Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [60]
There were two rules I decided early on that I just couldn’t follow at the seminary, and I knew God would forgive me. In October 1968, the Detroit Tigers were headed to the World Series, and as part of our penance for being freshmen, we were not allowed to watch or listen to the games. I was convinced that this edict did not come from the Almighty, and so I snuck a transistor radio into my room and hid it inside my pillowcase. At night I would lie in bed and listen to the games, muffled as they were, through the pillow’s duck feathers. The day games I missed.
The other rule was that you could not have any food in your room. As they were more interested in feeding our souls than our bodies, I decided to take care of the latter. That year, science had invented the Frosted Pop-Tart (“Proof of God’s existence,” I would say). I smuggled in boxes of these heavenly items and I would toast them by placing a sheet of paper on top of my lamp and sitting the Pop-Tart on it. I was eventually discovered by a priest who caught a whiff of burnt strawberry out in the hallway. I was given extra kitchen duties for a week and lost my Saturday afternoon escape privileges for a month.
The other thing I enjoyed doing was hanging out with the senior boys. They had a knack for coming up with ingenious pranks that they loved to play on the holy hierarchy. My contribution to this club was to concoct a powder that replaced the chapel’s incense. It was called a “stink bomb,” and when the altar boy put a scoop of this “incense” onto the hot coal in the censer, it let off the most god-awful stench, a combination of rotten egg odor and a locker room fungus. It cleared the church within minutes.
The other prank, for which I became legendary (but only as “Anonymous,” as I was never discovered), involved an “entry” of mine in the school’s annual science fair. Of course, I had no interest in science (unless science could make a chocolate fudge Pop-Tart, which it eventually did), but I did have an interest in pulling off the best stunt ever.
About an hour before the doors to the seminary’s science fair were to be opened to the public, I quietly entered the exhibit hall and placed my “science project” on one of the tables. It was a simple, plain test tube that contained a clear liquid (in reality, cooking oil). I set it on its stand and placed a placard in front of it. It read:
NITROGLYCERINE:
DO NOT TOUCH OR WILL EXPLODE
It was five minutes before the opening, and I hid nearby so I could watch people’s expressions when they saw the test tube of danger. At that moment, the science teacher, a short nun with thick glasses and in her seventies, came in to make a final pass through the fair to make sure everything was in place and all set to go. She came upon my addition to the fair and was surprised to see something on the table that she hadn’t placed there. She took her glasses off and cleaned them, not exactly sure what this was she was looking at. As she bent over to read the card, she let out a scream and quickly waddled over to the fire alarm box, broke the glass, and pulled the lever.
I was mortified.5 This had gone too far. I got out of there as fast as I could, and as the fire trucks arrived I watched the firemen go inside and retrieve the tube which they could tell was not nitroglycerine. The nuns and the priests apologized—and issued a fatwa on whoever was responsible for this. They never caught the culprit.
There are two types of fear: normal fears that are primal (fear of pain, fear of death), and then there is the fear of Father Ogg.
Ogg taught Latin and German at the seminary. The Church had also christened him with special powers, and he was the only one at the seminary to hold these powers. One night, he gathered