I’ve never been molested (that I recall), but it would’ve been nice to have been asked. After all, I went to a Catholic grade school, where, in retrospect, one expects to be inundated with bad touches from every conceivable angle. Statistically speaking, I should have been like a clip-on tied Toshiro Mifune in one of those classic black-and-white Kurosawa films, parrying attempted blows, so to speak, from an encirclement of inept samurai. (Didn’t you always love how the opposing samurai thoughtfully took turns attacking, leaving Toshiro ample time to pirouette and meet them all head-on just before julienning them with his sword into a side order of samurai frites? It entailed all the courtesy and logistics of a modern gang bang.)
Alas, I threw a party, and no one showed up. As a prepubescent, I wore the proscribed Corpus Christi grade school uniform: a light-blue long-sleeved oxford, a navy blue necktie, and matching navy blue cotton-polyblend pants, into which I packed what was, no doubt, a tantalizing young bootie that--sad to say--drew no takers. In my imagination, I seemed like ideal jail bait (or, I should say, cash settlement bait) to some lecherous priest who might prove creative in repurposing the darkness of the confessional booth; but the parish priest Father Blank [a real not a symbolically-assigned name] was all business and seemed to suspect only that I had shaved a few incidents of lying and/or dishonoring my father and mother from my sin tally and not that I had a seriously bangin’ eleven-year-old ass. (Or maybe he preferred huskier boys. The kind who are always somewhat damp and get red-faced from a single flight of stairs. In the end, who can account for the totalitarianism of taste?)
Somewhere around second or third grade, we were all marched, lock-step, by a glass-eyed nun into the gymnasium for a highly erotic skit known as “Big Bear & Little Bear,” which depicted the inappropriate crotch-area groping of Little Bear by another animal, the species of which escapes me. (The interspecies angle of the mammal-on-mammal action seemed to needlessly complicate the moral, in my estimation.) After some internal debate that bordered on the schizophrenic, Little Bear eventually joined the Hall of Fame of rat-faced squealers by snitching on his lover to Big Bear, whose name suggested his own proclivities. I don’t recall how the incident was resolved, but if the Catholic Church employed the fondler in any capacity, I suspect that Big Bear wound up with a “happy face” [slit throat] and floating in the river.
At first, I believed that this play (one of the lesser works of Edward Albee, surely) was a conflict of interests, very much in the manner of tobacco companies donating money to Stop Underage Smoking campaigns. But then I got wise. The Catholic Church craftily allowed these performances less as cautionary tales than as instructional guides. After all, we were just a gaggle of toe-heads without any sexual know-how… Little Bear’s initial acquiescence (“Ooooh yeah, dat how I like it, bitch.”) taught us (1) not to scream or gag and (2) to realize that we were intended to reciprocate before either one of us would be allowed to go to sleep. It is indeed very meaningful (and savvy from a marketing perspective) that I recall the fondling and not the subsequent litigation from this skit.
Of course, I didn’t allow stereotypes to limit my options either. There were, after all, plenty of pilgrim-shoed nuns with theoretically untapped hymens roaming around the halls of Corpus Christi, and perhaps my still-miniature love spigot would register as an insistent blip on one of their vaginal sonars. Then again maybe not: the particular beasts known as men accept sexual favors, as an axiom, with few preliminaries; women, on the other hand, prefer some kind of emotional connection. I shudder to think of what genre of connection was conceivable between me and Sister Geraldine, a visigothic elderly nun of abundant size and wrath.
These sisters, all over fifty years old, lived in a modest (although all-brick-exterior) convent across the street from the school with a mutt named Patches. Had the nuns of our school resembled the large-breasted, coquettish orders depicted in Italian nunsploitation films, the boys of Corpus Christi, nearing pubescence, might have been more imaginative in their conjectures of what went on in that convent. Perhaps Patches and a jar of creamy peanut butter might’ve figured prominently. As it was, we imagined only a great deal of gardening, squabbling over chores, compulsory prayer, and watching the local religious channel. Not exactly fodder for late-night Cinemax.
Years later now, I am considering suing the Catholic Church--that is, if all its assets have not yet been liquidated to pay off children who were deemed sexy and desirable enough to molest. My self-esteem has eroded to such an extent that I doubt that even the most salacious, indiscriminate priest would’ve touched me then if I’d been naked, goose-fleshed, and presented on a sterling silver serving platter along with a fifth of Dark Eyes vodka and a clove cigarette. In short, I fear that I will never properly recover from not being molested. Of course, a cash settlement in the amount of 1.3 million dollars (and a book deal) might go some way toward inhibiting my serotonin reuptake temporarily, but I imagine that I will never cease to be haunted by the specters of the myriad ecclesiastics who have failed to want to toss my salad when it seemed (to me) eminently tossable.
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