March 1, 2015
A
long long time ago. I can still remember how that music used to make
me smile...
I've
always wanted to start a story like that, borrowing these two opening
lines to Don McLean's classic song from 1971, "American
Pie." This
story takes place in the late 1970's, and, at that time, one
of the pastimes still occupying everyone from FM rock jocks to my
mother (of all people) was analyzing and reanalyzing the lyrics of
this song so as to probe for their deeper meaning. That is quite a
spectrum of people. And, though many may roll their eyes at this,
oh, but if any of us could but write a poem or a song that would
occupy people's hearts and minds in this way. People are still
analyzing this song, and, in a culture with a very limited attention
span, it is remarkable enough that this continued for several years.
That it continues after several decades is phenomenal. However, with
the mood thus set, I now digress.
This
story goes back to 1978. The spiritual angst of the previous spring,
as recounted for you in a story titled "Is
Anybody There?"
had given way to a semester at McCormick Theological Seminary in
Chicago that fall. This brought me to the decision that it was time
to abort my quest for higher education and pursue life. Burning my
bridges in a series
of essays
handed in to the seminary in lieu of my classwork, I spent the winter
with my parents in Florida, and spent my nights working as a night
auditor at the Nautilus Inn in Cape Coral. I spent my days helping
my dad restore my 1966 Buick Skylark Custom, while marveling at the
fact that, in my mid 20's, I had suddenly discovered the wisdom he
possessed. This had somehow eluded me in the earlier days of my life
in which I had known everything.
As
for my continuing spiritual journey, I revisited my greatest
undergraduate influences, and spent many a wee morning hour, after
the audit was done at the Nautilus, pondering the ethereal
shamanistic spirituality of Castaneda,
and countered this by reflecting on the darkly humorous, but deeply
depressing, atheism of Vonnegut. Ironically, or so it seemed, I discovered
that Vonnegut
was a great admirer of Castaneda,
and this seemed to invoke the sardonic catchphrase that runs through Slaughterhouse
Five:
"So it goes." I tempered all of this by reading just the
words of Jesus in red in the gospels, and took it as literal gospel
truth that all of what He said was true. I've been labeled a
fundamentalist ever since (see last
month's column). When I opened Cat's Cradle
and read the words of the first line, "None of this is true,"
it seemed to put all of this (and particularly Vonnegut) in
perspective. Castaneda's indoctrination into shamanism didn't lend
itself to the true/false dichotomy in this way, but after a rather
strange (and somewhat disturbing) out of body experience, it seemed
prudent to set it aside. And so I came to focus on the deeper truth
of faith in Jesus, and did so in light of my dad's mentoring, which I
found to be much gentler, and certainly much sounder in terms of real
world realities, than that of Don
Juan. So
it goes.
When
spring came, I decided to seek my future and my fortune back in
Michigan, and so I headed up I-75 towards Alma with the money I had
socked away over the winter, and with a restoration that ran far
deeper than the shiny new paint job on the Buick. There was a girl
waiting for me in Alma who I had met through a mutual friend that
past fall. In the waning hours of my night shifts at the Nautilus,
my intellectual and spiritual musings would give way to thoughts of
her, and I began to realize that I was either harboring an obsession
or was in love, and the trip back to Alma was mostly to determine
which was which. Upon my return, we struck up a friendship that
almost immediately became a romance, and we remain together to this
very day. My thought is this must have been love.
The
calendar had come around to May, and the transformation in my life
during this year had been amazing. My new girl, Jean, was still in
college, and my best friend and partner in the Incident of the year
before, Jack Quirk, was newly graduated and motivated to stick around
Alma figuring his own life out in light of the new reality, just as I
was now doing. When the opportunity presented itself to move into an
old house that was in the process of being remodeled, and so was
available at a much reduced rent, we seized the day. We had much to
talk about and did. And, in retrospect, this all went much smoother
than we anticipated it might, as we turned out to be less of a
nuisance to our landlords -- and they to us-- then we or they had
feared might be the case. This ended up being a transforming and
happy time of life, and we both look back upon it fondly and perhaps
even a little nostalgically.
