Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [63]
I devoured every line of Romeo and Juliet, and it spun my head and hormones into a wondrous web of excitement. Unfortunately, I had not read the rulebook before signing up for the seminary, and here’s what it said:
YOU CAN NEVER HAVE SEX, NOT EVEN ONCE IN YOUR LIFE. ESPECIALLY WITH A WOMAN.
Now, had I read that in eighth grade, I’m not sure I would have understood all the ramifications of agreeing to this prohibition. By the time it was explained to me in ninth grade at the seminary, something seemed oddly wrong with this rule. Call me crazy, but I kept hearing voices in my head:
Mmmmmm… girls… gooooood… penis… haaaaappy.
The voices intensified on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. That was when they bused the few of us seminarians who played a musical instrument into the Catholic high school in nearby Bay City to play with their school band. There were not enough of us to make up our own orchestra at the seminary, and the priests, who enjoyed culture and the arts and would often sit around and have conversations with each other in Italian, did not want those of us who were musically inclined to miss our “other callings.”
I was placed in the clarinet section next to a girl named Lynn. Did I mention she was a girl? At the seminary I spent 1,676 hours of every week around only boys. But for these two glorious hours, I was in the vicinity of the other gender. Lynn’s long, deft fingers that she used on her clarinet were a beauty to behold (as were her breasts and legs and smile—but I only wrote smile just in case one of the priests is still alive and reads this story because, truth be told, while her smile was pleasant, I have no recollection of it as it was obscured by her breasts and legs and anything else that didn’t resemble a seminarian). Being in a coed Catholic high school band literally drove me insane.
I tried my best to think about The Rule and to offer up this desire as penance for even wondering what might exist under her Catholic schoolgirl uniform. But there is just so much penance a now fifteen-year-old can do, and one day I asked one of the other seminarians on the band bus “Who the hell made up this rule?!” He said he didn’t know and that “it was probably God.” Right.
One weekend, I reread all four gospels and nowhere—nowhere!—did it say that the apostles couldn’t have sex, or get married, or be happy with their penises. As my after-school job was working as an assistant in the library, I did my own research. And here’s what I found: The priests of the Catholic Church for the first one thousand years were married! They had sex! Peter, chosen by Jesus to be the first Pope, was married, as were most of the apostles. As were thirty-nine Popes!
But then some Pope in the eleventh century got it in his head that sex sucked and wives sucked worse, and so he banned priests from marrying or having sex. It makes you wonder how all the other great twisted ideas throughout history got their start (like who came up with the card game Bridge?). They might as well have made it a sin to scratch when you have an itch.
I began spending a lot of time on the job in the library going into the basement level where all the old magazines were stored. The cultured priests subscribed to Paris Match, and let’s just say that in France in 1969, women were inclined to “stay cool” in the summertime. All my first loves could be found right there, in the periodical archives of St. Paul’s Seminary.
As we drew near to the end of our study of Romeo and Juliet, Father Ferrer announced that there was a new movie in the theaters based on the play and that we would be taking a field trip to see it. This version was by the Italian director Franco Zefferelli, and little did the priest know (or did he?) that his group of fifteen-year-old boys would be exposed for the first time to fifteen-year-old breasts, namely those on the body of the actress playing Juliet, Olivia Hussey.
That