It was a shock to all of us when we arrived at the seminary and discovered that confessions would not be held in private booths, the way they were back home, but in a brightly lit room, with Father Confessor ensconced in an armchair with his head turned slightly away from us, his hand cupping his eyes, like a child counting to ten before declaring, “Ready or not, here I come!” Worse yet, Father Confessor was none other than Father Trettel. This meant that anytime a seminarian had been plundering the temple of the Lord the previous evening, he had to join the queue outside that make-do confessional with all the other perverts and wait for a chance to confess his sins to a teacher whose class he would be attending later that day. It would have been so much nicer if our confessor were the bursar or the dean of admissions or one of the other priests we rarely saw, but this was not seminary policy. We all lived in terror that the normally soft-spoken Father Trettel might suddenly whirl around and confront us when we admitted to our insatiable carnal appetites, crying out, “You committed
how many
impure deeds
how many times
since six o’clock last evening? What, are you going for the school record?”—and that he might say it loud enough that everyone standing outside could hear. I have always believed that Father Trettel’s designation as our confessor was a deliberate ploy to reduce the number of smart-ass comments he got in class. A fourteen-year-old boy is far less likely to ridicule a simpleton when the simpleton is in possession of the fact that the boy manhandled himself eight separate times the previous evening, four times while fantasizing about Marilyn Monroe, four times while fantasizing about reform-school girls. And even the number eight might be a lowball figure.
Father Trettel was the only priest at the seminary who could accurately be described as slow on the draw. But, like many other clerical orders, the Maryknolls had an ancillary wing consisting of brothers. Brothers, by reputation, were hardworking holy men who had never been formally ordained as Christ’s terrestrial ambassadors. Because of this, they were prohibited from performing such lofty clerical functions as celebrating mass, or hearing confessions, which necessitated making snap moral judgments. My father, who was much given to the gratuitously contrary defense of untenable positions, maintained that brothers were every bit the intellectual equals of priests but were so humble and self-abnegating, so convinced of their own unworthiness in the eyes of God, that they had forgone the prestige that attended members of the priestly class. None of us believed this. Brothers in our eyes were the liturgical equivalents of dentists; they didn’t have the chops to crack the starting lineup. They were like the youngest sons in Mafia families who were handed no-show desk jobs at the Department of Public Works while their older brothers got to go out and actually kill people.
The brothers at the seminary were doled out the emphatically menial tasks of slaying cows, raising vegetables, plowing snow, repairing plumbing. They weren’t particularly sociable, especially not to seminarians who thought they were superior to them, because in the world according to us, smarter meant better. The only seminarians whose company the brothers enjoyed were the plowboys from God’s Country: bovine, standoffish lads who reveled in the aroma of manure and the fragrance of pigs’ gonads. These were the boys many of us suspected would one day become brothers themselves, as soon as it had become obvious to their superiors that they lacked the skills needed to preach, teach, counsel, heal, or heap contumely upon unreconstructed Bolivian sodomites.
I did not divulge my flagging enthusiasm for the priesthood to anyone at school, and I certainly never mentioned it to my father when I went home for Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations. After eight years of ostentatious rehearsal for seminary life, a vocation was not something I could easily relinquish overnight. This situation called for finesse; it had to be handled with kid gloves. I would gut it out in the hinterland as long as possible, and with any luck I might survive until it was time to attend college. But there was no realistic possibility of my ever joining the clergy. This may have had less to do with loss of faith in God than loss of faith in northeastern Pennsylvania, where the laughs were few and far between. Unlike real-life high school, where students could amuse themselves by wrapping their parents’ cars around telephone poles or falling to untimely deaths from ice-covered bridges while engaging in alcohol-fueled horseplay, nothing exciting ever happened at the seminary, in part because there were no slutty girls to blunt our judgment and goad us on to disaster. The year before, two sophomores had feigned rubella or scarlet fever so they could be sent to the infirmary, where they were caught in flagrante delicto and promptly expelled. Phone calls were made; parents were summoned; the boys vanished into the gloaming. The news of their concupiscent hijinks had come as a surprise to everyone concerned; the boys were very well liked and sorely missed. That was about as far as the conversation went.
