Idiot Wind

by Peter Kaldheim

  We’d been travelling for nearly ten hours by that point and I figured Gino must be getting worn out. But when I offered to take over the driving for a while he wasn’t ready to give up the wheel yet. He told me to go ahead and sleep for a few hours, he’d wake me when he felt like taking a break. We were halfway to El Paso when he finally pulled over and shook my shoulder. After we’d swapped places, Gino warned me to keep a sharp eye out for mule deer because the Diablo Mountains up ahead were full of them. He said he’d almost clipped one the last time he’d crossed Texas. I told him not to worry. I was well rested after my four-hour nap and promised I’d keep a close watch for deer on the road. Minutes later, he was snoring softly, slumped into the pillow he’d grabbed from the back seat and propped between his head and the window.

  As soon as I was sure Gino had nodded off, I switched off the radio and took a break from the country music he’d been playing non-stop since we’d left Slidell. I could tolerate Johnny Cash and Willy Nelson in small doses, but everyone else with a Nashville pedigree just made me wish I were deaf. When I was fourteen, just before I entered the seminary, my parents had gone through a country and western phase that completely baffled me at the time. How could two native Brooklynites fall for such cornpone music? But for months on end that’s all they played on the car radio – no matter how relentlessly I mocked the songs’ predictably rhymed lyrics from the back seat.

  I imagine my beleaguered parents were looking forward to my departure to St Mary’s, just so they could enjoy their cowboy music in peace – though that wasn’t how things worked out. In my absence, my younger brothers had carried on the anti-country and western campaign till my parents finally caved in; to my surprise, when I returned home four months later for Christmas break the car radio was tuned to a much hipper station: WMCA, ‘Home of the Good Guys’, where DJs like Jack Spector played the latest rock-and-roll releases. To a music-starved teenager just emerging from four months of cloistered life in the seminary, where students had no access to radios (or television, or even a daily newspaper), this was a welcome change. Before starting at St Mary’s, I’d been a Beach Boys fan, but, thanks to Jack Spector, by the time my holiday visit was over I was hooked on the Beatles.

  It was the week after Christmas in 1963 when Spector started spinning the Beatles’ debut single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, and as soon as I heard it I joined the hordes of American teenagers who were rushing out to their local record stores to buy the 45. Though radios were banned in student quarters at the seminary, we had occasional access to a hand-crank record player in the classroom where Father Artie Wendel taught his music lessons, and I couldn’t wait to get back to St Mary’s at the holiday’s end so I could introduce my classmates to the Fab Four – little suspecting that most of my friends would be returning to campus already avid Beatles’ fans themselves, with copies of the selfsame 45 safely tucked between sweaters in their luggage.

  We were certainly an incongruous-looking bunch of Beatlemaniacs whenever we gathered in the music classroom in our free time that winter, and I used to wonder what the boys from Liverpool would think if they could have seen us jiving around in our full-length black cassocks, singing their tunes with far more enthusiasm than we ever mustered during Father Wendel’s snooze-worthy lessons in Gregorian Chant. I suspect John Lennon would have been especially tickled. After all, he was a man who would later claim that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. What better proof could he point to than a room full of seminarians fervently singing the Fab Four’s latest hit?

  Neither Jesus nor John Lennon would have condoned the mean-spirited prank some of us pulled off later that semester, however, when we callously used that same Beatles song to publicly shame one of our classmates on the night of the annual Spring Carnival. The target of our cruelty was a fellow freshman – a homesick, pimple-faced Midwestern kid who was known behind his back as ‘Master Bates’, a nickname earned by his frequent, and embarrassingly audible, bouts of self-gratification in the attic dormitory after lights-out. In truth, there were few of us in that dormitory full of hormone-driven teenagers who weren’t guilty of the same so-called mortal sin, myself included. But, unlike Master Bates, we were more scrupulous in adhering to the rule of silence. Which is why we turned against him, I imagine. Our own failures in the chastity department were already the cause of much self-loathing, and Master Bates’ unstifled moans were unwelcome proof that the flesh is weak – a painful truth we didn’t appreciate being reminded of on a nightly basis.

