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Welcome to Friday Night Bug Juice, a Metro Detroit bar review site. We're here to give you a look into the dive bars of the Detroit area, so you can hopefully spend your cash wisely, and get a little insight into the lives of a couple of hapless irish louts.

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Welcome to the section of our site where you can learn everything you ever wanted to know and way too much more about the gang that works hard ruining their livers to bring you all you need to know about the dive bars of the Metro Detroit area!

MY LIFE AS A CATHOLIC


I have had a long, strange trip with the Catholic Church.  This is my timeline with humorous or insightful anecdotes (I hope):

Age 6-12 Inmate at St. Martha School in Dearborn.  Offense: Youth and energy.  Penalty:  Six years of physical and mental abuse administered by Sister Victoria, Sister Amobolese and Sister Justa (whose self proclaimed mantra of “My name is Justa, so I must be just” was usually followed by a head shot).  So many moments of danger, it is difficult to boil them down to a few:

    My friend Danny Tarrant and I are selected to read two passages during an upcoming mass and are told to go to the church which adjoined the school and practice the readings in order to get used to the cavernous sound.  Danny and I decide that this is the perfect opportunity to see what it is like to play catch with a beanbag from the balcony to the altar.  The nun that allowed us to go the church unchaperoned, did so for one of two reasons:  a momentary lapse of judgement, or the knowledge that if she crept into the church five minutes after Danny and I left the classroom she would catch us doing something stupid.  No matter the reason, she did catch us with bean bag in mid flight.  A beating ensues.  No readings are read.

    There is to be an after school sale of some kind and a drawing will be held to see which four children will be in charge of the sale.  The names of all of my classmates are put into some type of vessel and selected at random by the nun.  First name, “Tarrant”.  Second name “Scala”.  Third name “Kaczinowski”.  Fourth name “Morrison”.    My last name along with the last names of the three misfits I hung with.  After taking a moment to understand the ramifications of this selection, the nun cries out, “It’s the devil’s doing,” and prepares to re-draw the names.  One of the four, mumbles “What a gyp.”  A beating ensues.  No sale is presided over.

    Lately, there has been a bit too much fun during lunch.  A bunch of ten year olds who have just sat through religion and phonics for the past three hours are laughing and talking while eating warm bologna sandwiches.  The lunch aide decides it is too much for her to handle and calls upon the reasonable, even handed assistance of the nun to remedy the situation.  That the nun cannot take lunch with the rest of her coven and must spend it with the inmates will certainly have no bearing on her brand of justice.  After lashing out at the class and reminding us that we are all horrible, the nun sits at her desk and begins to eat her nun food.  A little boy forced to sit in the front of class because he can’t shut up or sit still is fiddling with the plastic spoon included in his lunch.  A small piece of plastic breaks off the spoon.  The boy, remembering a movie about knights storming a castle, puts the bit of spoon in the spoon and flexes the handle, mimicking the catapult from the movie.  His finger slips accidently (?) and the spoon bit flies ten feet through the air and nestles in between the crusty nun lips sitting in front of him.  The nun leaps to her feet, a swirl of black and white habit, jerks the paddle from her desk drawer and starts freewheeling through the class demanding to know who did it.  Only one little boy knows what she is talking about.  Sheer terror and survival instincts keep him from crying or otherwise incriminating himself (think of how the humans had to act during Invasion of the Body Snatchers to keep from being recognized).  Beating avoided.  Lunch eaten.  

Post script to the last story:  After forty six years of wondering why the nun could not pick me out as the guilty party, given my history of nonsense (nunsense?),  proximity to her desk and possession of the partially broken plastic spoon, I have discovered the answer.  Every kid in that room, though not guilty, understood that a beat down of some kind was possible.  My beet red face on the verge of tears blended perfectly with the other thirty inmates.  Like the t-shirt says “I Survived Catholic School”.  Though I do  sometimes wonder about the heavy set kid that the nun regularly referred to as a ”big blob of mechanism”.  Or the kids who were too afraid to ask to leave class to go to the bathroom, pissed their pants or skirts, and were made to sit on the blower in front of their peers until dry.  Or the quiet girl who was made to cry every day until one day she just stopped showing up for school.  I wonder if those kids wear that stupid, fucking t-shirt.

Age 12-34:  St. Martha closes.  The melding of catholic school kids and public school kids is a shock to both.  We can’t believe how much freedom we have, and our new public school buddies can’t believe how crazy we are.  

   Church and Catholicism goes from an everyday thing to a once a week thing.  I go to church only as long as my Mom can force me.  Once I become a surly teenager, attendance is spotty (like my skin).  Once I move out of the house, getting up early on Sunday morning after spending Saturday night at Harpo’s is not an option.  Once I get married and have children, I am too tired to get up early for Catholic shenanigans.  I can no longer remember the Apostle’s Creed.

