Son of a Critch

by Mark Critch

  I went home with a renewed sense of purpose. I was an actor. I started to see yellow everywhere I looked. Mustard was yellow. Pencils were yellow. Even my old enemy the school bus was yellow. I would become the colour. Every morning it was lemonade and scrambled eggs for me, banana for lunch, corn on the cob with butter for supper. I forced my parents to sit and watch me practise. I needed stage time, so I improvised by climbing up onto the kitchen counter and standing in the sink. My parents sat against the wall at the kitchen table watching as I rehearsed over and over. Dad was like a dry-ice machine with cigarette after cigarette as I committed every word to memory.

  I asked Dad what a pupil was and he told me it was a student. Here was another example of the poor writing that had plagued my entire acting career up to this point. How are you welcoming pupils when they don’t even know who you’re speaking to?

  The parents were expected to provide the costume for this Crayola box come to life. We were to wear white shirts, a sash in the assigned colour, and a pair of matching pants. This was a problem, as my mother was not what you’d call a crafty person. She once made me a Superman costume. It consisted of a red piece of plastic tied around my neck and a hand-drawn S scotch-taped to my school uniform. Not a costume that spurred people to ask “Wow! Who made that?” Thankfully, cosplay contests were a long way off. The white shirt, at least, was not a problem. We scoured the mall for yellow pants. They didn’t carry boys’ yellow pants at Sears or Woolco. To this day I’ve never seen a pair of boys’ yellow pants for sale. Or yellow pants at all, for that matter. And there was no hope whatsoever of finding a sash. The Miss Teen Newfoundland contest wasn’t for months!

  Mom took the scissors to a yellow dress she had and got a needle and thread out of Dad’s biscuit tin. She worked well into the night after both Happy Days and Three’s Company. I was about to head off to bed when she called me into the kitchen. “TryThisOn,” she said. My mother passed me a horribly deformed Muppet—a mound of bright yellow fabric sewn together with long strips of black, red, and brown thread. It looked like an infinity scarf that Big Bird might knit. I struggled to put my costume on, but I couldn’t find a way in.

  “There aren’t enough holes,” I complained.

  “My​God​What​Are​You​Talking​About​There’s​All​Kinds​Of​Holes,​Sure. The​Holes​Are​The​Easiest​Part!”

  I rolled around on the floor, half in and half out of the yellow monster. If you walked into the room at that moment, you might have thought an alien was giving birth to a small human boy, or perhaps a small human boy was giving birth to an alien. There was no way to tell, really. “There’s only two holes,” I said, holding my ground on the ground.

  “Yes. Sure​That’s​Plenty​Of​Holes. One​For​You​And​One​For​Your​Feet.” My mother examined her handiwork and eventually admitted that she’d sewn the waist and two arms of a dress together in a way that somehow gave you two legs but one foot hole. She lifted her scissors above my waist and told me not to move. My testicles disappeared somewhere up behind my small intestine. “There,” she said triumphantly, creating two separate leg warmers and a bright yellow knee-length skirt. The aerobics fad of the 80s was still a few years off, so Mom hustled me off to bed with a promise to fix it in the morning while I was at school.

  “Get​To​Sleep​Now​The​Big​Show​Is​Tomorrow.” Oh, yes. I would sleep. But what she didn’t know was that there’d be no school in the morning. If I was sick on the day of the assembly then Billy would have to step in for that show. He could have the matinee. I’d stage a miraculous recovery after school and take the prime-time slot. It was real Joan Crawford and Bette Davis stuff.

  The next morning I did my usual typhoid performance. Mom, relieved that she wouldn’t have to finish the costume, relented and I settled in to watch a Donahue episode about near-death experiences. After a delicious lunch provided by Chef Boyardee, I told Mom I thought I was well enough to take the stage that night. She reacted the way a can of Pepsi does when you shake it up.