It is impossible for the uninitiated to imagine how gingerly the subject of the love that dare not speak its name was treated back then; even though we all knew that a couple of priests who had a habit of smacking our bottoms were a bit forward, no one ever mentioned being molested, because no one ever was. The only time the subject ever came up was when the anecdote about the two frisky sophomores was revived, always with the observation that they had been apprehended in flagrante delicto. I never found out what in flagrante delicto meant in that case, whether the pair were merely jacking each other off or cuddling or smooching it up or perhaps engaging in something immeasurably less hygienic; I did not know at the time what to do with a girl, much less with a boy. Nobody ever got caught in flagrante delicto during my solitary year in the seminary, which was a great loss, as an excommunication-level offense like two boys giving each other clandestine blow jobs surely would have spiced things up considerably.
“Bored witless” was an apt description of my psychological condition that winter; I would literally do anything to escape the seminary grounds. I joined the speech team, even though I did not feel comfortable speaking in public, because I had nothing to say. I also joined the debate team, visiting high schools all over the Greater Scranton-Hazelton-Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area, facing off against a legion of pockmarked, bespectacled adolescent boys and pouty coeds shoehorned into taut sweaters, arguing with rehearsed vehemence that nuclear deterrence would not work because the Soviets were untrustworthy swine. Or, when it was time to switch sides and defend the nuclear-deterrence proposition, swearing on a stack of Bibles that it would work like a charm, for even the Russians occasionally behaved sensibly.
I was much more effective when arguing in the negative than when defending the affirmative, because the team on offense was allowed to be mean and dishonest, which played to my strengths, whereas the team on defense was expected to be honorable and scrupulously fair. My partner on the debate team was an intense, thoughtful, gifted speaker, and I was a decent debater myself, if a bit on the duplicitous side. But the other members of the team were a nervous boy who played the Henry Fonda role in the school production of
Twelve Angry Men
and a dithering sort who already seemed sixty-five years old. It did not help that the aspiring thespian stuttered when he got riled up, nor that he rapped on the table, schoolmarm style, in a censorious gesture later popularized by the testy, condescending British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Whenever we went out on a debate, our team would finish second or third, dragged down by the unimpressive scores of our outgunned colleagues. I didn’t care; I was only doing it to meet pouty girls in taut sweaters.
To maximize the amount of time devoted to off-campus escapades, I also took a job as timekeeper for the varsity basketball team, even though I had no more than a passing familiarity with the rules of the sport. Nervous, clueless, panicky, I made a mockery of everything that timekeepers have traditionally held dear to their hearts. I would stop the clock or press down on the buzzer, indicating a substitution or timeout, with no reason for doing so, as if I had succumbed to a surprise attack of Saint Vitus’ dance. I had no idea what I was doing up there with my thumb planted squarely on that machine, and while it is true that my training on the device had been woefully inadequate—“Here, kid; keep time for us!”—that is no excuse for my failure to improve my skills. The officials hated me, as did the coaches, the players, and most of the spectators. Although we were a microscopic school and were not officially included in any league, we usually held our own against similarly tiny institutions, but when we played against squads from bigger schools, they fish-gutted us. We also played an exhibition against a boys’ reformatory, where we not only got ripped to shreds by the future repeat offenders but—due to the obvious travel restrictions—had to play on their home court. My, did those strapping laddies ever enjoy the annual visit from the lithe and lanky seminarians.
