Meeting Someone I Used to Know
by Nicholas Miller
June 20, 2009
I don’t like running into old friends. Whenever I do, I feel obliged to care. I try to invent questions that will make me sound like an honest-to-God curious human being, and when the other person invents his own questions, I stumble over my own life story as I try to make it look like I’ve learned things and grown up, when I really haven’t and I don’t know what it would mean if I did. In the end, the old friend turns out to have drastically changed from the person I’d pretended to like however many years ago, and I don’t like what he’s become, or, for that matter, what I’ve become. We leave on friendly terms, slowly calculating how long it might be before we run into each other again, and I begin thinking of all the things I could’ve been doing if not for the ghosts of old friends.
Pat was an exception. We’d kinda known each other at St. Joe’s, a Catholic high school in the suburbs. We’d watched each other from opposite sides of the same clique and could talk about each other to mutual friends, but beyond that, there had never been any need for us to spend much time together. It had been at least a decade since we’d last seen each other. I had forgotten that I’d known him and would’ve forgotten him altogether if I hadn’t gotten an email one summer evening letting me know that Pat was trying to Friend me. I forget which account it was on. I had drifted from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook, and I neglected all of my accounts, but I liked having a little spot on them because there were people I knew there and it saved me the trouble of having to tell them things in person. Whatever account it was, I hadn’t seen or sent a message in months, and at the sight of this latest friend request, I wanted to delete the account altogether and be done with it.
But I had to at least see what he was up to. He had a pretty busy account. A few hundred friends whom he probably barely knew. Lots of pictures in dull-looking locations. A full list of interests and a series of messages from various well-wishers running down his profile. I was surprised to see that he’d gotten a little fat. He was still tall, mostly thin, and bushy-haired, and he still had this look in his eyes like he’d just gotten a crazy idea, but now he had some meat on him.
The bigger surprise was that he’d become a priest.
One of the things that has terrified me lately has been watching the dipshits I knew in high school become upstanding members of the community. The glue-sniffer has two kids. The thick-headed asshole became a cop. The worst bullshitter in school, the guy you knew you could never believe or trust, is now a successful businessman and budding philanthropist. I remember a short kid who made up for his size by constantly carrying a concealed knife in his front right pocket. The last I heard of him, he’d joined the military and is shooting people or getting shot at and having the time of his life. I tell myself I like people, and I like the idea of people, but then I get to know them and it goes all wrong.
Sometimes, back at St. Joe’s, I’d play a guessing game with my friends: Who’s the priest? I think everyone played that game, but it was more fun if you could pretend you were the only ones doing it. We did the same thing with the gay kids, and most of the time we were looking for the same things in priests and fags. If the kid’s legs seemed to be made of air, if he touched everything with only the lightest contact, and if a conversation with him made you uncomfortable, as if one of you didn’t belong there, the kid was either a priest or a fag. The only difference seemed to be that the gay kids simply desired things differently from the other guys, but the priests didn’t desire anything at all or hid their desires beneath the nice little wish that all things would be well. This was the system we had worked out in-between classes and things we’d rather be doing.
We were wrong most of the time. Of course we were. We were in high school. We barely knew what our dicks were for. I’m still not sure. The only kid we’d successfully pegged as gay was so flagrant about it nobody cared when he came out senior year. The rest were just pale, effeminate misanthropes who treated everybody like shit and cried at night because nobody liked them. There was only one student we thought might become a priest. He had an otherworldly, friendly sternness about him, the kind of guy who forgave everybody but himself. I found out some years later that he’d shot himself while a sophomore in college. I think he’d wanted to be a professor or something, and university life wasn’t the miracle he’d wanted it to be. It’s tough to find out you’re wrong.
Pat wasn’t like that at all. He was too regular. He was tall and had tousled hair and a goofy smile, and I never remember any priests like that. He’d walked with a thumping lack of grace, as if his own growing body had caught him off guard. He tended to babble, and when I’d first seen the look in his eyes as he talked, I’d thought that something was wrong with him, but it turned out that was just the look of something bouncing around in his head. I thought he would make a hell of a garbage man, or an electrician or maybe even an accountant. But instead he wanted to be a priest. It said so right on his account. And he wanted to Friend me.
He wasn’t really a priest just yet. In our messages back and forth, he talked about how it takes something around eight years or so before they frock you. They put you through a bunch of theology classes, they ship you off to some poverty-stricken landfill to teach the illiterate populace how to fish or some such thing, they periodically ask you a battery of psychological questions to make sure you’re not a child molester or some other breed of fuckup, and if you can put up with their bullshit for just short of a decade, they figure you can handle your average Catholic and stick a collar on you. Pat was almost there. I forget what stage he said he was at, but he wrote about it like he was about to graduate from high school. He was so excited and nervous about the future, and he hadn’t the slightest idea what was going to happen to him. I half-expected him to start talking about what he would wear to prom, but I refrained from making too many remarks on it.
It took some effort, but we decided we should meet. Our relationship in high school wasn’t nearly close enough to justify the energy we put into coordinating our schedules, but I think we felt it was important to see each other to find out if there was anything recognizable to either of us. We wanted to see how much we’d changed, if we had held onto a few key personality traits after all these years just for the sake of posterity. The first day we planned to meet, he tried to call my cell phone but it was off and he gave up when he heard the voice mail kick in. The second time, he didn’t even bother calling so I did something else instead. I told the waitress at a bar I frequent that I’d had a date with a priest but he was blowing me off. She didn’t appreciate the joke. But I’m used to it.
