I’ve never had a friend quite like “Adam”. I’ve always typecast him as “the Brit,” and he is one of those people with a magnetic personality who skates his way through life on charm and the ability to just slightly con nearly everyone he meets out of a little something: a free chai latte at Starbucks, or an extra movie ticket, all the way on up to a free car and even a free place to stay for months at a time.
The most memorable cons he’s carried off have to be the cars. Only one was outright free; the others are an assortment of surprisingly decent-looking beaters that cost an average of $450 and have an average life span of 9 months each before they either conk out in the middle of the 110 freeway or literally catch fire on the Lake Avenue exit ramp off the 134. Each time one dies, he will sit sadly, contemplating for literally just a moment, and say “Oh well, $450 for 9 months of a car? That’s what, $50 a month? AMAZing!” and then it’s on to the next little favor that he rarely seems to return.
People just love the guy due to his saucy British charm, joyful personality and surprisingly decent teeth. Women also love him for being fit, funny and able to think of witty comments on the fly – all factors that make up for the fact he has a quickly receding hairline at just 32 years of age.
I became his best friend when he realized that through my entertainment reporting job, I have access to tons of free events and the occasional meeting with a celebrity. He wants to meet Sam Jackson or Ewan McGregor while seeing “Star Wars” films earlier than anyone else? Fine, I need a ride to said premieres because a sleep disorder leaves me unable to drive. It is a match made in heaven, and like Ferris Bueller and Cameron we are pretty much inseparable. We are like-minded souls looking to coast our way through life in LA getting as many free and cheap opportunities as possible together.
I meet him the first time on the set of a Kelly Clarkson video where we are hired to portray paparazzi. It is perfect symbolism for our lives and our takes on LA: pretending to be the most obnoxious hangers-on in LA society for a fictional storyline. But what makes us stand out is that we are supposed to take a couple of photos with flashing fake cameras and not show our faces, pretending to snap pictures at a movie premiere Kelly is attending.
Only I am determined to be noticed, dammit! So I take a couple of snaps and then would pull my camera down and yell, “Kelly!” Or “Work it, girl!” and occasionally yell out at one of the extras that looks like a celebrity, like the dude who is a dead ringer for Ted Danson. “Yo, Ted! Danson! Becker!” I yell and make the crowd around me burst out laughing. “Adam” quickly slips in behind me and starts doing the same thing. Even though it drives the director nuts, it bumps the crowd’s energy up on an overnight shoot and we not only get our faces seen in the final video, but also receive bonuses for livening things up.
So it is a couple months later that I am a little too generous and offer my couch for a night to a guy named Bill, a 40ish guy who is one of the “regulars “ at the Barnes & Noble I work at part time. “Regulars” were people who are anything BUT regular members of society, just who regularly hang out at our store reading our books and magazines for free while driving away our REAL customers through a mix of their literally crazy behavior and even more literal mysterious odors.
Bill is one of the cleaner ones, but I see him begging for change outside the AMPM gas station on my way home one Sunday night. He tells me he is due in court at 8 a.m. to see a judge about something. I should ask about what, but instead I tell him I have an extra room or a couch and he can sleep in one of those so he’ll be fresh for the court in the morning.
Bill takes up my offer, which I think will be for one night. But after I come home that night, he turns up on my lawn again, yelling for me to come down. It was after doing so that he informed me of another wrinkle in his situation: the judge won’t let him change halfway houses without deliberating about it for another week.
“Halfway house?” I ask. “Yeah, for drug rehab,” he says. “I’m over the habit, man. Just slipped once and busted my probation.”
Again apparently lacking all reason and sense of self-preservation, I try to empathize with that and so I let him stay a couple more days, telling my landlady and neighbors that Bill is my mom’s cousin so that they don’t think something strange was going on. But then Bill wanders the hall and hangs out on the front porch with his shirt off and his prison tattoos in full sight – tattoos I didn’t know anything about before!
All my landlady can say is, “Your mom certainly has some colorful relatives.”
Great! Now I’ve brought my mother into my secret shame, and have no way of really kicking Bill out because everyone there will think I’m an asshole for kicking out a relative! Maybe most people don’t care about what others would think, but it was firmly rooted in my upper-middle-class, suburban, guilt-tripped Catholic upbringing that we are always to worry about the outside world would think of our actions! Wanna have a woman sleep over? What will the mailman think as she’s leaving?!
But wait, it gets worse: Bill was one of those people who always needs to have a conversation, no matter how asinine. I, on the other hand, watch certain shows with an obsessive focus to detail. What makes this sad is that I admit I watch some really stupid shit sometimes.
So on the fourth night of that week, I’m watching Jay Leno’s monologue on “The Tonight Show” when Bill says he’s gotta tell me something – NOW. What he reveals was that he has killed a man before and gone to prison for it. Though it was an “accident” of course – like every killing in the history of crime. Turns out Bill was on a meth binge “with my old lady” – the only time I’ve ever heard that phrase outside of a “Starsky & Hutch” episode – in some cheap motel in east Pasadena when another friend in the room wouldn’t shut up.
Bill warned him to shut up or he’d punch him. The guy kept talking, Bill punched him and the guy snapped his head back against the TV that was hanging, mounted, out of the wall. He then fell forward and cracked his ribs on the room’s dresser before passing out. Bill and his old lady ran for it, but Bill was eventually caught and sent to prison for involuntary manslaughter.
And now he is on my couch. This is clearly a story designed to say, “I’m fucking staying in your place, as long as I fucking want.”
And that’s where “Adam” really comes into my life. I call literally everyone I know even tangentially – literally about 300 people – and ask them if they know someone who can move in, immediately, that night. My only prerequisite is that the person referred to me not be a killer – accidental or otherwise.
And so “Adam” calls me after hearing about the place, telling me “Cheers!” and agreeing to help me chase Bill out that night. Bill doesn’t believe me when I tell him an English friend of mine is moving in immediately – “You don’t have an English friend. Who does? And I’m not leaving ‘til I see the fucker.”
Well, the fucker shows up on schedule at 7 p.m. that night and the two of us manage to convince Bill to leave without getting the authorities involved. In exchange for saving me from the uncertain terror of impending, looming, ever-present death, “Adam” finagles staying with me for free and paying $200 a month after that.
And for the next six months, we have a blast. He is not only my roommate but my chauffeur and the two of us have access to nearly every party and event we want. Even after he moves out, we stay tight for four more years so far, dreaming up short films to do together, hosting shows together, and just generally serving as each other’s wingmen with women. I get more out of it socially than he did, catching the leftover glow of his socializing glory.
And then it all comes crashing to a halt two Sundays ago.
I go to pick up “Adam” at LAX after he went home to England for two weeks. The reason for the trip is perfect for him and his strange life. He has been approached a few months before by a man who says he might be Adam’s father. Of course, all his life, Adam thinks another guy is his father. The whole thing turns into a real-life, very British version of the Maury Povich show, as the mystery father offers Adam a free trip home if he agrees to take a blood test and settle the question of who is his father.
It turns out the new guy is his dad after all, but Adam manages to make it work out well with everyone involved: new, real dad, fake, old dad and mom – the lady who’d slept with them both, creating a real-life “Mamma Mia’ situation. Adam calls to tell me he has two families now, including a couple of hot half-sisters that he is now thankful he’d never shagged.
But when Adam comes back to LAX, he is acting a little sketchy. He asks me to pick him up, but never gives me the flight number or airline before he hangs up – just a time: 2 p.m. I wait and search for two hours, his voicemail full and his not accepting calls or calling me, before someone suggests I check out the customs office.
There I learn he got busted and is being shipped home. His visa has always been strange – he officially has one year but someone “accidentally” typed in 10 years and he never bothered to complain about it. He’s managed to ride out 5 years here in the States including a different trip home without getting caught, but this time he botches his stories. I always wonder if he made that mistake himself or if he paid someone to make it. But he is my key into a whole other social strata – especially when he starts attending Bel Air Presbyterian Church and starts getting invited to house parties in the ritziest parts of town.
To one customs officer, he says he is a Christian missionary. To another, he says he is a cruise ship entertainer. And when he manages to get on the phone with me for a second, he wants me to tell them we are roommates who are also a duo cruise ship act.
“Why don’t you just get us a marriage license while you’re at it?” I sarcastically reply.
There is an awkward pause on his end just then. I think he has actually considered doing just that.
I realize that those of you reading or hearing this may assume that I have no personal standards, considering I allow a meth-taking killer onto my couch without checking his background. But faking a marriage to my best male friend is indeed where I draw a line in the sand.
It doesn’t matter anyway, because the feds hear “Adam” asking me to make up the roommate/entertainer story and abruptly takes the phone away, ending our call. It is just the last straw in that day’s problems, in which he can’t name what church he is with, or what ship we are on when the officers ask. A moment later, I realize that if I lie to the officials, I’m probably going down the tubes of the legal system with him.
