Here Comes Trouble

by Michael Moore

  But first I had to convince my parents to let me leave home. They did not like this idea. These were the people who wouldn’t let me skip first grade, and they were definitely less inclined to let me skip town. But I told them I had “a calling,” and if you were a devout Catholic in those days and your kid told you he had “a calling,” you had better not risk getting in between the Holy Spirit and your only begotten son. They consented, reluctantly.

  The seminary training would take twelve years before I could be ordained a priest. Four years of high school, four years of college, and four years of theological training. The high school part was optional, but for those who had the calling, there were two seminaries in Michigan for high school students: Sacred Heart in Detroit and St. Paul’s in Saginaw. It was less than a year after the Detroit riots, so Sacred Heart was out of the question for my parents. St. Paul’s it was.

  On the first night after my mother and father dropped me off at the seminary in September 1968, I instantly began to question the wisdom of my decision. My doubts were not driven by the strict rules I had to follow: Up at 5:00 a.m. for prayers, long periods of enforced silence, barred from your room from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., difficult studies (nine weeks spent dissecting just one Shakespeare play), hard labor and chores, and severe punishment for violating any of the rules. Freshmen were prohibited from watching any television or listening to the radio for an entire year. You were strictly confined to the campus—with the exception of 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturdays, during which time you could walk two miles to the strip mall, grab a Whopper, and rush back.

  But I was OK with all of that. My trouble was not with the system (at least not at first). It was with the two roommates I had been assigned to share a room with. Mickey Bader and Dickie O’Malley. Mickey and Dickie. “The Ickies,” as I called them (but only to myself). The problem with them being there at the seminary was that neither of them wanted to be a priest. No way. They were into girls, and partying, and smoking and sneaking off campus whenever they could. And pushing me around. They were what the adults referred to as “juvenile delinquents.” They were rich kids, the sons of important men in their communities, and it seemed as if at least Dickie already had a number of run-ins with the law. Their parents decided that perhaps the seminary could straighten them out, and how they got through the intense interview process I had to go through to get into this place was beyond me. I came to the realization that their fathers had probably bought their way in, and the priests were obviously in need of any “charity,” wherever they could find it.

  Discovering that this was both a seminary and a reform school did not sit well with me, and it was clear to me that I was going to have to endure the constant harassment of Mickey and Dickie if I wanted to be a priest. When they found out I really believed in all this “religion crap,” they were relentless in mocking me as I said my prayers, did my chores, practiced my Latin. They smeared applesauce over my sheets, placed Playboy centerfolds in the toilet bowl, and entertained themselves by seeing if a pair of scissors could alter the length of my pants. Although I was bigger than them, I did not want to resort to violence in order to have some peace and quiet, so I kept my distance from them.

  There were two rules I decided early on that I just couldn’t follow at the seminary, and I knew God would forgive me. In October 1968, the Detroit Tigers were headed to the World Series, and as part of our penance for being freshmen, we were not allowed to watch or listen to the games. I was convinced that this edict did not come from the Almighty, and so I snuck a transistor radio into my room and hid it inside my pillowcase. At night I would lie in bed and listen to the games, muffled as they were, through the pillow’s duck feathers. The day games I missed.

  The other rule was that you could not have any food in your room. As they were more interested in feeding our souls than our bodies, I decided to take care of the latter. That year, science had invented the Frosted Pop-Tart (“Proof of God’s existence,” I would say). I smuggled in boxes of these heavenly items and I would toast them by placing a sheet of paper on top of my lamp and sitting the Pop-Tart on it. I was eventually discovered by a priest who caught a whiff of burnt strawberry out in the hallway. I was given extra kitchen duties for a week and lost my Saturday afternoon escape privileges for a month.

  The other thing I enjoyed doing was hanging out with the senior boys. They had a knack for coming up with ingenious pranks that they loved to play on the holy hierarchy. My contribution to this club was to concoct a powder that replaced the chapel’s incense. It was called a “stink bomb,” and when the altar boy put a scoop of this “incense” onto the hot coal in the censer, it let off the most god-awful stench, a combination of rotten egg odor and a locker room fungus. It cleared the church within minutes.

