Amen's Boy. William Maltese

myself and forcefully jerked my arms to the side like I was hit by a bat. The water broke its connection to the current and I was free.

      The rectory was a great alternative to the hot summer world. It was great to go inside an air-conditioned place, eat candy and listen to records with my new priest friend and “personal confessor.” I found out that confession could happen outside the confessional, on a couch, and later, I was to find out I could confess in a Chevrolet on the way to New Orleans. Guilt was gone from my life at least fifty percent of the time now, instead of all the Catholic hours of my life. Personal confessors are a lot like gun slingers and marshals in the old west and they can shoot down some bad stuff. They have reputations that cause nobody to mess with them, not at all. It’s “Yes, Father,” and “No, Father” and “Thank you so much, Father!”

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      TO BECOME A FATHER

      I thought being a “Father” like this was the best thing in the world. After all, Father even fixed my maniacal habit of “self-abuse” five times a day. I was reformed, and to me, that spoke volumes about what being a priest could do. Maybe he could help the unhappy kids who lived in homes where the parents yelled at each other. My dad asked me who I wanted to live with when they got two houses to live in and was downcast when I said, “Mother.”

      I remember thinking, crying as I listened to my mother and father accuse each other of things in Cajun French, how terrible it was to bring a child into this world. They never allowed me to learn French at home because it was the only privacy from children they had. They claimed it might make a boy stutter to learn two languages, and I could study “good French” later in college. Yet their French didn’t hide their misery from me, their dreadful anger. I made a resolution: “I will never be part of bringing children into this hell of a world!”

      I made this conscious resolution long before I seriously confronted the issue of voluntary celibacy. I just knew I did not want to bring kids into hell. My life at home was hell, and my brother’s problems were worse, because, like a dumb-ass he began to drink as much liquor as he could. He flew into rages, slugging me and other things. He hit my father again.

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      ALGIERS

      Algiers, Louisiana, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans’s famous French Quarter, a ferry or a bridge ride away from the Crescent City, was home to Father Terry’s family. It was to New Orleans that we drove in the black Chevy from Assisi in Conway, all the way to New Orleans.

      Oddly enough, we went through Mississippi part of the way even though Louisiana is directly connected to Arkansas. We took the “scenic route” Father Terry said. He said there were advantages to some of the rural roads in Mississippi, more interesting sites; so, this long detour gave us a luxurious amount of time to chat and be together. It was clear to me Father Terry liked me, and I liked him, very much. I began to talk a lot to him about everything I could think of. I seemed to be waking up from something like a long dream state. He knew something about everything, too. No other adult talked to me like this. He was my friend, for sure, and now I was going to visit with his mother in their home. I was eager to see their family grocery store and “camel back house” where he’d grown up.

      I thought Father Terry’s rectory was spooky but not as spooky as his bedroom and home in Algiers turned out to be. It was really “old world,” and I learned what a “camel back house” was only after imagining a house with camel humps on the roof. What it meant was that it had a hump on the back, one story on the front of the house at the street and two story mid-house onward to the rear of the house. Property taxes in the parish in that part of Louisiana were calculated on how many square feet of frontage your house had on the city street. A two story frontage meant twice the property tax so people built shorter fronts, one story, and paid taxes on one story homes, but lived in two story houses back from the street curb. It wasn’t really a hump in the middle of the house, but the back of the house was the humped-up part.

      Being a guest in Father Terry’s family home and store was fun. I loved it. However, I was a little confused. I had been visiting Father Terry in his chambers as a solitary, one on one, private, very secret confessional and counseling relationship. Then I learned, on the way to his parent’s home in Algiers, that I could confess my sins to him in ordinary conversational talking. No one had to know it was confession; he didn’t have to put on the purple stole and didn’t have to make the sign of the cross with his hand. He said not everybody was allowed to go to confession like this, but I was advanced in my understanding of the sacrament of confession, and special arrangements could be made. I liked this because I always loved to have special secrets and special secret friendships. I had a few secret friendships with boys I met downtown. Like at the newsstand downtown across from the Fox Theatre there were some older teenagers who would meet up with me and buy me cokes and malts. Older men seemed to like to watch me read comic books and sometimes bought one for me after we hung around in the magazine stand in the back where I could sit on the lower rack. Yet, above all, I enjoyed just talking to Father Terry about sexual urges, and how I dealt with them, all in casual conversation when we were alone.

      In Algiers, Father Terry and I went into his mother’s house from a back door entrance. There was an alley which he used to drive his Chevy up behind the house, off the street. When we got there, it was nighttime and I didn’t see much of the neighborhood. It looked sort of dilapidated to me, like a picture of something out of an old 1930s movie.

      His mother was very sweet to me, but somehow she seemed far, far away. She was careful not to intrude too much. She gave me the sense she was just an apparition or maybe just a person who came and set out food and then left, not timid or shy. She was spooky, somehow in keeping with her black silk dress with little tiny white dots all over it, appearing from the other side of the room as little stars in the midnight sky. She was sweet to me and asked me what I liked to eat and how I liked my name called.

      “Thaddeus is my name, but I am called Tad and sometimes at school I’m called Tadpole!”

      “Tadpole! Why, that’s a cute nickname. How did you ever get that?”

      “I guess it is because I liked to swim as much as a tadpole or maybe I’m the little frog that becomes the prince?” I began laughing again, and couldn’t stop, and she laughed with me. She talked to me a little while she cooked, and then called her priest son to the kitchen table and pointed to a chair where she wanted me to sit.

      The table had a red-checkered table cloth and a wine bottle in a basket woven around it with a red candle burning like in Italian or French movies. There was a big, wonderful, hot, steaming serving bowl full of spaghetti and meatballs, swimming in a red sauce with lots of green onions cut up into it. I couldn’t believe it. Garlic bread, steaming from under the stove, she pulled out on a cookie sheet and shoved into a basket she’d lined with red checkered cloth napkins and covered the bread with the ends of the napkins before she moved to the next thing.

      “Milk?”

      “Yes, ma’am. I love milk. I think spaghetti and meatballs is my favorite food in the world.”

      “Well, Tadpole, you eat all that and then you can have more, but don’t forget you have desert to eat also.”

      Father Terry was giggling at me because I was laughing so much, and I kept giggling like a little girl, but it didn’t matter. I ate a lot of food, two plates full, and two big pieces of bread. There was a salad; I didn’t know exactly what it was, but it had marshmallows, the little ones, and cherries, and mixed fruit from a can. It had coconut and whipped cream on it; it was amazingly delicious.

      Desert was chocolate cake with chocolate filling, and another glass of milk. Father Terry had his cake with coffee; his mother never sat with us, but waited on us hand and foot.

      I didn’t want to say anything about his mother being a widow, but I knew she’d lost her husband. I couldn’t help wonder who she ate with, or when, or if she had company. I was curious because she seemed like a lady who would have thousands of friends and yet she lived alone. In contrast to her happy gregariousness, the house seemed strangely quiet and lonely.

      I