The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

“Marty, it’s for you,” my mom or one of my sisters would yell. I’d stand in the kitchen and speak briefly, quietly, on the phone with him—my counselor pal from camp, my mentor, my secret lover. I tried to resist the invitations, but the craving would rise up and I’d say, “Yes, OK,” and arrange to spend another few days with him. I knew that somewhere in the course of the weekend there’d be the drug, the fix, the touch—that one thing that felt true beyond any Truth. He knew that part of me, the part that craved sex. Pleasure. He accepted it. Fostered it. He wanted what I wanted.

  And also there was, during those long, winter weekends, the simple companionship. The holding of a hammer, the time spent together sawing wood, making things. He still had lessons he wanted to teach.

  I remember coming home from one of these weekends to find that my minibike had been stolen. It was my prized possession. A shiny red, fifty-horsepower minibike. I was in shock. My dad could barely look at me; he felt so badly, his head hanging low. Turns out he’d taken it for a ride to visit his friend and have a bit of a nip. Innocently, he’d left it out front and someone nabbed it.

  My motorized bike was months and months of paper route money. It cost way more than the guitar I bought. It was, at the time, the world to me. I could barely speak. Something so big, that I’d worked so hard for, gone. Vanished. I was numb with anger. I didn’t know what to do.

  I called Bob.

  Gently, he calmed me. “God has reasons, plans larger than we could ever know. Look, Marty, you may never understand why. You’ve just got to figure that someone out there needed that bike more than you did.”

  It was one of the strangest notions I’d ever heard, but, even so, there was something undeniably wise in his words. A larger kind of thinking. And what he said sunk in, comforted me. The last thing he told me before hanging up was, “Marty, you’ve got to forgive your father. That’s important. He meant no harm.”

  Eighth-grade weekends with Bob meant Karen too. She had an apartment in Boulder and sometimes we’d sleep there Friday nights before heading, just the two of us, up to the unfinished house where we’d work (and sleep) alone in sleeping bags. Or sometimes in the almost-finished bedroom with the fancy skylight, where you could lie on the futon and practice celestial navigation.

  On those occasional nights in her apartment in Boulder, the three of us had sex. By now I was demanding that I get my moment with her, my chance to prove myself. Then Bob and she would do whatever it was they liked as I hovered on the edge of the action.

  On one of those mornings, I remember Karen waking very early, with a start. She let out a sort of gasp, threw back the covers and dashed to the bathroom. There were large drops of blood all across the linoleum of her small studio, leading to the bathroom door. I felt a jolt of terror, thinking she’d cut herself or had a nosebleed or that she’d been hurt somehow. I noticed that there was blood in the bed too and in a panic I jostled Bob.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “She’s got her period.”

  “Oh,” I said, sort of putting it together with the little I’d gleaned at home from my sister and mother about menstruation. Bob explained a bit more and calmed me down. Said it was something normal. Eventually Karen emerged, pale and upset, and with a wad of paper towels she cleaned the floor.

  We spent that morning together packing up her studio apartment. She was moving across town, somewhere cheaper. In the midst of loading boxes into Bob’s pickup truck, the two of them erupted.

  “You live like a pig. You’ve left the place such a mess!” Bob yelled.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Everywhere you go, you leave a mess. Why didn’t you clean up?”

  “I’m working two damn jobs. What do you expect?”

  Suddenly, Bob lashed out and smacked the passenger door of the pickup with his fist, leaving a dent. He bent over and cradled his hand against his chest. That could have been her face, I thought. I’d never seen this violent side of him, though I realized I always suspected it was there. That he did his best to keep it from me.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said, throwing a broom and then himself into the back of the pickup. I sat up front, wishing myself invisible.

  “He’s crazy,” Karen kept repeating as we drove down the dirt road. “He’s fucking crazy.”

  There was one time my parents confronted me about the mountain trips. I came home very late one Sunday. Karen and I had gotten lost riding some horses, transporting them from one ranch to another. We were to meet Bob but we’d gone down a wrong trail and it was well after dark when we finally found a highway and a phone. By then, Bob had called Rocky Mountain Rescue and had rangers out looking for us. It was a school night, my parents were concerned, and when I got home my mom made my dad say something. It was a short and vague sort of lecture, Dad sitting in the armchair in his pajamas, smoking a cigarette.

