Racing Thoughts of a Suburban Anarchist

What if Monty Python recruited Noam Chomsky to write skits for Eddie Izzard? The result might be this collection of humorous essays that subvert enshrined certainties with inspired lunacy and a postmodern twist. Irreverent & heretical, stately & plump, Caramagno skewers Christian virtues, common sense, and political pundits alike with a combination punch of silliness and cultural criticism. What began as anecdotes for his lectures on postmodernism has become both intellectually challenging, absurdly stupid, and devastatingly funny–no, that’s three things. Sorry. I’ll begin again. Among his satirical weaponry are such diverse elements as a keen though disturbed mind, a freewheeling cynicism that makes Nietzsche look like a Franciscan, a love of life, and a deeply held commitment to fucking it up for the rest of us.

Published by Publish America (Baltimore, MD: Publish America, 2003)

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside, it’s too dark to read.”
–Groucho Marx

Heresy

I was raised Roman Catholic, but I have mixed feelings about martyrdom. As a child, I loved the names of the Saints--Aelred of Rievaulx, Xantippa, Polyxen, Ulehad, Cyprian--painted in a florid rhinestone red on the high grey walls of my church. They were the Batman and Robin of the Middle Ages, superheroes with mysterious powers, exotic origins, and obscure sexuality. The modern world shrank as I read, from massive leather-bound books secluded in the school library, of their fantastic adventures in exotic pagan lands, converting oriental kings and their hundred concubines, roasting in great pots of boiling oil, baptizing two-headed heathens awed by a three-personed God. I admired the martyrs, but I never felt good enough to become one. The Saints died in bliss, smiling contentedly while their flesh burned away. I'm pissed off I have to die at all. The missionaries enjoyed legendary endurance and patience. I get winded on the stairs and press the elevator button repeatedly so it will come faster. The mystics sensed a divine Providence working subtly in every aspect of their lives. I feel I'm being spied upon. So I have to wonder: is it just me?
I started off well enough, attending St. Michael's Grammar School in the 1950's, those halcyon days in suburban Los Angeles when salt-and-pepper corduroy pants were mandatory and plaid shirts came in various colors--all of them in each shirt. We wore stiff Buster Brown shoes with fake ventilator holes in the toes, nickel-plated inserts in the soles, and heavy heels like thick hockey pucks. No matter how quiet we tried to be, tiptoeing out of the confessional, the whoosh of corduroy and the crack of leather sole echoed on the hard marble floors of the church, attracting stares when we wanted anonymity the most. A thick red curtain closed across the booth, but it was hardly a private moment. Confession was like the gay closet: we pretended to be invisible, but everybody knew who was on his knees. No, they didn't want the sordid details. It was fun to guess. As we exited, we tried to look innocent for all the old ladies in the back pews whose hands were busily worrying their rosaries, as if they were shucking beans. We suspected they were measuring the gravity of our sins by the time we spent confessing. It was like a car wash: the lucky ones got the 5 minute quickie--in, out, no hand buffing, and who's the wiser? The unlucky were stuck for fifteen minutes or more, and everybody knew they were getting the Turtle Wax.
Named after the militant archangel, St. Michael's was governed by an Irish nun, Sister Mary John George Florida, a very tall woman who could see sin for miles. Her wire-rimmed glasses gave her an odd air of fragility, while her slate-grey eyes bore holes into your soul. Like Captain Ahab, she ran a tight ship, obsessed not with a white whale but with white thighs. Every month she measured the distance between hem and knee to catch seventh grade girls who, she suspected, were hiking up their skirts at the urging of atheist friends over at Gardena High. It didn't occur to her they were just growing. And I think she overestimated their seductive power. In their starched white blouses and pleated skirts, they looked more like Scottish Gurkas than Jezebels. They were ruthless at volleyball, elbowing rivals, cursing the refs, and spiking the ball with clenched fists of rage before they surrendered to the inevitable, lumpy prom dresses their mothers were already sewing for them at home. We boys looked on from the sidelines with incomprehension and interest. We knew we were destined to marry them, but none of us could satisfactorily explain why we would want to, or even how to choose which one. We grabbed at straws modeled for us by popular movies.
“A blonde,” Jimmy Fallon declared. “That’s what I want. A blonde who can cook!”
This forced a counterproposal from Charlie Descheneuf, whose crew cut was held together by vaseline, “I want a brunette. Brunettes are cool. I don’t care if she can cook. We’ll eat at restaurants.”
Joe Campanella said he didn’t care if she was blonde or brunette so long as she was “stacked.” It wouldn’t be until high school before I learned what that word meant, but I nodded in agreement as if he had just said the sun was bright and the sky was blue. Despite our bravado, we kept at a safe distance from the girls. Only the three Mangan brothers mixed easily with them–sexless, funny, inoculated against fear--because everyone knew they were going into the priesthood. Somehow their being guys just didn’t count any more.
Sister F. seemed to know before we did that we were growing up, and she felt no shame about cruising the boys' bathrooms, on the hunt for cigarette butts and "unspeakable practices," which she repeatedly warned us against, but since they never were spoken, we had no clear idea what she was talking about. If she had just told us it was circle jerking, we might have stopped. But you know how it is when you're fourteen years old. All sports seem innocent. At least, the Mangan brothers said so.
Sister F. suspected me from the very first of some outrageous crime against common decency, said she was keeping her eye on me, and a moist, imposing eye it was:

