The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir Read online

  Suddenly I saw what he was getting at. Just like in nature . . .

  Ewwwww.

  “Got it?” he said.

  I nodded up and down, my mouth agape. If I appeared awestruck, it was not over this anatomical breakthrough but over my father’s choice of props. It occurred to me that never before had any father pressed into service a garden hose to demonstrate the act of sexual intercourse. Not birds and bees. Not mating wolves.

  Not oak trees and acorns. The two ends of a rubber hose. Only my dad.

  “I got it,” I said.

  “Good. Now let’s get back to work.”

  With that, my sexual education was officially over. Dad had fulfilled his fatherly duty, one he no doubt had fretted over for months before delivering. He never came anywhere near the topic with me again.

  Other kids, especially those with older brothers, were more than happy to fill in the details. With the help of the Playboy Ad-visor and Penthouse Forum, and the wildly candid The Happy Hooker, which Tommy and I pooled our money to buy, and which featured among its many colorful stories a memorable encounter with a German shepherd, I was slowly piecing together the nuts and bolts of sex. I saw how the parts fit together, and why. It was all nature’s way of assuring that the human race would carry on.

  What puzzled me, though, was why, if sex was so natural and

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  so necessary, it was also so bad. If God was the creator of all things, and God was infallible and could do no wrong, then why did the priests and the nuns and my parents and Tommy’s parents and every other adult I knew treat this aspect of God’s handiwork as unspeakably embarrassing? It didn’t make sense. My mother could look at a rosebush in bloom and say, “See, Johnny, that rose is proof of our Lord. There is no other possible explanation for something so perfect and beautiful.” But when it came to swelling penises, lubricating vaginas, and mating urges so intense they could blind both men and women to even the need for food, God’s perfect handiwork seemed a little, well, less perfect. I suppose that’s why the Blessed Virgin Mother got a special pass from all the heavy breathing and unpleasantries of coitus.

  For Lent that year, Mom and Dad urged each of us kids to give up something special, something that would be a true hardship and honor the ultimate sacrifice Christ made when he died on the cross to save our souls. Lent began in late winter with one of my favorite holy days, Ash Wednesday, during which we got to walk around all day with a sooty smudge on our foreheads that made us look like junior firefighters. It continued for six weeks and was intended to be a time of personal reflection leading up to Easter.

  My parents told us to give it some thought and find a meaningful act. For instance, giving up creamed spinach wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice, nor would giving up something so specific you probably wouldn’t encounter it anyway. You couldn’t give up, say, lemon meringue pie and simply switch to apple or pumpkin. Likewise, on the charitable acts front, you couldn’t promise to do something you were supposed to do anyway, like take out the trash or complete homework. You couldn’t vow to brush your teeth every morning. It had to be a real sacrifice, something that took effort.

  Something that was a struggle to fulfill.

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  I thought and thought before landing on the perfect Lenten sacrifice. It would be the ultimate challenge for a twelve-year-old boy who had recently discovered that uniquely satisfying, solitary pleasure one could enjoy while locked in the bathroom with a copy of Popular Photography or The Happy Hooker.

  I would give up that one thing I had recently come to enjoy most in life, the thing that at once was a source of profound pleasure and profound guilt because I knew it was a sin, and a sin I committed on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.

  My sacrifice was not a joke; it was not a lark. I was deadly serious. On the bookshelf in my parents’ bedroom I had found a Catholic primer on human sexuality and read all about the sin of masturbation, or “self-pollution,” as the book called it. Self-pollution was a depraved sin, a weakness of the flesh. It was a surrender to lust and a selfish act, too, because every time one self-polluted was a time he was not sharing the sacred seed with the sacred womb, as God intended. For the record, I was primed and ready to share every last sacred seed in my arsenal with whatever womb waggled my way. I was dying to share. But I was not so delusional as to pretend it was going to happen any time soon, if ever.