  “Come in here and sit down.”

  “OK.”

  “You can’t be going off like this and coming home so late. What about your studies? What’s going on? What are you doing up there?”

  “I’m helping out.”

  “Well, you can’t just go off and come home so late,” Dad said.

  My mother nodded. I had the feeling that she wanted to know, to ask, more. But she didn’t. Nobody pressed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, seeing how honestly upset they were and how caring. And how powerless. Everything was too far along now for them to stop it, for them to have any grip on me. I looked at my dad across in the chair and Mom sitting on the couch. The seven feet between us was vast. I was barely aware of their preoccupation with making ends meet, with negotiating a crumbling marriage. And they hadn’t a clue what I’d gotten myself into. There might have been an inkling beneath (I recall one occasion when they’d suddenly insisted on driving me to the ranch instead of Bob picking me up. “We want to have a look,” they’d said.), but the conscious thought would never have been allowed to blossom. That a tall and charming man, a guy associated with St. Malo, a fellow I’d said was once a seminarian, was a pedophile. Unthinkable.

  “Well, don’t be home so late,” Dad said, stamping out his cigarette.

  “OK.”

  We all went straight to bed. That was the last of it. The closest we’d ever come to a showdown.

  Sometimes I felt scared and I liked it. All the concealment was a kind of strange power. An entire and buzzing inner life. A fourteen-year-old on a three-speed Raleigh, getting it every which way. I was getting away with murder, with pleasure, with crimes, and I was pulling As, I was pulling focus for all the right reasons. I got second place in the televised Rocky Mountain Spelling Bee (a joyous occasion, a prize TV!). I was spokesman for the class, top of the Catholic heap. I was oh so nice. Naughty and nice. My face was the frantic mask of a chipper boy. I was expert shape-shifter. Secrecy, my engine. A machine so loud it makes it nearly impossible to listen for what’s in your soul, to hear what’s authentic.

  I was aware in some way that the jumble inside of me was corrosive. I didn’t know then how my psyche was urgently fragmenting, stuffing the appropriate story into the appropriate corner of the brain to summon at the appropriate moment to deliver the appropriate impression—depending on the place, the person, the time. It is amazing how efficiently the mind can erase from the heart the details, the truth of the narrative.

  Sometimes I think, I dream, of going back there for a moment, back there to the boy on his bike, the boy I’m remembering now, and asking him how he did it, held it together. How, what, he really felt. I want to ask him exactly what words he would use to describe the muddle of it all and if I’m even close to telling it like it was.

  What he withstood, what he soaked up like a sponge, I’m wringing out now, and I know it’s him, it’s the boy, who’s summoning me to tell. He’s the one who insists, believes, that all the fractured pieces can be spread on a white page, examined, and woven back together with words.

  16<
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  I CAME HOME one afternoon and found a formal-looking letter addressed to me sitting on the kitchen table. I opened it and was confused by a tangle of unfamiliar names. Then I saw Robert and Karen and understood that this was an invitation, that they were to be married. The thought of it, the news of it, was shocking. Especially because I’d been busy boxing up thoughts of them and shipping it all away. I’d managed to be out of touch with them for nearly four months. The last contact was a call I’d made thanking them for the gift they’d sent me at Christmastime. A beautiful hardback copy of James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, inscribed: Merry Christmas, Happy Birthday, and Happy New Year, Love, Bob and Karen. The very sight of the inscription shamed me. I’d taken a pen and scribbled until their names were unreadable and hid the book at the back of my sock drawer.

  I threw the invitation away and went downstairs to do my homework.

  Several days later Kip (charming, bacon-frying, also-sleeping-with-Bob Kip) called. He said his mom was going to drive to Bob’s wedding. Did I want to go? “Yes,” I said without much thought. Suddenly it seemed the right thing to do, and I realized I wanted to wish them well, that I wanted, in fact, to witness the normalcy. Their wedding would tell me that what we’d done and who we were was over, that everyone, including me, was moving on into the respectable.