  The other prank, for which I became legendary (but only as “Anonymous,” as I was never discovered), involved an “entry” of mine in the school’s annual science fair. Of course, I had no interest in science (unless science could make a chocolate fudge Pop-Tart, which it eventually did), but I did have an interest in pulling off the best stunt ever.

  About an hour before the doors to the seminary’s science fair were to be opened to the public, I quietly entered the exhibit hall and placed my “science project” on one of the tables. It was a simple, plain test tube that contained a clear liquid (in reality, cooking oil). I set it on its stand and placed a placard in front of it. It read:

  NITROGLYCERINE:

  DO NOT TOUCH OR WILL EXPLODE

  It was five minutes before the opening, and I hid nearby so I could watch people’s expressions when they saw the test tube of danger. At that moment, the science teacher, a short nun with thick glasses and in her seventies, came in to make a final pass through the fair to make sure everything was in place and all set to go. She came upon my addition to the fair and was surprised to see something on the table that she hadn’t placed there. She took her glasses off and cleaned them, not exactly sure what this was she was looking at. As she bent over to read the card, she let out a scream and quickly waddled over to the fire alarm box, broke the glass, and pulled the lever.

  I was mortified.5 This had gone too far. I got out of there as fast as I could, and as the fire trucks arrived I watched the firemen go inside and retrieve the tube which they could tell was not nitroglycerine. The nuns and the priests apologized—and issued a fatwa on whoever was responsible for this. They never caught the culprit.

  There are two types of fear: normal fears that are primal (fear of pain, fear of death), and then there is the fear of Father Ogg.

  Ogg taught Latin and German at the seminary. The Church had also christened him with special powers, and he was the only one at the seminary to hold these powers. One night, he gathered together a few of us boys and asked us if we would like to see how these powers could be used. We were already scared of Father Ogg, but no one was going to admit that, and so we all agreed to let him show us.

  He took us down into the “catacombs” of the seminary (a series of tunnels under the building) to perform a ceremony only he was allowed to perform. It was called the Rite of Exorcism.

  Father Ogg was an exorcist.

  It would be another three years before Hollywood would make Linda Blair’s head spin in the William Friedkin film, so all we knew of exorcism was that it was a series of prayers and rituals performed over the body of someone whom Satan had possessed. The devil would be cast out and the victim would be saved. We were told by Father Ogg that he had a “one thousand percent batting average” when confronting Lucifer.

  “I always win,” he said.

  He told us that he would show us the ceremony but it would only be “pretend,” as none of us had shown any signs of being consumed by evil.

  Yes, but wouldn’t this be better, I thought, if there were someone here at St. Paul’s who actually was evil? Of course it would! And of course there was.

  “Father,” I said with fake sincerity, “before you start, I think Dickie O�
��Malley is going to be really upset that we left him out of this. He keeps saying he doesn’t believe you’re an exorcist and that he’d like to see you try it out on him. Can I go get him?”

  “Sure,” Ogg said, somewhat miffed that anyone would question his devil-disappearing powers. “But make it quick.”

  I ran back upstairs and found Dickie where I thought he would be—outside the gym door having a smoke.

  “Dickie!”

  “Yeah, fuckface, whaddaya want?”

  “Father Ogg says he wants you right now!”

  “Yeah, well, tell him you couldn’t find me.”

  “He said he saw you come out here to smoke, and that if you came now he wouldn’t turn you in.”

  Dickie considered the offer of leniency carefully, took his last couple of drags, gave me a tap across the face, and followed me inside and down into the catacombs.

  “Welcome, Dickie,” Father Ogg said with a sly grin. “Thank you for volunteering.”

  Dickie looked at him with smug-filled puzzlement, but sensing that he was not going to be in trouble if he went along, he stepped forward, unaware of what was to happen next. I could only hope that in about twenty minutes from now there was going to be a new Dickie.