  The Spring Carnival, intended as a night for letting off steam after midterm exams, was staged in the gymnasium and featured an assortment of carny-style games on which we could squander the stack of Monopoly money each of us was issued with upon entering the gym. The Carnival was also the only event at which the students were given free rein to choose the music. Would-be DJs put their names on a sign-up sheet, and when they were called to the turntable they got to play whatever tunes they liked from their personal record collections. One of our co-conspirators in the plot against Master Bates had signed up to DJ, and when he dropped the needle on ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ he gave a nod to his accomplice, who was manning a roving spotlight up on the balcony that overhung the gym floor. The roving spotlight was meant to enhance the carnival atmosphere, but, as the Beatles sang, its beam skimmed the crowd in search of prey, and with perfect timing swooped down on the face of Master Bates, right at the start of the third verse’s lyrics about touching and feeling happy.

  The light’s accusatory beam stayed hotly trained on the poor kid’s squinting face the entire time, while the rest of us who were in on the prank snickered knowingly and watched for his reaction. He stood alone at the back of the gym, slouched against the padded wall behind the basketball hoop, with one hand dangling a can of Orange Crush, the other trying to shield his eyes. It took a moment, but when it eventually dawned on him why he’d been singled out he burst out crying and sagged a little further into the wall, before quickly pushing back off and rushing out of the gym in shame. Meanwhile, we sniggered some more as we watched him flee, too heartless in victory to realise that we should have been sobbing with shame ourselves.

  Of course, we felt guilty the following weekend when his parents arrived from Ohio to collect him. He was crying then, too, and I overheard his mother trying to console him on the staircase as they hauled his baggage down from the dorm. She was telling him there was nothing to cry about. That his dropping out of St Mary’s must be God’s will. But how could I believe that? Surely the cruelty we’d shown the poor kid couldn’t really be God’s way of culling the priestly herd? Or could it? And if so, why would I want to serve such a God?

  My complicity in the humiliation of our classmate was without doubt the unkindest thing I’d ever done in my short life, and the questions it raised about my fitness for the priesthood would continue to trouble me long after my initial remorse over the Carnival incident had faded. In fact, it was still troubling me eighteen months later when I finally joined Master Bates in the ranks of the drop-outs.

  It was the week before Thanksgiving, three months into my junior year, when I made the decision to leave St Mary’s. Though I was firm in my resolve to drop out, I still dreaded breaking the news to the seminary’s rector, Father Murphy, who was an old friend and former seminary classmate of my Uncle John’s. But one night after dinner I screwed up my courage and presented myself with a timid knock at the door of his office in the priests’ quarters. My downcast eyes were already brimming with tears as I entered the room, and I’m sure Father Murphy knew at a glance what was up. Drop-outs are an unfortunate fact of life for a seminary rector. Less than twenty per cent of each entering class at St Mary’s would graduate and go on to the Novitiate House in Maryland, where novices spend a year in prayerful reflection before taking their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Still, despite his long experience, Father Murphy seemed genuinely surprised by my confession that I’d ‘lost my vocation’. Mine was a defection he hadn�
��t seen coming. Not from his friend John’s promising nephew, who’d just been awarded the Rector’s Prize for academic excellence and selected to serve as editor of the annual literary anthology, a post traditionally reserved exclusively for a member of the senior class.

  Father Murphy tried his best to dissuade me from acting rashly, urging me to hold off on my decision until I’d had a chance to sit down with my parents to seek their advice over Christmas break, but my mind was made up and I wouldn’t be swayed. The following morning I wrote home asking my mother for bus money.