Pat agreed to meet me at this steak place in our old neighborhood. I still lived close by, so it was no problem for me, but he lived at a seminary that was way the hell out in the suburbs, and he had to take a bike down because he never liked to use the communal car.
I remember that seminary. Back in grammar school – it dawns on me now that my entire education has been at Catholic institutions, from grammar school through college – they took my whole grade out for a one-day retreat. The place was built like a tiny college, with a series of dignified buildings arranged symmetrically across the campus. On the north end, a concrete staircase made its way down to a large pond whose other three sides were guarded by trees. You could shout across the water and hear your voice echo at you after it had bounced off the far side. The grammar school students, myself included, took time out to throw rocks at ducks, and then we shouted obscenities off the end of the stairs so that the pond could swear back at us. When they gathered us all together, they took us down to a basement lecture room where a surprisingly healthy youth counselor described to us in great detail the gruesomeness of Satan, the various horrors of hell, and the exquisitely bloody and terrifying sufferings Christ endured for us despite our hard hearts and unrepentant souls. Maybe my conclusions were the kind that only made sense to an eighth grader, but I was so scared I didn’t jerk off for a week.
He said he would bike down from the seminary to a monastery connected to a church that was close to where I lived. I’d meet him there and we could walk a few miles down the road to a steak place he had been to once before. While he was explaining this, I told him a couple of times I could just drive over and pick him up, even if it was a bit out of the way. Even if I couldn’t get all the way to the seminary, I could at least drive to the monastery and then to the restaurant. He turned me down and called me a pansy for suggesting it.
“So after dinner you’re going to bike the way back?”
“Depends on how late it is,” he answered. “Maybe they’d let me crash at the monastery. They like me there. Because I use to live in the neighborhood, they let me give talks to the school kids. And sometimes at the end of Mass. And there are a lot of empty rooms there nowadays. I think the order wants to sell the place.”
I’d passed it by hundreds of times, and I’d probably been in the church at least twice, but I’d never seen the monastery, or if I did, I hadn’t thought of it like that. It was a good, Catholic building, just a little fancy in an old sort of way. Red brick and arched windows. I remember looking at those windows, and I never remember seeing people. In front, there was an unusually large front lawn. The land was probably bought up when the area was still rural and property was cheap. A single, winding walkway led up to the front stairs, but I never saw anyone near the building or using the walkway or stepping across the lawn. The monastery was a place apart, fading away in everyone’s memory until finally, when it’s sold, everyone will have to ask each other what it was that had just been torn down. I’d always thought it was one of those discreet homes for retarded children or assorted misfits who shame their families. No one came in, no one came out, and everyone liked it that way.
I met Pat in front. He sat on the front steps, a little sprawled out and comfortable. He was dressed business casual, with khakis and a dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar. I had wondered before getting there if he would recognize me, but I realized that I would be the only person anywhere near his age who would even approach the place, so as I came up the winding walkway, slightly afraid of taking the straighter path through the grass, he smiled and shouted, “Marty! Mart! Martin! Hello!” From his relaxed position on the stairs, he shot up like a nervous, attentive schoolchild, something I’d never seen him do back in school. “Hello!” I shouted back, but by this time I was close enough so I didn’t have to shout. It came out all wrong. For a moment, we paused, regretting that we’d set up this meeting in the first place. It was too late now, so we got on with it.
Sticking to the walkway, we went back to the sidewalk and headed north. It was hard to know where to begin. “Did you bike here dressed like that?” I asked.
“I brought a change of clothes in a gym bag. They let me shower at the monastery. My bike and the bag are in the lobby. Just in case someone wanted to steal them.”
“From a monastery?”
“Nobody knows it’s a monastery. And people seem to think that stealing from priests is more fun than stealing from regular people. If you’re the kind of person who likes to steal.”
“I never knew that.”
I didn’t want to immediately pester him about the whole priest thing, and I was in no mood to tell him what I’d been up to. So we settled on nostalgia and gossip.
What about Patricia . . . do you remember Patricia . . . and Julian and Jose and Marie. We went down a list of names we had no reason to remember and found out we had no idea what had happened to them, mainly because we hadn’t really cared until now. Either Pat or I would pause until, for lack of anything else to say, one of us would blurt out a random name we hoped we’d forgotten.
“. . . Jenny!” I said.
“Jenn?”
“Not Jenn, Jenny!”
“Oh . . .” he said knowingly. “Jenny.”
I laughed. “She got around, didn’t she?”
“Yes she did.”
“Everybody knew her.”
“Yes they did.”
“Did you ever . . .” I’m not sure why I wanted to ask him that, which is probably why I cut the question short.
“No,” he said, and exhaled. “You?”
“No.”
“. . . Did you hear about Chris?”
“Chris?” We’d gone with different people, and it took a little time to remember some of his names.
“Polish kid,” he said. “Stocky. Really built-up upper body.”
“Glasses? Blonde hair?”
“Cut really short, almost military.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s him.”
