The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (16 page)

I was aware in some way that the jumble inside of me was corrosive. I didn’t know then how my psyche was urgently fragmenting, stuffing the appropriate story into the appropriate corner of the brain to summon at the appropriate moment to deliver the appropriate impression—depending on the place, the person, the time. It is amazing how efficiently the mind can erase from the heart the details, the truth of the narrative.

Sometimes I think, I dream, of going back there for a moment, back there to the boy on his bike, the boy I’m remembering now, and asking him how he did it, held it together. How, what, he really felt. I want to ask him exactly what words he would use to describe the muddle of it all and if I’m even close to telling it like it was.

What he withstood, what he soaked up like a sponge, I’m wringing out now, and I know it’s him, it’s the boy, who’s summoning me to tell. He’s the one who insists, believes, that all the fractured pieces can be spread on a white page, examined, and woven back together with words.

I
CAME HOME
one afternoon and found a formal-looking letter addressed to me sitting on the kitchen table. I opened it and was confused by a tangle of unfamiliar names. Then I saw Robert and Karen and understood that this was an invitation, that they were to be married. The thought of it, the news of it, was shocking. Especially because I’d been busy boxing up thoughts of them and shipping it all away. I’d managed to be out of touch with them for nearly four months. The last contact was a call I’d made thanking them for the gift they’d sent me at Christmastime. A beautiful hardback copy of James Fennimore Cooper’s
The Last of the Mohicans
, inscribed:
Merry Christmas, Happy Birthday, and Happy New Year, Love, Bob and Karen
. The very sight of the inscription shamed me. I’d taken a pen and scribbled until their names were unreadable and hid the book at the back of my sock drawer.

I threw the invitation away and went downstairs to do my homework.

Several days later Kip (charming, bacon-frying, also-sleeping-with-Bob Kip) called. He said his mom was going to drive to Bob’s wedding. Did I want to go? “Yes,” I said without much thought. Suddenly it seemed the right thing to do, and I realized I wanted to wish them well, that I wanted, in fact, to witness the normalcy. Their wedding would tell me that what we’d done and who we were was over, that everyone, including me, was moving on into the respectable.

A few Saturdays later, I put on a suit and a tie and spent the afternoon in a tiny church in the mountains, watching Bob and Karen walk down the aisle. In my memory it was a priest who presided, though I don’t recall a Mass, so it might have been a mountain minister or justice of the peace. I remember feeling awkward sitting there with Kip in the last pew on the left—two of Bob’s musketeers bearing witness. For some bizarre reason, Kip’s mom remained outside in the car. She wasn’t welcome. Bob had had some sort of quarrel with her, but she was so devoted to Bob, was so under his spell in some way, that she brought her fourteen-year-old son to the ceremony anyway.

Their figures, Bob in fancy black, Karen in white, standing with their backs to us at the altar, were surreal. There was that strange disconnect from the hidden things we’d done, who we were, and the ordinariness of a public ceremony. I recall that Karen was pregnant, already swollen with the reason for marriage. I never even spoke to them that day, save for a quick nod and a whispered
congratulations
as they moved past. I sat quietly in the back and smiled as they walked up the aisle and out to the pickup parked in front of the church. It all happened so quickly, with so few people there. No drinks, no food, no toasts. I knew the occasion was meant to be full of hope and happiness but the whole thing struck me as pathetic. Unreal. Somebody opened and held the door; someone else tossed a bit of rice. I saw that Bob was grinning as he took Karen’s hand and they ducked into the truck. Then they were gone. A honeymoon? Just going home? I never asked.

We drove back to the city. Kip’s Mom asked, “Was it nice?”

We nodded, and then sat in silence all the way home. The one good thing, I kept thinking, was that now I could say to my parents or anyone who happened to ask:
Oh, yeah, Bob? Him? I don’t see him anymore. Well, he got married, he’s having a kid. Just a regular guy
. The whole strange event gave me a certain relief that he wouldn’t be found out. Relief that he was through with little boys and so trouble was less likely to come to his door, less likely to come to mine.