  Tommy and I both had girlfriends now. His was Karen Mc-Kinney, a sandy blonde who always seemed to sport a sunburned nose, even in winter. Mine was Barbie Barlow, who had bright brown eyes that actually twinkled when she smiled, and budding hints of breasts beneath her plaid school jumper. The only thing was, Karen and Barbie didn’t have the slightest clue they were our girlfriends. We jostled with them on the playground, pulled evil pranks on them, and pretended we more or less detested them. But each afternoon down at the beach with our cigarettes, Tommy and I would gush at length about their many virtues and what we would do with our goddesses if we ever, hypothetically, got up the nerve to let them know we liked them.

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  No, I wasn’t too worried about the selfish part of my sin. I would happily share my seed if I could. In the meantime, I figured, there were plenty more where they came from. I was self-polluting at a furious pace, despite the Catholic remorse that followed each explosive release. I had allowed myself to become a virtual landfill of self-pollution. My temple was so dirtied by my actions, the Lord would never choose to fill it with his spirit.

  I was convinced what I was doing was horribly wrong, a serious transgression against God that would only increase the already near-certain likelihood that I would spend eternity burning.

  When Mom and Dad asked what I had decided to give up for Lent, I told them it was private. They were always respectful of their children’s privacy, and this was no exception. They asked no questions. “Just try your hardest,” Dad said. “If you do that, and in your heart you know you did the very best you could do, then that’s all we ask. That’s good enough for us.”

  The first day of Lent went quite well. In anticipation of my cold turkey abstinence plan, I had gone on a self-pollution bender the previous evening. I passed Day One with only a few passing impure thoughts. Day Two was not so easy. I had caught a glimpse of Barbie Barlow’s underpants on the playground as she climbed the monkey bars—so close, so out of reach—and recounting the glorious moment in exquisite detail later for Tommy only height-ened the tension. Barbie Barlow in pink panties; I could think of nothing else. By the time I got home from school on Day Three, I was crazed with hormonal lust. Please, dear Jesus, dear God the Father, dear Holy Spirit, give me strength. I really wanted to keep my promise, but not even they could infuse me with the necessary willpower. Less than thirty-six hours into my six-week vow of abstinence, I caved in to desire. I wasn’t proud of myself. A onetime lapse, I promised, and marked the calendar above my bed with a small X to mark my fall. I vowed not to let it happen again. But as the weeks progressed, I marked X after X. My calendar became

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  a minefield of X s, littering the days of the week and providing a shameful road map of my sinful secret life.

  “How are you doing with your Lenten resolution?” Dad asked a couple of weeks into it.

  “I’m sure trying,” I said with a jauntiness I hoped would leave room for optimistic interpretation.

  “That’s all we ask, son,” he answered and left it at that.

  Chapter 8

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  The seven days leading up to Easter are known as Holy Week, and it was the year’s most sacred and important time in our Catholic household, bigger even than Christmas. This was the week, we were taught, when Jesus laid down his life for our sins. In the words we recited each Sunday at Mass, it was the week when “he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell, and on the
third day he arose again, in fulfillment of the scriptures, and ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father.” It’s not every day someone covers so much ground in a single week, and our family celebrated each step of the way. It began with Palm Sunday, the day Jesus and his disciples had arrived in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years earlier, and wrapped up a week later with Easter Sunday, marking the day when Christians believe Jesus rose to heaven. In the middle was Holy Thursday, marking Jesus’

  last supper with his disciples, and Good Friday, which I always thought was egregiously misnamed considering that the only begotten son of God was hanged from a crucifix to die that day.

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  For some reason, my mother got it into her head that our family should celebrate Holy Thursday the way the Lord celebrated it nearly two thousand years earlier—with a traditional Jewish Passover dinner. Mom didn’t know much about Juda-ism other than it wasn’t Catholicism and that meant it was not the one true faith. But she knew Jesus had been a Jew and had spent his final meal on earth celebrating Passover. If it was good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for the Grogans.

  Our neighborhood was so Catholic it could have qualified as an official outpost of the Vatican. There were a few Protestant families, and then there were the Kabcenells, who lived down the street from us, right across from the convent. To my knowledge, they were the only Jews for miles around. Mom and Mrs.

