Amen's Boy. William Maltese

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СКАЧАТЬ ignorance was not only my own, but also my parents’ ignorance, the church’s ignorance, the ignorance of my peers. The Dark Ages existed around me and surrounded the themes of my life in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

      I was being groomed for the seminary, and for other things. It is the “other things” which I believe might surprise you. A boy can have secret experiences with an adult in a position of high trust.

      There are many persons who have walked along the sidewalk, smelling the odor of red bricks on the rectory front porch in the summer heat, and then into the buzzing cool atmosphere of the cold refreshing priest’s office. However, at the time of my first beginning this process I didn’t know any other boy in the world who had a similar problem or a life like my own. Walking up to the rectory was like approaching a King’s castle, a foreign fortress.

      To me at eleven, it was fun getting to hang out with Father Terry, sometimes twice a week in his office; the invitation was not for once but as many times as I needed to discuss my sexual urges and report to him when they were at their peak so I could receive support from him to abstain from “self-abuse.”

      I told him every time I had “irregular emotions” or practiced sinful “self-abuse.” Immediately I felt relief. Many years later, my best friend shocked me one day in the last year of the twentieth century when he said, “You were sexually and physically and emotionally abused!” It can take a lifetime to recall traumatic injuries.

      The dimension of all this was greater than one boy’s ego or needs. I had a role model now, Father Terry, and this gave my world a feeling of solidity that no fists or spitting could take away. I studied the Church’s teachings, my religion, liturgy, Latin, and totally identified with the Holy Roman Catholic Church in my love for Jesus Christ, my compassion for the poor, and my desire to grow up to be a priest to help the unfortunate, and those who suffered. I thought mostly in terms of the poor, but poverty was recognizable to me as a boy in things like loss of hope, or feelings of entrapment. I had both a concrete image of how I wanted to live my life, as a priest at the altar, but also as an activist, helping the poor. I went with the Sisters of Charity to the hill people around Assisi, and I went with Father Terry to many shanty-style shacks to visit the sick and bring them communion. I assisted in his administering of the last sacraments.

      I believed I was willing this to happen, that I was causing my life to take this new path, but I was too young to understand. What was profoundly taking root in my life was coming from a system, a culture, a church. I had not really noticed that now I was being groomed, cut out from the pack, styled in special means and modes and manners, and refined into a very loyal servant of the priest and the Catholic Church. This process began early in my life and was well-established before I was a teenager.

      The rectory was old looking when it was first built, I think; all the photographs of this building show a rather dusty-looking, old place. The red bricks seemed to be denser than regular bricks, and to call them red was to avoid use of terms like burnt umber, or brownish-red. The place was invisible in some ways, maybe because only a few people ever walked to the door and entered. It wasn’t like an office building where you felt welcomed into a vestibule of activity. There was no receptionist, no waiting room, like in a lawyer’s office or doctor’s office waiting room. There were no large rooms in the building, and the entrance room was almost full with just the one army surplus desk, and an antique Underwood manual typewriter. The telephone system was modern for the place and time: there were buttons and extensions, a buzzer system notified the individual priests to pick up on the lines.

      The secretary was the mother of one of the boys in school in the regular program at Assisi, but I didn’t know who it was then. Later I found out this red-haired lady was the mother of a boy that I wanted to see naked so badly that I was jeopardizing my entire reputation. I habitually went into his bedroom and tried to get him to relax enough to get naked with me, but that came after my meetings with the priest about masturbation. I didn’t ever get explicit instructions not to get naked with other boys, and it was not in the catechism, so I just plowed that field when I came to it.

      I opened the wooden screen door. The screen mesh was painted black in the middle of a white painted frame; the frame was chalky, so you had to be sure not to let the screen door touch your clothing or you would have chalk marks that wouldn’t come out. The housekeeper was an ancient, sweet woman in a white dress, and later I learned that she was also the cook. She looked kindly into my little boy’s eyes. Could she tell I was coming to this place to be crucified, worse—drawn and quartered?

      Father Terry came almost immediately, and with his hand on my shoulder, guided me into his office, or the outer part of his office, which was divided into his sitting room and his desk and writing materials area. The sofa and matching chair were covered in what I later found out was Army Surplus Naugahyde. It was standard issue, heavy duty, long-lasting, durable, bulky. I was lost on the giant sofa, and relieved to have so much room to myself. I’ve not thought much about how big or small I seemed to people then, but I imagine I was average, and at the seventh grade I was about five feet plus an inch or two, and growing. I was considered lean to my older brother, who called me a “fucking beanpole.”

      “Thaddeus, I want you to know that whatever we say here today or any day is in the secrecy of the confessional. In fact, this is a place now where you can come and make ‘special’ confessions.”

      I was surprised, already feeling better. Secrets I could handle. I had feared public embarrassment, but it’s possible I remember this out of sequence. I was there to be counseled about some problem I was having, as I recall now, but I think the bombshell of masturbation counseling was coming up in this conference for the first time outside of the confessional. I felt a little panicky when I learned the walls, veils, screens and sliding doors of the confessional were dispensable, and that we could, as human beings, have to face our priest in the telling of our sins. I was so used to the secrecy or supposed secrecy of the confessional that I was beginning to feel naked without the confessionals muted seclusion and anonymity.

      “Sister tells me,” Father Terry began, “that you’re playing with yourself in class.”

      I was totally and devastatingly shocked at such a lie. “NO!” I remember that.

      “NO!” I would later be proud that I stood up for the truth. I already mentioned how I had to arrange my penis to make it not break in two when it spontaneously sprung up in class. I was not looking at the girls and getting hard.

      I was sure of that.

      “It’s OK,” Father Terry said, “I know sometimes a young man has erections and they come at times unexpectedly and it is just, well, some would say....”

      “Uh...what?” I interjected trying to derail this line of confrontation. I thought of the ways I might change the subject, like I could mention about the choir singing so poorly or the ugly lamps on the front of the church that the pastor ordered installed. Innerly, I was panicking.

      “I know you may have some problems with urges you feel suddenly....” Father was continuing to speak about my erections and I didn’t know what to say or do.

      Well, he talked me through my panic attack, and we made a deal, simple enough too, that I wouldn’t masturbate without telling him immediately, the next day, and obtain absolution at that moment, so as not to make any bad communions in a state of mortal sin. I assume the entire world knows now that in the 1950s, Catholics were not allowed to even think about sex without it subjecting you to Satan’s plan to get you to go to hell for all eternity.

      I promised to keep this oath of purity, and at that moment there began a three month segment of my life when I was a changed man. No long baths, no time with the soap, lathering it into a foam all over my naked body, no finding nipples СКАЧАТЬ