by Chris Rush
And he played the piano like a genius.
In the castle, in a practice room, Pauly performed a Mozart sonata for me—from memory. It was extraordinary. He became another person when he played—his big body swaying fluidly about the keys. At the baby grand, he was beautiful.
I liked Pauly—liked listening to his big ambitions. “I’m going to be rich and famous. I’ll make brilliant music. The fact that I’m ugly doesn’t matter a bit.”
“You aren’t ugly.”
“You don’t have to lie. Luckily, concert pianists don’t have to be sexy. The best are almost always unattractive. Horowitz is hideous, farting as he plays…”
I risked a question. “Do guys ever mock you?”
“What do you mean?”
I told him I couldn’t take showers anymore—that every time I tried, some of the older boys made fun of my body, my little dick. I told him that two of them peed on me, on my butt.
“They what?”
“They’ve done it twice.”
“Is that what you were praying about?”
“Not exactly.”
* * *
PAULY, TOO, WAS MOCKED in the showers. So we began to do our showering together, at the gymnasium. We did it during dinner hour, when the building was deserted. We never dared turn on the lights.
In the gloom of the shower room, our bodies slowly materialized. The water was hot and delicious, and as we washed ourselves, we snuck glances toward each other. Pauly was pale and pudgy, and through the steam I saw a shadow of pubic hair above his dick. He looked at me, smooth as a baby, but I didn’t feel embarrassed at all.
Pauly became my guide and protector. It was his third year at St. John’s. On weekends he took me to the secret spots on campus— the fields and forests, the ancient barn, the abandoned swimming pool filled with leaves and bones. One could easily get lost on the huge estate, and there were afternoons we wandered without seeing another soul. I imagined us as the only two boys left on Earth, waiting for Paradise to begin.
Pauly talked about Mozart and Goethe, about Hesse and Horowitz, and, of course, about God and the Fallen Angel. And he told me about his crazy clan. Pauly came from a wealthy Italian family in Boston, the only boy. His mother was obsessed with him. He had to call her several times a week and report all his activities in detail. “I hate being interrogated every time I call home. ‘Pauly, are you studying? Pauly, are you regular?’ She never shuts up. I know it’s the pills. She takes them because she’s fat.”
“Pauly, your mother sounds nice. At least she cares. Mine is always too busy to talk. And I think my dad hates me.”
“Chris, that’s what fathers do. Do you think my father doesn’t hate me? Our fathers went through World War Two. They’re all psycho.”
I asked him what his father did for a living.
“He’s a surgeon. He just operated on the Bishop. He shoots vitamins into the Bishop’s ass—he really does. He does it in our house, in my bathroom. I saw the ass. Completely gross.”
“My dad throws big parties for the priests,” I said. “They put their hands up ladies’ skirts. That’s grosser. And my dad says I’m the bad one.”
“Bad at what?”
“He says I’m a queer. I’m not, you know.”
“Doesn’t matter to me. The Devil likes everything.”
I was about to bring up Father Jerry, but a deer had appeared in front of us, like a miracle. She seemed to say: Silence.
* * *
FATHER KARL, the crew-cut football coach, mussed my hair, then told me I needed a haircut. That Saturday, I took the school van to the little town of Morton. The barbershop was packed and stunk of cigars and old men, but just up the street was a place called Marta’s, a salon. An hour later, after a surgically precise haircut and a fluff under a space-age dryer, I appeared to be wearing a cap of yellow feathers on my head.
The young hairdresser seemed pleased. She said, “Pixie cut.”
My return to the dorm caused a small riot. Every kid in Low House came by to laugh at my hair.
“Rosemary’s Baby!” someone shouted.
“It’s Mia Farrow!” came next.
Even Pauly had to laugh.
Word of my hairdo spread quickly. By Monday morning, the dean of discipline, Father Boniface, had me in his office. Bonny’s punishments were famously harsh, but I liked him—his manicure, his stylish black glasses. He was also an art teacher, known for his calligraphy. Each day, he’d handwrite the list of boys for detention in a gleeful frenzy, posting the text on his door like a demented wedding invitation.