I could see the way that Chris’s shoulders were always pulled straight back, making his body into a perfect T. “I thought he was an asshole,” I said.
“Did you ever have a class with him?”
“No, I just saw him in the hallway every now and then.”
“He was . . . he was all right. Nicest guy you could hope to meet. Real bashful, though. I remember, once, a teacher pestered him to ask this girl out who was in some other class. I can’t remember how it got to this, the teacher was always getting off the subject and asking personal questions. It kinda got on my nerves. I remember the teacher –”
“Who?”
“Uhhh . . . Kim. Mr. Kim.”
“Never had him.”
“I remember him pestering the poor kid. ‘You like her. I know you like her. Ask her out. You’re a strong, handsome boy. She’ll say yes.’ In front of all the guys and girls! Chris just turned bright red and kept repeating, ‘No, no, no . . . I couldn’t. Really. I don’t want to. I think that Kim threatened to fail him if he didn’t ask the girl out. ‘You should be expelled for not asking her out! Does anyone here nowhere her? You girls are all chummy with each other, one of you has to know her!’ It was really very embarrassing, not just for him but for the whole class. I kinda liked his reaction. He didn’t give in, and he didn’t run away. He just muttered no.”
“. . . Like I said, I never knew him. Do you know where he is now?”
“Dead.”
“What?”
“Brain aneurysm. I don’t know what the ordeal looked like, but I like to think that he just twitched once and fell over. I heard all this secondhand, but it shook up the family something awful.”
“I can imagine,” I said. Then I thought twice about it. “No I can’t. How could I? That was a stupid thing to say.” We got a little tired of reminiscing and walked along silently.
The neighborhood was nice. Nobody else was walking. Everybody drove. Unless you were an ascetic seminarian willing to go miles out of his way, or unless you were humoring him, there weren’t many places to walk to, just rows of houses interrupted by the occasional chain store or school. It made for some good, lonely walking. The cars didn’t care what you said or did to yourself or others so long as you stayed off the street, but in return for their kindness, you somehow felt guilty about something. If you stood out in the smallest way, like by wearing a suit jacket or by being of an unusual age or ethnicity, they stared at you. They stared at us. At one point, an SUV slowed down and a teenager shouted out the window, “Hey! You dropped something!” Neither of us had much to drop, but Pat instinctively looked down. At once, a strange, cruel laugh erupted out of the SUV, and as I looked up I realized it wasn’t coming from the driver, but from some pimply kid in the back seat who grinned like he’d just kicked a rabbit. The car peeled away, its laughter barely audible over the other traffic.
“What the fuck!” I yelled to no one, then I turned to Pat. “He’s probably the bastard offspring of lawyers. Pedestrians don’t get any respect.”
“They get the right of way,” Pat said, not as disturbed by the taunting as I was. “At least in this country they do.”
“I guess . . . Why do I think I’ve heard that before?”
“Jesus,” Pat answered. “That happens to me all the time. I have to read so much in theology and whatnot I get to thinking that the same phrases are playing in my head over and over again. And the priesthood is a small world. I see the same people. Even if I don’t know who they are, I see them all the time, and I have to pretend to know them while I come up with something nice to say. I probably just can’t remember anything anymore . . . Shit piles up.”
This seemed like an opportune time to ask him why he wanted to be a priest, why he was so hung up on walking and the humility bullshit, why me for that matter, but the sign for the steak joint appeared in the distance, red and yellow. The Mecca. It changed the topic of conversation.
“Have you been to this place before?” I asked.
“Once,” he said, “awhile ago. It was all right.”
“I’ve never gone. I almost went in once, after a neighborhood fest when the cops kicked everyone out and they all went pouring into nearby bars. It was a little beautiful, but everywhere was packed and there was a line to get in and I don’t like drinking in sardine cans.”
We stepped into the place, and it looked like a bar where we weren’t welcome. A line of old-timers chatted gruffly to each other as they watched a basketball game that was going very poorly. Their collective memory made the place smell like dust. The only people who noticed us were these guys in their twenties who eyed us suspiciously. They looked they were trying to mark their territory, so that one day they could be the old-timers who didn’t have to give a shit. They made a point of not saying a word when we walked by them to the hostess sitting on a stool next to a video poker machine. She was tall, strong, middle-aged, and blonde, and she wore a poorly fitting tuxedo which led me to think for a moment that she was leading a double life somewhere. She led us further back, to the mostly empty dining section. “Hasn’t changed a bit,” Pat said.
If I had to guess, I’d say that the place was built in the sixties or the fifties, but I couldn’t tell why I thought that. It might’ve been the old-timers or the fact that the whole neighborhood had been built back then and everyone lived in fifty-year-old buildings and knew the style of them the same they knew what the air tasted like. When I looked down at the tiled floor, it made me think there had been a carpet here that had never looked too good to begin with but which had grown so worn and ragged that the owners tore the whole thing up, maybe in the mid-eighties, and while they were at it, they replaced some of the furniture and got a new gambling machine. The place was telling me a story, dull and sedentary, without much conflict except for what the customers provided when they’d had too much to drink. But even that didn’t change and came on like clockwork.
Wanting to seem like men who drink beer, we ordered two beers and looked at the menu. I began to think about who was going to pay, but I didn’t let on. I probably had enough for the both of us, and I wasn’t going to owe a priest any favors. He could pay the tip if he wanted. I was going to order a burger.
