The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (14 page)

Later came Father Dan, who at first seemed pretty cool. He actually had a degree in engineering and had worked on construction projects before becoming a priest. He was a big, bearish guy, and the altar boys loved him. It turned out he also loved the altar boys—a little too much. He took us on trips to explore the ghost towns around Telluride and swim in the hot springs at Ouray, where he gave us piggyback rides in the pool. He was known to ask inappropriate questions, prying for salacious details when we’d confess our struggles with the usual pre-pubescent temptations. Word of that got out among the young people, including some girls, and we came to realize that Father Dan was a little bit twisted.

My own encounter with him in this regard happened when I confided in him about my ticklishness. I wanted to overcome it because, as I’ve mentioned, Terence often used tickling to torture me. Father Dan suggested he could help, and took me down into the rectory basement and made me disrobe. Then he started touching me all over, assuring me that I could cure my ticklishness if I learned to “relax.” It wasn’t much of a molestation; it was more like a massage. He didn’t touch my genitals, but he saw enough to tell me that, yes, I was indeed circumcised. Was I “traumatized” by this treatment? Actually, I wasn’t. I was so clueless about sexual matters that it never even occurred to me that I was being molested, though of course I was. And I trusted him completely. I was well into my twenties when, after hearing of reports of a sexual abuse scandal involving the church, I thought: So
that’s
what was going on!

What is it about priests and pedophilia? Church officials would like to blame the trend on a few bad apples, but I think it’s much more common than they’ll ever admit. The idiotic celibacy rule undoubtedly contributes to the problem. Being a priest must be a very lonely job. They are expected to counsel people about their most intimate matters, including sexual matters, and yet with rare exceptions they have no experience with sex, relationships, family life, or any of that. I think it twists their personalities in many cases, but not all. I’ve known and learned from priests who never laid a hand on me—decent sorts like Father Hickey, and a few good conversationalists with sharp Jesuit minds. As always it comes down to the individual. Nevertheless, I no longer have any use for the Catholic Church. It is corrupt through and through, as far as I can see, particularly regarding the abuse issue and the cover-ups associated with it. It makes me sick every time I see the pope making some pronouncement on sexuality, gays, abortion, birth control, priestly marriage, or “proper” moral conduct. To have a claim to moral authority, you have to
be
moral. As a nest of pedophiles, the church long ago sacrificed any legitimate claim to that. The sooner it collapses under the weight of its own rot, the better.

Partly because of these early influences, and partly thanks to Terence, who despised Catholicism even more than I do, I’ve lost respect for virtually all organized religions. While they may have addressed the spiritual needs of people at some point in history, they are now largely political institutions that use their false authority and threats of eternal damnation to bludgeon people into conformity and silence. Who needs them?

Given the four-year gap between our births, Terence and I were never students together in the same school. In a town where the primary and secondary school systems were divided into four-year terms, I started junior high in 1961 just as Terence, then fourteen, moved on to high school. Being very much in Terence’s shadow, I probably benefited from this separation, which gave me a chance to stand on my own among my peers. I’m not sure what would have happened otherwise. Terence might have been protective of me, his little brother; or he might have piled on with older kids to make my life harder. I certainly would have been viewed as “Terry McKenna’s brother,” but since no other student in PJHS had been in Terence’s class, I had no reputation to defend. The teachers were a different story. With his exceptional intelligence and aggressiveness, Terence had been on their radar, and some surely had developed a dislike for him. Then again, others could see there was something special about him, despite how obnoxious he could be at times.

Quieter and more easygoing, I must have been a pleasant surprise to the teachers who had survived Terence. Though I was shy and well behaved, a kid who kept his light under a hat, some teachers discerned that I too was intelligent—and that I often judged myself in comparison to my more flamboyant brother. They encouraged me to be myself and not imitate Terence, and even today I remain grateful for their efforts to help me find my own path. One of them was Mrs. Campbell, from whom I took courses in both fifth and sixth grade. Mrs. Campbell and her husband, Cal, a science teacher, were really my first academic mentors. Mrs. Campbell had also taught Terence and may well have become fed up with him. Or so Terence believed, having often come home to report, “Mrs. Campbell despises me.” She was kind to me, however, and we had a couple of heart-to-heart discussions whose drift was that I stop trying to be like Terence. This was easier said than done at a time when I still worshipped my big brother. I do think she helped me develop enough self-esteem to realize I was as smart as Terence, but different.