I got home and took off my suit and sat on my bed. I’ll never touch him again, I thought, or allow him to touch me. He is wed, going to be a father. And I’m going to grow up now. High school soon and then I’ll get into the best college I can. Stanford, maybe. And when I get married, it’ll be to a good woman, and we’ll have lots of kids, and I’ll do my best to be honest and good. To be a citizen. A lawyer. A senator, one day.

I knew this now. I sat on my bed and felt the sharp stab of my convictions. And of my lonesomeness. I hated that I felt lonesome, but I did. The one person who knew my body, my secrets, had just been married. Wedded to a woman I didn’t like.

T
HE BUSY-BOY BRAVADO
, the manic performance that carried me through my last months at Christ the King Elementary, crumbled upon my arrival at Regis High. This was the place, I felt, the moment, to become a man. This was the big league now, no grade-school games, no singing nuns, no girls allowed, and in the face of it, I was utterly overwhelmed. Here was a brotherhood of boys taught by a fellowship of priests. Here was the revered Jesuit institution where my Dad, uncles, and all of my male cousins were educated, and the second I laid eyes on it I was stricken with shyness.

Constructed in the 1880s, Regis High School was a monolithic pile of giant rose-colored stone, a four-story monument to Catholic maleness. It was the most oppressive edifice I had ever seen. Carved in granite over the large doors of the main entrance was the phrase
RELIGIONI ET BONIS ARTIBUS
. And above that, faded rays were chiseled around the letters
IHS
, the Greek monogram for Jesus, known in English as the symbol for
I Have Suffered
. Each time I saw the carvings on the face of that mammoth building, every time I hiked up the wide steps past Father Fitz, barking at everyone to hurry to class, every fear I harbored about who I was and what I might be on my way to becoming was galvanized. I felt I was marching into a men’s-only holy club to which I could never win membership. A place where my face would flicker the wrong and sinful desire, where I’d move in a certain manner and all would be revealed. Because, somehow, this community of men would know. They’d know where I’d been, what I was.

Everything about the place, the dank halls, the priests living on the fourth floor above our classrooms, the rusty pipes and cracked tiled floors, the very odor of its history, heightened my dread. My deepest longing was to measure up. And my bottomless terror, that I’d already failed. As I moved from class to all-male class, particulars kept creeping from the pit of my stomach, up the back of my throat. There was the indisputable fact that he’d stolen my first orgasm. It felt, in some mythic, fourteen-year-old way, that that single act of thievery had doomed me, made me incapable of real manhood. He’d yanked it from me at just the wrong moment and now it was fated, encoded, that every drop of my Catholic seed and the rush of pleasure that came with it, was linked forever with him. I couldn’t shake the feeling, so strong in the dim rooms of this old school, that my deeds stuck to me like a bad smell. A stain.

How many students, how many priests in this institution held secrets? Countless of them, surely. But I felt that mine was the only, the worst possible, one. And the weight of it began to crush me.

For the first few months, by sheer force of will, I kept my studies up. But as the weeks went on, I couldn’t concentrate through the haze of depression. I hadn’t the armor to withstand the humiliation that seemed the main method, the core of the Regis curriculum. There was terrifying Mr. Getz, who smacked the science tables where we sat with a yardstick whenever we didn’t answer quickly or correctly. There was the ancient priest who taught Latin and Algebra, his cassock smeared with chalk from impossible calculations, with the dust of dead verbs. He gave pop quizzes, where disgrace awaited if you hadn’t memorized the lesson as well as the page number that the lesson was on. The message was clear and everywhere—get through all this, then you’ll be one of us. A strong, smart citizen. A good Catholic man. Dads all over town spoke of their time at Regis with the awe and affection of soldiers having served together through war. They would speak of the great Jesuit tradition of intellectual curiosity and rigor. Of this brilliant Society of Jesus dedicated to discipline and education and the pope. A society that included great leaders like the paleontologist and writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the passionate activist Father Daniel Berrigan. A society I was born into, in which I was meant, and wished, to take a proud part.

In the course of those dreadful freshman days, no hour was worse than gym. The place where body and masculinity are most nakedly revealed. At Regis, phys ed was lorded over by a beady-eyed man with no hair and less humor. Mr. McPhee. He forced us to participate in each week’s alternating activity in a furious nine-month tour through every sport known to man, from boxing to wrestling to basketball and rope climbing. No matter how ill equipped we were, no matter how terrified, he screamed at us (me) through every miserable activity. He was insanely strict about two things: jockstraps and showers. Each session began with his checking the one and ended with his observing the other.