We ordered more beer. He wanted a steak and asked if I wanted to get an appetizer. I let him do what he wanted. Midway through the second beer, I finally asked him what I’d wanted to ask him ever since we’d started sending messages back and forth.
“Okay,” I said, letting him know ahead of time I was coming to some sort of point. “You saw this coming! You saw this coming!” I raised my arms comically, like a basketball player denying he’d committed a foul. I enunciated every syllable, pretending I was talking to a crowd. “You seemed like a normal guy when I knew you. Or at least you were normal enough. So . . . why a priest?”
Judging by the way he refused to react to my question, just staring at me like a man at the edge of a cliff, I knew that I wasn’t going to get the bullshit answer I’d secretly wanted. “Were you called or what?” I added, hoping it would amount to something simple like that, and after a few minutes of dollar store theology and stories about priests he admired, the interview would be over and I’d get to say I had my answer.
“I guess,” he answered. “It’s weird how things happen.”
Shit. He had taken the first step in trying to explain himself, and I was in it for the long haul.
“I’d actually been in a serious relationship with a girl when I was an undergrad.” Pat put an undue emphasis on the word girl, as if he were on the defensive and wanted to prove that priests could still like girls. “I was up at Monmouth College. It’s close to Iowa and it’s small. I had been hooked on the idea of a small college. Do you remember that? I remember telling a lot of people at St. Joe’s about it. I didn’t like state universities or auditoriums and I walked around talking about student-teacher ratios. Did I ever bother you about that?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I’d be surprised if I didn’t. I bothered everybody about it. By the time I got there, I realized I’d moved to a small town. My parents covered most of the bill – and thank God for that or I don’t think I’d have gone to college at all. Small classes weren’t as great as I thought they’d be. You couldn’t just go to class, you had to be a part of everything and smile at your professors when you saw them in the hallway. It was all right, especially at first, because I didn’t know anybody like I did back home. But every now and then, I wished that nobody knew me. And then I wanted people to recognize me, and then I got solitary again. A whole lot of stuff was going on with me the first few months. Homesick, bored, disappointed . . . I don’t know.
“I’d start recognizing people around campus. Not in a good way. I didn’t know their names. Didn’t know them at all. But I’d recognize their faces from somewhere and I’d have to really think where. Sometimes I couldn’t figure it out at all. It wasn’t like high school, where every face I knew had a story and I didn’t give a damn about the rest. It was like the campus was full of ghosts. Maybe it was . . . everyone was giving up the past and rebuilding themselves out of nothing and stuff like that. It was weird is what I’m saying.
“Like this one guy . . . this is a little different because he was in a class of mine and I recognized him more easily than some other people, but the whole thing left me feeling the same way. He sat on the other side of the room and kinda looked like me, big guy but not fat, but he was wearing glasses. I didn’t like how he looked. I didn’t like the glazed-over look he had when his eyes were only open halfway, and I didn’t like the all-knowing tone of his voice whenever he spoke up in class. But I started hearing people tell him he should speak up more . . . I should be more specific. I heard a woman tell him he should speak up more, and then I heard another woman agree. He always had such interesting things to say, they said. Someone had said that to me about a month before. I wasn’t speaking up much at the time. And I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that when I wasn’t paying much attention my eyes went half-closed and I looked stoned or something. Every time I walked into that classroom and saw him, I thought I was looking at my twin . . . like my evil twin or something . . . That’s how much this college was fucking me up.
“I saw him walking through the campus and watched him like I’d watch any evil twin. However you’re supposed to do something like that. And I was in the library and saw him shelving books and realized he’d gotten a work-study grant and I had been turned down for that. He’d outdone me. I hated him for it. And then I saw him walking hand-in-hand with the most beautiful girl you could hope for, tan and busty and just a little bit shorter than him. I hated him for it, and I thought after awhile that I had the whole thing backwards. He had a job and a girlfriend and people seemed to like him. I was unemployed, unloved, and the sort of loner who recognizes people he doesn’t want to talk to. I was probably his evil twin. But I was kinda bored at the time. I didn’t have enough to keep myself occupied.
“That was how I met Christine. I was bored and I recognized people. I remember sitting at the back of a class and watching her walk in last, not like she was late, but instead like she was exactly on time. I opened a door for her once, and the nice thing about being tall is you get to tower over average-sized women. She looked up at me. Later, I was sitting in the computer area of the library . . . Christ, I spent a lot of time in the library . . . when I saw her looking at me from behind a few shelves of encyclopedias about twenty feet away. She darted away like a deer. What could I do? I went after her, and when I found her, almost hiding by the business directories, I didn’t know what to do and said that I’d seen her in class and . . . I don’t know, could we get some coffee . . . and talk about class? I think that’s exactly what I said. ‘Get some coffee and talk about class.’ Maybe if I’d said it right I would’ve sounded suave. But I sounded like a dipshit. That was probably why it worked.
