I began spending a lot of time on the job in the library going into the basement level where all the old magazines were stored. The cultured priests subscribed to Paris Match, and let’s just say that in France in 1969, women were inclined to “stay cool” in the summertime. All my first loves could be found right there, in the periodical archives of St. Paul’s Seminary.
As we drew near to the end of our study of Romeo and Juliet, Father Ferrer announced that there was a new movie in the theaters based on the play and that we would be taking a field trip to see it. This version was by the Italian director Franco Zefferelli, and little did the priest know (or did he?) that his group of fifteen-year-old boys would be exposed for the first time to fifteen-year-old breasts, namely those on the body of the actress playing Juliet, Olivia Hussey.
That night, after seeing Romeo and Juliet, the freshmen moaning up and down the hallway sounded like a cross between a lost coyote and a choir trying to tune itself. I will only say that I became on that night a grateful fan of Miss Hussey’s—and a former seminarian to the Catholic priesthood. Thank you, Shakespeare. Thank you, Father Ferrer.
To Dickie’s and Mickey’s credit, they had no interest in using Shakespeare to inspire their male hormones as they were already “in country.” They had little interest in wasting their seed on a cheap seminary bedsheet. Not when there were so many available girls in the greater Tri-City area.
I’m not sure when they began sneaking out at night, or when they found time to sneak the girls in, but these two Montagues obviously were in much demand. On the upside, this did give me the room to myself on a number of occasions. On the downside, once the priests were on to them, they thought I, too, was in on the sex ring. How little they knew me! I was far too busy trying to keep my focus on Vespers and Vietnam rather than Lynn the clarinet player, who was doing just fine in an imaginary state with me, the two of us, frolicking, on the Côte d’Azur.
On this particular night, I decided to take the suggestion of fellow seminarian Fred Orr and try some Noxzema Original Deep Cleansing Cream to help get rid of a few teenage zits. I rubbed the white cream all over my face and went to sleep facing the wall, not wanting Mickey and Dickie to ever catch me with this girl-stuff on my face.
“WAKE UP! I SAID, WAKE UP!!” Father Jenkins shouted, forcing me to tell Lynn in my dream that I’d be right back. I awakened from this pleasant sleep and saw two priests, Father Jenkins and Father Shank, shining police-size flashlights directly into my eyes.
“WHERE ARE THEY?!”
Obviously it was a raid, a surprise assault on the two active and public penises on my floor.
I looked over at their beds and saw that they were made up to look like someone was sleeping in them. Clearly, neither of the Ickies was home.
“Uh, I dunno,” I replied, trying to sound awake.
“When did they leave?” Father Shank asked.
“How long have they been gone?” Father Jenkins added.
“I dunno,” I repeated.
“Are you sure?” Jenkins asked pointedly. “There’s no good that can come from you covering for them.”
“The last thing I would do would be to cover for those two punks,” I said, surprised at my un-Christian-like language.
“You’ve never left here with them?” Jenkins continued with his interrogation.
“No. I don’t do what they do. I’m guessing they don’t go to Burger King.”
“How many times would you say they’ve done this?”
“Father, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but if you’re only busting in here tonight for the first time, you clearly have no idea what’s been going on.”
“I don’t like your tone,” Jenkins replied.
“I’m sorry. It’s my middle-of-the-night tone.”
“What in God’s name is that stuff on your face?”
Oh. Damn. “Just something the nurse told me to try.”
“Where do you think they are?” Father Jenkins asked.
“You can follow their scent to the nearest place where girls are known to exist.”
Giving the priests this much lip was not wise, but I didn’t care. I, too, had discovered girls, and there was now a part of me that admired Mickey and Dickie for acting on their very normal feelings. Though I did feel sorry for whatever girls they were with.
By this time they had turned their flashlights off—and that one act would end up doing the Ickies in. Not able to see from the outside hallway that I had visitors, the boys quietly opened the door to our room—and were instantly startled, not just by the sight of the priests, but by the mass of white goo covering my entire face. They tried to run, but the priests quickly grabbed them and dragged them down the hall and out of my life forever.
The next morning the parents of my two roommates came to my room and cleaned out their sons’ belongings. When I returned that evening I had the privilege that only a senior had—my own room! There was only a month left in the school year, but it was sublime. I held parties. I began to grow my hair longer for the first time. I acquired a peace sign and put it on my door. I had made the decision that the seminary wasn’t for me, although I had learned much that would remain with me for a long while.
Three days before the semester ended, I made an appointment with my class dean, Father Duewicke, so I could go in and tell him of my decision to not pursue the priesthood.
I walked in and sat down in a chair in front of his desk.
“Soooo,” Father Duewicke said in a strange, sarcastic tone. “Michael Moore. I have some unpleasant news for you. We have decided to ask you not to return for your sophomore year.”
Excuse me? Did he just say what I thought he said? Did he just say they were… kicking me out?!
