Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

he’s never found the family saga as compelling as the rest of us do. Once, when we were going through the slides from that aforementioned dig with him, he was somehow able to tell us his exact geographical coordinates in the Holy Land and every detail of every last stone in the excavation sites, but when the first baby picture popped up, he didn’t know which of his five children it was.

Catholic priests, by definition, aren’t allowed to be married, but my father snuck past the definition while the dictionary was sleeping and was somehow ordained one anyway.

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. She stood in the doorway of the classroom with her beautiful boundaries shining all around her—yes like a halo this time—and he decided he would marry her. He pursued her and he pestered her; he followed her home and threw rocks at her. He pelted a single question persistently at her window: will you marry me?

My mother loves to argue, and love is the only argument you can win by saying yes.

Over the course of that patrol, the men watched The Exorcist seventy-two times, and on the very next patrol, my father converted.

He had decided he was meant for the Lutheran ministry. Why he chose Lutheranism I cannot say, but I suspect he was attracted to the glamour of its founder: a snout-faced man who spewed insults from every orifice and believed he had the power to fart away the devil.

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. I can picture a few members of the congregation, who were square-faced and blue-eyed and gently brimming with pie filling. I also recall consuming an enormous quantity and variety of mayonnaise salads, which Lutherans loved and excelled at making. If Jesus himself appeared in their midst and said, “Eat my body,” they would first slather mayonnaise all over him.

Here is how it works: when a married minister of another faith converts to Catholicism, he can apply to Rome for a dispensation to become a married Catholic priest. He is allowed, yes, to keep his wife. He is even allowed to keep his children, no matter how bad they might be. The Vatican must review his case and declare the man fit for duty. (My father’s paperwork was approved by Joseph Ratzinger, later to take the name Pope Benedict XVI, later to resign the papacy and become an enigma in fine elfin shoes wandering through private gardens, his eyes among the bushes like unblinking black roses.) Once he has received this approval, the man can enter training for the priesthood and be ordained, but only after every member of his immediate family passes the Psychopath Test.

After it was all over, everyone had to call him Father, but I called him that anyway, so it made no difference to me. All fathers believe they are God, and I took it for granted that my father especially believed it.

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.

It seemed the very act of stacking boxes in a secondhand car and driving away with your childhood home in the rearview allowed you to be born again in whatever form you chose, and I could hardly wait.

The feeling of getting an email! As if the ghost of a passenger pigeon had flown into your home and delivered it directly into your head, so swooping and unexpected and feathered was the feeling.

The story of any courtship is one of ephemera, dead vehicles, outdated technology. Name cards, canoes, pagers. The roller rink, telegrams, mixtapes. Radio dedications. The drive-in. Hotmail dot com.

“What exactly do Catholics believe?” I’d been preparing my whole life for this question. “First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he’s also dead, and he’s also immortal, but he’s also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you’re causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He’s wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn’t know about jeans back then. He’s holding up two fingers because his dad won’t let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic.”

“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.”

Whenever he didn’t like people, he cleaned his guns in front of them. Part of me found this habit appalling, but the other part of me respected his flair for high theater. If I wanted to frighten off a chat-room bastard who was trying to be monogamous with my daughter, what better way than to lure him into my rec room and put together the world’s most deadly jigsaw puzzle right in front of his face?

My flaming certainty that I was born to write books dovetailed so neatly with Jason’s belief that he was destined to be a sort of Leonard Woolf figure, helping to usher female thinking into the world, that mostly we accepted our pinched circumstances as foreordained.

“Besides,” he says, “the craziness was in the house. It was like a weather, or an endless guitar solo, or a radio broadcast that never stops playing. I knew once you left, it would be all right.”

My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive options, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.

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. Jesus stands against a celestial background. He reaches toward a plump, dangling ray of the sun. He is going to milk the hell out of it.

it sounds like a Republican terrier howling the first three notes of “Smoke on the Water” to a blood-red moon—and

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.