“It was fun figuring out how to be a couple. I mean, there was more to it than the coffee but I don’t like people who go into details like that. It was just . . . it worked out is what I’m saying. The fun part was figuring out how to talk. Where to go. How to present yourself when someone you barely recognize sees you or the both of you walking through the campus. I found out she was a Lutheran. There’s a specific name for it . . . Lutheran Evangelical Protestant Church . . . I think the key word there is evangelical. She’d wanted to go to Wheaton College, where they don’t let you dance or drink or I don’t know, but something went wrong with the application and she got into Monmouth instead. She would always tell me when we were together how glad she was she hadn’t gotten into Wheaton. I loved her for it. She was sweet like that. But she was evangelical. You have no idea how long it took me to get her to let me grab her tits. We were in college, for fuck’s sake! And there wasn’t that much there to begin with! Don’t get me wrong, I loved them, but for the effort I put into them, I wished they had grown a little bit. I’m exaggerating. They were fine.
“The weird thing was, she made me more Catholic. I had stopped going to Church before I met her. Right out of school, I was in a good old-fashioned, ‘Fuck the pope!’ kind of mood. ‘He ain’t the pope of me!’ But when I got involved with her, I started thinking that maybe I should get religious. And I was raised Catholic, so the only way I knew how to be religious was by being more Catholic. I found out about a church in the town, I think it was called Immaculate Conception, and I started going. It was attached to a school so the Masses were all for kids but that was all right. I really only paid attention to the readings. And I stopped using my tongue so much on her. I don’t really know why, but it made sense at the time.
“At first it was just fun. We were the purest couple on campus, so long as someone was looking. I went to the masses at her church, she went to Masses at mine. It was great. it felt like we were supposed to get married, and we’d pretend we were virgins and she’d have lots of babies and I’d have a legitimate career even though I hadn’t picked my major yet and I was going to a liberal arts college.
“I thought that she was Lutheran in the same way that I was Catholic. They’re not all that different. We went to each other’s masses and barely noticed. I figured that being Lutheran was, for her, a way to get at things she couldn’t get at otherwise, and you can only really pull off that kind of shit if you’ve been raised with it. I could only do it by being Catholic. She could only do it by being Lutheran. So what? I didn’t want her to convert. I never trusted converts anyway. Converts believed shit and I don’t think that being Catholic or Lutheran has anything to do with believing. That’s what I thought at the time. You can tell where this is going.
“I started to catch it when she stopped coming to my Masses. Because she had things to do, she said. I was all right with that, and then I stopped going to hers. Because I had things to do. It screwed things up a little bit. Whenever we got into a fight, it always wound up being about religion.
“I remember once that I had made a stupid comment to one of her friends. I don’t think it was that stupid. It was something like, ‘You’re Lutheran but I like you all the same.’ I can’t even think why I would’ve said something like that, but whenever her friends saw me coming it was the Reformation all over again. So I’m not surprised at anything, really. What I said ticked her off, but she only told me later. She said I mistreated her friends. I said her friends attacked me. We got a little worked up about it and made out afterwards. Petty shit like that always ended well. I enjoyed it.
“What happened was that she got worried about my soul. She always thought that those Catholic rituals were a little weird, and she never saw them like I did, as another way of talking about things. She started talking about ‘those silly costumes’ and ‘the putrid smell of incense’ as if the first thing that happened when you walked in the door was they put you in a dress and spilled incense on your face. She’d picked it all up from somewhere but I really don’t know where. It started getting on my nerves.
“Everything came apart with one argument, and even now, I really wish I knew why I’d responded like I had. ‘Do you . . . admire your religion?’ she asked me, like I was Buddhist or something. ‘I mean, you defend it all day long, but you make it sound like you have to. You guard your faith like a dog, but how much do you respect it? Really?’
“She was trying to piss me off. She pissed me off. The thing was, I was still nuts about her. If I wasn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to piss me off like that. I didn’t want to have this kind of argument. I wanted to argue about where we’d go after college and what we would do for the rest of our lives. I wanted an argument about fear of commitment. Not religion, for fuck’s sake. I tried to get out of it. ‘Tell you what,’ I said, ‘how about I switch sides. The Catholic Church is going down the shitter. I may as well join the winning team.’
“Then she looks me dead in the eye and says, ‘I think you should seriously consider it. I’m worried about you.’
“Well what the fuck! She can’t tell me what to do like that! I mean, I don’t mind being a little pussywhipped but I’m not converting for the little bitch. ‘The truth comes out!’ I tell her. ‘The truth comes out! You can’t be happy until everybody’s exactly the motherfucking same as you! Get out!’ I told her. ‘Get the fuck out!’ But we were in her room and she refused to leave. I almost forced her out myself but I imagined her yelling rape, and then, when I’m locked up, she’ll start telling elaborate jokes about how Catholics don’t know what consensual sex means. So I left.
“‘I ain’t coming back!’ I was yelling down the hall as loudly as I could, hoping someone was watching me. ‘I won’t be treated like this! Everything’s revolution with you goddamned protestants!’ I tried to get away before I’d have to hear whatever it was she was going to yell back, but she got in her couple of words.”
“What did she say?” I asked. I was a little concerned that all the swearing and the religious references were going to get us in trouble, but nobody in the building seemed to care except for the three young guys up at the bar. They would’ve hated us no matter what we did.
“‘I don’t want you back! You fucking papist!’ I knew I’d hurt her because she kept on repeating it as I walked away. ‘Go fuck your pope, you fucking papist!’ I was kinda glad I’d hurt her. But it didn’t last very long.
