Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

I like to think I sprang from a head; I like to think the head was mine.

Like all contrarians, he felt a secret longing to live with the rules and to love them. He wanted to sleep tucked into the rulebook, where he would feel safe.

Put yourself in his place. You’re a drop of blood at the center of the ocean, which plays a tense soundtrack all night long, interspersed with bright blips of radar. Russians are trying to blow up capitalism and you’re surrounded by dolphins who know how to spy and the general atmosphere is one of cinematic suspense. All of a sudden you look up at a screen and see a possessed twelve-year-old with violent bedhead vomiting green chunks and backwards Latin. She’s so full of a demon that the only way to relieve her feelings is to have hate sex with a crucifix. You would convert too, I guarantee it.

The great-great-great-aunt was known far and wide for telling fortunes, administering potions, gazing deep into the eyes of potatoes, and just generally giving the pope a hard time.

Lutherans have a passion for banners that approaches the erotic. They are never happier than when they are scissoring big purple grapes out of felt and gluing them onto other felt.

The sermon was about me being the bad pig-keeping son who runs away from home and then has to oink back on all fours when his money runs out. At the time my reaction alternated between embarrassment and amusement, but now I see it must have been prophetic. All these years I have been tending the pigs of liberalism, agnosticism, poetry, fornication, cussing, salad-eating, and wanting to visit Europe, but I am back home now, and the pigs can’t come with me.

“Who knows what a freak might do,” my mother hissed, which sounded almost like a philosophical koan. Who DOES know what a freak might do. Could God make a freak so big even he didn’t know what it might do?

“He’s from Colorado, Mom. All people do in Colorado is get high, think about the mountains, and try to feel their white dreads growing.”

My father has never willingly put on a seat belt in his life. He has always found the very idea of “safety” to be ridiculous. Why would he ever want to be safe? What was he, a little girl? A miniature woman? A babylady? John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, huge hairy Samson from the Bible—those men didn’t wear seat belts. If they needed a seat belt, they tore off a man’s arm and laid it across their lap.

The Don Pablo’s in Cincinnati was a large converted factory, so it looked vaguely like a nightclub where people went to have wrong ideas about Mexico.

Do you think he’ll try to kill me?” “Did you give him any indication that you were a pacifist or an intellectual, or that you liked abstract art?” “Hmmmm, I don’t think so,” but his hmmmm had the quality of a yummy sound, like he found the act of thinking itself to be delicious. This was a bad sign. If he had let a hmmmm slip in front of my father, that might have been enough to do it. We decided we had better leave that night, just to be sure.

Pretty much all art in this house is of Jesus reaching out with two fingers and trying to milk things—the air, the clouds, the Cross, a cripple who wants to get blessed but who instead is going to get milked, by Jesus.

He plays the guitar like he’s trying to take off women’s jeans, or like he’s standing nude in the middle of a thunderstorm and calling down lightning to strike his pecs. It’s not bad, exactly, it just makes you doubt your version of reality.

His understanding of my childhood religion hasn’t deepened much since we first met. As far as I can tell, he considers a priest to be a sort of strict male witch, and he can’t figure out why Catholics want to eat so much flesh all the time.

“In fact”—the seminarian sighs—“no one knows how lesbians work.” “It’s easy,” I say. “You put one leg over her leg, and then she puts her other leg over your other leg, and then you brush each other’s hair forever while not going to church.” He rolls his eyes. “You’re not a lesbian, Tricia,” he tells me patiently. “You wear dresses.”

Also, I would love to date a woman who soaks teddy bears in perfume and sexually gives them to priests, because she has got to be crazier in bed than any atheist ever dreamed of being. Maybe once you got back to her apartment you would see an even bigger teddy propped up against her pillow, soaked in holy water and waiting for you, with a Bible between its legs opened up to the Song of Songs.

Often these jokes involve sporting events that are being broadcast that day, and then all the men groan, because they love sports very much and would rather be watching them, but just kidding, because Jesus is a football that all of us can carry down the field for the win.

I know that the most popular hotel paintings are: beach after everyone is dead, beige interpretation of the rage of a cat, squares going wild, a rose’s period.

She throws back her head and howls, and the sound chills me to the bone. It is the consciousness of a thousand cums crying out for a body. This is a Catholic’s worst nightmare: souls all over the bed.

“Who did it?” we wonder. She thinks it must have been a pervert who “gets off on voyeurism of porno,” but I think it was probably a businessman with a hotel fetish who shouted the word “amenities!” as he came. “A jizzness man, you mean,” she says, and I feel like I just taught a baby how to read.

The teenage boys were fed on hot dogs, and turned the color of hot dogs in summer. They glistened like wiener advertisements from a golden age. If you had thrown an ice cube, you would have hit a boy named Brad, which even sounds like a hot dog’s name.

Jason loses his head when he sees it and runs upstairs, terrified that my dad might offer him a slice of it to bond them together as men. “I just remembered that I have to . . . put different pants on,” he says, and then vanishes, leaving a comet trail of cowardice in his wake.

BECAUSE MY FATHER WASN’T allowed to hunt hippies, he decided to settle for hunting deer instead. It was a good compromise, all things considered. Deer were the pacifists of the animal kingdom. They sat around doing weeds all day and didn’t even try to get jobs. The males of the species pranced and ate salad and had a hundred kids they didn’t know about. In November, a long line of them marched to the polls, leaves held delicately in their mouths, each marked with the name of the Green Party candidate. A deer, in short, was a peace sign made out of meat, and the only way to fight it was with bullets.

