Here Comes Trouble (19 page)

What was special about this night? Every Easter, from then on and for the rest of my life, I would know the bitter answer.

The Exorcism

“K
ICK OUT THE JAMS
, motherfuckers!”
I shouted up the stairwell. O’Malley, my bully of a roommate, slapped me hard across the face.

“Shut the fuck up! Father Waczeski is right there!”

I turned quickly around to see if the priest had heard me, but there was no priest anywhere to be found. O’Malley, who was a year older than me, just wanted to slap me. He laughed his usual sinister laugh, and hit me again.

“Stop it,” I said. “I was just singing that new MC5 song.”

“Then sing the
clean
version, the one they play on the radio—‘Kick out the jams,
brothers and sisters.
’”

What the fuck did he care about a “clean” version? O’Malley was the opposite of anything clean. He was more a version of every mother’s nightmare. What was a thug like him doing at the seminary?

When I was fourteen I decided it was time to leave home. Mostly bored with school since the first grade, but politely biding my time to keep everybody happy, I realized I could do more good for myself and the world (wherever that was) if I became a Catholic priest. I’m not sure of the day when I got “the calling,” but I can guarantee you there was no vision or voice from above, no burning bush or Virgin sighting. Most likely I was just watching the news, probably saw one or both of the Berrigan brothers, the radical Catholic priests, breaking into a draft office and destroying the records of young men who were to be sent to Vietnam, and I said to myself, “Now,
that’s
what I wanna do when I grow up!” I liked the idea of the Action Hero Priest, and I thought I could do that. I liked seeing priests marching with Rev. King and getting arrested. I liked priests helping César Chávez organize the farmworkers. I wasn’t completely sure what it all meant; it just seemed like a decent thing to do. It was pretty basic: you had a responsibility to help those worse off than you. I was never going to play for the Pistons or the Red Wings, so the priesthood seemed like a good second choice.

But first I had to convince my parents to let me leave home. They did not like this idea. These were the people who wouldn’t let me skip first grade, and they were definitely less inclined to let me skip town. But I told them I had “a calling,” and if you were a devout Catholic in those days and your kid told you he had “a calling,” you had better not risk getting in between the Holy Spirit and your only begotten son. They consented, reluctantly.

The seminary training would take twelve years before I could be ordained a priest. Four years of high school, four years of college, and four years of theological training. The high school part was optional, but for those who had the calling, there were two seminaries in Michigan for high school students: Sacred Heart in Detroit and St. Paul’s in Saginaw. It was less than a year after the Detroit riots, so Sacred Heart was out of the question for my parents. St. Paul’s it was.

On the first night after my mother and father dropped me off at the seminary in September 1968, I instantly began to question the wisdom of my decision. My doubts were not driven by the strict rules I had to follow: Up at 5:00 a.m. for prayers, long periods of enforced silence, barred from your room from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., difficult studies (nine weeks spent dissecting just one Shakespeare play), hard labor and chores, and severe punishment for violating any of the rules. Freshmen were prohibited from watching any television or listening to the radio for an entire year. You were strictly confined to the campus—with the exception of 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturdays, during which time you could walk two miles to the strip mall, grab a Whopper, and rush back.

But I was OK with all of that. My trouble was not with the system (at least not at first). It was with the two roommates I had been assigned to share a room with. Mickey Bader and Dickie O’Malley. Mickey and Dickie. “The Ickies,” as I called them (but only to myself). The problem with them being there at the seminary was that neither of them wanted to be a priest. No way. They were into girls, and partying, and smoking and sneaking off campus whenever they could. And pushing me around. They were what the adults referred to as “juvenile delinquents.” They were rich kids, the sons of important men in their communities, and it seemed as if at least Dickie already had a number of run-ins with the law. Their parents decided that perhaps the seminary could straighten them out, and how they got through the intense interview process I had to go through to get into this place was beyond me. I came to the realization that their fathers had probably bought their way in, and the priests were obviously in need of any “charity,” wherever they could find it.

Discovering that this was both a seminary
and
a reform school did not sit well with me, and it was clear to me that I was going to have to endure the constant harassment of Mickey and Dickie if I wanted to be a priest. When they found out I really believed in all this “religion crap,” they were relentless in mocking me as I said my prayers, did my chores, practiced my Latin. They smeared applesauce over my sheets, placed
Playboy
centerfolds in the toilet bowl, and entertained themselves by seeing if a pair of scissors could alter the length of my pants. Although I was bigger than them, I did not want to resort to violence in order to have some peace and quiet, so I kept my distance from them.

There
were
two rules I decided early on that I just couldn’t follow at the seminary, and I knew God would forgive me. In October 1968, the Detroit Tigers were headed to the World Series, and as part of our penance for being freshmen, we were not allowed to watch or listen to the games. I was convinced that this edict did not come from the Almighty, and so I snuck a transistor radio into my room and hid it inside my pillowcase. At night I would lie in bed and listen to the games, muffled as they were, through the pillow’s duck feathers. The day games I missed.

The other rule was that you could not have any food in your room. As they were more interested in feeding our souls than our bodies, I decided to take care of the latter. That year, science had invented the
Frosted
Pop-Tart (“Proof of God’s existence,” I would say). I smuggled in boxes of these heavenly items and I would toast them by placing a sheet of paper on top of my lamp and sitting the Pop-Tart on it. I was eventually discovered by a priest who caught a whiff of burnt strawberry out in the hallway. I was given extra kitchen duties for a week and lost my Saturday afternoon escape privileges for a month.

