Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [23]
I love talking to my mom. I’ll talk to her on the phone for hours but regardless of how long the call is, at the end of it she’ll always say the phrase “one more thing.” But it rarely deserves to be “one more thing.” It’s always like, “One more thing—Ellen from my swim class bought a rice cooker.” I’ll say, “Mom, that’s not a ‘one more thing.’ In long division that’s called a ‘remainder.’ You save up ten of those, we’re gonna give you a conversation!”
For a while it looked like I might become a priest because I was really good at being Catholic and it was this thing that my mom and I had in common. Of anyone in my family, I relate most to my mom. Like me, she’s a talker. She’ll say anything to anyone in any context. I was visiting my parents recently and I met my mother at the bank and she had been talking to the bank teller for fifteen minutes about really personal things, and I walked in at the end and all I could hear her say was, “. . . And here he is now!”
My mom and I are kindred spirits, so when she sent me to Catholic school, I was thrilled to join the team. And I loved being on the team. Being Catholic was fun. When you’re seven years old and your parents send you to Catholic school, your world makes a lot of sense. You wear your little plaid bow tie every day, and your blue button-down shirt with the short sleeves. Every girl in your class wears the exact same patterned plaid skirt. And you assume that everyone in the world is named Fitzgerald, Murphy, or Sullivan.
At Catholic school a lot of your teachers are nuns, and they’re always talking about this guy Jesus who everybody’s afraid of but everybody loves, because he loves everybody. And a long time ago some people killed him, and it’s not totally your fault, and don’t be scared or sad, because he’s living forever, next to God, who’s his dad, even though he is also God. And also there’s this Holy Spirit part too, that no one really understands. But all three of these guys are everywhere, at all times, just in case you need to talk anything out.
“Am I going too fast for you, seven-year-old boy?”
“Oh, you have questions?”
“Oh, we don’t know the answer to that, that’s part of the mystery.”
“No, he’s different than Santa. That’s just some horseshit we made up. This is the real deal.”
And it’s funny how they roll it out to you when you’re seven. They’re like, “There’s this guy Jesus, and he totally loves you.”
And you say, “Oh, okay, great.”
And they say, “And you love him too, right?”
And you ask, “I’m sorry, do I know that guy?”
And they say, “You know, from the picture of the cross? That guy loves you . . . and you love him.”
It starts innocently enough, as innocently as man-boy love can start. You just accept that you’re in love with a long-haired dude who loves you and spends most of his time nailed to a cross, as far as you can tell from the statues around school. You’re seven. What are you going to do?
Then it starts to get a little heavier. When you’re eight they just casually throw it out there: “You know, he died for your sins.”
And you think, Oh man. I thought I’d gotten away with stealing that Brach’s candy at the supermarket. I guess that Jesus guy took the fall.
Then a couple years later, you’re eleven, and you get the word that Father Grady wants you to be one of his new altar boys. He’s seen your work at recess on the kickball field, and he thinks you’ve got what it takes to snuff out candles, hold a chalice, and not trip and fall on your robe. You’re excited. No one’s told you that being an altar boy is like being a priest’s AV guy, that church is just as boring when you’re watching the back of the priest’s head as it is watching the front of his head. It’s like watching a concert from backstage.
But church was also kind of glamorous. The priests have these multilayered robes. As an altar boy, even you have a robe. A real simple, white one. It’s like karate, where you start with white belt and then you get some different color belts once