“Like I said, everyone saw everybody else on campus. And when I saw her, I got so angry and sad and confused I just wanted to punch in a car window or tear up trees by the roots or something, anything so long as it was violent and frustrated. I took up drinking. Not like I hadn’t been drinking before, but I pursued it now. It started out at these frat parties I got invited to . . . I don’t know if there was an actual fraternity involved, but everyone called them frat parties . . . good old-fashioned collegiate binge drinking. I barely remembered what I was doing and probably caught a venereal disease. Then I started drinking by myself, and it was a good thing that I did, because if I’d kept at those parties like that, I’d probably have wound up suffocating on my own vomit or getting hit by a car as I ran naked down the street. Somehow I can imagine my disease-ridden genitals flailing upside-down from my exposed groin over the hood of a white Dodge Stratus. I don’t know why.”
Pat stopped to take another drink. I looked at the couple of beer bottles at his side and thought about the ones that had been taken away by the polite Mexican. Or maybe he had been Puerto Rican. I was trying to keep up with Pat, but all this meant was staying a respectable distance behind. We’d gotten our meals about ten minutes ago, and he hadn’t even touched his steak. By now I’d started diligently working on my burger, and a burger at a steak joint is always a nice treat, but Pat kept on going.
“I think I was still underage at the time, but I could pretty much get whatever I wanted. Everyone knew which liquor stores to stay away from, the ones owned by townies who hate the college kids even though the college is the only reason the fucking town exists. Most of the stores were okay, though, especially in the surrounding towns, because they knew where their money came from, and even if I’d done something stupid and no one wanted me for a couple of weeks, I could always get someone to buy the liquor for me. We all knew each other and knew how to do favors for each other.
“What I’m saying is I wasn’t spending my parents’ money on books. My grades were in the shit, and whenever I woke up in the morning and was sleepy because I’d been drinking and couldn’t sleep right and I was hungover because I’d been drinking, I was a fucking failure. No girl, no future, no fucking point. I don’t know what I did half the time. I’m sure I did something, but it didn’t matter so I didn’t bother to remember it.
“The one thing I did regularly was go to Church. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just stubbornness. Every Sunday, once every Sunday, I drove to that Immaculate Conception, which was really a kids’ church because it was connected to a school, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t much fun or comfort or much of anything at all. It was just something I did, but that was something. It was something I did, and I really didn’t do anything else.
“I give lots of talks at churches where I ask people to give money for seminarians. I like to tell them why I became a priest, because that’s the question everybody asks, and I say I dated a protestant girl and I say something about the Eucharist and I spout whatever piece of theology I’ve picked up about union with Jesus or something. I talk about ideas, because that’s the best way I have to talk to crowds of people. I talk about ideas, but I never tell them what happened.
“I remember – and this is one of the few things I clearly remember in that span of a couple of months – I remember standing in Church, in line to get the Eucharist, hungover as fuck, shaking and swaying and about to throw up. I get the host, and it sits there on my tongue like a thin piece of cardboard. Then, for no particular reason, I go for the wine. I think it was that I didn’t see anybody else going for the wine. The person with the cup looked lonely, and she was pretty, a little older but pretty. A milf, I thought. She was probably married with kids or a spinster who was out of her fucking mind or something like that. What I’m saying is I didn’t think I had a chance with her. It wasn’t about that. I wasn’t thinking about sex or anything like that. She was pretty and lonely and I drifted over. I’ll tell you something, I know why people go for the wine. The host soaks it up and you can swallow everything without chewing and look real dignified about it. And . . . and this is the point . . . when I was as hungover as fuck and drinking some wine offered to me by a milf, it was a miracle. A fucking miracle. The slightest bit of liquor, even if it’s watered-down wine, will do wonders for you when you’re hungover. It’s like a shot of adrenaline, and I hadn’t felt that good in a long while. I thought to myself, ‘This is it. This is what gives meaning. My body, my blood, my Church.’ From then on in, I was determined to drop all my classes, give up whatever bullshit was holding me back, and just devote myself. To something. About a week later I decided I was devoting myself to the priesthood.”
Pat dove into his steak with glee, not like a man who’d been waiting all day for his dinner, but instead like a man who had deliberately withheld himself from all unnecessary satisfaction, and now that the time had come, he relished his dinner with a smug, quiet pleasure. Every bite meant something different. I wish I could eat like that.
“Yknow,” I said. I picked at the remains of my burger, giving him time to eat. The fries were good, and it was a nice little hell waiting to eat them. I ordered another beer when the waitress passed by. Pat took the opportunity to get one too, but I wasn’t sure he was finished with the one he had. The waitress shrugged her heavy shoulders and got what we wanted. “Yknow,” I said. “I was in the liberal arts too. Monmouth is liberal arts, right?”
“Right.”
“I think I looked into it, but I went to another place, in the city. Didn’t do me a bit of good. Now I work at a pharmacy, and I should probably go back to school so they’ll let me touch the drugs and pay me for it.”
