Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

Instead of being fascinated by trains, as more orderly boys might have been, he was fascinated by cement mixers, whose job it was to perpetually stir.

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

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?

Conspiracy had arrived to us, whole, intact, and just large enough for two people.

She has ultimate trust in tall men, and Jason was six-two with two additional inches of millennial hair, so she no longer suspected he might be a murderer.

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?

“If we get in an accident, you will go headfirst through the window and your children will wake up tomorrow morning without a father.” “Sounds like a personal problem,” he said, and chuckled quietly to himself. “Sounds like a personal problem” was one of his stock responses, along with “What’s this ‘we’ business, white man?” He used each of them about a dozen times a day; they never lost their freshness or their wide applicability.

My mother had not yet reached the stage of her journey where she realized margaritas were a medicine that could relax you, and drank so much iced tea that by the time our food arrived, mariachi music was coming out of her eyes.

Jason stared down at his dead fajita, horrified. It had once, in the West, been a majestic animal.

I had never been much interested in story, so I had yet to realize I was participating in one: that I would see rising action, twists, and climax; that there would be conflict, revenge, and resolution; but above all, that I was the engine powering it forward. The landscape slid past me because I was moving. I was keeping the I upright.

I was wonderful at endings, I thought. I found an artful and unexpected one every time. Endings sprang out of the tip of my pencil like bouquets: they were magic; they were silk and illusion; they were not earned.

That seems exactly like God, doesn’t it, to kill a man and then make his hand keep writing his books.

not sweating, exactly, but working up a higher shine.

Yet connections forged in filth and nonsense are strong.

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

It was so total and unexpected I couldn’t look at it directly, as if generosity itself had opened up its trench coat and flashed me.

We had always come from elsewhere, and in the end we would always go there again. That was our real hometown.

I feel the jolt you feel when alternate universes, which usually run parallel and unseen alongside you, leap out of black water and crisscross like dolphins over your trajectory.

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.

“Oh, yeah, he married me because I’m a human terrier,” she told me once, with admirable equanimity. “I’m excitable, I’m hairy, I have a great sense of smell, and I’m a bitch.”

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.

AS I WALK BEHIND HER down the halls, it happens. I shrink inch by inch until I am no longer an adult, but a baby toddling along in a comically oversized business suit. I have been pretending to be a grown-up this whole time. My briefcase is full of milk; I have been found out.

What is home? Is it a sort of lap of location, that exists only if certain conditions are in place? Is it the intersection of rigidity and comfort—a junction of familiarity that you curl into? Is it a feeling? I don’t know, but I’m being hugged hard against it, and I can’t tell when I’ll be let go.

THERE ARE HOUSES people cannot seem to leave, even though the doors are wide open. You feel very slightly heavier in them, the way you would on Jupiter.

“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.

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.

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?

When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it.

I break form against my nature to tell myself that revolution, too, is a tradition that must be upheld.

he seemed to especially love the citric humor of high school girls—which is eternal, but which tasted new to us at the time. My friends and I were four full oranges of it, with a resilient shine on our leaves.

Then, at the reception, I gave a sentimental toast where I pretended I had carried the bride and groom as twins in my womb. Later, I learned quite a few of the groom’s guests believed I had extemporized the whole speech while on mushrooms. God bless them. If that’s what mushrooms did, I would take them all the time.

He persists in considering us a credit to him, despite the fact that Mary is from the jungle, I am from the devil, and neither of our husbands has ever held a gun.

The bishop makes the predestined joke about football, and my father laughs, long and loud enough to reveal the gap on one side of his mouth where a molar was removed a while back. When I see that black space I feel the same tenderness that wells up when I look at pictures of the Sacred Heart, that tenderness just where the thorn touches the meat—an empathy for his body I could not possibly feel for his mind.