  “My​God​Mark​Sure​Where​Are​We​Going​To​Find​Another​Costume​Now​At​This​Late​Hour? Sure​I’m​After​Ruining​My​Only​Good​Yellow​Dress!” Mom called the mother of another Yellow, who, as luck would have it, had enough material left to whip up another costume. She’d meet us in the school parking lot that night. A taxi to the mall and a bus to the school later, I found myself changing in the back of a stranger’s car like Superman in a phone booth. Billy was standing with his mother by the door to the school and I smiled at him as I walked past. I’d never seen anyone so happy to see me. Apparently, he’d suffered a major case of stage fright during the assembly and refused to go any farther than the wings of the stage, delivering his welcome address half-hidden behind a curtain.

  A rainbow of colours assembled in our classroom. We looked like the rallying point for a Pride parade. “Mark!” Mrs. Fowler shouted as I walked in. “Where were you this afternoon? Were you too nervous to come to school?”

  “Sure. Yes. Okay,” I stammered. Nervous? No. I was executing a cold, calculated plan. Parents mixed with the children until it was time for them to take their seats. Fox stood all alone in his purple pants and sash. His parents may not have been there, but someone had made him a costume at least. We all lined up for a last-minute tinkle to avoid any accidents onstage.

  “How come you weren’t here today?” asked Fox.

  “Sick,” I said, washing my hands. I could see him studying me in the mirror.

  “More like chicken,” he scoffed. “You were too scared to come today and you’re probably going to piss yourself tonight. We’ll see lots of yellow then, pissy pants.” I tried to think of a good comeback. To be fair, I had peed all over my classroom. Anyway, I didn’t have time for Fox now. I had a show to do. I stared into my reflection. “Showtime,” I whispered aloud.

  “You’re so friggin’ weird,” Fox said, leaving me to my dressing-room mirror and my thoughts. I followed the others down the hall and onto the gymnatorium stage. The muffled roar of the audience on the other side of the red velvet curtain sounded like a 747 revving up on the tarmac.

  “Are you ready, Mark?” my teacher asked. I nodded, and a nun by the side of the stage began pulling the ropes that opened the curtain. The spotlight hit me as I walked up to the microphone. I could see the silhouette of the Archbishop’s mitre, his pointed hat standing high above the other heads like a church steeple in a town skyline at dusk. As my eyes adjusted to the light I could make out some familiar faces in the front row: Father Mike, Father Davis, Brother O’Reilly. Perfect. I had my cast of characters. Now was the autumn of my content. Showtime!

  “Archbishop,” I began, straight to the pointy hat. “Bishop,” I continued to a shorter hat that I assumed to be the Robin to the Archbishop’s Batman. “Fathers, Brothers, Sisters,” I delivered right to the mixed bag of clergy in the front row. I could see their beaming smiles encouraging me. I was on a roll. “Parents, teachers, friends, pupils—” Suddenly I got a big laugh, a roar of a laugh. I momentarily lost my train of thought. What was so funny? This was serious stuff. “Pupils,” I repeated. This time the laugh was even bigger. I said it again, leaning into it now with a devilish look on my face. I’d figured out what was going on. The remnants of pouty baby talk in my voice mixed with my unfamiliarity with the word was making “pupils” come out as “poo-pills,” to the delight of the adults in the room. I was getting my first laugh and I was working blue.

  “Poo-pills,” I said again, covering my mouth as if I was saying something dirty. The crowd erupted. The Archbishop’s mitre wobbled as even he chuckled. It was intoxicating. “Poo-pills!” I said a fourth time, but by now the joke was wearing thin and I could see Mrs. Fowler waving me back into the wings.

  “Welcome!” I finished with a bow and then walked offstage, basking in the last waves of applause that emanated from the giant love machine. As the music started the other kids hurried onstage to get into plac
e, and I grabbed my pom-poms and joined them. I became the colour yellow. I stood up. I sat back down. But I was just going through the motions, still trying to absorb what had just happened. I had controlled them. I’d made them do something. No. I’d made them feel something. We finished our performance and there it was again, that beautiful sound. But this applause was different. They’d enjoyed the song and dance, but it was almost as if they were in a restaurant and the applause was a bill that had to be paid. They were choosing to clap. But they’d had no choice when they laughed; the response I’d gotten had been uncontrolled. And that sound seemed more authentic.

  I now knew who I was. I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. In some ways, I’ve been chasing that exact high ever since.

