I did research on the saints that were on my prayer cards and added enticing bits of information on each, including statistics whenever possible. How many diseases had they cured? How many blind had they healed? How many reliquaries with their bones were deposited in churches across Europe? Or how many times had they been tempted to give up their virginity? I think I made my classmates more interested in prayer cards than the sisters did.
The more I knew about the saints, the easier it was for me to trade away the prayer cards I didn’t want to keep. “What,” I would exclaim, “you don’t have any prayer cards of a saint who was beheaded? How do you expect to get rid of your headaches if you don’t have one of those?” Or when I was a teenager, I would warn the other girls, “If you don’t have a prayer card for a martyred virgin saint, your cramps are just going to get worse each month.” I would demand three or four of their cards for one of mine, proving the benefits of
successful marketing.
Mass was also where I got in touch with my mental creativity because the Catholic services’ penchant for order, repetition, and lackluster programming gave my mind the opportunity to wander and think up ideas which would impress my peers. It was easy to focus my mind on conceiving comic Catholic caricatures while robotically reciting phrases from the Catechism for the thousandth time. Even at this early age, I showed a precocious inclination to perform feats of inspired cynicism. Consequently, I was able to surround myself with a coterie of fellow skeptics who enjoyed following in my footsteps rather than doing everything their superiors bade them do. I showed my fellow inmates how to have fun in ways our teachers could never
have conceived.
I can’t recall all of the scurrilous stories and Popish ploys I perpetrated, but I can remember getting in quite a bit of trouble one time for breathing in helium before getting in the confessional. Stealing Eucharist wafers and using them for tiddly-winks, checkers, or poker chips came naturally to me (I was going to write a book entitled
101
Uses for Eucharist Wafers
, but only made it up to number sixty seven), and I never once believed that blood would come out of a consecrated wafer if I chewed it. If we couldn’t sneak some wafers out of the church, we could always make our own with slices of bread and some
bottle caps.
Using prayer cards for target practice on the dart board would have been enough to send me to reform school had I not hoodwinked my friends into doing the same deeds with me. Priests knew about our parish for miles around. As I grew up, I began to wonder whether it was more difficult for me to endure the sisters or the sisters me. I know some of the nuns and priests probably prayed each night that my family and I would convert to Protestantism, or at least my parents would take me out of Catholic School and make me a “public,” but alas for them, God did not answer
their prayers.
Sometimes my father seemed more contemptuous of the Catholic Faith than I was. Although father insisted that his children go to Mass every week, he rarely went himself. But then, how could he even find the church when he had gotten too plastered to breathe the night before, drinking beer in remembrance of Him when he visited his own house of worship, O’Malley’s Bar? When he got drunk, he would return home and carry on for hours making fun of the dog collars, pious old ladies, or anything else he had a mind to abuse, but my two sisters and I, who were supposed to be sugar and spice and everything nice, were not permitted to blaspheme or be sacrilegious in front of him.
I always thought there was some purpose to my rebellion. Maybe I wasn’t helping the Pagan Babies in the way the sisters wanted me to, but at least I was trying. Father, on the other hand, was just angry, so after a while, I simply did my best to avoid him. Though my mother would console me, she was too weak-kneed to stand up to him. It was sickening to see her knuckle under
to him.
By the time I was a teenager, father and I were like aliens from different planets. He would try to keep me at home and away from the boys, no doubt because he knew how he had behaved when he was a teenager. The more he admonished me against seeing the boys, the more time I wanted to spend with them. What he failed to realize was that I was smart enough and experienced enough to make sure that I controlled my companions of the opposite sex, and not they me.
I started going out with boys in the Windy City by staying late at school and enrolling in as many extracurricular activities as I could. And why shouldn’t I have? I already was an illecebrously licentious little Lolita, and the boys were as hot for me as I was for them. I might mention that thanks to my assiduous efforts, I gave up my virginity for Lent one year well before my dad realized the inevitable had occurred. To play it safe, I abjured playing Vatican roulette and used contraceptives to keep myself slim and trim. In case these earthly aids should fail, I prayed to the Virgin who conceived without sinning that I could sin without conceiving. After all, it wasn’t the bull I was afraid of, but
the calf.
