Snookered Calculus

There’s more to pool than the clack and the drop into the sack. Its exquisite harmonies surge the farther below ground you play to perfect it. — The Greek

For Ted Twine and Harry Northup

Iowa, a place between places, a swath of heartland dwarfed by more notable neighbors like Minnesota and Wisconsin that coasters love to slur. They can pile on the put-downs faster than the local groundhog lowtails it below during one of its erratic late winters.

The state doesn’t exactly reek with hicks, barbs, and plebes, though it’s often caricatured as typical of rural America along with other casualties of regional stereotyping. It has many small-to-mid-size cities offering the full haberdashery of modern consumer life and sports a high literacy rate and standard of living, a healthy climate for workers, and relatively low crime to boot. Iowa City is home to the University of Iowa, a special space of creativity and learning fertilized by the surrounding area's rich reservoir of rural craftspeople. And Des Moines is the relatively cosmopolitan hub we would expect from a sizable capital. Most of the population centers, however, are bloated small towns.

Iowa Hawkeyes, perhaps because of all that plain space to practice in, are keen-sighted folk. And they have worthy attitudes. Mark Twain must have had them in mind when he crafted “Corn-Pone Opinions” to explain the heartland's character. He did, after all, hang out in the southeast Mississippi river town of Keokuk during the 1850s, honing his survival skills and some of his first satires. These opinions are born of heartfelt feelings and refined through small group interchanges, not the rant of pundits and eggheads.

But Twain didn't veer too far inland, away from the bluffs and better-looking foliage to the state's most precious natural resource: rows and rows of corn stretching to infinity. Here he might have stumbled on some conformity-prone hawks in the state’s treasure of close-knit communities where serial deposits of provincial patriots pander their heartless attacks against the seers.

My feelings about such matters were as mushy as cornmeal back then. I never suspected that something might be missing in the suffocating security, the steady and predictable tread of time. Culture, whatever that was, and the bountiful experiences of city life were well down the road. Forget that Kiowa City, where I hailed from, had a drought of foreign films and live theater and a lag time for rock concerts so pronounced that a band’s appearance usually coincided with an attempt at a career revival.

I vaguely recall Sister Frannie pumping us with something about how culture was what made life worth living, an escape from the drag of the ordinary. It had to do with opening up senses we don't normally use and catapulting us toward the light. We would be filled with sweetness and light. Such notions left me in a whirr on the way to study hall. I was mostly enlightened with the tangy rot of Ripple in a dark and drafty pool hall cellar.

Savages, Carnivores, and the Sweet Life

Our keywords to the city’s identity were mostly sub-sentient sketches and hen-scratches on the lavatory walls left by anonymous visitors and ripe for deciphering. But it was Indians and cattle and hogs and slaughterhouses that mumbled through the parental lore about society’s progress and the city’s past industrial greatness.

I was always curious about our native glories but unfortunately far from up to snuff on the spirits from the past important enough for our fathers to name the city after them. Field-tripping to War Eagle's grave for history credits was one way to help close the cultural gap—at least for the few of us who didn’t use the time to hang over at the plaza, the city’s nod to the nation’s development standard. War Eagle was a Kiowa Indian warrior who proudly promoted peace with the white man after failing to fend off the Lewis and Clark Expedition's “discovery” of the area in 1854. He died in the 1860s and was memorialized at its forested fringe. 

Those who ducked this opportunity could get another chance to access our native legacy by heading to a ghetto slice of the city inhabited by Mr. Eagle's descendants—at least those who turned their thumbs down on a reservation to the good life.

Our history department might’ve been partially to blame for the prevailing myopia, but it’s likely the data packs they inherited were not current enough to explain the raw truths about our native past. And even if they were, our study habits were so poor that we were usually more interested in how many suitors Mary, the resident bad girl, melded with over the weekend.

The westerns we devoured at the West Theater didn’t help much. The “savages” were dispatched with such routine efficiency that we could barely see their faces. They might as well have been props. Though contained in this celluloid fantasyland, unknown to us at the time, were clues to our identity as an outpost of civilization. The cattle drives, like in Red River, were always pushing on toward some blurry map-point where payola, destiny, and romance would magically consummate.

The map-points in question were usually Chicago or Kansas City, but a geographic fluke gave our city a pretty good start. A direct and protected shot up the line from the Texas source, it grew and prospered in the late nineteenth century as a sizable meat-packing town, for a time rivaling Chicago. It remained mostly a one-industry dynamo well into the 1970s when, profit-bitten, corporations began to kowtow to global competition and sweat out the inevitable, throwing union-busting tantrums like terrible teens as they cast their sights overseas for cheaper labor like everyone else.

Our stockyards became a life-giving butcher to the nation, a meaty sustainer of everything we felt good and wholesome about our country. So our teachers gave us a riveting presentation to celebrate the city’s contribution to commerce in one of those rare assemblies where the speakers could actually be heard through the din of chants for Herb the janitor to come up and pass a few pearls of wisdom. They showered us with facts: the quantities of flesh packed up for export to all the good people lucky enough to be part of our great consumer society, all the bennies for our local economy, blah blah blah. It was all too much for our juvenile attention deficits to handle. Few could connect the dots of the food chain back to the Texas Red River Basin or other fantasy points where the march of progress began that led to our special niche.

But we felt the effects of this connection through living with death and decay, the collateral damage. It was difficult to mute. Driving through town on the interstate near the city’s groin where the Floyd and Missouri rivers meet, the packinghouse epicenter, was like being suspended over a vat at the local sewage treatment plant. The slitting of throats and dis-embowellings screeched around the clock. If you didn’t close your windows fast enough as you passed by, the noxious odors from cooking and slicing and other renderings of raw flesh would permanently pollute your duds and turn you into a pariah at corn-detasseling time.

It must’ve polluted our brains too since we trekked to this confluence of water and waste to snag carp from dense schools. Like mutant creatures downriver from a nuclear accident, these puffed-up Chernobyl carpasites, probably spacey with toxins, had no chance of escaping our oversized hooks. The sporting instinct fulfilled we retired them to their natural habitats.

We did, however, have our share of events where you could get a few quality glimpses of the sweet life. The county fair drew animal husbands and domestic divas who cultivated every aggie art imaginable while keeping the kids fertilized on the prize-winning pies.

And some really serious musicians were always on loan from one of the culture centers, their sounds so consummately correct you were afraid to twitch. Sometimes they had cute little stories attached about things that might as well have been science fiction. The reserved tonalities seemed to put the right folks into dreamy states of mind, but for many of us missing links the timpani of stretching calm failed to deliver the same in-group sweetness. It mutated into the kind of feeling we got from eating all the unsold, overpriced chocolate bars we were too embarrassed to take back at the end of the yearly be-generous-to-your-school drive. Variations on this sonic sugar high sent us into a manic tailspin in search of noise and chaos. Unfortunately, there were no antidotes to bring us back to a cultured state.

The drama department gave it their best shot with all those stories full of sophistos from way back running around in funny costumes and doing nasty things, but this only served to bolster the baser instincts of those who never knew they had any.

