The shopworn airplane was packed, every seat was occupied.
While the Delta flight from Paris went smoothly enough, everything else about it was a disaster: cheap cramped seats, non-working entertainment system, smelly bathrooms, and food that no one should eat. On arrival in New York, we barged our way off the plane, and raced through endless corridors in order to get into the customs line. At one point the lines separated into three, according to our status: US, non-US, and pre-screened Global Entry. After another round of endless corridors these three lines simply merged again into one and the zany high-speed jockeying for position started over again. Finally, we arrived at the huge customs hall, a latter-day Ellis Island where we entered the labyrinth (there’s no going back), and looked out over the sea of bobbing heads ahead of us, zig-zagging their way back and forth along the airport maze, stop…go, turn, repeat, dragging one’s possessions, grateful that one of our forebears invented the wheel, lightening our load slightly, many millennia later.
Only a week earlier, we had undergone the same process leaving New York: the security line winding its interminable way, back and forth, herded by uniformed authority, searched, maybe stripped, humiliated, robbed of all dignity, padding along in socks and holding up beltless pants, while moving our stuff along, yearning for a bathroom, and thinking they’ll assume I’m a terrorist if I ask for a bathroom.
In the midst of this airport farce, I recalled that I had experienced this slaughterhouse parade before, long ago, as a teenager. As we moved among the lines, my thoughts turned to that distant past.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” So began the last confession I ever made to a priest, as a freshman at Saint Aloysius, the Jesuit high school for boys in San Francisco. There’ll be time, I thought, later, much later. Who needs to go to confession? The nineteen-sixties had begun, free love was in the air, and though I did not yet know this, I was to make plenty of confessions in my life, to my wives, girlfriends, cops, bosses, and my children, a sinner to the last. Besides, it was humiliating, never liberating, always creepy.
Every Friday, in preparation for Sunday Mass and Communion, every student was made to give confession. We were led, under careful supervision, from our classrooms, double-file, to the large dining hall that had been set up with makeshift confessionals that looked like portable latrines, Jesuit-on-the-spot. There we were to relieve ourselves of our sins and cleanse our souls of all the vileness that fourteen-year old boys carry with them. The procession, punctuated by the Jesuit keepers barking orders in their dirty black cassocks and their black scowls, flowed through the halls and down the wide stairs, reminiscent of other such processions with grimmer purposes in other parts of the world. “Quiet!” crowed the priests along the way. And so began the bizarre regimented ritual of mass-produced confessions. How did G-d keep up, before computers, with so many penitents? The memory! The omniscience!
Having come from the Latin class for honor students, I thought seriously about verb conjugations, as the lines moved slowly along the halls and down the stairs. Could it be futere ? Thus giving futeo, futi, fatus. No, couldn’t be. And what about futetur? Futeor? Then, to pass the time, I thought about nouns and their declensions. Nouns like pudendum. Is it pudendus, –a, –um?
Meanwhile, the felicitously named Father Pope came down the hall, alongside the line. He was old, and a little goofy, and the jocks class (the 2A Animals) behind the honor class was merciless. As he passed the line, the boys would spit into their hands and then toss the sputum, underhanded at the back of Pope’s shabby threadbare cassock (they prefer the word habit), where it would catch and cling and slide down slowly. Dozens of guys did it. How heavy, one wonders, was the weight of all that filthy sputum? As heavy as the corresponding weight of the sin? This is nothing like spitballs in the classroom ceiling. For sure. Thank god they didn’t have cameras everywhere, like they do now. It wouldn’t be much fun anymore. Besides, Pope was easy; he wasn’t one of the bosses. The Irish mafia took all those jobs: Reed, Hanley, Hyde, Phipps, Ryan, McFadden, men whose malice you could feel through their impeccably tailored cassocks. They were younger and meaner, zealots in the heat of their mission, the front-office men who liked to socialize with the rich Catholics in town. Not that they minded rich Jews. They were very ecumenical, in spite of their history. They understood that Jews were smarter than the Irish, and richer. Pope was just a sweet old timer with little salvage value at the end of his useful life, slowly being depreciated and relegated to the menial jobs: classroom watchdogs or mass confessions. And the we boys finished the job on him. No one wondered what the Order did with him, and others like him. Where did they go when they got old, and couldn’t bathe themselves anymore? Maybe they got kicked back to their families.