And it’s that realization that troubles me most. Somewhere in the Bible it says that to lay down your life for another is a great thing. But this sacrifice is rooted in dishonesty, what I’ve come to realize is a pattern of constant spin. (And I know I'm no angel: I was a really needy, co-dependent kind of friend much of the time and we had plenty of arguments.)
So, a half-hour later I watch as the dude who is my best friend ever, whom people have always laughed about us having a “bromance” together, is led past me in cuffs by two burly pissed-off customs guards. He is getting a free trip back to the motherland from Uncle Sam, though he is now able to have two families help him through it. As he glides past, he has one of his beloved teas in his hand and a smile on his face, saying “They won’t let me talk now, bro – Cheers!” as if he is a pop star being pushed through by bodyguards. And this time all I can do is watch – like the director of that Kelly Clarkson video originally ordered me to do so long ago.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
FROM "STINKFIST" TO FINE WINE SCENTS: The story of Tool singer Maynard James Keenan
If you wanna know why a guy who sold 13 million albums with a band called Tool and songs about "Stinkfist" (if you don't know what that means, you don't wanna!) and "Prison Sex" (ditto!) is now making fine wines and asking you to sniff it, then go to my "Wide World of Film" blog http://famousfunnypeople.blogspot.com/2008/09/from-stinkfist-to-fine-wine-scents.html and check it out!!!
Monday, September 15, 2008
WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF SAMUEL L. JACKSON MOVED IN NEXT DOOR?
Read all about Jackson's fantastic performance as the Neighbor from Hell in the new thriller "Lakeview Terrace" at my other blog, "Wide World of Film." Up now, movie's out Friday- good flick! Its at http://wildfilm.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-scared-would-you-be-if-samuel-l.html Then stick around and read other celeb profiles! If you like what you see, let other blog fans know! Thanks!
Thursday, September 11, 2008
GOOD GOD, AM I TURNING MIDDLE-AGED ALREADY!? (aka a rare, brief moment of personal reflection and self-awareness)
So this has been an interesting year so far: sold my first essay to MSN.com, been headlining storytelling shows all over LA, now taking a class with one of the best story/performance teachers in the country and just landed a radio show on a big time station (KRLA - AM, home of Dennis Miller!) after 2 years of trying to break through.
But with that radio break, being picked up by a conservative radio station (even if we are trying to be funny on it) has completely made me wonder just what the hell has happened to me in the past few months.
I'll be exploring some of the things that i've been going through since June in another essay, but let's just say I bottomed out on a few levels (nothing to do with drugs or alcohol). Since then i've been working harder than i ever have before to become a good human being and more importantly a healthy one. But as I've gone through hypnotherapy (its OWN ball of wax, you'll see that too!) I've come to reclaim the passions and attitudes i had been ignoring for years at my core. It's made me more spiritual, got me back into music more than ever, set my movie habit on fire, and... apparently turned me into a right-wing jerk again.
It began with a vague distrust of Obama and grew and grew (there's other essays about that on this site). But now that i"m actually gonna make money doing my political harangues (along with my good friends Jake and Brant), I've been watching as much Obama-ness as i can (i.e. hs Letterman appearance last night) and then watched Bill O'Reilly's four-night showdown with the O-man on the "Factor" show.
This is the first time i've actually WATCHED the "O'Reilly Factor" on purpose (as opposed to seeing it on monitors in airport lounges where i couldn't change the channel). And I've come to think of a few things.
I'd heard O'Reilly is just a horrible human being, when in reality i think he's a compelling presence (again, i don't know if something's wrong with me!). But the thing is, I also don't understand what's wrong with the guy! As in, not that there's NOTHING wrong, but what the hell IS it with him?!
I've seen "The Colbert Report" plenty, and know that it mocks O'Reilly. But i had no idea that the real-life, ostensibly serious Bill actually has nearly everything he says appear in writing on the screen next to his face - AS HE"S SAYING IT!!!!
Does he think we're f-ing retarded?! Is HE?!
WHY would someone have the very thing they're saying put in writing next to his head while he's saying it?! Does he think we're all deaf from the shouting he does each night?
The other thing that makes me worry that i've crossed the line into middle age-ness is that I don't understand technology (I've never played XBox, Playstation, Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution or any of that s***! And i hate the concept of IPhones forcing us all to be sheep in lines (see other essay in this blog for more on THAT). And I only got my first real cell phone 2 years ago, at age 35!!! I just bought an MP3 player two months ago, loaded it up with CDs (none of which were from this decade, I assure you! Another old man trait!!!) and then proceeded to LOSE it!!!!!
But the thing that REALLY pisses me off to no end is tattoos. I've never seen so many of 'em til i moved out to LA, so maybe it's a geographical anger rather than an age-related one. But because everyday is a beach-worthy day in Southern California (i'm not kidding!!! 24/7/365!!!) people seem to flaunt them more than other places.
Seriously, WTF are you thinking when you cover your entire shaved head in tattoos? Do you just plan on never working a day in your life again?! Do these nitwits ever have second thoughts? Do they ever have thoughts, PERIOD!?! Last night i saw some amorphous blob of a human being (i seriously couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, and I"M 300 pounds so I can judge!!!) asleep on the red line train to Union Station, who had what looked like an open bloody wound on their cheek but in reality was...Tada! A tattoo of two dripping cherries! Right on their friggin' cheek!! Their CHEEK!!!! WHY?????? And then on their throat area, in ever-so-tasteful cursive font that mostly Latino tattoo recipients seem to favor, were the words "Candy Shop." Oh, and i almost forgot the two piercings jutting out of his/her/ITS lip and the indeterminate, also-cursive tattoo just above their eyebrows?
Would you hire that person? Or run the other way?
Yet i'm always thinking "I guess they dont' want to ever work again." Or "good luck getting a decent job with that!?"
But now, in my increasing moments of clarity about my own faults and weaknesses, I'm starting to realize these pinheads probably DO have jobs, and they're probably making a lot more than me.
Journalism don't getcha rich.
Maybe I'm just jealous. I'll get a picture of Obama tattooed on my a**.
But with that radio break, being picked up by a conservative radio station (even if we are trying to be funny on it) has completely made me wonder just what the hell has happened to me in the past few months.
I'll be exploring some of the things that i've been going through since June in another essay, but let's just say I bottomed out on a few levels (nothing to do with drugs or alcohol). Since then i've been working harder than i ever have before to become a good human being and more importantly a healthy one. But as I've gone through hypnotherapy (its OWN ball of wax, you'll see that too!) I've come to reclaim the passions and attitudes i had been ignoring for years at my core. It's made me more spiritual, got me back into music more than ever, set my movie habit on fire, and... apparently turned me into a right-wing jerk again.
It began with a vague distrust of Obama and grew and grew (there's other essays about that on this site). But now that i"m actually gonna make money doing my political harangues (along with my good friends Jake and Brant), I've been watching as much Obama-ness as i can (i.e. hs Letterman appearance last night) and then watched Bill O'Reilly's four-night showdown with the O-man on the "Factor" show.
This is the first time i've actually WATCHED the "O'Reilly Factor" on purpose (as opposed to seeing it on monitors in airport lounges where i couldn't change the channel). And I've come to think of a few things.
I'd heard O'Reilly is just a horrible human being, when in reality i think he's a compelling presence (again, i don't know if something's wrong with me!). But the thing is, I also don't understand what's wrong with the guy! As in, not that there's NOTHING wrong, but what the hell IS it with him?!
I've seen "The Colbert Report" plenty, and know that it mocks O'Reilly. But i had no idea that the real-life, ostensibly serious Bill actually has nearly everything he says appear in writing on the screen next to his face - AS HE"S SAYING IT!!!!
Does he think we're f-ing retarded?! Is HE?!
WHY would someone have the very thing they're saying put in writing next to his head while he's saying it?! Does he think we're all deaf from the shouting he does each night?
The other thing that makes me worry that i've crossed the line into middle age-ness is that I don't understand technology (I've never played XBox, Playstation, Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution or any of that s***! And i hate the concept of IPhones forcing us all to be sheep in lines (see other essay in this blog for more on THAT). And I only got my first real cell phone 2 years ago, at age 35!!! I just bought an MP3 player two months ago, loaded it up with CDs (none of which were from this decade, I assure you! Another old man trait!!!) and then proceeded to LOSE it!!!!!
But the thing that REALLY pisses me off to no end is tattoos. I've never seen so many of 'em til i moved out to LA, so maybe it's a geographical anger rather than an age-related one. But because everyday is a beach-worthy day in Southern California (i'm not kidding!!! 24/7/365!!!) people seem to flaunt them more than other places.
