saints claim leave no marks at all but cause excruciating pain. Better yet, concentrate on the stigmata wounds that refuse to clot and, in some cases, have a pleasant aroma known as “the odor of sanctity.” I knew there had to be a name for it. Come on, let’s hold hands and smell like pain.
There will be homework. Lots of reading. You might as well start now. Here are a few of the titles that are the cornerstones of our new religion. Of course, you’ve already read The Bad Popes by E. R. Chamberlin and How the Pope Became Infallible by August Bernhard Hasler, but I expect you to dive into The Cult of the Virgin Mary by Michael P. Carroll, Why Catholics Can’t Sing by Thomas Day, Encountering Mary by Sandra L. Zimdars-Swartz, The Bleeding Mind by Ian Wilson, and Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen. After you’ve digested these and discussed the theology in each ad nauseam with your fellow fanatics, we can get serious. Serious about excess spirituality. Serious about reverse dogma.
But we must prepare ourselves physically, too. Our assholes will be clean but we must never wash our hands. Our immune systems will be strengthened by our being dirty. Not filthy. Just mildly grimy. Filthy fingernails have always been a favorite fashion accessory of mine. Especially when you place your hands in the prayer position. Matter of fact, I urge all my followers to forgo nail polish permanently and replace it with expertly applied soot. The nonexistent gods above will ignore our prayers better this way. Germs, at least in small doses, are good for you. Aren’t all vaccinations filled with a tiny bit of the diseases they are designed to prevent? I’m always mystified to see grown men scrubbing their hands as if they are about to perform open-heart surgery after urinating in New Jersey Turnpike rest stop bathrooms. Did they piss all over their hands at the urinal? Didn’t they already wash their penises that morning in the shower? How does your unit get dirty by aiming a stream of urine into the proper receptacle? These germ freaks will get sick, I guarantee you. They’ll be so healthy they’ll get old and die of “nothing.” Avoid them! Run from the overly clean before they infect you!
Dirty hair is kind of heavenly, too, if you know how to wear it. Matted. In clumps. Stringy. All those negative terms can be turned around if you are carefree and have good cheekbones. David Lochary always recommended cleaning your hair not with some overpriced shampoo, but with cornstarch. He would just pat it all over his bleached hair and then brush it out. I tried it. It kind of worked. Your hair did feel thicker. Just be careful if it rains, though. Rainwater and cornstarch equals gravy.
As your leader, I will try to set a good example. William Burroughs once called me “the Pope of Trash” and I’ve been milking that title for decades. Now it’s time to finally live up to it. I always knew visiting the actual Vatican would be a terrible idea for me, but when I had a speaking job in Rome and the sponsor wanted to take me, what could I say? Once inside the anti-vow-of-poverty walls of the Vatican, I figured the only safe place for me would be the gift shop. I lurked near the postcard rack picking out the most hideously pious cards to mail to business associates, hoping to kill time while the rest of my group toured the opulently oppressive sites. When it was time to pay for my purchases, I approached the no-nonsense nun behind the counter and she rang up my sale. When I asked for a receipt, as I always do for any corporate-related expense like this (Warhol’s diaries taught us well), she sniffed her nose in the air like she had just seen a leper and snarled, “The Vatican doesn’t give receipts!” “The Vatican doesn’t give receipts??!!” I repeated in my mind, stunned at the simplicity of her knee-jerk response. “I guess not!” I started fuming as my host gently grabbed me by my elbow and began leading me toward the exit. “I guess my cash will be funneled to anti-abortion and homophobic lobbyists all over the world!” “But the Vatican doesn’t pay taxes,” the nun suddenly tried to explain in a nice voice, totally not getting it. “I know they don’t,” I shrieked in my mind, “but I do!!” The politics of the Catholic Church never seemed more obviously expressed.
I hated my Catholic high school, so I certainly never went back to a reunion, although I did get to comment to The Baltimore Sun, on the school’s fifty-year anniversary, that the Christian Brothers and lay faculty there had “discouraged every interest I ever had.” A friend who attended the reunion that year said he heard me called “faggot” and “pornographer” by some of my pissed-off fellow classmates who had read my criticism, but I didn’t mind. The only reason to attend any school reunion is to see how the people whom you had wanted to have sex with then look today. And I had already looked up those people’s addresses and driven by their homes to stalk them years before.
Decades later, I was contacted by a group of men from my high school who claimed they were sexually abused by one of the Christian Brothers long after I had attended. They wanted me to join their case because, apparently, he’d been doing it for years, but I had to tell them, “Hey, he didn’t fuck me!” I was even rejected by the child molesters in my school! Is this supposed to make me feel lucky? Or double-rejected?
I can’t predict the future the way some cult leaders pretend they can. But who on earth would want to know what was going to happen to them? Isn’t that the only reason we get out of bed every day—to find out? Imagine the burden of knowing the exact date you were going to die? Talk about pressure to have fun NOW! I can, however, rearrange your past if you’ll let me. Make you use whatever pain you may have felt to experience a new level of lunatic anti-piety. I was lucky enough to have worked out most all of my onetime troubling issues with my dad before he died. The ones that lingered, I turned into a career.
