Another Roadside Attraction (26 page)

Dear Far-away Friends,

As you no doubt have determined, I am writing from the Vatican. Ho-hum. What can I say? I took one look at this place and surrendered. Just gave up.

What earthly difference could it make whether my ambition was to help destroy the Church or help reform it. Can you imagine an ant trying to decide whether to remodel Chicago or tear it down? It's the same. If only you had been permitted to write and alert me to the delusions I was suffering.

From the air, Vatican City looked like a marble Monopoly set. The Church owned all the property from Boardwalk to Illinois Avenue, had three hotels on every lot, and no matter how often it tossed the dice you just knew it would never land on Go to Jail, it would be forever passing Go and collecting $200. From the air, Vatican City looked also like a street dance to which the libraries of New York and Philadelphia had been exclusively invited, those sooty old neoclassical stone depositories paired off in a dignified promenade, too stiff any more to swing their partners, their voices too hollow with centuries of library hush to manage even the most perfunctory do-si-do. Vatican City looked like a Disneyland for zombies and it looked like a drag.

Later I stood in St. Peter's Square with the enormous old Basilica bell-donging above me and the pageantry breaking in velvet waves around me and somewhere in the jeweled bowels of his castle the Pope reading the Italian edition of the
Wall Street Journal
while eating caviar with a golden fork—and I surrendered. What's the use? A guy might see possibilities of effective action when he is up against a small band of ecclesiastical Nazis at Wildcat Creek Monastery, but here at the home office, well, it's just too big and too wealthy and too entrenched and too powerful. Why bother? Maybe shooting peas at the sun is someone's idea of a fine poetic gesture but it's a bore to me. So the Roman Catholic Church is out to Catholicize the world. What of it? Communism is out to Communize the world and Capitalism is out to Capitalize the world. Let them fight it out among themselves. I've got life to live and I can't be bothered. Now that I think about it, I guess that has been your philosophy all along. Oh well. I'm slow to learn.

At any rate, it's one hell of a grand joke, me being here, me working at the Vatican in an official and privileged position. So I decided I'd just relax and enjoy the joke and play it for all it's worth.

A couple of days after I arrived, however, I did discover something that inspired a final twitch of hope, that proved to me the Church was not entirely invulnerable. It wasn't the court of law or the jail that sits right off St. Peter's Square. Although I didn't realize that the Vatican maintained those institutions, I guess I've associated courts and jails with churches for so long that the presence of them at the Holy See didn't come as any great surprise. No, the real chink in the churchly armor is something else. It's the time clocks. In 1956, forty time clocks were installed in Vatican offices. Today, there are about sixty. The official explanation of the time-control system was that it was “to end late arrivals and early departures by staff members of Vatican bureaus and to regulate absences.” The only dudes who are exempt from punching in and out are, according to the handbook, “the Cardinal Secretaries of Congregations, the Episcopal heads of other offices, and the Swiss Guard.” (Of course, we Felicitate Brothers are also exempt but then we aren't publicly acknowledged as an existing order.) Now I ask you, when a religion has to make its own priests punch a clock, when it so much as admits that its own oath-bound holy fathers have been sneaking off the job early, coming in late and playing hooky, wouldn't you say that that religion has a soft white underbelly? Can you imagine Jesus punching a clock? If he had, would it have prevented his “early departure"?

They claim their church is built on a rock, but it looks to me like its foundation isn't all that solid. I mean, show me a religion with time clocks and I'll show you a religion that has shot its spiritual wad. Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I'll topple it.

["Purcell won't have to topple it,” interrupted Marx Marvelous. “It obviously is toppling on its own accord."]

So far, no one has handed me a crowbar or shown me a spot to push, and I'm not really expecting to budge this colossus, but every time I pass one of those clocks I smile with the comforting knowledge that God's biggest billy club has a crack in it.

