Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [58]
It was one week from Holy Thursday, 1968, the Thursday before Palm Sunday, the day that Jesus would enter Jerusalem and prepare for what would be his last Passover on the following Thursday. At St. John’s during Lent there was either a Lenten service or Mass on each weeknight. I was asked to be an altar boy on this particular Thursday. There were gospel readings and Communion and the consecrating of the altar with incense.
I was given the silver censer that held the burning coal onto which you placed the incense and then swung it around the altar and throughout the church. This had all of my favorite activities rolled into one: fire, smoke, and emitting a strange odor.
When Mass was over, one of my duties was to take the censer outside the church and dispose of the smoldering incense and coal onto the ground, putting it out with my foot.
It was a chilly evening on this early April night, and the vestments that I wore over my clothes were not enough to keep out the piercing wind that was blowing up into my black robe and making me want to get back inside as quickly as possible. I emptied the remnants of the incense out onto the still-frozen ground and rubbed them around, pressing hard with the heel of my shoe, until they were extinguished. It was then that a man in the parking lot, a parishioner who had gone out early to his car to warm it up, had heard a news bulletin on the radio as it came on. Excited, he wanted to share it with everyone as they were departing the church. With his car door open, he stood up on the floorboard so all coming out of Mass could hear his joyful announcement:
“King’s been shot! They’ve shot King! Martin Luther King!”
At that moment—in what I will recall for the rest of my life as one of the most depressing things I would ever witness—a cheer went up from the crowd. Not from everyone, not even from most. But from more than a few, a spontaneous joyful noise came out of the mouths that had just held the body of Christ. A whoop and holler and a yell and a cheer. I was still processing the stunning and tragic news about Reverend King I had just heard—heard from a man who said it with such surety that all would be well now, this Negro, this nigger, this terrorist, was somehow no longer going to bother us anymore. Hallelujah.
I jerked my head in the direction of the church door to see who in God’s name was celebrating this moment. Some people had smiles. But most were stunned. Some remained silent, while others rushed to their cars so they could turn on their radios and hear for themselves that this troublemaker was no longer with us. A woman began to cry. People passed the news back inside the church to those who had not yet come out. There was much commotion, and all I could think about was that stupid Angel of Death—and who the hell forgot the lamb’s blood tonight in Memphis? There would be no pass over.
What was special about this night? Every Easter, from then on and for the rest of my life, I would know the bitter answer.
The Exorcism
“KICK OUT THE JAMS, motherfuckers!” I shouted up the stairwell. O’Malley, my bully of a roommate, slapped me hard across the face.
“Shut the fuck up! Father Waczeski is right there!”
I turned quickly around to see if the priest had heard me, but there was no priest anywhere to be found. O’Malley, who was a year older than me, just wanted to slap me. He laughed his usual sinister laugh, and hit me again.
“Stop it,” I said. “I was just singing that new MC5 song.”
“Then sing the clean version, the one they play on the radio—‘Kick out the jams, brothers and sisters.’”
What the fuck did he care about a “clean” version? O’Malley was the opposite of anything clean. He was more a version of every mother’s nightmare. What was a thug like him doing at the seminary?
When I was fourteen I decided it was time to leave home. Mostly bored with school since the first grade, but politely biding my time to keep everybody happy, I realized I could do more good for myself and the world (wherever that was) if I became