Amen's Boy. William Maltese
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root in my life was coming from a system, a culture, a church. I had not really noticed that now I was being groomed, cut out from the pack, styled in special means and modes and manners, and refined into a very loyal servant of the priest and the Catholic Church. This process began early in my life and was well-established before I was a teenager.
The rectory was old looking when it was first built, I think; all the photographs of this building show a rather dusty-looking, old place. The red bricks seemed to be denser than regular bricks, and to call them red was to avoid use of terms like burnt umber, or brownish-red. The place was invisible in some ways, maybe because only a few people ever walked to the door and entered. It wasn’t like an office building where you felt welcomed into a vestibule of activity. There was no receptionist, no waiting room, like in a lawyer’s office or doctor’s office waiting room. There were no large rooms in the building, and the entrance room was almost full with just the one army surplus desk, and an antique Underwood manual typewriter. The telephone system was modern for the place and time: there were buttons and extensions, a buzzer system notified the individual priests to pick up on the lines.
The secretary was the mother of one of the boys in school in the regular program at Assisi, but I didn’t know who it was then. Later I found out this red-haired lady was the mother of a boy that I wanted to see naked so badly that I was jeopardizing my entire reputation. I habitually went into his bedroom and tried to get him to relax enough to get naked with me, but that came after my meetings with the priest about masturbation. I didn’t ever get explicit instructions not to get naked with other boys, and it was not in the catechism, so I just plowed that field when I came to it.
I opened the wooden screen door. The screen mesh was painted black in the middle of a white painted frame; the frame was chalky, so you had to be sure not to let the screen door touch your clothing or you would have chalk marks that wouldn’t come out. The housekeeper was an ancient, sweet woman in a white dress, and later I learned that she was also the cook. She looked kindly into my little boy’s eyes. Could she tell I was coming to this place to be crucified, worse—drawn and quartered?
Father Terry came almost immediately, and with his hand on my shoulder, guided me into his office, or the outer part of his office, which was divided into his sitting room and his desk and writing materials area. The sofa and matching chair were covered in what I later found out was Army Surplus Naugahyde. It was standard issue, heavy duty, long-lasting, durable, bulky. I was lost on the giant sofa, and relieved to have so much room to myself. I’ve not thought much about how big or small I seemed to people then, but I imagine I was average, and at the seventh grade I was about five feet plus an inch or two, and growing. I was considered lean to my older brother, who called me a “fucking beanpole.”
“Thaddeus, I want you to know that whatever we say here today or any day is in the secrecy of the confessional. In fact, this is a place now where you can come and make ‘special’ confessions.”
I was surprised, already feeling better. Secrets I could handle. I had feared public embarrassment, but it’s possible I remember this out of sequence. I was there to be counseled about some problem I was having, as I recall now, but I think the bombshell of masturbation counseling was coming up in this conference for the first time outside of the confessional. I felt a little panicky when I learned the walls, veils, screens and sliding doors of the confessional were dispensable, and that we could, as human beings, have to face our priest in the telling of our sins. I was so used to the secrecy or supposed secrecy of the confessional that I was beginning to feel naked without the confessionals muted seclusion and anonymity.
“Sister tells me,” Father Terry began, “that you’re playing with yourself in class.”
I was totally and devastatingly shocked at such a lie. “NO!” I remember that.
“NO!” I would later be proud that I stood up for the truth. I already mentioned how I had to arrange my penis to make it not break in two when it spontaneously sprung up in class. I was not looking at the girls and getting hard.
I was sure of that.
“It’s OK,” Father Terry said, “I know sometimes a young man has erections and they come at times unexpectedly and it is just, well, some would say....”
“Uh...what?” I interjected trying to derail this line of confrontation. I thought of the ways I might change the subject, like I could mention about the choir singing so poorly or the ugly lamps on the front of the church that the pastor ordered installed. Innerly, I was panicking.
“I know you may have some problems with urges you feel suddenly....” Father was continuing to speak about my erections and I didn’t know what to say or do.
Well, he talked me through my panic attack, and we made a deal, simple enough too, that I wouldn’t masturbate without telling him immediately, the next day, and obtain absolution at that moment, so as not to make any bad communions in a state of mortal sin. I assume the entire world knows now that in the 1950s, Catholics were not allowed to even think about sex without it subjecting you to Satan’s plan to get you to go to hell for all eternity.
I promised to keep this oath of purity, and at that moment there began a three month segment of my life when I was a changed man. No long baths, no time with the soap, lathering it into a foam all over my naked body, no finding nipples hardening, no expulsions of vital fluids; I stopped relating to my body totally. No more cleaning up the mess that was difficult to mop up or wipe off when the entire bathroom was a steam room from a sensual hour long bath—boys did get dirty. I stopped that day.
Thursdays were wonderful, filled with various cold drinks, and coke in icy bottles, the returnable ones. Often, there were cookies, or cake, and sometimes candy, even two or three pieces of candy, so I could put some in my jeans and some in my mouth. Father Terry kept us focused on the problem, and we did not allow ourselves to be sidetracked off of the most important topic, the topic which we were not allowed to think of in our own minds, but which now had “confessional” sanction: SEX!
I had a pretty good education about sex without knowing it. I was not like John Palermo, who, as an altar boy a year older than me, told me one day that he knew the “dictionary word” for when a man and a woman make babies. I said he did not, and he said he did too, and I said he did not and he said he did too, and he told me the word and told me to check it out in the dictionary. John said the word for men and women doing it was “RAPE!”
“No! It is not!” “It is too!”
“It is not!” I kept this up a while but couldn’t remember what the actual word for intercourse was, so I shut up and went home. I looked up the word.
“Rape—The unlawful carnal knowledge of a woman by a man.” Wow! John Palermo was right! RAPE it was! I knew it was not allowed by the church, and that if you got a girl pregnant, the sheriff put you in jail. Its unlawfulness was clear. John Palermo told me the definition of “fuck” as “rape” and I believed it, until—and this is what Father Terry gave me, that the other boys didn’t have—good information. He taught me what sex was, and what thinking about sex was, and what “sin” was, and what was allowed. I learned fast that in confession it is the word that is important, and so one can stop saying, “Fuck,” for example, and be free of the stigma of the term. Father taught me inoffensive terms that referred to sex, bodily functions, and many things which before then I only knew slang terms for, learned from Bubba or other kids.
Time was compressed fast when it came to me and sex. I began to learn lots of sex information very quickly in the private chamber of my priest’s study.
Invitations were not long in coming. I was invited to camping trips with my priest and the altar boys group. At times, people who were not altar boys came to the camping trips, but they were usually kids whose parents provided a camp in the woods on the bayou for the priest and us to use, so they could come with altar boys. I didn’t know there was such a life as this outside of Huckleberry Finn. It seemed too good to be true. We were free of parents and mean older brothers, and we were nature’s children in the woods and bayous.
The camps were at a place called Blueberry Hill Bayou. It was a long, sand-bottomed stream