Confirmation
In which a rogue wave looms
The Society of St. Vincent de Paul
I was in eighth grade. I was twelve. Tracey was probably also twelve? Maybe thirteen? She’d done that thing that some girls do. She’d grown a foot taller than me over the middle school leg of The Race of Life. I’d done that thing that some boys do. I’d grown no taller. Rather, noticeably wider.
My dad had done that thing that many, many dads do. As we raked leaves together in the back yard, apropos of nothing, he tried on his “best friend” hat.
It’d only been about a year since he and my mom had separated and he’d moved into the spare bedroom of a friend’s house.
My parents hadn’t quite ironed out the finer points of their new separation of duties. (They never would.) For the time being, Dad was still at our house often enough, doing “dad” things, guiding us boys in The Boy Arts, such as raking the leaves.
“Tracey, huh?” he said.
“Mm,” I said.
“Tracey.” he said.
He made a knowing face. I felt a little nauseated.
That year was the lead up to my Confirmation. If you don’t know, Confirmation is the Catholic sacrament where you join The Church of your own free will. Your parents baptize you when you are an infant and promise to raise you Catholic. But long about twelve or thirteen, you promise God that you’ll take it from there.
You know, as the rational, totally-done-pruning, adult-brained person that you surely are.
Confirmation is a big deal. It’s like a Bar Mitzvah. But without the displays of wealth or the fun.
Anyway, community service was but one of the things on the long, long checklist of special tasks we children needed to complete ahead of our big adult-now day. As such, I’d volunteered at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store affiliated with our Parish.
St. Vincent thrift stores are very much like Goodwill thrift stores, except that they are operated by Catholics. Tracey was the other Confirmation candidate volunteer from my public school who just so happened to be doing her part there at the St. Vincent’s at the same time that I was.
I guess I must’ve let my guard down with Dad at some key juncture. I must’ve rambled on a little too much about Tracey. About how “cool” and “nice” she was.
“Have I met Tracey?” he said.
“Mm,” I said.
“Yes?” he said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know.”
I’ve written before about my dad’s rage. About how explosive and terrifying it could be. This isn’t one of those essays though.
For much of my young, waking life, my dad was the most amazing person I knew. He was the funniest. The funnest. The coolest. The smartest. The most interesting. He was also my number one puzzle to solve: How can I get the best of him without triggering the worst of him?
When he asked me if he had ever met Tracey, I was just doing that thing that many adolescents do. I was expressing a deep, deep discomfort with sexuality—with the very idea of like-liking girls, though I had been fantasizing about doing hugs and kisses to Alyssa Milano and Judith Light for quite a while by the time I was in eighth grade. Fantasizing about them separately, I should say. And rarely on the same night. I was a Catholic, after all. But this is what the world can do to us as our little baby brains are still hard at work pruning themselves—it can deliver us two inappropriate-to-overlap loves of our lives in a single sitcom.
Anyway, I was doing that thing that many adolescents do. Under interrogation by an adult, I was denying (badly) that girls appealed to me or even existed in any way whatsoever. But I was also trying not to piss off my dad, who, more than once up to that point in my life, had loudly stage-whispered (scream-whispered) to my mom his concern that I might turn out gay without proper intervention and/or the discontinuation of certain perceived coddling behaviors on her part.
This wasn’t a “send him to someone who can fix him” situation. That technology wasn’t available to Catholics. At least, I don’t think it was. Not in 1994. Or maybe it was? Maybe it was available to rich Catholics flirting with evangelicalism? Are there rich Catholics? Who can say.
What I do know is that my dad handled his “oh no, what if boy gay?” insecurities by expressing them to my mom while I was well within earshot. It wasn’t out of the question for him to underscore such a communiqué by punching a hole in the wall. This still isn’t one of those essays though.
What I’m getting at is that saying a grievous thing to a third party with the intention of it being overheard was our charming Catholic way of effecting change within the family. Brutal. Subtle. Permanent. Affordable.
Eventually, Dad stopped pestering me about Tracey on that particular autumn day and did whatever grownups do when they waltz back into the house they no longer sleep in and in so doing have left you alone, still raking leaves in the backyard. He probably congratulated my brother on being appropriately tall and having a girlfriend. Why hadn’t my brother been out there raking leaves with us? Maybe he had been. He probably had been, actually. Memory is weird.
Alone was good, welcome, but the seed had been planted. Alone, I was free to think, but now I was thinking about Tracey. About her very big eyes. And about her roguishly short hair—mousy and curly. Very Greta Garbo.
I shoved a big fat wad of leaves into the black plastic liner of our old-timey, metal, Oscar-the-Grouch-style garbage can.
I could be Tracey’s Clarke Gable. Couldn’t I? Except that I was short. And chubby. And blonde. And effeminate. And instead of finger waves and a pencil-thin mustache, my barber’s dowry would include a peak 1994 silky butt cut.