Macbeth caused an unexpected crisis. It was so long that just about everyone except the ushers left early so they missed the hero’s final power move and came away with the message, reinforced by the lead actor’s charismatic performance, that evil was cool if you plotted it out well. This gave a boost to copycat evildoers, kick-starting the grand delusions of those who worked religiously to put every bee they could find in the bonnets of our good teachers.

The culture of politics was a stickler. The monthly gathering of young Republicans played with our sartorial fantasies, gave us lessons in manners and respect, and above all showed us how to worship the dollar and panhandle influence. But it also sparked a rash of imaginary disrobings for the ragtag who couldn’t afford the getup, and a fleeting fascination with Mao’s Little Red Book for those who were either casualties of the color-coding or victims of the new baggie fashions.

Cellar Life: Pooling the Patois of Messin’ Around

One of the worst nightmares for every parent must be the moment when their little wonder begins to hang out on the streets with suspicious characters or finds a secret home away from home. We were mostly obedient, well-adjusted Catholic youths, and while we threw our share of pubescent tantrums we were hardly prepared to escape from our home lives. But like football hunks set loose in Bishop’s Cafeteria after a marathon Lenten fast, we began to devour every imaginary morsel of temptation possible. We felt we had to break stride, shed the uniform, buck the discipline, and find those dark, dirty, and offbeat depths that, we learned later, alienated Catholics have been seeking ever since they hung out in catacombs. We skinny-dipped through some mysterious energy flow that seemed to give us periodic power surges, and every attempt by our masters to make us well-rounded seemed to create a greater desire to avoid becoming square.

This might have had something to do with our identity as Crusaders, our high school nickname. We were supposedly equipped with something like a tracking beacon, an aureole of inspiration that could flush our faces with special confidence. We were marked, meant to take the lead and make something happen. This was a heavy burden to bear, especially since we weren’t all that clear about what this might be. And once uncertainty enters a Catholic’s mind, corrosive doubt and even anarchy might not be far off. The beacon can fade and you start to look like you’ve been holed up at the sand dunes fasting for forty days and nights. Crusaders can’t thrive in limbo.

As our masters garbled again and again in detention period, we were getting the best classical education money could buy—our  pagan pals over at the public high school had a very limited budget. But one of the bright spots in our budding education came near the end of an especially brutal session when our heads hung so low our metabolism was threatened by a blood rush and we found ourselves flashing a flurry of signs between the desk legs. This required some painful contortions, but it was worth the discomfort since it loosed a few tongues.

Our teacher that day, Father Benedict, was brimming with bluster about how we had all blown it once again, spewing tribute to Ignatius of Loyola and the value of classical training when Whitey, “the Stick,” not exactly known for his articulate outbursts in class, sent him an unexpected carom.

“But…weren’t the Greeks into all that stuff? And they had a blast, too!”

Whitey knew what he was talking about. He was the resident shark at Greek’s, the pool hall downtown which to our parents might as well have been a toxic waste dump. And it didn’t help that it was a shadowy cellar that conjured all sorts of alien emotions.

These were lacking in those well-lit uptown parlors where the balls moved at the mercy of mating conversations, plopping casually but erratically into large pockets. Their meeting sounds even seemed to couple. The kiss-offs had a more caressing quality because the strokes were cued to compete for a different kind of game where dates dripped with the desire to score the values that would satisfy Mom and Dad. They resisted the urge to tail off into a demonstration of pool for pool’s sake when the woo bait blends into the crowd and the sticks switch to the lonely snooker table with its smaller pockets.

Whitey popped into these palaces from time to time like a nervous foreman sniffing around the corporate farm for squatters, always trying to scope out the competition. And he never met a game he didn’t like, no matter where it was or who was playing. But he thrived on the whispered awe that trailed his rep from that other place downtown where he apprenticed more and more students in the angle arts, doing clinics on how to actually use all that book stuff they tried to teach us up on the hill.

A passionate teacher Whitey surely was, and there were few who graduated to actually challenge him. But it was also his mentoring of the experience of hangin’ out in this special place that meant so much to us. He could turn the tizzy of truancy into ecstasy, provide a new sport for those who got woozy at the thought of grids and courts, and help free up time so we could do the things we were penalized for merely foaming about before.

The special climate of Greek’s empowered his passionate mentoring of this experience. Passing through its portals for the first time spawned a certain spiritual potency, if not exactly spirituality. It certainly wasn’t like any sensation you got from being in Mass. Perhaps it was closer to the feeling you got when you nearly missed it, when you crept through the vestibule and smack into the middle of the sermon, your guilty gait becoming a confident strut from the success in striking the pose that atoned for tardiness.

The Greek’s experience had a complex pedigree. Descending the long flight of stairs through increasing darkness to a dungeon-like, smoky space to cavort with a whole new group of mates and acquaintances wasn’t unlike the sensation you got from over-inhaling the incense gushing from that gaudy swinging teapot at Sunday Mass. Altar boys were a desperate breed in those days.

But most of the similarities with any official religion we knew quickly vaporized. The two high priests of the establishment, the Greek himself and Tommy his assistant, wanted nothing to do with anyone forced to eat fish and flattened circles of bleached-out bread. In this chapel, consuming fine grades of jerky was the sacrament of choice. Our ministers were secular vitalists who welcomed many different gods as long as they helped out with the gaming odds. And the only choir music was the soothing refrain of “rack ’em, Tommy” that counterpointed the competitive clash of balls.

Living the nirvana of good companionship, we felt liberated. We had no need for the Bible or any other fundamental authority. No priests, brothers, or nuns allowed (and rarely any girls), only a concerned laity dispensing worldly wisdom from the school of hard knocks that we acolytes could share in our daily crusades. What a relief from that dictation at school. We were in rapture. Our escape from limbo was at hand. We absorbed new slants on dating and relationships that gave us the potential to realize that a roll in the hay and a hayride could be on the same plane but usually weren’t. And we learned to speak with profanity to void liturgies and commandments.

But we couldn’t consider that this kind of speech might prevent us from finding quality sacred substitutes. Our playpens after all were booby-trapped with too many happy trails that led nowhere. Speaking this way might bring the same kind of rushes that provoked snake handlers to search for the Lord’s lost chord in the reptiles’ vibrations. We might begin to act like fish flipping out of water.

Advanced Angle Art

Geometry was a subject you could pass your eyes over and come away feeling instantly educated, and it was Whitey’s best subject for metering the meaningless and fudging the rift between pool hall and study hall. Known for passing up easy, straight-in shots, he lived and breathed three-rail kiss-offs and other unthinkable combinations. Like a Symbolist poet absorbed with snatching the perfect word string, he would gorge on trajectories so finely crafted and placed that we suspended all belief a game was even being played.

So it’s no surprise that Whitey’s training in the classics fortunately missed Aristotle and all that beginning-middle-end stuff. He simply got used to Ds: detour, deferral, detention. A crass, as-the-crow-flies-payola had little chance of penetrating his consciousness until some stick from St. Louis heard the rumor that an upstart from Hicksville actually had what it takes. He could become the most competitive of teleologists at the sound of breaking balls.