Things are changing here at the home office and a lot of my brothers are shocked, but I don't know whether the changes are for the better or worse. For one thing, the Pope is toning down the pomp. Not long ago, he ordered cardinals, bishops and monsignors to prune much of the regal splendor from their dress. He threw out red shoes, silver shoe buckles, galerum hats, sashes, tassels, capes and ermine-trimmed cloaks. His instructions also allow the title “monsignor” to be used in addressing a cardinal or bishop instead of “eminence” or “excellency.” The result is, things aren't as fancy around here as they used to be. However, they are still far from plain. There is gold everywhere, and silver and precious gems and long limousines and valuable art. They could unload just a third of this treasure and feed every hungry mouth in Europe for the rest of the century. And, you may have noticed, the Pope didn't cut any of the frills from his personal wardrobe.

Couple years back, a papal decree was issued to clean up the roster of venerable saints. More than forty of the dudes were dropped from the liturgical calendar, mostly because they never existed in the first place but were merely the invention of fanatics and souvenir salesmen. Among those that got the ax was St. Christopher, the blessed buddy of cruise-ship casanovas, astronauts and six-day bicycle racers.

Scuttlebutt down in the catacombs is that a lot of powerful Catholics, including those responsible for the Society of the Felicitator, are unhappy about those reforms. However, the word is the Pope had to enact them because criticism of ostentation and hypocrisy in the Church has grown so voracious.

[At this point, Marx Marvelous intruded again to contend that such reforms were desperate last-ditch efforts to revive a dying institution. Amanda, who was pinning violets in her hair, silenced Marx with a special look. Sometimes our scientist friend gets carried away.]

Here I am, scribbling a hundred words a minute about internal problems of the Catholic Church and you guys probably couldn't care less. Sorry if I'm boring you but, you know, ever since the freak accident that turned me into Brother Dallas I've found myself getting hung up on churchly matters. It'll pass. I keep telling myself that it'll pass. Someday I'll be a plucky dope dealer again, ministering to my own stoned flock.

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying a unique position, a job shared by no living soul on this planet. Assuming that you've got at least a peapod of curiosity about it, I'll scribble on.

Up until several years ago, the Vatican maintained four branches of military or police (four
known
branches, that is: don't forget the undercover Felicitators). Three of these corps, the Palatine Guard, the Noble Guard and the Gendarmery were flat out law-and-order bad asses. They protected the security of the Holy See with rifles, revolvers, cannon, machine guns and other tools of the trade. If an appreciable number of Catholics saw anything incongruous about a religious mission bristling with weapons, they pretended that cannon were canon and didn't let on. Until just recently. Then, all of a sudden, the implications of holy police were being discussed so widely that the Pope, to head off further dissent, was forced to make his most drastic reform to date. With a well-timed sweep of his ringed fingers, he disbanded the Palatine Guard, Noble Guard and Gendarmery.

In so doing, he increased the power and presence of the Felicitate Society. Whereas once we were mainly trouble-shooters abroad, we now swarm in the shadow of the golden throne itself. The smiling jerk who mixes your chocolate sundae in the Vatican soda shoppe may be a master of poisons, the same 007 who slipped Adlai Stevenson his London heart attack pill. The enthralled tourist you see grinding his movie camera at the Gate of Saint Anne may be photographing potential troublemakers for closed circuit TV. I write “may” because I myself don't really know.

All I know is my own job here, and my job is involved with that military corps that the Pope did not dissolve—the ancient and colorful Swiss Guard. The fifty-six dudes in the Swiss Guard strut around in pantaloons and leggings of blue, red and yellow; silver breastplates and medieval helmets. They are armed only with fifteenth-century halberds, which are long pole-like weapons with ax blades and spiked points. As you must have gathered, they are mainly a showpiece. Or they
were
. Since all other papal soldiers have been fired, and since the Felicitate Society, however strong its presence, must work in secrecy—not only from the public but from most Vaticanians as well—the burden of defending Vatican City has fallen hard on the fancy shoulders of these overgrown Swiss choirboys.