Seriously, WTF are you thinking when you cover your entire shaved head in tattoos? Do you just plan on never working a day in your life again?! Do these nitwits ever have second thoughts? Do they ever have thoughts, PERIOD!?! Last night i saw some amorphous blob of a human being (i seriously couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, and I"M 300 pounds so I can judge!!!) asleep on the red line train to Union Station, who had what looked like an open bloody wound on their cheek but in reality was...Tada! A tattoo of two dripping cherries! Right on their friggin' cheek!! Their CHEEK!!!! WHY?????? And then on their throat area, in ever-so-tasteful cursive font that mostly Latino tattoo recipients seem to favor, were the words "Candy Shop." Oh, and i almost forgot the two piercings jutting out of his/her/ITS lip and the indeterminate, also-cursive tattoo just above their eyebrows?
Would you hire that person? Or run the other way?
Yet i'm always thinking "I guess they dont' want to ever work again." Or "good luck getting a decent job with that!?"
But now, in my increasing moments of clarity about my own faults and weaknesses, I'm starting to realize these pinheads probably DO have jobs, and they're probably making a lot more than me.
Journalism don't getcha rich.
Maybe I'm just jealous. I'll get a picture of Obama tattooed on my a**.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
WOW THIS IS ONE WEIRD ELECTION!!! JOKES...
Before I get into anything substantive, I thought I'd throw a few news jokes at ya. These are by me, for good and bad (or bad and worse):
Did you hear about McCain's choice for Vice President? He picked a real hottie, Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska. Who knew the VP could be a MILF? Better watch what I say, or the FBI's gonna be after my A.S.S.
Everyone took one look at her and finally agreed Alaska's a great place to go drilling.
I've heard of swing states, but who knew Alaska's a "Schwing!" state?
Her husband is part Eskimo. So you know he'll be rubbing his nose in everyone's business.
Hillary's pissed that the Republicans picked a woman. Bill just wants to know if he can trade Hillary in for her.
Geez, this has happened so fast and dramatically, I have to ask if she's supposed to lead the free world, or if this is simply a new reality series for Lifetime?
Palin's one tough cookie, though. She hunts, fishes, snowmobiles - and i think i just saw her behind the wheel on "Ice Road Truckers."
I don't know about Obama, though. He wants to be leader of the free world with just two years' experience. Come on! You need five years if you wanna manage a Circuit City.
They're telling everyone to flee Gustav. Who's naming the hurricanes these days? Gustav doesn't sound like a threat - it sounds like an old German. What's next - Hurricane Klink?
Shannen Doherty's coming back to he new "Beverly Hills 90210". She 's now so old, that's not just her ZIP code. It's her age.
Did you hear about McCain's choice for Vice President? He picked a real hottie, Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska. Who knew the VP could be a MILF? Better watch what I say, or the FBI's gonna be after my A.S.S.
Everyone took one look at her and finally agreed Alaska's a great place to go drilling.
I've heard of swing states, but who knew Alaska's a "Schwing!" state?
Her husband is part Eskimo. So you know he'll be rubbing his nose in everyone's business.
Hillary's pissed that the Republicans picked a woman. Bill just wants to know if he can trade Hillary in for her.
Geez, this has happened so fast and dramatically, I have to ask if she's supposed to lead the free world, or if this is simply a new reality series for Lifetime?
Palin's one tough cookie, though. She hunts, fishes, snowmobiles - and i think i just saw her behind the wheel on "Ice Road Truckers."
I don't know about Obama, though. He wants to be leader of the free world with just two years' experience. Come on! You need five years if you wanna manage a Circuit City.
They're telling everyone to flee Gustav. Who's naming the hurricanes these days? Gustav doesn't sound like a threat - it sounds like an old German. What's next - Hurricane Klink?
Shannen Doherty's coming back to he new "Beverly Hills 90210". She 's now so old, that's not just her ZIP code. It's her age.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Growing Up Catholic - an epic three-part essay on accidentally setting your church on fire and saying "F***!" by accident the first time
It's been nearly 3 weeks since i last posted, but had a little writer's block on this baby, a rare problem for me...But I've wanted to write a comedic epic on my growing up Catholic years for ages and it finally poured out of me last night: 4617 words in 8 hours. It's divided by **** marks into three sections if you need to split it up...Please lemme know your thoughts!
GROWING UP CATHOLIC
I’ll never forget the time T.J. Hargett spilled the Precious Blood of Christ on his white Adidas sneakers while pulling altar boy duty in front of 400 classmates at St. Edward’s Catholic School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
It was a typical morning during my 3rd grade year, during which we had to go to Mass twice a week before class. Depending on the day, Mass was an alternately mystical or boring experience that at the very least killed off the first half-hour of the school day.
Sure, you could say I’m being slightly blasphemous for admitting we were often bored in church. But if Isaid it was great, I’d be slightly lying – ok, not slightly. Gimme a break – I was 8! I’d rather be out doodling pictures of fast cars and Superman in my notebook at class!
On this day, however, EVERYONE perked up and paid attention. T.J. had done the unthinkable and perhaps even the unforgivable. Father Peter – sweet old octogenarian Father Peter – had just invoked a blessing on a chalice full of wine, transforming it into what we believed was the Sacred Blood of Christ – when T.J. sneezed and wham! The chalice slipped and the Blood was everywhere!
Now thankfully, it doesn’t REALLY turn into blood as we know it, or T.J. would’ve REALLY been freaking out. Not to mention, the carpeting would have been a lot more difficult to clean. But because of the sacred nature of this divine mistake, every one of the 425 students of St. Edward’s let out a collective gasp of horror.
Father Peter looked like HE was going to have a stroke himself. He was paralyzed by fear and confusion. He couldn’t just LEAVE it there, staining the carpet, and he couldn’t sop it up and expect people to drink it. He finally ran backstage to the sacristy and - I imagine - flipped through a big priestly guidebook like “Mass for Dummies” or “The Idiot’s Guide to Mass Mishaps”. And there he found the answer….grab a towel and soak up as much of the Blood as possible before having to re-consecrate another chalice of wine. I wound up getting whacked in the back of the head by my teacher when I snorted loudly at the sight of TJ crying as Father Peter sopped up the situation.
Of course, that wasn’t the only moment of Holy Bloopers and High Drama I ever encountered during Mass at St. Edwards’s. There was the time when I myself almost burned the church down to the ground in 4th grade, when I was lighting the altar candles and accidentally caught my altar boy robe on fire. I ran to the backstage area and proceeded to put out the flame-maker by dousing it into a trash can – a trash can filled with paper and dead roses.
As the flames shot heavenward from the top of the garbage, Father Peter once again had to save the day with a combination of priestly prayer and firefighting heroics. Of course, everyone in my class laughed at me afterwards – especially TJ Hargett, who was returning the favor for my loudly snorting at him during the Blood On the Sneakers incident.
There were also moments worse than those, which thankfully happened to other people. Like the time a guy named Brian (who begged me to take his name out when he found this online) brought the St. Edward’s communion line to a standstill when the Communion host – the Precious Body of Christ! – fell off his tongue and onto the floor. That time, Father Peter made him pick it up off the floor and swallow it as I tried not to giggle at the sheer EWWWW! GROSS!-ness of the moment.
And how could I forget the time little Tracy Shollmeier got sick in the middle of St. Edward’s giant old church and had to run for it, her shoes click-clacking down the seemingly mile-long center aisle towards the back of the church, racing futilely against time as Father Peter froze to see what all the racket was, and giving the rest of us a clear earshot of little Tracy making it to the lobby – but not out the door – before she puked up her breakfast all over the Precious Marble Flooring?
At least it was easier to clean than carpet and she got sick BEFORE communion, sparing Father Peter from another desperate round of searching for answers on what to do over a piece of Christ being unexpectedly desecrated.
These are the moments I recall when people ask me with surprise about why I’m still a practicing Catholic a full 15 years after leaving my home and my parents’ rock-hard rule over my life. Ok, I’m naturally pre-disposed to seeking spiritual pursuits, but could any other church invoke the guilt necessary to turning a worship service into a masterful display of schadenfreude?
Let’s face it, though. Being an altar boy is a heavy trip and a lot of responsibility. You have to put on fancy robes and stand next to the priest at the altar throughout Mass and help with the mystical transformation of bread and wine into the Lord Himself, then be asked not a drop anything – and an 8 year old boy is ALWAYS dropping SOMETHING!!!
And then add in the fact that once Mass starts and you’re seated or standing next to the priest, there’s no chance to get away to the bathroom. I always managed to hold it, but I’ll never forget the time an altar boy named John who was a year younger than me had to, as he so succinctly put it, “go wee.” There was no way for him to get up and go, so in my best older-brother mode of sage, year-older, veteran altar boy wisdom whispered back, “It’s OK. Just go. No one will even notice. Your robe will hide it.”
