Here Comes Trouble (20 page)

“C’mon, Father! What is this?!”

“Be still. I am casting Satan out of you!”

I thought, with that, Dickie would bolt. Priest or no priest, he was not going to stand there in front of a bunch of other students and be humiliated. Or have it implied he was in cahoots with the devil.

Instead, Dickie didn’t move. He was intrigued with the possibility that his accomplice was the mother of all hoodlums, Beelzebub himself. A sinister smile came across his face.

Father Ogg took the cap off the holy oil and smeared it on Dickie’s forehead, cheeks, chin. He then took Dickie’s head and placed it between his two hands and pressed it like he was in a vise.

“Oowww!” Dickie screamed. “That hurts.”

It was nice to see Dickie hurt.

“Silence!”
shouted Ogg in a voice that I swear wasn’t human.

“Ephpheta, quod est, Adaperire. In odorem suavitatis. Tu autem effugare, diabole; appropinquabit enim judicium Dei!”
he continued in some ancient tongue, or perhaps no tongue at all. I’m not even supposed to be sharing this with you, and to commit these words to paper makes me want to go and check the lock on my door (I’ll be right back).

It was time for the olive branches. We were each given one and told to hold them out over Dickie—but not to touch him. Ogg then took his branch and started to wail on poor Dickie, careful not to whip him anywhere that might hurt.

“Christo Sancti!”
Ogg yelled, causing Dickie to turn to me—the one who brought him into this—and scream, “Fuckin’ moron! I’m gonna kill you!”

“Don’t make me have to tie you down!” Ogg shouted.
“Abrenuntias Satanae? Et omnibus operibus ejus?”

And at this moment, Dickie started to cry. Father Ogg, a bit surprised, stopped.

“Hey, hey, it’s OK,” the exorcist said in a comforting tone. “This isn’t real. It was just a demonstration. You don’t have the devil in you.”

At least not now,
I thought. I prayed that this exorcism, albeit a “practice” one, would have a real effect on this miserable bully.

But, alas, such was not the case. The next day I found my transistor radio in the toilet and my underwear all gone. One of the nuns would find them later that night in her own drawer, with the words, in magic marker, on each waistband: P
ROPERTY OF
M
ICHAEL
M
OORE.
I did not want to take the punishment for finking on Dickie, so I took the extra week of garbage duty instead and said nothing. Frankly, it was worth it just to have the extra time to myself so I could replay in my head Dickie being whacked with an olive branch, olive oil dripping from his face, and the Devil departing his miserable body.

Not all the time at the seminary was spent on my knees or observing strange rituals or playing pranks. I actually had one of the best and most challenging years of education I would ever have. The priests and nuns loved to teach literature and history and foreign languages. The class I had the toughest time with was Religion. I had a lot of questions.

“Why don’t we let women be priests?” I asked one day, one of the many times that everyone in the class would turn around and stare at me as if I were some freak.

“You don’t see any women among the apostles, do you?” Father Jenkins would respond.

“Well, it looks like there were always women around—Mary Magdalene, Mary, Jesus’s mother, and his cousin what’s-her-name.”

“It’s just not allowed!” was the end-of-discussion answer he would give to most of my questions—which included:

• “Jesus never said he was here to start the ‘Catholic Church,’ but rather that his job was to bring Judaism into a new era. So where did we get the idea of the Catholic Church?”
  
• “The only time Jesus loses his temper is when he sees all these guys loaning money in the Temple and he smashes up their operation. What lesson are we to draw from this?”
  
• “Do you think Jesus would send soldiers to Vietnam if he were here right now?”
  
• “In the Bible, there’s no mention of Jesus from age twelve to age thirty. Where do you think he went? I have some theories…”
  

On the first day of English Lit class, Father Ferrer announced that we would spend nine weeks dissecting
Romeo and Juliet,
word by word, line by line—and he promised us that by the end of it, we would understand the structure and language of Shakespeare so well that for the rest of our lives we would be able to enjoy the genius of all his works (a promise that turned out to be true).

