Our makeshift band “practiced” every night for a month, miming the Stones’ crackling rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around.” I suppose it was a nice way to pass the time, at least for them. The big night finally arrived. All the seminarians, all the priests, and all the brothers were in attendance that evening, not sure what to expect. The sisters stayed home, cooking inedible meals and praying in a bucolic, sixteenth-century French so impenetrable that not even Le Bon Dieu could have made heads or tails of it. I do not recall who preceded or followed us; I do have some hazy recollection of a couple of students warbling corn-pone folk songs with little passion or conviction and of a couple of boys delivering sententious speeches from time-honored plays. Even by the standards of a junior seminary that was training young men to be tillers of soil and planters of yams, the talent show was pretty thin on talent. At last it was my hooty ensemble’s turn to perform. Nervous, anxious for this ordeal to be over, I meandered out on stage sporting a filthy sweatshirt and a silly wig and brandishing a pair of cheap maracas. A helpful assistant cued up “Around and Around” on a turntable backstage, and I launched into my impression as the four boys in my “band,” all of whom had now turned distressingly meek, pretended to play their instruments. Twenty seconds into the song, the record skipped. We stopped, waited for the record to start again, then took another crack at it. The record skipped a second time, then a third, and finally we gave up. We could not have been on the stage more than ninety seconds—two minutes, tops.
We may have coaxed forth a few laughs that night, or at least a few smirks. I believe there may even have been a smattering of applause as we wrapped up our performance. There was no applause from Father Casey, however; he took in the performance with the rapture of a Savonarola. Our eyes briefly met as I descended from the stage, and I could see that he was not one bit amused by my tomfoolery. My impersonating the posturing, ridiculous Mick Jagger must have struck him as a poke in the eye, as conduct unbecoming a member in good standing of the Church Militant. Maryknoll missionaries were supposed to be tillers of soil and pullers of teeth and bringers of light and fishers of men. They were not supposed to be clowns. I am not sure Casey even knew who Mick Jagger was, but the damage had been done. From that night until the very end of the school year, Father Casey never said a word to me. But from that moment on, I knew I was a marked man. And so my career as a seminarian began to slouch its way toward its ignominious conclusion. I now knew that I would never be a priest; Casey knew that I would never be a priest; we only needed to put the finishing touches on my official exit from the Maryknoll community.
Here, I took a surprisingly hands-on role in orchestrating my future. Already known as a capable writer—no great accomplishment in this congress of poltroons—I was invited to guest-edit the student newspaper. It was a Maryknoll tradition to let freshmen put out the final issue of the paper, and this year my number had come up. Sharing this honor was a bright, sober chap, who four years later would resurface as my roommate in college. Not much of a student but every inch a patriot, Bill Beazley would join the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps at a time when making such a choice was by no means a popular one, going on to serve in Vietnam. He was a straight arrow in the seminary, he was a straight arrow in college, and for all I know, he may be a straight arrow today. I, on the other hand, was not.
Bill and I had no idea how to put out a newspaper. We knew that newspapers relied on news, but there was no news in the seminary. The paper was only four pages long, so we crammed it full of sports stories and articles entitled “Passion Reading Set for Holy Week” and “Farewell to Brother Eugene.” Shortly before we shipped it to the printer, a “bazaar” was held at the seminary. There were games and music and refreshments and a Name That Hamster contest in which students paid a nickel for a chance to confer both a first and a last name on a lively white rodent. This was the Maryknoll idea of fun. At the end of the festivities, the first name was drawn from a jar; it proved to be Omahard. I never found out which of our classmates had scrawled this, much less what it meant. It sounded pastoral. The second name withdrawn from the jar was “Casey.” Everyone thought this was terrifically entertaining, because whatever handle students may have suggested as a first name on their raffle tickets, they had all written “Casey” on the second, making some sort of derisive nomenclature inevitable. Bill and I must have found this impish ploy outrageously amusing, not to mention newsworthy, because we chose the hamster-naming event as the lead story in our edition of the newspaper, with a photo of the feisty rodent peering out from beneath the headline OMAHARD CASEY RIDES AGAIN!