His bridge was an instant crowd converter. It began with a spreading display of long and lean fingers put through repeated stretches and contortions—like Rocky Colavito stroking every tic before stepping into the batter’s box—and found final form as a sculptured hand. We watched the cued chain of balls carefully—always the soft touch!—careening along a route that told a story within a story while the surrounding chaotic scatter blurred as if seen through a telephoto lens. His tangle of frozen fingers survived the clash for just a moment in exclamation.

But Whitey’s genius was mostly expressed through intangibles. Once out of halo-radar and passing through the downtown din into Greek’s, those tidbits of theorem caroming through his gray matter must’ve fused into a bedeviling bug immune from extermination, and while fermenting they matured into much more than mere nuisance, tripping up the logic that governs every move on the felt. It became a power to finesse and intuit, open the doors of perception and do something with the morsels of information in our heads.

Whitey was not unlike an alchemist, one of those unconventional visionaries from the Middle Ages, lay scientists who probably flunked out of college and fancied a way to convert base, valueless metals into gold with chemistry sets they’d purchased at the local flea market. His base metals were often wrong answers in his science classes that were somehow converted to precious truths after passing through his gray matter.

One day as we exited geometry class Whitey began to get lathered up about the Pythagorean theorem. “How come the squares hangin’ from those little sides have to go over to that big one,” he blurted. “That ain’t right…can’t be true all the time…seems like an unfair triangle.”

“Guess that’s what he meant,” I suggested. “All this stuff adds up to some sort of law about unfair triangles.”

“But how come that one line gets more credit? Isn’t two bigger than one...so why do they get the shaft?”

“Maybe pictures were different back then,” I offered, “or maybe this Pythagoras dude had holy credentials. He was probably closer to God.”

“Or maybe he was Greek and coulda had lotsa gods on his side,” came the thoughtful reply.

Whitey had begun to play pool well before he knew his multiplication tables or even how to spell “geometry.” His experience came first and this conveniently left a membrane menacing to all abstract paradigms in search of an audience. So that supposedly clear picture on the board demonstrating this or that theorem was a loser from the get-go. It only overloaded his circuits and sent him sputtering off. And the more he crafted his angle art the more resistant he became to certain stories, especially those passed along by the priests and nuns. What he discovered from dancing around the green felt gave him the confidence to suspect every alien bit of sound advice and “correct” thinking.

The Pythagorean theorem was a classic example. If the hypotenuse was such a big deal for the wise guys, the picture which proved what mind games could do when pitching a line toward sure victory on the straight and narrow, for Whitey it was lots of untested gobbledygook. The real revelations came through his experiments between the rails. 

Snooker is one of the most advanced genres in the pool arts, loosely related to regular pool as cricket is to baseball, and it was a natural game for Whitey. Billiards, a kindred form, tested his obsession with angles but it lacked holes, depriving him of the drop in the sack that followed the flat-ball-smack, pure music to his hypersensitive ears. And the players dressed like they were on their way to a banquet. Who knows what they rapped about!

Snooker came already loaded with the stratagems Whitey needed to take competition to new heights. Both the pockets and the balls are reduced in size, leaving a tighter fit. Guaranteed to get the juices flowing. You choose the shots that inch you toward the finish line while blocking—“snookering”—your opponent’s moves. The enlarged rack includes a nine-ball formation surrounded by a mass of red balls—“cherries”—which have to be sunk before you can go after the numbered balls in order. You get one point each for the cherries and whatever the number value is on the balls in the nine-ball set.

The twist is that the numbered balls can be sunk and points gotten if they fall while sinking the cherries, but only if the cherry—and later the appropriate numbered ball—is  hit first and every movement in the chain, from rails to kiss-offs, is clearly described in advance. So there’s motivation to keep all options in view and of course to pop the cherries hanging around the high payola numbers. And since all numbered balls are brought back up, spotted, until they’re dropped in succession at the end of the game, they can be made over and over, putting a premium on playing the rails and kiss-offs proficiently. And if the ball formations offer few options, you can block your opponent from being able to hit the right ball first, switching on your saboteur savvy and forcing him into a slip that gives you the offensive initiative.

Whitey’s brush stroke employed a varied palette to paint the edges and corners of every material obstacle in his way with such precision that his poor adversary would pace and fidget, chalk the cue over and over, and hit the rosin so often that Tommy had to call an official time-out to mop up the creamy spittle-sludge spawned from his cowering movements (the Greek had no insurance).

From Mass to Masse and Morality

Like an artist grappling with demons, Whitey would withdraw into a corner and become a kind of NIMBY-nihilist while envisioning strokes that defied gravity and the straight line. Then, newly energized and having already stroked virtually every angle possible on that compass he forgot to buy, he’d bust out and chalk the cue tip like a master violinist caressing the strings of his Stradivarius before plunging into a D-minor concerto.

You might say Whitey was fiddling with fate. He would skip over balls with finesse, rarely coming close to damaging the felt. Or he’d go around and masse their asses, touch that cue ball with just the right amount of downward pressure on the edge to send it spinning out and away from its designated path like a top out of control, and then toward a blocked ball like a heat-seeking missile.

It was consummate subterfuge, angling between angles to make the shot that might not have ever been made, tracing a path never before followed, free from the grip of common sense or someone else’s authority. He could effortlessly snooker the snooker and the snook.

If Mass after Mass after Mass was supposed to bring it all together for us, shape our lives for the clear-and-clean-cut techno world ahead, teach us to be quiet, mind our own business, stand straight, be on time, stay awake, and cultivate a stiff upper lip, then maybe the masse metaphor could help us wiggle and spin our way out of it all. At the very least it could help us slip out of Mass for pool practice. 

Of course, we couldn’t control the spin like Whitey. Our missiles would usually fizzle like those made-on-Monday D.O.D. rockets tested for Nam. From watching the master at work and feeling the vibes, we picked up the flow in fits and starts. But we needed quality nurturing time.

Now Whitey was never very religious. Though he went to church more or less regularly like the rest of us, his preoccupation with angles seemed to trump any credible interest in moral questions. But one day when we exited religion class he gave us a different glimpse.

“What’s this Saint Augustine dude all about?” he asked. “I don’t get it! He was bad…did all kinds of wrong things and…now he’s one of the bosses…got a title and a picture in the church and…”

“Just another one of those old-timers who didn’t play by the same rules,” I ventured.

“So we can do bad stuff and have fun and later it will all be good stuff?” 

“I guess it depends on how you look at it.”

After that Whitey’s masse maneuvers became sharper, more finely tuned, but they were also occasionally wildly unpredictable like he was struggling with this newly discovered glitch in our Catholic legacy on the pool table. Had that moment of truth nurtured some new strain of serpentine geometry? What would happen if these riffs fermented in the feral minds of his passionate acolytes? We might end up in some quirky quagmire beyond good and evil.