  6

  BLESS ME, FATHER

  THE LINE BETWEEN GOOD AND BAD was always clear in my childhood. My parents, their friends, priests, and nuns were good. Burglars, safecrackers, car thieves, and villain wrestlers were bad. However, I also knew that it was possible for someone to change columns or even to straddle the good and bad sides. I’d seen that things weren’t always black and white.

  An older altar boy had sworn to me that he’d seen a priest and a nun kiss one day in church. He was returning his vestments and the Sanctus bells to the vestry, a sort of locker room for altar boys, when he noticed a priest and a nun holding hands off to the side of the altar. Something about the way they were standing unsettled him and he froze in place, watching. He said they looked around and then the priest leaned in and kissed the nun on the cheek. Now, this was not something you see every day. The boy was not only shocked but terrified, and his hands started to shake. And since he was still holding the Sanctus bells they began ringing, the sound echoing throughout the church. The bells are supposed to focus the attention of the church on the supernatural event taking place at the altar, not on the dirty one taking place off to the side of it.

  The ecclesiastics broke apart from each other like two boxers hearing the bell at the end of a round. They quickly left the church from opposite doors. The altar boy stood like a mannequin, his eyes fixed on the vibration of the bells in his hand. He left the robes and bells right there in a pew and retired from religious life. And since the boy who told us this was older and had smokes, for us younger kids that was all the confirmation needed to make this story true.

  It was in this confusing world of sinners dressed as saints that I prepared for the sacrament of First Holy Confession. When Catholics confess their sins, they do so to a priest. Personally, I didn’t see the point of a middleman. Nuns were always reminding us that God is all around us. If I sinned and wanted God to forgive me, why couldn’t I just ask him? If I had his direct line, why did I need to place my call through an operator? In my mind, confession was just a way for them to keep tabs on you. It was a sucker’s game and I was having none of it.

  We received a lot of special instruction in how to properly bare our souls. Sister Cecilia would come in and tell us why it was so important for young children to confess their sins. “Do you like to play games, children?”

  “Yes.” All hands agreed that children enjoyed games.

  “Do you like the hockey, children?” We did. I was beginning to see a pattern. “There are rules in hockey. If you break the rules in hockey then you are sent to the penalty box. The people in the penalty box do not get to join in the happiness that all the other players of the hockey are experiencing. And because they have broken the rules, they are no longer liked and nobody wants to play with them anymore. Isn’t that sad, boys and girls?”

  Clearly she’d never seen a game, given that fighters were among the most loved players in hockey and some of them spent more time in the box than they did on the ice. “Catholicism is like hockey,” she said, really going for it, “and sinners break the rules. Sin puts you in God’s penalty box.” Did she mean hell? Players are only in the penalty box for, like, five minutes. I thought hell was for eternity. If hell was only a five-minute stint, then it might actually be worth it.

  “Sin is what happens when we break God’s rules. But sin is not just the bad things we do. It’s also the good things that we should do that we don’t do. You don’t have to do anything at all to sin. You can sin in your own head just by thinking about sinning!”

  “Don’t think about boobs. Don’t think about boobs. Don’t think about boobs,” I thought. Then I thought about boobs.

  “Sin happens,” she continued, “when we choose to do what we want to do instead of what God wants us to do.”

  So, to recap: sin happens when we do something, when we fail to do something, or even if we just think about doing something. My body was a perpetual sin machine during my every living moment. I’d had no idea. Wait! Was ignorance another sin? I hadn’t known I’d been sinning this much. I’d come to school an innocent child. I would leave feeling like a Nazi.

  A few hands shot up. “What was the worst sin?”

  Murder.

  “What happened to people who sin and don’t go to confession?”

  They either go to hell or spend hundreds of years in limbo, a kind of waiting room for heaven without any magazines.

  “What happens to people who aren’t Catholic when they die?”

  They go to hell.

  Now, that last one struck me as funny. She was saying that if you weren’t a Catholic you were going to go to hell. I raised my hand. “Sister? What about Chinese people? Do they go to hell?”