“Wait a minute,” I said, agitated and upset. “I came in here to tell you that I was quitting!”
“Well, good,” he said with a smarmy tone. “Then we’re in agreement.”
“You can’t kick me out of here! I quit! That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
“Well, either way, you won’t be gracing us with your presence in the fall.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, still hurting from the rug being pulled out from under me. “Why would you ask me not to come back? I’ve gotten straight A’s, I do all my work, I haven’t been in any serious trouble, and I’ve been forced to endure living in the juvie room with those two delinquents for most of this year. What grounds do you have to expel me?”
“Oh, that’s simple,” Father Duewicke said. “We don’t want you here because you upset the other boys by asking too many questions.”
“Too many questions about what? What does that mean? How can you say such a thing?”
“That’s three questions right there in less than five seconds, thus proving my point,” he said, while giving a mock look at his nonexistent watch. “You do not accept the rules or the teachings of our institution on the basis of faith. You always have a question. Why’s that? What’s that for? Who said? After a while, Mr. Moore, it gets tiring. You either have to accept things, or not. There’s no in-between.”
“So, you’re saying—and, sorry, I’m asking another question, but I don’t know any other way to phrase this—that I’m somehow a nuisance just because I want to know something?”
“Michael, listen—this is never going to work for you, being a priest…”
“I don’t want to be a priest.”
“Well, if you did want to be a priest, you would cause a lot of trouble for both yourself and for whatever church you’d be assigned to. We have ways of doing things that go back two thousand years. And we don’t have to answer to anybody about anything, certainly not to you.”
I sat and glared at him. I felt indignant and deeply hurt. This must be what it feels like to be excommunicated, I thought. Abandoned by the very people who are here on earth representing Jesus Christ and telling me that Jesus would want nothing to do with me. Because I asked some stupid questions? Like the one that was passin
g through my head, supplanting the fleeting thought of choking the smug out of Father Duewicke.
“You mean like why does this institution hate women and not let them be priests?”
“Yeeeesss!” Father Duewicke said with a knife of a smile. “Like that one! Good day, Mr. Moore. I wish you well with whatever you do with your life, and I pray for those who have to endure you.”
He got up, and I got up, and I turned around and walked the long walk back to my room. I shut the door, lay down, and thought about my life—and when that became pointless I reached under the bed and consoled myself for the next hour with the latest issue of Paris Match.
Boys State
I HAD NO IDEA why the principal was sending me to Boys State. I had broken no rules and was not a disciplinary problem of any sort. Although I was a high school junior, it was only my second year in a public high school after nine years of Catholic education, and not having nuns or priests to direct me still took some getting used to. But I thought I had adjusted quite well to Davison High School. On the very first day of my sophomore year, Russell Boone, a big, good ol’ boy who would become one of my best friends, took his fist and knocked the books out of my hands while I was walking down the hall between fourth- and fifth-hour classes.
“That’s not how you hold ’em,” he shouted at me. “You’re holdin’ ’em like a girl.”
I picked up the three or four books and looked around to see if anyone had stopped to laugh at the boy who carried his books like a girl. The coast seemed clear.
“How’m I supposed to carry ’em?” I asked.
Boone took the books from me and held them in the cup of his hand with his arm fully extended toward the floor, letting the books hang by his side.
“Like this,” he said while walking a manly walk down the hallway.
“How was I holding ’em?” I asked.
“Like this,” he barked as he mocked me, holding my books up to the center of his chest like he was caressing breasts.
“That’s how girls do it?” I asked, mortified that for the first half of my first day in public school, everyone had seen me walking around like a pansy.
“Yes. Don’t do it again. You’ll never survive here.”
Check. So, half a day impersonating a girl. What else had I done to deserve Boys State?
Well, there was that time a few months later on the band bus. Boone had fallen asleep with his socks and shoes off. Honestly I can’t say he had socks. But there he was, barefoot, his leg propped up on the armrest of the seat in front of him. Larry Kopasz had his cigarettes with him and it was decided that in order to solve the riddle “How long does a cigarette take to burn all the way down if being smoked by a foot?” he lit one and placed it between Boone’s toes to find out. (Answer: seven and a half minutes.) Boone let out quite a yell when the hot cinder of the Lucky Strike reached his toes, and he didn’t miss a beat from dreamland to wrestling Kopasz to the floor of the bus, which caught the attention of the driver. (In those days, as most adults and bus drivers smoked all the time, student smoking often went undetected because their smoke simply went into the same smoky air we were all breathing.) Somehow I got implicated in this brawl, as Boone held us all collectively responsible. (On that same overnight band trip, we snuck into Boone’s room to run another science experiment: “Does placing one’s hand while asleep in a warm bowl of water make one piss himself?” Answer: yes. And this time we took a Polaroid so we’d have proof to hold against him should Boone, the bedwetting tuba player, turn us in.)
But that was it. Seriously. I got good grades, was on the debate team, never skipped school and other than a skit I wrote for Comedy Week about the principal living a secret life as Pickles the Clown, I had not a smirch on my record.
