Chapter 2
I was born directly into the Church at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Portland, Oregon on the fifth of February, 1951. The way with illegitimate Catholic babies in those days was to remove them from the mother at birth, presumably to prevent any bonding, put them in the care of the nuns for six months in case the natural mother should change her mind, and then give them up for adoption to some devout couple.
Thus on the eleventh of July I was handed over to David Callahan, a grain broker, and his wife, Rosemary, who thought themselves unable to have children of their own. They were mistaken. My adoptive mother became pregnant the following December with the first of five natural Callahan children, three boys and two girls.
While I was still in diapers the Callahans were transferred eighty miles up the Columbia River to The Dalles, a small town that they hated. To a Portlander this was exile. Never mind that the place was deeply rooted in history—the greatest rendezvous of pre-Columbian America, where thousands of Indians gathered annually to net the abundant salmon, trade, gamble and tell lies. Never mind that the landscape was of surpassing grandeur. In 1954 The Dalles was a sleepy wheat port with a small Irish Catholic community surrounded by snakes, lizards and Mormons. The nuns who taught in the parochial school left no doubt which was worse. Whenever a busload of Mormon kids went by on their way to a picnic or a ball game the sisters would hiss, “You know that they’re going to Hell on that bus, don’t you?”
My earliest preschool memories were of the church itself, built in the 1800s to serve the increasing number of shepherds who had come over from County Cork. The soil of the Columbia River Basin was prepared for grain by millions of sharp hooves. The sheep were mostly gone but the Rileys, the Kennedys, the Learys, the Sullivans remained. During the long masses, whenever I was not kneeling, jumping up, standing, sitting, kneeling, jumping up again, never imagining that I was an aerobics pioneer, I liked to study the farmers dressed in badly cut pinstripe suits like dead men’s clothing, their thick necks topped by homemade haircuts, their hoarse, pessimistic voices intoning the Latin hymns.
The building itself seemed magnificent (it has since been designated an historical monument). The wainscoting, the lectern and the screens were of polished oak, finely worked, and the stained glass had been brought from Germany. The altar, altar rail and tabernacle were gold, the ceilings frescoed with the lives of the saints, the plaster walls above the wainscoting covered with icons between the stations of the cross. A choir of nuns lifted their voices at the back.
Into this splendor filed an amazing collection of rubes and yokels. I especially remember one old man with a flowing white mustache, in an old suit, arm in arm with his old wife who, due to a stroke, could barely walk. I was sure they had been born senile.
Bringing up the rear were the Daltons, always late though they had probably gotten up early on their remote farm, in ancient suits, hand-me-downs and faded dresses. The whole family looked like Hoss Cartwright, even the women. Boone Dalton, one of the youngest, would be in my first-grade class. They sat up front and bobbed their soup-bowl haircuts one by one as they genuflected and shuffled sideways into the pew. I thought they lived in a state of mortal sin from tardiness.
The Callahans also sat near the front, with mother and father on either end of the squirming line of kids. I was never bored in church. I was always being popped by my dad: “Don’t stare! Look ahead at the altar!” No use, I was straining for every morsel of interest and excitement. I always secretly wished Father Flynn would one day announce to the congregation, “And now, let us join together for a few moments in staring openly at the Daltons for a good laugh.” Instead, he was droning the introit ad altare dei and old Pete, who acted as if he was senile and had Parkinson’s, was voicing the responses about ten minutes late, often in the middle of the succeeding passage. Pete also limped and so it was he who was charged with passing the collection basket.
My father always fell asleep during the sermon. He was a big, highly visible man, about six foot four and two-hundred-plus pounds. His neck craned back and to the right over his shoulder; with his mouth gaping straight up at the ceiling frescos, he would begin to snore. No one ever woke him up. He would rouse himself just before the snores crescendoed and shout, “God, my neck is killing me!” Then he’d remember where he was.
