Along the way, however, I experienced my first publication, the moon ditty that appears earlier here in the epigraph. In its simplicity, it says a lot about me back then, and predicts (I think) my later life view. Just something I had scribbled down during class, it ended up in Maryknoll magazine — the sisters had sent it to their missions in Africa, South America, Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Formosa, and Japan, as an “example of the originality and imagination of a fifth grader.” (Mainly, I am amazed that it’s one of the few things my mother kept of my doings from those years.)
There’s not much more about my childhood schooling to tell, except to say that, in some essential sense, I somehow got through it alone. I read all the books we were supposed to read, though I don’t remember any now, and magazines like Highlife and Maryknoll. On certain afternoons, we had readings from the Bible, which I loved. My favorite story was of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt, but Moses’s epic tale, from his abandonment as a baby in the reed marshes of Egypt to his last days on a mountain overlooking Jericho, from whose summit he spied the promised land, before dying, broke my heart — and I took that book’s stories as pure history, burning bushes, water struck from a stone, descending angels, and all. (Another favorite involved a tale from the book of Daniel, in which the evil Babylonian king witnesses God’s own disembodied hand scrawling out words on the wall, the kind of thing I often waited for to happen at night when, unable to sleep, and hearing voices from down the hall, I’d get spooked by the Rorshachian shapes made by the bad plastering in my bedroom.)
Nothing, however, seemed more straightforward than Father O’Reilly’s Baltimore Catechism, which, wrapped in blue covers, contained the simple truths that we children were expected to learn and abide by, lest we one day experience the fires of hell. A simple question (“Why do we pray?”) was followed by a simple answer (“Because God hears us”). In that manner, as I recall, it offered explanations of sin, salvation, and the immortality of the soul and, as if out of a fairy tale, did not skimp on its depictions of the devil, who came across vividly in wonderfully simple but graphic black-and-white ink renderings as a hoofed, betailed, soot-faced creature with pinched backpointed ears, crooked bat wings, and long talons for fingers, holding a pitchfork or else cringing in fear and revulsion when confronted with true sanctity. I believed in the devil as well and, somewhat of a blank slate, took to heart all the other dictums we were taught. (By the time I received my First Communion at the age of ten, I truly thought that my state of grace so guaranteed an entry into heaven that, with a child’s optimism, I’d think it wouldn’t be so bad if I were to be run over by a truck.)
I’d always absorbed religion. For one of the first things I’d ever heard, predating my illness, came down to this: “Hay un Dios,”—“There is a God.” A God to be respected and feared, a God who ruled the universe through the wisdom of His ways. I don’t remember hearing that He, the Father, had ever been a kindly God — that was reserved for His son — but, on the other hand, as my mother used to put it, we owed this world — our very existence — to him, “el Señor.” Even if He’d kind of fucked me, at least in terms of what I had once been or was on the cusp of becoming, I truly believed that His presence was as certain as the air I breathed. And why wouldn’t I, spending so much time as I did with my mother? In some ways she really went for Catholicism: At the beginning of Lent, a cross made by ashes graced her forehead; on Palm Sunday, strands of dried palm reconfigured as a crucifix were put up on the wall as a reminder of what was to come; Good Friday brought the three o’clock gloom, when, I swear, the world seemed to go dark at that exact moment when Jesus was said to have died.
Easter, however, brought the greatest joy, as holy days went. Even to a little kid, it seemed wonderful that the misery of death was transcended by the flower and sunburst triumphs of the resurrection. And it was fun. I recall that even my father attended the Easter services, my brother singing with the choir for the High Mass, the three of us dressed to the nines, going off together to get lost in that rarified atmosphere of incense and flowers, all the while taking in the mysterious and chilling mystical incantations of the Latin (which my mother always appreciated and possibly understood better than the sermons, which were recited in English). Sweetest of all, for a sick kid like myself, I always felt happy — and curious — to see the other children in their Sunday best, their shoes spanking clean, their hair nicely combed, as they sat up in the balcony, facing the altar, in their own separate section. I enjoyed the sense of being around them, of almost seeming to be a part of a group, even if we sat far away: Quite simply, I often felt alone, though it wasn’t as bad in church, where, at the very least, I could count on the company of the angels and saints.
I even had a guardian angel, whom I’d always envisioned as a sword-yielding being of indeterminate sex, with flaxen hair and enormous wings, and Jesus himself, whose picture, which I always admired and felt fascinated by, hung in the hall.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that, with my protected, coddled, and shell-shocked air, I gave off a somewhat otherworldly and “good” impression, the sort that, later, as I got a little older, provoked certain of the nuns to invite me up to their convent above the school, where I was given simple chores, like sweeping the floors or cleaning their long kitchen’s cabinets, in exchange for a handful of candies and fifteen cents or so in pennies. Despite the endless stories I’ve since heard about cruel nuns, and aside from having the back of my head slapped and my knuckles rapped by a ruler, and yes, my earlobes tugged painfully when, getting older and more pent up, I turned into a classroom wise guy, I have always thought only fondly of those women, who, in their black-and-white wimpled habits and ascetically appointed rooms — narrow, with just a bed, a table, a washbasin on a stand, and a crucifix hanging on the wall — seem now to have been nothing less than sincerely devout throwbacks to some other time.
Along the way, in the church rectory, the Irish priests must have had some kind of discussion about the changing demographics of the neighborhood, for they began to give Hispanic-flavored sermons. At those nine A.M. Masses when the children filled the galleys, from the pulpit came little parables about a boy and girl, José and María. Typically, these were simple moral tales: María finds a wallet with money in it: Should she return the wallet, even if she has her eye on a dress or her mother could use the money? What should she do? This was the kind of thing she’d ask José. Righteous and good at coming up with answers, he’d advise her to do the right thing. Or they’d feel troubled over some hardship in the family and were thinking resentful thoughts toward others, only to learn that was not the right way to behave. The devil would come to them in disguise and advise them to do whatever they wanted but then they’d meet a gentle and quiet man with the most saintly face, and he would tell José and María to take the high road, never to sin, and in that way they would find their happiness. Sometimes he would tell them his name: Jesus; or it would turn out to be a guardian angel — but in any case, the point of those sermons always came to the triumph of good over evil. And so it went; I would sit listening, surrounded by real-life Josés and Marías in the pews, fascinated and rapt by the telling of such simple tales.