Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

“Why did you say yes?” I ask her, but I already know the answer. My mother loves to argue, and love is the only argument you can win by saying yes.

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.

Further proving my mayo eating theories

“Dad,” I call to him, “did you ever take this test Mom was telling us about?” “I took it twice,” he answers. “The first time I got angry, because they asked every question four different ways, trying to mess you up. So I resented it, and I answered every question wrong on purpose, and it came back that I was one hundred percent a psychopath.”

“Of course,” I thought, actually blushing at my stupidity. There was a reason we hadn’t bought any supplies, any notebooks or highlighters or beanbag chairs for my dorm room. There was a reason I didn’t have a framed poster of The Kiss or The Starry Night all ready to hang—or at the very least one of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes, to remember the family by.

Im not the only lady who remembers posters of The Kiss everywhere in college dorms and also i went to college during this period described

Empedocles wrote that the eye was fire set in a lantern, which poured out to illuminate mountains and forests and the face of the beloved. Other Greek philosophers believed sight was water. Either way, it was an element, capable of flaming or flooding if it was let loose from its delicate pen, of sending mountains and forests and the face of the beloved up in smoke, or else surging them away till they were gone.

“It’s not art if it’s evil,” she said. “It’s only art if it’s evil, Mom.”

When I left home, I was insane. I used to lie down on the floor next to my boombox, press my ear against the speaker, and pretend I was listening to the fetal heartbeat of music itself.” “Oh, I remember,” he says, giving a long, low whistle—not the kind you use to tell a woman that she’s hot, but the kind you use when a woman rips off her wig and reveals to you her gaping head wound.

Bishop Finn is the man I met last night, who asked if I wanted a picture with him. He really thought I might; many of the people he meets do. Here is the smile, here is the hand that signs the documents, here is the measured voice that tells the priests they must go away until everything dies down. Nothing permanent, of course, nothing ever permanent. Here is the little hat, which confers total power. Here are the glasses through which the eyes scan the numbers, how much it is worth, how much must be paid out. Here is the compassion in the face, that flowed toward the sinner and never the sinned-against, that forgave before justice had even been meted out.

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.

Yasss

Usually publishing a poem is like puking in space, or growing an adolescent mustache—no one really notices, and it might be better that way.

Lol

“Well, I was thinking of getting a Smart car,” Jason tells him. My father almost cries. A car that is smart, as opposed to a car that failed out of tenth grade, wears black leather jackets, and gets bicycles pregnant on its days off? He turns to me. “Can’t you influence him?” he begs.

This was the great tragedy of my life. If I could sing, I wouldn’t be here—I’d be living in an apartment in Vienna eating small cakes with my fingers and drinking cologne on purpose and petting a pale castrato on a golden couch. If I could make that white sound I wouldn’t need paper. But I couldn’t sing, so here I am.

When I listened to her, my hearing flew out of the coop of my head and then came home. I knew it was art because it drew the senses slightly out of my body, and they leaped to meet the art in the middle of the air.

Clad in a disintegrating T-shirt and a pair of his billowing bengal-striped Zubaz, he would bend over his worktable in the garage and drag an X-Acto knife against the sheets of glass, which were opaquely swirled like candy, but which let the light flood through when you held them up.

I am not alone remembering zubaz

The opposite of machismo is marianismo.

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.