No matter how deplorable my timekeeping skills, I continued to serve in that quasi-chronometric capacity, because nobody else wanted the job, and, as it reduced my campus confinement by roughly ten hours a week, I would never have abdicated that post without a fight. It did not matter to me how depressing the cataleptic backwaters we visited proved to be; the ugliest small city was infinitely preferable to the come-liest hamlet. One night, a bunch of us drove all the way up to Binghamton, New York, battling a driving rain that Noah himself would have found a bit excessive. It was a sixty-mile jaunt, and the whole time we were motoring along, we could see almost nothing in front of us. Just outside Binghamton, we hit a dog hard enough to kill it. We dragged the bloody carcass off to the side of the road, scattering innards all over the interstate, then resumed our trek to the abbatoir masquerading as a gymnasium, filled to the rafters with dyspeptic townies who had come out to support their team. Because the out-of-bounds area along the sidelines was only about two feet deep, we were forced to stand cheek-by-jowl with this neolithic crew throughout the game. I doubt if they were Catholics; for all I know, they may have been Empire State Druids. We lost by forty points, the spectators despised us, and on top of everything, we had to drive back to the seminary at midnight in an even worse storm, keeping our eyes peeled for yet another frothing cur that might tempt fate by trampolining into the grillwork. I didn’t care; it was still better than staying at the seminary. At least we got to see girls. Girls with the charm of Gorgons, but girls all the same.
Insensitive but by no means oblivious to the general mood of the academy, Father Casey and his staff realized that we all found life in Clark’s Summit a bit on the sclerotic side. They chose an unconventional method for defusing the tension. One day the school held a raffle whose top prize was permission to go into Scranton for the day. The prize did not include bus fare or free transportation to Scranton; it consisted solely of
permission
to go there. It was like raffling off weekend passes to the Strait of Magellan. One of my friends won the prize and included me in a group of eight boys who made the pilgrimage into the brooding, pointless municipality. When we got there, there was nothing to do but freeze. We spent the whole day wandering around the exanimate downtown, drifting from one scuzzy store to the next, buying records we did not want and books we did not intend to read. If we had been ordinary high school boys instead of seminarians, we might have bribed a wino to buy us a bottle of cheap rotgut or hooked up with some ripe local colleens, if only for a bit of repartee and a glimpse of stocking. But we were seminarians, lofty-minded virgins prepping for sainthood, so the notion of indulging in that sort of saucy caper never even occurred to us.
Somewhere along the line, our doomed octet got separated. At the end of the afternoon, a couple of us missed the last bus to Clark’s Summit, so we had to walk the eight miles back to campus, staggering along the side of the road for what seemed like days as night engulfed us and our stamina fled. We felt like idiots. We were sure we were going to die out there, unmourned and unloved, breathing our last on the shoulder of an inconsequential road that provided a direct link between Scranton and nowhere. As luck would have it, we did not die. We returned to the seminary too late for dinner and, in punishment for violating curfew, were forbidden to leave the grounds for the next month. Nobody bothered asking how our day in Scranton had worked out; they had a pretty good idea that it was not like an evening in Venice.
Because my existence up until then had been structured around a career in the Church, it was going to be difficult to extract myself from this situation and start a new life. I shared the news about my loss of faith with no one, not even my sisters, so no one suspected that I was preparing to leave the seminary as soon as a suitable pretext presented itself. When this might occur, I was in no position to say. In the end, I decided that I would simply allow events to take their course and let the chips fall where they may.
Events did take their course. One night shortly after Christmas, a bunch of my underclassman chums were fooling around in the auditorium, flailing away at the guitars, pounding on the drums. For reasons I have never understood, I seized a microphone and launched into an impersonation of Mick Jagger, who had not yet become internationally famous but was already displaying a somewhat camp disposition. The impression extended no further than puffing out my lips in simian fashion, and pointing at an imaginary audience in that limp-wristed manner Jagger so often would, as if he were Charles II proffering his hand to a cheeky commoner. It was a terrible impersonation but a great hit with my friends, who persuaded me to enter a talent contest that would be held at the seminary the following month. I had never before stepped onto a stage and had no desire to; nor at the time was I especially fond of the Rolling Stones. Peer pressure alone must have induced me to toss my hat into the ring.