Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

I believe he grew toward heaven only because it was not possible to grow toward hell, inching taller and weedier to the Cincinnati sky.

Like all contrarians, he felt a secret longing to live with the rules and to love them.

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

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.

Most of my poems were about mermaids losing their virginity to Jesus (metaphor), and most of his poems were about the majesty of canyons, arroyos, and mesas. The West had infected him with some sort of landscape mania—these were essentially poems a cartoon roadrunner would write, after retiring from a career of anarchy.

His father was a Baptist preacher who was saved after a dream about flying an airplane over a landscape of erupting volcanoes. A wall of flame appeared in front of him and he opened the door and jumped. He felt himself drifting softly, safely, toward earth and he looked up and saw that Jesus had him by the hands and was using his own sacred body to parachute him down. This seems like a specifically Baptist dream. Catholic dreams haven’t caught up to airplanes yet. The dream that converts a Catholic is more likely to take place in a medieval prison, or on a slave ship in the days of Ben-Hur, or in a sinister outhouse filled with red light.

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.

I took a moment to wonder what constituted my mother’s understanding of “cybering.” Hackers in black leather gloves, giving each other handjobs in space, while glowing green numbers streamed through the air?

St. Bonaventure was said to have continued his memoirs even after his own death. The only surviving relics of him are the arm and hand he wrote with. That seems exactly like God, doesn’t it, to kill a man and then make his hand keep writing his books.

They pumped him full of Valium during prep, which made him feel that “presidents were negotiating peace treaties in his mind and heart,”

I submit that every man of God has two religions: one that belongs to heaven and one that belongs to the world. My father’s second religion is Nudity, or Underwear, to be more precise. There are some men who must strip straight down to their personality as soon as they walk through the door of their castle, and my father is one of them. I have almost no memories of him wearing pants, and I have a lot of memories of him sitting me down for serious talks while leaning forward on his bare haunches. He just never wore pants on principle. We saw him in his collar and we saw him in his underwear, and nothing ever in between. It was like he couldn’t think unless his terrier could see his belly button. In the afternoons, he reclined brazenly on leather couches and talked to Arnold Schwarzenegger while he shot up the jungle, and every time Arnold made a pun about murder, he laughed with gratification. As far as I could tell, he thought movies were real. He watched them in a state of alarming physical receptiveness, with his legs so completely open toward the television that it seemed possible he was trying to watch it with his butt. His default position was a kind of explicit lounge, with one leg up and the other leg extended, like the worst kind of Jazzercise stretch you could possibly imagine.

The only magazine she ever subscribed to was called Prevention, and it exclusively carried articles about which fruits could prevent cancer. The cover always featured a picture of a jogging young grandma in a sports bra pumping her fist in the air as she overcame any number of invisible diseases. My mother’s expression, while reading it at the kitchen table over an antioxidant-rich meal of beets and steamed carrots, called to mind Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

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.

“A book about the universe? Are you kidding me?” she said, as if Cosmos is generally found shelved somewhere between The Satanic Bible and the books about gay penguins. “What’s wrong with that?” I asked. “Oh, Tricia.” She clucked at my foolishness. “Even a book about the universe can have an agenda.”

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.

Yet you cannot shake the feeling that Jesus is hiding out in there somewhere, as the weirdest, hottest cabin boy, or an incredibly ripped, tan parrot who repeats after no one and gives crackers to YOU.

“I hate all modern art, because it’s mad at God,” he likes to say. Most Catholics have never recovered from that painting of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung all over it. They are under the assumption there are entire museums in New York dedicated to anti-Catholic shit paintings, where all varieties of zoo scat are flung at pictures of the innocent Virgin.

“When people started forgetting about gender roles, they started building ugly churches. Architecture requires an equal balance of the male and the female in order to be beautiful.” What? There’s no way that can be right. According to those standards, the perfect cathedral would be a gigantic Prince symbol people could pray inside.

On top of the chest of drawers is my entire childhood collection of gnomes, accumulated during a time when I lusted after gnomes so strenuously I’m surprised I grew up to have sex with human beings as opposed to whimsical statues in people’s gardens.

Nuns are feminazis, Democrats are feminazis, the secretary who asks him please not to call her “dollface” is a feminazi. It goes without saying that I am a feminazi. He finds uses for the word in all sorts of situations. If he were alone in the wilderness and a cougar charged him, he would yell, “FEMINAZI!” right in its tawny face, and I have no doubt the cougar would back down.