Maybe Whitey would become like one of those Greeks Father Method mentioned briefly in history class who came before Socrates and complained about everything learned men of that day believed in. The Sophists! They were skeptics and relativists. One of their leaders was a character named Hippias. Now that I think of it, around this time Whitey started looking kind of hippieish.

Anyway, Whitey never said anything to us directly but from then on he would often mumble snippets about “that saint,” or blurb Delphian phrases about prayer and give us a comical twist on the evil eye before pulling away to gather his game face. One day he said in a tone we’d never heard before, “Okay, everybody, it’s time now for Tommy to hear our confessions!”

Whitey’s behavior over the following weeks affected us. We began to be more aware of our pagan counterparts at the public high school and seriously ponder our differences from them when it came to experiencing the ways of the world. Would our distinction as Crusaders be compromised if we tried to catch up, be like them, while still practicing the values that shape our heritage? And if we tried to put a catch-up plan into action would this put a monkey on our backs since few believed our different worlds could be reconciled?

It was another moment of truth. Did a catch-up plan worth its name mean following the example of our favorite saint? There would be no stopping halfway. Praising his qualities in theory was safe, but what would it be like to model our lives on a serial sinner who took debauchery so seriously? Would we get the same treatment as our accidental mentor? He certainly had better connections than we could ever hope to have so we would not likely get reprieved like he did.

And since we were such novices, if we started to get let off the hook too easily for our transgressions, our guilt might become squared from the sheer efficiency of the transactions. We might even become delirious from having to repeatedly beat the path between street life and confessional, forced to wonder if our slates were really wiped clean or just covered over and waiting to be exposed.

We could go for the complete catharsis and hit the road, follow the example of Jack Kerouac. He was the patron saint for those who wanted to let it all hang out before packing it in. Of course, he was a lapsed Catholic and many of his books made Rome’s Ten Most Wanted list. Plus, how would we deal with the temporary downers between mea culpas if we became serious roadies?

Our saving grace was perhaps that our saint did his dirty deeds when the Catholics were still battling to be recognized by the Roman government, traveling the catacombs’ beaten, underground paths. He was a cellar man like us. So we began to view our cellar in a new light. Maybe it cultivated a climate compatible with the one that nurtured him. It did seem like a new breed of folks was starting to descend on the cellar with ever-greater frequency.

Working-stiff townies refusing to turn the other cheek; beaconless philosophers living life free of words and homework; druggies and winos, casualties of the tread forward, reverse crusaders with tracking beacons flickering faintly from some unfamiliar source but full of story-spurts from society’s cracks; prosties, unreformed Magdalenes perfuming us away from our routines to give us fits of self-flagellation; hyped-up cowboys looking for the new Wild West, finding bad guys and savages all over the place and wanting to recruit us; oldsters on the lam seeking refuge from their enforced idleness, chewing up the past and spewing it out in chunks of melancholy to outline their final novenas while advising us how to avoid their missteps.

“Where are all these people coming from?” Whitey asked one day.

“It’s certainly getting colorful here,” I responded. “Maybe this will be a catalyst for our catch-up plan.”

“Think our patron saint had something to do with this?”

Anyway, we soon realized that these new additions to our cellar life were probably kin with those Jesus mingled with in his day, those on the margins of society. And being around them proved to be a learning experience. It was the mere sight of these new cellar citizens that grabbed us. The way they dressed was unsettling at first but refreshingly stimulating. It made us more conscious of our uniformity. And this seemed to make us more aware of other changes like how they talked, smelled, and presented themselves.

On any given day the Greek had always burned a candle in his little nook by the cash register, usually an offering to this or that god of gaming. But now shadows would shimmy on the walls from the occasional breezes or bodies in motion, exposing a face or frame languishing in the cracks. A loud clack of balls, a boisterous conversation, a string of screeching traffic sounds and honking horns, or a scream from an errant tourist wandering down the stairs, would scramble our views of the surroundings.

As could the smells. The burning wax would release a smoky, purple vapor that suffused the space with a curious odor like the candle might’ve been laced with some of the Greek’s home-grown incense or rare herbs he brought back from the wilds of Mykonos. These moments would leave us blissfully drowsy, but then we’d become aware of such unimagined bouquets, like pinches of sweat-garnished Jade East cologne, wafts of benzene from the street, and whiffs of sewer gas diffusing through the walls. We really started to wonder when one day there was a blast on a car horn from very near the entrance and a healthy wisp of sweet alfalfa spread through the cellar. The sweetness persisted for a very long time, strengthening to the point where we felt dizzy like we’d possibly been drugged. Strangely, this led to another change. Our mental energy thrived, and we began to entertain deep thoughts about why we exist. This stoked our desire to break free from the whole program.

But once we gained some distance from our sensual bath, these reflections soured. We weren’t ready to cease pulsing the confidence of good Catholic lads destined to perform good deeds. Our tracking beacons, already askew, might start sending mixed signals and suggest to others we were no longer special. Having languished so long in imaginary closets, what would happen to us? When not-very-worldly lads with heavy catch-up monkeys on their backs taste the elixir of temptation they might forge extreme paths simply to make up for their deficits.

Saints in Search of a Method

Abe was a poster child for how to inch one’s way from immigrant squalor into the middle class. His ancestors had been rendered landless in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide, and each generation since had struggled against Muslim religious oppression and political cronyism. He was ecstatic, therefore, about finding the freedom to pray and pay his tithe while living in a shanty near the packing house where his father cleaned the floors to support a family of seven.

Abe did everything he was supposed to do. He respected curfew and girls (by avoiding them), studied hard, considered the priesthood as a profession, loved his dog and his country too. And above all, he dutifully attended Mass most mornings and especially on Sunday. Perhaps this is why he was always trying to look inward and aloft simultaneously. Unfortunately, a tic formed which made it seem like he was winking at someone who wasn’t there.

One Friday as we ogled our fish sticks in the cafeteria he opened up.

“It seems sometimes like…well, there’s this sorta cellophane barrier between me and the people talking to me and…I can’t figure what they’re saying.”

“Sounds like you’re getting even more spiritual,” I said.

Since inward-looking skills are very useful for book-reading, the sheer ecstasy of tracing forms in private, Abe devoured all the titles he could get his hands on, including some that might as well have been in a foreign language. He carried them around to band practice and on his pizza delivery job, becoming the butt of every egghead joke imaginable. He even began to dabble in Vatican II and its ideas about taking the liturgies to the people, elevating even more eyebrows of the near-sighted in the process.

We had invited him to Greek’s before but he merely looked off in a way that said, “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

“But how do you know you won’t like it?” I asked. “You’ve never been there.”

“I’ve heard all I need to hear.”

“Like what?” He was looking off again.

We did finally get him down the stairs one day after we’d gorged on the non-Friday menu at Bishop’s Cafeteria, but he stopped near the bottom with only a few steps to go. His body suddenly stiffened like he was getting ready to vault inside, as if the darkness, forever his refuge, was beckoning him. Then a burst of pent-up energy zapped him backwards and he shot up the stairs like he’d seen Lucifer himself.