The other thing I enjoyed doing was hanging out with the senior boys. They had a knack for coming up with ingenious pranks that they loved to play on the holy hierarchy. My contribution to this club was to concoct a powder that replaced the chapel’s incense. It was called a “stink bomb,” and when the altar boy put a scoop of this “incense” onto the hot coal in the censer, it let off the most god-awful stench, a combination of rotten egg odor and a locker room fungus. It cleared the church within minutes.

The other prank, for which I became legendary (but only as “Anonymous,” as I was never discovered), involved an “entry” of mine in the school’s annual science fair. Of course, I had no interest in science (unless science could make a chocolate fudge Pop-Tart, which it eventually did), but I did have an interest in pulling off the best stunt ever.

About an hour before the doors to the seminary’s science fair were to be opened to the public, I quietly entered the exhibit hall and placed my “science project” on one of the tables. It was a simple, plain test tube that contained a clear liquid (in reality, cooking oil). I set it on its stand and placed a placard in front of it. It read:

N
ITROGLYCERINE:

D
O
N
OT
T
OUCH OR
W
ILL
E
XPLODE

It was five minutes before the opening, and I hid nearby so I could watch people’s expressions when they saw the test tube of danger. At that moment, the science teacher, a short nun with thick glasses and in her seventies, came in to make a final pass through the fair to make sure everything was in place and all set to go. She came upon my addition to the fair and was surprised to see something on the table that she hadn’t placed there. She took her glasses off and cleaned them, not exactly sure what this was she was looking at. As she bent over to read the card, she let out a scream and quickly waddled over to the fire alarm box, broke the glass, and pulled the lever.

I was mortified.
⁵
This had gone too far. I got out of there as fast as I could, and as the fire trucks arrived I watched the firemen go inside and retrieve the tube which they could tell was not nitroglycerine. The nuns and the priests apologized—and issued a fatwa on whoever was responsible for this. They never caught the culprit.

There are two types of fear: normal fears that are primal (fear of pain, fear of death), and then there is the fear of Father Ogg.

Ogg taught Latin and German at the seminary. The Church had also christened him with special powers, and he was the only one at the seminary to hold these powers. One night, he gathered together a few of us boys and asked us if we would like to see how these powers could be used. We were already scared of Father Ogg, but no one was going to admit that, and so we all agreed to let him show us.

He took us down into the “catacombs” of the seminary (a series of tunnels under the building) to perform a ceremony only he was allowed to perform. It was called the Rite of Exorcism.

Father Ogg was an exorcist.

It would be another three years before Hollywood would make Linda Blair’s head spin in the William Friedkin film, so all we knew of exorcism was that it was a series of prayers and rituals performed over the body of someone whom Satan had possessed. The devil would be cast out and the victim would be saved. We were told by Father Ogg that he had a “one thousand percent batting average” when confronting Lucifer.

“I always win,” he said.

He told us that he would show us the ceremony but it would only be “pretend,” as none of us had shown any signs of being consumed by evil.

Yes, but wouldn’t this be better, I thought, if there were someone here at St. Paul’s who actually
was
evil? Of course it would! And of course there was.

“Father,” I said with fake sincerity, “before you start, I think Dickie O’Malley is going to be really upset that we left him out of this. He keeps saying he doesn’t believe you’re an exorcist and that he’d like to see you try it out on him. Can I go get him?”

“Sure,” Ogg said, somewhat miffed that anyone would question his devil-disappearing powers. “But make it quick.”

I ran back upstairs and found Dickie where I thought he would be—outside the gym door having a smoke.

“Dickie!”

“Yeah, fuckface, whaddaya want?”

“Father Ogg says he wants you right now!”

“Yeah, well, tell him you couldn’t find me.”

“He said he saw you come out here to smoke, and that if you came now he wouldn’t turn you in.”

Dickie considered the offer of leniency carefully, took his last couple of drags, gave me a tap across the face, and followed me inside and down into the catacombs.

“Welcome, Dickie,” Father Ogg said with a sly grin. “Thank you for volunteering.”

Dickie looked at him with smug-filled puzzlement, but sensing that he was not going to be in trouble if he went along, he stepped forward, unaware of what was to happen next. I could only hope that in about twenty minutes from now there was going to be a new Dickie.

Father Ogg had brought an ominous black duffel bag with a red coat of arms on it and words embossed in Latin that I didn’t understand. He reached down in it and pulled out a shaker filled with holy water, some holy oil, about a half-dozen dried-out olive branches and, um, a leather rope.

“Now, normally, Dickie, I would tie you down so you wouldn’t be able to hurt me,” Father Ogg said to the snickers of those present.

“I ain’t gonna hurt you, Father!” Dickie protested. “And you ain’t gonna tie me up. I was only smoking.”

“Yes, sometimes smoke comes out of the possessed,” Ogg said. “A few have caught on fire. But I don’t think you have to worry about that tonight.”

The exorcist then launched into a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, words and language I had never heard. To see this jabber coming out of his mouth a mile a minute gave me goosebumps. This was the real deal! It scared Dickie, too, and he stood there dumbfounded at what he was witnessing.

“Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei Patris omnipotentis, et in nomine Jesu Christi Filili ejus, Domini et Judicis nostri, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti, ut descedas ab hoc plasmate Dei Dickie O’Malley, quod Dominus noster ad templum, sanctum suum vocare dignatus est!”
Father Ogg continued, spraying holy water all over Dickie. Dickie did not like that.