  I was sad to say goodbye to my seminary friends when they gathered around the taxi cab that was about to take me out of their lives forever. And sadder still as I passed through the tall wrought-iron gates of St Mary’s for the final time. But by the time the cab dropped me off at the bus station and I was dragging my heavy steamer trunk across the concourse, rushing to catch the Greyhound that would carry me back into secular life, my sadness had given way to excitement. I was sixteen years old, embarking on my first-ever solo road trip and the novelty of anonymous travel on a Greyhound was so thrilling it made me giddy. And the best part was, now that my life was my own again, I had a world of thrilling ‘firsts’ to look forward to, no matter where the future might take me next.

  My euphoria lasted only as far as Buffalo. As soon as the bus turned onto the Thruway and started pushing downstate toward New York City, reality began to set in, and I realised I had no idea how I was going to explain my change of heart to my family. My letter home had been terse. No more than a simple plea for a bus fare, with the promise I’d explain later. Well, later was fast approaching and I still didn’t know how I’d explain myself. In my exit interview with the rector, I’d offered only the vague explanation that I no longer felt called to the priesthood. Though Father Murphy had pressed me to be more specific, I had steadfastly resisted his probing questions. The answers would have been too painfully personal. I just couldn’t bring myself to say them out loud.

  If I’d had the courage to be candid, I would have told him about the Spring Carnival incident, and how the cruelty I’d been party to had undermined not only my faith in my worthiness to serve as a priest but my faith in God himself. When you feel that way, it’s hard to envision a priestly future.

  And if I’d been honest, I would have told him, too, how much I’d grown to hate the humiliating experience of kneeling in the Confessional box every Saturday afternoon, confessing to the same sorry teenage sins of the flesh – knowing full well that my confessor was undoubtedly one of my classroom teachers, who could recognise my voice even through the so-called privacy screen, no matter how softly I mumbled. ‘Were these impure deeds, or impure acts, my son?’ My son? What a laugh! They might as well have come right out and asked me by name. I don’t know why I squirmed through so many of those dreaded Saturdays before I finally got the message, but in the end I figured out what my confessors had probably long since concluded: I wasn’t cut out for the celibate life.

  As if those weren’t reasons enough to abandon any hope for a future in the priesthood, I’d recently added another, and oddly enough it resulted from my appointment as editor of the literary annual. One of the perks of the job was a private office and, though it wasn’t much more than a converted broom closet, it turned out to be harbouring unexpected treasure: a boxy old tabletop Emerson radio, with oversized Bakelite control knobs and a gut full of cathode tubes – tubes which, by some miracle, were still in working order. Suddenly, I had access to music again! And news from the outside world! I began spending most of my free time in the office, pretending to be doing editorial work, when all I was really doing was listening to the latest tunes – and wondering why I’d ever thought enrolling in a school that bans radios was a good idea.

  One of the songs in heavy rotation on the rock stations in the autumn of 1965 was Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively 4th Street’. Every time I heard it I couldn’t help taking the lyrics personally. When Dylan insisted that you can’t lose your faith if you have no faith to begin with, it was like hearing the voice of my own conscience finally admitting the truth. Ergo, it was time to go back to the world.

  Throughout the long night, as the Greyhound rolled steadily south toward my reunion with my parents, I tried to picture myself telling them the full truth and realised in the end I could never do it. Though my mother might have been sympathetic to my reasons for quitting, I knew my father well enough to know he’d find them flimsy, and I had no trouble anticipating how he’d dismiss each one in turn.

  The cruel prank at Spring Carnival?

  ‘Simple, quit being a dick.’

  My struggles with celibacy?

  ‘Simple, quit playing with your dick.’

  My radio-inspired conviction that cloistered life was not my calling?

  ‘Simple, quit listening to that dick Bob Dylan.’

  None of which I had any desire to hear face-to-face, so when the time came I took the easy way out and kept the truth to myself. The only explanation my parents got was as vague as the one I’d given the rector. All I told them was that I’d prayed on the matter a lot in the past few months and God had let me know I didn’t have a calling to the priesthood after all. Case closed. End of story.