Some people are, through whatever mystifying means, able to make the guitar talk. My father can’t do that, but he can do the following: Make the guitar squeal Make the guitar say no Make the guitar falsely confess to murder Make the guitar stage a filibuster where it reads The Hunt for Red October out loud I can’t figure it out, and I think for a living. He practices mainly in his bedroom, so it’s possible he’s having sex with the guitar? It’s possible that somewhere out there I have a half brother who is a sweet lick from the waist down? Alice, to everyone’s surprise, cannot get enough. She rolls on her back and flashes her claws in the air when he plays. She is blown away by the concept of sustain; the longer a note lasts, the more she purrs; it seems to stretch her actual perception of time. She wriggles with pleasure; she twists and switches her tail; she forgets to close her mouth over her thirsty pink tongue. She is dropping her panties, catwise.

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.

he blinks like an overeducated cave creature who is in the process of evolving away several of his most frivolous body parts.

He believes the ideal woman lives somewhere on the Boot, rolling down hillsides in a red-checked skirt with a bottle of wine in each fist, her boobs like perfectly twirled forkfuls of pasta. He will never meet her, but she is there. This allows him to feel content. “It would be very difficult to be celibate in Italy,” he tells me, a muscle leaping in his jaw, probably one of the main ones you use when you eat lasagna.

Somehow we are perfectly comfortable with each other, in the way people who agree about absolutely nothing sometimes are.

A wave of pleasure washes over me as I imagine this encounter: two young men, tall with theological purpose, discussing people who dress up as stuffed animals and scritch each other’s bellies at conventions. “Why on earth do you need to know about furries?” “Because people will confess to me about them. Someone will confess to me ‘I am a furry,’ and I need to know what that is.” It almost makes me want to turn Catholic again, just so I could go to confession sometime and lay a big, eloquent paw up against the screen right as he asked me what my sins were.

SOMEHOW OR OTHER, the seminarian has heard about milfs and he is haunted by the concept. He fears hordes of milfs are roaming the plains of dating, simultaneously breastfeeding and trying to trick young men into having sex with them. “Are milfs something that’s popular in secular culture for guys in their twenties to go after?” he asks. “Yes,” I say gravely, signaling Jason across the room to write that quote down word for word. “Very, very popular. The most popular thing now.” His eyes widen and he crosses his legs, as if to protect his holy jewels from the very notion of a milf. I consider other possible lies to tell him. In Britain they call them Nummy Mummies, and due to the gender imbalance left over from the Great War, there are two of them for every male.

“So disordered,” the seminarian breathes. Calling people “disordered” is practically his favorite thing to do, and a tawny animal woman who chases after tender cubs is about as disordered as it gets. “I hope I never meet one.” I get very close to his face and fix him with my most feline expression. “Too late, buddy. You already have.”

“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.” “If you’re so determined to figure out who’s gay and who’s not,” I say to my father, “then why don’t you ask someone who has actually met some gay people, gay people who haven’t had to pretend their whole lives not to be gay?”

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.

“It’s not a pompom, it’s a tuft,” the seminarian tells me. “A pompom would be silly.” “We don’t call it a hat, we call it a biretta,” my father adds, his tuft going absolutely wild.

“Those goofy Anglicans,” he says, and then makes the distressing moo-cow noise he always makes when imitating the communications of feminists, who lurk in his imagination in rabid, milk-spurting, man-stampeding herds. “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.

to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it.

Since the days of lions, there is nothing a Christian likes so much as to feel that he is in danger, simply for believing God was put on this earth in the form of a man with eighteen abs and a virgin mother.

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?

“She shouldn’t have put him in that position,” I hear a male voice say, and an old familiar wildness flutters up my chest and into my throat, sending feathers and flames into my voice box until I cannot speak, that same phoenix heat that still rises up in me no matter how many times I force it down.

I do not melt into it—the memory of the original pain, and the night I snuck into my parents’ room to tell them, and their reaction, is still too vivid. It prickles over the skin like a sweat, or a flush. My mind fixes on the indelible image of kneeling next to my mother’s side of the bed, in that bedroom filled with decorative gold balls, and telling her what had happened, and her asking with a sob, “But you didn’t sleep with him beforehand, did you?” And when I told her I had, of my father rising, holding me against his great patriarchal stomach, and making the sign of the cross over me to absolve me of my sins. It moves next to the image of sitting in the cold, clinical office of the pro-life gynecologist my mother had designated for all her daughters, and telling him what had happened and hearing him say, “Well, now you’ve learned that you can’t trust everyone, can you,” in a voice wiped entirely of human sympathy, as he squared my file with two brisk taps against his desk and stood to leave. It must have been then I began to suspect, something is not right with the way these people have arranged the world, no matter what their intentions.

when asked for a description of my poetry, Jason offers, “Electrifying . . . like if a bumblebee stang you right on the clit.”