I have to say that, in retrospect, the choice of a heterosexual love story with characters who were our age and who were
having sex
was a bold move by this good priest. Or it was sadism. Because if we were to become priests, there would be no Juliet (or Romeo) allowed in our lives.

I devoured every line of
Romeo and Juliet,
and it spun my head and hormones into a wondrous web of excitement. Unfortunately, I had not read the rulebook before signing up for the seminary, and here’s what it said:

YOU CAN
NEVER
HAVE SEX, NOT EVEN ONCE IN YOUR LIFE. ESPECIALLY WITH A WOMAN.

Now, had I read that in eighth grade, I’m not sure I would have understood all the ramifications of agreeing to this prohibition. By the time it was explained to me in ninth grade at the seminary, something seemed oddly wrong with this rule. Call me crazy, but I kept hearing voices in my head:

Mmmmmm… girls… gooooood… penis… haaaaappy.

The voices intensified on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. That was when they bused the few of us seminarians who played a musical instrument into the Catholic high school in nearby Bay City to play with their school band. There were not enough of us to make up our own orchestra at the seminary, and the priests, who enjoyed culture and the arts and would often sit around and have conversations with each other in Italian, did not want those of us who were musically inclined to miss our “other callings.”

I was placed in the clarinet section next to a girl named Lynn. Did I mention she was a girl? At the seminary I spent 1,676 hours of every week around only boys. But for these two glorious hours, I was in the vicinity of the other gender. Lynn’s long, deft fingers that she used on her clarinet were a beauty to behold (as were her breasts and legs and smile—but I only wrote
smile
just in case one of the priests is still alive and reads this story because, truth be told, while her smile was pleasant, I have no recollection of it as it was obscured by her breasts and legs and anything else that didn’t resemble a seminarian). Being in a coed Catholic high school band literally drove me insane.

I tried my best to think about The Rule and to offer up this desire as penance for even wondering what might exist under her Catholic schoolgirl uniform. But there is just so much penance a now fifteen-year-old can do, and one day I asked one of the other seminarians on the band bus “Who the hell made up this rule?!” He said he didn’t know and that “it was probably God.” Right.

One weekend, I reread all four gospels and nowhere—
nowhere!
—did it say that the apostles couldn’t have sex, or get married, or be happy with their penises. As my after-school job was working as an assistant in the library, I did my own research. And here’s what I found: The priests of the Catholic Church for the first one thousand years were married! They had sex! Peter, chosen by Jesus to be the first Pope, was married, as were most of the apostles. As were thirty-nine Popes!

But then some Pope in the eleventh century got it in his head that sex sucked and wives sucked worse, and so he banned priests from marrying or having sex. It makes you wonder how all the other great twisted ideas throughout history got their start (like who came up with the card game Bridge?). They might as well have made it a sin to scratch when you have an itch.

I began spending a lot of time on the job in the library going into the basement level where all the old magazines were stored. The cultured priests subscribed to
Paris Match,
and let’s just say that in France in 1969, women were inclined to “stay cool” in the summertime. All my first loves could be found right there, in the periodical archives of St. Paul’s Seminary.

As we drew near to the end of our study of
Romeo and Juliet,
Father Ferrer announced that there was a new movie in the theaters based on the play and that we would be taking a field trip to see it. This version was by the Italian director Franco Zefferelli, and little did the priest know (or did he?) that his group of fifteen-year-old boys would be exposed for the first time to fifteen-year-old breasts, namely those on the body of the actress playing Juliet, Olivia Hussey.

That night, after seeing
Romeo and Juliet,
the freshmen moaning up and down the hallway sounded like a cross between a lost coyote and a choir trying to tune itself. I will only say that I became on that night a grateful fan of Miss Hussey’s—and a former seminarian to the Catholic priesthood. Thank you, Shakespeare. Thank you, Father Ferrer.

To Dickie’s and Mickey’s credit, they had no interest in using Shakespeare to inspire their male hormones as they were already “in country.” They had little interest in wasting their seed on a cheap seminary bedsheet. Not when there were so many available girls in the greater Tri-City area.