Fifth grade was also the year I became aware of my own sexuality, or rather, that such feelings could be directed toward other people. Until then, my erotic activities were solitary and sometimes aided by the “men’s magazines” that my father occasionally brought home from his trips and hid (not very well) in his suitcase. At the time, my nascent sexual identity was ambiguous. I was definitely attracted to the opposite sex, but like many males I went through a phase where I wasn’t sure whether I was drawn to my own gender or not. In fact, it took a few years and some “close encounters” before I understood that I was straight. Why even discuss this? Well, for one thing, I believe it’s normal for boys to wonder about, and come to terms with, their sexual identities. Most Americans now accept that being homosexual is no cause for shame. Fifty years ago, however, it was still regarded as a deep, dark, scandalous secret to be concealed at all costs. I agree with most current informed opinion on child development that, with possible rare exceptions, one is born homosexual, or heterosexual, and that the main determinants are genetic. Homosexuality is an ingrained biological trait, not a choice, unlike what certain fundamentalist moralists would have us believe. That said, it is not unusual for the young to dabble in homosexual urges or even activity in that period before sexual identity has solidified.

I mention this in light of what may have been my first “love,” though, if so, it was distinctly platonic. In a roundabout way, I can thank Mrs. Campbell for my encounter with Gerard as well. She was somehow related to a family from Chile who spent that year living with her. I’m not sure which if either of Gerard’s parents was actually Chilean, let alone what led them to Paonia; I do know he was their only child. As fellow fifth-graders we had some classes together, and I soon became completely obsessed. Gerard was the most exotic creature I’d ever seen. It was his foreignness that fascinated me—a boy from a faraway land, better educated, more polite, and more mature than my uncouth peers. He dressed well and spoke well. He had a very pale complexion and dark lashes. He might have grown up to be gay for all I know, but I saw no hint of this, and would not have known what to look for anyway. He was to my mind the very paradigm of sophistication, and I aspired to be like him, if possible, since I could not actually
be
him. Though my attraction wasn’t overtly sexual, at some subliminal level I suppose it was, even if such emotions never penetrated my conscious awareness. In fact, for much of his stay we had no relationship; I was much too shy. We eventually developed a tentative friendship, though I never let on how completely smitten I was. By the end of the school year, he and his parents were gone. We kept in touch for a while, our letters growing more infrequent until our correspondence faded away.

With the arrival of fall and the start of sixth grade, Gerard was all but forgotten in favor of other crushes, this time on those wonderful, exotic, and scary creatures, girls! Not that I had much luck or confidence with them. My next obsession was Liz, a lovely blonde. Her family had recently moved to Paonia and ended up in my grandfather’s house, joining a series of tenants who had rented the place since his death a few years earlier. That she lived just a half block away only intensified my longing. I had a job at the time delivering the
Daily Sentinel
, published in Grand Junction and trucked up to Paonia every night. Dropping the paper at Liz’s house was the highlight of my route; there was always the chance I’d see her hanging out on the porch swing. And when I did see her, in all her lissome, long-legged loveliness, it would keep me charged up for days. I could literally think of nothing else and lived in a perpetual state of unrequited longing. Besides being attracted, I was also terrified and had no idea how to convey what I felt. I invested great effort in pretending to be indifferent, fearing I’d say or do some foolish thing that would blow my cover. I don’t know whether she was ever aware of how I felt. This was the first time I was “head over heels” in love, an intense state bordering on pathology. Though erotic obsession is by no means normal, it is a state that most of us long for. Indeed, I feel sorry for those who have never been overwhelmed by such desire, even though it is a kind of exquisite torture, especially if those emotions are not returned.