The line moved down the stairs to the long hall on the second floor. There the line was punctuated by another set of black-robed men. There’s Mr. Forée, gently urging the line along. Sounds French, but oddly, his first name was Donald. He was not yet a priest but rather what they called a scholastic, a priest-in-training. He was actually a very sweet guy. He was one of those effeminate men, whose sexuality is uncertain, and that is perhaps why they chose the safe haven of the priesthood, where matters of sex did not have to be confronted, except perhaps in the innermost parts of the rectory. Mr. Soirée was also the swimming coach. Which is what I did, swim. I often wondered what thoughts the swimmers in their tiny Speedos, bending over on the starting plaforms, inspired in their coaches.
And so I had to go to confession, automatically, along with everybody else. Now was the time to work up some good sins to confess. Good, but not too bad, either, or the priest won’t believe a word of it. Like witnesses in a courtroom, penitents always lie. There is the standard repertory of mild sins: little lies, name calling, talking back to parents, working up to masturbation, stealing, and cheating on an exam. Those are the big ones for adolescents, but they will pass muster with the poor sod behind the screen of the pretend latrine/confessional. But one still always worried about what the guy was going to do with the information. The priest can always figure out who you are, peeking around the curtain or recognizing your voice if he knew you. Down the stairs again to the first floor.
There’s that prick, Henry Charles, with two first names, one of the more thuggish of the mafia. He taught Latin, and his classroom was outfitted as a language laboratory, with earphones and sound recorders. He had an interesting habit of rubbing his hands together in front of his face while holding a stick of chalk like a cigarette, a neat trick. The odd thing was that one of his little fingers wouldn’t straighten completely and you couldn’t miss it. The overall effect was one of a talisman being rubbed, mesmerizing the class. He was a vengeful one, that Father Henry, and he firmly believed in the religion of don’t-get-mad-get-even. That was a sin easy to perpetrate on naïve adolescents. He committed it regularly, all the while eluding his own penance. He didn’t give one the sense that he was a “just man in whose heart the spirit of God dwelt,” as they say. Gracelessly, he lined his students up along the rows according to their grades, so that Mr. Number One (alas, that was me) sat right under his nose. What was I supposed to do? Throw the fight and get poor grades so I could sit in the back?
Father Becker was at the next landing. He was a mensch, one of the few. It’s a pity that there weren’t more of those to go around. He wrote me in his old age that he couldn’t wait to die so he could be with God, or something. What a sap.
The line was in the dining hall already; it was moving faster now. The priests must be getting antsy inside those boxes, hurrying things along. I quickly worked up my story and went into the next available booth.
The smell was overpowering. That explained the quicker flow. It was Father Cooney. The luck of the draw. Damn. Cooney was like Pope, washed up, doing penance for his endgame. Except he was going down fast. His personal hygiene was way off, and he drank more than the usual Eucharistic requirement at morning Mass, in the small niche side altars of St. Aloysius Church. But there was something else in the mix; he had become incontinent, and the brew was toxic. He must have forgotten his diaper. Add in the stale tobacco, and the effect was homeric.
There’s got to be a better way to get through this process. The problem, of course, is that if you never go to communion, the blackbirds are going to notice, sooner or later. You can fake it, and take communion anyway, without confession, just to get the vultures off the scent. That will work; it depends on how you feel about it. After a while, I didn’t care anymore, of course.
Now, in a hurry, I said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“How long since your last confession?” said Cooney.
“Father, this is my last confession.” I left and never returned.
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NOTES:
Remember Gagan the popped eyes and fish-eyed stare
ravens, blackbirds, crow, vulture
While in the line he realized he had never seen his parents go to confession or take communion, for that matter.
(an …………outpost in an…………outpost)
Henry turned out to be one those malicious, vindictive, rock-throwing Anglo-Irish-American Jesuit priests. There you have it, all at once, no way to deliver it slowly. Graceless…
I’ve come to pay for my sins. Does it matter that the debt collectors are all dead?
I’ve come to collect the debts owed to me for their sins. But the deadbeats are all just that, dead. I am the repo man, and want my life back. Why, oh why, did I give them so much credit? Not one paid me back. They should be dunned; their wages garnisheed.
Janos got his revenge on me. He didn’t pay the school bills, and didn’t tell me.
[Flashback ends here: return to first person?]
So, here we are, as I approached the grim Homeland Security officer behind the bullet-proof glass.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“How long since your last confession?”
“Father, this is my last confession.”
The good Fathers had a habit of kicking you when you were down.
NOTES:
The fathers had pretensions; they were intent on overcoming their shanty irish beginnings; they were going to show their betters that they were better. One way was to create a high school that outdid the eastern protestant prep schools. First, the name was changed from SI High School to SI College Preparatory. Truly. Then they introduced sports like lacrosse, and soccer, and various forms of rowing before these became ubiquitous.
It was hard to dissociate from the psycho Spanish zealot Ignatius, as much as they would have liked to.