Often we’d go to Portland for the weekend and attend mass at huge Saint Madelaine’s Church, Grandpa Otto’s parish church. Grandpa Otto habitually turned his hearing aid off for the duration of the mass. When the Sign of Peace came in after Vatican II, the priest would announce, “You may offer one another the Sign of Peace.” You were supposed to turn to your neighbors left and right, offer your hand and say, “Peace be with you.” So I turned to Grandpa Otto and said, “Peace be with you, Grandpa Otto! Peace be with you, Grandpa Otto!”
And he yelled back, “Huh? What? Whaddaya want?!!” Every man, woman and child was staring at us. Even the saints were rotating on their pedestals.
Of course I have some regular preschool memories as well: playing along the creek with my friend Jimmy Riley and falling in four or five times a day, exasperating my mother because I was always wet and muddy from the pursuit of frogs; building log rafts that would have floated if the creek had been more than six inches deep; sleeping out in homemade tents; being tucked in at night warm and secure in the basement room I shared with Kip, prayers heard (“God bless Mommy and Daddy and Kippy and Tommy and Murphy and Terry and Ritchie and the dog and . . .”) and kisses given. Even at that age I was drawing pictures for my mother, who understood me better than anyone.
My parents made no bones about my being adopted and revealed it to me very early on. They’d heard of a case where the parents waited until their son was grown up, and when they told him, he went crazy. On the other hand, I was the only kid in the family with bright red hair and ultra-pale freckly skin. To save endless explanations Dad would tell people that I took after his redheaded Grandma Ethel, who had come over from Ireland. I always felt funny about that.
My brother Kip, who was nearest to me in age, had black hair. Tom, who was four years younger than me, had our mother’s light brown hair and could more plausibly have been my sibling. My sisters, soft-spoken Murphy with her piercing blue eyes and rowdy, fun-loving Terry, both had jet-black tresses. Only Ritchie, born when I was twelve, had even slightly reddish hair, and by then it was too late. Where had he been when I needed him? I had to change his diapers, which I loathed and which I still guilt-trip him about (in front of his fiancée).
The Callahan kids were tall, good-looking, and witty. There was always a joke going in that house. In spite of the usual kid brutality—Kip and I rode Tom unmercifully, and everybody ganged up on Murphy because she was so shy and gentle—I have good memories of my preschool and gradeschool years.
Yet I’m convinced that I experienced a sense of loss even as an infant, and as childhood wore on, I spent more and more time by myself, thinking about my own strangeness. I didn’t feel I belonged and I felt guilty that I felt that way. I often wondered about my birth parents. Was my mother a queen? A whore? Could I locate her and surprise her, say, at a bank teller’s window? “Yes, I’d like to cash this check, MOM!”
These feelings gave me a big chip on my shoulder toward my adoptive family, which led to trouble during my teenage years.
I had an early fascination with death, of which there was plenty. When I was eight, Grandpa Joe skidded off the icy road into the river while bringing a load of Christmas bicycles up the Columbia Gorge to us from Portland. I insisted on going to the funeral, though the rest of the family thought I was nuts. His death, I think, was a harkening back to my real mother, who was lost to me at the time as if she were in the land of the dead.
They held the Rosary in a funeral home chapel in northwest Portland, just across the street from the window in which I am writing this. I can remember the women filing by to kiss his waxen and unnatural forehead. I was aghast that people would kiss his dea
d body as it lay in the casket. On the other hand I didn’t blink for minutes because I didn’t want to miss seeing him twitch. It never entered my eight-year-old head that he wouldn’t twitch. It was all fascinating: the weeping, the guilty undertakers, the dismal organ music, all of it enveloped in a deep floral pungency.
The day was dark, and rainwater gleamed on the steps of Saint Madelaine’s. There seemed to be hundreds of people listening to the eulogy, which went on for an hour. Then came the long procession in glistening black Cadillacs, winding up the hill to Calgary Cemetery above town, with motorcycle cops weaving in and out to stop everybody else at the crossings, which made me feel very important indeed. The family sat under a tent at the graveside with easy chairs for the older women and folding chairs for the rest of the family. More weeping, while the rain puddled up on the tarp provided by the undertaker to cover the fresh dirt.
I enjoyed it all.