“When I went to the seminary,” Pat said, “it wasn’t what I thought it would be.” He didn’t appreciate my trying to change the subject. “It was weird enough telling my parents, who didn’t seem to get it at all, and the admissions and financing were really something else, but I was so out of it that other people took care of it for me. Or it seemed that way. I filled out the paperwork and answered all the questions, but I hadn’t done that stuff like it was worth doing for awhile. It was like someone else was answering the questions. I was fine with that. I was still sobering up. But I’d suddenly wound up in a place where there weren’t any parties, only social gatherings or prayer meetings, and everyone acted like they didn’t drink, and nobody drank during Lent. And Mass was more than once a week. It was just a matter of habit, but it was tough habit to get used to.
“The people were the strangest. Did you ever run into a guy who always speaks up like he was real sociable, and because he was sociable it was like there was something wrong with him and he clams up when you try to honestly talk to him? Imagine a campus full of these people, and you’ll see what I mean. They say that priests are just a bunch of homosexuals, but pedophiles aren’t gay and the rest of them realized a long time ago that the Catholic Church wants nothing to do with gays. Maybe in the past, they had nowhere else to go, but now they got their own neighborhoods and cable channels and there’s no reason to hide unless you don’t want to leave your hick small town . . . what was I talking about? This is good steak, you should try some.”
“No thanks. I’m fine right here.”
“Your loss . . . but whenever we met in the cafeteria or someplace like that, it was always really uncomfortable. We talked about our projects, and whenever someone stopped talking, there was this long, awkward pause until someone else came up with something official to say. What I started to realize was that nobody wanted to talk about what he’d been up to before he’d gotten here. Being a priest is a fucking embarrassment and everyone knows it. It’s worse than being a social worker or a librarian. Doing a pathetic job at something people should be able to do themselves doesn’t do anybody a bit of good. We all had our theology classes, so we all knew each other. We talked about God and helping people. We got shipped off to godforsaken countries where starving kids with swollen bellies died of medieval diseases so we could get course credit. To some extent, we thought we were making a difference, but it was like anything else. It was something else. Even if we threw ourselves into traffic to save the lives of a couple dozen innocents, it wasn’t like we were sacrificing ourselves. We were just doing something. Sometimes I think that if God tore up my heart to see what it had, if God opened the heart of a seminarian, and then tore up the hearts of rapists and murderers and businessmen and lawyers, He wouldn’t see much difference between them. We just need something to do is all.
“I’d run into guys like me. Guys who had just come out of a bad relationship or who were just desperately lonely. They had no one to give themselves to but God. Then there were guys who were generally bored and didn’t get along with anybody else and didn’t know what to do. Then there were guys who thought they were alcoholics or mental cases, or they had some dark secret they weren’t going to tell anybody, and by holding to a strict regimen of pointless ritual, somehow they’d get God to save them.
“It was like the foreign legion in those old black-and-white movies. Everyone was running from something, and they ran right to God. Or it was the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps or Teach for America. Someone feels guilty for what he has and doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he runs off and feeds the children who will starve to death anyway or he teaches children who already know that education hasn’t done anyone they know any good.
“Me? They’ll put me where they want me. I’ll probably be sent to serve four different parishes in some podunk county because there aren’t enough priests to go around. I’ll make some meaningless change to the order of things, like at the end of Mass, instead of saying, ‘The Mass is ended,’ like I’m supposed to so that everyone can say, ‘Thanks be to God,’ like they’re thanking God Mass is over, what I’ll do is say, ‘The Mass is never ended.’ Everyone will still say, ‘Thanks be to God,’ but somehow I’ll think I’ve made a difference and that will really do it for me. I’ll be where I should be, and everything will be where it should be, and God will be where He always is, even if He should probably be somewhere else, and everything will be okay as the world falls apart like it always does. I’ll be where they put me.”
He ate his steak a little furtively now, and silently. It gave me more of a chance to pick at my fries and to suddenly notice the varieties of bread and crackers in the basket that had been left untouched since the beginning of the meal. The plastic wrapping on the crackers was greasy, or maybe it was my fingers. I had a hard time opening the packages, but I was really looking for a way to kill the time, so I grabbed a knife and cut away at the packaging until I had something to nibble at. Every now and then I forgot about the packaging and went after the plastic with my teeth. Nobody cared. Pat worried about his steak. He cut around the fat very carefully. Sometimes he spit out the fatty parts he didn’t like into a napkin. It made him look like a priest.
When the waitress came with the bill, she did a beautiful thing, like any good waitress knows how to do. She put the bill in neutral territory, those few inches of space where neither party feels comfortable reaching. “Did you see that?” I told Pat. “I could’ve fucked her for that. But I ain’t worth the fuck. So I guess I’ll just tip her.” Pat just watched what was left of his steak. There hadn’t been that much, but he hadn’t eaten it. He was waiting for a Mexican or Puerto Rican to pack it away for him. He was also making a disgusting effort to finish his seventh or thirteenth or twenty-first beer. I reached for the bill.
“No!” he shouted, then he turned to a passing busboy. “Could you put this in styrofoam for me? I can’t finish it.” Then he looked at me. “I’m paying. Don’t worry about it.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said. “You’re a fucking priest. What kind of Catholic would I be if I let a priest pay my meals?”
“I’m not a priest yet and I still got some money of my own, and I don’t know where to spend it. Do you think I would’ve come here if I didn’t? Don’t worry about it.”
“Didn’t you take a vow of poverty or something? You can’t pay for your own meals.”
“It’s a vow to be poor, not to be broke. And I didn’t even take it yet. I’m a seminarian.”