Praying does not have to feel so empty. Try starting every day with Divine’s prayer from Mondo Trasho and say it exactly as I have edited it here.
Oh Mary. Oh Mary.
Oh Mary, our Most Beloved Lady
And it is to you and only you
That I owe my crackpot admiration, my divinity!
BUT I CAN ONLY PRAY SO HARD!
I can but only pray that the Holy Trinity will grant me
The necessary grace to combat the evil forces
That have reared their heads so often in our lives.
Please, Mary! I only ask for what is rightfully mine!
I BESEECH THEE! SHOW ME A SIGN!
GRANT ME MY WISHES!!
So that once again I will be able to believe…
To be Divine.
See? It’s easy to get in the mood for God even if he isn’t there! As Crackers and Cotton say to each other in Pink Flamingos, “You are God” and “You are God,” and you know what? They are both right.
I will make your sex life better by encouraging your fantasies. Believe in incubi? I do. Bisexual demons in male form who lie
upon sleepers in the night and have sexual intercourse with them. No dating. No unsafe sex. No alimony. Just demon sex when you want it! Or how about a succubus? The title of a bad sixties exploitation movie, but what a sexy concept. Women devils who drain semen from the men they seduce in their sleep, collecting energy “often to the point of exhaustion of the victim.” Who needs sleeping pills with these babes? Just hit the hay and we’ll all score!
Of course, there are some saints we do take very seriously. Saint Catherine of Siena is without a doubt the most insane of these and we have no choice but to honor her daily. Reading Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell, the best encyclopedia of deranged saints ever written, we learn that in Catherine’s time (the 1300s) she was known as “a person of considerable reputation for outstanding holiness”—in other words, nuts! At the peak of her career she “urged the holy hatred of oneself” and advised others to “build a cell in your mind that you can never escape.” She was a “bottom” for God.
Little Miss Catherine the Lunatic supposedly had her first vision at the age of six. Who didn’t? When I was six I saw myself as the winner of a full-length mink coat on the Bess Myerson–hosted 1950s TV quiz show The Big Payoff, and for weeks wore a filthy piece of material around my shoulders that only I knew was the coveted prize. Catherine organized a group of fellow child masochists who flagellated themselves daily. Well, I can understand that, too. I had a Horror House in our garage and I’d charge the neighborhood kids twenty-five cents to enter. After they gave me the money, I’d tell them to wait, and I’d go inside and then yell, “Okay, come in!” The little ticket buyers would grope their way into the darkness and I would squirt them with a fire extinguisher (my dad’s company sold them) and then kick them in the leg. They loved it. They even came back for more. I also used to play “school” as a kid with the little girl who lived next door, and I was always the teacher and she was always the student. Every time we played I failed her, yet she still eagerly agreed to play every time I asked, fully knowing the results. Failing can be a relief for some. A sexual position. A way of life. A choice. Some kind of happiness that never lets you down.
Saint Catherine was also, like us, thin. Her favorite diet? Drinking “only a little cold water” and “chewing on bitter herbs” and then “spitting out the substance.” Well, we can imitate that! But we’re not anorexic, for chrissakes. We eat. Six white Necco wafers (the ones that look like Communion hosts) for lunch. And dinner? Well, we usually don’t swallow past one p.m., but on special occasions, two red French radishes make a delicious late-night treat.
Saint Catherine was out of her mind, but she tried to do good deeds. Volunteering as a nurse, she was dressing the cancerous breast sores of a woman she was tending to when she “felt repulsed at the horrid odor of the suppuration.” Going for a new level of religious excess and “determined to overcome the bodily sensations,” Catherine carefully drained the pus “into a ladle” and chugged it all down. For God, I guess! Maybe one of you followers could volunteer somewhere and reenact this new station of the cross and see what happens. But “do” a goiter instead. Goiters are so scary. Every day of my life I worry about growing a goiter. But maybe chugging goiter juice is some sort of miracle cure for baldness? You can never know until you try it. Let me know if it works.
Like all good tales, Catherine’s story has a happy ending—at least from her viewpoint. “Her final days were filled with pain, tormenting devils, self-doubts and fear of the church’s future.” That’s where our stories will have to differ. We know no self-doubts, our egos are way too big to die yet, and we laugh a lot. And we never doubt our church’s future because we have been praying for years to the biggest saint of all. “The Most Hated Woman in America,” as Life magazine once called Madalyn Murray O’Hair. And she will definitely answer us.
Madalyn Murray, as she was initially known, tried to defect to Russia in 1960, was rejected, and then opened the New Era Bookshop in downtown Baltimore, locally known as “the Commie bookshop.” I was afraid to go inside but fascinated that someone was actually out of the Communist closet in my hometown. I didn’t like Ike in grade school, and secretly rooted for Adlai Stevenson, even though I had no idea of the differences in these presidential candidates. I just knew no one in my entire private school claimed to be for Stevenson, so I naturally jumped on board his campaign, at least in my head. In the early sixties, when I was festering in Catholic high school, Madalyn Murray hit pay dirt and, using her son as a test case, had prayer removed from the Baltimore public school system. She then made a federal case out of it and suddenly the whole world made her the Enemy of God, the hag in the housedress who took away the “Our Father” from our Christian children. One of my lay teachers even hinted to our class that he “wouldn’t be against someone breaking the windows of her house in protest.” I remember being outraged when I heard him say this, and that’s when I became Madalyn Murray’s fan. “She wouldn’t care if you hate her!” I wanted to shout out to my classmates. “She’s fighting for our rights!”