In the weeks that followed, he began asking veiled questions about Greek’s. This show of curiosity was enough to convince us that he might be ready to take another crack at it.

On the day he took the plunge he acted at first like he had before, hesitating on the threshold. This time, however, he inched inside and began scoping out every detail like he was taking a tour of the catacombs off the Appian Way in Rome which he had fantasized about so many times from books. His eyes were glowing like a friar’s lantern as he moved along the back wall, inspecting its smudges and lines and pondering the shadows flickering over its surface. He inhaled the sensual smack and before long he turned to the Greek himself for a hug.

The rest, as they say, is history. He immersed himself in books like never before, bringing many of them with him to the cellar as silent witnesses to his matches, placing them on a nearby bench and caressing them between shots like they were talismans for tipping the spin on his attempted masse shots. He kept a dog-eared copy of one book by a Russian writer in his back pocket and read from it periodically, mouthing the words in a near trance like they possessed some biblical authority for him. He told us it was about this guy who lived by himself underground, kind of like we did, and had a fascinating philosophy in the story. The book claimed that two plus two could equal five and that we had a better chance of being free if we did things against our interests, even irrational acts, relying only on our will. Whitey’s ears perked up when he heard this and he had to reconfigure his bridge. After his shot, which hung in the pocket, he came over to Abe and asked him if he could look through it. I couldn’t remember the last time Whitey took such an interest in a book. 

Abe finally started to spend his time in camouflaged hideaways all over the city, dodging his parents and the priests and nuns up on the hill. He even stayed in the Greek’s back room for a stretch, living mostly in isolation like that Russian character he was so inspired by. He couldn’t go back to plastic Jesuses and picket fences, mowed lawns and haircuts, duty and discipline, the things that once ratcheted him to the front of the class. When he finally surfaced it was like he had been purged of his previous existence. He even lost his tic!

He now had a new reading list and game plan, carrying around tattered copies of manifestoes, particularly The Port Huron Statement and Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, raging between shots about our sinful and unequal society and the dangers of the coming Fourth Reich. His crusade continued across the border in Canada where he wouldn’t have to face “gooks.”

Then there was Harry, one of the most inspired athletes in the history of the school, primed to raise the bar on any sport but especially baseball. He was obsessed with following Yogi, whom he resembled, into the Hall.

One of nine lucky testaments to family planning through the arrhythmia method, he learned early on the meaning of the phrase, “I need my space.” Playtime was a chance to escape notice and expand his vistas in the valley of parallel rails that abutted his meager backyard, where the train cars served as stickball barriers and secret hideaways when they weren’t moving. Then they became speeding flashes that quaked the ground of the adjacent shanties and beckoned restless hobos on their itinerary of freedom. No need for toy trains in his childhood.

His life revolved around competition, being better than the next guy, and he was driven to structure and order—it provided a balance to his chaotic family life. Alas, he was a consummate Crusader! In a sense everything he did was a crusade, a pulsing toward closure authorized by a Creator he never questioned.

His spiritual existence was auto-piloted. He felt like an ethereal presence gracefully monitored his actions. This permitted him to go about his everyday tasks in a secure frame of mind, all sanctioned by his Maker’s authority. No need to rely on third parties. He wasn’t that keen on priests with the exception of one who had passed on many years earlier, Pope Pius XII.

Harry sponged up the Roman playbook so thoroughly that temptations barely flickered his corpuscles. Carnality was an alien concept. Sins were the transgressions of others. He became a kind of Cub Scout Torquemada, goading the shantied to obey, stay in shape, get haircuts regularly, and clean and press whatever clothes they could obtain. Like him. It seemed he was always prepping for a military inspection, putting himself through rigorous workouts and keeping his frayed threads presentable. 

One day he showed up at Sister Frannie’s English class wearing pieces of an old WWII Marine uniform he found in his cousin’s basement.

“What…what are you…you can’t come into her class like that,” I stuttered.

“I’m getting ready for…she won’t mind…she’s one of us,” he stammered in a semi-trance capped with a smirk.

“Getting ready for what?” I queried. “She’s one of who?”

“Lately I feel I…need to be punished. I’m not ready to take the big step.”

It turned out that this big step was joining the Marines. It was like some invisible inquisitor had regimented his body. All activities were treated as duties, from Mass through morning exercises and others throughout the day. He appeared perpetually vexed—the war had begun and enemies were everywhere.

We were quite worried about him and decided he needed a jolt, something to wake him up. So one day as we strolled by Greek’s we pulled him down the stairs, almost to the bottom. He had built up such a toxic sediment of hearsay against the place that it took three of us to keep him from bolting back up. He protested that he was late for his afternoon workout.

The sight of layabouts spread around in various obscene angles in the shadowy cellar made him cringe. We finally let him go and he tried to spring up the stairs to freedom.

“You think you’re better than us!” Whitey shouted, freezing him in his tracks. “You must be some kinda martyr. Ain’t you ever had fun?”

Pleasure beamed from the beseeching glares around the cellar and seemed to draw Harry back down the stairs, like the Holy Spirit itself had suddenly suffused him. He sat comatose in the corner for the next hour or so, tracing the trajectories on the pool table from smack to smack until someone brought him a starter cue. By twilight Whitey had a new pupil.

All the urges, visions, and desires tamped into his subconscious that discipline had blocked from the light of day were now options in his waking existence.

He devoted his attention to the details of everyday life, the here and now, as if that’s where spirituality truly resided. All that life-after stuff was a nuisance when it came to what matters in the present. He bought a long, black Cadillac with the money he’d never spent, a correction symbol-cum-party wagon providing an on-call shuttle service to virgins from the suburban side of the tracks—and coached them in the ways to salvation. He had prayed to a virgin all these years but had never really known what one was like, so he opted for some hands-on field research. As a reminder of his years of devotion he stored a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary with Tommy’s rosin stash, pulling it out for a moment of silent meditation before an especially big game.

During his two-week stay in Greek’s backroom, He refined his snooker skills under Whitey’s tutelage and re-grooved his competitive urge toward a new game of chance. He stopped attending classes regularly, deferring his graduation, and avoided Mass. Living now in slo-mo he became the slacker he once detested, though with an improved agenda. He became fascinated with marginal lives, often taking extended excursions to various street enclaves around the city.

He had always been hostile to nerds and bookish types but found himself perusing a few tomes from the Beats and soon after hit the road, becoming an oral poet of everyday life. Burying the crucifix, he ambled away from our wasteland on any barge he could find, seeking perpetual redemption, perhaps, through the flow of dirty river water. He jested that he was trying to recapture that unctious tickle at the baptismal font and make it everlasting. He became our minstrel of life on the Missouri, twaining and forking his way to the Promised Land. And if the rumors can be trusted he’s been reborn high and dry on a D.H. Lawrence peyote mount in the southwest.

Infidel Interlude

The plunge into Greek’s could be risky for those whose catch-up monkeys were especially burdensome, leaving them destined to search for answers through extremes that most of us were unequipped to embrace. Fearing the unknown, we wanted to discover more about what it was we had to catch up to.