Via intermediaries, Bill and I soon learned that neither our overall story sense nor our headline-writing skills had found favor with the powers that be. The headline was suppressed, and replaced with the less incendiary FRESHMEN ARE HOSTS AT SUCCESSFUL BAZAAR. No one said anything specifically menacing to me, but I knew I had committed a fatal faux pas. A month later, each and every student was invited in to chat with Father Casey and review his progress toward the goal of ordination. Bill was in and out of the rector’s office quickly; he returned the next year, though by the time his seminary years were over, he, too, had ceased to believe that he had a vocation. My conversation was even briefer. I entered the office and sat down as Father Casey stared at me with the sort of disdain that, even by his standards, seemed just a smidgen frosty. We chatted a few minutes, and then he said, “You weren’t thinking of coming back here next year, were you, Queenan?”
“No, Father, I wasn’t.”
“Good luck, then.”
And so my career as a seminarian came to an end.
Now it only remained to break the news to my family. This proved much less difficult than I had expected. Returning home for summer vacation, I went back to work for Len, played baseball, started a rock band, bided my time. Not until the third week in August did I work up the nerve to tell my mother that I had no plans to return to the seminary. She relayed this decision to my father. I suppressed the information that I had not actually been invited back to Clark’s Summit for my sophomore year, though I think my mother may have received some paperwork to that effect. Certainly, the uncharacteristic silence from my old recruiter friend and erstwhile career counselor, who had nurtured my dreams throughout grade school, was something of a giveaway. To all intents and purposes, without officially being expelled from the seminary, I had been cut from the team.
I expected this news to be greeted with the same shock as Edward VIII’s announcement that he was abdicating the British throne, but it was not. If my mother was at all upset to learn that my vocation had gone up in smoke, it was mainly because we would now have to go through all the rigmarole of getting me enrolled in diocesan high school, and it was already late in the summer. By this time she had gone back to work and had a completely new agenda. The dreams of her children did not loom large, if they loomed at all, as, for the first time in years, she had other fish to fry. My father, to my amazement, was indifferent to the news; the disclosure that his son would never have the opportunity to transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ didn’t faze him in the least. It took me a long time to understand why, as I was still a child, and children know nothing. Then one day it came to me. The last thing my father wanted was a son in a position to upstage him, a son invested with the moral authority to chastise him, to rain down fire and brimstone from an unassailable perch atop the moral high ground. The last thing he wanted was a child who had succeeded in doing something he might have enjoyed doing himself; after all, becoming a Trappist monk had been his burning ambition as a youth. The renunciation of the only dream I’d ever had enthralled him; he could not have been more pleased. He had always known that I would fail, he had warned me since birth that I would never amount to a pimple on an elephant’s rear end, and to him my failure was neither a surprise nor a disappointment. Failure, in his estimation, was nothing to be ashamed of. It was our oldest family tradition.
Chapter 7.
Twilight of the Apothecaries
The men who served as shining beacons to me as a child had strong personalities. They also had remarkable hair. Self-made clothier Len Mohr, haberdasher to the proletariat, sported a lustrous lion’s mane that retained much of its original chestnut hue well into his fifties. My uncle Jerry cultivated a crop of spiky hair that stuck straight up in the air, as if the carcass of an unfortunate porcupine had been glued to his skull. Finally, there was my uncle Charlie, the guitar-strumming ward heeler whose job it was to make sure that on Election Day the people’s voice was heard loud and clear, but only if the people were Democrats. Even at an advanced age, he would continue to fuss about with a pint-sized pompadour, applying wax to its surface in the vain hope of infusing it with something approaching Gibraltarian stolidity. In his mind, it was never too late to be stylish, even if his thinning hair served no other purpose than to cue fond memories of earlier, more hirsute days. In their own little way, all the manly men whose manliness I strove to emulate as a child were smitten by their hair. Perhaps they believed that as long as a man had his hair, he was not yet in the process of dying. Or perhaps they honestly thought they had “the look.”