Home was a three-bedroom house on Dry Hollow Road across from a vast field of weeds where we hunted lizards. The blue-bellied kind were okay. The yellow-bellied kind could kill you. Our basement was finished to accommodate more kid bedrooms and the decor was churchy: plug-in picture of Christ flashing His illuminated heart in the hall, holy-water dips under each light switch, so that if you were electrocuted it would be in a state of grace. There was a library equipped, oddly, with a set of the Russian classics. In adolescence this would be my territorial niche. Insomniac, I spent the nights in the library reading, writing poetry, drawing, thinking, being alone. Eventually I started sleeping there as well. I delighted in staying up all night working on my latest creation to dazzle family and friends. My family was always in awe of my artistic talent, and Mom and Dad were especially supportive and encouraging.
Sleeping in the library also helped me to avoid my dog. The whole family except me hated pets, but I had finally talked my father into what looked at first like a small Lab. He quickly grew into a fat brute exactly like a black pig, and he had none of the sweet nature the breed is known for. He insisted on sleeping across my legs, cutting off my circulation; if I tried to move he attacked me, biting through the covers into my legs. When we finally got him off the bed he moved to the back-door landing, halfway up the stairs between basement and kitchen. If I tried to sneak up the stairs he would nearly kill me. I thought of the saint who was plagued by a satanic lion roaring at the foot of his bed. The dog’s undoing came when, with advancing age, he decided to get surly with grown-ups instead of just us kids. “Boy, when they start that nippin’ business . . . ,” said Dad as he prodded the swinish brute into the station wagon for a “ride in the country.” My only other attempt at pets was a guinea pig that died even before I finished paying for him. I buried him behind the garage but kept exhuming him to see how his decomposition was progressing.
During World War II my father had fought in the Papua, New Guinea campaign, a corporal in a regiment of army engineers specially trained for amphibious assaults. The unit made over sixty landings and two-thirds of the men had become casualties by the end of the war. He would never talk about it; but I think he bore the scars. He was extremely short-tempered, apt to fly into violent rages. I’m sorry to say that as I grew up, I learned just how to provoke him and often did. His approach to parenting was to try to control everything. Even when we were little, mealtimes were like dining with a drill instructor.
“Sit up straight. Keep quiet. Get your elbows off the table. Watch your milk, you’re going to spill your milk. Don’t talk so much. Talk more. Eat your vegetables. Move along.” He stood by the table with a butter knife held by the blade, ready to thwack any errant elbow. There was a rod on top of the refrigerator for major offenses. He was relentless in tracking you down if you tried to get away with something. I imagined myself after several succeeding lifetimes somewhere in India, where a stranger approaches me and says, “You broke that basement window, didn’t you?”
Friday night after a meal of “fishdicks” (who would have thought that fish had dicks?), we were made clean for confession by a shower and one of Dad’s haircuts.
“A gentleman gets his hair cut every week,” he was always telling us. He was absolutely obsessed with short hair. Armed with electric clippers and a jar of Butcher’s Wax, he created flattops so short that the sides of our heads were shaved white and with stubble so stiff I feared I would slash open my pillowcase. “How can you stand to have that hair touching your ears?” he would ask in wonder. Visually, what he left was a little half-inch picket fence, with maybe a sixteenth of an inch left on top where the bumps on my head surfaced like a volcano out of a flat lake. I always thought it would be more expedient to have our ears surgically removed. Then he would send us up to show mother, who pronounced our cuts “masterfully done” and “sharp-looking.” Thirty years later she admitted to me that she really thought they were appalling.
In third or fourth grade I had to start wearing glasses, which, added to the flattop, made me look like the Ultimate Drip. My self-esteem was totaled, and when the Beatles came along, it got worse. I can remember sitting in the classroom eating my lunch sandwich, with my deskmate, Suzie Ballinger, laughing uncontrollably at the sight of my nude temple muscles grinding away.