There was nothing that could clip your confidence more than when an especially cool infidel dropped into the cellar while you were pulsing with good graces from having a good shot at snookering Whitey. They summoned such poise. It must’ve come from sowing their oats with no tinge of regret. And they had an air of superiority like they were the ones flush with the Holy Spirit. They had such a head start seeding their swank that even if they agreed to the most stringent, spiritual decontamination imaginable, like taking a day-long retreat in a sauna of fish repellent, they still faced a formidable task. And in the end, many of us thought, we might become lapsed Catholics anyway and we knew that they were worth spit in Rome’s eyes. 

But to live without a beacon, what a feeling that would be! Free of spirits shadowing our mindscapes 24/7 and the obsessing over extra-worldly fates.

So as more and more infidels dropped into the cellar, we decided how gratifying it would be to stop merely wondering and find out what made them tick. As Crusaders we had an obligation to convert them or, better yet, make them go away if we could. What a wonderful world it would be if we could get rid of them and compare ourselves only to ourselves. Many of us secretly didn’t want to believe they were more advanced anyway. Did they simply project the panache of victory? Perhaps they had a tracking beacon easily recognized by other infidels and did their duty for other masters, embracing different lines about life’s mysteries.

Since we lacked a method to convert these infidels, and elimination was simply unrealistic, we decided to send someone behind enemy lines and get their secret formula.  

James was our best candidate since he had decided to make pool his career and the cellar his home away from home. And he knew what it was like to be a lapsed Catholic. He had more lapses than a coked-up hummingbird during mating season. Lapsed hall passes, lapsed warnings from the principal, lapsed tickets, lapsed homework, lapsed attention surpluses, lapsed REMs from staying up too late. He had difficulty transitioning through normal chains of events, often starting in the middle of his paper route, or hitting Greek’s during the day before blowing past the school on his way back for some sack time.

Since he had become our resident expert on school—having spent so much time ditching—it was the perfect place to plant him. He headed for his lessons in pagan pedagogy like a zealous gumshoe with a per diem.

The infidels’ devil-may-care attitude was so advanced, however, that the geometric forms circulating in the real world that tend to conjure crosses in the minds of devoted observers began to resemble horns for him. He got so relaxed from the lack of discipline that he started to lose focus. And there were no hovering spirits to keep him in line. He was so bug-eyed from trying to learn the upgraded party program that his investigative and note-taking skills failed to develop. His handwriting took on a slovenly lilt. Gaps started to appear in his already gap-prone thinking processes. He had to split before he became a basket case.

The theory going in—as cobbled together by the Greek, Tommy, and a few of us with a measure of insight—was that James could at least come back with something of value, such as a greater confidence toward the affairs of everyday life which would visibly expand like a good virus in his body as he made continued progress in getting rid of the monkey. His example might lead to the development of a kind of behavioral prototype for use by any group of saintly rebels at odds with Rome. Spreading it through our cellar community and beyond could help cultivate a monkey-free state of mind.

But there were some concerns. What would happen if what James got in the pagan scene was the equivalent of a disease, his exposure leading to obsessive self-interest, nihilism, or some mysterious social pathology that blocked him from advancing spiritually. Our school would get nominal bragging rights for sure. We had the right stuff all along! This would give us more incentive to eliminate the competition. But what would be the long-term consequences from this exposure? 

From our first debriefings we learned, however, that since he hadn’t been exposed long enough to develop the full-blown disease, there was no permanent damage. But it was long enough to develop immunity, considering the matter from the perspective of the medical model. This must be why vaccines always include a dose of the malady to be treated.

We wondered if his incomplete plunge had prevented him from absorbing enough of the pagan experience to help us craft a complete catch-up plan. If he hadn’t, there would be few if any benefits from the plunge. But then the fact that he couldn’t slip into a spiritual void and live a life so unlike one modeled on that of Jesus would be no meager victory. After all, immunity would now prevent him from giving into the temptations that might lead him to an existence of hopeless sinning.

After he had settled back in at the cellar, we learned that his beacon was still flickering; his floundering hadn’t resulted in a loss of belief. Plus, his catch-up monkey was only halfway down his back and may never fall off, thanks to our years of conditioning. From this we realized that our beacons and the meanings attached to them were probably permanent fixtures like the organs that coordinate bodily functions, virtual pacemakers beating to the Roman rhythm. Removing them surgically or through hypnotherapy, for example, would severely impair our ability to function. 

The consequences would be unthinkable. We might roam around aimlessly in search of assurance, prevented like Sisyphus from rolling that rock of redemption all the way to the mount. With the beacons still flickering, on the other hand, we might learn to avoid rigid postulates and catch up with the evolving lifestyles as catch can, jettisoning our monkeys through mature moral behavior practiced in our own experimental time frame. We hoped this kind of progress would help us find a niche in the society we inherited. 

Catabasing Crusades

That inheritance was mostly invisible as we passed through and beyond the cellar. We had the vague notion that we were at the tail end of baby boom America, the beneficiaries of the pent-up demand for families in the weeks just after WWII ended, but we didn’t really think about it much. It didn’t help that we offered up most of our social studies classes to play snooker. Our parents drummed into us that we were lucky to be born then, that we had opportunities to achieve much more than they had. One of our presidents, JFK, whom they told us had been shot by a crazy guy, inspired youth to do great things—and he was a Catholic. That perked some of us up, but Whitey said that maybe what Catholics offered was not very popular and we might be shot too! And JFK’s successor talked about something called a Great Society that would help us realize our dreams and uplift our stations in life. A few in the cellar bandied bits of this around occasionally, but they found themselves without an audience.

As we moved on, this society didn’t seem all that great. It appeared to be mostly about getting richer, and that didn’t sound all that bad to us who had never had much. But this apparently meant we should buy lots of stuff we didn’t need and get a newer house in a neighborhood with people who were a lot different than us and probably not all that happy we were around. And our parents were still brown baggin’ and scrimpin’ anyway.

We weren’t yet equipped for college, so we put that on hold while we worked at odd jobs while hanging at the cellar and waiting for our lottery numbers. A few panicked to Pendleton in a patriotic fever ahead of the letters, driven by some private crusade. Whitey said we should hang loose, that our saint would watch over us, and we performed better on this math test than any that our masters gave us on the hill. We felt grateful in some way, to whomever we owed the debt, though we would’ve tried to do the right thing no matter what.

 We never paid much attention to the Vietnam War before graduation, our masters barely giving it short shrift, but as we started to sample the commentary we developed a retroactive queasiness about the aggressive world we lived in. This war was a small part of a bigger and much different one.

 Everyone was crusading against the Godless and faceless commies, wanting to bury them at a game they seemed incapable of winning. And this threat had been around for a long time, even before our dads got settled in after WWII. We had been fighting another war, a cold one with the commies, and didn’t even know it. Other little hot wars broke out in unfamiliar places as substitutes. These could never become another hot-and-numbered war—the result would cancel many bank accounts and likely the forward march of civilization.