After the school year ended, Liz and her family moved away, leaving me heartbroken, for about a week. It didn’t take long before I found another girl to obsess over. My third debilitating crush also remained a secret, though a secret I kept less well. Rosalie, the daughter of a local coal miner, was a pretty brunette. She also happened to be Catholic, so I got the double charge of seeing her in school and in church. I’m sure she was a nice Catholic girl, which didn’t stop me from routinely entertaining sexual fantasies about her while I was supposedly praying. I was no less terrified of Rosalie than of my earlier crushes, and I was too shy to say much beyond a few murmured pleasantries. To say more might have revealed what I was really thinking and wanting, or so I feared. But I couldn’t forever keep those feelings to myself. I decided to write her an anonymous letter, which I did—and immediately regretted sending the moment I dropped it in the mail. I was mortified. Then I realized in my nervousness I’d forgotten to put a stamp on it. I’d been saved! I allowed myself to believe the letter never reached her. Thinking back on life in our small town, I now guess it probably did reach her, and that poor Rosalie was either too appalled or too kind to let on that it arrived. Or maybe she really didn’t know who had sent it.

It’s strange to think back on these ancient episodes of puppy love and the anxiety and guilt and longing and fear they caused in me. Being in love, at least at that age, on the cusp of puberty, was a kind of mental illness that rendered me dysfunctional for months. Outwardly, I was fine; I did my homework, went to school, and behaved more or less normally. But in truth I was like a zombie, just going through the motions. My real life, my inner life, was preoccupied with the bittersweet contemplation of my beloved—bittersweet because the object of my desires knew nothing, and could know nothing, about feelings I was afraid to express. Later, of course, I’d have relationships that were more mature in that they led to actual connection and communication, even consummation, but they too could bring anxiety and frustration. I suppose all this is completely within the range of normality, and that almost everyone has similar experiences as they grow up. Not that crossing the threshold into adulthood makes it any easier. If anything, love only becomes more complicated and problematic. Being “in love” is an altered state, as much or more than any state induced by a psychoactive drug. With its radical and prolonged shifts in hormone balances and neurotransmitter fluxes, reflected in behavioral and cognitive responses, the neurophysiology of love is a rich area for exploration, as neuroscience is discovering.

In a simpler sense, it’s strange to think back upon those young, lovely girls and realize they’re now nearing old age, as I am. What have they felt and experienced over the past decades, what grief and joy? It’s hard to imagine. I hope that life has been kind to them. I wish all of them well, and thank them for what they meant to me, even if they never knew it.

Chapter 12 - The California Crusade

While I was discovering the joys and frustrations of unrequited love in the sixth grade, Terence was in tenth grade and already plotting his breakout. At some point the year before, he’d resolved to get out of stifling, conservative Paonia and finish high school in California while living with Aunt Tress and Uncle Ray. Since then, he’d spared no effort to convince our parents to let him go. Most people with such an agenda would have tried to be extra nice, to use charm and persuasion to bring their parents around to seeing the merits of the idea. This was not Terence’s style. Instead, he amped up his usual, steady drumbeat of obnoxious behavior, and why not? That had always worked before.

He single-mindedly pursued this campaign throughout his sophomore year. There was a new math teacher at the school whom I’ll call RJ. RJ was an unconventional soul, or what was known as a “beatnik” back then, before the invention of hippies. He was a smart person, a bachelor, kind of pudgy, straight, harmless, perhaps lonely and insecure. But he’d read a lot of books and had many funny ideas—meaning liberal ideas. He did not fit into the red-meat, gung-ho, sports-obsessed culture of Paonia High School any more than Terence did, and they immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits. Despite RJ’s basic decency, our parents, especially my father, were quite suspicious of Terence’s friendship with him. I don’t know what his concern was, beyond not wanting Terence to be exposed to his unconventional ideas. It was the non-intellectual’s distrust of the egghead. RJ was also the art teacher, and he worked with Terence on various projects, like an eight-by-four foot mural in the style of Jackson Pollock—“Looks like somebody spilled a bunch of paint and then rolled in it,” grumbled our father—that Terence insisted on hanging in our bedroom.