I had always thought the words “hotel” and “motel” were synonyms, but as soon as I stepped across the threshold, I understood that a motel was grosser. It looked like the place where Smokey the Bear went to cheat on his wife.

“Why would you want to kill deer?” we argued. “A deer is the last thing that needs to be killed.” “There are too many of them,” my father said forcefully, as if any day now the deer would realize their advantage and stage an uprising, herding all of us into empty prisons and gently licking the salt off us. “Too many of them,” he repeated. “Also, they eat people’s gardens.” I promise you that my father had never even looked at a garden. Flowers registered to him as very small bitches, far off in the distance.

He looked like what he was: a boy who would eventually grow up to pronounce the name of our country Murica, exclusively date women with patriotic eagle noses, and get a huge gun tattooed on his beefy side.

“Sensual” is the worst word he knows. I actually called him a sensualist once, meaning simply that he liked food, music, fine wine, jazz, and cascading lace all over his body, and he nearly cried. It obsessed him for weeks. “What do you mean I am a sensualist,” he would burst out at me, bothered, from time to time as we sat with our books.

“Why didn’t you just get him what he wanted—you know, something off his Christmas list?” I shake my head gently. “You don’t understand. You can’t just get Jason what he wants. The two things he desires more than anything else in the world right now are a scale that tells you the Real Age of Your Skeleton and something called a Brain-Sensing Headband.”

It is probably the last conversation like this the seminarian and I will have. After his ordination, particular friendships with women will be discouraged. I understand why, but in a wider sense, it is frightening. If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.

Sex would probably have helped, but the only thing I was having sex with then was the intolerable sadness of the human condition, which sucked so much in bed. It was always playing the Requiem Mass when we were doing it, and its D was very minor indeed.

He rolled his eyes. “Do you even know what vagina means,” he asked me. I did, but it was better in these instances to play innocent. “It’s sort of like a pussy, isn’t it?” “It means ‘scabbard’ in Latin.” “Pussies aren’t in Latin,” I told him.

The slogan that reaches across all movements is this: if you arrange the words neatly enough, people will understand.

We patronized pro-life businesses, which in the Midwest, back then, was easy to do. It was possible to buy a pro-life pizza, despite the fact that a pizza is by its very definition made out of choices.

A woman’s body always stands on the outskirts of the town, verging on uncivilization. A thin paper gown is all that separates it from the wilderness. Half of its whole being is devoted to remembering how to live in the woods. This is why Witch, this is why Whore, this is why Unlucky and this is why Unclean. This is why attempts to govern the female body always have the feeling of a last resort, because the female body is fundamentally ungovernable.

If I seem colorless and receding, a background character in my own life who simply receives what happens to her, it is because I am vanishing again, the way I did when I was young. It is such an annihilating sensation that sometimes I think, just a gentle push and I would fall back into the old faith; I would believe all of it again, everything.

As the glow of tween possession began to warm my father’s face, he said, with every appearance of perfect happiness, “Now here’s what you need to know. This story is absolutely true, it happened right here, right in St. Louis, and it will one day happen again. Maybe to one of you, or to one of your friends.” There are downsides to believing everything that everyone tells you, but I had not discovered this yet.

She listened to the kind of music where people screamed, but still she served the Lord.

Yet even as we were afraid, what a thrill to feel ourselves fought over by light and darkness, desired with equal fierceness by high wild heaven and the leaping flames.

But it is hard, while people walk among us, to imagine their absence; while they are present, they are a bread that is passed and passed among us and never comes to an end.

There is always a phone call in the middle of the night. There has always been an accident. There is always something unfixable wrong with a baby. And a voice is saying, “Please come.”

I’M NOT INTERESTED in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I’m not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried.

I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn’t work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am.

But I did not want to be a priest. I was the same as most girls who wished themselves in a convent: I wanted to be where I could think, and where not just anyone could look at me. I wanted to sleep in a bed that was just big enough for me and my own salvation. I wanted to choose constraint and be freed by it, after constraint was all that had ever been offered to me.

Oh my god, I had almost forgotten about the Republican Cruise. Soon after I ran away with Jason, my father took it into his head that my mother deserved a holiday—on a neoconservative ocean liner. The featured speaker was to be a woman who once wrote a whole book defending the internment of the Japanese during World War II. The food, we are left to assume, was the flesh of the poor, grilled to order.

“I can only write down what you say,” I tell my father silently, tired of editing him with such childlike vigilance, of choosing only the quotes that show his brightest side. “Please, give me something. Be a human being.”

Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn’t?

“All children are my sons!” she cries. “That are men. They’re really children between the ears, and yet physically they’re men!”

Silence upon silence from upstairs. Then, like music over the closing credits, the most objectionable American guitar riff I’ve ever heard begins to somersault down the steps, shirtless and wearing the tightest possible jeans, signaling that it’s time for us to leave.

A family never recognizes its own idylls while it’s living them, while it’s all spread out on the red-and-white checked cloth, while the picnic basket is still open and before the ants have found the sugar, when everyone is still lying in the light with their hearts peeled and in loose sweet segments, doing one long Sunday’s worth of nothing. It recognizes them later, when people are gone, or moved away, or colder toward each other.