I’m still an altar boy and even though I hate it and all of my friends have already quit, my mother is making me stay in the cassocks until I go to high school.
“I still like to see my little Kneeney up there on the altar and it fills me with pride, would you please do it for your mother?” she says. Then she’ll put out her arms and ask me to give her a hug and she’ll say something like, “I’m gonna lose my little boy soon just like I lost your brother, aren’t I?”
And I say, “No, I won’t be like him.”
But I feel guilty when I say it because I know I’m lying. I mean, I won’t be like Tommy, being a jerk all the time and never listening to her and being rude and ignoring her when she tells him to be home for dinner and breaking her heart with his drinking, but I know that’s not what she’s talking about. She just doesn’t want me to grow up, period. And sometimes I don’t want to grow up either because it makes me sad because I can feel myself not wanting to hang out with her the way I used to and I always used to love hanging out with my mom.
On rainy days, we would sit at the kitchen table and do puzzles or play gin rummy. On hot summer nights when my dad was working, she would make bowls of popcorn and homemade lemonade with tons of sugar and we would watch TV together. We don’t have air conditioning in our house, but we have this big metal fan that sits on the floor in our living room. I would lie on my stomach in front of the fan and my mom would lie next to me and we’d put our faces right up to the spinning blades and sing songs into them and it would make your voice sound funny and we’d both crack up laughing. She also likes to read a lot and she lies on the couch in our living room all day when she’s into a good book and sometimes I’ll get a comic book and lie there with her, and we’ll read for hours, or I’ll fall asleep like I used to when I was really little. She loves stuff like that, stuff that reminds her of when I was still her little Kneeney.
My birthday is at the end of the summer, August 31, and it feels like that day is a ticking clock time bomb. I’ll be turning thirteen, a teenager, and this worries my mom. She’s scared of me growing up and all year has been saying stuff like, “When you turn thirteen you’ll turn into a lunatic like every other teenage boy with the hormones and testosterone and my little boy won’t want to spend time with me like you used to.”
When she says stuff like that, I can see it really makes her sad because she knows it’s true, because I don’t like doing a lot of the stuff I used to with her because I’m too big now. But I wish I did because I know it would make her happy. So sometimes I force myself to hang out with her but then that makes me even sadder because I see how happy it makes her and then you’re filled with guilt on top of your sadness because it would be so easy to do this stuff with her all the time—but still you don’t because none of your friends still hang out and play gin rummy with their moms and if you tried to tell them you were staying in to do a puzzle with your mother you’d never hear the end of it and besides, you don’t want to be the last momma’s boy on Marlboro Road.
So, I decided not to tell her how much I hate being an altar boy because she’s down in the dumps enough already without me adding to it. I mean, during the school year, serving Mass isn’t so bad because if you have to do a funeral, you get to leave class and walk over to the church during the school day because funerals are usually during the week. And who doesn’t mind missing class even if it’s because of a funeral. But it’s harder during the summer, instead of being outside on a gorgeous day when all your friends are out playing, you’re standing on the altar, sweating under your cassock, keeping a close eye on Father Nolan, the priest saying the Mass, because he’s always in a bad mood but today he’s really pissed off because the other boy you were supposed to serve with, Joey Mullen, didn’t show up and if you mess something up—which is what kids do, right?—you know you’re getting a smack or worse after Mass.
So now I’m stuck up there alone, kneeling on the sanctuary step and my kneecaps are killing me because Father Nolan doesn’t let you use a pad for your knees because he says a little pain in your knees is the least you can do for Jesus considering he took nails to his feet and hands for you and died up there on that cross for your sins, and you want to complain about your knees you little ingrate. But when your knees are hurting, you try to think of something else to forget the pain, and if you get too distracted you might miss the spot during the Eucharistic Prayer when you’re supposed to ring the bells and if you mess something up like that—which I did last Sunday—Father Nolan will make sure to drag you by your ear through the sacristy after Mass to make sure your ears are still working because he can’t understand how you couldn’t have heard him call the Holy Spirit down upon the gifts and if you’re hard of hearing you’re not fit to serve his Mass—which is exactly what happened. It’s moments like that when you start to wonder why God lets such mean people work for him. But maybe that’s what God wants. He wants us to be afraid of him.
