the Confessional...

When I was about 8 or 9 yrs old...I got caught spanking the monkey, or stroking the lizard, or choking the chicken, or throttling the one eyed monster, jerking off, or the adult medical term of, masturbating…by my step mother Stephanie…it was freaking horrific…she stumbled in and screamed at me and then slammed the door to my room (guess she figured knocking wasn’t needed for a 8 or 9 yr old). This whole thing was weird enough for me considering I had just found that and kind of already thought I was a freak for doing it.

The whole incident than began to roll down hill quickly as she took her born and raised a repressed Catholic all her life views, and than preceded to make fun of me in front of the whole family, on numerous occasions (years actually). Pointing and staring and snickering like a 7 yr old school girl. Next thing you know, her parents (my step grandparents I guess) her cousins, my grandparents, my cousins, brothers, sisters aunts, uncles, all knew that I was caught doing something horribly wrong, and I could not have felt more uncomfortable with the whole thing. When she wasn’t making fun of me, and telling how wrong it was… she would try to get serious at times, and tell me that God does not approve of this type of behavior. I thought that this was odd because the only behavior I was having trouble with was hers.

A few years later…Stephanie and her wonderful church…decided that me and my brother who is a year younger than me would go through Catechism or Catholic CCD…which is an indoctrination into the rituals and dogma associated with the Catholic religion with the end result being I would get to take my first bite of the body and get to wash it down with my first bit of symbolic savior blood. Whoopee… once again…I was horrified.

I remember vividly… asking the Nun in the CCD class… why the Lord’s Prayer would ask the Lord, not to lead us into temptation …when I thought this Lord created us all with love and good intentions, and surely would not create us only to fuck with us... I thought at that young age… that this sounded like a crock of shit… I was then removed from the class and talked to vigorously by an elderly priest who also would not answer my question…but made it very clear that I was to stop asking stupid questions…I was never comfortable there, hell… the only part I understood was the sermon in the middle of the mass because the church we went to did all the masses in Latin…which needless to say... really sucked for me…and I guess all who were there…but I digress again…

A few months later... after some real good brain washing (had to memorize all the prayers forwards and backwards that I was going to have to say because I was apparently an evil little jerk off)…it was time to finalize this blood drinking and body eating event…but first…I had to go to my first confession…which was needless to say…another horrific event in my life…I think I was 11 or 12 at this time…anyway…

Father Marion, a 70 something yr old priest…was the exorcist, or should I say confessor…anyway…I said “ forgive me father , for I have sinned” and he replied “go on child”…I then proceeded to tell him how I was mean to my brother, lied to a teacher at school about homework, and was disrespectful to my step mother…this is all I could think of because… they really had not taught me what a sin was…so I just grasped for what I thought I was doing wrong…anyway…the priest than asked me if I was sure if that was it….I said “yes father”…he then said “are you sure you haven’t been touching yourself?” I was freaking horrified…this old man was asking me if I was jerking off…and the shit was that I did not even know it till years later when I came to the conclusion that he was just an old pervert…

After he asked me I said no, not really knowing what the hell he was talking about…and he said okay child…bla bla blah…say 100 - Hail Mary’s, and 47 - Lead us not into Temptations…and than that was it…So a few years later when I was a teenage know it all… I figured it out…it just dawned on me all at once that that old pervert was asking me if I was jerking off…So I formed an opinion about Father Marion…that I have recently changed…because you see at 42 yrs old…I started looking back at all this shit I’ve been burying inside my goofy head…and realized it wasn’t the priest….it was my fucking step mother who tipped off the priest that I was a little heathen jerk off…
So I guess the moral, or lesson to this actual piece of personal madness that should lessen the pain is… you can’t always judge a book by its cover...