His vocation, whatever it was (actual Jesuit or lay teacher, I can’t recall) was buried beneath his mound of sweaty sweat clothes. Always in his hand was a clipboard, and around his neck a silver whistle, which he blew often and loudly. The first whistle was our signal to line up along the black (not the red!) line in alphabetical order, arms clasped behind our backs. He would walk along the row of boys, his tennis shoes squeaking, his baldpate reflecting fluorescent light. At random, he would pause in front of three or four different boys, reach under their regulation red shorts and quickly, deftly (years of practice) hook his stubby index finger under the elastic of the required jock.
Snap!
He did all this without ever taking his eyes off the face of the boy he was checking. We were all ordered to stare ahead at attention. If the jock wasn’t there (which happened only rarely), if you were wearing mere underpants, he simply marked it on his board without a word and everyone knew you were two demerits closer to the six that brought you JUG.

JUG: Judgment under God—a kind of punishment handed out at Catholic school, usually in the form of detention, suspension, and, occasionally at this Jesuit high school, forced participation in a boxing match with the dean of discipline in a vacant lot behind the field house. This instilled in most students a sense of mortal terror, which of course was the point. I never actually knew anyone who’d boxed with Father Fitz, the dean. The rumor was enough.

At the end of class, McPhee would blow the whistle again and stand at the end of the shower stall, where each boy was required to get fully naked and fully wet before being checked off his list. No shower, two demerits. He stood there, his eyes moving slowly from boy to clipboard and back to boy. The tepid water, the tense atmosphere, the beady eyes of Mr. McPhee, kept things quick and furtive. His presence did offer one bit of solace—it crushed my abiding fear of getting an erection at the worst possible moment.

The single class that came as a relief was Brother Tom’s Freshman Theology. He was a compact, athletic man with very small but very bright blue eyes. He had a tiny mustache, which he constantly rubbed with the side of his index finger as if it were a bit of dirt he was trying to brush away. The first several weeks of school, Brother Tom was subdued and nearly as strict as all the other teachers. But after winter break, the moment we left the Old Testament behind and began with the New, he was like another man. A light, an actual twinkle, began to burn in his blue eyes. We were witnessing a man smitten. And, suddenly, an easier grader.

“Do you see what a radical this guy was? What a lover of life?” he asked, clutching the crucifix, caressing the Corpus as he spoke, needing, it seemed clear, to hang on to the very man of whom he talked. His voice rose in pitch, and his body, onto the balls of his feet, as he spoke.

“Did Jesus fall in love?” he cried out one day.

We boys generally thought so and cited Mary Magdalene.

“So, you think he liked women?”

“He must have . . .
after a certain age
,” said handsome Kevin McKenzie, with his perfect Groucho Marx inflection.

“Did Jesus have a penis?” Brother Tom asked, tapping Christ’s feet tenderly.

The room went dead silent.

“Well?” he asked again.

Silence, genitals retracting all over the room.

He spoke slowly, softly, rising up on tiptoe.

“We need to accept, to love
all
of Jesus, his body, his manhood. Look, what I’m saying here is that it’s important we not be afraid to ponder the question of humanity and divinity. Are we bodies with a spirit or
spiritual beings
with bodies? And can we not see our bodies, the desires that course through us, as sacred? I think there’s something we can uncover when we meditate on Jesus as God become man, God as flesh.” He held up the cross. “Here is God as flesh. He gave His only begotten son. Who are we? Can we accept the sanctity of our bodies, our own desires, even our imperfections?”

“Are you saying we’re like Jesus?” Kevin asked.

“Are you of God?”

“I guess . . .”

“Well, I purport that you certainly are. You are, Mr. McKenzie.”

“But I’m not the Son of God.”

“Not
the
Son, but
a
son. With all our imperfections, with this wonderful physical body of ours”—he touched his chest, his stomach—“I think we must recognize the ways in which we are divine.” He brought the Corpus to the side of his face, to his cheek, in a delicate and shocking gesture. “Look at the ways in which this radical, wonderful teacher, was
human
. Like us. Bring him close to you.”