Out of the Bag: A Search for Missing Pieces

Out of the Bag:

A Search for Missing Pieces

By Greg McAllister

Copyright 2012 Greg McAllister

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowledgments

I am especially grateful to four people: my friend Arthur Westing for his encouragement, proofreading, and cover photography; my editor, Suzanne Kingsbury, who taught me how to see through my pen; Jeremy Taylor who designed the cover; and my partner, Linda Evans, who daily inspires me with her love and positive energy.

Thanks also to the many seminary friends and classmates who shared my youthful idealism, as well as my ex-wives who had to put up with my arrested development. The names of the latter have been changed to protect the intimate.

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Table of Contents

Prologue: The Manichaean Candidate

Part One: The Joyful Mysteries

Chapter 1: Fat Wimp

Chapter 2: The Call

Chapter 3: Answering the Call

Chapter 4: First Impressions

Chapter 5: The Rule

Chapter 6: Temptations

Chapter 7: Sports

Chapter 8: Aw Hell!

Chapter 9: Near Death Experience

Chapter 10: Apologetics, Rhetoric, and Football

Chapter 11: Transition summer

Chapter 12: Seeds of Dissent

Chapter 13: Mischief

Chapter 14: Loss of Faith . . and Hair

Chapter 15: White Sock Rebellion

Chapter 16: Seminary Filmmaking

Chapter 17: Mississippi Death Wish

Chapter 18: Christian Prejudice

Chapter 19: Klan Capers

Chapter 20: Disillusionment

Chapter 21: Re-entry

Chapter 22: Controversy

Chapter 23: Politics & Guerilla Theater

Chapter 24: Double Standards

Chapter 25: The Oath of Celibacy

Chapter 26: Kidnapping Jesus

Chapter 27: Life in the Rectory

Chapter 28: The Roman Collar as Weapon

Chapter 29: Decision

Part Two: The Sorrowful Mysteries

Chapter 30: The Haight & S.F. State

Chapter 31: Panthers, Pickets & Priests

Chapter 32: Bridget

Chapter 33: Death

Chapter 34: Trapped

Chapter 35: Elan Vital

Chapter 36: Laura

Chapter 37: Women’s Lib

Chapter 38: Castles Burning

Chapter 39: Sad Escape

Chapter 40: LSD

Chapter 41: Arrest

Chapter 42: Heavy Beefs

Chapter 43: The Crucifixion

Chapter 44: Achieving The Bottom

Part Three: The Glorious Mysteries

Chapter 45: Deja Vu

Chapter 46: Courtroom Rashomon

Chapter 47: Watergate

Chapter 48: On the Road

Chapter 49: Celeste

Chapter 50: Farewell

Epilogue: Dancing

About the Author

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Prologue: The Manichaean Candidate

In the backyard, a basketball hoop stands between the fig trees along the wire fence. My dad has strung chicken wire between the fence and the slatted backboard to keep the ball from going into the Peck’s yard. Jim Boy and Tony stand beneath it, beckoning me down for a game. I leave my Grandma Mayme with her sensible black shoes and tortoise shell combs and run out for a pick-up game, dribbling around rotting figs and fermenting apples, sweat rolling down my back until my hair is matted and my shirt cast off.

After Jim Boy and Tony are called home, I head for the kitchen to get a drink, and poke my head in to my grandma’s room on the way. It’s a hot muggy June day. The air is heavy with the smell of the Ben Gay I have tirelessly massaged into her shoulders. She sits stone-like in her rocking chair, rosary beads wrapped around her pudgy fingers, her eyes shut. She is whispering prayers. A partly-crocheted rug lies at her feet. On the wall beside her, Jesus kneels against a jagged rock, blood and sweat oozing from his temples, an angel hovering behind him. Hi, Gramma, I say quietly.

She opens her eyes briefly, then creases her forehead and turns toward the wall, showing me her tight perfect bun.

 My stomach grabs. What’s the matter, Gramma? 

She keeps her face to the wall, her hands moving on the rosary. I’m surprised, that’s all, she says.

I try to still my breath. The sweat runs in rivulets down my back. My eyes sting.

I’m disappointed, she says. Her tone is the one she uses to talk about sinners, lax Catholics. I didn’t think you were that weak.

What do you mean? I whisper. Hot tears run down my cheeks.

My grandmother turns her fierce face to me. You couldn’t keep that shirt on? she narrows her eyes and offer your suffering up for the poor souls in Purgatory? 