If I couldn’t be happy at home, I could enjoy life creating a world of my own for me and my fellow female friends. A lot of them were also cursed with overbearing, overprotective parents, and we all plotted together to discover life on our own. We carefully coordinated our stories and actions with military precision to pursue our extracurricular activities behind the backs of our oblivious parents.
Though father must have suspected something was up, I was able to keep him thinking I was chased though chaste for some time so I could pursue my coital conations at my discretion. My Mother wasn’t so dumb. She knew what was going on long before my Father did. She tried to convince me of the error of my ways, to reform and to be obedient, but I wasn’t going to become some man’s servant like she was. When she reproached me by quoting St. Paul and told me, “It is better to marry than to burn in Hell,” I replied to her, “Judging from what I’ve seen of married life, mother, I’d rather burn.”
Unfortunately, vicious rumors about my extracurricular activities made their way to father’s ears, and when he learned the full extent of my sexual proclivities, he punished me by keeping me in the house at night. Maybe I couldn’t meet my latest boyfriend at night anymore, but I didn’t become a cheerleader just to shake pompons. Grounded during the week, I was determined not to let his interference ruin my life, and never willing to let a minute of my valuable time be wasted, I took advantage of my forced enclosures to become a voracious reader so I could complement my religious rebellion with
intellectual rebellion.
There were limits to what we were allowed to learn in Catholic School. Every day we had to pursue the moliminous memorization of mariolatrous manuscripts to make the sisters happy. God, that was boring. The Catechism, in addition to forcing dogma down our throats, relied on repetition so much, it seemed like it was written for robots. To really learn something about the world, the real world and not the one created by the Catholic Church, I had to read and learn on my own. I knew their side of the story, but I wanted to learn the truth. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on, especially the books the insipient nuns did not want me to look at.
Naturally, I shared my discoveries with my schoolmates. When the sisters left us alone in the room, I would wait until I knew the coast was clear and get up in front of the class and began teaching the truths I had discovered in a stentorian tone to counter the ones my classmates were being brainwashed with. I had graduated from the days of stories from the easel. I was quite a cut up and was able to make my fellow students laugh as I mocked our teachers to
get my classmates’ attention while interjecting words
of wisdom
.
Most of the other kids spent each night doing homework, but I could do all my homework during school, which left me plenty of time at home to pursue my own dianoetic digressions. Since I was an equal opportunity intellectual, I read some Catholic authors out of fairness, but they were usually hairsplitting bores who never cared about legsplitting. Just read some of the Church’s favorite authors and you’ll see what I mean. Even academicians today can’t outdo someone like Jerome who took forty-two chapters to explain the Parable of the Prodigal Son. What a waste. And who would have read Augustine if he hadn’t included juicy stories in his memoirs about his own little Lolita? Or Abelard if he hadn’t messed around
with
Héloïse
?
I enjoyed reading about the different heretical groups who opposed the Church from century to century. My favorite heretics (in twenty-five words or less) were the Nicolaites who practically promoted sexual intercourse to being a sacrament. One Nicolaite deacon even showed the Christian spirit by offering his wife to the whole church. Of course, some heretics were even more reactionary than the Church itself, so it was up to me to sort out the wheat from the chaff and share my discoveries with
my classmates.
There were parts of the Bible that I found inspirational. Not the preachy part of the New Testament, but the adventuresome Old Testament with its tales of sex, death, and destruction. How many other girls fantasized about going to bed with Goliath? Bet you the Philistine women of a mentulate mentality hated David for murdering the man of their dreams.
