From Young Rooms: And Also With You
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My girlfriend reads and studies the Bible. Somehow I came to college and found a lot of people who do this or at least go to church. (Creative Commons)
People are all extremists where no one’s looking. You read my journals from September and October and you find someone who’s living in a tree.
The date, location, and time in the upper corners, then art, art, art—nothing should really make sense, you shouldn’t have to explain yourself, reservations are for the weak—anyone who thinks promiscuity is wrong is someone I don’t like. You’d think I walked around everywhere with no shirt on.
That’s only a series of moments. You believe those things kind of how you think having that last drink is a good idea. You’re drunk. Even if you don’t throw up you still need a few seconds with your hand stabilizing on a beam or a friend’s car hood so you don’t. Or you get in trouble and you’re like, Oh yeah that was a mistake. By the next day you’ve qualified yourself, but you’ll still drink again. That’s what really strong philosophy is like. It comes in waves and covers you until it heads back out.
I’ve recently been proud about the fact that I’m not baptized anything. When you grow up you enter different worlds of religious presence like smaller to bigger air spaces. Molecules frantically swimming around in balloons that are losing air. The image you get in your head when you study oxygen in science. In eighth grade it was everyone’s Catholic. Now it’s how no one can get along.
In high school there’s the moment where the “liberals and intellectuals” all think it’s cool to entertain atheism. “Well god’s certainly never talked to me.” On the newspaper staff there were a lot of these and like with everything else in my life I sort of lived on the fringes. I was a friend and sympathizer but I changed my mind too often to carry any card. I was just Mike. “Mike what do you think about this?” If Mike really spoke his full extent he’d talk in circles. That’s always true about me. Mike just wants to write. Or have an office to go to, people to waste time with. Sit back in a patchy swivel chair and let life dissolve while other people try to find themselves on the map.
My girlfriend reads and studies the Bible. Somehow I came to college and found a lot of people who do this or at least go to church. “Mike do you want to come with us on Sunday?” --“Err, I’m okay I have homework.” I’m not even lapsed anything. We’re Greek Orthodox but to be that you merely have to be Greek. That’s your signature. I’ve been to one Greek mass and that was my cousin’s baptism. I don’t think there even was mass, just the event. I only go if there’s an event.
Catholics fill their lives with ceremony. The Jesuits are the dark horsemen of the church. You tell Catholics you go to a Jesuit school and they’re like, Oh yes, the Jesuits. It’s written that they’re the smart rebels. “Good morning, Mike.” They weren’t stiffs so they didn’t use your last name in the halls. Most of them seemed happy, like it was actually their passion. With most priests you get the idea that they’re sort of stuck, like the priesthood was a way out. If nothing else they could use their lifetimes to educate themselves like you could in prison. As many books as they wanted but no conjugal visits (supposedly).
Again for me, being a Catholic school student was more of a cultural allegiance. It was a war I could wear for the rest of my life, a manhood. If I couldn’t play football I could at least survive daily life and that seemed like a sturdy accomplishment. And we were allowed, even encouraged in a way, to misbehave on our own. Catholics have a mischief that isn’t as cool with other religions. Catholic shame is more personal and private, underneath jokes and red cheeks. Their shame is more shameful. Protestants make a bland show of their suffering, it’s a white American device to hide behind. They make it seem like they’ve dealt with it. The real problems live deeper but are never confronted.
I went to an Episcopalian service recently for another cousin’s graduation and it seemed so dry. They’d sucked all the alcohol and cigarettes out of it. It’s too American. At school the Jesuits would give communion and we’d look at each other glinting, Isn’t it kind of ironic that we’re both actually here and not in the gutter like usual. Our secret lifestyles were somewhere else but they were funny. Boys, I know you’ve been bad. Father, we know you have too.
High school was a sodden time. So was my first year of college but that’s over with now also. I’m in a bigger balloon. And I’m not even Catholic, I don’t know what the problem is. There’s no named flag I’m confused about, just me and my vibrating life. Like what else is there—you cut out books and masturbation and my whole life is other people anyway. That’s what Earth is. I hate the word “agnostic.” And though I thought Bill Maher’s movie was funny atheists sort of seem dangerous. They’re part of that group of creeds you grew up thinking belonged to creeps: communists, Scientologists, Jehovah’s Witness. You expect all of them to be balding with goatees and secretly want the worst for you.