Now,
Quirk and I in our college days fancied ourselves budding
intellectuals and scholars, and dressed and behaved accordingly. We
were rapier thin in those days. I had long, thick hair parted in the
middle, and Jack's tumbled to his shoulders. Jeans and flannel
shirts were the usual attire, with a corduroy sport coat and boots
for dress up. Jack tended to follow more in the style of the radical
theologians of the day (I argued then as now that "Christian
Marxism" was an oxymoron if there ever was one). I tended more
to the fashion of the ancient near eastern history and archaeological
schools, and so favored a civil war era style vest for everyday, and
a herring bone jacket for dress. Pipe smoking was in vogue, and the
more odorous the tobacco the better. I was so totally taken by a
photograph of Fathers Roland
de Vaux
and Jozef
Milik,
and their team of Jesuit scholars, smoking non-filtered cigarettes
with long, curling ashes dangling precariously over the Dead Sea
Scrolls, that I soon convinced the vendor who stocked the cigarette
machine in the student union to make sure it had an ample supply of
fresh Pall Malls, Camels, Old Golds, Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields.
Theologians of the day, like Danielou,
were often photographed with smoke from the stub of a cigarette
rising from nicotine stained fingers, and, as a Protestant, I had to
grudgingly admit that the Jesuits had the market cornered on
intellectual cool. They had nothing on us, as we virtually lived in
the student union, gathering the other young lions of our day around
us, as we debated, discussed and solved the pressing issues of our
time over strong, black coffee, and while filling the air with a
thick cloud of acrid smoke.
Our
post college life in Alma quickly morphed into something of a
proletariat, blue collar Christian existence. I got a job at Lobdell
Emery, a plant that produced mostly body parts for Ford, and took on
a "factory rat" persona. Jack went to work as the midnight
attendant at the Clark gas station in St. Louis, and soon had a
following among the road beer and toke crowd who came in nightly to
gas up, buy snacks and listen to his pontifications on various
subjects. He was adept at turning these discussions in the direction
of his own unique Christian witness, and his boss liked the fact that
it sold pop and chips. I tried to achieve the same kind of thing on
the line, and over the games of "Three Card Guts" that went
on when our nightly parts quota was reached. Life at home revolved
around hanging out and entertaining our girlfriends. We were both,
by this time, in committed relationships, and we actually engaged in
some rather serious faith discussions from time to time. But
usually, when the ladies were around, it was show time. Or, perhaps
more accurately, show off time.
While
we oftentimes took ourselves too seriously as students, my friendship
with Jack Quirk is now, and always has been, largely comedy based. In
college classes, we perfected the art of conducting vicious and
highly personal and insulting debates, knowing that at least some of
our fellow students would be unaware of the tongue-in-cheek nature of
what we were doing. On more than one occasion, someone who had
witnessed this would later walk into the student union to find us
amiably chatting over cigarettes and coffee and exclaim, "You
mean you guys are friends?!" Priceless.
Believe
me, this fact that we find each other hysterically funny has caused
its share of eye rolling and sighing on the part of those we believe
we are entertaining, but this just adds to the fun for us. Anything
for a laugh, especially if it is at my expense. Once when I was
living briefly in my parents basement, Jack got down on the floor and
pulled at my pant leg with his teeth while growling like a dog. He
did this in view of my mother, who from that day to this has
continually told me, "There is something wrong with that Quirk
boy." At 96, my mother suffers from advanced dementia, and
cannot tell you what she had for breakfast this morning, but she will
still tell you flat out that there is something the matter with Jack
Quirk. Jack will go to almost any lengths in terms of humiliating
himself if this in turn humiliates me. It is a sacrifice he is
always willing to make. Ask him about "the potato." The
idea is to push me past the boundaries where the humor lies in this
for me, knowing that his boundaries extend much, much further.
And
so, I have spent these many years being Laurel to his Hardy, Benny to
his Burns, Bing to his Bob, Garth to his Wayne and Ted to his Bill. In these "Odd
Couple" days of sharing a house in Alma, I was Felix to his
Oscar. The devotionals of Oswald Chambers are found in a book called My
Utmost for His Highest. If I were to write a book about my
relationship with Jack Quirk, I
would call it My Butt-head
for His Beavis. I don't know that this is something
either of us is necessarily
proud of, but it is the way that it is, and, if nothing else, it
is a profound demonstration of the grace and patience of God the we
proclaim our Catholic faith in public. Had the world found us as
funny as we believe ourselves to be, we would probably be opening for
Wayne Newton in Vegas. In the greater scheme of things, it is
probably just as well that most others don't get it. We understand
this and we accept it.
