Priestdaddy
Page 1
ALSO BY PATRICIA LOCKWOOD
Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
Balloon Pop Outlaw Black
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Patricia Lockwood
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Ebook ISBN: 9780698188396
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lockwood, Patricia, author.
Title: Priestdaddy / Patricia Lockwood.
Description: New York : Riverhead Books, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016029241 | ISBN 9781594633737
Subjects: LCSH: Lockwood, Patricia. | Poets, American—21st century—Biography. | Authors, American—21st century—Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3612.O27 Z46 2017 | DDC 813/.6 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029241
p. cm.
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Version_1
For my family
CONTENTS
Also by Patricia Lockwood
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTORY RITES
1. MEETING OF THE MINDS
2. LOW COUNTRY
3. BABIES IN LIMBO
4. R & R CIRCUS
5. MEN OF THE CLOTH
6. DINNER WITH THE BISHOP
7. PUT IT IN PRINT
8. TOUCH OF GENIUS
9. THE CUM QUEENS OF HYATT PLACE
10. SWIMMING HOLE
11. HART AND HIND
12. MEN OF THE CLOTH II: THE CLOTHENING
13. BLOW, GABRIEL, BLOW
14. VOICE
15. I AM A PRIEST FOREVER
16. ABORTION BARBIE
17. MISSOURI GOTHIC
18. POWER AND LIGHT
19. INTERIOR CASTLE
20. ISLAND TIME
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTORY RITES
Before they allowed your father to be a priest,” my mother tells me, “they made me take the Psychopath Test. You know, a priest can’t have a psychopath wife, it would bring disgrace.”
She sets a brimming teacup in front of me and yells, “HOT!” She sets a second one in front of my husband, Jason, and yells, “Don’t touch it!” She situates herself in the chair at the head of the table and gazes at the two of us with total maternal happiness, ready to tell the story of the time someone dared to question her mental health.
We are congregating in the dining room of my father’s rectory in Kansas City, where I have returned to live with my parents after twelve long years away. Jason presses his shoulder against mine for reassurance and tries to avoid making eye contact with the graphic crucifix on the opposite wall, whose nouns are like a poem’s nouns: blood, bone, skin. We are penniless and we are exhausted, and in the grand human tradition, we have thrown ourselves on the mercy of the church, which exists for me on this earth in an unusually patriarchal form. It walks, it cusses, it calls me Bit. It is currently shredding its guitar upstairs, across the hallway from the room where we will be staying for the foreseeable future. Through the east window I can see the same dark geometry of buildings that surrounded me all throughout my childhood: closed school, locked gymnasium, the squares and spires of a place of worship plummeting up into the night.
“Well. You wouldn’t want . . . to bring disgrace . . . to the Catholic Church,” Jason says, with a diplomacy that is almost beautiful, making a great show of blowing on his murderously hot tea.
“No, you wouldn’t,” my mother agrees. “They came to the house, because where people are a psychopath the most is in their own homes. And they tried to trap me. They brought all these questions.
“They said, ‘Oh, did you ever feel bad when you killed someone? Which drug tastes the best to you? When your dog talks, what does he say? How many times have you been suicidal?’ They didn’t believe me that I’d never been suicidal. Why would I be suicidal. I’m in love with life.”
She bangs down her rosebud-patterned cup with unexpected force, seized with the sudden urge to backflip through time and attempt a citizen’s arrest. “They were using so many double negatives that finally I just lost it. ‘You can come back here and give me that test when the questions are in English!’ I said, and I chased them away.”
“I don’t understand how you passed,” I say. “From what you’re telling me, it sounds like you should have gotten a pretty bad grade. It sounds like you should have gotten the worst grade, actually.”
“I passed it by being smarter than the test itself,” she says, lifting an aha! finger and touching the tip of my nose with it. “Same way I got the highest-ever score in the history of the SAT.”
“I didn’t know you even took the SAT.”
“The Sears Aptitude Test,” she clarifies in ringing tones. “They had never seen anything like it.”
“Why would you hang that on your wall,” Jason breathes, staring past us at the bloody spectacle of the crucifix, held spellbound by its gore. “Why would you hang that in the room where you eat. It looks like someone screamed into a ribeye.”
“They also tested you,” my mother continues, “to see if you were a psychopath. But you were young enough that nothing showed up, thank God.”
“Your dad gets an F,” Jason says, looking up the questions on his phone and motioning us to be quiet. “Listen.”
I was a problem child.
True
False
I am neither shy nor self-conscious; I speak with authority.
True
False
I am not or would not be proud of getting away with crimes.
