Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  It is part of the ritual that once you have received the host, you leave with your hands clasped. I held mine in front of me and double-stepped toward the door.

  On the way back into the house, I met my mother at the door. She looked at the shirt, then at me.

  “Did you wear that to church?”

  No point in lying—“Yes.”

  “You must have been quite a hit.”

  She pretended to be disappointed, but I know she was pleased. I often suspected that the only reason my mother continued to practise was that it gave her the moral standing to resent certain parts of the Church.

  We didn’t discuss religion in my house. It wasn’t an off-limits topic, but it seemed too monolithic to bother mentioning. There was the Church and you went and that was it. In the south of Ireland even more so than the rest of the country, the institution was wrapped in romantic ideas about freedom and self-determination. The Church was an extension of the need to assert yourself.

  For my mother, going to mass was a small act of rebellion—submitting to one authority in order to defy another. She still goes to church. I do not.

  Shortly after the Great T-Shirt Debacle, I found the only excuse that trumped religious duty in my mother’s calculus: a job. Neither my Saturday nights nor my Sunday mornings were free anymore. It is remarkable how something that accounts for such a regular part of your life can fade so quickly.

  Now out of the habit, I return less than a half-dozen times a year—Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Christmas Eve and one or two furtive visits to confession. I am fairly certain there is no heaven or hell, but I’m not taking any chances. As such, I lack the courage to accept what Sartre called “the divine irresponsibility of the condemned man.” I’ve become one of those Catholics.

  Intermittently, this causes me guilt. Not because I’ve let down my mother or the Church or God. All three have more important things to worry about. But guilty because I’ve let a cornerstone of my identity slip from my grasp and replaced it with nothing. That thought most often occurs to me around Easter, beginning the first time I pass someone on Ash Wednesday with the telltale smudge of devotion pressed onto their forehead.

  * * *

  —

  ANOTHER OF THE TRICKS of childhood is the illusion of permanence. “I will always live in this house with these people, go to this school and like this show and wear these shoes.” One by one, those things are taken from you. You change schools, move house, find new things to like and different people. For a while, growth—any sort—is a thrill. But eventually it occurs to you that whatever you have now will be taken from you in due time.

  That’s another threshold of adulthood—the realization that life is not one long process. It’s many short ones, punctuated at each break by loss. Maybe things will get better for you—you’ll lose one thing to gain another that is preferable. But maybe not.

  When alarmists talk about the extended adolescence of a generation (and I’ve now lived long enough to see it happen to several generations), they presume people are hiding from the responsibilities of adulthood. That’s not it. They’re trying to put off change. Very few people change willingly. They have to be forced into it by events.

  The church (any sort of church) is a hedge against this fear. Yes, you may now have a new job, and a new wife, and new debts, but church hasn’t changed. That continuum is as it was—live right, die happy, enjoy the fruits. That’s a ninety-year plan that will not be interrupted by a mid-life crisis.

  I gave that up, which, in retrospect, was foolish.

  Though I did not recognize it as such at the time, there was a profound comfort in church. It wasn’t the message or the teachings—though those remain a bulwark of civilization. It was something even greater.

  I’m sure my Catholicism—or my grandfather’s or my mother’s—is not entirely like any other person’s. It’s possible it’s not even close. I’ve always been curious about how other people, not just Catholics, pray. What do they say? How do they feel as they do it? Is there real communion with God? Is that possible?

  Once you start down that mental path, the world falls away. Your trivial concerns, your problems, your faults, your secret desires—they all become insignificant as you consider the purpose, direction and meaning of human existence.

  I remain convinced that we all confront that in church and that it is depressingly possible to avoid it everywhere else. Perhaps even likely. In church, this doesn’t require discussion. I’ve never heard a sermon that changed my mind on any particular issue. The implicit bargain of worship is that you spend some time each week sitting still and giving thought to what it’s all about.

  You could do that at home, but you probably won’t. There isn’t time—you have too many photographs to like on Facebook.