  I could tell my parents were disappointed, and I couldn’t blame them. First, I’d made a life-changing decision without bothering to consult them. Which was bad enough. But then I’d compounded their justifiable confusion by offering an explanation which was hardly forthcoming. Yet what could they do? By characterising my decision to drop out of St Mary’s as a purely spiritual matter, I’d effectively ducked all the awkward questions I’d have faced otherwise, which left my parents still squarely in the dark – but at what cost?

  I told myself I hadn’t really lied to my parents, yet by evading the truth I’d deceived them just the same, and deep down I knew it. Still, I never came clean, and the longer I lived with the lie, the easier it became to start thinking of the truth as something malleable. Without realising it at the time, I had set a fateful precedent, and in the years ahead I would become a master at massaging the truth to suit my needs whenever honesty would have proved embarrassing or inconvenient. And, as any liar soon discovers, the lies you tell others are far outnumbered by the lies you wind up telling yourself. One day you wake up and realise you no longer know what the fuck the truth even sounds like any more. But by then your future has turned into a series of car rides with strangers – strangers you can only fob off with flippant answers when they ask: ‘No offence, Pete, but what the fuck happened to you?’

  Gino was still sleeping soundly when we reached the Diablo Mountains, where the first warning signs began to appear – not just for deer, but for rockslides too. Okay, Pete, stay sharp, I thought, and lowered the side window, letting the cool night air wash over my face. I felt wide awake and alert, but as the road climbed steadily higher I also began to feel more and more hemmed in and claustrophobic. On my left, steep, rocky slopes now divided the eastbound and westbound lanes of the highway, and I could no longer see the lights of oncoming traffic. On my right, beyond the low steel guardrail, the mountainside dropped away even more steeply, into the shadowy maw of a deep canyon.

  Faced with danger on both sides, I played it safe and straddled the centre line, giving myself extra room to manoeuvre if a hazard suddenly materialised around the next bend. But my vigilance was no defence against what happened moments later, when a suicidal mule deer buck came crashing down the hillside on my left and bolted directly into the beam of the Audi’s headlights. Oh, shit! If I had veered sharply to my right, I might have dealt the deer only a glancing blow, but my fear of the sheer drop beyond the guardrail kept my hands frozen on the wheel. Before I even had a chance to hit the brakes I struck that mulie head-on. Two sickening thumps followed in rapid succession, as first the front wheel then the back wheel rolled over the animal’s thick neck.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Gino exclaimed, as his body heaved forward when I belatedly slam
med on the brakes. ‘Tell me you didn’t just hit a mule deer,’ he groaned, while I pulled to a stop beside the guardrail.

  ‘Sorry, Gino,’ I admitted guiltily. ‘There was nothing I could do, I swear! The fucking thing must have had a death wish. It came barrelling off the hill and jumped right in front of me before I even saw it coming.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re unbelievable. It’s not like I didn’t warn you,’ Gino griped, as he climbed out of the car to assess the damage. I was so amped up on adrenaline I felt like snapping back at him: There’s nothing you could have done any different if you’d been behind the wheel, you jarhead jackass! But I held my tongue. Mad as he was, I didn’t want to provoke him further and wind up being dumped by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.

  The damage appeared to be confined to the wheels on the driver’s side. The front and back rims had been bent out of shape by the force of the collision. Luckily, the tyres were run-flat radials and hadn’t yet deflated. Which was more than you could say for the carcass of the mule deer that lay open-eyed on the road behind us.

  ‘What do you think, Gino? Is it still drivable?’ I asked, fearing the worst. We were still at least a hundred miles east of El Paso. I had no idea how far we’d have to hike to find a phone if we needed to call for a tow truck.

  ‘We’ll soon find out,’ Gino frowned.

  For the next few hours, as Gino nursed the Audi through the mountains at a cautious twenty-five miles per hour, I sat listening to his muttered curses and wondering if he’d send me packing once we reached El Paso. Gino must have been considering the idea, too, because when we finally pulled into the lot of a Goodyear service centre at 7 a.m. – a half-hour earlier than the shop was scheduled to open – he told me to take a hike.

  ‘So this is it?’ I asked. ‘I’m on my own?’