Holy Hell

Holy Hell

A Catholic Boy’s Story

by Ted Lorenz

Inspired by a true story.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Ted Lorenz

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowledgements

Several friends read early manuscript versions of this book and provided helpful feedback. I want to thank Anders Larsen, Mary Ann Isaacs, John Hall, Pat Kogan, Robert J. Hughes, and Dean Doser for their comments, friendship and support. I also want to acknowledge Lester Jacobson, my editor, who helped me improve and clarify the book and Matt Burghard for the cover design.

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For Anders. Thank you for the unexpected and improbable joy.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Salvation

Chapter 2 - Picture Perfect

Chapter 3 - Home Schooling

Chapter 4 - A Better Life

Chapter 5 - Bedtime Stories

Chapter 6 - A Gift From God

Chapter 7 - Cowboys and Indians

Chapter 8 - Route 66

Chapter 9 - Out West

Chapter 10 - Unsuitable Quarters

Chapter 11 - Along The Stravenue

Chapter 12 - Eden

Chapter 13 - Boys With Beards

Chapter 14 - Tribe of Two

Chapter 15 - Movie Stars

Chapter 16 - Poison Ivy

Chapter 17 - Dancing Close

Chapter 18 - Even Educated Fleas Do It

Chapter 19 - Carnal Knowledge

Chapter 20 - Rotten Fruit

Chapter 21 - God Calls

Chapter 22 - Preparing To Depart

Chapter 23 - Guardian Angel

Chapter 24 - In The Presence of God

Chapter 25 - The Sum of All Angles

Chapter 26 - Hockey Pucks and Bug Juice

Chapter 27 - The Rule of Touch

Chapter 28 - Early To Bed

Chapter 29 - Boot Camp

Chapter 30 - Beyond Repair

Chapter 31 - The Ants Go Marching

Chapter 32 - Digging Grave

Chapter 33 - Sacred Vows

Chapter 34 - Love Is Strange

Chapter 35 - Atheist’s Prayer

Chapter 36 - Inkblots

Chapter 37 - Waxing Eloquent

Chapter 38 - Please Be Seated

Chapter 39 - Roller Nights

Chapter 40 - Reading and Riding

Chapter 41 - Orbiting My Constellation

Chapter 42 - Bastardized English

Chapter 43 - House of the Rising Sun

Chapter 44 - The Marriage Act

Chapter 45 - Do Over

Chapter 46 - Under the Blue Light

Chapter 47 - Learning to Dance

Chapter 1 - Salvation

If you have ever been in a car accident and survived without major injuries you know that it is nothing like in the movies. Your life history doesn’t flash by and nothing even remotely mystical or dramatic happens. On the contrary, the experience is utterly mundane. The tires don’t screech loudly, the sound of shattering glass and crunching metal is surprisingly dull and unmusical. And even though there is a moment of remarkable clarity and awareness during the crash, the whole thing is over fast. And then there is silence. Not so bad after all, you think.

It is only later when the real danger of the moment comes home. Only then does the feeling of invincibility and the giddy thrill of surviving death give way to the terror of what almost happened, when you imagine the scratches being longer or deeper, or when you remember the sharp edges that could have punctured your body or severed a limb. Not like the movies at all.

Leaving home at a young age can be like that.

We rode to Christian Brothers High School that late August of 1959 in a tense silence. This was supposed to be a joyous, even holy journey, yet the mood was suffused with anxiety and hurt.

Dad’s eyes looked straight ahead, but his mind stared at Mother, who sat next to him looking away with a cold, hurt look on her face. As always, he felt there was something he should do to comfort her, and, as always, he didn’t know what it was. Bridget, the youngest child, sat quietly and glumly between them. It was a dangerous time to attract the attention of either parent. In the back seat were Tony, Barbara and me. Staring out the window, Tony fiddled with his dental retainer rotating it and clicking in his mouth. Barbara showed sadness and confusion in her every movement.

All of us were dressed as if we were going to Sunday mass. Even in the St. Louis summer heat, Mother wore a hat and insisted that Barbara and Bridget do the same, which added to the girls’ misery. Mother had chosen the hats herself, as she chose most of the clothes that each of us wore. Our outfits were invariably out of fashion, too small, too big or downright peculiar. The hats she selected for the girls were especially silly and humiliating.

Only my oldest sister Mary Beth had been spared this choked goodbye. She had undergone her own departure ceremony two years before when we drove her to Union Station. Escorted like a convict between two nuns, she departed by train to Dubuque, Iowa, and entered a novitiate to begin religious training to become a nun. In 1959, only nuns and poor people traveled by train.

Lucky Mary. The rest of my family was in the car that humid day. Occasionally, someone tried to ease the mood with pointless non sequiturs.

How can they work in this heat?

The Chastains left their front door open.

Mother’s anger grew at the realization that Dad wasn’t helping her – no one was. For the first time in my life, I was happy not to help and felt light headed with the thought that I might never have to help again.