Very White Jesus
When I was a little younger—maybe eight—I’d drawn a picture of Jesus. I’d used colored pencils because I was serious. This was—absolutely—A Very White Jesus. I’m sorry. I didn’t know any better. It was a self portrait, frankly. It was me. But with long hair and a halo and a beard. The kind of tall, handsome “me” that maybe I could be someday if I kept growing up. The kind of me that a girl like Tracey might want to do hugs and kisses to. Someday. Maybe. If I kept growing up.
My mom absolutely fucking loved this picture I’d drawn of Very White Jesus. She cherished it. She put it in a thin, brassy frame. It must have proven something to her. Perhaps Very White Jesus could show the world that in spite of her flaxen-haired baby boy saying things like “there is no God” and “I don’t believe in God” and “none is this makes any sense” over and over and over since he was very little, that maybe—just maybe—there was a believer hidden in him somewhere. A tiny little diamond.
Maybe Very White Jesus reassured her that she was doing a good job.
In any event, Very White Jesus was always around—omnipresent, if you like. At one point, he was propped up on an end table in the living room. Later, he was hanging on the wall in the dining room.
Very White Jesus was, you know, like, just okay. He was pretty good. He was a B minus Child’s Drawing of a Very White Jesus. The kind of drawing one might see their kid generate and think, “Maybe I should sign this one up for art classes or something.”
My skill as a figurative artist may have been slightly above average, but it wasn’t mind blowing or anything. In fact, the thing I remember the most about this particular Jesus was that he had very, very small hands. And on those very small hands, he had long, spindly fingers with nubby fingertip pads like an alien. He was so earnest though—the way his strange, tiny hands were pressed together in prayer as he looked up to his Father in heaven, barely holding it together, pretending to be ready for whatever that psychopath asked him to do next.
Before Mom elevated Very White Jesus by showcasing him in that brassy frame, he was just one of many drawings in one of those cheap, spiral-bound artist’s pads you find at Michael’s.
One day, my bully was hanging out at my house. Let’s call him Jake. Jake was friends with my brother—that’s how he got in. Bullies are like that. They’ll divide your House. They’re capricious shitheads.
Jake found my sketch book. I’d left it out in plain sight. It had never occurred to me to hide it.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Give it back!” I said.
Et cetera.
I don’t think that I need to dramatize this. We’ve all seen this futile struggle for power in one movie or another.
The thing about this sketch pad, aside from it having a Very White Jesus with strangely tiny hands front and center on page one, was that it was also, maybe, kind of my diary. There were some big feelings in there. Some deep thoughts. Even some… poems.
Jake saw prey. He saw an opening and went full tilt. He made me sit and listen. Page by page, he went through my most vulnerable stuff and told me what he thought about each and every thing he found in there. He laughed and laughed.
Jake would recount this violation in mixed company for years. I lived in dread.
Here’s an uncomfortable set of facts about Jake: he was the funniest guy in the neighborhood, and—honest to God—he was one of the best artists I knew as a kid. He was really, truly, incredibly talented. So when he flipped through my art and died laughing—when he called me a f***** for the n-teenth time—I really took it all to heart. Perhaps not especially the f***** part, but definitely the f***** part. Something was wrong with me and now everyone would know.
Much later, I would get the feeling that Jake had had a much rougher childhood than I’d had. After those first few years of haunting me, he’d really mellowed out. He’d seemed to anyway. He’s started smoking a ton of pot once pot had become available to him.
I don’t know if pot fixed him or if he’s still a shithead, but I don’t hold a grudge. I haven’t talked to him in decades. These days, I’m more pissed at Jake’s dad and at all of the Jake’s Dads that run businesses and hold public office the world over.
No, I don’t hold a grudge, but holding a grudge and reliving the stabbing sensation that birthed the grudge are two different things.
For the purposes of this story, I’ll say this: Jake wasn’t the only teenager to call me a f***** when I wasn’t quite a teenager myself, but he was the neighborhood’s most prominent teenager to call me a f*****. It hurt more coming from him than from anyone else. And along with a lot of other forces at work, it turned me inward. Way, way inward.
Good Will Hunting
After my parents separated, my brother and I lived with my mom full time. Dad became one of those 90s dads that swooped in on the weekends to take us hiking or to the movies. I never had a second place to live with a race car bed. Divorced dad race car beds are for rich kids, I’m told.
Thus, my brother and I saw a ton of movies. So. Many. Movies. I mean, a whole fucking lot of them. And so, so many of them were entirely inappropriate for children. We loved it. This was the silver lining of an angry divorce.
These are some of the best memories I have of my dad. The movie theater was a peaceful place. It was sacred to me. It still kind of is. Dad taught us to talk about movies—not just to watch them but to engage with them. To thumbs up or thumbs down them in more and more sophisticated ways as we got older. If there were songs, he taught us how to sing them on the way home, unashamedly. He taught us how to love the movies. To be movie guys. To be guys who loved movies.