Age 34-45:  Because of the obvious good my religious background had done for me, I convinced fellow Catholic slacker and wife Andrea that exposing (perhaps a poor choice of word) our two oldest children to Catholicism was a good idea.  

   The setting changes from St. Martha in Dearborn to St. Francis Xavier in Ecorse.  My Mom is the head of catechism and my sister Chris a teacher.  Both Rachel and Max struggle with the going, but do so largely because of their Grandma and Aunt.  Max becomes an altar boy (the best one of all time if you listen to some in the parish; he would only work solo and managed to pull off pious without being weird).

   I was around the parish quite a bit and was in a “joining” phase ( I became a member of the Knights of Columbus for about two weeks until I realized it was a scam to get me to buy life insurance; the old time Knight who contacted me was super pissed that I declined his offer to hear about all the great benefits of their plan; And, once I tried the vaunted K of C fish dinner and found it to be no better than Long John Silvers, I could find no reason to be a member and quit).   

   I ended up asking the Ushers Club if I could join their group.  My vetting process lasted one minute, the amount of time it took me to mention that Joan Morrison was my Mom.  When that sunk in, my fellow ushers mumbled an appreciative “Here, Here” and knuckled table tops to signal their approval.  A short time later, I got my green jacket (dandier than the one given out by those pikers at The Masters), and became the youngest usher.  Seriously.

   I can say no bad about these men.  They were old school all the way and loved their church.  We held an Ushers Club pancake breakfast once a month and served up weak coffee, thin pancakes and fatty link sausage.  Max always came with me on these Sunday mornings.  He worked hard setting up tables and serving coffee.  One of the old guard gave him a statue of The Virgin Mary as a reward (he still has it).

   In the blink of an eye, Rachel and Max made their first communion and confirmation.  Jackson was to follow. 

   Then, it all came unraveled.  Priests all over the country were being outted for molesting children.  The church hierarchy responded with denials and shifting priests for protection.  The national headlines hit close to home when a beloved former priest at St. Francis was convicted of molestation.  Understanding that there was no possible way to support this policy of denial with attendance or money, I quit the Catholic Church.  My youngest son Jackson would not be raised in that faith.

Age 45-Present:  After staying away from mass for over a decade, recent circumstances dictated that I take my Mom to church four times in the span of six or seven weeks.  I took my job as chaperone seriously, and listened with rapt attention to the readings and sermon (the balance of the service consisted of the same rote prayers I had abandoned eleven years ago).  

    One gospel told the story of the Prodigal Son.  This prick took his inheritance money before his dad was in the ground (can you do that?), left the drudgery of the farm life, and spent the entire wad on chicks and good times.  When the money was gone, he came home to his dad and the good brother who stayed behind to work his ass off.  When dad saw this “prodigal son”, he threw a big party and gave the little shit the best food and clothes available.  The son who stayed behind and worked his ass off was miffed.  When he expressed his displeasure, his dad responded, “this brother of yours was dead and is alive again, he is lost and is now found.”

   Back home after mass, I recounted this gospel to Tony.  Oddly enough, we did not see eye to eye on the message.  Is forgiveness for any indiscretion possible or to be encouraged?   A loud argument ensued, driving our Mom to her bedroom hands flailing in the air.  
  
  I began to think a lot about religion.  There was something about the familiarity of the prayers, the message of the readings, even the parishioners sitting in the same spots every week that I found comforting.  I wondered if keeping Jackson away from Catholicism was the right thing to do.  Was a reconciliation on some level possible?

   Then, I opened the Detroit Free press and read a story concerning Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit.  He stated that Catholics who believed in gay marriage should not bother taking communion.  If you believe that all are equal in the eyes of Jesus, no matter their sexual persuasion, do not bother taking part in the essence of mass.

   Thank you, Archbishop. I had always considered Jesus to be a pretty good guy.  Problems with authority, all shredded up, handsome, cool beard, probably would have liked the Stone Roses if he was around today.   Come to find out from Archbishop Vigneron that I was wrong.  Jesus, it turns out, is narrow minded  and not accepting of those who are different.
  
   I had forgotten or ignored an important lesson culled during my fifty-six years of life as a Catholic .  The people that you meet on the grass roots level, the old school ushers, selfless catechism teachers and  church fair volunteers are basically good people that drive the machine.  Their intentions are often pure.  They work long hours for little or no pay.  Their goal is to make the world, especially their little slice of it, the parish, better.

   The real perversion, sexual and otherwise, grows as you move closer to the top.  This all male club, wrapped in their bizarre trappings, preaching their antiquated, exclusionary and hateful message has no place in my world.  Their goal is to exclude those that do not agree with their narrow views, to keep their secretive boys club alive and to push people back to a simple world that never really existed. 

56-forever:  I’m out.

Cheers! Jim
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