I didn’t really know if that was true – hell, I wanted to find out for myself what would happen if an altar boy took a whiz while on duty! But I figured his robes would hide any telltale mark of shame.
Well, maybe they WOULD have – if his robes were black. Instead, they were red.
Whoops! Wrong choice of fashion that day!
Not only did an undeniable trickling noise occur, but John soon had a giant circle of shameful wet urine soaking the front of his robes. As we were asked to stand and deliver Communion to the congregation that day, John mysteriously stayed back in his seat, crying and refusing to stand again until the entire church except for his family were gone.
At least I know John learned an indelible lesson that day. About eight years later, he was a year behind me at Little Rock Catholic High, but had grown into a giant bully. I once saw him as a sophomore shoving a freshman around until I stepped up to him and whispered, “You gotta wee?” He teared up, ran away and never bullied anyone again.
Actually, the John Peeing Incident happened at my other favorite Catholic place – the chapel up at the VA hospital where my dad worked and where we actually lived amid a row of special doctors’ housing for a couple years. On weekdays, we’d have the bizarre joy of our mom warning us not to look out the kitchen window because a mental patient had wandered into our yard, was standing outside with his pants down, and was watering the lawn without a garden hose.
On weekends, we’d go to the most unpredictable Mass ever – where you had dozens of mentally disabled war vets seeming to compete for the title of who would do the craziest thing each week.
That title was almost invariably taken by one James Keever, a 55 year old man who had bipolar disorder and excitedly insisted on reading the Scripture passages from the pulpit whenever he was attending Mass.
That approval was something that the VA priest would come to regret.
Most weeks, he was fine, but once in a while, he’d be so filled with Christ’s joy that he’d apparently forget to put a belt on before he took to the pulpit. Yet he also wasn’t spontaneous enough to adapt when surprises overtook him. On at least three occasions, months apart, Keever stood up to read the week’s Gospel passage only to find that his unbuckled pants had fallen down around his ankles.
At least he still was wearing patriotic, flag-colored boxers – or it would’ve really been awkward watching as he acted like his pants had never fallen in the first place. That self-denial – or perhaps, an overdeveloped yet misplaced sense of propriety – meant that James Keever wouldn’t acknowledge his collapsed pants until he was done wit h a Scripture passage and had blessed the congregation. Then he’d hike up his pants and stumble in embarrassment out the back of the church, vowing never to be seen again but nonetheless guaranteed to come bug the priest for another chance within another two weeks.
After the third time James Keever’s pants fell, however, the VA priest instituted a strict must-wear-belt policy on James if he hoped to ever read publicly again. And in a masterstroke move, the priest actually told him that pants were now an Official Vatican Policy. James had no option, and from then on managed to keep his pants up around his waist rather than down around his ankles. It made Mass a lot less entertaining, but thankfully ensured I’d never get whacked by my Mom again for laughing at James from the altar.
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Now, I had a colorful imagination as a kid about how the world works. And I was in trouble a lot in Catholic school, as you might imagine. While I was well-acquainted with the classroom corner of seemingly every grade I went through at St. Edward’s – having been forced to stand in the corner any time I made a disruptive wisecrack in class – I always was a little too clever for my own good when it came to taking notes home to my parents from the teacher.
Mrs. Weinzimer was my 2nd grade teacher and she sent home plenty of notes with me. Unfortunately, she also had a sense of trust in me to actually BRING my parents the notes and have them read them.
I, on the other hand, had my own diabolical plans for her handwritten screeds against my behavior. I figured, if she’s not going to make them sign them, then why bring them the letters at all? Instead, I would accept the note from her, looking sorrowful, then take the note home in my backpack, read it in the bathroom located in the attic of our giant old doctor’s mansion on the VA grounds, and flush it down that toilet – somehow assuring myself that if it was flushed from an attic toilet, it was even more protected from ever being seen and read again.
Each time I flushed down a letter, I would be nervous for about two weeks afterward. The reason is that I thought there were special city employees who worked in the sewers and sorted through all the papers that floated their way – with a special crew assigned to finding the letters that teachers sent home with their troublemaking students. I figured if these mysterious men hadn’t found my flushed letters within two weeks, I was in the clear.
(Yes, I know that sounds nutty for a kid to be conjuring up those wild flights of fancy about how a city works. But I was a weird kid. And yes, I had an ulcer by the time I was 12.)
But there was one time I got in so much trouble, it changed everything.
I was in 2nd grade, still under the oppressive regime of Ms. Weinzimer. One day I’m sitting at Mass when the kid next to me, Harlan (again, all names are true), does something that makes me laugh. I mean, we are giggling HARD, as in cover your mouth and turn red from clamping on yourself.
It is the carefree laugh of a child, a child filled with such 2nd grade joy that he needs not have a reason, but as we snort, giggle and guffaw suddenly the Hand of Justice – aka Miss Virginia Weinzimer – clamped down on each of us, grabbing us by the back collars of our little blue uniform shirts and virtually lifting us over the back of our pews an d into seats right next to her.
Laugh Time is over.
We wound up being marched back to class at the front of the line, led by Ms. Weinzimer herself, and forced to stand in front of the class as she gave us a her own modern version of the Spanish Inquisition.
“Why were you laughing?”
I didn’t know. It was amazing to experience an Alzheimer’s-worthy blackout at such a young age, I’ll admit, but that’s what happened. I had literally no idea what we were laugh ing at. Her grabbing us so suddenly had knocked the memory out of me, apparently. And Harlan – poor, rednecky Harlan (come on, I can call him a redneck; his name was HARLAN) – was just standing there, apparently unable to muster a syllable of English under such duress.
It was up to me to answer, and Ms. Weinzimer was bearing down. Hard.
“Tell me! Tell us! Why. Were. You. Laughing??? Tell me, or I’ll send you to the principal’s office and have Sister Hermana beat an answer out of you with her paddle.”
I had to summon an answer. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, but I said…
“Father Peter was coughing a lot…” I whimpered.
“And that’s funny to you?!”
Holy crap! I realized then that I had said just about the Dumbest Thing of My Entire Seven Years on the Planet. What WAS I thinking?! Of course an 80-something year-old priest hacking his way through a Mass in front of a bunch of children wasn’t funny!!!
As my peers eyed me with venom worthy of staring down the Devil himself, I knew nothing good was going to come of this. And sure enough, Mrs. Weinzimer was quaking with anger as she said what came=2 0next.
“Boys and girls, this word may shock you, but it’s in the Bible!”
Everyone hunched forward to hear what was about to fly out of her mouth.
“Carl, you…are…a…jackass!”
WHAT?!
A seismic gasp shot thr ough the room, as every kid in the place also heaved with shock. I was horrified, because I was only a 7 year old Catholic school kid, and as bad as I was, no one ever used the “A-double-S” word on me before. I didn’t know whether to cry or shriek or just shut up and take it. So I shut up and took it.
Amazingly, Ms. Weinzimer didn’t send me out of the office. Instead, she wrote my parents a letter, which I was once again expected to hand to them. This time it was stapled shut. I still didn’t care. I was gonna read it and flush it right down the drain like usual.
The next day, I came back to school, filled with my usual ulcer-inducing fear of having my note caught by the hard-working fellows in the city’s Sanitation Department. But I resolved to put on a better show of my contrition than usual for Ms. Weinzimer.
“So, did you show your parents my note last night, Carl?” she asked, smirking with self-satisfaction.
I not only answered, I rubbed my butt for show. The stakes were high, you know.
“Yeah, my dad whipped me good!” I replied, wincing as I touched the supposedly affected area.
Mrs. Weinzimer said “I’m glad you learned your lesson,” and moved on to teaching our class! I had gotten away with it!!!!
Or so I thought.
Over the next month, I was a friggin’ saint. I figured that this note had been so bad that it wouldn’t just take two weeks to be safe from the Sanitation Department’s investigative work, but a full month. So I was polite, friendly, respectful, and hard-working: all traits that had long been foreign to me.
In fact, I was so well-behaved that Ms. Weinzimer was downright excited to see my Mom when she one day wasn’t able to make it to school in time to pick me up like normal. Nope, Mom was half an hour late and the principal asked Ms. Weinzimer to wait after school for me to get picked up safely.
So20my mom walked in and she and Ms. Weinzimer exchanged excessive, smile-filled pleasantries. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but as long as they were Chatty Cathies, I figured I was fine. In fact, I myself had forgotten what a demon I had once been.
But after a few minutes, it became apparent that they hadn’t forgotten. For suddenly, the tone of their conversation had changed and their smiles had disappeared. Now they were speaking fast and furious to each other in a series of whispers, while also scowling at me and gradually working their way into being downright pissed-looking.