  “If they are not Catholic, then, unfortunately, they do,” she said, dooming not only them but the vast majority of all human life. I thought of Yim Kee, who ran the Chinese takeout by our school. He seemed like a nice enough fella. Was he really going to go to hell for eternity? Occasionally he’d kick everyone out of his store if it was full of groups of kids splitting one order of fries six ways, but did he really deserve to burn in hell just because he wasn’t a Catholic? Come to think of it, he may very well have been a Catholic. I’d just assumed he wasn’t because he was Chinese, which was racist. Chalk up one more sin for Mark.

  I needed a follow-up. “But, Sister, what about all them youngsters we see on TV dying in Africa? Will they go to hell?”

  “If they have not accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts, then they, too, will suffer the hellfire.” Man, she really wasn’t big on multiculturalism. I couldn’t see her working at the United Nations anytime soon.

  “But, Sister,” I continued, “those babies I see on the news with flies on ’em. They weren’t so lucky as us to be born in Newfoundland where you got no choice but to be Catholic. It doesn’t seem fair that they got to go to hell just cuz nobody made them go to Catholic school.”

  “I want to make one thing very clear,” she said in a voice that made it very clear that question period was over. “Everyone on earth is given at least one chance in life to become a Catholic. Every. Single. Person. If they choose not to take that chance, then that is their own fault.”

  That seemed like bullshit to me. We’d been seeing more and more images of starving children in Africa. Their distended bellies and skinny arms were a shocking sight for any child. I couldn’t imagine priests shuffling around on their hands and knees asking these dying children if they wanted to become a Catholic. And if priests were there anyway, shouldn’t they be asking the kids if they wanted some water? And if they said no, or were too weak to answer at all, then what would happen? Would the door-to-door baptism salesman just say “Sucks to be you” and crawl on to the next kid, or would he try to sell them on it? I just didn’t believe Sister Cecilia, which had to be a sin, also. But there was no way I was going to confess that one.

  That day at recess, the other kids and I couldn’t wait to talk about confession. “What are you going to confess?” my friend Jamie asked me. I had no idea. I couldn’t think of anything good. I hadn’t really done that much. I swore a couple of times. I lied whenever I felt the possibility of discomfort. So, clearly, I would lie about lying when the time came.

 
The other kids were in the same boat. We didn’t feel we had anything worth confessing. First confession was a big deal. Our parents would be buying us new clothes. Relatives and family friends would be there. There was going to be a special Mass. We really needed to bring it in the sin department.

  “If we don’t confess something good, they might think we’re holding out on them,” a kid named Frankie put in. He had a point. If I were a priest and some kid got in the confessional and said he’d “swore twice,” I’d definitely think he was a liar. “You’re not telling me something,” I’d allege. “What did you do? Stick a butter knife in a cat to see what it might feel like to kill a man? Confess!”

  “Maybe we should make some up,” I ventured. “Like, if we come up with something we all did and we all confessed it. Then when we each went up to the priest, he’d think we were all being honest because he’d have already heard the story.” The lads thought about this, and I could see enough heads nodding to know I had a majority. “Good,” I said, taking the lead. “It has to be bad enough to seem like something we’re ashamed of, but not so bad that we’ll get in trouble.”

  A kid in the back named Gerry was first with a suggestion. “My neighbour’s cat went missing. Nobody could find it. Then I was delivering newspapers and I saw it. It got run over and I found it in a ditch. Its eye was pushed out and it went all purple. I didn’t tell anybody I found it. And I poked it with a stick. We could say we all did that.” The entire gang was silent, waiting a few moments to let the awkwardness air out. No. We were not going to say that we all rode our pedal bikes out to a ditch to poke at a dead cat, ya weirdo.

  “We could say we stole something at the store,” Jamie offered up after enough time had passed to respectfully mourn the death of the last suggestion. “Like maybe we all stole something.” This was a brilliant idea.

  “We could say we had a gang,” I added excitedly. “And to get into it you had to steal something.” The trick was to keep our stories straight. We’d all have to pick something unique that we’d confess to stealing. Surely the store owner would notice six bags of ketchup chips or something suddenly disappearing from his shelves.