  When you go out to do this, there are other people to do it with you. You may not know them but you feel fairly certain you have something basic in common. You can assume you are all like-minded about at least one thing, have come together in goodwill and want to share an idea.

  When I was not yet an idiotic middle-aged man but rather an idiotic teenager with a mohawk, earrings and an air of erratic aggression, strangers still wanted to shake my hand in church. Regardless of how I looked, they assumed we were on the same page. And though I might not have agreed at the time, I know now they were right.

  That involved more than accepting that Jesus was a real person and that he rose on the third day. It was more profound than that.

  I cannot assume when I walk into any home, bar, shop or other place of business that I will receive a warm welcome. One would like to think so, but one can’t know. We’ve all experienced that small feeling of doubt before we cross certain thresholds—“Do I belong here?” I have never felt I belonged anywhere. I have had moments where I felt things were going right in the world and that I was part of that. But belonged? That assumes too much. I am here in the world, but I am a visitor (not even a guest). It has never been in me to join anything.

  Church was a small respite from that feeling. I assume that all people of good intent will be embraced in any church, any mosque, any synagogue or any temple. Because if that were not the case, there would be no reason for those places to exist. I also assume that’s why people do it. You get up. You make yourself presentable. You talk to your neighbours. God is the reason they built the place, but community is the reason people go. That’s the heart of it.

  I suspect I’ll end up back at church someday. More than any deep spiritual longing, it’s too perfect an arc.

  Because even if you leave the church and do not return, church never really leaves you.

  LISTS

  THE ONLY GIFTS I REMEMBER RECEIVING as a child were ones given by my father, largely because he had the habit of giving you things he wanted for himself. You’d get books you couldn’t yet read, or clothes that fit him rather than you or something bizarre you knew he’d bought on a whim after several rum and Cokes.

  He was Fred Flintstone, giving his wife a bowling ball when she was hoping for a fur coat.

  One Christmas he gave Brendan a stuffed crocheted chicken. As a general rule, eight-year-olds don’t like things that are stuffed or crocheted or chickens. The only way this thing could have been a more inappropriate present for a child was if my father had lit it on fire before entering the house.

  My brother was an eerily poised child. He unwrapped the chicken, took a good look at it, put it down and left the room. My father was not pleased. That was another of his things—get you something he knew you wouldn’t like, and then sulk when you didn’t like it.

  He’d done some dumb child-gifting before—a set of Ukrainian nesting dolls also stands out—but this was a special effort. That chicken wasn’t just useless. It was also remarkably ugly—enormous and rust-coloured. It was stitched together from wool so coarse you could have used that chicken to sand a deck. It had little black beads for eyes. They rolled around inside translucent orbs so that that chicken was a
lways staring directly at you when you entered a room. It was the sort of chicken you expected to wake up and find sitting on your chest late at night, holding an ice pick.

  We moved several times during my childhood. During each switch, Brendan and I would lose half our stuff. But not that chicken. Six days or six weeks or six months after a move, he’d pop up on a shelf, like it had taken him that long to track us down.

  A while back, I asked my brother if he still had the chicken. He said no.

  And I thought, “Great. That chicken is still out there. Stalking me.”

  But to that chicken’s credit, it stood out from the mountain of detritus one collects in childhood.

  I had toys. I’m sure of that. I can’t remember any of them specifically unless I consult a listicle of “Popular Toys of the ’70s.” There were G.I. Joes and Stars Wars figures. There must have been a Slinky and a Stretch Armstrong. I had a four-foot-high stuffed cat that I’d won by cheating in a colouring contest at the local drug store (my father did it for me).

  The only birthday or Christmas present I can still recall using was a large volume entitled The Big Book of Lists given to me by an aunt and uncle. There were hundreds of random entries: “Ten Tallest Buildings”; “Seven Wonders of the World”; “Largest Capital Cities.”

  I tried to memorize each one for later deployment in casual conversation: “It’s a funny thing you mention aqueducts. Are you familiar with the six longest in the world? I’ll give you Rome and then you can guess the others.”