All I knew was, I was in trouble.
My mom stormed over, took my hand and said “You’re coming with me!”
Well, no kidding, mom. Who else was gonna be allowed to take me?
We got to the outside parking lot, and she said “I just learned all about those letters you were supposed to be showing me.”
Holy crap, again! I looked around frantically for a means of escape, a safe house, a concerned and friendly adult who could save me from the emotional agony to come.
But there was no one to save me from my mother, and I got in the car with her. I knew this would be ugly, and sure enough I was proven right.
“No lollipop today!”
WHAT?! I thought, but I was afraid to verbalize it.
“And maybe not ever!!!”
Oh my God! This was like being assigned to an eternity in Purgatory for a 7 year old!
But it all turned out ok. Looking back, I feel like a prisoner who stared down hard time. No lollipop for a month? I can handle 20 years, bro! At least that ’s what my inner gangbanger says.
But having TV taken away for a week – THAT was a bitch.
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There still was one thing that happened that trumps all my memories of growing up Catholic. It was the first time I said the word “Fuck.”
Now, that isn’t something one normally remembers, I don’t think. You kind of blurt it out to sound tough, or you slam something into your toe, scream it out and voila you’ve sworn and it’s not a big deal anymore and you keep on swearing.
But my first time saying the “F word” was when I was six.
Yes, you read right. Six.
It seemed to be an innocent enough day. The sky was sun-dappled, the air filled with a light breeze, and I was playing a rousing yet wholesome game of Monopoly around an outdoor picnic table across the street from my home.
This was at the giant, old, cool but creepy Addams Family/Munsters-style mansion that my dad rented on the grounds of the VA during our first two years in Arkansas. My mom was outside the house watering plants. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect day – and it helped that I was winning the game. Clobbering everyone in sight, in fact.
“Everyone” consisted of four neighbor kids and my sister, Krystyna, who is a year and a half older than me and actually pretty cool in her a dulthood. She was cool then, too, but each of us had been bred with a streak of goody-two-shoes-ness that made each of us want to rat out the other over the slightest indiscretion, in the hopes of scoring points with our hard-to-please parents.
So when I said “THE WORD”, all hell broke loose.
Now how, you might ask, does the word “Fuck” come into play when one is, well, playing a board game at age six?
Well I was so thrilled at my latest show of domination in Monopoly – perhaps it was the placement of a hotel on Park Avenue – that I reared back and yelped out, “This is fun!”
Only, instead of saying “fun,” I said that…other…word.
Yep, Big Ol’ Moronic Me actually said “This is fuck!”
I knew the second I said it that I was headed for trouble. This was nuke-the-world kind of trouble for a strictly raised Catholic kid. And my sister, after her initial shock and the utter silence that both she and our playmates displayed, knew that she was sitting on a gold mine of a problem for me.
She knew that if she could report me she’d be Queen of the House for eternity, with her choice of TV programs accepted without question for all time. I would be seen as so awful, and she would be seen as so holy, that I would never get to pick a movie or vacation destination ever again.
I somehow concluded, in that split second of shock, that it would be wiser for me to run up and tell my mom what I’d done rather than let my sister beat me to it. So after a three-second staredown in which both our intentions became wildly apparent, we both leaped up and ran towards my mom.
My sister just called out “Mom! Mom!” She was smart.
I blurted out, under a veil of tears, “Mom, I said fuck! I said fuck!”
Now, I didn’t even know what the word meant. I had barely ever heard it before either – I was six. But it was one of those mysterious things that a kid can somehow understand at a preternaturally young age: there are some words that you know are seen as inherently awful and even evil.
And “fuck” was one of them.
My mom reacted in what was both an utterly insane and yet utterly expected manner. She dropped both her jaw and her garden hose and proceeded to grab me by the back of my pants and start slapping my bottom while shrieking “Why?” and “Wait til your father gets home!”
I know that “Wait til your father gets home!” is, or at least was, the Great American Threat to Childhood. It was the ultimate early warning that your ass was gonna get beat, and you’d better make a run for it with whatever you had in your piggy bank.
The Joads had made a go of it. And they were in the midst of the Great Depression. What was holding your sorry ass back?
I made plans to move out of my house, but then reality struck me when I realized I had about 42 cents to my name. Why couldn’t I lose more teeth? I wondered. That would make me a few bucks from the Tooth Fairy.
But eventually my dad did get home, and my mom found a way to share my new linguistic prowess with him. He ordered me down to the bathroom, where he proceeded to ask me to uncover my backside while he slipped off his belt.
This wasn’t going to end well.
Thankfully, my dad was a sensitive European man of culture, rather than an ass-beating American cretin. He actually said, “This will hurt me more than it hurts you,” and MEANT it. He had me bend over, reared back with his belt a little bit (seriously, just a smidge) and let me have it at about half-speed velocity.
Sure, it still hurt. But sure enough, it seemed to hurt him more. He actually started crying. And he also stopped after two whacks. I couldn’t believe my good fortune! But I did feel bad for hurting his feelings and hugged him anyway.
But he still wanted to know: where did I hear that word?
And, strangely enough, I had an answer for him: I didn’t even know what it meant, or that it was necessarily a bad word. But I did know that I’d seen it etched into the wall of a bathroom stall in the boys’ room for 1st through 4th graders. So I told him I saw it on the bathroom wall at school.
He couldn’t believe it. Not at a Catholic school! (Well, looking back, it probably WAS hard to believe.)
So the next morning, Dad wound up driving me to school. This was a rare occasion - but one befitting the importance of the moment. He had shocking news to deliver to our principal, and he was going to deliver it personally.
We walked into the principal’s office as an odd pair, for sure. I looked nauseously afraid, while he looked mournful yet outraged. The principal was an ancient and, of course, stern-faced nun named Sister Hermana – aka Sister Sister for the Hispanically inclined. This was about a decade before hip-hop took over the culture, so I never got as much comedic mileage out of her as I should have.
My dad was afraid to tell her what was up, so when she asked, he said he would write her a note. She said “Well couldn’t you have done that without leaving home?”
She clearly wasn’t aware of the d ire implications of what she was about to read.
My dad said, “My son saw a bad word here.”
Sister Hermana would have none of it.
“What word?”
I kinda wanted to see if my dad would actually say it. But instead, he asked for a sheet of paper and a pen, and he wrote it out – those four horrid letters, f,u,c,k.
Then he slipped it back to her on her desk. Sister Herman turned ashen with shame and fired up with fury, all in one fell swoop. It must have been her super nun powers.
“WHERE did you see this, Carl?!”
“In the bathroom,” I replied.
“Not in MY bathroom!” she shrieked.
“No, not yours! The boys room!” I whined. I didn’t realize she meant none of the bathrooms under her supervision, which would include the boys’ room.
But about five seconds later, we were marching down the hallway as fast as we could towards the 1st through 4th graders’ boys’ room. Sister knocked furiously to make sure it was empty, then poked her head in and drove a lone fearful kid out.
Finally, it was time to show the evidence. I was so nervous, I actually wondered, what would happen if it wasn’t there? Did I just invent where I saw it, to cover my tracks when my dad asked? Was I a pathological liar?
Thankfully for me, the word WAS there, carved high up near the top door jamb of a toilet stall. I pointed at it fearfully, wondering what would happen next.
What did happen next was that my dad again cried a little, because he didn’t quite understand that this was a normal thing to see in our often coarse and callous American culture. But he put his arm around my shoulder to let me know that he didn’t blame me for saying it anymore, and we walked to the car while Sister Hermana frantically called Jewel, the school janitor, to paint over the bathroom stall, right that instant.
I don’t know what Jewel had to say about that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he muttered a certain word as she walked away.
“Fuck!”
GROWING UP CATHOLIC
I’ll never forget the time T.J. Hargett spilled the Precious Blood of Christ on his white Adidas sneakers while pulling altar boy duty in front of 400 classmates at St. Edward’s Catholic School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
It was a typical morning during my 3rd grade year, during which we had to go to Mass twice a week before class. Depending on the day, Mass was an alternately mystical or boring experience that at the very least killed off the first half-hour of the school day.
Sure, you could say I’m being slightly blasphemous for admitting we were often bored in church. But if Isaid it was great, I’d be slightly lying – ok, not slightly. Gimme a break – I was 8! I’d rather be out doodling pictures of fast cars and Superman in my notebook at class!
On this day, however, EVERYONE perked up and paid attention. T.J. had done the unthinkable and perhaps even the unforgivable. Father Peter – sweet old octogenarian Father Peter – had just invoked a blessing on a chalice full of wine, transforming it into what we believed was the Sacred Blood of Christ – when T.J. sneezed and wham! The chalice slipped and the Blood was everywhere!