Saturday nights we went to confession, bored to tears and weary from standing in the line that moved slowly backward to the confessional booth, always facing the altar. I imagined an express lane ending at a special booth with the sign “Eight Items or Less.” Every twelve feet or so was a pillar against which we could lean for a moment’s relief. Meanwhile our minds were occupied making up sins. You had to have a lot or you might end up confessing a real one. There in the booth, with the forbidding silhouette of the priest behind the silk screen, it was better to have stolen some cookies. Then, all you heard in the surprisingly human voice was, “Are you sorry for your sins? Say a good act of contrition and seven million Hail Marys.”
We didn’t dare skimp on them, but ripped through the prayers as fast as possible so the others wouldn’t suspect we were real sinners. If I had admitted my real sins, such as masturbation, I was sure the priest would have ripped open the screen, climbed through and said, “Look, you little son of a bitch, nobody’s ever done anything that bad before. I’m going to kill you right here on the spot and embarrass you in front of the whole church!”
I would have sooner confessed to murder. After years of going to confession with Father Flynn, I’d theoretically stolen the entire Grandma’s cookie factory.
When I was six, school began amid so much pants wetting the nuns had to wear tennis shoes. Jimmy Riley’s corduroys flew from the top of the jungle gym like a sodden flag while he cowered bareass in the Sister Superior’s office, missing recess. It was a time we would devote to catching lizards to put down girls’ dresses.
At Saint Mary’s Academy, grades were divided one through four in one classroom, five through eight in the other across the central hallway, with a small gym and an office on the end. That’s all there was to it, yet my memory tells me we were always in line. “Silence in line.” “No talking in line.” We went in line to assembly, to recess, to confession, to class, to the toilet. I often wondered what happened to the old nuns when they retired and had no more lines behind them. I am sure that if the children had ever mutinied, they would have run away in line.
The nuns, Sisters of the Holy Name, took no guff. They were highly trained, excellent teachers. No one got “passed along”—you were held back if you didn’t perform. Even in the early grades there were two or three hours of homework every night. Emphasis was on the basics: math, English, penmanship and, with a grade of its own equal to the others, deportment. I did well and more than once classmates asked me to tutor them.
The nuns were all-powerful. They could crack you across the knuckles with a ruler or make you stand in a wastebasket. On one occasion Tom Quinn, who was incorrigible, had to eat soap. He liked it, which really pissed off the nun. Once Jimmy Riley was caught doing something so horrible that he was spank
ed by two nuns—Sister Sergeant Bilko and Sister Butch Johnson. To underscore the theme of discipline, we were not allowed to dress like normal children. We went all over town in uniforms that set us self-consciously apart: salt-and-pepper cords, blue long-sleeved sweaters over white shirts, black brogues.
The first Friday of every month was a “holy day of obligation.” Our parents dropped us off at church, which was clear downtown, at 6:30 A.M. High Mass lasted until about eight. Then we all climbed up the hill to the school, two miles away—in line, of course. Then and only then could we open our lunchboxes. We’d eaten nothing since the previous night because we were fasting for communion and, self-conscious about eating in public, the most I could manage at that point were a few furtive nibbles. Spirituality is all very well, I thought, but I’m just a kid. I didn’t want to be a saint, just a cartoonist or a CPA.
A nun’s or priest’s birthday was a feast day, a school holiday. If the janitor had a birthday, it seemed, we were out of school. The result was that our school year ended about the Fourth of July.
Holy cards were the prize money of Saint Mary’s Academy. Often having worked your butt off to win the spelling bee or the book-report contest, you soon caught on that you were not going to get a trip to Disneyland or a blender. Instead you got a holy card of Saint Michael or Saint Teresa. When I first heard of holy cards I thought, I didn’t know the saints played baseball. These consisted of pictures of the saints, usually down on one knee with glowing halo, and a light coming from a cloud into their faces, which wore expressions of what I can only describe as X-rated ecstasy.
Sister Joseph of Mary was a huge nun, quite masculine in appearance, with great beetling eyebrows, like Ernest Borgnine in drag. She was so large we used to joke that the vast wooden cross at her waist was the True Cross. Like all the nuns she had no pockets but tied things to her girdle with string instead. She could reach down and haul a big pair of scissors up like a fish from the depths of her hem. Sometimes, standing next to her, I would get lost in the many black folds of her habit.
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot Page 2