I can remember when I was in first grade, and I was just learning how to read, and I picked up the church bulletin to show my dad what a good reader I was becoming but I screwed it up because the bulletin is called “The Good News” but I read it as “The God Knows.” My dad started cracking up right in the middle of Mass when I said that.
“The God Knows?” he repeated. “Oh man, they got you shaking in your boots already, don’t they?”
On the drive home from church that day him and mom had a big fight over the whole thing.
“You see that’s the problem with the church. This poor kid is already afraid of God because he’s afraid God knows what he’s thinking. Why can’t the little guy at least have his thoughts to himself without worrying that whatever weird shit might pop into his head might send him straight to hell?” my dad asks. My mom didn’t want to hear it.
She said, “Then he can go to confession and tell the priest all about it and he’ll be forgiven.”
“But he doesn’t need to go to confession because he didn’t do anything wrong. And if this crazy vindictive God of ours is all knowing and all seeing, then why does he have to go to confession in the first place? Wouldn’t he already know the kid was sorry? And if he did know, would he really care? He’s seven years old for Christ’s sake.”
“Fine,” she says. “But when he ends up in eternal damnation let it be on your conscience. And please don’t take Jesus’s name in vain when you’re bashing the church. Two sins don’t make a right.”
My dad turns to me in the back seat and winks. “Don’t worry kid, nobody here is going to hell.” Then under his breath, he adds, “Or heaven for that matter.”
But my mother hears him and yells, “Don’t poison his mind with your blasphemy,” and this starts another fight.
I still don’t know what he meant by that. Either he thinks there is no heaven or we’re all sinners.
My dad was an altar boy when he was a kid, and he says the priests were even worse then. Instead of just smacking you in the back of the head and dragging you by the ear, they’d smack you in the face, with their keys in their hands if you really screwed up, to make sure you really felt it. He served at Holy Cross on Forty-Second Street just off Times Square in Hell’s Kitchen. He says the Mass was in Latin back then and that Latin is really hard to understand, so of course you’d never know when you were supposed to ring the bells and then you’d get the keys to the face.
When you become an altar boy, there are initiation rituals the older boys put you through. The priests aren’t supposed to know about it, but they must because it usually ends with altar boys crying and what priest doesn’t love the sound of that. At our parish, the initiation came during Holy Week when the church would get the delivery of the stacks of palms for Palm Sunday. Our job would be to separate the palms from the stacks and put them in the boxes to hand out before the Palm Sunday Mass. It was a miserable job because the palms can be really sharp, and you’d get all these little cuts on your fingers. They were like paper cuts, but only worse. The older boys would then take the palms and whip the shit out of the new altar boys. They would aim for your arms and face and neck, anywhere you had skin showing. I had such a big scrape across the front of my neck that I had to tell my mother I got scratched playing Salugi. I knew she’d believe me because anytime you played Salugi, you came home with some kind of scratch, cut, or scrape. If you don’t know Salugi, it’s like kill the man with the ball, only with two teams. There’s no real purpose to the game because there’s no way to keep score so it’s really just a way to run around and beat the crap out of each other which can be a lot of fun if you’re playing with kids your own age. But during lunch recess we usually play our grade against the eighth graders and that always ends with one of the sixth graders crying because some of the eighth graders are already like men with mustaches and muscles and when they tackle you, they really hit you hard. And since we don’t have a field at our school, we play in the church parking lot, and it hurts like hell to get tackled on cement. The worst is when they do a pile on and you’re stuck at the bottom and you get that feeling like when a big wave keeps you under water and you can’t breathe and your heart races and you’re screaming for them to get off of you and they just laugh because they’re older and when you become a teenager you can’t help yourself from being a dick.
When my dad was an altar boy, his initiation was much worse than mine. For some reason, they kept some coffins in the church basement at Holy Cross and the older boys would drag one of these coffins up the steps, put one of the new boys in the coffin, slam it shut and send Holy Cross’s newest altar boy flying down the stairs. My dad said when they shut the coffin closed and sent him down the stairs he nearly pissed in his pants and he prayed to Jesus that if he didn’t piss himself, he promised he wouldn’t do the same thing to the new altar boys when he got older because if he pissed in his pants, the abuse would have been endless. God answered his prayers and my dad didn’t piss himself. But of course, when he got older, him and his friends did the same coffin surfing initiation to the younger kids, because that’s what older kids do.