Week 51: Music from a Catholic School Education 3
Part 3: Graduation Express
Play this song while you read this. It’s a slow song with a synthesized harpsichord-type instrument leading the way with arpeggios and subtle middle eastern melodies. Play it while you read this so you can hear the music we heard as we marched down the center aisle of the church towards our graduation ceremony, our eighth grade graduation ceremony. Afterwards we would go to four years of Catholic high school, and this was our last stand as the oldest kids in the elementary school. And slowly we marched down the center aisle of a church filled with proud parents, standing as we walked by, with rows of marble saints peering over their heads from the side aisles. This was the church at the center of our school, and we were the 54 boys and girls that had been together since kindergarten growing up under the tutelage of mother church. We were the same boys and girls who won the science fair in second grade for our group project on medicinal plants, the same boys and girls who Miss Garcia allowed to pile the desks and books into a big mountain in the middle of the classroom on the last day of fifth grade, the same boys and girls that hooted and hollered during confirmation class in seventh grade, when Father Narcissus fell to his knees raised his arms to the lord and screamed, blasphemy blasphemy after Monica asked how we could be sure that Mary was a virgin. All 54 of us same boys and girls were lined up along the school hallway and told by the principal that for that bit of fun with Father Narcissus, we would not be receiving the holy sacrament of confirmation, not at this school, not this class. Not Academia Santa Teresita’s eighth grade class of 1980.
But no one left the school, and on graduation day, all 54 of us marched together, stepping in rhythm, boys and girls one next to the other arranged by height, while over the loudspeakers the music we had chosen for the occasion played on, the theme from the movie Midnight Express.
I was lucky with movies as a kid. One of my best friends was born just about a month after me, lived across the street from me, and his parents owned the neighborhood movie theater. El Grand, as it was called, showed daily double features, a different double feature of last run flicks each week. Samurai, western, action, horror and war movies followed one another in endless succession. If it had fighting, screaming and bleeding they would show it, though once in while, to break the routine, they’d show some slapstick comedy such as the Terrence Hill/Bud Spencer classics. It was a great theater, but it was no Paradise, and no one wrote any concept albums when they tore it down in the 1990s to put a drive thru bank in its place.
But from the moment we could run, El Grand was our home base. It was a big theater in the main business road of our neighborhood. Within a block there were pinball machines, a bar, a drug store, a hardware store, an empty lot, and lots of questionable people.
The theater itself was a classic, with uncomfortable seats covered in red velvet, sticky floors, a huge screen, and a balcony for those who wanted to watch the movie with a bit more privacy, or for us to throw spit wads at unsuspecting patrons below. For the first few years of our time at El Grand we explored its every corner. I don’t remember watching any movies, just the sound of gunfights and blood curling screams constantly in the background as we ate or threw free popcorn, ran through the aisles trying to tag each other, or played hide and seek through the darkened back hallways of the building.
At some point though, the movies started to get interesting. I think it was probably around the age of 10 or 11 when we started sitting for whole scenes, and not just to catch our breath or hide among the patrons. I do not, however, recommend watching stuff like the Omen if you are a kid going to Catholic School. Nor do I recommend watching I Spit on Your Grave if you are just entering puberty. But I will say that if you have a short attention span, there is nothing that will teach you to focus your attention quite like watching a girl your age, fuck herself with a crucifix and projectile vomit on a priest’s face. Once our attention was focused we started to really watch the movies, sometimes watching both movies back to back taking breaks only to go outside to harass the bums.
And so we get to Midnight Express, a movie loosely based on the true story of Billy Hayes, a young man who gets arrested in Turkey for possession of hashish. He is then made an example by the courts and sentenced to 30 years of medieval suffering in a Turkish prison. At the end he gets out, but not without the kind of suffering that in the movie was mainly represented by having to bite off the tongue of a snitch, and getting raped by a very scary Turkish guard.
We liked this movie a lot, but when I think about it, we liked it as much as we liked the Omen, or High Plains Drifter or Enter the Dragon or any of a number of movies during those days which included body parts being bitten or cut off in some semi-clever way. The thing that made Midnight Express stand apart from the rest, however, was not its violence, but its theme song, a Giorgio Moroder instrumental that became an instant hit in our occasional driveway parties.
It's hard to believe now, but back then some parents liked to put on driveway parties for us kids. A stereo would be dragged out to the driveway, a table would be set up with food, sodas, and other treats, and while the grown ups sat on the porch talking about their grown up things, we boys and girls would wrap our arms around each other and slow dance to songs like How Deep is Your Love or Do That To Me One More Time. Well, when i say we, I mean they; I personally did not do any dancing. It was beyond my comprehension how I could ask a girl if she would put her arms around my neck while I put mine around her waist so we could slowly and supposedly romantically spin around in circles. And it's not that I had any problem communicating with girls, two of my best friends were girls and I got along just as well with the girls in my class as I did with the boys. I had even kissed a girl, though more as a game than romantically. Dancing however, was not just about moving in circles with a girl, but it involved a whole other realm of being that turned boys into requesters and girls into rejecters or accepters. It involved a whole new way of dealing with the opposite sex that seemed to actually involve our gender, as well as an uncountable number of rules, rules that no one had explained to me.