  I made my own lists—places I’d been, how many people I knew, jobs I wanted, a ranking of school subjects. I thought of everything I encountered in list format. Where did the movie I’d just watched rank all time? Or the TV show?

  Into my late twenties, I carried around a series of diaries listing every book I’d ever read—how many pages it contained, when it had been started and finished, and a mark out of five stars. I loved reading, but I got a special thrill from being able to pad the list.

  Life is not orderly, but a list can make it so. As you change, so do your lists.

  I no longer believe that The Breakfast Club is one of the ten best films ever made. But there was a younger version of myself who did. An astrophysicist once told me, “You cannot properly consider a system of which you are a part.” (It’s one of the Top 20 Aphorisms I’ve Encountered in Conversation.)

  So while I remember the iteration of myself who thought Molly Ringwald dancing on a staircase and Emilio Estevez talking about ripping the hair off some guy’s ass was right up there with La Règle du Jeu, I’m not sure I would recognize him now.

  However, I can make certain assumptions about him because I have the list as a reference point. If the list is long enough, you can make good guesses about someone’s personality and approach. You can tell if this is someone you’d like.

  In journalism, lists are considered the lowest form of literature, tucked in behind streeters and notes columns. A list is what you print in August when everyone’s on vacation and you can’t come up with anything better.

  I’ve never understood that pervasive opinion. I defy you to read past a list on a printed page. It’s impossible. Because you know that while ten thousand words of explication may tell you nothing about the author, a list can’t help but do so. It lets you flip through the filing system of someone’s brain. It’s a form of mind reading.

  It’s my book so I get to inflict just a few of my lists on you.

  I apologize in advance if they do not offend you. That was my intention. I’ll try to learn from this and do better in future.

  UNDERRATED FILM CLASSICS

  1. Sorcerer

  2. Alien 3

  3. Weird Science

  4. Tremors

  5. The Hit (1984)

  6. The Long Good Friday

  7. Fail Safe

  8. Antonia’s Line

  9. Layer Cake

  10. Sneakers (1992)

  GOOD THINGS THAT NO LONGER EXIST

  1. Being unreachable

  2. Ignorance of the daily news cycle

  3. Rotary dial

  4. Remembering phone numbers

  5. Silence

  6. Darkness

  7. Smoking on subway platforms

  8. Music videos as destination television

  9. Aerosol deodorant

  BOOKS YOU WANTED TO BE THE SORT OF PERSON WHO LIKED, BUT COULD NOT GET THERE

  1. Dante’s Inferno

  2. Moby Dick

  3. On the Road

  4. The Catcher in the Rye

  5. Ulysses

  6. War and Peace

  7. Middlemarch

  8. The Alexandria Quartet

  9. To the Lighthouse

  10. The Bell Jar

  WORST PLACES

  1. The middle seat

  2. Cleveland after dark

  3. Disney World/Land

  4. Cleveland in daylight

  5. Any hotel room facing a highway

  6. O’Hare Airport at Christmas

  7. A twenty-four-hour coffee shop between 2 and 5 a.m.

  8. The front row at a movie theatre

  9. Any lineup for any reason

  10. Budapest

  GREAT NOVELS ABOUT BASEBALL

  1. The Natural—Malamud

     There is no number two.

  GOOD BOOKS ABOUT THE VIETNAM WAR

  1. A Bright Shining Lie—Sheehan

  2. Dispatches—Herr

  3. The Things They Carried—O’Brien

  4. In Pharaoh’s Army—Wolff

  5. A Rumor of War—Caputo

  6. The Quiet American—Greene

  OVERRATED EXPERIENCES

  1. Picnics

  2. Being there

  3. Concerts in arenas

  4. Canoeing

  5. The Louvre

  6. Theatre in a park

  7. Cross-country skiing

  8. Opening night

  9. Pop-up anything

  10. Cooking over an open fire

  TEN COMPELLING COMICS BEFORE ANTI-HEROES, CROSSOVERS AND IRONY RUINED EVERYTHING

  1. The New Mutants

  2. Conan the Barbarian

  3. Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu

  4. Archie

  5. The Amazing Spider-Man

  6. Alpha Flight

  7. X-Men (before it got stupid)

  8. Lone Wolf and Cub

  9. Daredevil (Frank Miller era)

  10. Longshot

  SONGS FROM FOOTLOOSE, RANKED

  1. “Almost Paradise”