I’m not sure when they began sneaking out at night, or when they found time to sneak the girls in, but these two Montagues obviously were in much demand. On the upside, this did give me the room to myself on a number of occasions. On the downside, once the priests were on to them, they thought I, too, was in on the sex ring. How little they knew me! I was far too busy trying to keep my focus on Vespers and Vietnam rather than Lynn the clarinet player, who was doing just fine in an imaginary state with me, the two of us, frolicking, on the Côte d’Azur.

On this particular night, I decided to take the suggestion of fellow seminarian Fred Orr and try some Noxzema Original Deep Cleansing Cream to help get rid of a few teenage zits. I rubbed the white cream all over my face and went to sleep facing the wall, not wanting Mickey and Dickie to ever catch me with this girl-stuff on my face.

“WAKE UP! I SAID, WAKE UP!!”
Father Jenkins shouted, forcing me to tell Lynn in my dream that I’d be right back. I awakened from this pleasant sleep and saw two priests, Father Jenkins and Father Shank, shining police-size flashlights directly into my eyes.

“WHERE ARE THEY?!”

Obviously it was a raid, a surprise assault on the two active and public penises on my floor.

I looked over at their beds and saw that they were made up to look like someone was sleeping in them. Clearly, neither of the Ickies was home.

“Uh, I dunno,” I replied, trying to sound awake.

“When did they leave?” Father Shank asked.

“How long have they been gone?” Father Jenkins added.

“I dunno,” I repeated.

“Are you sure?” Jenkins asked pointedly. “There’s no good that can come from you covering for them.”

“The last thing I would do would be to cover for those two punks,” I said, surprised at my un-Christian-like language.

“You’ve never left here with them?” Jenkins continued with his interrogation.

“No. I don’t do what they do. I’m guessing they don’t go to Burger King.”

“How many times would you say they’ve done this?”

“Father, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but if you’re only busting in here tonight for the first time, you clearly have no idea what’s been going on.”

“I don’t like your tone,” Jenkins replied.

“I’m sorry. It’s my middle-of-the-night tone.”

“What in God’s name is that stuff on your face?”

Oh. Damn. “Just something the nurse told me to try.”

“Where do you think they are?” Father Jenkins asked.

“You can follow their scent to the nearest place where girls are known to exist.”

Giving the priests this much lip was not wise, but I didn’t care. I, too, had discovered girls, and there was now a part of me that admired Mickey and Dickie for acting on their very normal feelings. Though I did feel sorry for whatever girls they were with.

By this time they had turned their flashlights off—and that one act would end up doing the Ickies in. Not able to see from the outside hallway that I had visitors, the boys quietly opened the door to our room—and were instantly startled, not just by the sight of the priests, but by the mass of white goo covering my entire face. They tried to run, but the priests quickly grabbed them and dragged them down the hall and out of my life forever.

The next morning the parents of my two roommates came to my room and cleaned out their sons’ belongings. When I returned that evening I had the privilege that only a senior had—
my own room!
There was only a month left in the school year, but it was sublime. I held parties. I began to grow my hair longer for the first time. I acquired a peace sign and put it on my door. I had made the decision that the seminary wasn’t for me, although I had learned much that would remain with me for a long while.

Three days before the semester ended, I made an appointment with my class dean, Father Duewicke, so I could go in and tell him of my decision to not pursue the priesthood.

I walked in and sat down in a chair in front of his desk.

“Soooo,” Father Duewicke said in a strange, sarcastic tone. “Michael Moore. I have some unpleasant news for you. We have decided to ask you
not
to return for your sophomore year.”

Excuse me?
Did he just say what I thought he said? Did he just say they were…
kicking me out?!

“Wait a minute,” I said, agitated and upset. “I came in here to tell you that I was quitting!”

“Well, good,” he said with a smarmy tone. “Then we’re in agreement.”

“You can’t kick me out of here! I quit! That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“Well, either way, you won’t be gracing us with your presence in the fall.”