Chapter 14
That night, it was a night of everything. Trivial Pursuit with the Coppens family around the round oak kitchen table while listening to an early Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and classic Motown, followed by more drinking (at least ten beers’ worth in the Aspen nightclubs) while we talked about Shirley MacLaine’s belief in reincarnation and the fourth dimension. We talked about all of life being an illusion and other planes of existence like this fourth dimension of hers occupying the exact same space we stood in now. We talked about Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein and their fascinating study of the dimension of time.
At the condo, Lucas and I talked late into the night with Lucas’s sisters Faith and Anna while Declan ran down to the river chasing two Irish girls that had called up to Kerry’s living room window looking for Lucas’s brother Kenny. Declan tried to fool them and be Kenny, who wanted no part of it, and threw on the same clothes that Kenny had been wearing earlier. He ran down into the darkness to find the girls. He chased their Irish echoes down the trails of night but came back about a half hour later disillusioned. They were gone.
Early in the morning, Declan and I finally crashed, but Luke, his two younger brothers, and his three sisters, all continued talking around the table in the kitchen until six a.m.; they talked lovingly about their youngest brother Nate. Nate had died a year before, going to work at a pizza parlor, driving a lone country road back in Topeka. He had been hit head-on by a carload of drunken girls.
Sunday morning, September 2nd, and the ninth day of being on the road came quickly. I awoke once again in the living room of Kerry and Sam’s apartment, but had managed (because of the others talking all night) to have scored the coveted fold-out couch. No more shaggy carpet burns for Mike Hogan, I thought.
We all went to church that morning and after church, we gathered up with Luke’s whole family and headed out to a nearby ski resort, stopping once along the way at a McDonald’s. I shoveled down two filet of fish sandwiches and a chocolate shake outside the fast-food restaurant, fueling my junk food cravings before our anticipated mountain climb. McDonald’s in Aspen . . . It was a stark symbol of the corporate commercialism I loathed, right smack-dab in the middle of God’s creation. I thought about the irony of it all.
When we arrived at the ski resort, twelve of us jumped on six chair lifts for six dollars apiece and rode them as high as they would take us. I noticed upon disembarking from the chair at the top of the lift how much easier it was to jump off at the turn without a pair of skis or poles in my hand. From the lift shack, we all had to climb another 100 yards or so to get to the summit.
A sign at the summit told us we were at 11,700 feet. It was a cool forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit and the panoramic summit seating gave us a view of the whole wide world.
Kerry’s architect fiancé Sam pointed to the distant mountains, two of them peaked with streaked snow. He told us they were called Maroon Bells. In the breezy air, I thought that Sam said “Marooned Bells” and wondered how they had come to be called that. They were marooned rocky peaks standing out against hills of greens and fallen gray trees. Just like the scene at Tahoe, people were in the air below us, but their winged toys were hang gliders and not the parachutes of the Sierra lake. These hang gliders were just like those that sailed off of the cliffs of Torrey Pines State Beach just north of San Diego, where Colette and I used to hike. I wrote about them one day, inspired and frightened by the thought of the reliance on only the wind to carry you . . . the thought of completely letting yourself go. It was life and death in perfect balance.
Hang Glider
Tattered wind drawn kite
Scream while you’re in flight
For the wind’s your only sight
Sky diver
Cannot find his way
The thoughts won’t go away
The pain is here to stay
Sky glider
Falling, spin away
Cannot change the day
Gray spider, go away
Gray spider
Waiting, cannot see
Although you can’t be free
You can’t imprison me
Gray spider
Your web will catch the rain
Is it worth it, all the pain
To weave it all again
Hang glider
Scream aboard my kite
Sail with all my might
For a moth flies toward the light
We were on top of the whole world in Aspen. Twelve of us stood quietly and walked around the summit separately, taking in the valleys below. Like architects of the world, portrait painters, we mapped out every river as far as we could see. We allowed the rivers to dip in and around the green foothills freely; we tried to find the mighty Colorado. I imagined the thousand-mile river flowing through the canyon states below us, cutting deep into the centuries, and eventually moving to a trickle through the desert sands of Baja, gasping for life again. How our country looked so peaceful below. There were real lives down there, lots of them; noisy lives, some ugly, more of them beautiful . . . living, breathing, all of them thinking out loud. We gathered ourselves after a while and made it back to the weathered wooden chairs that had brought us up so high.