"What are you doing now, Mr. Caramagno?
"Doing, sister?"
"Why are you squinting?"
"I'm trying to read the board, sister."
"Don't 'sister' me. You're making faces at me!"
"I think I need glasses."
"What good are glasses when you've lost your soul?"
"I could look for it."
"Impudent child!"

Of course, I resisted intimidation, bravely, though passively, turning my eyes from hers and staring at her chest, or what I thought was her chest, but which later turned out to be a money belt. Sister F. didn't believe in this world's banks or the next world's charity. I passed around a story that she was hiding bingo profits in it. Suddenly, all the kids were staring at her chest. In retaliation, she put me in charge of closing the windows at the end of class. The windows were those very tall windows you always see in parochial schools, and I was short for my age. My mother promised me I would grow. But in the meantime I had to stand unsteadily on the steam radiators to reach the window locks. It was a good learning experience, Sister F. said, for someone going to Hell.
Sister F. taught me my catechism, a handy list of which acts were pleasing to God and which were not, with no explanation of how anyone knew this was the way He felt, and a few choice opinions of her own thrown in for good measure:

"Communists are soulless atheists whom God will banish to a special place in Hell."
"What place is that, sister?"
"Next to the Protestants."
"Honor your mother and your father. But if you catch them using contraception, tell Father Conklin immediately."

"Television is the greatest instrument ever invented for communication and education. That's why it's too dangerous for you to watch."
"I saw Senator McCarthy on TV."
"There are exceptions, of course."
"What about "Gunsmoke"?
"Is Miss Kitty married?"
"I don't think so."
"Harlot!"

As an educator, it was Sister F's duty to warn us that some people were just too smart for their own good, and that we should consider ourselves lucky. (By the time I realized I had been insulted, I was already in graduate school where I was learning to insult my own intelligence.) With a photograph of Pope Pius XII smiling benignly behind her, like a street vendor on a hot day, she argued that non-Catholics had abused the freedom to think, largely by exercising that freedom, but (and here she squinted very hard at us as if to underline each word) they couldn't recognize that their reasoning was faulty because Error made them think they were right. "Hoisted on their own petard," she said with relish. We winced. A petard sounded particularly nasty. I imagined a very sharp point skewering very soft skin in the worst place possible. How we could recognize Protestant ideas without thinking about them, and thereby succumbing to heresy, was too tricky to explain, Sister F. said, but she assured us we needed only a split second to know when to shut down cognitively. It would help, she added, if we just didn't think about the things we didn't think about. "Leave that to the Jesuits."
By the time I got to Loyola University where some Jesuits could be found, I was already experiencing a youthful Byronic impulse to fling aside convention and try my waxen wings at rebellion. I learned to curse. I said bold things, like "Damn the Republicans!" and "Question authority!" But in the back of my mind I could see Sister F. shaking her aerodynamic headdress, wafting eddies of disgust in the sacred air around her, and I understood why I was rebelling. It was pride, simple, Luciferean pride. I was the son of a working class Italian immigrant, every Friday I ate at the Fish Fry in the Knights of Columbus Hall, and my only goal in life was to get married before I got a girl pregnant. Who was I to question the difference between sin and self-worth? Being saved, I figured I could do without both.
Then one day, when I was nineteen and the sun was bright and the sky was blue, I met a strawberry-blond Congregationalist named Cathy Lord whose smile blew me into a thousand pieces, and I felt dizzy and disoriented. My appetite disappeared. My acne reappeared. With a shock I realized that I was in love with a Protestant. (At least, I presumed she was a Protestant. Actually, I had no idea what Congregationalists were. I just imagined them having meetings all the time.) I was unprepared for heresy and Eros combined. I knew that Satan could assume many guises to corrupt me, but this was good. I had been expecting red-flanneled fiends, unctuous men with cheap aftershave, women who owned their own Chevys. What I got instead was a girl who called herself "the Vestal Virgin of Belton Avenue," whose skin as flawless as a Virginia peach, eyes a deep meadow green, a smile straight out of a MacCleen's toothpaste ad, not a cavity in sight. We had religious discussions. She tried to open my mind. I tried to save her by making her feel damned. After two years of sectarian conflict, she broke up with me and went to Harvard. It was then that I realized I knew everything about life except how to live it.