I sat down in a huge butt-dented leather chair, facing his desk.
“Mr. Rush, what is the meaning of your coiffure?”
“Father, it’s just a haircut.”
“Young man, I’m quite certain that is a girl’s haircut. Is it supposed to be some kind of joke?”
“No. The woman just gave it to me. All I said was make it short.”
Bonny told me to be quiet. “You have detention all this week, Mr. Rush. And I’ll be watching you very closely. Very closely!”
Leaving the office, I swore I’d never cut my hair again.
For seven years, I kept that promise.
* * *
FOR THE WHOLE WEEK of detention, Pauly selflessly joined me and did his homework—a silent vigil that sealed our friendship. Afterward, we ran to our favorite spot in the apple orchard, relishing the fact that we could speak again. The hour of silence only served to increase the needy nerdishness of our conversations.
“Pauly, just assume with me that God exists.”
“I do not deny this fact.”
“Okay, so would you say that God is all-encompassing?”
“It depends on what you mean.”
“I speak of totality.”
“Then no. We must include the shadow…”
If I brought up God, Pauly brought up Satan.
One evening, as we walked toward the cafeteria after Vespers, Pauly asked me if I was hungry.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m starved.”
“Well, look what I have.” From his shirt pocket, he pulled out a Host, waving the little white wafer in front of me. “At Communion, I only pretended to swallow.”
In all of Christendom there were few sins as grave as desecrating a Consecrated Host. If anyone saw it in his hand, we’d be expelled—and excommunicated.
Pauly nibbled on the holy disc. “Wanna bite?”
Piously, I declined.
Saturday morning, a few weeks later, Pauly sat at breakfast, shoving a powdered donut into his mouth. Sugar dusted the book in front of him: A Compendium of Black Magic. I gasped and put my napkin over the title.
“Relax, Christ-o-pher.”
But I couldn’t relax.
When I was little, I’d often dreamt of demons. In my nightmares, they dragged me away into darkness, into a terrible crater. I’d inherited this propensity for bad dreams from my father, who often woke up screaming.
I didn’t like the Devil. I told Pauly to get rid of the book.
“I just need you to do me one favor,” he said.
“What?”
“Just come to the woods with me later? You trust me, right?”
Pauly was not just my friend—he was my only friend. He’d spent a week with me in detention; played Mozart just for me.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll come.”
* * *
THAT EVENING, in the beam of our flashlight, I saw Randy, an older friend of Pauly’s. He had on a varsity jacket and, implausibly, goggles. He carried a huge book bag.
I whispered to Pauly, “Why is he here?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll see.”
He gave the flashlight to Randy. We had arrived near the ruins of an old stone house, deep in the woods. Pushing leaves away from the ground, Pauly drew a circle in the dirt with the long willow wand he carried at his side. Outside the circle, he traced a triangle, where I was told to sit. When Pauly pulled out
a homemade white gown from his pack and struggled to get it on over his clothes, Randy and I started laughing.
Pauly told us to shut the fuck up.
“Randy—get into the magic circle with me. Chris, you stay in the triangle.”
We laughed once more and Pauly snapped. “Do as I fucking say!”
I took my place, heart pounding, and, as instructed, lit the three candles stuck in the dirt in front of me. Pauly held a piece of parchment in one hand and his willow stick in the other. He read some words in Latin, and then he said, “Randy, get the rat.”
From his book bag, the other boy lifted a silver cage containing a white rat—stolen, I assumed, from the biology lab. Pauly, speaking English now, offered the rat’s life to Satan. Randy pulled out a pearl-handled letter opener. Its first plunge into the animal produced only a tiny squeak.
“Stop,” I said—but Randy downed the blade again, this time producing a ruby of blood.
“Kill the goddamn thing!” Pauly hissed.
Randy, eyes squinting behind goggles, strangled the rat to death, then placed the corpse at Pauly’s feet.
I felt ill.
Pauly called out to the demons. He named all their terrible names, one after another. He said, “I give to you a virgin.” He crouched down and touched my shoulder, the candles throwing shadows across his face.