At seventeen I realized how much I love literature and I started in on being romantic. I had just turned seventeen or was just about to. It was right before prom. I was getting fitted for my tux at Men’s Wearhouse and I came home and started writing. I read about how bad people had been and it seemed kind of cool. I’d seen people do drugs. I’d seen people have sex. Some stuff had happened to me. And there it was on the page but there was more of it. Whole lives constructed around these two things the Church supposedly didn’t want us to do.
Sometimes we had to go to chapel, which was smaller and more specific than mass. Mass was the big show. In chapel it was more personal and you’d often hear the story differently because the Father was right in front of you. We’d get called out of class during our religion periods, Scripture or Moral Theology, and file into the pews and go get in line to confess if we wanted to. I never did. That seemed like too much.
Instead I would daydream and look at the stained glass with inscriptions surrounding it thanking the school for the time. I would move to sit next to the other guys who liked Bob Dylan and try to get close with them. Kids who would jet out of the parking lots to get stoned at home and play music before their parents left work. “He’s going home to get blitzed,” and he’d almost run a red light.
I had the idea that art needed community. If you were going to write poetry you needed to have a muse. I was trying to cheat myself away from how lonely the life is. And there we were sitting in the middle of a Catholic room holding clammy hands and saying the Our Father, men on the verge of adulthood, religion making my point for me—don’t be alone, not even in faith.
I go to a friend’s house and sit down on the living room couch with him and his father, the dog at their feet. Catholic men feel comfortable turning into their fathers. A lot of my friends needed to hit certain benchmarks to be self-assured and it was okay if they drank because in high school so did their dads. It was being a trust fund kid but without a whole lot of money.
The life wasn’t that fancy. Most of them worked in insurance and had connections because the families were so large. They could go to ballgames and concerts with their wives but only really to avoid having to stay at home and do too much parenting. Life is perpetual adolescence that you could glide through if you didn’t hope for too much.
His dad drank a glass of straight vodka every night in front of the television. Son looked at that and thought, “Good, rock on dad.” I tried to think like my friends but in order to follow my father I’d have to leave the family in shame so theirs seemed good enough to me. I felt the comfort. I could live easy too, I was good at that. I was my mother’s new Catholic son, it was her nightmare. It was a good way to rebel and not have to break anything in the house but my self-respect. At our graduation parties we drank openly in front of any authority. “Congratulations, boys.” That small success was their excuse to let us. They really wanted us to. It felt unnatural to say no. “I’m no narc.”
Going to college it’s easy to think that a lot of people are like you. You understand on a certain scale the diversity but encountering it has a different story. It’s you seeing all the Indian kids who hang out together. Of course, diversity. And I’m not black, or Hispanic, or Asian. I’m white. So all white people must be like me.
I knew that wasn’t true but that’s what I was feeling. At Catholic school I was the minority because I wasn’t part of the church at all. I made friends early on with the blacks and Mexicans because it seemed easier. But everyone else was pretty much like me anyway, or I was like them, or I became like them. Drinking in backyards and masturbating. By the end of the four years I was writing and then I understood there wasn’t hardly anyone like me at all. Drink up Mike.
Before my girlfriend left for Europe this summer I told her I was thinking about dyeing my hair red. “Why would you do something like that,” she asked. I was reading a lot about punks and felt like I needed to be in someone’s face because I was about to have three months of summer in my little den, writing this column.
With distance it’s easy to boil with how different we are, how it’s comfortable to hold on to private beliefs without having to explain or doubt all the time outside yourself. It’s enough weight sorting it out on your own. “Don’t get all weird on me when I’m gone,” and I said that the same went for her too.
People I know very well love God. Capital G, God. Jesus Christ is their lord and savior. The Bible is the truth. As I keep finding out more I’m more afraid of them, but I really like them, but I don’t want to be like them. I think that’s healthy. I’m twenty years old and walking around campus everyday with notebooks and pens is enough passion for me. I can’t overload on passion again. It makes me want to be just like everyone else, to connect, and people generally don’t willingly come towards you so I had to go to them.
Now the bubble’s so big I could realize my condition, the loneliness, it’s like thinking about the whole city of Chicago when I’m just in a hotel room. It’s irrational and a waste of time. It’s like thinking about your worst moments and wishing the city could take them from you. I like being in charge. I like holding the balloon. I can hold Jesus in my chest. Who says I don’t go to church, my church is just very small.
Reach Michael Juliani here.