  A few Saturdays later, I put on a suit and a tie and spent the afternoon in a tiny church in the mountains, watching Bob and Karen walk down the aisle. In my memory it was a priest who presided, though I don’t recall a Mass, so it might have been a mountain minister or justice of the peace. I remember feeling awkward sitting there with Kip in the last pew on the left—two of Bob’s musketeers bearing witness. For some bizarre reason, Kip’s mom remained outside in the car. She wasn’t welcome. Bob had had some sort of quarrel with her, but she was so devoted to Bob, was so under his spell in some way, that she brought her fourteen-year-old son to the ceremony anyway.

  Their figures, Bob in fancy black, Karen in white, standing with their backs to us at the altar, were surreal. There was that strange disconnect from the hidden things we’d done, who we were, and the ordinariness of a public ceremony. I recall that Karen was pregnant, already swollen with the reason for marriage. I never even spoke to them that day, save for a quick nod and a whispered congratulations as they moved past. I sat quietly in the back and smiled as they walked up the aisle and out to the pickup parked in front of the church. It all happened so quickly, with so few people there. No drinks, no food, no toasts. I knew the occasion was meant to be full of hope and happiness but the whole thing struck me as pathetic. Unreal. Somebody opened and held the door; someone else tossed a bit of rice. I saw that Bob was grinning as he took Karen’s hand and they ducked into the truck. Then they were gone. A honeymoon? Just going home? I never asked.

  We drove back to the city. Kip’s Mom asked, “Was it nice?”

  We nodded, and then sat in silence all the way home. The one good thing, I kept thinking, was that now I could say to my parents or anyone who happened to ask: Oh, yeah, Bob? Him? I don’t see him anymore. Well, he got married, he’s having a kid. Just a regular guy. The whole strange event gave me a certain relief that he wouldn’t be found out. Relief that he was through with little boys and so trouble was less likely to come to his door, less likely to come to mine.

  I got home and took off my suit and sat on my bed. I’ll never touch him again, I thought, or allow him to touch me. He is wed, going to be a father. And I’m going to grow up now. High school soon and then I’ll get into the best college I can. Stanford, maybe. And when I get married, it’ll be to a good woman, and we’ll have lots of kids, and I’ll do my best to be honest and good. To be a citizen. A lawyer. A senator, one day.

  I knew this now. I sat on my bed and felt the sharp stab of my convictions. And of my lonesomeness. I hated that I felt lonesome, but I did. The one person who knew my body, my secrets, had just been married. Wedded to a woman I didn’t like.

  17

  THE BUSY-BOY BRAVADO, the manic performance that carried me through my last months at Christ the King Elementary, crumbled upon my arrival at Regis High. This was the place, I felt, the moment, to become a man. This was the big league now, no grade-school games, no singing nuns, no girls allowed, and in the face of it, I was utterly overwhelmed. Here was a brotherhood of boys taught by a fellowship of priests. Here was the revered Jesuit institution where my Dad, uncles, and all of my male cousins were educated, and the second I laid eyes on it I was stricken with shyness.

  Constructed in the 1880s, Regis High School was a monolithic pile of giant rose-colored stone, a four-story monument to Catholic maleness. It was the most oppressive edifice I had ever seen. Carved in granite over the large doors of the main entrance was the phrase RELIGIONI ET BONIS ARTIBUS. And above that, faded rays were chiseled around the letters IHS, the Greek monogram for Jesus, known in English as the symbol for I Have Suffered. Each time I saw the carvings on the face of that mammoth building, every time I hiked up the wide steps past Father Fitz, barking at everyone to hurry to class, every fear I harbored about who I was and what I might be on my way to becoming was galvanized. I felt I was marching into a men’s-only holy club to which I could never win membership. A place where my face would flicker the wrong and sinful desire, where I’d move in a certain manner and all would be revealed. Because, somehow, this community of men would know. They’d know where I’d been, what I was.

