Confession

[This is a sequel to The Ravishment of Young Judy.]

On the day after my non-consent role-play with Judy I was on the train down to the college. I daydreamed about the confessional boxes of my childhood, the ones at the back of the Holy Spirit Roman Catholic Church. I had always been a public school student, but during the 1960s there was "released time" every week where I spent an afternoon with the old school nuns who taught at the parish. They prepared us public schoolers for our First Communion and Confession and then eventually our Confirmation.

I guess the Confirmation was done prematurely because as I got older everything I had believed started to evaporate. I became basically an agnostic, not an atheist, but I never again regained that level of faith for any religion. Maybe I will someday but I wouldn't bet on it.

My sex game with Judy prompted me to speculate about how my twenty-year-old self would confess it now. I saw myself in the dark space with a curtain across the entrance; outside a small green light would turn to red as I knelt in the beam of an electric eye.

The priests had a wooden door on their booths, plus their name plate was there so you always knew who you got. Priests who were cranky about your sins did less business. (Lapsed Catholic George Carlin has a wonderful routine about his youthful manipulations of this.)

There was a grillwork between the booths but one couldn't see through it. Once in a while they had a light on in their section and the parishioner could see his outline. I guess the priests sometimes recognized the voice of one of the adults. Regarding the kids who passed through with their blah-blahs about being mean to their sisters and so forth: it must have been a chore to listen to those.

My present-day self would begin:

"Bless me father, for I have sinned. It's been - about seven or eight years since my last confession. I kind of lost track."

"You lost track?" So this guy was going to give me a hard time.

"It might have been around, 1968? I used to tell me parents I was going and then just walk around for a while."

"I understand, it was a long time ago, let's get to the matter at hand now."

"Okay, it involves one of my girlfriends . . ."

"Wait a minute, just how many girls are involved here?"

"Ah, let's just say I have a girlfriend."

He was getting impatient, "All right, what did you do regarding this girl?"

Being the sinner that I was, I fudged the details. Actually, I straight up lied, "I had a fantasy about raping her." I guess I did feel a bit ashamed of myself. Of course I had done more than fantasize but I hadn't really raped her; we had play-acted the whole thing.

I had quit confessing long before I got around to sins like that so I had no idea of how priests reacted to the more juicy ones. I guessed he would probe a bit. It must have been boring to be in that dark box all Saturday afternoon and a good story was to be savored.

"Impure thoughts are a serious sin." I had hoped that they were mere close occasions of sin. "Tell me, young man, did you abuse yourself during these thoughts?"

This wasn't a good time for wisecracks like, actually I treated myself quite well. Pranksters like that probably did show up occasionally, but I was serious here. "Yes, Father, I did."

"Well, that's a major sin too. Tell me, is your relationship with this girl chaste?"

This was my chance to get off the path of lies, "No Father, it is definitely not."

"I see, this just keeps getting worse." I supposed this was surely a mortal sin but I wasn't sure about the first two. I hoped that fantasies and masturbation were not mortal. It always seemed to me that the Catholic Church needed more calibration in its categories. Some gradations between venal and mortal would be helpful, like a scale of one to five perhaps.

"Where did you meet this girl?" Now in my view he was just getting into gossip.

"We're students together at my college."

"And you found a time and place for these shenanigans?" Describing it that way didn't sound so bad, like it was merely horseplay or something else silly.

I decided to give him something more to chew on, "You see Father, we have access to her friend's apartment and we also have a car we can use."

"I have a feeling you've been fornicating with other girls beyond this one."

Fornication just sounded so racy. "Yes, I admit there have been several others, including the one with the apartment."

"Young man, you really should get a grip and concentrate on your studies, not on running around sullying the virtue of young girls."

I should protest. Virtue! You should see these hot numbers, the shameless way they approach me. But confession was not the place for excuses or negotiations.

Then his curiosity got the better of him, "Why did you find it necessary to imagine this, ah, non-consent act with her? I mean you were already . . ." He let that hang.

"I have to admit, Father, I wasn't fully honest about this." I knew he would get me for lying now so I broke in, "Wait, please, let me finish. It wasn't actually a fantasy, I mean this girl and I, her name is Judy, we played a game where it was a pretend rape; it's called a role-play if you know what I mean."

"I know, I understand." Did he? Probably he'd heard about such things from other sinful parishioners.

He went on, "In any case, this game and other acts with her involved sexual relations, did they not?" This guy is really nosy. And besides, couldn't he figure that out from what I had previously told him?

"Of course they did."

He wasn't done yet, "This girl, is she Catholic?"

"No Father, she's Jewish." That was a conversation stopper. The Church had backpedaled from the anti-Semitism that once, perhaps, was common in their own schools although I had never heard it myself. Nevertheless I wouldn't get to know what this priest's own views were on that subject.

He had one more question for me, "Where exactly did you and this girl perform these acts?"

Was that necessary for him to know? Wasn't that between me and God? I gave him a minimum of info, "It was on the lawn behind a building on campus. It was night-time."

That seemed to be enough for him. I assumed priests must remember and collect quite a few confessed stories. How did mine compare with some of his better ones? I thought to say, I sliced off her underwear with a knife for the sake of realism, but I decided against it.

What kind of penance would he give me? Maybe ten-thousand Hail Marys and fifteen-hundred Acts of Contrition. With that load it would take several days in the pews outside to get it all done. But when it was finished I could walk out with a soul as pure as pasteurized milk. I remembered the milk bottle drawings in the little study books the nuns gave us.

It turned out that the prayer burden was much less than I had expected. The priest did admonish me to return to "the ways of chastity." I couldn't explain that going cold turkey on sex would probably not go over well with my girlfriends. Would they dump me or keep me around as a friend while they banged other guys?

When I finished my penance I went out on the portico overlooking University Avenue. In those moments if a lightning bolt had hit me or a nuclear weapon had detonated in New York I would have gone straight to heaven. Or at least, that's what the nuns had told me during my weekly "religious instruction" in the classrooms upstairs. I wondered what heaven would look like.

Then my confessional reverie ended and I was back on the D train. It was just pulling into 125th Street. I would exit here and walk up the hill to the campus, my soul still lacking a state of grace.

*******

[The church described here still exists in the West Bronx.]