Yes, he had his faults as a parent. Some major ones. There were an awful lot of things that he didn’t bring to the table. But he brought this sort of stuff—movies, museums, music, the glory of nature—in total fucking spades. I imagine he would have been a great brother or a great friend—the very best—as long as you never got a glimpse of the guy who lost his temper in his home life. And I don’t think very many people did.
In 1997, I was fifteen. I had grown a foot taller, I’d lost twenty pounds, and I’d been photographed going to homecoming with an actual girl—two years in a row.
Dad took my brother and me to see Good Will Hunting on a cold December day. And, of course, in Good Will Hunting, there is that scene. That fucking scene. The scene where Will is in Sean’s office. And Will finally opens up and it all comes out. And he describes the abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his foster father.
I looked up that famous dialogue. I was surprised to find that it’s as dry as a piece of toast without Williams’ and Damon’s performances to fill it with pathos:
Sean: It’s not your fault.
Will: Yeah, I know.
Sean: It’s not your fault.
Will: I know.
Sean: No, you don’t. It’s not your fault.
Will: Don’t fuck with me, Sean. Not you.
Sean: It’s not your fault.
When the movie ended and the lights came up, we were all a little shook.
When we stood and stretched, Dad gave me a great big bear hug. And he wouldn’t let go.
“It’s not your fault,” he said.
“Dad, stop,” I said.
“It’s not your fault,” he said.
“I know, cut it out,” I said.
“It’s not your fault,” he said.
“Fucking stop,” I said.
I remember feeling embarrassed. Like, what the fuck does this old weirdo think he’s doing? In one sense, this is very, very basic mortified teenager stuff.
But a rogue wave loomed. I didn’t fully understand it at the time. I didn’t understand what I was feeling. I didn’t really even fully understand what I had just seen.
I can’t remember if he tried the same dialogue on my brother. Did he really try the same bit on each of us, one right after the other? Right there in the theater with the credits rolling? Or did he somehow hug us both at the same time? Maybe he tried the dialogue in the car on the way home?
It’s all a blur now.
I don’t remember everything, but I do remember feeling both “thank God that hot crisis is over” and “I guess Dad’s healed now?” at the same time. Let me tell you: That is a weird-ass feeling.
I’ve revisited that moment many, many times as I’ve gotten older. What was Dad thinking? What was really going on in his mind when he tried out that dialogue? Did he realize the extent of the harm he’d caused? Just the other day, the memory came to me again. But this time I extended the scene. I wrote new dialogue.
In this version, Dad says, “It’s not your fault.”
And I say, “What isn’t?”
“It’s not…” he says.
“What?” I say. “What’s not my fault?”
“I don’t understand,” he says.
“What did you do?” I say.
“It’s not your-” he starts again, but I cut him off.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” I say. “What did you do? Say it out loud, you fucking coward. What’s ‘it’? What’s not my fault? What did you do?”
He starts to turn purple, clench his fists.
“Are you going to scream at me?” I say. “Throw something? Break something? In front of all these people? Are you finally going to hit me? Go on, get it over with. What’s not my fault? What did you do?”
“I-”
“Do you really think you’re Robin Williams?” I say. “Did we watch the same fucking movie? You can’t be Robin Williams and Will’s foster dad at the same time. Can you? You can’t. That doesn’t make any fucking sense. Who the fuck are you?”
The Smell of Old Brick Buildings when It Rains
Back at age twelve, a foot shorter and twenty pounds heavier, I step out of my mom’s car and into the church parking lot. It’s a cool, gray, drizzly day. I walk down a short path from the church and into the little school. Mom drives off. Once I settle into the classroom, I’m informed that tonight we have a special opportunity. Father so and so will be taking our confessions in the church proper. Another good practice to check off on our Road-to-Confirmation checklist.
I feel hot panic welling up.
I don’t want this. I don’t believe in this. I don’t remember how to do this. I can never remember all the things you’re supposed to say and the order you’re supposed to say them in. Goddammit. I hate this. I hate all of you.
The students begin to file out of the classroom. Maybe a dozen of us. We walk in the cool rain toward the church. Tracey gives me a smile and a little wave. Tracey…
I try to smile back but it’s impossible. I linger, letting myself fall to the back of the line.
When I see my chance, I make a break for it. I run around the side of the church. I sit on the mulch against the brick wall between a couple of juniper bushes. I cry and cry. I feel my clothes slowly soaking up the rain. My jacket is still in the classroom.
I sit there for an hour, shivering, until I spot my mom’s car turning into the lot from the main road. I run to intercept her before she comes around the front of the church. Startled, she stops the car. I get in the passenger seat.
“What happened?” she says. “You’re soaking wet! Are you okay? Where’s your jacket?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.