  2. “Holding Out for a Hero”

  3. “I’m Free”

  4. “Dancing in the Sheets”

  5. “Let’s Hear It for the Boy”

  6. “Somebody’s Eyes”

  7. “Footloose”

  8. “Never”

  9. “The Girl Gets Around”

  BEST UNIFORMS

  1. Notre Dame

  2. Brazilian national football team

  3. Montreal Canadiens

  4. New York Yankees

  5. Penn State

  6. Toronto Maple Leafs

  7. FC Barcelona

  8. Boston Red Sox

  9. Italian national football team

  10. Chicago Blackhawks

  MARTIN SCORSESE’S FEATURE FILMS, RANKED

  1. Goodfellas

  2. Raging Bull

  3. The Wolf of Wall Street

  4. The King of Comedy

  5. Mean Streets

  6. Casino

  7. The Departed

  8. Taxi Driver

  9. The Age of Innocence

  10. Cape Fear

  24. After Hours

  MOST EFFECTIVE EXCUSES

  1. None. Nobody cares about your excuses.

  2. “I apologize unreservedly.”

  3. “Is that really what you wanted?”

  4. “This is news to me.”

  5. “Are you sure you gave it to me?”

  6. “They didn’t have it
.”

  7. “What can I tell you?”

  8. “I feel like I did that already.”

  9. “That’s not what he told me.”

  10. “I think you’ve got it backwards.”

  CITIES, RANKED

  1. New York

  2. London

  3. Berlin

  4. Prague

  5. Florence

  6. Nairobi

  7. Vienna

  8. Johannesburg

  9. Zagreb

  10. Minneapolis

  BEST BOOKS ABOUT NAZIS

  1. Inside the Third Reich—Speer

  2. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich—Shirer

  3. Survival in Auschwitz—Levi

  4. Hitler, 1936—45: Nemesis—Kershaw

  5. SS-GB—Deighton

  6. The Man in the High Castle—Dick

  7. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth—Sereny

  8. Fatherland—Harris

  9. Night—Wiesel

  10. The Day After Tomorrow—Folsom

  ORWELL

  THERE WAS A FIVE-YEAR WINDOW in the late eighties/early nineties when getting a tattoo was still cool. Few people had them at the time and those who did were the right sort of people—bikers, hookers, seamen and other attractive degenerates. Tattoos were still rare enough that when you saw one, you remarked on it. You read what it said and backed up a bit. It was vaguely dangerous.

  By the mid-nineties, that was over. Lower-back and ankle tattoos had become an aspirational middle-class birthmark. Your cool aunt wanted one. Tattoos on the face became the only way those who planned a career in the penal system could get any credibility from the exercise.

  But back in that golden window of tattoo glory, I’d made myself an expansive tattoo plan. First, I was going to get one on my head. Above the ear, maybe. I was partial to the Public Enemy symbol—the profile of a man in the crosshairs of a rifle sight. I’d also designed a symbol of my own for an as-yet-unrealized street gang I hoped to found called The Lunatic Fringe, which at fifteen I thought quite clever. I’ve never had much of a visual imagination. The symbol was a stylized L superimposed over an F and was almost indistinguishable from a swastika.

  If the proto-swastika on my head turned out to be a bad decision, there was an easy solution: I’d just grow my hair back over it. Presto whammo. Had that truly stupid idea worked out, I’m not sure how my life would have gone as an ersatz Heinrich Himmler with male pattern baldness. But thankfully when I was fifteen tattoos were expensive and hard to get; and I was poor and had no follow-through.