Page 64 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

Imet him—one of three Catholic priests who advised director William Friedkin on the most frighten-
ing movie in history—when I was fifteen years old. He was delivering a guest lecture to the students
at Gonzaga College High School, the Jesuit-founded institution I attended in downtown Washington, DC (notable alumni: Pat Buchanan, Bill Bennet, Martin O’Malley), only a few miles from Georgetown and the stone steps down which, at the film’s climax, Father Damien Karras hurls himself through a shattering window towards death.
Growing up on capitol Hill in the early eighties was a turbulent affair. Trust in government had chilled
in the long shadow of Watergate, belief in its basic competence under the various recessions. Abuses
of law enforcement—we called it “police brutality” then—had resulted in outrage around the city, a race riot down in Miami, fervid claims that the political protesters who were a permanent feature of my DC youth had been communist agents all along. With dreamlike eeriness, the current moil in America re- minds me increasingly of those times. The New Right was clamorously ascendant, a self-proclaimed “Moral Majority,” Good-vs-Evil Christianity that already con- tained within its rhetoric the seeds of today’s mili- tancy. And at the barricades, then as now, stood the women: women speaking up, women speaking out, ERA and NARAL and Take Back the Night.
I remember the chaos of those years in the special way one remembers transitions in one’s personal growth, though this one corresponded to a hinge in national history. In the halls of Congress, less than a mile’s littered walk from our school, all talk was of a Reagan Revolution, but the mood on the street had a stiller, darker element to it, one that whispered the real possibility of breakdown. Culture war, economic
disparity, street violence: the social fabric was whis- per thin. I remember demonstrators on the National Mall wheeling a life-size plastic Jesus around in a child’s wagon, one hollering man holding up an aborted fetus in a jar. I remember being mugged outside Union Station, one of my teenage attackers swinging a bicycle chain at me with a padlock affixed to one end, like something out of the Middle Ages. I remember the shooting of Lennon, the President, the Pope; I remember following a series of blood drops, one afternoon, where a homeless man had been knifed, counting them off in my head, like a strange game of hop-scotch in a lost city.
But I did not dream about these things at night. Like many Catholic boys of my generation, at night, I dreamed about the Devil.
~
My own experience with Blatty’s novel began well before the high school visit from the man who drove out demons as a profession. This prologue is from somewhere in the middle seventies; I was perhaps only eight or nine years old, just self-reliant enough to be in the habit of walking several blocks to the local library, then, as now, a favorite place to pass time. My understanding of evil encompassed little more sinister than the Dust Witch in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. It was a rich time, full of the early joy of juvenile reading. Returning home, under the shimmer of autumn trees, I noticed our neighbor, Mrs. MacCabe, leaning over something in her driveway.
The MacCabes were good Irish Catholics, keepers of a colonial two-story with trim lawn and hedges. They were ethical without being vain, still close enough to the old country to have a russet setter named Don- negal. The oldest McCabe girl, Carolyn, had been my babysitter. Mr. McCabe was like a father in a Thorn- ton Wilder, forever out raking leaves, touching up railing paint, keeping their small, shared piece of the cul-de-sac in order. I shifted my books under one
arm and turned to see what Mrs. McCabe was doing. Perhaps I angled my walk toward her, hoping for a hello. It was an odd sight—a dignified, middle-aged woman, glasses on neck chain, crouching down in her drive. Then I saw smoke.
I remember the cold fingers crinkling up my chest. She had Carolyn’s copy of The Exorcist in an iron skil-
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All of Them Witches
WilliAm orem