Now thankfully, it doesn’t REALLY turn into blood as we know it, or T.J. would’ve REALLY been freaking out. Not to mention, the carpeting would have been a lot more difficult to clean. But because of the sacred nature of this divine mistake, every one of the 425 students of St. Edward’s let out a collective gasp of horror.
Father Peter looked like HE was going to have a stroke himself. He was paralyzed by fear and confusion. He couldn’t just LEAVE it there, staining the carpet, and he couldn’t sop it up and expect people to drink it. He finally ran backstage to the sacristy and - I imagine - flipped through a big priestly guidebook like “Mass for Dummies” or “The Idiot’s Guide to Mass Mishaps”. And there he found the answer….grab a towel and soak up as much of the Blood as possible before having to re-consecrate another chalice of wine. I wound up getting whacked in the back of the head by my teacher when I snorted loudly at the sight of TJ crying as Father Peter sopped up the situation.
Of course, that wasn’t the only moment of Holy Bloopers and High Drama I ever encountered during Mass at St. Edwards’s. There was the time when I myself almost burned the church down to the ground in 4th grade, when I was lighting the altar candles and accidentally caught my altar boy robe on fire. I ran to the backstage area and proceeded to put out the flame-maker by dousing it into a trash can – a trash can filled with paper and dead roses.
As the flames shot heavenward from the top of the garbage, Father Peter once again had to save the day with a combination of priestly prayer and firefighting heroics. Of course, everyone in my class laughed at me afterwards – especially TJ Hargett, who was returning the favor for my loudly snorting at him during the Blood On the Sneakers incident.
There were also moments worse than those, which thankfully happened to other people. Like the time a guy named Brian (who begged me to take his name out when he found this online) brought the St. Edward’s communion line to a standstill when the Communion host – the Precious Body of Christ! – fell off his tongue and onto the floor. That time, Father Peter made him pick it up off the floor and swallow it as I tried not to giggle at the sheer EWWWW! GROSS!-ness of the moment.
And how could I forget the time little Tracy Shollmeier got sick in the middle of St. Edward’s giant old church and had to run for it, her shoes click-clacking down the seemingly mile-long center aisle towards the back of the church, racing futilely against time as Father Peter froze to see what all the racket was, and giving the rest of us a clear earshot of little Tracy making it to the lobby – but not out the door – before she puked up her breakfast all over the Precious Marble Flooring?
At least it was easier to clean than carpet and she got sick BEFORE communion, sparing Father Peter from another desperate round of searching for answers on what to do over a piece of Christ being unexpectedly desecrated.
These are the moments I recall when people ask me with surprise about why I’m still a practicing Catholic a full 15 years after leaving my home and my parents’ rock-hard rule over my life. Ok, I’m naturally pre-disposed to seeking spiritual pursuits, but could any other church invoke the guilt necessary to turning a worship service into a masterful display of schadenfreude?
Let’s face it, though. Being an altar boy is a heavy trip and a lot of responsibility. You have to put on fancy robes and stand next to the priest at the altar throughout Mass and help with the mystical transformation of bread and wine into the Lord Himself, then be asked not a drop anything – and an 8 year old boy is ALWAYS dropping SOMETHING!!!
And then add in the fact that once Mass starts and you’re seated or standing next to the priest, there’s no chance to get away to the bathroom. I always managed to hold it, but I’ll never forget the time an altar boy named John who was a year younger than me had to, as he so succinctly put it, “go wee.” There was no way for him to get up and go, so in my best older-brother mode of sage, year-older, veteran altar boy wisdom whispered back, “It’s OK. Just go. No one will even notice. Your robe will hide it.”
I didn’t really know if that was true – hell, I wanted to find out for myself what would happen if an altar boy took a whiz while on duty! But I figured his robes would hide any telltale mark of shame.
Well, maybe they WOULD have – if his robes were black. Instead, they were red.
Whoops! Wrong choice of fashion that day!
Not only did an undeniable trickling noise occur, but John soon had a giant circle of shameful wet urine soaking the front of his robes. As we were asked to stand and deliver Communion to the congregation that day, John mysteriously stayed back in his seat, crying and refusing to stand again until the entire church except for his family were gone.
At least I know John learned an indelible lesson that day. About eight years later, he was a year behind me at Little Rock Catholic High, but had grown into a giant bully. I once saw him as a sophomore shoving a freshman around until I stepped up to him and whispered, “You gotta wee?” He teared up, ran away and never bullied anyone again.
Actually, the John Peeing Incident happened at my other favorite Catholic place – the chapel up at the VA hospital where my dad worked and where we actually lived amid a row of special doctors’ housing for a couple years. On weekdays, we’d have the bizarre joy of our mom warning us not to look out the kitchen window because a mental patient had wandered into our yard, was standing outside with his pants down, and was watering the lawn without a garden hose.
On weekends, we’d go to the most unpredictable Mass ever – where you had dozens of mentally disabled war vets seeming to compete for the title of who would do the craziest thing each week.
That title was almost invariably taken by one James Keever, a 55 year old man who had bipolar disorder and excitedly insisted on reading the Scripture passages from the pulpit whenever he was attending Mass.
That approval was something that the VA priest would come to regret.
Most weeks, he was fine, but once in a while, he’d be so filled with Christ’s joy that he’d apparently forget to put a belt on before he took to the pulpit. Yet he also wasn’t spontaneous enough to adapt when surprises overtook him. On at least three occasions, months apart, Keever stood up to read the week’s Gospel passage only to find that his unbuckled pants had fallen down around his ankles.
At least he still was wearing patriotic, flag-colored boxers – or it would’ve really been awkward watching as he acted like his pants had never fallen in the first place. That self-denial – or perhaps, an overdeveloped yet misplaced sense of propriety – meant that James Keever wouldn’t acknowledge his collapsed pants until he was done wit h a Scripture passage and had blessed the congregation. Then he’d hike up his pants and stumble in embarrassment out the back of the church, vowing never to be seen again but nonetheless guaranteed to come bug the priest for another chance within another two weeks.
After the third time James Keever’s pants fell, however, the VA priest instituted a strict must-wear-belt policy on James if he hoped to ever read publicly again. And in a masterstroke move, the priest actually told him that pants were now an Official Vatican Policy. James had no option, and from then on managed to keep his pants up around his waist rather than down around his ankles. It made Mass a lot less entertaining, but thankfully ensured I’d never get whacked by my Mom again for laughing at James from the altar.
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Now, I had a colorful imagination as a kid about how the world works. And I was in trouble a lot in Catholic school, as you might imagine. While I was well-acquainted with the classroom corner of seemingly every grade I went through at St. Edward’s – having been forced to stand in the corner any time I made a disruptive wisecrack in class – I always was a little too clever for my own good when it came to taking notes home to my parents from the teacher.
Mrs. Weinzimer was my 2nd grade teacher and she sent home plenty of notes with me. Unfortunately, she also had a sense of trust in me to actually BRING my parents the notes and have them read them.
I, on the other hand, had my own diabolical plans for her handwritten screeds against my behavior. I figured, if she’s not going to make them sign them, then why bring them the letters at all? Instead, I would accept the note from her, looking sorrowful, then take the note home in my backpack, read it in the bathroom located in the attic of our giant old doctor’s mansion on the VA grounds, and flush it down that toilet – somehow assuring myself that if it was flushed from an attic toilet, it was even more protected from ever being seen and read again.
Each time I flushed down a letter, I would be nervous for about two weeks afterward. The reason is that I thought there were special city employees who worked in the sewers and sorted through all the papers that floated their way – with a special crew assigned to finding the letters that teachers sent home with their troublemaking students. I figured if these mysterious men hadn’t found my flushed letters within two weeks, I was in the clear.
(Yes, I know that sounds nutty for a kid to be conjuring up those wild flights of fancy about how a city works. But I was a weird kid. And yes, I had an ulcer by the time I was 12.)
But there was one time I got in so much trouble, it changed everything.
I was in 2nd grade, still under the oppressive regime of Ms. Weinzimer. One day I’m sitting at Mass when the kid next to me, Harlan (again, all names are true), does something that makes me laugh. I mean, we are giggling HARD, as in cover your mouth and turn red from clamping on yourself.
It is the carefree laugh of a child, a child filled with such 2nd grade joy that he needs not have a reason, but as we snort, giggle and guffaw suddenly the Hand of Justice – aka Miss Virginia Weinzimer – clamped down on each of us, grabbing us by the back collars of our little blue uniform shirts and virtually lifting us over the back of our pews an d into seats right next to her.
Laugh Time is over.
We wound up being marched back to class at the front of the line, led by Ms. Weinzimer herself, and forced to stand in front of the class as she gave us a her own modern version of the Spanish Inquisition.