Like a heroic Gawain donning armor, I pull my shirt back on. My grandmother continues looking on in disapproval, cinching me into her delicately stitched, but inflexible, religious corset, judging me along with the other laggards, putting moral stricture over love, dividing good and evil along the dotted line first drawn by Zoroaster in 600 B.C. when God had two sons and the first chose Good and Truth, the other, Evil and Falsehood.

Eight centuries later, a Persian named Mani would introduce this dualism into Christianity by teaching that the human body was a dark prison confining the light of man’s soul, that only a strict, almost violent, asceticism could free the soul from its fleshy prison. The doctrine would morph its way down through Augustine and the medieval Jansenists, and by the time my Grandmother learned it from the Benedictine nuns and then passed it down to me, her eight year-old grandson, it would be the basic operating system in the Catholic computer.

I am seven the summer the Second World War ends and Mayme comes from Montana to live with us. My father adds a room to our little house in Kentfield he and my mother bought for $3000 when they were first married. That was just after the Golden Gate Bridge was built, and rather than taking the ferry, my father drives across it to work at the base of Market Street in a dusty three-man trucking office wedged between noisy loading docks. I ride the bus every day to St. Anslem’s grammar school, a three sided mission-style building with stucco walls and a long arcade lined with low green benches where we salute the cross and the flag and then wait for the sound of the wooden clacker so we can run out to the cement playground. Nuns watch from the sidelines in their black crepe robes, their faces framed with starched white linen.

German, Irish and Italian, the kids of St. Anslem’s are all Catholic, and the Catholics are under siege. We know this because the nuns make us pray for Cardinal Mindszenty, who is being tortured in a Hungarian prison. They make us pray for the overthrow of the Communists, including Jews, Protestants, Masons, and the owner of Jack’s Drug Store, who sells girlie magazines.

Every day I wear a uniform with salt and pepper cord pants to a school that smells of crayons, floor wax, baloney and ripe bananas from the lunchboxes in the cloakroom. One afternoon, I grab my lunch pail from the cloakroom and run out the door, banging into something on the arcade, something dark and scratchy, and I can’t get loose. Things are bouncing off my head, hands grab me, spinning me around, pushing me out into the light. Finally, I look up and see a giant, red-faced nun, shaking her finger, telling me not to run in the corridor. I realize I was lost in the black crepe folds of her habit, tangled in her rosary beads, dangling scissors, and wooden clacker, trapped there like a flightless bird.

I end up not liking nuns much. In third grade I call Sister Mary Coleman an old goat under my breath, and she grabs my arm, shakes it, yanks me toward the door and down the empty arcade toward the boys’ bathroom, where she stiff-arms the old green door, and drags me to the wash trough with its spring-loaded faucets and the soap dispensers you have to jiggle on the bottom to get the Boraxo out. She jiggles out a handful of powder. Open, boy!

I open my mouth and she slaps the powder into it, then cups her hand under the faucet.

Open! Her hand splats over my mouth. Water softens the coarse powder. Now chew, boy!

I hate her. I want to spit it in her face, run out of there, but I remember grandma at home, and what she has taught me about suffering. I start chewing, offering the pain up for the poor souls. I know, at that moment, God loves me more than He loves Sister Mary Coleman.

I never tell anyone at home when I get into trouble because they’d side with the nuns. Instead I tell it in confession on Saturday. Bless me father, it’s been one week since my last confession. I used swear words five times, disobeyed my mom twice, and called Sister Mary Coleman an old goat. I always have little sins to confess, cussing, getting angry, fighting, never the big ones Grandma talks about – missing Mass on Sunday, eating meat on Friday. And definitely never sins of the flesh. I’m not even sure what those are. All I can imagine is blubber jiggling.

It’s hot in the confessional. I rattle off my sins and wait. Father Leonard doesn’t say anything. Then he clears his throat. I can see his mouth working close to the screen. Uh, Greg, do you ever, when you’re in bed, ever rub your penis?

Wow! How does he know about that? I only recently learned how to do that. I thought it was my own discovery. When I say yes, he asks me if it feels good.

Yes, Father, I say, it feels really good.

He lets out a sigh. What you’re doing is very dangerous. It’s called masturbation, and it’s a mortal sin. If you don’t stop right now you could end up in Hell. For your penance say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. And, uh, Greg, do you suppose you could cover the 8:30 Mass tomorrow?

I’m Father’s first-string altar boy. I started out as a torchbearer in the second grade. People told my mother that I looked like an angel on the altar. I wore a cassock and surplice and carried big candles and had to kneel for a long time without getting sick from the incense. Grandma said even the pope probably started out as a torchbearer.

We’re good Catholics. We say grace before meals, night prayers before bed, and after dinner we pray together with the radio. It’s almost time, my mother says, clearing the table. She puts the dishes in the sink and I twist the volume switch on the radio until I hear the sharp snap followed by the hum of tubes heating up. My father and grandfather kneel down. Grandma stays in her chair because of her arthritis, and I slump on the worn wicker chair, my forehead pressed into the wicker backing. This is The Rosary Hour with Father Alvin Wagner, the announcer says.

Weekends, we buy cokes and comics at Caesar’s Soda Fountain, get our hair buzzed at Eldon’s barber shop, hunt for nuts and bolts at Mueller’s Hardware. On the way home we stop at Berthenier’s station and use our gas ration stamps to fill up the brand new Chevy we’ve won at the St. Anselm’s festival.

Tony Giusti and Jim-Boy Pulskamp are my best friends. We play at the little sandbar near the bridge, catching polliwogs in Folgers Coffee cans and use those same cans to pick blackberries, selling them for 25 cents a can. We make arrows from sticker-ended swamp weeds and attack the Hinkley gang up the hill throwing acorns and using garbage can lids as shields. I try to escape the stigma of being an only child and the void of lonely hours when my friends are home with their siblings by cultivating companions, co-conspirators.

I don’t remember the exact moment I become Grandma Mayme’s confidante. I know only the familiarity of her full round face, her stocky frame, the warmth of those hours spent in her room at her knee, shuffling her playing cards, which smell like camphor ice. She reads me tea leaves, gives me pennies and candy, bakes me cookies and blackberry pie. We play whist and rummy and Parchesi. She shows me the holy cards she keeps in an old candy box, the ones the nuns gave her when she was a girl at St. Benedict’s Academy. The cards have doily edges and show Jesus crucified, his heart stabbed with thorns, blood oozing out. The cards have different numbers on them. The plenary indulgence card, with no number, forgives everything. If you recited this prayer and fell over dead, she says, you’d go right to Heaven. In her silky flowery dresses, her crocheted afghan over her shoulders, she teaches me the magic of indulgences, saints days, feast days, first Fridays, novenas. Rubbing Ben- Gay into her shoulders for her acute arthritis, I hear about the sins of the flesh, the redemptive power of the rosary, how self-denial strengthens the soul of a spiritual warrior. Stick out your tongue, she says. If you’re fibbing, there will be a black mark down the middle. Sure enough, I find an ugly black line running down the length of my tongue whenever I lie. She tells me about St. Francis, a rich kid who gave away all his fancy clothes and money and dedicated his life to God and the birds. Greggie, she says, I don’t care if you never make a cent. Just be a saint.

As new people move into the neighborhood, she ranks them on the scorecard of salvation, reserving her harshest judgments for those whose names indicate they should be Catholics, but aren’t practicing. Even my parents do not escape. They enjoy an evening highball and are therefore weak. Tony’s family goes to the 10:30 Mass. Mayme says that makes them not quite as good Catholics as us, because they’re lazy. I find it exhilarating, pigeonholing people into simplistic categories. My grandmother stands at her bedroom window, watching Liz Peck whistle happily in her tomato patch. Turning to me with the offended look of a medieval inquisitor, Mayme shakes her head slowly, pronouncing her anathema: A whistling woman/ and a crowning hen/ bring the old devil/ right out of his den. My stomach sinks. I like Liz, but she’s doomed to Hell.

When her arthritis gets really bad, Mayme offers it up, and I imagine streams of poor souls floating up to Heaven on contrails of Ben-Gay.

I watch my grandfather turn our back yard into an Eden of vegetables. His pleated pants are held up by worn suspenders, and he wears a stained, soft-brimmed hat cocked at an angle. His pipe is clamped between loose dentures, and his shirt is rolled to his elbows. Unlike my grandmother, Peter Kennedy is thin and wiry with high cheekbones that give him the appearance of the Native American Sioux he spent so much time with in North Dakota.

My grandmother’s arthritis keeps her from the basement steps, and when the sun goes down, my grandfather will come into the basement, where he keeps his gardening tools and his stash of outlawed smoking materials hidden in an old Folgers can. Under the steps, he keeps a record of the first rainfall of each year, the first frost, the date of each year’s spring planting. He grew up in the rolling green farmlands of Wabasha township on the Mississippi River, sixty miles south of St. Paul where Irish immigrants farmed land that resembled their native Ireland. As a boy, he delivered groceries in a horse-drawn wagon, and was instructed by his employer to hand his cargo over without resistance to the brash young Indians who frequently waylaid his wagon. He was the first person the Sioux saw with fillings in his teeth, earning him the nickname Hiamuga or Iron Tooth. Later, he owned a trading post in North Dakota, learned to speak Sioux, went to pow-wows, learned their dances, caught tarantulas found in banana bunches delivered to the post and put them on display for his Sioux customers who were mesmerized by these strange prehistoric insects.

I will spend my childhood under the spell of my grandmother’s Catholicism, lost in the black habit and rosary of that Manichean destiny. What I will discover when I finally emerge is that my grandfather’s resonance with the pagan roots of our native Irish Catholicism, and his sensuous bond to the Earthly mother is stronger than a beaded rosary, stronger than thorns and crosses, stronger than kneeling in a cassock for hours on end and praying to the radio, stronger even than that plenary indulgence card that is supposed to send me right to Heaven.

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Part One:

The Joyful Mysteries

Chapter 1: Fat Wimp

When is our fate decided? When do the dominoes that eventually form the patterns of our lives begin to fall? Perhaps for me it began with St. Augustine, my grandmother’s Manichean tendencies, St. Anselm’s and the Catholic neighborhood that raised me. Or perhaps it started with the strange labyrinth of puberty.

1954: Eighth grade. The year of pegger pants, black wing tip shoes with horseshoe tap heels and white painted welts, the year of duck's ass hairstyle with fishhooks dangling over the forehead. The official colors are pink and charcoal. You have to wear your MacGregor windbreaker with the collar up. Belts are skinny, pink suede and black-edged. The ‘chuke look. At first only Bocabella and the class hoods dress this way, but then Scabby, our substitute eighth grade teacher, snatched prematurely from a skin cancer operation, outlaws it, and the rest of us taste the forbidden fruit. I start timidly with the suede belt, then convince my mother I need a charcoal windbreaker. Next thing I know, I’m crashing out of the Junior Bootery in my first pair of horseshoe taps. The sound of that rebellious metal in the St. Anselm’s arcade gives me the same unfamiliar sexual rush I got when I lit illicit fires down by the creek with matches filched from my grandfather’s smoking can.

It’s the year I beg God to make my grandmother better, the year I pray for her to come home from the hospital, but she breaks my heart by dying. The year I beg God to make her better and plead with the poor souls to help, but she dies in a hospital room without saying goodbye to me. It’s also the year my grandfather begins to bloom. He laughs more, shows us Sioux dance steps, drinks an occasional glass of wine with my mother. In school I surprise myself and everyone else by scoring the highest on the scholastic aptitude tests. Scabby sits me in the front of the class, telling my mother he just hasn’t been working up to his potential, calling on me all the time like I’m Einstein’s little brother. That winter, my father comes to my room, most likely goaded by my mother, and gives me the talk. It goes something like this: Uh, Son, you may find that once in a while you’ll be having a dream and you’ll wake up and, um, feel some fluid coming out of your penis. That’s called a ‘nocturnal emission’ and, well, it’s not a sin, even though it feels good. So don’t worry about it.

My dad has handed down to me the only loophole to pleasure he ever discovered as an Irish Catholic.

It doesn’t matter anyway. Though I dress the part, I remain loyal to my grandmother, ignore puberty, deny its urges. I resent my friends as they fall in love, ask girls out, and talk about make-out sessions and the smoothest way to unclasp a bra. When they ignore Scabby’s orders and sign up for Mrs. Preble’s mixed dance lessons, I am the only one, besides Wendell Joost, whose mother insists on puritanical lessons at Arthur Murray, practicing formal dances with matronly instructors twice my age.

1955: Marin Catholic High School. I switch to desert boots, button-down shirts, ivy-league khakis with a belt in the back. But I’m wary of Elvis’ pelvic thrusts. I don’t do the be-pop at mixed dances where the girls cover their hickies with makeup and press their lips against their boyfriends’ necks. I’m still doing the box step with Wendell and joining the ham radio club. I try out for freshman basketball, but the newly arrived Black kids from Marin City are too good, so I wind up sitting on the bench.

A pretty regular existence, except that I haven’t yet held a girl’s hand, asked her to the movies, felt her bra strap in a cool back row seat. Through the years I will wonder what my life would have been like if what happened next never occurred. Would I have forgotten my grandmother’s warnings about the sins of the flesh and cut loose on the dance floor? Learned to thrust my hips? Would I have been different if circumstance had allowed Desire to call my name and I had felt the intoxicating touch of a girl’s lips, the softness of her breasts? Would my fate have changed?

It starts with a cold. Then bright red dots appear on my chest. The next thing I know I’m lying under the bright lights of Marin General Hospital gritting my teeth as they crush my sternum with a needle and suck out the bone marrow to determine what’s causing my idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. My platelet count is 10% of what it should be. My blood isn’t coagulating.