In a fit of road rage, she once called a man Mr. Silver Dildo. “Mom, WHY,” I said, aghast. “That silver car is his dildo, Tricia,” she explained. “He’s compensating with that car.” She regularly accuses men of jacking off in their vehicles, despite the fact that she doesn’t know what the act of jacking off physically entails. She just thinks it’s an extra-bad kind of wasting time, of the sort practiced in prison yards, public schools, and Washington, D.C.

As we drive deeper into the valleys, though, that radio station fizzes and goes out, and all we can find is a classic rock station playing “Imagine,” which is my mother’s enemy in song form. “Imagine there’s no heaven?” I don’t think so. “Imagine there’s no countries?” Then we would be France. Sure enough, one verse in and she becomes enraged. She shifts gears so murderously my organs all relocate one inch to the left.

When I read, my head seemed to go diagonal, and I swore I saw things in the sentences—not what I was supposed to see. When I read the words “moonlit swim,” I saw the moonlight slicked all over the bare skin. The word “sunshine” had a washed look, with the sweep of a rag in the middle of it. The word “violinist” was a fig cut in half. “String quartet” was a cat’s cradle held between two hands. “Penniless” was an empty copper outline and “prettiness” seemed to glitter. “Calamity” was alarm bells, and in “aristocrat” there was the sharp triangle of a cravat, and in “sea serpent” one loop of the green muscle. It was as if I could read the surfaces of words, and their real hearts, but not their information. Even “word” had a picture—I saw a blond hostess in a spangled dress turning black and white letters over one by one. When I read, the meaning swam and the images leaped out and the words gave up their doubles. When I wrote, the same thing happened with the paper. “You start by thinking sideways,” I tell her. “First you sit in a sunlit room, and you look at the wall but really look through it, and you read your book but really read past it.” “Sounds like a recipe for insanity,” she interrupts, tipping back her head and pouring a barrage of chocolate-covered blueberries down her throat, all the while holding the wheel steady with one wrist. “Then pretend you’re washing your hair under warm water, and unfocus your vision like you’re trying to see a Magic Eye, and loosen up your...

When Moses came down from the mountaintop, did he make the people touch it? I pause so long I get something pregnant.

“Mom, you’re a Catholic! Isn’t that one of the main things you’re supposed to know? Haven’t you guys written entire books about how long cum lives?”

Sperm either die shortly after they leave the body, or else they live eternally, first on earth and then in heaven, banging themselves adoringly against the great gold egg of God’s face. No one can decide.

The next morning she stomps down to the front desk and registers a complaint about the amount of semen in our room—the ideal amount of semen in a hotel room being none, the amount in our room qualifying as an actual wad. She has never felt more alive, you can tell. She is enjoying herself with all the immensity of a recently inseminated elephant. She inserts the phrase “COME on” into the conversation wherever possible, and when the concierge attempts to make excuses, she tells her not to give her that load.

There has never been a trilogy he didn’t like, and if you don’t understand why, I have three words for you: father, son, and Holy Spirit. Foremost among his favorites is the original Star Wars trilogy, which he fervently believes is about priests in space, and the first three Alien films, which he believes are about how all women are destined to be mothers. Currently he is obsessed with the Transformers movies, because the greatest Transformer of all . . . is Jesus Christ. He even sat me down one day to have a serious discussion about “moral choices the Transformers are forced to make.” At no point did I interrupt him to say, “But Dad, they’re cars.” This means I am becoming an adult. Because truly, the Transformers are more than cars. Some of them are trucks.

It can get tricky, being the heathen aunt. I am sometimes called upon to tell my nieces and nephews that I go to “mental church,” or to explain why my friends are not named after saints.

When it came to teaching us to swim, though, my father dismissed my mother’s suggested strategy: first we would dip our faces in the pool every day for one year. Then we would submerge our bodies in the water every day for two years. Then we would meditate on the beauty of the dolphin every day for three years, and at the end of a decade we might be ready to learn how to swim.

Water wings were a sign that a child needed to be picked off by predators in order to strengthen the herd.