On the other hand, I never liked the Old Testament God because He had no sense of humor. The Hebrews weren’t like the Greeks who had fun with their gods. The Greek gods would disguise themselves, come down and have sex with mortals, battle each other, and have a good old time. The Hebrews just killed people and got martyred. If they had had stand-up comedian contests back in the ancient world, the Hebrews would have come in dead last every time. I would have taken Aristophanes over Isaiah any day of
the week.
The only story in the Bible that revealed the Hebrews might have a sense of humor was the lurid tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham convinces the three angels to reduce their demands from fifty good men to ten in order to save the cities. This convinced me that if God says no, renegotiate. Then, Lot offers his virgin daughters to the crowds so the perverts won’t attack the angels (therefore, men and angels can have sex?), but best of all, when Lot’s family—the only pious souls in the city—escape the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s dear little nympho daughters rape their father. Perhaps the crowds knew more about Lot’s daughters than he did. Otherwise, the Old Testament is pretty mirthless, unless of course one improvises by reading between
the lines.
Religion gets pretty old after a while, so I moved on to ideas that mattered. I never planned what I would read from one week to the next. Some author or some subject would attract my attention, and I would read every book by that author or on that subject I could get my hands on until I had devoured the subject completely. By then I would find something new to study or would wait until the spirit moved me in some new direction.
Abjuring books about the oxymoronic truths of the Catholic Faith, I went straight to the hardcore intellectual material I knew my Catholic mentors hated with a passion. Since I was required to eat supper with my dad each night, I decided to use him as a sounding board for my intellectual discoveries. Whenever I read something exceedingly blasphemous or anti-Catholic, I brought the idea up at dinner, reproduced the philosopher’s argument perfectly, and boxed my father into a corner until he would throw a fit and stomp down to O’Malley’s to forget his insulting daughter. After he left, I stepped out to enjoy the pleasures of the night, and in this manner, Nietzsche, Voltaire, Marx, Russell, Renan, and others became the unwitting accomplices to my sexual adventures. During my senior year, I wrote my unpublished memoir of life in Catholic School, which I called
From Abstinence to Obstinance: The Life of a Lapsed Catholic.
Inquiries
are welcome.
Finally, after twelve years of Catholic school, I graduated and entered college, that center for consumers of conspicuous cogitation. Let me tell you, the secret of college life lies not in learning how to toady to your favorite professor so you can learn all the recondite intricacies of their chosen micro-field of study, but in making new friends and learning to teach yourself about life.
I read even more voraciously in college than I had in high school. At first, everything I read was terribly interesting and informative. I could never get enough, but the more I read, the more cynical I became. No surprise there. What amazed me about so much of what I read was the inanity or naïvety of the writers’ ideas. I’m not talking about the thoughts and conceptions of the followers who could only copy the ideas of others to prove their lack of originality, but of the biggies, the philosophical masters who replaced the mistakes of their predecessors with mistakes of their own. Almost everyone had some asinine idea that formed the foundation for their philosophical system, but once you removed those pillars, their superstructure came crashing to
the ground.
My skepticism was justified when I took my first philosophy class in college. Every week we covered a great philosopher’s ideas on Tuesday and tore them apart on Thursday. With only a couple exceptions, the philosophers usually had as many stupid ideas as intelligent ones. Reality was whatever philosophers perceived it to be. Spinoza was condemned as an atheist in the eighteenth century, but was posthumously converted into a God-intoxicated philosopher for his pantheism in the
nineteenth century.
How could an intelligent woman lend any credibility to Descartes’s vortices, Plato’s cave, existentialism, Leibniz’s Optimism, Freud’s sexual psychology, or Hegel’s dialectical eccentricities? Of course, I always assumed the good ideas had come from their wives and the absurd ones from the philosophers themselves, but eventually it dawned on me that these men weren’t famous because they knew the answers to the mysteries of the universe, but because they could fool themselves and their contemporaries into believing their ideas. It was just like religion. So, having lost my faith in one subject, I moved on to another, going through ideas and fields of a study with amazing skill and alacrity for the rest of my collegiate days
in Chicago.