Page 336 - Some Dance to Remember

306 Jack Fritscher

looking for spare change. She had many women friends, but she
also had ideas about the way women should ideally be. Some-
thing in her style taught me early on that the worst thing anyone
could do was not be themselves, and that the worst offenders
of this commandment, which was my mother’s commandment,
were women.
The nuns, women themselves, made her seem correct. They
taught me that young Catholic girls were a source of temptation
to sins of sexual impurity. Maybe they were lesbian nuns. Any-
way, I never really understood that, because wait as I might for
it to happen, girls, Catholic or otherwise, never materialized as
objects of desire.
Then, from my mother, I discovered that she found the worst
kind of female trouble to be women’s sin of self-denial. Natu-
rally, I came to think of most women as examples no man should
imitate.
Charley-Pop, on the other hand, reinforced the nuns and the
priests. They all talked about my becoming a man, but their talk
was all abstractions and mortal sins. They couldn’t make it clear
to me what a man was. I lacked something. Perhaps the kind of
understanding that happens not in the head but in the flesh. I
wanted naked men to breakthrough the doors of my dormitory
at Misericordia and march me out in front of all the other boys
and war-paint me purple and wrestle me around in the grass in
a circle of roaring firelight and make me wear a tight loincloth.
I could not even imagine sex between people then. I knew
men and women did something, but I didn’t know what, and
when I finally asked at eighteen what it was I knew I could never
have imagined anything as bizarre as the sex in heterosexuality,
and I wondered however did anyone ever think up something
that disgusting? No wonder straights never want to talk about
sex. No wonder gays can’t shut up.
In addition, naive simp that I was, I had no idea men could
have sex with other men, but I knew of a vague longing I had to
be with and be like other guys. I lacked something more than
factual and emotional sex education. I lacked a dramatic—even
Hollywood—rite of passage to manhood.
My life might have taken a totally different turn if my
father on my sixteenth birthday had, more than driving me to
daily mass, given me some ritual icons of passage like a razor,

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK