The Three Sisters (3 page)

By my junior year in college, learning from my years of reading, I had realized that the past held few if any truths. Pre-twentieth-century art, music, literature, and ideas were written for a completely different human race, one ignorant of, and divorced from, our modern industrial way of life. Their ideas should be buried with the dead societies that created their boringly baroque ideas and art. The avant-garde was where the future lay, and that was all I would concern myself with. I will admit though, some of the past was worth saving—Aristophanes, Hume, Twain, and their ilk—but only as a means to an end: advancing the present into the future.

From Dada to Abstract Expressionism to Aleatory to the Theater of the Absurd, I took it all in. Luckily enough for me, my college was big enough that I found a dozen other adventurous souls who shared my enlightened view of the future. Our little group of eclectic explorers bore the burden of the avant-garde upon
our shoulders.

The college I was at had a small Newman Club for committed collegiate Catholics, who spent most of their youthful years behaving more like St. Augustine than Cardinal Newman. Some of my friends and I set up a Joyce Club as a refuge for lapsed Catholics, and during our years there, we successfully filched several members of the Newman Club and got them to join our own. Whenever this occurred, I felt the great joy the father in the Bible must have experienced when the Prodigal Son returned home, or the shepherd had found his one lost sheep. Working with this close-knit group of friends and learning from each other made college worthwhile. Moreover, there were hundreds of naïve young freshmen each year ripe for corrupting whom I could gird up my loins for, exchange jelly for juice, and turn them into cynics with amazing ease.

Academic life also gave me the opportunity to express my artistic talents in ways that impressed my coterie of college friends. When it snowed, a not infrequent event in Chicago, we created chionic masterpieces that lasted until the sun melted them away. Some were conventional, such as
Marie Antoinette Gets the Guillotine
, but when the college was too cheap to build new sidewalks for its students we put together a column of legless snowmen and snowwomen sitting on their carts and pushing themselves along with paper signs on them saying, “Chicago’s disabled demand new sidewalks!” Thus we married the avant-garde to
social activism.

We would also create living art, recreating and transmogrifying great works of the past. The one that got me and my fellow artists into real trouble was when we recreated Da Vinci’s
Last Supper
with me
in puris naturalibus
as
The Naked Maja
recumbent upon the table in front of Christ and his disciples. If the college officials had complained about the anachronistic juxtaposition of Da Vinci’s Cenacle and Goya’s Ode to Pubic Hair as the Christ and his disciples argued over who was going to pay thirty pieces of silver for me, I would have understood their objections, but instead they complained about my full frontal nudity, even though I was as faithful to Goya’s original as I could be. Sure, Billy Sunday wouldn’t have liked it, but he had died decades before. We referred to our masterpieces as Mama Art, the indirect descendent of
Dada Art.

That artistic milestone didn’t get me kicked out of college, but my next creation was the millstone that did. Several of the girls I knew back in Catholic School attended our college, and had achieved their greatest ambition in life and joined a sorority as soon as they could. Not all the sorority girls were mindless matrons, but for the ones who made sorority life their primary obsession in life, it was a sign that they were sliding down a slippery slope into a lifeless, normal marriage, ready to follow in the footsteps of
their mothers.

With one of the biggest fraternity-sorority dances of the year coming up, I decided to enlighten some of my former Catholic School classmates by creating a Masterpiece of Mama Art. While they were away at class, I sneaked into their rooms and got the three dresses they had bought especially for the dance. That night, I got three crosses I had created using my carpenter skills, nailed each of their dresses to the crosses, and planted the crucified dresses in front of their sorority house. I called the work,
The Modern Golgotha
, and envisioned it joining
Nighthawks
and
American Gothic
at The Art Institute of Chicago, or even being displayed at the Museum of Modern Art one day in a retrospective. I always enjoyed going to MoMA, but I got kicked out one time when I spun Marcel Duchamp’s
Bicycle Wheel
. I knew Marcel wouldn’t mind, but the minimum-wage
guards did.

Unfortunately, the anti-art critics of the college seized upon this to get K kicked out of college. Instead of admiring my artistic creativity, they put me before their inquisition and, like Christ and Sophocles, condemned me for trespassing and for burglary rather than admiring the results of my creativity. And all this after I even offered to sew up any tears in the dresses the nails
had created.

At my hearing, it seemed like every sorority girl, every frat brother, every mother and father, every cousin, every nephew, every in-law, every square in the country was there to assail me. Men have no idea what women can be like when they are by themselves, for behind the innocent chit-chat of some sorority girls exist the most devious minds ever placed upon
this planet.

The sorority sisters had taken me before the committee in the past, but this time the rats hit me with every story they could tell. Some even made up stories about things I had never done, though I wish I had. I put up a marvelous defense and tried to show my inquisitors the light, but it was no use. I was forced to end my college
days prematurely.

Getting kicked out of college didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would since I was getting tired of school anyway. When I originally entered, I had this grand idea that professors were interested in new ideas and were trying to discover all the different things in the world that make life fun. Naïve me. Academics abhor originality. All they were interested in was creating clones that would do the same kind of research and investigate the same ideas they were interested in. If you didn’t fit into their paradigm, you didn’t exist. Period. Anyway, I had gotten what I wanted out of college, so I was happy
to leave.

Unfortunately, I had no job and no money. Though I didn’t like the idea, I moved in with my mother and father until I could afford to live on my own. Being kicked out of school, not finding a decent job, and not having (or wanting) a husband gave my father the chance to rub in my failure every time we met so he could ignore his own failures.

My ecophobia soon reached such intolerable levels that I began considering going into the nunnery. I know this is hard to believe, but I honestly thought there were ways I could help the Church join the twentieth century. I actually had this bizarre idea I could change the Church from within.

I remembered how much I hated Catholic School, but how much I had enjoyed entertaining my classmates when the sisters were gone from the room. I had endured Catholic School, and I knew what it could and should be like, so I convinced myself that if I could put up with the convent for a year or two, I could spend the rest of my life, or at least a few years, reforming Catholic School from within its very bowels. I knew every trick in the book the terrorists in training, as the sisters referred to us in junior high, could think of, and if my students even thought about misbehaving, I could stop them before they converted their plans into reality.

My first choice for a Catholic career would have been to become an exorcist. I had seen
The Exorcist
when it first came out in
1973
, and let me tell you, if I had been in that house with Linda Blair, she would have known that she had met her match. If she had thrown up on me, I would have slapped that little bitch so hard, her head would have spun around like a top until it levitated off her torso. I knew I had more balls than either Jason Miller or Max Von Sydow, and after I was done with her, she would have been begging for mercy. Fortunately for the possessed of the world, the Catholic Church doesn’t allow nuns to become exorcists, and a movie version of
Coito the Exorcist
was never made. This was just another example of how equal opportunity would have helped the Catholic Church to fight evil in
the world.

I told a priest I had gotten “the calling” to become a nun, and he sent me to some nuns. I met with the sisters, and being the inquisitive type that I am, I asked them what was expected of a postulant. The sisters told me they expected a nun to have the seven cardinal virtues: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility. A nun should be between sixteen and forty with a spirit of heroic generosity and common sense; be in reasonable health; have stability and a desire to give oneself utterly and unconditionally to God; be able to get along with others; be distinguished by Christ-like charity; have a limpid simplicity of the soul, selflessness, unquestioning loyalty, prudent zeal, an orderly mind, gracious courtesy, an adaptable disposition, solid piety, and the saving grace of a good sense of humor. It was Academy Award time. Feigning repentance from my wicked past and throwing in a few lies, I told them that was me all over, and a month later I was accepted into
their order.

To be honest, I was of two minds about going into the convent. The optimistic side of me, the part that was full of youthful determination and ambition said I could succeed. After all, Vatican II had been introduced ten years before, and we were living in the modern age, the
1970
s, when the Church might actually replace a medieval church with a modern church. Then there was the pessimistic side of me which was convinced of the futility of my Icarian ambitions. If I went into the convent, I would be fighting two thousand years of established hierarchy, and this was certain to be a lost cause.

I felt like I was in one of those cartoons where the angel and devil whispered in the character’s ears trying to convince their alter ego of their point of view. I wavered back and forth until the week before I entered, and finally decided to go through with it. I was still young, and if my worst fears were realized, I could always leave and change the world in some other way. Everything else in the world was changing, so why couldn’t the Catholic Church?

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. A thousand
times wrong.

My stay at the convent was a sobering cold shower. I had thought Catholic school was oppressive and boring enough to give sleeping sickness to a neurotic, but being in a coma was probably more exciting than living in a convent. Nothing but unconscious, masochistic self-hatred could have driven me to torture myself
like that.

The whole process of initiating a nun is designed to destroy a woman’s individuality. She is given a standardized uniform (the bandeau and coif can give one the most terrible migraines) and receives a new name; her hair is cut; personal belongings are looked down upon; she has to ask for everything; she is fed propaganda; and she is told her past is dead. Marine boot camp would have been paradise by comparison.

Trying to dehumanize a bull-headed person such as me was bad enough, but when I confessed to the Mother Superior and had to kiss the floor after she gave us penance, I knew my stay at the convent would not last long. Believe me, cloistered K hated life in
the convent.

What was life like as a nun? I did nothing but manual slave labor, washing, cleaning, praying, learning religious propaganda, and making special convent clothing for me and my fellow sisters, some of which we sold to pious Catholics. The convent bought special materials to make leather tongs, haircloth shirts, or any other clothes ye holy medieval minchen used to wear. My convent wasn’t very progressive, and all those special materials cost a lot. So the convent ended up spending half the money we made on the clothes of paupers. It would have been a lot cheaper if we had just bought our habits from Sears or Kmart, but that would have been too simple. Instead we killed ourselves to make money to live in clothing made for
papal paupers.

We rose at
5
:
00
A.M. That alone was enough to make me an atheist. At
5
:
30
we had thirty minutes of mental prayer followed by Mass and Communion, breakfast, more prayer, manual labor, more prayer and a silent supper for us while another nun read to us from the Bible. (The food was terrible, and we often got diarrhea, since God’s culinary skills left something to be desired. Forgive me father. I confess that to add some spice to life, I once put pepper in the other nuns’ food and waited for them to sneeze. What a mess!). After supper, more prayer, work and recreation, more prayer, and bed. I was bored
to tears.