When I was young, I had threatened several times to run away from home in an angry but impotent assertion of independence. My parents’ mocking reply was always, You don’t have to run. We’ll pack your bag. Once when I was five, they even went so far as to make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to take with me and drove me out to the edge of Tucson, where we lived at the time.

Of course, I didn’t leave. I didn’t even get out of the car. But I burned with humiliation, not because I was unwanted but because I was powerless to make good on my threat. Now, with only dim awareness, I was finally doing it, and the pain I saw in my Mother’s eyes stiffened my determination.

The hot air barely moved through the open windows of our Ford, which still smelled of new vinyl and nylon. I felt a certain pride about riding in that car. It was the first automobile our family had owned that wasn’t used. More importantly to me, it was similar to the cars other families in our parish drove. In fact, that car had been, a hopeful, tangible sign of belonging to a larger, more normal world outside of my family.

The stylish new Ford filled me with pride, and almost made me feel optimistic. It also confused me. Where did they get the money? I had come to believe that we couldn’t afford anything, much less a new car. All of the family’s problems seemed bound up in the fact that there were five of us children and Dad’s salary and Air Force retirement money barely covered the necessities.

Often I felt guilty about the number of kids in our family. It was as though we should have known that Mom and Dad, as good Catholics, were obligated to accept all the children that God sent them. It was up to us to have the good sense to know when to stop coming, especially Barbara and Bridget. They were two too many.

In those days, I felt responsible for a lot of things. The burden was unending, often crushing. In some unfathomable way, without wanting or asking for it, I was responsible. At the beginning it was terrible enough since it involved my mother’s happiness or, as was most often the case, her unhappiness. If I were not the direct cause of her emotional states then I had it in me to calm the turbulence and brighten her mood. Or at least this is what she led me to believe.

The only problem – and it was a severe one – was that I could never figure out what it was I was supposed to know or do. Worse yet, if I did somehow stumble on the correct behavior, it was a deadly mistake for me to think that this alchemy would work a second time. If I tried to repeat the performance, I was buffeted by waves of my mother’s anger and contempt for my ineffectuality. Eventually, I began to feel a general sense of grave but shapeless responsibility that I could never discharge because I was hopelessly incompetent.

Nonetheless, on this hot summer day, I felt joy even as those around me suffered. As Dad turned the car into the paved yard behind the Christian Brothers High School, I couldn’t imagine what lay ahead of me. But I knew what I was leaving behind.

Dad drove the car across the bubbling asphalt into the shade of a sycamore tree and turned off the engine. The hot still air intensified the silence and no one moved. Dad bit his pipe and glanced sideways at Mother as she sighed deeply. Finally, I reached for the handle and opened the door, glad to get away. As if on signal, everyone else spilled out of the car. I was relieved to see Mike Hanson walking toward us.

Tom! Ready for the adventure? Hanson’s forced bonhomie splashed on me like cold water. To my surprise, I became the perfect master of ceremonies.

Mike, these are my parents. And my sisters, and you know my brother, Tony. In the presence of an outsider Mother and Dad seemed to act more normal, like other people’s parents. And I switched on what I imagined to be correct social behavior. The tension dissolved and for a moment, at least, we acted like a family. Hanson nattered on brightly, not seeming to notice the strain it caused my mother to respond. The girls stood awkwardly in the shade and talked quietly to one another as Bridget adjusted the elastic hat band under her chin where it was making a red welt.

I was shocked last spring when Mike Hanson announced he wanted to become a religious. His personality seemed too large and his family too normal for him to be taking such a step. He called his parents over and earnestly introduced them to mine. Dad was quietly polite and Mother was now using her social voice, somewhat forced, a little too loud.

Hanson’s parents looked like the parents I felt I should have had: his father, confident and worldly; his mother, slender and stylish. Vitality swirled around them as they talked. They even belonged to a country club, not the most expensive and exclusive, but a country club nevertheless.

Dad opened the Ford’s trunk and Tony began unloading my two large fiberboard suitcases and a small footlocker that was a relic from the war. It was an act of surprising generosity for Dad to give me the footlocker because he hoarded his Air Force mementos carefully. One of his uniforms was still neatly folded and packed away in tissue paper and mothballs in our basement, and he always kept various ribbons and medals arranged carefully in the top drawer of his bureau in the bedroom. We had moved five times since the end of the war, and these relics always followed us.

Three other boys who were departing for Glencoe that day arrived with their families. Several brothers from the high school mingled with the crowd. My chest ached as I felt myself moving away from my family, who now stood together saying little, and yet all I could think of was to get away. The pressure inside me was becoming unbearable and I wanted to leave as soon as possible. Each time the group around us enlarged, I felt more and more relief, because I knew the presence of other people would discourage my mother from acting in any embarassing way. The crowd also helped me keep my own feelings in check.

The last suitcases were loaded into the luggage compartments of the large bus that was of the sort that Greyhound used. This one belonged to the school and was used principally by the varsity football team. The fact that we would be transported to Glencoe on this bus made me feel important.

Brother Jerome swung the luggage compartment door closed.