  Father Ogg had brought an ominous black duffel bag with a red coat of arms on it and words embossed in Latin that I didn’t understand. He reached down in it and pulled out a shaker filled with holy water, some holy oil, about a half-dozen dried-out olive branches and, um, a leather rope.

  “Now, normally, Dickie, I would tie you down so you wouldn’t be able to hurt me,” Father Ogg said to the snickers of those present.

  “I ain’t gonna hurt you, Father!” Dickie protested. “And you ain’t gonna tie me up. I was only smoking.”

  “Yes, sometimes smoke comes out of the possessed,” Ogg said. “A few have caught on fire. But I don’t think you have to worry about that tonight.”

  The exorcist then launched into a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, words and language I had never heard. To see this jabber coming out of his mouth a mile a minute gave me goosebumps. This was the real deal! It scared Dickie, too, and he stood there dumbfounded at what he was witnessing.

  “Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei Patris omnipotentis, et in nomine Jesu Christi Filili ejus, Domini et Judicis nostri, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti, ut descedas ab hoc plasmate Dei Dickie O’Malley, quod Dominus noster ad templum, sanctum suum vocare dignatus est!” Father Ogg continued, spraying holy water all over Dickie. Dickie did not like that.

  “C’mon, Father! What is this?!”

  “Be still. I am casting Satan out of you!”

  I thought, with that, Dickie would bolt. Priest or no priest, he was not going to stand there in front of a bunch of other students and be humiliated. Or have it implied he was in cahoots with the devil.

  Instead, Dickie didn’t move. He was intrigued with the possibility that his accomplice was the mother of all hoodlums, Beelzebub himself. A sinister smile came across his face.

  Father Ogg took the cap off the holy oil and smeared it on Dickie’s forehead, cheeks, chin. He then took Dickie’s head and placed it between his two hands and pressed it like he was in a vise.

  “Oowww!” Dickie screamed. “That hurts.”

  It was nice to see Dickie hurt.

  “Silence!” shouted Ogg in a voice that I swear wasn’t human.

  “Ephpheta, quod est, Adaperire. In odorem suavitatis. Tu autem effugare, diabole; appropinquabit enim judicium Dei!” he continued in some ancient tongue, or perhaps no tongue at all. I’m not even supposed to be sharing this with you, and to commit these words to paper makes me want to go and check the lock on my door (I’ll be right back).

  It was time for the olive branches. We were each given one and told to hold them out over Dickie—but not to touch him. Ogg then took his branch and started to wail on poor Dickie, careful not to whip him anywhere that might hurt.

  “Christo Sancti!” Ogg yelled, causing Dickie to turn to me—the one who brought him into this—and scream, “Fuckin’ moron! I’m gonna kill you!”

  “Don’t make me have to tie you down!” Ogg shouted. “Abrenuntias Satanae? Et omnibus operibus ejus?”

  And at this moment, Dickie started to cry. Father Ogg, a bit surprised, stopped.

  “Hey, hey, it’s OK,” the exorcist said in a comforting tone. “This isn’t real. It was just a demonstration. You don’t have the devil in you.”

  At least not now, I thought. I prayed that this exorcism, albeit a “practice” one, would have a real effect on this miserable bully.

  But, alas, such was not the case. The next day I found my transistor radio in the toilet and my underwear all gone. One of the nuns would find them later that night in her own drawer, with the words, in magic marker, on each waistband: PROPERTY OF MICHAEL MOORE. I did not want to take the punishment for finking on Dickie, so I took the extra week of garbage duty instead and said nothing. Frankly, it was worth it just to have the extra time to myself so I could replay in my head Dickie being whacked with an olive branch, olive oil dripping from his face, and the Devil departing his miserable body.

  Not all the time at the seminary was spent on my knees or observing strange rituals or playing pranks. I actually had one of the best and most challenging years of education I would ever have. The priests and nuns loved to teach literature and history and foreign languages. The class I had the toughest time with was Religion. I had a lot of questions.

