Bad Habits (11 page)

Lent is a lot like the story of Cinderella. You start out with ashes on your forehead and end up wearing a beautiful dress.

In between, it’s a time to atone for your sins with heaps and heaps of sacrifice.

And let’s face it, the Catholic Church likes the idea of sacrifice a lot.

Holy people say that sacrifice wards off the devil. Then they turn right around and mention the Bible passage in which Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights in the desert. As I recall, the only visitor Jesus had during that time was … the devil.

The folks who invented Lent—no, it wasn’t Jesus’s idea—decided that just like Christ’s time in the desert, it should last forty days. Actually, from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday it’s forty-six days, so it looks like the first thing someone ever gave up for Lent was math.

For those forty or so days, you’re supposed to give up something you enjoy—or something you’re not supposed to enjoy but you do anyway.

When I was young, one of the first things I tried to give up for Lent was lying. I quickly found out that wasn’t a good thing to do, or maybe I should say that wasn’t a good thing to stop doing because someone soon will ask what you’re giving up for Lent.

If you tell the truth and say, “I’m giving up lying,” they will say, “You’ve been lying? About what?”

And if you lie about giving up lying, well, that’s that.

When I got older, I tried to give up alcohol.

I was okay for a while, but then I really started to miss it. I imagined I was living in the time of Christ and I had been invited to a wedding at Cana. All of a sudden, Jesus comes up to me.

If you think that’s crazy, imagine the hallucination I had when I broke my Lenten resolution and started drinking again. And it’s not enough to give up chocolate or lying or alcohol or gossip. You also have to give up meat on Ash Wednesday and all Fridays during Lent.

Why Fridays? Maybe it’s because Jesus died on a Friday.

Or maybe it’s because Long John Silver’s has a surplus of fish that it has to get rid of by the weekend and it worked out a deal with the Vatican.

By the way, this rule of no meat on Fridays was for Americans only. So truth be told, I wonder which bishop owned stock on the East Coast fish harbors, considering this rule only came into practice in the 1960s. Sounds fishy to me.

Anyway, if you’re a meat lover like I am, giving up meat for even one day is a real sacrifice. No hamburgers. No meat loaf. No steak.

But if you’re a vegan, giving up meat is no sacrifice at all. This doesn’t seem fair.

Shouldn’t the Catholic Church say, “No meat on Fridays and no vegetables or salad on Wednesdays”? Let’s balance out all this sacrifice.

So for all of these reasons, Lent remains a mystery to me.

The Catholic Church says sacrificing to cleanse your soul of sin is something you should like. Therefore, for Lent you should give up something that you like. Okay then. The next time Lent rolls around, I’m giving up sacrificing.

College. Holy shit.

I attended Southern Illinois University. It was voted the number one party school by
Playboy
magazine, so I was all over attending that campus. Also, it was really easy to get into. My parents didn’t want me to go there, but I was denied entry from all the other universities, so they didn’t exactly have a choice.

After attending Catholic school for twelve years, the thought of being unsupervised elated me. I couldn’t wait to hit the bars with my big hair and fake ID.

My dad took the six-hour drive with me from Chicago. I was waiting for the “don’t get pregnant and don’t do drugs” talk, but it never came. It felt good that Dad trusted me enough to at least use a condom and not overdose.

We pulled up in front of my dorm, and I will always remember the feeling that I had vividly. It was the feeling of freedom. I unpacked my dad’s car and brought everything up to my room in one hour. Then I politely hugged my dad and shoved him out the door.

I heard silence. No parents, no sisters, no nuns, no one telling me what to do. I quickly pulled out the pack of cigarettes I had been hiding for four years and sucked one down. With every puff, I danced around my room. I couldn’t wait for a dorm neighbor to offer me a beer.

That night, I went out to nickel draft night and met Laura. She was a junior, but she must have recognized the look of “I’m ready to party” on my face and quickly made friends with me. Laura and I then proceeded to go out every week, getting drunk, making out with boys, and begging restaurants for free food. Soon we gathered a regular crew of girls and proceeded further to intoxicate our bodies and wreak as much havoc on campus as possible. My friends’ favorite thing to do was to dine and ditch. The problem, besides running out on the bill, was that my crew enjoyed having me be the last one to leave the restaurant. They would take turns peeing and then would knock on the glass outside the restaurant staring at me, leaving me alone to ditch the table myself.

As I successfully ran for my life every time we dined and ditched, I was hit with huge amounts of guilt. I would run and cry without letting my friends see. I wasn’t afraid of breaking a commandment so much as I was saddened by the waitress who was counting on the tip to feed her family. I felt bad about it, but peer pressure always won.