Part of me wanted to run, but a nightmare feeling of helplessness overtook me. I went limp. I thought to myself: Am I hypnotized? I could feel myself far away, a shivering body. And then suddenly Pauly struck me with his stick.
I tasted blood. And then—no pain, nothing. In a trance, I dreamt of my father, in the woods with me, a deer carcass at his feet. I remember my father shouting.
Then Pauly shaking me, screaming, Come back! Come back!
When I opened my eyes, the other boy was gone. Pauly’s eyes were wet, glittering. “It worked. It worked,” he said. “I have no soul.”
I saw the dead rat on the ground.
I began to shiver. Pauly took me in his arms. And then he told me that we could never leave each other. “Do you understand, Chris? Not ever.”
4.
Napalm
WHEN I CAME HOME for the summer, I had flawless grades, but it meant nothing. I was still condemned to childhood—puberty would not arrive for almost a year. But somehow, my younger brothers already looked and acted like little men, following my father around the yard, doing their chores like soldiers.
It was cookout season—and my father was getting ready.
Dad’s barbecue was a monument, a brick ziggurat crowned with an iron R. He could cook for a hundred people, if need be. Dad was a pro.
That summer, he decided to use napalm.
Napalm, a form of jellied gasoline, was invented to melt people during the Vietnam War. In 1969, billed as the perfect accelerant, it was briefly available to home chefs. My dad bought cans of it at the hardware store and used it to start the barbecue. It was a real crowd-pleaser. Whoosh! A wall of flame.
* * *
AFTER A YEAR away, it was strange to be home. I fussed with my room, decided it was time to get rid of my toys and stuffed animals. I torched them with napalm in the sandbox, thinking of Pauly and the fires of hell.
I saw my brothers Michael and Steve watching from the distance. Mike, a pyro like me, smiled at the flames. He was a brain, as well, a twelve-year-old who liked to dismember stereos in his junky room, then put them back together. He favored noise and chaos. Steve, a year younger, was a nervous child (he’d been given tranquilizers to get through first grade). Staring now at the fiery mayhem, he looked worried. After a few minutes, the boys drove off together on their bikes. Secretly I wanted to get on my ten-speed and race ahead of them. Once I’d been their leader, but my going off to boarding school was a kind of betrayal.
Now brotherless, I hung out with Donna.
In my sister’s locked bedroom, she snuck not only Tareytons but quick hits of pot. I begged her to let me try some. “Valentine said it’s good for me—it’s from God. It’s a sacrament.”
Donna rolled her eyes, but I gave her my laser stare and tried to sound tough. “Or would you prefer I get it on the streets?”
Finally, she gave in to my high-pitched begging.
One night, after everyone was asleep, Donna and I smoked a joint in her bedroom. As I pulled the smoke into my greedy lungs, it burned, but I was too proud to cough. After a few more puffs, my hands began to feel like catcher’s mitts. And I couldn’t stop smiling.
Donna took the joint away. “That’s enough.”
I looked around the room. Every detail was leering and hilarious. My sister’s chiffon curtains seemed like they might start to sing and dance.
“Chris, are you okay?”
I nodded, unable to speak.
Eventually, we drifted downstairs to the rec room. Everything I saw—the poker table, the wet bar, the gun racks—was transformed. The stuffed deer heads, killed by Dad, seemed undead but not unhappy. I studied their glass eyes, set like glowing jewels. I sang “Silent Night” to them in German, as I’d learned in the choir at St. John’s.
Stille Nacht! Heil’ge Nacht!
Alles schläft; einsam wacht
Suddenly the deer’s eyes were my father’s eyes, telling me to be quiet. But the pot made me fearless and I sang even louder, Donna laughing at every silly note.
* * *
IN JULY, Mom invited her relatives over—a rare occurrence. While strange kids swam in the pool, the adults congregated in the living room, curtains drawn, AC set on freeze. Mom’s relations were poor people, with crooked teeth and ugly clothes. I barely knew who most of them were. What I did understand was that Mom was not quite herself—serving drinks in plastic cups instead of crystal.