Quirk
wasn't always this accepting. In small town Alma back in the day,
Jack was somewhat offended to find out that the local folks noticed
him and discussed his odd appearance and behavior. This had
something to do with an incident at the Main Cafe downtown, but I
don't recall exactly what it was. I do remember that Jack was
incensed at the fact that the skinny, new guy in town with long,
scraggly hair, who was loudmouthed and opinionated, and who had a
high threshold for public embarrassment, was somehow unable maintain
his anonymity. Seriously, he couldn't figure this out and took it
personally. This was also complicated by the fact that living in the
neighborhood in which we did, with the superintendent of schools next
door, and my old high school gym teacher around the corner, I found
my comedic boundaries much reduced compared to what they had been on
the much more freewheeling Alma College campus. My much lower
threshold for public embarrassment was now set even lower, and far be
it from Jack Quirk to ever fail to seize on any perceived
vulnerability on my part, either real or imagined. And this was
quite real.
In
retrospect it is hard to figure why it was, at that point in our
lives, that we found ourselves in committed relationships with
attractive and intelligent young women. I guess this is the same
question audiences posed about the relationships between Ralph and
Alice and Norton and Trixie on The
Honeymooners. In any
event, such was the case with us, and the girls were always a
good audience, particularly for Jack, and especially if we had taken
the opportunity to indulge in adult cigarettes. This all combined
for a solo routine that Jack came up with in which he would walk out
onto the front porch of the house and loudly proclaim his opinions to
the world. Or at least to the neighborhood. If the townsfolk
were going to talk about his oddities and his appearance, then, by
God, he'd give them something to talk about. And so he would thrust
open the screen door, step defiantly out onto the porch and begin to
rant. He would proclaim the injustices of small town parochial
attitudes and prejudices, protest the attitude of thinking oneself
superior to others, and basically just tell them what he thought. He
would go on with this until those of us inside witnessing this would
begin to become horrified that it was going too far. "Jack! For God's
sake! Get back in here! Somebody might not know you're
joking!" we would plead. "Who's joking?" he would ask
rhetorically, and off he would go again. This would continue until
we all stepped out on the porch with him to beg him, to adjure
him, to come inside and stop behaving this way.
Each
one of these tirades began the same way, with Jack loudly exclaiming,
"Hey Neighbors! Hey Neighbors!" And so these little
impromptu speeches to the neighborhood came to be known by this name,
and this became a recurring performance. The mood would strike and
Jack would head for the front door. "I think it's time for a
'Hey Neighbors!'" he would announce, and away he would go. He
once grabbed my dad's double barrel shotgun from the closet where I
had it stored, and made his speech shirtless while waving this around
over his head. This episode truly frightened the three of us
watching it, as the best case scenario I could see was the police
arriving, and the worst case that someone just might seize the
opportunity and take a shot at him.
Oddly
enough, "Hey Neighbors!" never had any repercussions beyond
the entertainment it provided Jack, most of which was geared to our
horrified reactions, and which he thus enjoyed at our expense. After
the shotgun performance, I believe Kimmie, Jack's girlfriend, let him
have it, as I remember Jean and I telling her she needed to talk to
him about this and convince him that it had gotten out of hand. We
had this conversation as Jack proceeded in his rant out on the porch.
Regardless, "Hey Neighbors!" had reached its limits with
this variation and so, much to our relief, was hereafter retired from
Jack's comedy repertoire.
You
may wonder why I have related this little story. Well, it seems that
in the fall of 2012, I got a call from my old friend Jack Quirk,
asking me if I would contribute a monthly column to his new magazine.
When he told me that it was going to be dedicated to Catholic social
teaching, I suggested that perhaps a good name for it would be "Hey
Neighbors!" He didn't seem to see the humor in this, and said
he was calling it "Christian Democracy." I tried to
decline the column offer, but when he assured me that I would have
free reign to write and say what I wanted, the picture came to mind
of the shirtless young Quirk, waving my dad's shotgun around his head
and proclaiming his social teachings to the neighborhood. I agreed
to do the column. I actually thought of calling it "Hey
Neighbors!" but realized that was Jack's routine. Even if not
copyrighted, it was certainly his intellectual property. I decided
on "Camel's Hair and Locusts."
I
know that my views, and the way I express them, sometimes must make
Jack cringe. I suspect this month's column just might do that.
Sometimes, as I write, I see myself stepping out on the front porch
of our old house in Alma, shirtless and waving my dad's shotgun
around my head, as I proclaim my views, just like Jack did. "Hey
Neighbors!" I say to myself, "Hey Neighbors!"
Paybacks,
gentle readers, can be hell. So it goes.
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