A Different Kind of Crazy Being Recognized

Still worry this time of year that I am going to get dragooned and wake up in a fine boarding school in New England. Still count every day of August. Unlike December which I count in steps up, August is a count down to incarceration back in grey windy Rhode Island and Portsmouth Priory.

In the time it took to drive back to Washington from where we went not far away right over the Mass Rhode Island line, bought some clothes, went to the doctor and dentist and flew back to Rhode Island, it had turned cold.

Dumbarton Oaks, Georgetown, D.C.

I grew up across from this place. I liked to pretend I was the lord of the manner when I was a kid, so I never went near the house so as not to spoil the illusion if I ran into a staff member, being as I preferred to go when when the garden was closed.

When I went away to school they wanted a picture and the one we sent was of me on the front lawn in front of the main house, a Georgian mansion. I must have looked right at home because for the first week the monks were treating me strangely, being snoopy and standoffish at the same time.

Finally one asked about the house and seemed greatly relieved when he found out it was across the street and ours, which was a normal house. After that they treated me more normally, which is to say, everyday shitty instead of peculiarly shitty.

They were an odd lot. I doubt any of them thought, ’when I grow up I’d like to ride herd on a bunch of sheltered unhappy adolescents sent away from home, civilization, their mother, everything that’s normal and teach them Latin’. I had come from a mostly Jewish, suburban Maryland private day school so Portsmouth might as well have been something out of Dickens. Strange bitter, cross, unfriendly, neurotic some, Some outright starkers.

There were wars between the houses that would occur spontaneously, with the house Father cheering his boys on. War consisted in throwing whatever was in season: snow, crab apple, in a pinch, gravel from the driveway.

Father Andrew during a crab apple war

Dom Leo Van Winkle, the Headmaster, who like Father Andrew had been on the Manhattan Project, could count a study hall of fifty boys in one breathe. This was our only contact with him. He was always smiling looked like redheaded Jerry Lewis, his mind completely elsewhere. Today we would probably say he was autistic. I was surprised how kindly I felt toward him when I saw his obituary years later. When I was there I was looking for some adult to provide protection from these crazy people.

For instance Mr. Atchinson so dreadful one suspected he was behind half of his wife's hair falling out, someone actively horrible in every way, the main architect of the clumsy terror that passed for tradition there. On my fourth day I saw a boy in the locker room whose ass was purple and black. "What happened to Rooney?" I asked. "Oh Atchison did that, Rooney got behind in his Latin" I can still feel the burst of joy, the celebration really, when I saw his obituary. "Yes! finally!" and as my ex said of her Father when he died "I wish he would come back to life so I could kill him!" On that happy note I will leave out such things as how his hands shook when he got the girls sneaker out of the drawer in his desk and wet it in the tiny sink in the corner of his office, it will spoil the mood. I read recently that thirty percent of Vets that have PTSD never saw action. It was kind of like that.

Father Stephen’s specialty was to tell long shaggy dog stories about teenagers who went to lover’s lane and [insert lots of fuzzy language to suggest mortal sin was involved]…and then set off to go home and got hit by a train. He was a joke but with repetition, it got under your skin in a creepy way. Fortunately this was balanced by Father Thomas who liked nude sun bathing and would huff “O that’s not a sin” if you tried to include masturbation in your puny list of sins. Gee, what opportunity for sin was there in this crummy place?

One afternoon I got so carried away listening to Odetta sing Waterboy which has a loud WHAUP! in the chorus that I decided to charge the wall in the common room with a push broom. Jousting knight. Don't ask. What I didn't understand was that the dorm being a DU had beaverboard walls downstairs, basically loosely compressed paper. The handle of the broom easily went through the two layers of the wall. The other thing I didn't know was that Father Stephen's bed was right on the other side of the wall and he was at that moment enjoying an afternoon nap and was a little surprised when the handle quickly passed across his belly and just as quickly disappeared. It was kind of hard to calm him down. How was I to know that you couldn't run into the wall ?

When I got there the school play was the Madwoman of Chaillot. My roommate had the only male part. No one thought this was odd. Having grown up in what passed for the gay part of town, however closeted, I decided not to say anything.

The dorms were a hodge podge, one each of a Gothic brick three story, a midcentury modern (complete with it’s architect/monk who donated it, a lovely distinguished Irish queen always smelling faintly of juniper, that is gin. He had a flock of sheep that shat all over the playing fields, giving visiting teams a start)

My dorm was a World War ll Dwelling Unit. When they showed me my room I thought it was the closet to store my trunk. With bare beadboard paneling and a bare forty watt bulb hanging from the ceiling it didn’t look like any room for humans that I’d ever seen. Cramped, it was for two of us.

This was the nightmare version of my bedroom at home. The idea that there was something called a rec room in the new suburbs was exotic, an artifact from a different culture where teens had their own room in a split-level ranch house, turned the lights out and had make out parties.

When I was ten my mother let me pick out new wallpaper for my room. I was riveted by the knotty pine pattern in the big sample book. What no one told me was that though the book was big, it in fact showed the entire pattern, comprising two knots, a big one that looked a bit like a sheep if you tried really hard and a little one that never looked like anything, repeated over and over.

It did not make my smallish room with high ceilings look like a rec room, more like a packing crate as depicted in a school play.

I never got much of an answer as to why the barracks other than they were put up during the War. Did they hit a sale on barracks at the Army Surplus store? It was only looking back that I thought the fact that the Assistant Headmaster, Dom Leo and Father Andrew had been on the Manhattan Project, might be a clue. It was in a building just like this that the Nation Security Act of 1947 was written on yellow legal pad by my Father at the tender age of thirty four.