  “Why don’t we let women be priests?” I asked one day, one of the many times that everyone in the class would turn around and stare at me as if I were some freak.

  “You don’t see any women among the apostles, do you?” Father Jenkins would respond.

  “Well, it looks like there were always women around—Mary Magdalene, Mary, Jesus’s mother, and his cousin what’s-her-name.”

  “It’s just not allowed!” was the end-of-discussion answer he would give to most of my questions—which included:

  “Jesus never said he was here to start the ‘Catholic Church,’ but rather that his job was to bring Judaism into a new era. So where did we get the idea of the Catholic Church?”

  “The only time Jesus loses his temper is when he sees all these guys loaning money in the Temple and he smashes up their operation. What lesson are we to draw from this?”

  “Do you think Jesus would send soldiers to Vietnam if he were here right now?”

  “In the Bible, there’s no mention of Jesus from age twelve to age thirty. Where do you think he went? I have some theories…”

  On the first day of English Lit class, Father Ferrer announced that we would spend nine weeks dissecting Romeo and Juliet, word by word, line by line—and he promised us that by the end of it, we would understand the structure and language of Shakespeare so well that for the rest of our lives we would be able to enjoy the genius of all his works (a promise that turned out to be true).

  I have to say that, in retrospect, the choice of a heterosexual love story with characters who were our age and who were having sex was a bold move by this good priest. Or it was sadism. Because if we were to become priests, there would be no Juliet (or Romeo) allowed in our lives.

  I devoured every line of Romeo and Juliet, and it spun my head and hormones into a wondrous web of excitement. Unfortunately, I had not read the rulebook before signing up for the seminary, and here’s what it said:

  YOU CAN NEVER HAVE SEX, NOT EVEN ONCE IN YOUR LIFE. ESPECIALLY WITH A WOMAN.

  Now, had I read that in eighth grade, I’m not sure I would have understood all the ramifications of agreeing to this prohibition. By the time it was explained to me in ninth grade at the seminary, something seemed oddly wrong with this rule. Call me crazy, but I kept hearing voices in my head:

  Mmmmmm… girls… gooooood… penis… haaaaappy.

  The voices intensified on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. That was when they bused the few of us seminarians who played a musical instrument int
o the Catholic high school in nearby Bay City to play with their school band. There were not enough of us to make up our own orchestra at the seminary, and the priests, who enjoyed culture and the arts and would often sit around and have conversations with each other in Italian, did not want those of us who were musically inclined to miss our “other callings.”

  I was placed in the clarinet section next to a girl named Lynn. Did I mention she was a girl? At the seminary I spent 1,676 hours of every week around only boys. But for these two glorious hours, I was in the vicinity of the other gender. Lynn’s long, deft fingers that she used on her clarinet were a beauty to behold (as were her breasts and legs and smile—but I only wrote smile just in case one of the priests is still alive and reads this story because, truth be told, while her smile was pleasant, I have no recollection of it as it was obscured by her breasts and legs and anything else that didn’t resemble a seminarian). Being in a coed Catholic high school band literally drove me insane.

  I tried my best to think about The Rule and to offer up this desire as penance for even wondering what might exist under her Catholic schoolgirl uniform. But there is just so much penance a now fifteen-year-old can do, and one day I asked one of the other seminarians on the band bus “Who the hell made up this rule?!” He said he didn’t know and that “it was probably God.” Right.

  One weekend, I reread all four gospels and nowhere—nowhere!—did it say that the apostles couldn’t have sex, or get married, or be happy with their penises. As my after-school job was working as an assistant in the library, I did my own research. And here’s what I found: The priests of the Catholic Church for the first one thousand years were married! They had sex! Peter, chosen by Jesus to be the first Pope, was married, as were most of the apostles. As were thirty-nine Popes!

  But then some Pope in the eleventh century got it in his head that sex sucked and wives sucked worse, and so he banned priests from marrying or having sex. It makes you wonder how all the other great twisted ideas throughout history got their start (like who came up with the card game Bridge?). They might as well have made it a sin to scratch when you have an itch.