Humbuggery

There was that one little trick by my dad, who wasn't generally known for his tricks. Just when I was ready to throw in the towel and denounce Santa, we got a knock on the door one night. It was Santa himself, in the flesh. Of course, some time later, I found out it was one of the guys my dad worked with. They'd conspired to have the man visit our place wearing a Santa outfit.

I went to the airport one Christmas and saw the big guy in red disembark from a helicopter and thought, "This can't be!" But he gave me a Peter Pan board game, which I took home and immediately spread out in the doorway to the kitchen, and I was a believer. While certain other kids were going around Santa-bashing, I kept quiet in the knowledge that I'd actually seen him. It didn't occur to me at the time that something was wrong with this, that Santa had come out of a helicopter instead of the traditional sleigh.

My memory has never been top-notch, but lately it's gotten, as my son would say, ah...sketchy. It's like a filing cabinet. Trouble is, someone's gotten in overnight and rifled the drawers. Some memories, like the Santa stuff, stand out and won't go away. But I always wonder how much I am forgetting and how much sticks like lint to the mind's fabric.

When my son was growing up, I was well aware of this. I drew a map of my Catasauqua neighborhood and posted it on the refrigerator. It could give him a schemata of the places and things I was remembering and telling him about. It was as much to jog my own memory as it was to give him a visual layout of the neighborhood.

Broke down memories aside, the truth will always come out, one way or another. It almost doesn't matter if you get the details wrong as long as you've got the essence of the thing.

Nowadays, you don't know who to believe when news is fiction and so-called reality TV programs that are just so ... programmed. And that isn't all. That's just modern times, man. Back then, in the Elvis era, we knew who to believe. It was the church. Christ, even Elvis believed in that.

To me, as an impressionable kid, happenings around town had an air of unreality about them at times. There were things I found just unbelievable. Like the time when Bear got his penis caught in his zipper and had to go to the ER to get it removed. Or the time when Tips's mom threw me and Soupy out of her house using the F word-- not cool. (That was before the term had gained so much currency among young and old alike.) Or when Kevin taught his Bassett hound to "say" hamburger, and I was momentarily taken in by it.

Our days were laced with petty irrationalities. Kevin and I buried a skate key a foot deep into the alley near his house by pulling stone by stone out of the road surface. (This was before Macadam had become the go-to paving material it is today.) I joined the Struss boys in throwing rocks at a fish they'd hung from the railroad trestle. Once, someone had packed my shoes with snow while I was ice skating the frozen canal, so I walked home in my skates. Cookie, my next door neighbor, shot his friend Jimmy Reed with a BB gun from his third floor window. My mother would ask, "What kind of cake do you want for your birthday?", then, disobeying my request, she'd make the usual marble chiffon cake. The G in the word, god, had to be upper case.

So it wasn't so far-fetched when I was asked to believe that a stranger two thousand years ago was put to death on my account.

I was getting up in the middle of a school night to eat cereal. My dreams were mixing with reality at two, three in the morning. I was launching a promising career as an insomniac. There was a face of Jesus in concave relief up on our wall, constructed in such a way that the eyes seemed to follow you around the room. They were always watching, like some primitive form of the surveillance camera. At night when everyone else was asleep I was awake, and so was Jesus.

The only saving grace was the absolute reality of the church's teachings. The church kept us grounded.

I'd get up at the crack of dawn, fighting performance anxiety, to serve Mass as an altar boy. I mean, I was so into it that I went to visit a seminary to see what it would be like if I, Jim Hoffman, were to fill the shoes of a priest. My mother was really pulling for me, couldn't have wanted anything more. I'd go to confession on Saturday afternoon, rattle off the usual offenses-- bad words, impure thoughts, talking back to my parents. The hard stuff. And I'd feel just great afterwards.

I remember that one afternoon... I came home from confession, feeling all cleansed, and went right out to the alley behind our house. I got on my cluncky Roadmaster bicycle though, up till then, I couldn't even keep my balance on it at a standstill. I'd been out there day after day trying to create some kind of two-wheeled magic, but my mojo just wasn't working. What was the trick? I don't know, but that afternoon, I lifted one leg over the top bar, gripped the rubber ends of the handlebars with assuredness, clenched my teeth, and I began to ride. There was the smell of diesel fuel and the sound of squealing tires. No, that was the traffic in the nearby street. But it was a miracle (ok, a small miracle), and my confession had a lot to do with it, I was sure. If I followed the rules, then good things would come to me.

That was the high point. But slowly, in increments, it began to sink in that I was being deceived. Everything began to unravel about the same time I realized my mother was persisting in serving us canned peas instead of frozen. I felt it was time for an investigation into the final whereabouts of all that cash we collected and gave to the nuns for "pagan babies", as they called them. I became wary of grown-ups and all their chicanery.

Our assistant parish priest allowed his car to smash into the house diagonal from the rectory where a universally disliked, rotund kid lived. We'll call him Tommy, 'cause that was his name. Tommy was known for committing oral sex on a lot of the guys in town. (I hasten to add that I was passed over.) The crash was no simple accident as it turned out. God was punishing the boy for his indiscretions. He was smiting him down by sending a messenger's car to demolish his house. And, lo, the indiscretions stopped soon after this. Perfect! And then I found out about the alcoholism, and it came back to me how the assistant pastor would routinely smack his lips when drinking the altar wine from the chalice during Mass. (You'll recall that I was an altar boy and had a front row seat to this.) This kind of dashed my vengeful god theory.

It was getting harder to believe from then on, that the priest was indeed God's messenger. Not just because of this; I was by then already becoming rebellious and suspicious of this cleverly constructed Rube Goldberg contraption that was the liturgy.

Our assistant pastor disappeared from the scene, replaced by a young, wholesome-looking priest who proceeded to run off with the Irish immigrant housekeeper placed in her position by one of the leading families in the church.

The grand scheme was coming apart. Never mind the Crusades or the Inquisition. It was happening to me on the inside. It culminated in a visit from our pastor one day in the late sixties. My mother had put him onto the case to ferret out why I had been skipping Mass. It was a clever ruse to get me back in the fold. We relaxed in the living room, the room that was made ready whenever company was coming to call. The pastor had already gotten the money he came to collect as part of an annual tithe and was now content to spend a few moments doing the counselling part of his job. I explained that I didn't believe anymore. I couldn't. He stammered, then stated forthrightly that he did.

Of course I knew he believed, but what about me? He had the answers for himself but no real answers for me. I felt I was putting him on the spot, that I'd cornered him, for he started repeating himself. I could see that I was forcing him into a no-win situation, and I felt sorry for this.

One of the earliest memories I have is that of a book of fairy tales. The cover had been torn off, and it was worn as the deck of playing cards my dad always had handy. It had all the classic tales in it. There were characters like Chicken Licken (alias Chicken Little) and Henny Penny, and Goosey Loosey. You may have heard of them. They'd been alarmed that the sky was falling. The name Foxy Loxy too comes to mind. He said he could help and cleverly lured the animals into his cave to be eaten. He was a sly one. Crazy too, I might add.