Speaking of peer pressure, drugs quickly became popular among my friends too. Fortunately, the drugs back in my heyday were pot and mushrooms. There wasn’t really any coke, heroin, crystal meth, etc., on our campus. Just good old-fashioned hallucinogenics. Looking back on this time now, I’m grateful for the drugs that were en vogue because I hadn’t yet built up enough self-esteem to stand up to peer pressure at that time and those harder drugs really ruin people’s lives. So I turned into a stoner and mushroom expert. I had posters of the Grateful Dead; I knew every word to Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
. And I started to grow dreadlocks. I became so good at shrooming that I started offering tours on the weekend to help people through their trips.

As odd as this may seem, I was really good at it. I realized during this time that I was really connected to other people’s energies. I was able to figure them out and calm them. I was like the mom people went to when they were tripping their balls off. This is not something you want to find as your calling, but later on I would come to realize how valuable it was in being able to identify negativity and illusions that people were using to get to me.

My first year in college, I did very well academically. By the second year, I was running out of money and could barely pay my bills, which made my grades suffer because I was busy working odd jobs instead of studying. One of the jobs was cleaning fraternity house bathrooms. I knew I could get hired for that because I spent the majority of my time bent over scrubbing. I wish I could have called home to ask for money, but I knew my parents didn’t have any, so I quickly learned how to expand my scrapper career.

I would ask boys if I could come over to their place and make out. Then I would go over and raid their fridge for frozen pizzas and canned food and take off. Once most of the boys were on to me, I resorted to bouncing checks for food. I was bartending at the time, but all that money went toward my rent and I had no way of surviving without sinning.

Then I came up with the really good idea of creating a VIP parking pass that allowed you to park anywhere on campus. I made these and then sold them to freshmen for fifty bucks. It was lucrative, but it really started to wear on my soul.

I thought that if I was sinning to get by, I should at least save the money to use for good, like tuition and books. I promised myself and God that I would not use my money to party or buy clothes. Then my crew of friends came to me with the biggest temptation of all.

“Jenny, we are all going to Daytona Beach, Florida, for spring break. Want to go?”

Damn it!

I looked at my giant vodka bottle filled with fifty-dollar bills. I was in agony. This wasn’t fair.

I envisioned them all coming back with tans and STDs, and I couldn’t bear to miss out on the action. But I did what any smart Catholic girl would do and said no. My friends understood, which pissed me off more. They all packed up their suitcases and wedged eight girls into a ’78 Chevy Nova. I watched them pull away, limbs sticking out of the car and horn honking.

I hated being poor. I thought back to that passage in a church song: “Blessed are those who are poor … for someday you shall laugh.”

I wasn’t laughing.

I was depressed and angry.

The next day, the campus was empty.

There was no one around. Every living soul from SIU went on spring break, and the only good thing about it was that I could park anywhere I wanted to on campus. I went to grab a slice of pizza from Pag’s Pizza (had to mention it for all those SIU alums). While I was in there, two guys walked in and ordered slices and I overheard them talking about heading to Florida for spring break.

Just as I was about to close my ears so I didn’t have to suffer anymore, I heard one guy say, “Too bad we didn’t post a sign for help with gas. We still have room in the car.”

Before I could even think about it, I shouted, “I’ll go!”

With that, I was sitting in the back of a beat-up, disgusting van that didn’t have backseats. I was on the metal floor next to a drum kit and what I thought for sure was a body bag. I think I was in shock as I sat there finally realizing I was with two strangers. I started praying to God for a lifeline.

“Please, God, don’t let me get raped or killed. I don’t know what I was thinking. If you can get me back home alive, I promise to never steal food or sell illegal parking tickets again.”

Then I started smelling pot.

Even though I was a stoner, I never risked it while driving. My fellow road trippers passed the bong back to me and I politely refused. My body started shivering because the van didn’t have heat and I was sitting on metal with holes in it and I could see the road as we drove.

“Um … how long until we get there?” I asked.

“We’re driving straight through, so we should be there in twenty-five hours.”

I would have started crying, but my tears would have froze. I don’t know how many hours had passed when the car pulled into a stop. I asked where we were and the weirdos replied, “Chattanooga.”

I closed my eyes and tried to flash back to fifth grade when we learned the map and attempted to count how many states we had left until Florida, but I was interrupted with …

“Hey, how much money you got on you?”

Shit.

I’m fucking dead.

This is it.

They are going to rape me, kill me, and then rob me.

I replied like a Canadian. “What do you mean, eh?” I asked with a chuckle.

“We could use more.”

“How much more?”

“Like another twenty bucks.”

“Okay. Just let me pee and I’ll come back and give it to you.”

I ran to the truck stop bathroom, which smelled worse than anything I had ever smelled before. I went over my options and it was clear I didn’t have any. Cell phones hadn’t been invented yet, and I was in a truck stop in Tennessee. I’ve done some pretty stupid things in my life, but this was the worst by far.