True
False
I can hear my father’s objections now: who wouldn’t be proud of getting away with crimes? Who wasn’t a problem child? When your dog talks, doesn’t he tell you that you’re a champion? Mom can’t remember if he took it at all, but if he did, Jesus must have appeared at the last minute and filled out the answers for him, because he was allowed to walk through the doors of the priesthood freely, as upright as sanity itself, while his sane wife and sane children watched sanely from the pews.
Jason continues to scroll through the test, growing more and more horrified as he goes. When he reads, “‘I often get others to pay for things for me, true or false,’” he clutches at his heart. “We’re psychopaths,” he says mournfully. “We’re being psychopaths right now, in your dad’s holy rectory.”
“I told you it happens at home,” says my mother.
• • •
WE TAKE OUR TEACUPS into the living room and curl up on the couch together looking at family pictures. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, almost none of them fine except the sunsets over flat scalloping water and beaches of crushed mussel shells. There is my mother in a Playboy Bunny T-shirt my father gave her for her twenty-second birthday—that was before he found God. My mother in a library, with long ca
rved carnelian hair, smiling in front of shelves of red-and-gold encyclopedias. There is my father on a five-week “biblical archaeological dig,” wearing white short shorts and his whole body the color of wet sand, searching for the door of the First Temple. There he is standing on the spot where the herd of demon swine were driven squealing into the Sea of Galilee.
“Should we see if Dad wants to come down?” I ask, but he’s never found the family saga as compelling as the rest of us do. Once, when we were going through the slides from that aforementioned dig with him, he was somehow able to tell us his exact geographical coordinates in the Holy Land and every detail of every last stone in the excavation sites, but when the first baby picture popped up, he didn’t know which of his five children it was.
There I am, sluglike and drooling, unwilling to close my mouth until my first words arrived to me. “You were the kind of baby I could set down on a blanket and then come back three hours later and you hadn’t moved,” my mother tells me approvingly. “That’s how I knew you were a thinker.” There I am, held in a pair of black-sleeved arms, a white rectangular collar floating over my head, not like a halo at all, but like the first page of an open notebook.
My father in a tight, appalling sailor suit. My father dressed as a pro-life Dracula. My father wearing a Speedo at the lapping edge of a picturesque lake, between two buff buttocky dunes. “There’s no in-between with him, is there,” Jason says. “He’s either buck nude or he’s in a little outfit.”
My father propping my boneless, footie-pajamaed form up on the back of a chrome-and-lipstick motorcycle. My eyes full of unshed tears, because I am thinking of accidents and crashes, of the inherent dangers of going vroom-vroom. My father lying on his back and pretending to eat my cheeks, ears, hands. My father reclining spread-legged in the sunlight while terrier puppies romped over his lap.
“Is he wearing anything at all on his lower half?” Jason cries, as if in supplication to heaven.
“Underwear,” answers my mother, turning her head sideways and squinting. “Just . . . underwear.”
“You came out of that,” Jason says, indicating the white triangle at the center of a whirl of dog-fur. “That’s where you came from.” I close my eyes to shut out the image. I like to think I sprang from a head; I like to think the head was mine.
A picture of my father standing at the altar in a lamb-white robe, ready to accept an unseen blessing and enter his life as I have always known it: as an oddity, an impossibility, a contradiction in terms. Catholic priests, by definition, aren’t allowed to be married, but my father snuck past the definition while the dictionary was sleeping and was somehow ordained one anyway. An exception to the rules, before I even understood what the rules were. A human loophole, and I slipped through him into the world.
“Just look at him,” Jason says, with something approaching awe, all five of the journalistic Ws present in his eyes, plus a single shining H. But faith and my father taught me the same lesson: to live in the mystery, even to love it.
• • •
SOME MEN ARE so larger-than-life that it’s impossible to imagine them days-old and diapered, but I’ve always found it the easiest thing in the world to see my father as a baby, lolling on his back in the middle of fresh sheets, smoking a fat cigar to congratulate himself on his own birth, stubbing out the cigar—with great style—in the face of his first teddy bear.
He suffered, or did not suffer, from congenital naughtiness. He was either the favorite child or else the sort of person who would claim to be the favorite child when he wasn’t. In even his earliest pictures, he grinned with the huge, hand-rubbing glee of a cartoon villain, as if he just watched the photographer trip and fall into an open sewer. His hair curled upward, dark and frizzed, like the smoke of an illegal bonfire. He was cherubic, satanic, dressed in scandalously short pants. Myopic in a way only I have inherited—even back then, his lenses were thicker than the glass in the popemobile. Propelled forward by his wants, which were enormous. When he was little, he used to creep into his mother’s cocktail parties and eat all the shrimps off the silver platters and then run away giggling. My grandmother would shake her pink fist, which generally gripped a gin and tonic. She would chase and try to catch him, but you can never catch my father. The element of surprise is forever on his side.
