Fallen Catholic (continued)



Stuff like that bothered me all the time.  I thought if I could just become a priest when I grew up everything would be easy.  I would be loved by all, especially my Mom and Grandmother.  So I started practicing the rituals of the Mass in my bedroom at home.  My sister and I would set up a table and put a sheet across it so that it looked like an altar.  Then we would run downstairs and grab the coffee pot, (It looked like a chalice to us.)  a couple of orange juice glasses and some Ritz crackers.  I draped a beach towel over my shoulders to resemble vestments and it was show time.  I was the priest and Cathe was the altar boy.  Cathe wanted to take turns doing this but I explained how wrong that would be what with all the rules about women in the Church.  She could only be a nun and we could stretch the rules to let her play an altar boy but there were certain things you just better not do.  Letting a girl play a priest was just too much.   

We would practice for a while, arguing about each little detail.  Did he genuflect here or did he just bow?  Did the altar boy ring the bells three times or just once?  We would go through each motion trying our best to remember the Latin.  

“Domini no nabisco!”  I would open my hands and say.

“Et come speery too too oh!”  Cathe would respond.

“Oreomus,”  I rejoined.  

The Latin reminded us of cookies and before too long we were eating the Ritz crackers instead of consecrating them to be the body and blood of Jesus.  

Playing Mass was not as boring as going to Mass but it could only keep us occupied for a few minutes.  Then we would transform the altar into a space capsule and we were off to the moon where we would bounce on the beds to simulate low gravity.  

Cathe was a good big sister but I could only stand to be around girls for a few hours before I felt a need to wrestle with somebody.  We would part company as soon as the doorbell rang.  It was usually Doug Draper or Tommy Kerr.  

My best friend was Doug Draper.  He was my big brother.  Doug was smart.  He was a couple of years older than me and a much nicer person.  But he was a Protestant.  The nuns had warned us about having Protestant friends.  The nuns would have advised me to be best friends with Ronnie Metzgar.  He was a good Catholic.  But Ronnie was my age and Doug was older and wiser.  For some strange reason, Ronnie and I were never close buddies.  When I think about him, I remember what a nice guy he was, how he gave me one of his twinkies at lunch just about every day.  He was smaller than me but a lot tougher.  I started a fight with him one day and he hit me about a dozen times before I took him down on the ground.  We wallowed around for a few minutes before my sisters pulled us apart.  I was ashamed of myself.  The very next day, Ronnie gave me a twinkie out of his lunch.  

Doug Draper was tall and tough.  We use to fight occasionally.  But Doug never hit me.  He would hold me down until I gave out.  No matter how hard I fought, he always won.  An hour later we would be playing together again as if nothing happened.  

Doug taught me how to play “hotbox.”  If you only have three guys, hotbox is the next best thing to playing baseball.  Tommy and Bill Kerr would play with us.  If you ever watched a runner trapped between bases, you know what a hot box is.  The two base players try to tag the runner out as he runs back and forth between the bases.  In baseball, this seldom happens because the base player can get off the base and chase the runner.  But in hot box, you have to stay at your base.  We used to play for hours, keeping score of the runs.  There was always the chance you were gonna get beaned as you ran back and forth but somehow we avoided that.  

Doug treated me like a little brother.  Once he made me eat a cucumber because “it’s good for you.”  We seldom talked about religion but I occasionally tried to get him to admit that Catholicism was the one true religion.  Doug would always get a big laugh at that.  I didn’t understand why it was funny.  I had no idea what he did in his church.  Doug told me it was just one big long sermon.  I couldn’t imagine that.  The sermon was the shortest part of the Catholic service.  Sitting through an hour without getting up and kneeling down and singing and rattling off Latin seemed impossible to me.  So when he asked me to go to church with him, I told him it would be a sin.  I thought sure it was.  But Sister Cornelia Marie later told me it was okay.  Mom didn’t agree.  It may not be a sin but there were certain things called “imperfections” that could keep you in Purgatory an extra couple of days.

Purgatory was the magic washing machine of retribution.  You couldn’t go to heaven with any sins on your soul and the only way to get them off was to burn them in the cleansing fire.  So Purgatory was just like Hell only temporary.  Scary.  You could skip Purgatory if you had just been to confession the minute before you died.  So I made sure I was never more than a week away from my last confession.  At the age of six I was capable of some really horrible sins.  Not doing my homework and lying to my Mom about it was at the top of the list.  

I often disobeyed Mom if I thought nobody was watching.  She had a hard fast rule about eating anything off the floor.  One day I found a piece of chocolate candy between the couch cushions.  Just as I popped it into my mouth, I heard her warn me not to eat it in that familiar tone.  I notice a slightly stale flavor as it hit my tongue but I went ahead and bit down and slurped it around in my mouth.  Suddenly an alarm went off in my head.  The sweet taste of chocolate was missing and in its place was a rank, sour, smelly, putrefied stench filling my oral and nasal passages.  I began to scream as I ran from the room, frantically searching for Mom.  I began to gag and retch as I clawed at my tongue, trying to remove the candy.  But it was pretty well slathered all over my mouth by the time I realized my mistake.  

Mom rushed into the room.  She led me to the sink and helped me rinse my tongue and mouth.  I continued to gag and retch as she tried to wipe my mouth with a rag.  

“What in the world did you eat?” she demanded.  

“It was a piece of candy,” I cried.  

“That wasn’t candy, Rod.  Where did you find it?”  By now she was less angry and beginning to smile.  This confounded me.  Why would my Mother smile at the prospect of her favorite son being poisoned?

“I found it in the couch cushion.  The big green couch.  It was a Hershey kiss.” I pointed toward the living room.  Mom began to laugh.  

“What?”  I didn’t see anything funny about this horrible accident.  

“The green couch?  Did you say the green couch?”

“Yes.  Yes.”  I was back to crying again.  This was strange behavior for my mother.  What could be causing her to laugh?  And by now she was trying to stifle the laughter.  I thought she was going to lay down on the floor and roll around.  She was snorting with laughter.  She finally managed to squeeze out a few words.

“The couch I used this morning to change Joan’s diaper?  That green couch?”  At this point, she double over and held her sides.  My sister Cathe came into the kitchen and wanted to know what was so funny.  But Mom couldn’t answer.  She was crying now and whimpering as she tried to explain what had happened.  Suddenly, I realized what had happened.  

“Oh no!”  I said, and now there came a flood of tears.  

Cathe was laughing already but had no clue what was funny.  It was common for Mom to lose control of herself while laughing.  She regularly peed in her pants when something really funny happened.  

“What’s so funny?”  Cathe begged to be let in on the joke.  

Mom tried to respond, “Roddy ate....Roddy ate.....Roddy ate....”

But that was all she could say.  Then she darted into the bathroom.  We could hear her laughing through the door.  

“What? Cathe put her ear to the bathroom door.  “What did he eat?”  

“Don’t tell her, Mom!”  I yelled through the door.  My fear had been channeled directly into anger and I walked to the sink, turned on the water, washed out my mouth and ran outside.  As I mounted my bike, I could hear Cathe and Mom laughing.  I drove off to Doug’s house and never looked back.  

Eating shit is not exactly a sin.  But Mom reminded me that if I had obeyed her, my gastrous disaster would never have happened.  It was a stain I could not wait to get off of my soul.  

But I digress.  I was talking about Purgatory and magic.  There was a piece of magic that could keep you out of Purgatory.  It was a thing called an Indulgence.  An Indulgence was a “get out of Purgatory free” pass.  You earned them by saying prayers, mostly the rosary.