“Why were you laughing?”
I didn’t know. It was amazing to experience an Alzheimer’s-worthy blackout at such a young age, I’ll admit, but that’s what happened. I had literally no idea what we were laugh ing at. Her grabbing us so suddenly had knocked the memory out of me, apparently. And Harlan – poor, rednecky Harlan (come on, I can call him a redneck; his name was HARLAN) – was just standing there, apparently unable to muster a syllable of English under such duress.
It was up to me to answer, and Ms. Weinzimer was bearing down. Hard.
“Tell me! Tell us! Why. Were. You. Laughing??? Tell me, or I’ll send you to the principal’s office and have Sister Hermana beat an answer out of you with her paddle.”
I had to summon an answer. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, but I said…
“Father Peter was coughing a lot…” I whimpered.
“And that’s funny to you?!”
Holy crap! I realized then that I had said just about the Dumbest Thing of My Entire Seven Years on the Planet. What WAS I thinking?! Of course an 80-something year-old priest hacking his way through a Mass in front of a bunch of children wasn’t funny!!!
As my peers eyed me with venom worthy of staring down the Devil himself, I knew nothing good was going to come of this. And sure enough, Mrs. Weinzimer was quaking with anger as she said what came=2 0next.
“Boys and girls, this word may shock you, but it’s in the Bible!”
Everyone hunched forward to hear what was about to fly out of her mouth.
“Carl, you…are…a…jackass!”
WHAT?!
A seismic gasp shot thr ough the room, as every kid in the place also heaved with shock. I was horrified, because I was only a 7 year old Catholic school kid, and as bad as I was, no one ever used the “A-double-S” word on me before. I didn’t know whether to cry or shriek or just shut up and take it. So I shut up and took it.
Amazingly, Ms. Weinzimer didn’t send me out of the office. Instead, she wrote my parents a letter, which I was once again expected to hand to them. This time it was stapled shut. I still didn’t care. I was gonna read it and flush it right down the drain like usual.
The next day, I came back to school, filled with my usual ulcer-inducing fear of having my note caught by the hard-working fellows in the city’s Sanitation Department. But I resolved to put on a better show of my contrition than usual for Ms. Weinzimer.
“So, did you show your parents my note last night, Carl?” she asked, smirking with self-satisfaction.
I not only answered, I rubbed my butt for show. The stakes were high, you know.
“Yeah, my dad whipped me good!” I replied, wincing as I touched the supposedly affected area.
Mrs. Weinzimer said “I’m glad you learned your lesson,” and moved on to teaching our class! I had gotten away with it!!!!
Or so I thought.
Over the next month, I was a friggin’ saint. I figured that this note had been so bad that it wouldn’t just take two weeks to be safe from the Sanitation Department’s investigative work, but a full month. So I was polite, friendly, respectful, and hard-working: all traits that had long been foreign to me.
In fact, I was so well-behaved that Ms. Weinzimer was downright excited to see my Mom when she one day wasn’t able to make it to school in time to pick me up like normal. Nope, Mom was half an hour late and the principal asked Ms. Weinzimer to wait after school for me to get picked up safely.
So20my mom walked in and she and Ms. Weinzimer exchanged excessive, smile-filled pleasantries. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but as long as they were Chatty Cathies, I figured I was fine. In fact, I myself had forgotten what a demon I had once been.
But after a few minutes, it became apparent that they hadn’t forgotten. For suddenly, the tone of their conversation had changed and their smiles had disappeared. Now they were speaking fast and furious to each other in a series of whispers, while also scowling at me and gradually working their way into being downright pissed-looking.
All I knew was, I was in trouble.
My mom stormed over, took my hand and said “You’re coming with me!”
Well, no kidding, mom. Who else was gonna be allowed to take me?
We got to the outside parking lot, and she said “I just learned all about those letters you were supposed to be showing me.”
Holy crap, again! I looked around frantically for a means of escape, a safe house, a concerned and friendly adult who could save me from the emotional agony to come.
But there was no one to save me from my mother, and I got in the car with her. I knew this would be ugly, and sure enough I was proven right.
“No lollipop today!”
WHAT?! I thought, but I was afraid to verbalize it.
“And maybe not ever!!!”
Oh my God! This was like being assigned to an eternity in Purgatory for a 7 year old!
But it all turned out ok. Looking back, I feel like a prisoner who stared down hard time. No lollipop for a month? I can handle 20 years, bro! At least that ’s what my inner gangbanger says.
But having TV taken away for a week – THAT was a bitch.
***********************************************************************************
There still was one thing that happened that trumps all my memories of growing up Catholic. It was the first time I said the word “Fuck.”
Now, that isn’t something one normally remembers, I don’t think. You kind of blurt it out to sound tough, or you slam something into your toe, scream it out and voila you’ve sworn and it’s not a big deal anymore and you keep on swearing.
But my first time saying the “F word” was when I was six.
Yes, you read right. Six.
It seemed to be an innocent enough day. The sky was sun-dappled, the air filled with a light breeze, and I was playing a rousing yet wholesome game of Monopoly around an outdoor picnic table across the street from my home.
This was at the giant, old, cool but creepy Addams Family/Munsters-style mansion that my dad rented on the grounds of the VA during our first two years in Arkansas. My mom was outside the house watering plants. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect day – and it helped that I was winning the game. Clobbering everyone in sight, in fact.
“Everyone” consisted of four neighbor kids and my sister, Krystyna, who is a year and a half older than me and actually pretty cool in her a dulthood. She was cool then, too, but each of us had been bred with a streak of goody-two-shoes-ness that made each of us want to rat out the other over the slightest indiscretion, in the hopes of scoring points with our hard-to-please parents.
So when I said “THE WORD”, all hell broke loose.
Now how, you might ask, does the word “Fuck” come into play when one is, well, playing a board game at age six?
Well I was so thrilled at my latest show of domination in Monopoly – perhaps it was the placement of a hotel on Park Avenue – that I reared back and yelped out, “This is fun!”
Only, instead of saying “fun,” I said that…other…word.
Yep, Big Ol’ Moronic Me actually said “This is fuck!”
I knew the second I said it that I was headed for trouble. This was nuke-the-world kind of trouble for a strictly raised Catholic kid. And my sister, after her initial shock and the utter silence that both she and our playmates displayed, knew that she was sitting on a gold mine of a problem for me.
She knew that if she could report me she’d be Queen of the House for eternity, with her choice of TV programs accepted without question for all time. I would be seen as so awful, and she would be seen as so holy, that I would never get to pick a movie or vacation destination ever again.
I somehow concluded, in that split second of shock, that it would be wiser for me to run up and tell my mom what I’d done rather than let my sister beat me to it. So after a three-second staredown in which both our intentions became wildly apparent, we both leaped up and ran towards my mom.
My sister just called out “Mom! Mom!” She was smart.
I blurted out, under a veil of tears, “Mom, I said fuck! I said fuck!”
Now, I didn’t even know what the word meant. I had barely ever heard it before either – I was six. But it was one of those mysterious things that a kid can somehow understand at a preternaturally young age: there are some words that you know are seen as inherently awful and even evil.
And “fuck” was one of them.
My mom reacted in what was both an utterly insane and yet utterly expected manner. She dropped both her jaw and her garden hose and proceeded to grab me by the back of my pants and start slapping my bottom while shrieking “Why?” and “Wait til your father gets home!”
I know that “Wait til your father gets home!” is, or at least was, the Great American Threat to Childhood. It was the ultimate early warning that your ass was gonna get beat, and you’d better make a run for it with whatever you had in your piggy bank.
The Joads had made a go of it. And they were in the midst of the Great Depression. What was holding your sorry ass back?
I made plans to move out of my house, but then reality struck me when I realized I had about 42 cents to my name. Why couldn’t I lose more teeth? I wondered. That would make me a few bucks from the Tooth Fairy.
But eventually my dad did get home, and my mom found a way to share my new linguistic prowess with him. He ordered me down to the bathroom, where he proceeded to ask me to uncover my backside while he slipped off his belt.
This wasn’t going to end well.
Thankfully, my dad was a sensitive European man of culture, rather than an ass-beating American cretin. He actually said, “This will hurt me more than it hurts you,” and MEANT it. He had me bend over, reared back with his belt a little bit (seriously, just a smidge) and let me have it at about half-speed velocity.
Sure, it still hurt. But sure enough, it seemed to hurt him more. He actually started crying. And he also stopped after two whacks. I couldn’t believe my good fortune! But I did feel bad for hurting his feelings and hugged him anyway.
But he still wanted to know: where did I hear that word?
And, strangely enough, I had an answer for him: I didn’t even know what it meant, or that it was necessarily a bad word. But I did know that I’d seen it etched into the wall of a bathroom stall in the boys’ room for 1st through 4th graders. So I told him I saw it on the bathroom wall at school.