These otherwise dissimilar individuals sported hairstyles best described as “quirky.” Yet the most memorable hairdo of them all belonged to Glenn Dreibelbis, who employed me in his apothecary during my last two years in high school. Viewed from the front, Glenn appeared to be totally hairless, a self-depilating sort who had made a preemptive decision to throw in the towel and divest himself of all but the most minimal cranial finery at an early age, since he was already going bald anyway. His head was virtually devoid of any protective or ornamental camouflage, save for a thin gray sliver of vestigial fur lurking all the way in the back, where the head joined the shoulders. This ambiguous coif evoked none other than Friar Tuck, who adamantly refused to cut off that anemic, redundant halo of hair that snaked its way around the lower portion of his skull, as if a geriatric caterpillar were slumbering there.
It was not clear how long ago Glenn had shorn what must have been but skimpy locks in the first place. A few times I asked to see pictures of him when he was younger to ascertain whether he had once been a strapping youth with a full head of hair, but these photographs never materialized. Well into his fifties when he hired me as a stockroom clerk, delivery boy, cashier, and general factotum, he always wore a brief, tight white pharmacist’s jacket rippling over his formidable paunch and was forever chain-smoking mentholated cigarettes, contemptible items he gave no sign of enjoying. His gait suggested that of an oversized gnome, advancing with weird little prancing steps, like a timid dancing bear not yet sure he had clinched the job with Barnum & Bailey. He wore battered Hush Puppies and covered his head with one of those unfortunate mashie hats that would be popularized by Alan Alda and Woody Allen in the 1970s, when self-emasculation came into vogue. Glenn was ahead of his time, but in the wrong way. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that he was simultaneously both ahead of
and
behind the times. The composite image—beer gut, surgical jacket, chrome dome, Kool filters, Tilley hat—was not an attractive package; he was as unprepossessing a man as I have ever known.
Glenn (né William, but he never used his first name) was born in the coal-mining hinterland of central Pennsylvania around the time the Great War broke out. Anthracite was not in his future. He must have quickly made it clear to his Swiss-American family that he had no intention of pursuing the almost compulsory regional profession, for he cleared out in a hurry. Never in the time I knew him did he ever mention coal, not even as a serviceable fuel. Instead, he trundled off to the big city to become a pharmacist, then, after getting his degree, wended his way to New York, where he pitched camp in Greenwich Village. The Village was to be the alpha and omega, the triumph and tragedy, of his existence. While sowing whatever wild oats were in his power to sow, he lived smack-dab in the epicenter of Depression-era Bohemia. This was, it should be noted, a time when Dylan Thomas and his merry retinue were still very much on the scene, as were innumerable other poets, musicians, and subversives, though, judging from the historical record, not an enormous number of countercultural pharmacists. These were Glenn’s days of heaven.
Then overnight everything changed. He met a woman from out of town, fell in love, got married, and was somehow induced to relocate to Philadelphia, where he opened a demure apothecary in a quiet, mildly prosperous community called West Oak Lane. There, he spent the rest of his life wishing he were somewhere else. Philadelphia in the 1950s was not a dream destination; it was intergalactically renowned for its lack of nightlife and was not all that much more bubbly by day. Philadelphia was a town, so the saying went, that pulled up its sidewalks at dusk. In fact, to this very day, most American cities pull up their sidewalks at dusk, but due to its proximity to voluptuous, fun-loving New York, Philadelphia has always been singled out as a drowsy municipality where nothing exciting ever happened, in sharp contrast to raucous Minneapolis, bacchanalian Cleveland, and sybaritic Des Moines. Whenever Glenn spoke of those golden days in New York, he made his forced evacuation to Philadelphia sound like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, perhaps even his exile on bleak, rat-infested Saint Helena. The rest of his life was anticlimactic; till his dying breath, he would rue the day he left New York. It did not help that bit by bit, week by week, the charming neighborhood where he ran his business was becoming less charming; by the time my family showed up with our foolproof ability to make a bad situation worse, its decline was in full swing. Glenn was a sweet, generous, fascinating man, but by the time I hired on, life had broken him.