MY OLD NEIGHBORHOOD

The year I reached the age of reason, I can’t remember why... but I woke on a Saturday morning and, my bed was dry. I remember it like yesterday, but it was unlike all other yesterdays as I stood at the end of my bed, in a row of beds three wide and Johnny Marrs began to cry.

It was the ritual each day at St. Thomas Asylum, a figure came from a small room dressed in a long black habit with a white hat, and in her hand a switch... and on her face a smirk, and Johnny Marrs knew that hell was headed for him.

We all felt bad that he would get the switch, he’d bare his tiny bottom... and dignity left the dormitory while three sharp flicks of the wrist only hurt, if she missed... a cheek, and hit the scrotum. Poor Johnny Marrs wished he were a girl and tried to suck it up but her aim ran true and he limped into the shower, head lowered for he could not bear to see the faces of those now snickering.

And then she came to me, fully expecting to redefine the torture laid on Johnny Marrs, but I gave her a knowing look and dropped my drawers, and she could see my member was dry...and on that day, a reason why... big boys do not cry!

I was born a bastard, and a ward of the Catholic Charities our neighborhood was as different as the methodology employed by the good Sisters of Charity teaching us the etiquette of growth between the time we were babies and the time we had reached the age of reason. The age at which we might even be required to remember the name and the face of brutality.

Please don’t get me wrong, corporal punishment was as intolerable to the state as was the practice of “loose women” in the age when abortion was illegal but the practice of leaving an unwanted child, wrapped in a loin cloth at a church door was as easy as accepting the weight of a lover, in a dark room, where the window was open and a plastic curtain swayed to the tune of Tommie Dorsey whose band was accompanied by the sound of springs on a summer night when all was right for the making of a child who would not know love!

St. Thomas Asylum was not the scene of a Dicken’s novel, nor a Hitchcock thriller, it never had its moments, it never had its drama. It was tranquil, it was clean, it was warm in the winter and cool as a summer rain. There was good and plenty of food, there was work shared by all, there was Mass every morning, a great education taught by brilliant women married to Jesus but retaining the memory of a fair-haired boy running through a fragrant field of new mown hay, waving and smiling for her at last to come!

But there was no love left here, there was no time for a slight crew of nuns and five hundred boys who found their own form of love under the sheets or in the shower, and then the worst thing of all was facing the darkened confessional and the caring voice of Father Lammers whom I confessed many things, but I never confessed that I loved him. I respected this man of God who looked like Spencer Tracey and it pained me so to go...into that sweet good night confessing that I had masturbated seven times...seven!

I could not give up masturbating, even for Father Lammers or for God, so I came up with an alternate plan: I went into the confessional and heard the sliding door as my mouth took on a cotton feel, I prayed to the good priest in Latin because I could not bear to hear myself lie “Nan tantum benedictionem habes pater, quia peccavi ego masturbated mentiti et simul quadraginta octo temporum”! (Bless me Father for I have sinned, I lied forty-eight times and masturbated once!)