On the ride down, it started to rain. It quickly turned to a soft sleet and finally a light snow. I was freezing, shivering, in my maroon sweater. Declan was in the chair behind me. We began screaming, both of us, crying to be heard in the biting wind. Just get us through the ride, I thought, for it won’t be the last time I ride in a chair lift, freezing cold. There had been plenty of other times; Canon Mountain, Killington. Surely I had been colder than this at times. Sam’s sister Elaine sat beside me on the first chair down. She was a Chicago girl who worked as an assistant in a doctor’s office. She was blond and pretty; she loved to ski as an alternative to the bar scene, she told me, and loved the Bears and the Cubs. Who didn’t love the Cubs? The Cubs shared the same winless fate as the Red Sox; they had their curse of the Billy goat and we had our curse of the Bambino. Beloved Babe Ruth had been sold away to the Yankees in 1919, and after that, we would never win another World Series again.
I stopped at the chair lift turn in order to relieve myself at the halfway shack while the others continued the ride down. When I came out of the wooden building, I was alone, and had to ride the last two chairs down to the base by myself. The clean, beautiful air and the soft snowflakes swirled around me. I took note of the same small stream that I had traced with my eyes from the summit. She still wove in and out of the valley below, disappearing in the green hues of the countryside, only to reappear again further on down the road. With the cold coming at me hard, I sang like a madman into the wind to take my mind off of freezing. I was almost home.
Lucas’s estranged father had flown in that morning and was with our group at the top of the mountain. There was an uncomfortable air amongst all of them because of the fact that their dad had left them when Lucas was only eleven; he left Luke’s sweet mother to work her two jobs and raise seven kids on her own. Lucas could never forgive him.
I thought about our time in church now to take my mind off of the biting wind. Before the climb, Lucas, Trent, Anna, Declan, and I attended the small Catholic church that Kerry was going to be wed in on Monday. It was a quaint white church in town with beautiful stained glass windows and statues of Christ the Savior and the Blessed Mother adorning opposite sides of the altar. There were lesser statues, probably saints, on either side of Jesus and Mary; and with their painful faces of stone they looked up to Jesus and Mary for golden direction. It had been my first time back in a Catholic church since my sister Kate’s wedding a few months before. A visiting dark-haired deacon did the Mass in Aspen. He wore a white robe; he spoke with a distinctive Spanish accent, with muffled words, and was kind of difficult to understand. A young girl and a young boy stood as altar hands on either side of him. The deacon often leaned to either side, as the Mass progressed, reminding the kids of their obligatory duties: “Bring the bread, ring the bells, bring the water, and please get the wine!” After each alert, the boy especially, would jump for a second, regain his composure, and then quickly scamper to retrieve the needed item.
It was necessary for the deacon to drink all of the wine, making sure to take big gulps. Although this wasn’t necessarily the right path to salvation, I think it was a prerequisite to deacon-hood.
We had a visiting deacon back at Saint Matthew’s in Lowell that was there for about a year when I was a teenager. Deacon Mark was a great guy who loved drinking down those big gulps of wine too. After about six months on the job, Deacon Mark was gone though, admitted to rehab; we never saw him again. He kind of missed his step going up to the altar one day with the chalice all full of communion wafers. They spilled everywhere, and he didn’t know if he should bless them again as he picked them up or what exactly to do with them. Deacon Mark fell like Roy Buchanan right off of that stage at the Paradise Beach Casino, and the concert for him abruptly ended too.
But it was Father Cunningham who really missed a lot of steps at Saint Matthews; he was the head of the high school youth group and the consummate pedophile. He single-handedly bestowed more physical and emotional harm upon the youth of 1970s Christian Hill than any man ever had before him or, hopefully, ever will again.
