PART
II
In part one, I told you all about how my father had "the talk" with me. In this installment...well, things get Insanely Catholic.
Time
passed and like most teenage boys, I became further interested in the opposite sex
but was completely baffled by them. It didn’t help that I wasn’t a cool kid or
didn’t have the nicest clothes...or in hindsight, any self-confidence at all.
That made it especially hard to talk to a girl, let alone ask one on a date.
Meanwhile,
I was investigating anatomy. It was as self-paced program of study with no
defined outcome. I could have gone to my Dad and asked more questions, but the
stick figures just didn’t answer the mail. If the internet had existed back in those
days, I could have simply done what kids do today and searched for nude women
on the computer, but we weren’t so luck and forced to resort to more old
fashioned means.
When
I was about fourteen, I had gotten a few old Playboy magazines from a friend who
stole them from his brother and decided to hide them in my bedroom. The house
we lived in needed a lot of work and my bed sat against a wall that was nothing
but brown paneling over studs; no insulation or drywall. I slid my bed over,
pulled the paneling off the bottom of the wall and concealed my stash of
illicit magazines between two studs. No one would find them here, I thought.
It
wasn’t more than two weeks and my mother somehow found them and went absolutely
ape shit. She waived the books around, crazed look in her eyes, like she’d
found some some horrible bestiality porn mags.
In a screechy mothering tone, I was told how disappointed she was in me for
having these “dirty books” and what my father would do to me when he found out.
She also broke out the “you’re going to go blind if you’re touching yourself”
chestnut and “God is watching you and he’s not happy.”
I
was ashamed, not because my mother had found my Playboys, but I feared God may
have been watching me do unclean things to myself. Should I got to Confession?
I mean, that’s what all of us good Catholic boys were supposed to do when we
did bad things. Was I going to Hell for looking at pretty plastic enhanced
girls? Was saying a thousand Hail Marys and five hundred Our Fathers going to
save my black soul from endless torture in the pit? Looking back, I’m pretty
glad I decided not to go to Confession because the young hip priest we all
looked up to turned out to be an unabashed pedophile and defrocked by the
Church.
At
the time, the thought never occurred to me how my mother had found them. I have
to say I felt that they were hidden pretty damn well. She was like frigging
Gunny Foley in “An Officer & A Gentlemen,” knowing exactly where Mayo had
hid contraband in the ceiling. Did my little brother rat me out (probable)? Did
she have x-ray vision (less than probable)? I may never know, but what I did
know was that she was snooper. Unfortunately, I didn’t figure this out until
much later in life when if it had occurred to me at fourteen, I may have saved
myself a lot of aggravation.
Later
that night, I got the inevitable speech from my dad, delivered with enough
decibels to make the windows shake, how wrong it was and disrespectful to God
and broads…cigarette of course hanging out of his mouth, bouncing at the side
of his lip with every word.
“You
are a damn disappointment and were taught better than that,” he yelled.
I
never quite understood that statement because we’d clearly never had a
conversation about not looking at girlie magazines, but I learned not to argue
with my Dad. He was a strict disciplinarian who didn’t tolerate any backtalk and
never hesitated to whip off his belt when my brother or I had done something
wrong. When I was younger, we had gotten the belt regularly, often on our bare
ass. Occasionally, if he was in a good mood, he’d let us keep our pants up.
He
liked to use this Western belt my mother’s brother had made for him with his
name “MIKE” embossed on the back. I think if you look very closely at one of my
ass cheeks, you can still see a faint outline of “EKIM.” I think by the time I
was fourteen, the belt had ended for me but I still feared it.
So
back to the found Playboys; where was I supposed to have learned that it was
bad to look at naked girls? I never got an answer from my Dad, but I think it
was supposed to somehow be implied through sermons at Mass and the Catholic
version of Sunday school which was called CCD. Now I know I often didn’t pay
attention to things that didn’t interest me, so I must have missed that passage
in the Bible and for the life of me, I can’t remember a sermon about it. It
must have been somewhere in the Good Book, but I never found it.
Oh wait, I know...sex was dirty!
I
came to realize that my parents were absolutely bat shit crazy when it came to
sex or what I now call “insanely Catholic.”
An incident later that same year further illustrated the point.
We
lived only a stone’s throw from the Wamesit Drive-In Theater. For a kid who
loved movies, it was perfect. Once I was old enough to stay out well past dark,
my buddies and I would cross the railroad tracks and slip into the drive-in on
foot and watch as many movies as we could over the summer. We even began to
brazenly bring lawn chairs and FM radios to listen to the broadcast. Sometimes,
we could even pick up the low powered broadcast at our house if the atmospheric
conditions were right.
 |
| A neon sign from the long departed Wamest Drive-In Theater in Tewksbury, MA |
One
autumn evening, after the leaves had fallen off the big oak in our front yard,
we could clearly see the ten story main screen from the picture window in our
kitchen. We were used to watching television on a little fifteen inch
television and from a distance, the drive in screen wasn’t much smaller.
 | |
| The infamous big screen! |
“Woah,”
he just whispered.
At
some point, we may have been giggling which got my mother’s attention.
“What
are you two watching?” she asked.
“Um….it’s
um…” I replied.
Like
any good mother, she immediately knew we were up to something. She got up from
watching television and came over to see what her children were so interested
in. As she approached the window, her eyes got big as saucers and she grabbed
both of us and pulled us away from the window and told us to get our asses to
our bedroom.
We
sat in our darkened room, and knew we were in trouble. We listened as she
called the town police and began to make her near hysterical complaint. The
exchange went something like this (and yes, I’m imagining the police
dispatcher’s voice).
 |
| The entrance to Wamesit Drive-In. |
“Yes,
I’d like to report a naked woman outside,” my panicked mother said.
“What’s
your address ma’am?”
“It’s
90 Eckel Street.”
“And
you have a naked woman outside? Can you describe her?”
“She’s
about eighty feet tall…”
“Wait,
what?”
“Oh,
it’s the drive-in? They’re showing some filthy movie. I want you to tell them
to turn it off.”
“We
can’t do that ma’am.”
This
exchange went on a few more minutes as my very upset mother finally gave up her
crusade to have the drive in shut off the movie, hung up and called my father
up from the basement where he was hiding from her….er, working on someone’s
car.
She
ranted and raved for a good five minutes before my Dad finally figured out
what she was talking about. It ended with;
“…and
the boys saw a woman’s boobs!”
I
looked at my brother and saw the fear of EKIM all over his face. Luckily, I think my father was laughing so hard we escaped
punishment that night.
As
I said, insanely Catholic.
Next time, Part III - Should Have Known Better...I Only Brought This On Myself..
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