Now, with dissension so rampant within the Church today, and with outside opposition stronger than it has been in decades, the Pope and his pals are theoretically in unusual danger. (On a visit to Asia last year, the Pope required a security force twelve thousand strong and even then he was almost assassinated in Manila.) The threat of demonstrations of one sort or another is constant. So, it is conceivable that the Swiss Guard will be seeing action soon, even if that action consists only of clearing St. Peter's Square of sit-in protesters. Imagine how messy it would look in the press—and in the eyes of pilgrims and tourists—if these favorite picturesque toy soldiers are forced to go hacking and stabbing with their almost comical Renaissance halberds. It would seem especially nasty if the victims of the poleaxes were nonviolent demonstrators. How much cleaner and quieter it would be if, with a few quick, almost unobtrusive hand motions a Swiss Guardsman could snap a spine or shut tight a throat. Maintain the old decorum with a minimum of blood and fuss. It is toward that end that the Swiss Guard is learning karate. Yours truly is its honorable mentor.

I live in a cell just off the karate training room two levels down in the restricted catacombs. I'm adjacent to the College of Cardinals' private rifle range and directly below the VIP cafeteria where Gurdjieff once shared a pizza with Mary Baker Eddy. Below me, the third-level catacombs are really top secret, but as an agent of Felicitate I have pretty much the run of the place. I can get into areas where even the Swiss Guard is not allowed. While trying not to arouse suspicions, I have been poking around in the various bedrock chambers down here at every opportunity. Following are listed some of my more interesting discoveries.

1. 
Erotic Art
. Naturally, I list this first. Drool, drool. There are stacks and stacks of paintings and squads of sculptures salted away down here. Many are in exile from public perception merely because they depict men and women in their birthday suits, but some have come by their banishment more deservingly. There is a magnificent Rembrandt, for example, that portrays a couple balling in a hay field. I sneeze and scratch with vicarious pleasure just to glance at it.

2. 
Dead Sea Scrolls
. As I understand it, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed in the late forties and early fifties, some were purchased by Hebrew University, others by the archbishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. The archbishop (a Catholic, natch) later sold his scrolls to Hebrew University (does Hebe U. have a football team or aren't they allowed to play with pigskin?), but evidently not before culling those which might contradict traditional religious beliefs or embarrass Catholic dogma. Moreover, some of the Hebrew U. scrolls were processed at the Vatican Library, where additional editing might have taken place. Hidden in the catacombs, along with other old manuscripts and documents that for one reason or another must be too dangerous for inclusion in the 500,000-volume Vatican Library, are Dead Sea fragments whose contents are a mystery to all but a powerful few. These mysterious documents are guarded day and night by a quartet of blind nuns who know them only by touch.

3. 
Pharmaceutical Taboos
. Since Catholic missionaries often were the first white men to have contact with primitive cultures, particularly in Africa and the New World, they were in an excellent position to examine—unhampered by scientific proponents of free inquiry—the folk medicines and drug sacraments employed by various tribes. In the process, they concealed a great deal of pharmaceutical information, and were able in some cases to scare the natives into abandoning use of natural drugs. I have found in the catacomb drug room, samples of peyote, yajé and psilocybic mushrooms along with documents dating from 1510 describing their “demonic” effects, plus countless jars of other blacklisted botanical materials containing God knows what lightning-flavored molecules offering God-knows what incredible insights and flashes, oh baby, my mind sputters to consider it. Also locked up in the chamber of pharmacological subversives are native contraception potions, any or all of which might be safer and more effective than the Pill. Medical science knows nothing of them. Guess why they were suppressed.

4. 
Easter Island Plaques
. When the first white explorers landed on Easter Island, each of the giant stone heads there had at its base an inscribed plaque that presumably explained the significance of the statue. It is widely documented that French Catholic priests destroyed these plaques—for what reasons we may only surmise—thereby depriving science of the essential keys in the most stupendous of anthropological enigmas. Who knows what an Easter Island plaque might have revealed about the stone heads, the mysterious people who built them, about the origins of man. All of the plaques were not destroyed, however, for there are three or four of them locked up here with totems, fetishes and other primitive knickknacks in a dusty chamber. Wish I could smuggle one out to the experts at the Laboratory of Obsolete Impulses because the alphabet used in inscribing the plaques is totally unfamiliar to me. Except that, come to think of it, it does resemble fairly closely that faint writing on the palm of Amanda's hand.