Madalyn actually exhibited her hate mail and loved to quote publicly from it. “Someone is going to put a bullet through your fat ass,” one read. “You swine, you masculine lesbian bitch!” Madalyn went on to sue anybody and everybody who dared mix church and state, even trying to have “In God We Trust” removed from all U.S. coins. The Baltimore cops especially loathed her, beating her up, yelling, “Get that bitch!” before finally terrorizing her so much that they ran her and her family out of town to Austin, Texas.
According to the fascinating biography America’s Most Hated Woman, by Ann Rowe Seaman, Madalyn adored infuriating people. She put out bumper stickers reading “Praying Is Begging” (it is) and “Jesus Is Lard” (he isn’t). She raided a San Diego church and turned over bingo tables, “pushing and shoving people.” She called Jesus “the most despicable man in history, including Hitler” and you can imagine how her enemies rose to that bait. When Pope Paul VI died, she commented, “I only wish I could spit on his corpse for the world to see.” Manners, for her, were nonexistent. When a pious preacher came to her house and offered to “explain about Jesus, about the blessings that could come back when you did the Lord’s work,” Madalyn pretended to listen but then reasoned, “Yes, you can tell me about Jesus but first let’s go up and fuck. Then after we’re fucking you can tell me about Jesus. Or maybe you can tell me about Jesus when we’re fucking.” Later in her career, Madalyn even came onstage in some of her lecture tours riding a broomstick!
The very people whose support Madalyn needed didn’t find it any easier to deal with her. When a gay militant sent her some of his writings, Madalyn wrote him back, “I would expect this kind of literature to issue from a misogynist. I am a female head of the American Atheist Society. You are a cocksucker.” So much for gay rights. She threw Jews out of her organization, claiming “a Jew could not be an atheist, Judaism was a religion, not a race.” “Why don’t you go to the gas chamber?” she challenged the very red-diaper babies who could help her. “It’s people like you who promote the need for them.” Despite claiming “Jesus Christ, it’s wonderful to be rich” from all the donations she pocketed from her followers, she was still a really tough boss, calling her staff “flotsam, jetsam, cunt lappers and nigger-fuckers.” She’d sometimes realize she had gone too far and would apologize. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she’d beg, before adding with a vengeance, “…that you are such an asshole!”
No one was really surprised when Madalyn Murray was eventually murdered in 1995. By a man named Waters. David Waters. No relation of mine, of course. A onetime hood turned disco stud turned gay hustler and wife beater who even set fire to his own mother’s wig and then urinated in her face! This former employee of Madalyn’s thought she had more money on hand than she did, got the help of two low-life buddies, kidnapped Madalyn, her son, and her granddaughter, kept them hostage in a motel for months, and then strangled them, cut up their bodies, and buried the pieces in a shallow grave. Not her son Bill, the one M
adalyn used to take prayer out of the schools. No, he found Jesus in 1977, broke away, and wrote a Mommie Dearest–type book about Madalyn entitled My Life Without God. It was the other son, John, who was martyred for his mom. The one who lived with Madalyn his entire life and never married, fighting the atheist battle to the end. Robin, too, Madalyn’s grandchild, the ultimate loyalist to the cause, who died like a defiant holy woman. How proud Madalyn must have been of her offspring, as she continued “humiliating and infuriating” her captors until Waters finally wrung her neck. They gave up their lives for us, you know. All three of them.
Participation in certain “actions” would be expected of all cult members, and this includes bringing in daily monetary donations. In other words, begging in the streets. I always remember the insane Catholic panhandlers I saw in Rome: the true nutcases, usually female and on their knees, who had gone completely off the deep end, whipping themselves on the streets and wearing cloth bags over their heads with no eye or mouth holes as horrified tourists pretended not to see them. I won’t expect you to go as far as that, but I would hope you’d be creative. When we were a young starving film troupe and didn’t have enough money for our needed LSD, Mary Vivian Pearce sent away for a UNICEF kit, dressed in straight disguise, and went door-to-door, collecting charity money until she had enough cash to pay for some of our doses. Today, I would recommend making our marks laugh. This seems like the best way to get the employed to give us their hard-earned wages. I have a few examples of witty panhandling that might inspire you. In New York, I once saw a middle-aged hobo type sitting on the street with a tin cup in front of him and a hand-lettered sign reading I USED TO BE QUITE ATTRACTIVE. I noticed his tin cup was flush with bills. Another time, in San Francisco, I spotted another grimy homeless guy with a sign that simply read I NEED $ FOR A HOOKER, which also seemed to be inspiring charity from the local citizens. Go ahead—think like a grifter. You have to chip in here. I need money.