  Kabcenell were neighborly but danced around the topic of their faiths. They both seemed to think some things were best left un-explored.

  But this Lent Mom went on a Passover crusade, and she wanted to get it just right. She laid out her plan to Mrs. Kabcenell, who was more than happy to sign on as Mom’s Seder mentor. The two of them were on the phone for hours, Mom furiously jotting down Passover pointers and Kabcenell family recipes for matzo ball soup and charoset, a salad of spiced apples and chopped nuts.

  Naturally, the more they spoke, the less mysterious the other’s religion seemed.

  When Mom announced at dinner one day that we’d be celebrating Passover on Holy Thursday, I was thrilled. “We get to drink wine! We get to drink wine!” I squealed. The Kabcenells had a son my age. I had told him all about the fringe drinking benefits of being an altar boy, and he had told me all about the intoxicating virtues of Mogen David and Manischewitz.

  On that Thursday before Easter, Mom called us to the table, and we found it laid out with an assortment of unfamiliar dishes.

  Dad took his seat at the head of the table. As the youngest child, I had the honor of asking the question to start things off.

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  “What is the meaning of this night, Father?” I read off a card my mother had handed me, being careful not to glance at my brothers. I knew they would be wanting payback for all the times I had made them laugh when they were supposed to be solemn.

  Dad took his cue and read from a borrowed Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book that told the story of the Israelites’ flight from slavery in Egypt. We ate unleavened matzo, and Dad explained how the Jews, in their haste, did not have time to let their bread rise. We dipped parsley in salt water, and sampled horseradish, which he said symbolized suffering and tears. My mouth stuffed with sawdust-dry crumbs and my eyes watering from the horseradish, I decided those Catholic fish sticks we ate every Friday during Lent weren’t so bad after all.

  We ate hard-boiled eggs, which he told us stood for spring and renewal. The apple mixture was a reminder of the mortar the Jewish slaves used to build pyramids, and I had to admit Mom’s version had the consistency of concrete. The wine was the highlight, even if it did remind me of grape cough syrup. The Catholics, I decided, definitely had an edge when it came to the quaffability of their sacramental alcoholic beverages.

  “Sip, don’t gulp,” my father admonished. He had no idea that my training as an altar boy had taught me otherwise.

  The Seder behind us, Mom brought out a roasted shank of lamb, a reminder of the first Passover sacrifice. “Hey, this is just like our Catholic lamb!” I said. It was dawning on me that Catholics and Jews were not that different after all. Something else was dawning on me as well. I am certain it wasn’t the message my mother hoped I would take from our Passover celebration, but sitting there as my parents tried to connect the Judeo and Christian traditions, I suddenly realized: there was no one true faith and no one chosen people. Not us, not the Kabcenells, not anyone.

  Heaven was not a paradise reserved for the exclusive use of any one religion. The Lord could not be that unfair. There could be either one God who loved everybody the same, or no God at all.

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  Whatever Mom’s motivation, she succeeded in bridging at least one gap: she and Mrs. Kabcenell remained close friends for years to come, and the Passover Seder became an annual event in our house.

  If there was one day out of the year on which even the most way-ward Catholic dragged himself into church, it was Easter Sunday.

  The services were always packed, and Father added extra Masses to handle the crowds. Every altar boy was pressed into duty, and I was assigned the eleven o’clock Mass. It was a mob scene. Every pew was crammed. People stood three deep along the side and rear walls. The choir loft overflowed and so did the glass-encased cry room, filled with mothers and noisy babies. Dozens of white lilies lined the altar, filling the church with an overpowering, nearly narcotic fragrance. All the mothers and daughters came decked out in their new spring dresses, and there was real excitement in the air. I felt like I was at a rock concert—and I was onstage with the main act.

  During communion, the congregants filed forward, pew by pew, to the altar rail. My job was to stand next to the priest and balance a gold plate beneath each chin as Father pressed a host on the parishioner’s tongue. Just in case Father fumbled the host, which happened at least once per Mass, I was there to catch it. Or at least try. If I was lucky and caught it on the plate, Father could simply pick it up and carry on. But more times than not, it missed and fell to the ground, in which case Father would have to bend down, retrieve it, and swallow it himself.

