-a song by Buddy Miles from 1976.

 

That first car.  Does anyone ever forget that first car you owned? You can close your eyes and you still see it, maybe even see your young self at the wheel, youthful master of your own little steel and glass speed machine. You may own or lease a dozen or more cars in your lifetime, some good, and some lemons, most of them forgettable.  But not that first one.

Mine was a 1965 Plymouth Fury I, reddish in color, with ” leatherette” bench seats that in the summertime heat scorched the backs of legs of mini-skirted young ladies. It was powered by a Mopar “slant six” cylinder engine, small enough that you could change the sparkplugs (look that one up if you are under fifty) while standing with your feet on the ground inside the engine compartment.  My car was actually brought to life by an amazing mechanic, one Mr. Matusiak, father of my friend Christine Matusiak (later Clancy).  He worked for Gladstone Cab Company in Elmwood Park and bought wrecks from local police departments, who, because of their frequent high speed chases, offered a steady supply.

He would cannibalize an un-wrecked front end and marry it to an un-wrecked back end and voila! he crafted a workable taxi cab. Somewhere along the line, he promised to make one for me and in 1970 he made good on that promise. It was a rebuilt police car, or rather the remarried halves of two former police cars, and it still had the hand operated floodlight that the driver could point and illuminate at will. My wife, then my girlfriend, and I would have great fun on our way home from a date seeking out her teenage brother and his sidekicks swilling beers in the nighttime alleys; we would light them up with the high beam, watching them scurry, beers flying, because they thought we were the fuzz.

My friend charged me all of $450 for that car, which was an incredibly charitable price even then. I doubt he broke even, but he sure made my year by giving me what all American boys want: their own set of wheels. And I paid him from the account my grandmother had been building for my chalice, saved at the rate of $5.00 per month since 1963. Yes, I said chalice. As in the metal vessel from which the priest drinks wine at mass. For I was, at least for four years of Quigley Preparatory Seminary and two months at Niles Minor Seminary, on my way to being a Catholic priest. That all came to a screeching halt on Halloween night, 1967.

Niles was the first time I was away from home, and anyone who has ever gone away to college knows how heady that time can be.  Your parents might be footing the tuition, room and board, but you feel a false sense of freedom, of giddy independence. All of life is still in front of you and amazing opportunities are all around you, and you are young and immortal and a little crazy. So when Halloween rolled around, and the announcement was made that there was a planned religious service that night, four of us quietly booked out the back door and into someone’s car. We went looking for adventure and we found some.

Our first stop was at DePaul University in Lincoln Park, where somebody got the bright idea of taking the fire extinguishers out of an old building known as “the Barn”. We had four of them on board and headed north toward Evanston, occasionally firing a watery burst at costumed revelers with our new toys. Great fun until we took the Evanston Police under fire. As it turned out, they were fighting a race riot a block away and mistook us for radicals and troublemakers. Which, of course, we were.

They were not amused. They stopped the car, made us get out, searched us, cuffed us, and threw us into the back of a wagon. One of our group made a run for it and got away, a young cop drawing a bead on him with his sidearm and then thinking better of it.  We arrived at the station, got photographed and fingerprinted, and traded our handcuffs for a shared cell, two customer per. At some point we were asked if we wanted our phone calls. I was not about to call my parents, particularly my father, and drag them 80 blocks north to bail out their prodigal son.

It was sobering, to be sure.  I remember sleeping on and off on the thin, dirty mattress and I remember the fried egg sandwich that was offered as breakfast. Can still taste it. And around 10 a.m. they trotted us out before a judge to hear the charges. We were being charged with disturbing the peace. The judge, as it turns out, had attended Quigley North for a few years and had a hard time keeping a straight face.  He released us with a stern lecture, again, straining to keep his composure. The car had been towed to the station, and we got in and drove back to the seminary at Harlem and Touhy.

Our fame had preceded us. The guy who got away had told the story, and within an hour everybody on the whole campus knew about the four desperados who spent the night in the Evanston lockup. Our dorm director, himself a priest, thought it was pretty funny, but upstairs in the rectors’ office the good Monsignor who ran the place was already changing our fates.  By day’s end we were told to pack up and go home. A special tribunal would review our case and decide our fate.

So I went home to the west side and spilled out my story. My parents were good about it. My father drove livery for funeral homes on his days off from the Fire Department, one of them in Evanston, The funeral home director was also a powerful politician in Evanston and the photos, fingerprints and court records all vanished in that magic fog known in Chicago as “clout.” Thanks, Dad.

My grandmother took it hard, though.  Irish grandmothers think having a priest in the family is Big Medicine, so she kept growing my chalice account even after I got the phone call that told me I could finish out the term but would then have to leave. I would be reconsidered after a two year period of “discernment” which I believe is a Catholic term meaning “once you get your head out of your rear end.”

I never went back. 1968 was a year of radical change for me and my family. My father died suddenly that summer and we moved from the two flat my family had occupied since 1916, driven by the winds of racial change in Chicago. It was a pretty radical year everywhere, it seemed, with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Tet offensive in Viet Nam, marches, protests, and riots. Oh, and televisions’ first interracial kiss (Cpt. Kirk and Lt. Uhura).

After three long months in the Tribune pressroom, I enrolled in DePaul, the same school whose fire extinguishers I helped boost, and joined the secular world.  I would make new friends and then meet a little red headed girl named Maureen that autumn, fall in love, and feel like for the first time like I had a real purpose in life. All in about ten months.

And within a few years, the seminary system itself began to fall apart, driven by the changes of Vatican II, many of its priests, nuns and brothers doing a bit of discernment of their own and striking out toward new lives. I still meet them now and again as ordinary people. It seems strange to meet someone today in the neutral role of fellow person instead of their role as a religious, which conferred upon them some air of authority. Maybe that air of authority or that conferred legitimacy was what attracted me to the priesthood in the first place. I think maybe it did.

The seminaries are mostly gone now; populated today it seems by children from other lands, many with their “old school” Catholic beliefs.  I wish the church leadership would open their eyes and remove the barriers to ordaining women, or at the very least finally renounce celibacy and allow marriage. We’ve all paid far too steep a price for the sexual aberrations brought on, in part, by an irrational insistence on denial of normal sexual relations.  And I know dynamic and committed married or single women and men would breathe a much-needed new life into the ministry; they would be far better as the homilists we all seek and so seldom find in the meager talent before us today. We need good ministers as much as we need good cops, lawyers, politicians, doctors, nurses, and teachers.  Maybe more so.

——————

I guess most people have “Them Changes” in their lives. This was mine. Kind of like the chalice turning into a 1965 Plymouth, I changed from the seminarian into just another college student, on my way to a career, a marriage and a life. I looked like the same guy, but I wasn’t the same guy at all. Thank God for the ability to screw up when you’re young and to let fate, or a deity, or maybe just dumb luck point you in a new direction in life. I’ve never regretted it for one minute.

Billy Joel once wrote and sang that “your mistakes are the only things you truly can call your own” and I, for one, happen to agree with him.