I listened to Grandma Loey chat on the couch with her sister Peggy. Old as dragons, they sipped cocktails, their eyes swimming behind enormous glasses. Not three in the afternoon, and already they’d begun to drift.
Loey was proud of her daughter’s well-appointed home. “Look, look,” she kept saying to her sister. “My Norma collects turtles! Aren’t they something?” She picked up one from the coffee table and pushed it in Peggy’s face. The turtle was a pill case, and as Loey held it aloft, hundreds of saccharins fell like flakes of snow.
Neither noticed a thing.
The sisters drank, toasted, and kissed, smearing their lipstick like jam. I didn’t know that they’d once been fabulous flappers, gorgeous girls with terrible luck. Both married men who beat them silly. No one ever told me how rough their lives had been, how tough they had to be.
My parents, of course, explained nothing.
* * *
MY SISTER HAD graduated with honors from St. Ignatius High. Her graduation gift had been a Mustang convertible, in forest green. Once she had the keys, she was hardly home. I missed her terribly.
But it seemed she could still read my mind. One morning, she came down to the basement. “Chris, there’s a be-in at the park today. Wanna come?”
In five minutes, I was dressed: maxi-fringe moccasins, Peter Max pajamas, and a strand of baby-blue beads. When I came upstairs, Mom thought I looked darling in my costume and took a picture. Then, in another, quieter voice, she said she was concerned about Donna, who was still primping in her room. “Chris, I think some of Donna’s friends may smoke marijuana. Keep an eye out, will you?”
* * *
AT THE COUNTY PARK, there were a couple of hundred kids stretched out on the lawn. There were puffy pants and ostrich feathers, face paint and attempted beards. Under the shade of a giant maple, we found Donna’s friends. On an Indian blanket, we sat beside Valentine and Jo. Valentine was shirtless and tanned, his blond head on Jo’s lap.
He said, “The angels have arrived.”
I’d forgotten how pretty he was, boyish even, but so confident, with his sexy girlfriend and adoring friends.
Some dude nearby tapped on a drum and hummed. No one spoke, though, or danced. The crowd wa
s strangely reserved. Donna whispered to me, “They’re all tripping. Valentine doses everyone. That’s his thing.”
Soon, he sat up and spoke to his disciples, in the kind of cooing tones one uses with toddlers. “People, are you with me? Do you feel the breeze? It’s sooooo fulfilling. Do you feel it? Do you feel the earth vibrating? Yeaaaaah—let’s ride it, people … ride…”
From inside his own movie, Valentine swayed back and forth.
It was a Sunday afternoon. At home, the adults would be mixing cocktails, maybe playing cards. Someone would be trying to sing along with Perry Como or Robert Goulet.
From Valentine’s girlish hand appeared a little sheet of folded paper. Carefully, he undid the puzzle. Inside was a tangerine-colored tablet. With his fingernail, he chipped it, holding up a tiny sunny shard. “Take this,” he said to me.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Jo.
But when I looked at my sister she shrugged, and Valentine put the LSD on my tongue—like a priest giving Communion. He bowed his head, and I bowed mine. Instantly, the drug dissolved. Valentine handed the rest of the tablet to Donna.
“Orange Sunshine,” he said.
In silence, everyone stared out across the lawn. Soon, an agitation began to flutter inside me. Or was it outside? As the breeze moved across the park, the shuddering of the trees was mesmerizing; the lawn rippled like the surface of a lake.
I thought: God’s here.
I had not yet been drunk, but like a drunk I found that everything around me was moving to and fro. But rather than falling overboard, I stayed safely on the red blanket. It was a boat and on it we were slowly carried away …
My sister said, “Let’s take a stroll,” and, like Jesus, we were able to walk across the waters of the lawn. Against my bare feet, each blade of grass felt profound and singular. When my sister bought me an ice cream, I began to cry. I wanted to scream: I love you so much!
Love was not a word that was ever said in our house. It suddenly felt like a great secret, rediscovered. Why hadn’t anyone told me about it before? And how had it arrived inside a piece of dust placed on my tongue?
