A Prodigal Son

Baptism

An act, experience, or ordeal by which one is purified, sanctified, initiated, or named.

I must have been 4. Sitting between my mother and my oldest sister in the pew, I looked up at the man towering over the priest from behind the altar. He loomed before me, hands and feet pinned to the crucifix and blood seeping from his chest, looking down on me from above while my family listened to the sermon. All I remember thinking was, “Where am I?”

My father was a mechanic stationed in Germany during World War II, and he taught me how to shoot. We would go into the backyard or on hikes, and he would tell me about the Indians while we stumbled upon arrowheads. He told me how spiritually connected the Indians were to the land, and how when they hunted for deer with their bows and arrows, they cried out in sadness and exhalation after a successful hunt. When we would shoot, my father would set up beer cans and even beer tabs, and he would tell me which targets to shoot with his .22 rifle. Sometime when I was 7 he told me, “I’ll give you a dollar if you shoot a petal off that flower.” The flower must have been 30 feet away. Looking down the barrel through the iron sights, I inhaled deeply, let my air out slowly, and squeezed the trigger at the end of my breath. I shot the stem of the flower and it tilted to one side. My father was impressed, and after I took the shot, he told me I was laying on an Indian burial ground. When I asked where my dollar was, he told me, “Well, you didn’t hit a petal.”

I remember my mother telling me how if babies died before they were baptized, they existed on in purgatory forever; so when I was 29, my wife and I agreed to have our son baptized. There’s no way for me to know if what my mother said was true. One true thing my mother did tell me was the story of some girl who was eating an orange and, somehow, a pit got stuck in her nose and took root. She had to go to the hospital to have the growing orange removed. Whenever my ears were a little dirty, she would tell me to clean them, otherwise potatoes would grow. And we didn’t have a chimney, so when I told my mother I knew that Santa came down the chimney, she told me she left the back door open for him. When I asked about the Easter Bunny, she told me that he used a magic bubble to travel inside the house. And then one time, my mother and I visited my father in the hospital after he suffered from smoke inhalation fighting a fire. In the bed next to him was a man yellow with jaundice. I didn’t know that the man was jaundiced at the time, or even what jaundice was, so I asked my mother why the man was yellow. She answered, “He ate too much pine sap. Don’t ever eat pine sap.”

Father Matt was nice. We attended a church that held itself to a Franciscan ideology, which adhered to poverty stricken lifestyles. When Father Matt spoke at the sermons, he said things like, “God is not short on cash.” He lived in a house paid for him, drove a big, red Cadillac, and drank Irish whiskey after the sermons. I knew that because he brought the smell of it with him to confession, where I would stand with my classmates in a single file line and make up things to tell him. We couldn’t all tell Father Matt that we didn’t do anything wrong because he wouldn’t believe us, and we couldn’t all tell him the same thing because he’d know we were lying, so one of us decided to admit he took the Lord’s name in vain. Another of us would say that they swore, and somebody else would say that they had lied. Eventually, I wanted to, and confessed, to Father Matt that I stole things for an old Cherokee man. Sometime after that, while I walked down the hallway of my school, cutting class, a classmate of mine whose mother was a hall monitor asked me, “Did you really break into houses and rob people?”

I was the last of five kids born to an Irish-Catholic mother who used the rhythm method. You know what you call an Irish woman using the rhythm method? Pregnant. After I was born, I’m pretty sure one of two things happened. Either my mother stopped using the rhythm method, or my parents stopped sleeping together. My mother was a God-fearing woman, so the use of birth control was probably out of the option.

Communion

An act or instance of sharing.

I remember my mother telling me once, “Ryan, don’t ever do anything wrong, because God is everywhere and he can see you.” And sometime later, “If you misbehave, you’re going to go to hell!” My mother always reminded me, “I’m giving you enough rope to hang yourself,” and one Friday night I left, and was gone until Monday night. I missed school on Monday, and when I finally walked into the house, she told me, “I was just about to call the police.”

My father was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and when he was drunk, he gave the five of us cute little nicknames. He later renounced his faith to become Catholic in spite of his father and to marry my mother. He found God at the bar or at the firehouse, usually at night or in the early morning after work and always somewhere in between the empty space where his lips met a bottle.