OK, everybody on. No one in my family moved, but instead they looked around helplessly. My heart broke. I couldn’t look either of my parents in the eyes. Our farewell embraces were strained and tense, and we mumbled things at each other that were meant to comfort but were really gasps of pain. Bridget and Barbara stood quietly and sadly like two orphans stranded in a crowd. I embraced each of them and shook Tony’s hand and we both looked at the ground. And then I jumped onto the bus.

I grabbed a seat by the window, and smiled bravely and waved to my family who stood waving back in a numb charade of farewell. My mother’s deep pain was evident on her face, and yet strangely I felt no pity, no compassion. In fact, a confusing, exhilarating thrill surged through my body, which was followed immediately by sorrow. I didn’t understand any of it.

As the bus pulled away, I looked out the window and waved one last time and saw my mother collapse into tears and turn away. Dad, looking helpless and miserable, tentatively put his arm around her.

On the bus, the other boys were laughing and joking and waving as if they were leaving for summer camp. With much relief, I turned toward them and joined in. Without realizing what I was doing, I had shut a door on the people I left standing in the schoolyard on that hot August day. At age fifteen, I was leaving my home in St. Louis and starting a new life preparing to become a religious brother. I was going to live at a preparatory school in Glencoe, Missouri, and I didn’t have the faintest idea where that was. I couldn’t even remember how I came to be on this bus.

Chapter 2 - Picture Perfect

Long after World War II ended, the war and things military remained a vivid presence in our house and lives. When Dad retired from the Air Force in 1946, my parents, Mary Beth, Tony and I had moved from Fort George Wright in Spokane to Webster Groves, Missouri, a bedroom suburb 12 miles west of St. Louis. We returned to the little white New England saltbox house on Wexford Street that Mother and Dad had bought shortly after their marriage and prior to America joining the battle in Europe. Mother had named the street herself, selecting it from a list the developer provided because it sounded British, and therefore somehow sophisticated.

The sense of peace after the war was palpable, even to a young child. Though I don’t remember the tensions, shortages and anxieties of wartime, I do recall the atmosphere of relief at war’s end. Smiles and highballs were the order of the day. Those who survived were almost giddy. In fact, for many of the men, the war now took on the caste of a grand adventure as heroism sprouted from the end of hostilities. If Dad were a hero, he wore the mantle with modesty and he, at least, never seemed to forget the tragedy that swallowed those years. He had lost too many friends and investigated too many plane crashes at flight school where young pilots died in training before they fought anyone.

Dad had left the service but the service hadn’t left him or us. Our basement held trophies from his military life as well as from Dad’s teen years when he learned to fly while his contemporaries tinkered with their jalopies. A wooden airplane propeller eight feet long, gleaming with shellac, was suspended against one wall. Olive drab metal boxes that had once housed belts of machine gun bullets now held Dad’s wrenches, pliers and screw drivers. Household items and clothes that Mother had packed for the move from Spokane still rested in Army issue footlockers and gray packing cases. You could trace the progress of Dad’s military career by reading the words stenciled in white paint on those containers: 321st Calvary Reserve, U. S. Navy, U.S. Army – Air Corp, 2nd Lieutenant T. J. Larsen, Captain T. J. Larsen, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J. Larsen.

Glamorized by celluloid images of Clark Gable in unform, military officers were admired and respected after the war. Throughout his life Dad retained his upright military bearing and the mustache that was so fashionable when he was an officer. In old age, arthritis mocked his posture by fusing his vertebrae together, forcing him to stand straight and making it impossible for him to bend except form the waist.

Relatives and neighbors treated Dad with respect. He was, after all, a Colonel and a retired Colonel at that. The fact that he was retired somehow added to his stature. It was as if he had done more than merely leave the Air Force because the war was over. He retired and that signified not just a termination but a graduation from military service because he had earned it. He would always be an officer.

Mom used his status – their status, for she was the wife of an officer. For a while, she clung to the atmosphere of privilege that officers and their families enjoyed in the service. She regaled her five sisters with marvelous stories about an exotic world where uniformed men received dangerous and important missions and petit fours were served with afternoon tea at the Officers’ Club. My aunts had never heard of petit fours.

Their conversation would veer between the war and the Great Depression, life on the base and time on leave, uniforms and mufti, ersatz coffee and butter rationing.

And always that dear, heroic, saintly, marvelous Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

My aunts’ affection for us children was obvious, but it seemed unfair to me that they could tell us tales of ourselves as even smaller children, about events we had already forgotten. To question what they said was to doubt my own existence. I had no choice but to accept their descriptions of me, giving me my first experience of adults’ power over children’s memories.

Chapter 3 - Home Schooling

For many people living in 1946, history could be divided into three distinct periods: Before the War, During the War, and After the War. Mom and Dad had two subsections of their own: before they were married and after they were married. And for me personally, time sliced primarily into two parts: before I was born and after I was born. Everything that ever happened could be placed on life’s calendar with one of these designations.

Occasionally, I would be sitting on Mother’s lap when she would add another mind boggling cosmic dimension to world history.