Had our society gone crazy and made a pact with the devil? It seemed that getting into the flow of buying more stuff and the new bomb technology generated from the atoms somehow synchronized into a virtual national anthem for the Great Society. Unfortunately, we lived with the haunting terror that at the click of a switch we’d all return to those atoms in the heavens.

The culture of this society was changing too according to the media. There was a “crusade,” their very word, against outdated moralities. We welcomed the efforts of these enlightened crusaders. The thought of finally freeing ourselves from stifling codes, no more empty talk! The prosperity of this era, it seemed, was making a catachresis of religion itself. With new worldly pleasures mushrooming everywhere, few now wanted to defer gratification to another world. And it seemed messages from influential people about helping others, like what our canceled, short-time Catholic president pontificated, would soon be snuffed by me-first monologues.

What a revelation! We were free to live life without these codes and get the catch-up monkeys completely off our backs. We should’ve been euphoric, but James’s experience haunted us. Could we shape a morally mature lifestyle on the challenging roads ahead without our beacons? They had protected us with a quasi-permeable prophylactic that blocks noxious transmissions from all directions while discharging good graces. Our favorite saint must’ve faced a similar dilemma.

If we were to be truly liberated we would have to marry our religious and social visions, learn how to make good moral choices no matter what apocryphal scenarios this society fed us in our post-cellar lives. We would have to make a virtue of uncertainty, question everything at every step and above all avoid easy postulates and trendy cults. This was a tall order for many of us who had not fully emptied our subconscious of the postulates that puffed up our heritage.

Whitey dropped into the cellar one day while we were celebrating Tommy’s birthday. He had just returned from a big game in Vegas. We jawed away into the wee hours, reminiscing about the good ole days when we ditched classes to play pool.

“Should we drop in up at the rectory and see if our masters approve of our…crusades?” asked Whitey, grinning ear to ear.

We chatted about what a big deal our masters made of our name, and someone remembered the day Abe, not long before he split, challenged Father Method about why he never told us about the Crusades in religion class.

“Yeah, that look on his face…like he was in mourning,” I said.

This was just before I started writing reviews for the local paper and one of my assignments was a mass market historical novel set in the Middle Ages. There was a passage in there about the Crusades. With our conversation still fresh in my mind my imagination took over and I did my best to make sense of those spectacles overlapping the first millennium, and especially how they affected our experience growing up. Since in school their substance was airbrushed from the big picture, we knew them only through the physical music of rods on flesh as we submitted to the not-very-grand inquisitors convinced we stood a real chance to be saved. Our parents helped. Of course, our contemporary inquisitors weren’t killing infidels like the first generation that set its sights on competing with Islam. But the pressure to toe the line was great. There were horror stories about how the grand Pope Pius XII---whose reign ended in 1958, way before our time---had backed the crusading Nazis.

Sitting in Mass gave us time to reflect on our heritage, though it could be trying to say the least. The tripwire to oblivion could be one of those sermons you were sure you heard the previous season or a particularly quiet stretch when even the aisle greeters appeared ready to succumb. If you could prop those lids up with your fingers, assuming they weren’t already past the numbing stage, you were home free. Then you could inventory the surrounding scene and see that a lot of specialness and status had accumulated over the years. 

All that glitters is hardly gold but as soon as you panned away from the monstrances you needed welder’s goggles to refract the rays of spoiled wealth. The whole space was laminated in luxury, from the altar utensils to the pews and even the confessionals—perhaps to lend an extra oomph of credibility to the penance. Were all the marble figures tapped into the rich experience of having met their Maker? Where did all of this come from? One little shaving from a golden candelabra could pay our rent for a year.

How many infidels were slaughtered for straddling the faith-fence and meeting the wrong Maker so we could be free and secure in our beliefs? Were those baby faces sculpted everywhere and painted on the ceiling giddy at converting to the cause and escaping mayhem, or pained from ending up in the wrong history?

Maybe they were pondering the protestors who popped up in the early 1500s to complain about the influence peddling of grace credits and conspicuous consumption that supported the priests’ opulent lifestyles. These protestors were down on Baroque statuary and mega-churches that broke the treasury, preferring minimalist and austere prayer spaces. And they were becoming an ever-larger majority. The church had fewer tithe-paying bodies around in the wake of the Crusades’ efficient cleansing campaigns. Maybe there was a tinge of guilt in those faces.

The protestors were also down on saints, those specially endowed people, since the voting for membership was not always democratic and the evidence for miraculous acts was not always on the up-and-up. They got it right with our saint, though, perhaps because his fun came at a time when the early church just surfaced from cellar life. This showed that they could give credit where credit’s due. We hoped that kind of special person would become the norm in a transforming church. It could reprieve us from the heavy burden of sin.

Crusaders love to legislate sin. They left little room for human vagaries and made the literal letters on the page into one-strike laws. We witnessed the evolution of sin as we passed through the Great Society’s cultural shifts.

Sin is sin, but at some point it has to keep pace with the pacesetters caught in the vortex of changing times and getting sympathy for their devilish deeds to help them cope with the aberrations in the Roman code. Just as reason will never be the same after the Holocaust, sin has irrevocably changed. Wild deeds occupy a murky Neverland. These sowed oats might return as some new strain of forbidden fruit that if consumed will only mess with the nutritional needs for faithfully living the clean and blissful life without regret. “Sinners” will likely get trapped in one of those circles of Dante’s hell, having a blast and getting burnt over and over but never scoring any credits.

More and more fun seekers got waivers, making it look like these aberrations were the rule. Only the cretins stayed home at night and prayed a lot, not knowing they were doomed to repeat the farces of history. Recidivism was becoming an oxymoron. And many priests and brothers were not exactly setting a good example. They kept thrusting ahead with their closet crusades to the Vatican’s initial shock, getting dazed cherubic boys to accept a twisted version of the Crusades from all sorts of angles. Sinning for these throwback catamites approached the horror of Inquisition savagery, but their transgressions were mostly ignored.

The message seemed to be that if well-intentioned beings were testing a moral fabric that had as many holes in it as Swiss cheese, they might as well try to heal themselves and bypass all codes and rules. But this might be irresponsible. Could the rules be revamped from within the heritage itself? Pope John the 23^rd, not exactly on the tips of our parents’ tongues, who reigned from 1958 to 1963, passing the same year as our fallen Catholic president, didn’t give too much credence to the literal letters on the page and endorsed unwritten, many-strikes laws. It seemed theology-as-usual could be liberated and upgraded. The Polish Pope who borrowed his name and served from 1978 to 2005, Pope John Paul II, pressed on with further deviations. And he had a bit of an Augustinian revel as an actor before cloistering his attention on the heritage.

If there’s a dose of disease in every serum designed to eliminate it, then maybe there are nodules of healthy thinking in every diseased belief system that spawn protest.