I had a ruptured disc and doctor’s permission to skip sports. This didn’t sit well with the management and they tried various things to make me say, just kidding. First they made me supervise upper class men doing punishment squad, moving dirt from one place to another, for instance. This made me instantly famous and hated and a week into the school year turned to see a mob of fifty of my classmates wanting to chase me down and depants me, which they did. Another unusual tradition there, for special occasions.

So I got moved to doing the punishment squad chores by myself. I am in the squash court with a piece of steel wool in my hand, assigned to remove all the marks from the wall. White room , red line across, I spin and spin by myself and go back to my task, day after day. Then the next court and the next. Now raking stones from the earth next to a long path. By the time I reach one end it has rained and a new batch of stones waits.

i’ve been informed that it’s co-ed now but I’m afraid I can’t imagine that. My brain nibbles at the idea but spits it back out. So much would have to change, so many traditions would be lost. Wars between dorms with rocks, crab apple and of course snow, for instance. Can’t very well ask a girl to drop her trousers and kneel over the back of a chair like in the old days. Getting whacked with a wet sneaker leaves marks for all to see. You’d get arrested. Stochastic terrorism is frowned upon these days.

Easter

In my mind the baby Jesus was barely three months old and already we were celebrating his grizzle death with a large rabbit, pastel everything and complicated fasting routines. All part of the Catholic Mystical Dissociation program.

There never was much description of what life was like before Jesus cancelled original sin, no testimonials "This is great, I feel light as a feather" or words to that effect, no, and the process seemed to leave plenty of sins behind.

Very little in the Sacrifice format has survived in practical magic. I can only think of pouring out a forty at a sidewalk shrine, smashing a bottle of champaign to launch a ship and stomping on a light bulb at a wedding.

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Only stranger are the hold overs from burnt offering days. The upgrade to bread and wine was a godsend. No more complaints from the neighbors about the smoke. What's more, no clean up. Communion wafers don't even leave crumbs. Now you barely have to think about cannibalism and human sacrifice, all that went out when we smashed the pagans.

Besides some sharp Jesuit lawyers have come up with a workaround: transubstantiation. This particular legerdemain is accomplished by saying certain words. These words and only these words turn the wee haunted wafer into Jesus' body, only invisibly, only the appearance of bread and wine remain. Try that at a kids magic show and see how far you get.

This is some advanced stuff. Google can't even understand if you ask "are there other examples of..." Wiki wants you to know "the notions of "substance" and "transubstantiation" are not linked with any particular theory of metaphysics" It works by the words, but only if a priest says them. As my dear friend, Amy Wallace once said, "If absurdity could kill, I'd be dead now.”

At Portsmouth Priory one of the punishments was having to serve mass for the House Father at 5:30 in the morning. Father Damien got to find out that I'd made it to fifteen without absorbing one single detail of where you go when, the Latin might as well have been baby talk, not processed with any literal meaning.

So when it got changed to English the first time I heard the priest say, "Go, the mass has ended" I laughed. THAT’S what he was saying all this time? It. was done as English with a Latin accent, not friendly sounding. You wouldn't say to guest GO, the party's over.

At Easter Time they would enforce silence at meals and every year read from the same book, a long minutely detailed description of the Crucifixion, whole meals passing on how and where and what tendons and what bones and what size nails, on and on, droning down in sheets from the crummy PA system.

Mathias Grunewald

AN EASTER STORY

The dining hall smells of floor wax and hot garbage soapy steam of the dishwasher. Father Andrew stands by the trash can, staring, Mad again, trying to eat all the leftovers on the trays returning to the kitchen, even the egg shells.

One of the scholarship boys who didn't understand one of the compensations of his Madness, which went completely unacknowledged by his fellow Monks, was a near constant stream of ill temper and abuse, and he, the scholarship boy did the natural thing and calmly and swiftly emptied a tureen of soup on Father Andrew's head.

There was silence. No one laughed, no one scolded, the Madman found himself alone and with one of those lucky breaks you get from time to time with the insane, seemed to take in the common sense aspect of this gesture.

Then there was Aelred Graham, the Prior. On Monday nights when you were starving for dinner, he would give a talk in the chapel to everyone. He had a rocking gently swinging declarative delivery which sounded like this. "BOYS, I want to Talk to you about ruff fruff frah, Alur caferlimah caffrankachun. NOW when you are confronted by the wawurrimur...." and so on and so until, though you were standing you would be lulled into a trance so complete that when you popped back out at the end, you had on idea what was just said.

He was the first mystic I encountered. He was wall-eyed, well one eye looked over your shoulder when he talked to you, it was all you could do to keep from checking if someone was there. He was also the first person I heard talk about the future, as in read the future, what we'd call a psychic reading or slightly differently, Darshan. "I see you will be part of some lay order" he said. The whole school was on retreat for two weeks no classes no lights out and I was feeling a great rush of Something, it felt immanent, impending. So I was momentarily crestfallen that something was not going to happen now but it gave me something to look forward to.

I was out at 1:30 in the morning trying to sort this out when Father Andrew popped out from behind a tree, Father Andrew who looked just like St Anthony in Bosch's Temptation of St. Anthony. He pops out gives me a start and says "LOOK! Up in the Sky! It's the red cloud that Moses followed out of Egypt!" And there was a red cloud miles long going East. We looked at each other. We looked at the cloud, we looked at each other some more, a different kind of crazy being recognized.