Instead of being fascinated by trains, as more orderly boys might have been, he was fascinated by cement mixers, whose job it was to perpetually stir.
I believe he itched against the way things were. I believe he grew toward heaven only because it was not possible to grow toward hell, inching taller and weedier to the Cincinnati sky. Before long, he had turned into a smirking teenage atheist, whose only religion was rock and roll, tight jeans, and making rude comments to authority figures. He played the guitar upside down and set off cherry bombs in the school toilets. He was the first boy in school to grow his hair—out in a cloud, not down to his shoulders—and when they tried to kick him out for it, he just laughed.
He first encountered my mother in 1968, when she was sent to his freshman algebra class on a hall monitor assignment. It has always given me considerable pleasure to imagine this scene. “Some people in this school,” my little mother might have announced, “are not disposing of their gum properly, and the rest of us are paying the price.” My father looked up from his desk and was thunderstruck. Like all contrarians, he felt a secret longing to live with the rules and to love them. He wanted to sleep tucked into the rulebook, where he would feel safe. She stood in the doorway of the classroom with her beautiful boundaries shining all around her—yes like a halo this time—and he decided he would marry her. He pursued her and he pestered her; he followed her home and threw rocks at her. He pelted a single question persistently at her window: will you marry me?
A picture of my mother holding my father’s hand, the very essence of oval-faced, madonna-blank loveliness, with something mischievous about her left canine. “Why did you say yes?” I ask her, but I already know the answer. My mother loves to argue, and love is the only argument you can win by saying yes.
“He was pretty bad at that time,” she reflects, “but I knew I would make him a Catholic eventually, because the really bad ones always convert sooner or later. The worst bad boy of all was St. Paul, and he fell off his horse and ended up in the Bible.”
I am long and fatally lapsed in the tradition, so the time I feel most Catholic is when I think about how many Irish people had to have sex before I became a statistical possibility. My mother was the last in a staggering line of them—the second of six children, raised up in a neighborhood that had a St. Something-or-Other on every corner, a handful of beads in her cardigan pocket. When it came to the athleticism of religion she was a natural. She didn’t have to think about it; her body thought for her. She crossed herself and folded her hands because those were the movements her body liked best, the way a hurdler’s likes best to leap. She said yes to my father, rejoicing in her heart that she had won the debate at last, and they stood at the altar together when they were just eighteen.
She attended church every Sunday, which my father thought was “just so damn hilarious.” He was not going to be shut up in small spaces and forced to do tricks on command. Instead, he joined the Navy and plunged into the ocean in that smallest and most obedient space of all: a nuclear submarine called the USS Flying Fish. And it was here, in the middle of perfect claustrophobia, that a moment of his life split open and spilled the nuclear green glow of infinity all over him, and became his origin story. It occurred during a late-night viewing of The Exorcist. The room was dark and that eerie, pea-soup light was pouring down, and all around him men in sailor suits were getting the bejesus scared out of them, and the bejesus flew into my father like a dart into a bull’s-eye. He saw the little girl’s head spin around to consider the hidden half of things and his head spun around likewise. Over the course of that patrol, the men watched The Exorcist seventy-two ti
mes, and on the very next patrol, my father converted.
Put yourself in his place. You’re a drop of blood at the center of the ocean, which plays a tense soundtrack all night long, interspersed with bright blips of radar. Russians are trying to blow up capitalism and you’re surrounded by dolphins who know how to spy and the general atmosphere is one of cinematic suspense. All of a sudden you look up at a screen and see a possessed twelve-year-old with violent bedhead vomiting green chunks and backwards Latin. She’s so full of a demon that the only way to relieve her feelings is to have hate sex with a crucifix. You would convert too, I guarantee it.
Down in the amniotic sea, and ready to be born again. Later, he always called it “the deepest conversion on record,” which just goes to show we like a nice way of saying things.
When I think about his time in the Navy, there is a certain unreality about it, as there is with anything underwater. I picture a little toy submarine, sleek and bobbing in the bath, but I know there must have been more shape and dimension and metal guts to it than that. It must have been such a place to him. He must have had such affection for its physical workings, and such a private knowledge of them. When he fell down an open submarine hatch and broke his back, it must have been like falling down a channel of his own self—and when he felt the pain, he must have felt it in the whole ship, vastly and beyond him.
Rearranged in both body and beliefs, he returned home to my mother, who was wearing an I-told-you-so face so triumphant it was never able to return to its former configuration. He now counted himself a Christian, and he disappeared for a few years into books and study. He could argue the numbers off a clock and the print off a newspaper, and now he argued himself into orthodoxy. He had decided he was meant for the Lutheran ministry. Why he chose Lutheranism I cannot say, but I suspect he was attracted to the glamour of its founder: a snout-faced man who spewed insults from every orifice and believed he had the power to fart away the devil.