One night, when I was 12, I watched him drink from a bottle of vodka through a crack in his unclosed door, and saw him put it back into his dresser drawer once he was through. After he left his room, I snuck in and took it, walking through the living room with it and into my bedroom to grab my pellet gun. I carefully doubled-back and made my way out the front door before placing the bottle of vodka on a rock and loading the pellet gun. I walked towards the window and saw my father inside, so I tapped on the window until he turned and noticed me. When he recognized me, he came to the window, saw what I was doing, and looked over the scene as if he had just lost his best friend. I pulled the trigger, breaking the bottle, and he roared so loudly that the window in front of him shook. I turned tail and ran, throwing my pellet gun into the bushes, and didn’t come home until I was sure he was asleep. The next day, I went to look for my gun, and found it in a thousand pieces.

My father called my youngest sister a “pre-Madonna” and my middle sister a “brat.” We sat through a church sermon that our father was supposed to pick us up from, and we heard him arrive early because his station wagon had a leaky exhaust that sounded like mosquito repellent. I was 14 at the time, and we were all embarrassed, so we snuck out the back of the church after the service and into the car. He was drunk and I sat in the back, doing everything I could not to fall through the hole in the floor of the vehicle. The old man was driving in the wrong lane and had to swerve out of the way of a car. Instead of getting into a head-on collision, he wound up rear-ending a truck in the lane he was supposed to be driving in. I called him a drunk and was able to get out of the car before he could turn around and hit me. We were only a few minutes from our house and, while I ran, I heard him scream, “Get back here you wise ass piece of shit!” I laughed the whole way home.

I was in trouble a lot, and when I was 7, I remember thinking my mother could kick for the Rams. We were all in Vermont and I was climbing an apple tree when my “hussy” oldest sister told me to smile for her new Polaroid camera. I told her no, and she insisted; so I threw an apple and hit her right above the boob. My mother yelled at me to, “Get down!” but she was busy setting the picnic table and couldn’t do much else. I climbed down the tree and over to the table to eat some of the olives my mother had just put down. I loved olives, and she yelled at me to stop eating them before the table was properly set. I looked at her, deliberately placing another olive into my mouth while she watched me, and she chased me around the table. She kicked me because I was fast, and when her foot caught me in the seat of my pants, I swear to God I flew.

I forget why, but one time while I was in class, I was told to go to the principal’s office. As I sat there, waiting to be reprimanded, I tried to balance a book on my head. The secretary didn’t like that, so she sent me down to the church. There was another kid there, and we each had to walk the Stations of the Cross on our knees five times for misbehaving. When I got home, my mother was mad at me for ruining my pants because we were too poor to afford another pair, and she had to spend the night fixing them before school the next morning.

Around the same time, when I was 11, there were a couple of weeks when construction workers were redoing the piping in our school. To refit piping, you need to dig out the floors. One day, a friend of mine and I decided to crawl under the floors into the room where the nuns, or big, fat penguins as we used to call them behind their backs, stored ice cream while the faculty was having lunch and we were supposed to be at recess. We walked over to the ice cream freezer and took as many ice creams as we could carry with us. That day, it seemed like everyone on the playground had free ice scream.

When I was 49 and my son was 21, we were listening to my “pre-Madonna” sister’s husband recall the horrors of Catholic school. When the bus driver stopped at St. Catherine’s of Bologna Middle School before driving off to public school, you could see the penguins lined up outside with their arms crossed to usher me and my classmates in. My brother-in-law said entering the dimly lit hallways seemed like, “Going to prison.”

There was a nun who was particularly mean, and she had what we called a “Nun Book.” Every time we misbehaved, we would write our name and what we did into the book, and then repeated that exercise on the chalkboard throughout recess. One day, me and my friends decided to have a contest to see who could get their name in the book the most. On the last day of school, we stole the book and brought it into the woods behind the school. We read it, laughing and remembering what we got in trouble for throughout the year, and once we were done, we burned every page.

We would spend all day in the same room learning different topics with different teachers for different periods. Mrs. Jimenez was not a nun, but she was one of my teachers; Hispanic, of the faith, and stern. She would slap a yardstick down on her desk to maintain order in her classroom when things were getting out of hand. I don’t remember what I did, but one day I was acting out in class, and was forced to sit on the floor in front of her room next to her desk. My friends continued making a commotion while I was being disciplined, and Mrs. Jimenez slapped her yardstick down onto my head. I was never sure if she missed intentionally.

We didn’t always have nuns for teachers at St. Catherine’s, like in Mrs. Jimenez’s case. On certain occasions, like Ash Wednesday, we would tell the non-nun teachers that the altar boys would have to be in church half an hour earlier than we were actually supposed to be there. Me and my friends would spend the extra time running through the pews, eating the unblessed Host and sometimes drinking the communion the wine. Then, after a cigarette break, we would walk back in through the front with the other altar boys as they arrived so we could perform our duties to the church.