As it turned out, Boys State was not a summer reformatory school for hoodlums and malcontents. It was a special honor to be selected to attend. Each June, after school ended, every high school in the state sent two to four boys to the state capital to “play government” for a week. You were chosen if you had shown leadership and good citizenship. I had shown the ability to come up with some very funny pranks to play on Boone.
Michigan’s Boys State was held three miles from the Capitol Building on the campus of Michigan State University (the girls held a similar event called Girls State on the other side of the campus). Two thousand boys were assembled to elect our own pretend governor of Michigan, a fake state legislature, and a made-up state supreme court. The idea was for us boys to break down into parties and run for various offices in order to learn the beauties of campaigning and governing. If you were already one of those kids who ran for class office and loved being on student council, this place was your crack house.
But after campaigning for “Nixon-the-peace-candidate” as a freshman, I had developed an early allergy to politicians, and the last thing I wanted was to be one. I arrived at the Michigan State dormitories, was assigned my room and, after one “governmental meeting,” where a boy named Ralston talked my ear off about why he should be state treasurer, I decided that my best course of action was to hole up in my room for the week and never come out except at feeding times.
I was given a small single room that belonged to that floor’s resident advisor. He apparently had not moved all of his stuff out. I found a record player and some record albums sitting near the windowsill. I had a few books with me, plus a writing tablet and a pen. It was all I needed to make it through the week. So I essentially deserted Boys State and found refuge in this well-stocked fifth-floor room in the Kellogg Dorms. The album collection in my room included James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, The Beatles’ Let It Be, the Guess Who’s American Woman, and something by Sly and the Family Stone. There was a big coin-operated snack machine down at the end of the hall, so I had everything I needed for the week.
In between listening to the records and writing poems to amuse myself (I called them “song lyrics” to make them seem like a worthwhile endeavor), I became enamored with a new brand of potato chip that I heretofore had not encountered. The snack machine offered bags of something called “Ruffles” potato chips. I was amazed at how they were able to put hills and valleys into a single chip. For some reason, these “hills” (they called ’em “ridges”) gave me the impression that I was getting more chip per chip than your regular potato chip. I liked that a lot.
On the fourth day inside my NO POLITICS ALLOWED/FIRE AND RAIN bunker, I had completely run out of Ruffles and made a run down the hall for more. Above the snack machine was a bulletin board, and when I got there I noticed someone had stuck a flyer on it. It read:
BOYS STATERS!
SPEECH CONTEST
on the life of
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Write a speech on the life of Abe Lincoln
and win a PRIZE!
Contest sponsored by the
ELKS CLUB
I stood and stared at this flyer for some time. I forgot about my Ruffles. I just couldn’t get over what I was reading.
The previous month, my dad had gone to the local Elks Club to join. They had a golf course just a few miles from where we lived, and he and his linemates from the factory loved to golf. Golf, the sport of the wealthier class, was not normally played by the working class in places like Flint. But the GM honchos had long ago figured out ways to lull the restless workers into believing that the American Dream was theirs, too. They understood after a while that you couldn’t just crush unions—people would always try to start unions simply because of the oppressive nature of their work. So the GM execs who ran Flint knew that the best way to quell rebellion was to let the proles have a few of the accoutrements of wealth—make them think that they were living the life of Riley, make them believe that through hard work they, too, could be rich some day!
So they built public golf courses in and around the factories of Flint. If you worked at AC Spark Plug, you played the I.M.A. or Pierce golf courses. If you worked at Buick you headed over to the Kearsley course. If you wor
ked at the Hammerberg Road plant, you played at Swartz Creek. If you worked in “The Hole,” you played the Mott course.
When the factory whistle blew at 2:30 p.m. every day, our dads grabbed their bags from the car and started whacking balls around (they’d play nine holes and be home for dinner by five). They loved it. Soon working class became “middle class.” There was time and money for month-long family vacations, homes in the suburbs, a college fund for the kids. But as the years went on, the monthly union hall meetings became sparsely attended. When the company started asking the union for givebacks and concessions, and when the company asked the workers to build inferior cars that the public would soon no longer want, the company found they had a willing partner in their demise.
But back in 1970, thoughts like that would get you locked up in the loony bin. Those were the salad days (though I’m certain it was illegal to offer a salad anywhere within a fifty-mile radius of Flint). And the guys in the factory grew to believe that golf was their game.
The Elks Club owned a beautiful course that was not as crowded as the Flint public courses, but you had to be a member. So it was with some disappointment when my dad went out to the Elks Club to join that he was confronted with a line printed at the top of the application:
CAUCASIANS ONLY
Being a Caucasian, this should not have been a problem for Frank Moore. Being a man of some conscience, though, it gave him pause. He brought the form home and showed me.
“What do you think about this?” he asked me.
I read the Caucasian line and had two thoughts:
Here Comes Trouble Page 15