Father “C,” as we called him, invited me once with three other kids to a ski weekend in the mountains of Killington, Vermont, but Frank Hogan refused to let me go. At the time, I was pissed, really pissed; I would run away, I thought, because Frank would never let me do anything. But it was Frank’s premonition or whatever you want to call it that saved my life, for I never was invited back again, on any trip, with the others. And “C” would keep taking them, tens of them, one by one, and molest them, on those go-away weekends; tennis weekends, ski weekends, or even upstairs in his room in the rectory, or down in the quiet, dark recesses of the Drop-In Center, or in their homes as he visited with their parents and tucked them into their beds at night. “C” always checked in to see how much my friends had grown, God rest their souls.
Look at Father Cunningham
Sitting in his chair
He’s happy ’cause our play sold out
If this could happen every year!
We had to sing that song to him at the annual youth group shows. And Frank, knowing that the sin within Father “C” probably existed, but without any proof, could only keep his own children safe, quietly kept his faith and attended Mass with my mother every week. “We need to remember that a priest is still a man, and it’s a sin to think otherwise. And it’s a sin to run through a Christian tent with no clothes on!”
Now the sermon that morning in the cathedral of Colorado was incomprehensible, maybe because of the strong accent that the deacon spoke with, maybe because of the acoustics in the church itself, or maybe it was just because of my foggy perception of everything around me. I was still hungover, of course. From what I could get out of it, the Spanish deacon spoke of coping with life’s misfortunes; he told us about a handicapped boy that carried the Olympic torch in LA and how this had something to do with the union of a man and a woman. Together, they could solve all of life’s problems.
I looked around. The church was almost empty. Lucas’s younger brother Trent sat beside me in a Zen trancelike state with his eyes closed. A woman with two young children sat two rows in front of us, both kids were about five or so. The girl yawned with a headband of flowers on, and the boy crawled around on the floor of the pew in and around the kneeler, as their mother looked straight-ahead at the struggling deacon.
A tall and attractive olive-skinned girl, who looked about twenty years old, sat further on down in the same pew as the young family. The twenty-year-old’s sister, about sixteen, was on her right with what appeared to be their parents at the far end of the row. The twenty-year-old girl cast several mean glances toward the children, probably upset at them for distracting her during the sermon.
I watched them all as the Mass drew to a crescendo, with everyone in the church (except for the young kids and me) lining up to receive communion from the blessed hand of the visiting deacon. Trent handed his trance over to me, I felt, for he got up slowly to join the others in the communion line.
I felt I was outside looking in at a world that I wasn’t a member of anymore; I forgot the routine of it all. I could recite the Apostles Creed or the Act of Contrition, all of them, verbatim, yet I failed to listen to what I recited. These were the rituals and prose that had been taught to us from the cradle. I was an outsider, a director, sitting behind the camera as it rolled with a rock-and-roll ballad with a beat all too familiar to me; it permeated my senses as the people took their place and received the perfect round bread wafers one by one.
It was one of those songs that always came into my head. The ballad started out softly and slowly. I imagined getting married myself. The song had a repetitive lead guitar riff that pinged like water dripping into the visual of an open mountain pool. There were ringlets all around the falling drops, followed by the slow buildup of the band’s vocals. It was the familiar psychedelic sound of Jefferson Airplane that I heard. I could hear their words . . . the beautiful tenor sounds of Marty Balin with the harmonizing backup of Grace Slick as they sang “Today”; it was such a perfect song for my wedding.
In this secret world in my head, we stood at the altar, Colette and I, as the camera moved out to a wide-angled bird’s-eye shot of the whole congregation around us. Like a passage stolen from Thurber’s Mitty, like Walter himself, I didn’t want to ever stop dreaming of how wonderful life could be.
Rack Focus: I was back at Kerry and Sam’s church again. My shot encompassed the struggling deacon, the olive-skinned girl, the kids on the kneeler, and Lucas’s whole family, and then it all rolled back and faded away. Life was truly beautiful.