  Some priests were so skilled they could deftly pop a host on the tongue without making any flesh-to-flesh contact and almost never fumbling. But most of them, in their caution not to drop Christ’s body and risk a sacrilege, ended up touching the recipient’s lip or tongue, then doing it again for the next person in line, and the next. Standing beside him, I could actually see Father’s

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  thumb and fingertips wet with saliva. The number of germs spread in communion lines should have triggered a four-alarm public-health alert, but no one seemed to mind. What was a little shared spit among true believers who were all going to heaven anyway?

  Besides, it was hard to imagine the son of God would come into your body and then let you catch a disease simply because Father’s host-dispensing skills weren’t up to par. If Jesus could multiply fishes and loaves and raise the dead, he could certainly make sure no one contracted strep throat from the communion line.

  I was holding the gold plate for Father when my eyes wandered down the altar rail. There, making her way toward me, was the lovely, budding-breasted Barbie Barlow. She was in a wispy pastel dress with a matching ribbon in her hair. It was the first time I had seen her in anything other than her blue plaid school uniform, which resembled something that would be issued at a women’s penitentiary. I nearly gasped out loud. She looked beautiful, ethereal, as if it were Barbie who was meant to ascend to heaven on that spring day. She seemed to float toward me in the communion line, and soon she would be kneeling right before me. I sucked in my stomach and stood taller. So what if my cassock pinched around the middle and bunched at my feet; I never felt prouder to be in the uniform of the altar corps. When it was her turn, Barbie knelt in front of the priest and lowered her eyes. I slipped the gold plate beneath her chin and watched, mesmerized, as her lip
s parted and her tongue slipped out to accept the host. She swallowed, blessed herself, and just as she was stepping away, glanced at me and smiled. It was only a little grin—the kind one classmate might slip another in recognition—

  but her eyes had that twinkle, and I felt my heart stutter. The ascension-worthy Barbie Barlow had bestowed her beatific smile upon me. My eyes followed her as she returned to her pew and knelt again, still grinning my way. I nearly dropped the gold plate.

  As Mass concluded, the other altar boys and I formed our

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  usual procession. I carefully lifted one of the big floor-length candles from its stand and took my place behind the boy carrying the Bible. Father proclaimed the Mass over, blessed everyone, and told them to go in peace to love and serve the Lord. That was the cue for the organist, who launched into the recessional hymn, and the congregation began to sing. It was the big finale of the biggest service of the year, and Father joined us in line for our grand parade down the center aisle. I scanned the crowd, and there was Barbie holding a hymnal, looking right at me with those twinkling eyes. I sneaked a small smile back and gripped my giant candle in its long brass holder, wielding it like a knight with a lance. Father gave a sign, and we stepped forward, down the steps. As we marched toward the rear of church, I stared straight ahead with my manliest expression. How could she not be impressed? I stole another quick glance. She was still looking, still twinkling.

  That’s when it happened. It started with a barely noticeable tug on my cassock. In the next instant, the tug became a pull and the pull a sharp yank. The toe of my shoe had gotten tangled in the hem dragging on the floor. I steadied the candle in front of me, the flame flickering inches from my face, and tried to free my foot. A little shake would do it, I was sure. The trapped foot was in midstep; I just needed to kick the material clear before my foot hit the ground and all would be well. I was confident I could recover without so much as a misstep. But as my foot made contact with the floor, I could feel the cassock heaving down hard at my shoulders. It felt like someone had reached up from a hole in the floor and grabbed ahold. I heard my voice rise above the organ music: “Whoaaaa!” I made one last, valiant maneuver, shooting out my other foot to regain my balance. In that split second, I paused to marvel at my ability to keep my oversize candle with its voluminous pool of hot liquid wax stable through my crisis. I stumbled forward on the pinned fabric, and my free foot did the only thing it could do. It made a giant, graceful arc as if kicking