San Francisco Sentinel
March 1, 1990
Street Talk
Catholic Kids
By Doris Fish, Sentinel Arts Writer
When Catholics go “bad” they go whole hog. At a recent photo session for West Graphics, it came out that we’d all been Catholic children and hellcats ever since. Billi Gordon, the enormous black model from Los Angeles whose portrayals of Aunt Jemima have caused severe run-ins with the NAACP, had a brief but meaningful stint as a Catholic student. “This one nun accused me of making a loud noise when she was writing on the blackboard, but it wasn’t me, it was Bobby Jackson. I denied it but she just told me to stop lying. She turned away, and wanting to protest my innocence, I grabbed at her habit, and it came off her head! And, honey, this was the ‘50s when those bitches shaved their heads! Anyway, she took me out into the hall and pinched and poked and twisted my nose until it bled. When my mother heard this, she swilled down some vodka and sashayed into the bitch’s classroom and ripped that thing off her head and said, ‘Now just try pinching my nose!’” Happy to say Ms. Gordon never returned to that school.
“You could die tonight, and if you’re in a state of mortal sin you could go straight to Hell.” The nuns told us this crap and I think they really believed it. I know my beautiful older sister believed it, and could not go to sleep at night without a long talk from my mother, a convert who, ironically, is the only member of the family who is still a practicing Catholic. I absolutely adored my older sister. She was a real troublemaker, with a fierce Irish temper. Like a high-strung thoroughbred, she was unpredictable. The thought of her dying and going to Hell worried me a lot, and there was no doubt in our little minds that if she died tonight, she would go to Hell. Although she never really went “bad”, she did wear skin-tight pants, big, teased hairdos and heavy black eyeliner (top and bottom!) and one look at her would turn my father white.
I was the one that went “bad”. I was a perfect Catholic child, even going to Mass as an altar-boy during the week. For my parents my early years were trouble-free, I was well-behaved and quiet. They never suspected.
The nuns thought I was some kind of saint when I sent the Pope a hand-colored Christmas card at the age of seven. I received a small card in reply which must have been signed by His Holiness, Pius XII, I think. The nuns were in seventh heaven with this bit of evidence of my devotion to the church. The card itself was treated like a holy relic and I think Mildred, my mother, still has it.
Purgatory was a favorite of the nuns. Everybody went there if they didn’t go to Hell, except, of course, saints and martyrs who went straight to Heaven to sit next to God for all eternity. Purgatory was invented in the twelfth century and was used to cleanse away venial sins and was a real popular destination in my childhood. And there was Limbo, too, for babies who were not baptized. I don’t think very many adults went there.
Confession and communion were the weekend duo. The first you endured on Saturday evening, supposedly telling the priest what rotten things you’d been up to made you worthy to receive the Body and Blood of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, on Sunday morning. This was not symbolic; this was a miracle every Sunday. We ate his whole body: eyeballs, testicles, toenails, asshole and nose hairs were all somehow present, really and truly, in this little wafer.
But happily, I found Drag and was saved! My best friend in school took me to a Drag bar when we were just fifteen. For four years I did little more than look, then, head-first, I plunged in. I was smoking pot and drinking cider and wearing really cheap clothes and lots of makeup. Soon I was turning tricks, then running a brothel! A typical Catholic girl.
No matter how old I get, there’s still a little child in me who’s still hearing the nuns, still fearing their Hell, and most of all now hating them with a rage that seems not to diminish but to grow. As an adult I grieve for myself, my brothers and sisters, and my classmates, all innocents, whose minds were defiled, and in the name of God no less.