“So what? A seminarian who doesn’t become a priest had better become a priest or he’s worth fuck. Unless he’s got some talent, and as far as I can tell, you ain’t got shit.” In my head, I was counting the beers I’d had, partly to tabulate my portion of the cost, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to do it. “I’m paying.”
“Okay. Fine. As far as you’re concerned, I’m a fucking priest. I got down on my knees and put my head on the ground and an octogenarian dressed like a fat transvestite put his hands over me and told me I belonged to God. I took the vow of poverty, and I don’t what that means but I can still pay for my meals. I don’t owe you shit. I mean, I took a vow of celibacy, right? I’m a fucking priest, right? I’m not a seminarian, I’m a fucking priest. I took a vow of celibacy. But that don’t mean you gotta fuck me. Right?”
I didn’t know what he meant, but he made perfect sense. I let him pay the bill, but insisted on paying the tip, and I put down way too much for the tip. Which bothered him somehow. He pulled out a wad of twenties, which I think he’d been saving up for just such an occasion, and he put them one by one into the little black folder the waitress had put down for us, and then I threw some godawful amount down on top of it, like I could’ve paid for three meals like this and the tips too. We put down the money and left without asking for change. One of the three young guys at the bar stood up to go the bathroom and deliberately bumped me with his left shoulder. If I were a little more drunk, or a little less, I would’ve thought of starting a fight. As things were, I wanted to go home. Or to a monastery. Or to anywhere where I could collapse in a magnificent arc onto a floor where no one was looking. Already out the door, we crisscrossed each other’s paths. I would stumble close to the street and Pat would lean towards the buildings, then we’d overcompensate and I would bump up against the buildings as Pat dodged the fire hydrants and street lamps on the edge of the curb. We saw what we were doing and repeated it a few times just for fun, but it took too much thought and we couldn’t keep it up for very long. “A fucking priest!” I told him. “You’re a fucking priest! Do you know what the means?”
“If I’d known that . . . I don’t know . . . If I’d known that . . .”
“I work at a fucking drug store and ask for money from my parents!” I wasn’t yelling at him but at the passing cars. “And he’s a priest because of a fucking girl!”
“You weren’t listening,” he tried to say. I waited for a cop car to pull up and ask us what we wobbly types were doing at these late hours. Cops usually don’t give a shit, but the economy was tough and a guy could keep his job by filling up the drunk tank on a regular basis. But I was being paranoid. It was easier in the end to think that nobody gave a shit. I shouted at the passing cars, begging them to swerve.
The walk went by quick. I’m sure there were intersections where we should’ve stopped and waited, but there weren’t any cars at this time of night, not in this neighborhood, and we went right by, swaying around each other. “Jesus, did you hear that car?” Pat said.
“What car?”
“It was playing music.”
“So?”
“It was loud. Not loud but deep. I could feel my ribs vibrate.”
“That’s what it does.”
“Jesus.”
When we got back to the church and the monastery, the lights were all out. Pat had been mumbling ever since the last intersection that he was crashing with the monks tonight, but then he saw that the lights were out and he walked up to the front door through the grass, skipping the walkway, and found out it was looked. His bike was off to the side of the stairs, and his gym bag lay on the lawn like a limp dick. “What the fuck!” Pat said. He shook the locked door as if it would open for him. “What the fuck!” He stormed away, almost stumbling down the front stairs, then he tripped on an uncooperative piece of air and sprawled across the lawn. I wasn’t in much mood to stand, so I lay down on the grass about twenty feet away from where he rolled. “What the fuck!” one of us yelled.
“I gave speeches!” Pat shouted.
“He gave speeches!”
“I thought they liked me!”
“They’re gonna call the cops!”
“The cops won’t arrest a seminarian!”
“They want nuns!”
It went on like this for a little while, with cars passing by and nobody caring. Whoever was in the monastery didn’t have the balls to confront the two young men considering horrific acts of vandalism involving the nipples of retired pastors. And the two of us didn’t have the balls to act on anything we were bragging to each other. Pat seemed to enjoy spreading his arms and legs on the grass. Then he flipped over on his face, to get a look at how it felt the other way, but then he must’ve realized this wasn’t a good way to be found in the morning, so he stood up. And I stood up, not having anything else to do.
Pat slung his gym bag over his shoulder. I watched him as he dragged his bike out to the walkway. He climbed on top of it like it was some exotic creation of his imagination. “Bye,” he said.
“See you around,” I said. I watched the bike soar into the course of usual traffic, and I thought, as I watched it sway, that he was talking to himself as he tried to pay attention to the road. He told himself things he didn’t have the time to tell me, and all the while, his bike ran away from what he said. When his bike disappeared behind a streetlight, I got myself to stop thinking about how long it would take him to get back to that seminary, and I stopped thinking about whether or not he would get sideswiped by a pickup truck. I lay down on the grass for a little while and looked up at the nothing that was supposed to be stars and then I got up and went home. As I clumsily tried to put my key into my backdoor, I thought that he wouldn’t want to see me again. That he might even try to deFriend me. And he did. I let it happen. I didn’t have much to lose. Or gain. Or anything. The night was a bust, and we wouldn’t see each other again.
I hate old friends. And they hate me.
I like it that way.