He couldn’t believe it. Not at a Catholic school! (Well, looking back, it probably WAS hard to believe.)
So the next morning, Dad wound up driving me to school. This was a rare occasion - but one befitting the importance of the moment. He had shocking news to deliver to our principal, and he was going to deliver it personally.
We walked into the principal’s office as an odd pair, for sure. I looked nauseously afraid, while he looked mournful yet outraged. The principal was an ancient and, of course, stern-faced nun named Sister Hermana – aka Sister Sister for the Hispanically inclined. This was about a decade before hip-hop took over the culture, so I never got as much comedic mileage out of her as I should have.
My dad was afraid to tell her what was up, so when she asked, he said he would write her a note. She said “Well couldn’t you have done that without leaving home?”
She clearly wasn’t aware of the d ire implications of what she was about to read.
My dad said, “My son saw a bad word here.”
Sister Hermana would have none of it.
“What word?”
I kinda wanted to see if my dad would actually say it. But instead, he asked for a sheet of paper and a pen, and he wrote it out – those four horrid letters, f,u,c,k.
Then he slipped it back to her on her desk. Sister Herman turned ashen with shame and fired up with fury, all in one fell swoop. It must have been her super nun powers.
“WHERE did you see this, Carl?!”
“In the bathroom,” I replied.
“Not in MY bathroom!” she shrieked.
“No, not yours! The boys room!” I whined. I didn’t realize she meant none of the bathrooms under her supervision, which would include the boys’ room.
But about five seconds later, we were marching down the hallway as fast as we could towards the 1st through 4th graders’ boys’ room. Sister knocked furiously to make sure it was empty, then poked her head in and drove a lone fearful kid out.
Finally, it was time to show the evidence. I was so nervous, I actually wondered, what would happen if it wasn’t there? Did I just invent where I saw it, to cover my tracks when my dad asked? Was I a pathological liar?
Thankfully for me, the word WAS there, carved high up near the top door jamb of a toilet stall. I pointed at it fearfully, wondering what would happen next.
What did happen next was that my dad again cried a little, because he didn’t quite understand that this was a normal thing to see in our often coarse and callous American culture. But he put his arm around my shoulder to let me know that he didn’t blame me for saying it anymore, and we walked to the car while Sister Hermana frantically called Jewel, the school janitor, to paint over the bathroom stall, right that instant.
I don’t know what Jewel had to say about that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he muttered a certain word as she walked away.
“Fuck!”
Monday, July 21, 2008
THE TIME I ALMOST SNEEZED ON THE BACK OF MICHAEL JORDAN"S HEAD (aka I"m Lucky to Be Alive to Write This)
Today's a busy one, but I want to post at least a couple times a week, so here's a quick memory I'm sharing that is about what nearly became the greatest tragedy of my journalistic career.
HERE GOES:
So, the time was fall '99, Christmas season to be exact. I was a fall quarterly paid intern for the Chicago Tribune, the first weekly newspaper person ever to be picked up by the Tribune, or so I was told. It was a thrill and an honor to work for the paper i most loved in the world.
But I got sent on all sorts of random assignments, and one of them was to watch Michael Jordan show up at the Boys & Girls Club he'd named in his late father's honor and hand out thousands of Christmas presents to hundreds of needy kids. Afterwards, we in the press would be blessed with the privilege of throwing some questions his way.
At the time, Jordan was the most popular man on the planet. Or at least, definitely in Chicago. I had never been in the room as a reporter with anyone this famous, knowing that my take on it all would be THE definitive story people could read. I was nervous, but I grabbed my mini tape recorder and got my place in front of the man, the myth, the legend.
That is, i had a place until the TV cameras barged in, at which i point i was literally ordered to move. I wound up getting pushed and jostled around to the back of Jordan, leaving me no option but to swing my arm around his head from behind and hold the tape recorder just under his mouth.
Let's just say Jordan is a "low talker," or at least he was that day. Mushmouth from "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" was Winston Churchill next to Jordan. This surprised the hell out of me.
Anyway, I'm standing and straining for my tape recorder to pick up whatever it can. And the other, far more veteran reporters were starting to notice my tippy-toes act and trying not to snicker. If I fell one step wrong, i'd either fall smack into Jordan or away from him, choking him, maybe both. And again, we were being filmed for the TV news.
Just then, things got worse. I had just been getting over a horrible cold, my nose building up an itchy sensation over and over before releasing visible globs of goo anytime i sneezed. It was allergy season for me...And I knew something was about to make me sneeze.
Ya know how, if you are trying to prevent a sneeze you start twitching your face and blinking your eyebrows? This was worse, much worse. I had to twist my face muscles into pretzels in order to hold it in as The Greatest Athlete Ever kept mumbling. And the other reporters were starting to notice and trying not to laugh.
That only made me feel worse, and more nervous. And of course the more you think about something happening, the more likely it is that it's going to happen. On top of that, I'm convinced that I'm God's personal court jester, the one human being that He most enjoys watching crazy shit happen to.
So i know that i won't be able to hold it for ten seconds more. With 5 seconds to spare, Michael finally shut up and I whipped my microphone out of his face and proceeded to double over with the LOUDEST SNEEZE EVER. My nose shot out clear sticky goop at rocket speed straight into the floor. Everyone saw it.
Including Michael.
I was mortified.
He was pissed.
Thank God he had an image to maintain. As everyone else backed away in disgusted horror or grossed-out giggles, Jordan shot me a look that I don't think he ever gave to any other member of the public, at least. It was a look that wanted to kill me. And then he turned and walked away, leaving me as the source of gossip that day for the entire Chicago press corps as i found a paper towel and proceeded to mop up my mess.
And to think I didn't get picked up by the Trib after my fall session was over. Hmmm, wonder why.
HERE GOES:
So, the time was fall '99, Christmas season to be exact. I was a fall quarterly paid intern for the Chicago Tribune, the first weekly newspaper person ever to be picked up by the Tribune, or so I was told. It was a thrill and an honor to work for the paper i most loved in the world.
But I got sent on all sorts of random assignments, and one of them was to watch Michael Jordan show up at the Boys & Girls Club he'd named in his late father's honor and hand out thousands of Christmas presents to hundreds of needy kids. Afterwards, we in the press would be blessed with the privilege of throwing some questions his way.
At the time, Jordan was the most popular man on the planet. Or at least, definitely in Chicago. I had never been in the room as a reporter with anyone this famous, knowing that my take on it all would be THE definitive story people could read. I was nervous, but I grabbed my mini tape recorder and got my place in front of the man, the myth, the legend.
That is, i had a place until the TV cameras barged in, at which i point i was literally ordered to move. I wound up getting pushed and jostled around to the back of Jordan, leaving me no option but to swing my arm around his head from behind and hold the tape recorder just under his mouth.
Let's just say Jordan is a "low talker," or at least he was that day. Mushmouth from "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" was Winston Churchill next to Jordan. This surprised the hell out of me.
Anyway, I'm standing and straining for my tape recorder to pick up whatever it can. And the other, far more veteran reporters were starting to notice my tippy-toes act and trying not to snicker. If I fell one step wrong, i'd either fall smack into Jordan or away from him, choking him, maybe both. And again, we were being filmed for the TV news.
Just then, things got worse. I had just been getting over a horrible cold, my nose building up an itchy sensation over and over before releasing visible globs of goo anytime i sneezed. It was allergy season for me...And I knew something was about to make me sneeze.
Ya know how, if you are trying to prevent a sneeze you start twitching your face and blinking your eyebrows? This was worse, much worse. I had to twist my face muscles into pretzels in order to hold it in as The Greatest Athlete Ever kept mumbling. And the other reporters were starting to notice and trying not to laugh.
That only made me feel worse, and more nervous. And of course the more you think about something happening, the more likely it is that it's going to happen. On top of that, I'm convinced that I'm God's personal court jester, the one human being that He most enjoys watching crazy shit happen to.
So i know that i won't be able to hold it for ten seconds more. With 5 seconds to spare, Michael finally shut up and I whipped my microphone out of his face and proceeded to double over with the LOUDEST SNEEZE EVER. My nose shot out clear sticky goop at rocket speed straight into the floor. Everyone saw it.
Including Michael.
I was mortified.
He was pissed.
Thank God he had an image to maintain. As everyone else backed away in disgusted horror or grossed-out giggles, Jordan shot me a look that I don't think he ever gave to any other member of the public, at least. It was a look that wanted to kill me. And then he turned and walked away, leaving me as the source of gossip that day for the entire Chicago press corps as i found a paper towel and proceeded to mop up my mess.
And to think I didn't get picked up by the Trib after my fall session was over. Hmmm, wonder why.
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