  Everything about the place, the dank halls, the priests living on the fourth floor above our classrooms, the rusty pipes and cracked tiled floors, the very odor of its history, heightened my dread. My deepest longing was to measure up. And my bottomless terror, that I’d already failed. As I moved from class to all-male class, particulars kept creeping from the pit of my stomach, up the back of my throat. There was the indisputable fact that he’d stolen my first orgasm. It felt, in some mythic, fourteen-year-old way, that that single act of thievery had doomed me, made me incapable of real manhood. He’d yanked it from me at just the wrong moment and now it was fated, encoded, that every drop of my Catholic seed and the rush of pleasure that came with it, was linked forever with him. I couldn’t shake the feeling, so strong in the dim rooms of this old school, that my deeds stuck to me like a bad smell. A stain.

  How many students, how many priests in this institution held secrets? Countless of them, surely. But I felt that mine was the only, the worst possible, one. And the weight of it began to crush me.

  For the first few months, by sheer force of will, I kept my studies up. But as the weeks went on, I couldn’t concentrate through the haze of depression. I hadn’t the armor to withstand the humiliation that seemed the main method, the core of the Regis curriculum. There was terrifying Mr. Getz, who smacked the science tables where we sat with a yardstick whenever we didn’t answer quickly or correctly. There was the ancient priest who taught Latin and Algebra, his cassock smeared with chalk from impossible calculations, with the dust of dead verbs. He gave pop quizzes, where disgrace awaited if you hadn’t memorized the lesson as well as the page number that the lesson was on. The message was clear and everywhere—get through all this, then you’ll be one of us. A strong, smart citizen. A good Catholic man. Dads all over town spoke of their time at Regis with the awe and affection of soldiers having served together through war. They would speak of the great Jesuit tradition of intellectual curiosity and rigor. Of this brilliant Society of Jesus dedicated to discipline and education and the pope. A society that included great leaders like the paleontologist and writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the passionate activist Father Daniel Berrigan. A society I was born into, in which I was meant, and wished, to take a proud part.

  In the course of those dreadful freshman days, no hour was worse than gym. The place where body and masculinity are most nakedly revealed. At Regis, phys ed was lorded over by a beady-eyed man with no hair and less humor. Mr. McPhee. He forced us to participate in each week’s alternating activity
in a furious nine-month tour through every sport known to man, from boxing to wrestling to basketball and rope climbing. No matter how ill equipped we were, no matter how terrified, he screamed at us (me) through every miserable activity. He was insanely strict about two things: jockstraps and showers. Each session began with his checking the one and ended with his observing the other.

  His vocation, whatever it was (actual Jesuit or lay teacher, I can’t recall) was buried beneath his mound of sweaty sweat clothes. Always in his hand was a clipboard, and around his neck a silver whistle, which he blew often and loudly. The first whistle was our signal to line up along the black (not the red!) line in alphabetical order, arms clasped behind our backs. He would walk along the row of boys, his tennis shoes squeaking, his baldpate reflecting fluorescent light. At random, he would pause in front of three or four different boys, reach under their regulation red shorts and quickly, deftly (years of practice) hook his stubby index finger under the elastic of the required jock. Snap! He did all this without ever taking his eyes off the face of the boy he was checking. We were all ordered to stare ahead at attention. If the jock wasn’t there (which happened only rarely), if you were wearing mere underpants, he simply marked it on his board without a word and everyone knew you were two demerits closer to the six that brought you JUG.

  JUG: Judgment under God—a kind of punishment handed out at Catholic school, usually in the form of detention, suspension, and, occasionally at this Jesuit high school, forced participation in a boxing match with the dean of discipline in a vacant lot behind the field house. This instilled in most students a sense of mortal terror, which of course was the point. I never actually knew anyone who’d boxed with Father Fitz, the dean. The rumor was enough.

  At the end of class, McPhee would blow the whistle again and stand at the end of the shower stall, where each boy was required to get fully naked and fully wet before being checked off his list. No shower, two demerits. He stood there, his eyes moving slowly from boy to clipboard and back to boy. The tepid water, the tense atmosphere, the beady eyes of Mr. McPhee, kept things quick and furtive. His presence did offer one bit of solace—it crushed my abiding fear of getting an erection at the worst possible moment.