Splashes of Spiritual Salvage

We could be like the Blues Brothers on a mission directly from God and bypass all doctrine-mediators, just do our own thing. But could we be saved going at it alone? How would we negotiate passage to the next life? Maybe there was a proper accounting from someone once you went through that light at the end of the tunnel ready to take the heat, no matter what institution you deferred to or hailed from. Or maybe it all came down to instant darkness with a cold slap in the face and nothing mattered anyway.

If you bought the first option and more or less followed the rules, then that burden of worry over the long haul of denial would be worth it after all if you sensed you were right, even put a smile on your face as you neared the finish line for the time trials. But since logic has little to do with it and during that long stretch there were many revisions to the sin code, you might just lose the credits you thought you had and get fried anyway or get the cold slap without a chance to utter your mea culpas.

If you inclined toward the second option, breaking every rule you possibly could, not even being vaguely interested in accumulating saintly credits and smiling all the way through the epicurean revel, you might be too happy living in the moment to even reflect on such matters. Or, as you got closer to the end you might be so sated and bored and have so much time to reflect that you might panic and grab the best cash-out plan available, only to find out it was the wrong one. And you’d have an eternity to mouth your mea culpas to an unforgiving Maker.

 This was a spiritual quagmire the Catholic church, with its many middlemen, was supposed to take care of for us. So being on our own was frightening. Could we be protestors without being Protestant traitors?

Whitey again was our guide since he was beyond quagmires. And he had Nordic genes, his kin hailing a stone’s throw from where Luther scribbled his famous complaints on that door. He wasn’t into theses but he was an avid skeptic of middling confessors too close to the boss’s games and cocksure about answers. You got a glimpse of how he communed with sweet divinity just before he formed his bridge. He would dash off a blur of vertical and horizontal motions, not always in the same order, baby signs of the cross that gave him a little extra confidence. And these always prefaced a look up to the heavens to the only high priest that mattered, besides the Greek, never a glance up the hill where our masters were.

This direct communication made God his only confessor, and therefore the sole dispenser of absolution and penance. Whitey’s graces came through good deeds and thoughts recognized by this authority in the same way protestors in Calvin’s sixteenth century random and vaguely predestined world negotiated credits to heaven. Whitey was not all that sure a heaven existed, but he was a keen negotiator, adapting his language of masse refinements and snooker challenges to craft credible truths that work in our evolving society. His sensible, pragmatic bent was nurtured in all the game stations crisscrossing our post-Greek’s roadmap, finding enough inspiration in the backrooms and all-night naves of the American Dream for any well-meaning Christian citizen. Hopefully his efforts and those of his acolytes will be recognized by an overlord someday.

These strategies did help buffer our bumpy road ahead, the chain of sensational events and figures and crises that conformed to the zooming speed throttle of baby-booming time, those that sent so many either scampering after specious causes and quick fixes or withdrawing into shells, afraid to experiment. Few dared to look back without immersing themselves in deceptively comfortable nostalgia bubbles. At times we felt like we were on a runaway commuter train speeding toward infinity, having missed our transfer station.

Sirhan Sirhan, Vietnamization, Watergate, stagflation, the “Me”-generation, hijackings to all the Cubas, Roe v. Wade, miniskirts, liberation this, that, and the other…all fueling the booster rocket leading finally to a slow-motion flight through some fifth dimension—the screwy ending in 2001?—where a different series of coordinates lie ready to plot, promising to cancel past confusion and give peace a chance…John Lennon and that other guy, the Iran hostage crisis, Three-Mile Island, John David Hinckley and the teflon Gipper, perestroika, family values, Columbia, the nuclear brink, S&L crisis, Berlin Wall, political correctness, Granada, millennium virus, 9/11, Iraq Wars, Wall Street crash, ISIS, caravanning refugees, Ukraine, climate change, MAGA…

The buzzing up-rush of words and images stretching across the warping expanse of time seemed to fuse into a ditty you could never get out of your head, then swell and cross-pollinate with one of those minted run-on songs that drugged you for hours and hours—“Nights in White Satin,” “Layla,” “Mountain Jam,” “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” “Free Bird,” “Do You Feel Like We Do”—their energy wombing you to warm and private hideaways where all that mattered was keeping the flow.

Who knew or cared how the vocabulary for grasping this blurry pass through a special moment in time could help us. But doing your time in this way was a sentence the bomb-culture-babies uncannily expected, poised for years and years for explosions so astronomically greater than anything they could imagine. That energy fueling the heavens seemed to descend and suffuse our arteries and synapses, ramping up our everyday lives. We were amphetamined along by the Great Society’s crusading technocrats whose complex calculations delivered the payloads that were supposed to keep us free birds forever.

But could powerful forces in motion still be linked to logic, be equal to the mass times acceleration—to pull up one of those frayed formulas from physics class that used to make Whitey blurry-eyed. (He said they were only making us memorize f = ma—force equals mass times acceleration—so we would go to Mass more often!) It felt at times like these forces were pulsing at some surreal pace beyond the speed of sound and light in some cockamamie zone, the result of logic compounding logic to the vanishing point. It felt good to be hitched to this cross-pollinating warp, but was this real freedom? Could we ever find a transfer station?

Yet if the calculating world was so powerfully convoluted and unpredictably irrational, perhaps we should stop looking for a transfer and get off the train, retire to the nearest underground station or cellar. There we could refine the angle arts that Whitey taught us and learn new strategies to block this world out with our protesting wills, snooker its supposedly sensible maneuvers one day at a time to shape a community of enlightened Crusaders. With our beacons still flickering perhaps we can attain this enlightenment. After all, Catholics were once the liberal, underground force that challenged the not-so-great Roman imperial society in its final, decadent throes.

The sign said: “Welcome Crusaders!”

The scene is the lobby of Kiowa City’s most advanced temple to convention center progress, an architectural marvel shadowing the now mega-gentrified lower-fourth area. The conversation is early-first-night-reunion-neo-stagflation. Hotspots of overfamiliar exuberance, memories of the good ole days hopped up in the spirit of some infinite happy hour mixed in with cooler pockets of stymied stares.

“Why did I …”

Some of the attendees have done their fifteen minutes of reminiscence, cliqued their way back to the sweet vibrations of the best that sock-hop nostalgia can provide, and now find themselves with one eye on name tags and the other on the door, either worried about who might come in next or looking for the best opportunity to split. Others start the inevitable speculation about who didn’t show up.

“Whatever happened to Whitey?”

“He’s never been to any of the reunions.”

“Like the last time…probably has a big game and can’t get away.”

“Can’t believe he’s still playing pool after all these years.”

“I heard he’s doing construction, building bridges over in Malta.”

“No, he got religion and joined the Greek Orthodox Church.”

“Somebody said he went back to school and got into theology, inspired by Vatican II or something like that, and then went down to Chiapas in the early nineties to fight in the jungles.”

“I heard he went to Rome for Pope Francis’s inauguration and nearly didn’t come back.”

“Yeah, I heard that too. But now he’s got a pool hall in Omaha somewhere. He’s pretty much the same ole dude…doesn’t go to church. But the kid he had with a girl he met playing pool in a dive bar back in the seventies just got ordained a priest last summer. Name’s Father Thomas.”