One of my duties was to serve the Host at church services. I would wear the traditional robe with the rope belt, and bear the paten, a plate usually made of precious metals attached to a long handle that was used at the Eucharist specifically to serve the Host. When my friends came up to receive the Host from me and I was pretty sure the priest was looking, I would sometimes jab them in the neck with the paten, forcing them to hold back from spitting the Host onto the ground. My friends did not like coming up the aisle on the side I was on.

I had my first real job when I was 14 because I needed to help my mother pay rent. When I was 15, I showed up late to work one day. I was late because I got too drunk the night before. Mr. Pasquale fired me on the spot. Begging him to change his mind, I swore to God I would never be late again. Eventually he agreed because he knew I was a hard worker, and that I needed the money. I was never late again.

I told Father Matt about the old Cherokee man because one day, when I was 12, the cops rounded me and my friends up for questioning and I sat in a cell block in Paterson, etching my name into the brick. I testified against the old Cherokee man who used to pay us for the stuff we stole. He told us to get things like drugs, jewelry, and even one time when I wasn’t there somebody stole him a gun. The old Cherokee man told me and my friends that if we ever told on him, he would find us, and after he was released from prison, he would cut our throats. We were 12 and Catholic and we told on him mostly because we didn’t want to get in any more trouble, but what else could we do to be forgiven?

My “hussy” older sister worked in the parish office on Saturdays answering the phone for $10 an hour. A weekend came around when she could go skiing with a friend and their family, so she begged everyone she knew to cover for her. Eventually, she asked me, my mother cleared it with the powers that be, and I brought homework to make everything look good. While I was in the office, ignoring my homework, Brother Bobby stopped by and paid me a visit. Entering the room and seeing me there, he asked, “Where’s your sister?” I told him I was filling in for her and he said, “Oh! Well, would you like a soda?” I did, so I left the chair to get it. Brother Bobby asked me, “Do you like to wrestle?” and picked me up, holding me against the desk and fondling my balls. I hit him with my elbow on his jaw and ran all the way home without my things to tell my mother. When I got there, I got in trouble because she had to go back to the church to get my jacket and she thought I was lying.

My “pre-Madonna” sister was a straight A student that attended DePaul Catholic High School on-the-slide. She did this because she was a good student, we were very poor, and the church community knew that our father was an alcoholic. She went on to college, and I’m a carpenter now. I never tried hard at school. The happiest day of my young life was when I was kicked out of St. Catherine’s at the age of 12 and I could go to public school. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I stole a girl’s comb. On the second week into 8th grade she was brushing her hair onto my desk. I told her to stop, but the teacher didn’t mind her, so she didn’t. I snatched the comb out of her hands, and when she wailed, the penguin sent me to the principal’s office. My mother had to come pick me up, and when my principal wondered aloud, “What are we going to do with you?” I told him I didn’t want to be there anyway.

Confirmation

The act of giving official approval to something or someone.

Aunt Patty was my mother’s sister. She was slender and had the deep, open voice of an opera singer. When I was younger, she told me a story about a time when she was walking through the woods and she just looked up and saw two angels in the sky. And you know the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish funeral, don’t you? One less Irishman. So when Aunt Patty died, the service was long and sad, and the after-party was full of drunken antics and laughter. I always remembered to look up whenever I walked through the woods after that, but I never saw any angels.

And the straw that really broke the camel’s back was when I woke up to the smell of smoke coming through a hole in the wall that exposed my room to the staircase. I escaped and stood outside in the dark and cold in my underwear, watching my house burn down. The community knew our situation, and my friend’s parents offed to house me. They asked if I wanted to go to church, and I went because that’s what they did. And when I was there, I noticed the sermon was different and the faith had some discrepancies, but it still felt the same as when the people who were in charge of my church pushed me away. Eventually, I decided those people were the majority of the problem, and eventually I decided I was done going to church.

After the fire, my mother moved out, and I was forced to move in with my only brother. My brother was the second oldest child and was sort of like Tommy Chong from Chechen and Chong. After the movies, Chong is quoted saying, “I used to be all fucked up on drugs, but now I’m fucked up on God.” At the time, my brother was fucked up on both drugs and God. I came home drunk from a party one night when I was 16, and my brother came into my room to tell me, “You’re a sinner. You should go to church and pray with me.” I told him he’d better pray he made it out of my room before I broke his legs.

My brother and I worked days and let our father stay with us while he worked nights. We told him to just leave us alone. By morning, he would come home drunk, and one Sunday, my older brother was minding his own business, sitting on the couch after a 6 day work week. My father called him a “backyard mechanic” and a “bum,” and I asked my father what his problem was before pushing him. I thought he’d hit me with Murphy’s hammer, a name he gave his right hand when he used to box in the Air Force, but he surprised me with his left. I struck him with my forearm, my elbow hit his face, and he toppled to the ground with a loud bang. Three-quarters of the fact I won that fight was because he was so drunk. We kicked him out and told him not to come back again.

I waited years and years after I learned the only good thing that my father had to teach me before I got my hunting license. I sat in tree-stands season after season, sending out Hail Mary arrows in hopes of striking some far off deer until I later realized that, had by some miracle I hit one, I most likely would have only wounded and damned it. One day, I was at a friend’s house and while we were in the backyard, I watched the neighbor shoot arrows at a block target in his yard. When I asked who that was, my friend told me, “That’s Frank. He’s crazy.” We were bored and I was curious, so we went over to his side of the lawn and he let us shoot. His son was mentally handicapped, so after he saw me shoot and I asked him if he would teach me to hunt, he agreed to help me. His lessons included giving me a tree-stand and fly-fishing rod, telling me, “Here you go,” and letting me fail until I learned on my own.

When I was 52, my son became a carpenter. I taught my son to shoot at the age of 5, and when he was 6, I took him hunting with me, another carpenter named Gene, and his son. We trekked through high grass, waiting for the dog in front of us to scare a bird from its hiding spot. Eventually, the dog kicked up a pheasant and it flew into the air. I forgot who shot first, but whoever did pull the trigger must have clipped the bird’s wing because it landed in a tree branch and stared us down while we looked up at it. I cleared it with Gene, and set my son up so that I would take the recoil from my shotgun while he aimed down the sights at the bird. I felt his back swell, heard him exhale slowly, and felt blast in my shoulder after he pulled the trigger. The pheasant dropped from the tree and we walked over it to claim our stake. When I picked it up, I noticed he had shot the bird right between its eyes. From that point on, whenever we were shooting, I called him “Ole Deadeye.”

When I was 24, my father died after his third heart attack, and when I was 47, my brother died of heart complications after a transplant and a few bypasses. A year after my brother had his only heart attack and two days before my 35th birthday, I asked my friends to bring me to the hospital. I had lobster bisque the night before, and nothing seemed to feel right since then. When I got there, the nurses put a nitro patch on me for the night, telling me they would perform more tests in the morning. I woke up at some point because I needed to use the toilet, so I stood up and walked to the bathroom, but when I saw my reflection, pale and staring back at me, I pulled the nurse’s cord so they would come check on me. I heard them walk into the room, but they didn’t check the bathroom, so after they walked out, I pulled it again. They ushered me to my bed, hooked me back onto all the machines, and I watched my pulse rate on the heart monitor drop all the way down to 23 before a white light silhouetted the nurses’ bodies and then swallowed the room whole. I was weightless and floating, like I was submerged in a bathtub, and then I heard the piercing whine of the defibrillator pads. And suddenly, I was wide awake, just after a nurse shot my IV full of adrenaline. I wasn’t ever too sure about the white light, but my brother said he had a similar experience, so I remained curious.

And one morning when I was sitting in my tree-stand, I closed my eyes and started daydreaming. Remembering the things my father told me, I thought about how I had to hide like an Indian when I was in the woods hunting. I waited in silence until the sun came up, listening to the sounds the woods made in the pre-morning darkness. I was used to squirrels foraging in the leaves, but while I daydreamed, a strange rustling broke me from my daze. I opened my eyes, and saw a five-point buck standing broadside directly underneath me. I stood up slowly, grabbing my hanging bow from a hook installed into the tree stand that allowed it to hang next to me. Drawing my arrow, I filled my lungs with air, and let all of it out before releasing the arrow. The projectile sunk into the deer’s spine, and the animal dropped onto the ground, kicking its legs and moaning in agony as it writhed around in circles on the ground. I drew another arrow as fast as I could and yelled at it to stop from above; and all at once, the creature stopped moving. I shot my second arrow and pierced its heart. To this day, the mount is in my son’s room, overlooking him; but when I looked down at the deer after climbing from my tree-stand, tears welling up at the corner of my eyes, all I could say was, “Thank you.”