Gaydar is not real, and I hope never to be in the business of perpetuating crude stereotypes, but the priest who owns his own harp and gets ten different brown-bagged magazines about the Royal Family delivered to him each month? Is possibly not a straight man. But Dad assures me the Gay Inkblot Test is quite sufficient for their needs. So a word to my queer brothers who are longing for a life in the Church: you are safer than houses, for the time being. Go with God.

a woman who once gave him “a teddy bear soaked with your mother’s perfume, to try and tempt me.” How would that even work? Has any man who ever drew breath been seduced according to this method? 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. Maybe it’s for the best, after all, that the seminarian knows what a furry is. If they ever come for him, he’ll be ready.

“I like domestic stuff,” he tells me, his voice falling to a sudden romance-novel huskiness. So fuck a butler. Men, it bears repeating, are so weird. This is so far outside my area of sexual expertise it’s not even funny. Tell me you want to role-play a butlerfuck while pretending to serve your penis on a big silver tray and I will nod with understanding, and perhaps even offer to film it. But you want a woman to wash your clothes in a river? What are you, some kind of pervert?

“MooOOooo, we all gotta be equal, don’t we?” he mocks, with such perfect assurance of my agreement that I wonder if he has ever really looked at me, or heard a single word I’ve ever said. Perhaps, when all is said and done, I am more like a son to him than a daughter.

The English language began as an upheaval; I am not protecting it when I try to guard it against change. The Jesus Christ of it, Chaucer, walked across the water telling dirty jokes, made twenty stories stretch to feed a million people, spelled the word “cunt” five ways, performed miracles.

The seminarian calls women the “tabernacle of life.” The tabernacle, if you do not know, is an ornamental box that is largely important for what it holds. It is shut up and locked when the men go away, so the consecrated elements inside cannot be stolen.

The pleasure is in never knowing what she’s going to do next.

My mother shreds documents with the ruthlessness of a person who believes a French con artist named The Mustache is trying to steal her identity. Woe to The Mustache if he succeeded. As soon as he realized what living her life entails, he would very quickly give it back.

“Okay, Mom needs a glass of wine!” Mary hollers as she enters the house, and claps her hands to get the party started. She is, after all, a pharmacist. She knows what people need.

The mesh is so see-through it opens a window onto my soul. Wearing this in front of the bishop would be tantamount to going to confession again.

“YOU’RE NOT WEARING THAT!” my father yells, appearing out of nowhere to loom large in the doorway. For a man who only ever wants to be naked and spread-eagled in front of other people, he sure has a lot of provincial ideas about clothing.

All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.

The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?

It is sweet, sometimes, to hear clichés after long days of trying to say something new.

TWO DAYS LATER, I wake from a dream of God creating the pig for the first time. I have these dreams at least once a week now, and they always mean my father is in the kitchen cooking a whole pound of bacon.

He has always revised history to larger and smaller degrees, but lately the revisions are so complete as to be disquieting. Within a year’s time, he will have progressed to the story that I stood in that room and told him college couldn’t teach me anything anyway, because writers didn’t need it.

But how long can you outrun your subject, when your subject is your own life?

She plastered the back with Catholic radio bumper stickers, which was the final insult, because if you’ve ever listened to Catholic radio then you know the flow is awful and the beats are not remotely tasty. Not only can you not dance to it, but it makes you want to lie down on the ground and never move again. It’s just a bunch of call-in shows where people talk about whether something is a sin or not, and they almost always decide that it is, in fact, a sin.

“He just ran smack into the front corner of the van and bounced off. You should see the dent he made. He was quite a large man; I’d say he weighed at least two hundred and eighty pounds. People say it isn’t good to be big, but sometimes if you’re not big . . . you’re dead.”

She never forgets a bad driver, and she never forgives one either. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she prowled through parking lots at night, castrating the Truck Nutz off of vehicles that had crossed her.

My mother turns back the blanket and gasps. From the look on her face I can tell she has seen cum. 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.

Lightning was sunlight played backwards, and moms hated it.

Deer were the pacifists of the animal kingdom. They sat around doing weeds all day and didn’t even try to get jobs.

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.

Horniness and death, as usual, went hand in hand.

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who care if they crap themselves and people who don’t. My brother manifestly did not. Probably the crap was keeping him warm.

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.