Most of my friends, however, seemed to know the rules by heart, but to me asking someone to slow dance was the same as asking someone to make out with me, which was the same as asking someone to have sex me, which was the same as asking someone to marry me, which was the same as asking someone to have a baby with me, which for an eighth grader was, well, a little intense.
And it wasn’t just the slow dancing, these were the dancing 1970s. The driveway parties featured disco and salsa music with steps more complicated that most car engines. Yet somehow all the other 53 boys and girls in my class had managed to learn them. I guess not having had a father around and being an only child might have something to do with how by the age of thirteen I still couldn’t dance like John Travolta or Roberto Roena.
Lucky for me the graduation ceremony at the church didn’t require me asking anyone to do anything. My walking partner was assigned to me based on her height, and all I needed to do was stand next to her and walk in step and down the aisle to our assigned pews while the theme from Midnight Express played over the loudspeakers.
After the music was over and we sat down, the lengthy graduation ceremony began. But I quickly realized that the ceremony couldn’t be long enough, because afterwards there was a graduation party, and really, in eighth grade 1980, who wants to go to a graduation party? Not me that's who. I could see the party clearly, 52 pairs of boys and girls dancing the night away in a disco fever, while one angry girl stood alone waiting for me to ask her to dance. We would stand there through song after song while I tried to calculate in my head the best possible way one could go about the task of asking a girl to dance. And since I am cursed with a good imagination, it turns out that the possibilities for asking a girl to dance are endless.
So I sat in the pew listening to the priest tell us to head into the future with faith. And I saw the future and the future ended at the graduation party. In the end, the party would be over and everyone else would go to high school and then college and then they would marry their dance partners and have dancing children who would marry other dancing children. But not me. While the dancers would be busy living their dancing lives, I would be standing in the same spot I stood for the duration of the graduation party. I would still be weighing the pros and cons of the infinite ways one can ask a girl to dance. The years would pass me by, eighth grade graduating classes coming and going. My hair and beard would grow long and my clothing would fray and tatter, and I would stink like the years, and compassionate Catholic mothers would shake their heads in disdain and throw coins in front of me that I would ignore, and eventually my toe nails would grow so long into the ground below my feet that even if I figured out how to ask a girl to dance, I wouldn’t be able to move and I would become indistinguishable from a tree. Except to the girl who, thanks to me, wasn’t able to dance on her eighth grade graduation party. She would show up, take one look at me, and chop me down with a hatchet like so many trees. Then she would turn my wood into pencils that she would use to write novel after novel about the weakness of boys.
These were the thoughts of a young catholic boy on his eighth grade graduation mass, and yes those thoughts finally started manifesting themselves physically, and soon enough my stomach felt like someone had punched me repeatedly, maybe the girl that I wasn’t going to ask to dance. By the end of the ceremony, my stomach hurt so much that I could barely get up from the pew to exit the church. But I did, because at the same time I couldn’t wait to get to the reception area of the church so I could tell my mom that I was sick to my stomach and couldn’t go to the dance. Well, she didn’t care if I went or not, but she wasn’t about to let me off the hook that easy, so since my stomach hurt so much, to the doctor it was. To an obviously sadistic doctor who even though it was obvious that my discomfort was due to my nerves, still he insisted on examining me, just to be sure it wasn’t appendicitis, he said, and I swear I saw him wink.
At this point there was no going back. I was going to say, never mind, I feel better now, I think I’ll go to the party and dance the night away, but it was too late for that, and the truth is my stomach still hurt, and even if I knew it would feel better once the party was in the past, maybe a few decades in the past, I couldn't pretend it didn't still hurt. So I bent over, braced myself and told myself that if Billy Hayes could stand being raped by that Turkish guard, then I could stand this doctor sticking his finger up my ass, even if it sounded like he was whistling the theme from Midnight Express as he did.
It wasn't appendicitis, but after that I never again questioned the logic behind dancing. Well, at least not until the big dancing backlash of the early 1990s, but that's another story.
*Painting is Terpsichore, Muse of Music and Dance, by Jean-Marc Nattier, 1739
*Photo is Brad Davis as Billy Hayes in Midnight Express, 1978
For other parts of this series, click on the link below:
Play this song while you read this. It’s a slow song with a synthesized harpsichord-type instrument leading the way with arpeggios and subtle middle eastern melodies. Play it while you read this so you can hear the music we heard as we marched down the center aisle of the church towards our graduation ceremony, our eighth grade graduation ceremony. Afterwards we would go to four years of Catholic high school, and this was our last stand as the oldest kids in the elementary school. And slowly we marched down the center aisle of a church filled with proud parents, standing as we walked by, with rows of marble saints peering over their heads from the side aisles. This was the church at the center of our school, and we were the 54 boys and girls that had been together since kindergarten growing up under the tutelage of mother church. We were the same boys and girls who won the science fair in second grade for our group project on medicinal plants, the same boys and girls who Miss Garcia allowed to pile the desks and books into a big mountain in the middle of the classroom on the last day of fifth grade, the same boys and girls that hooted and hollered during confirmation class in seventh grade, when Father Narcissus fell to his knees raised his arms to the lord and screamed, blasphemy blasphemy after Monica asked how we could be sure that Mary was a virgin. All 54 of us same boys and girls were lined up along the school hallway and told by the principal that for that bit of fun with Father Narcissus, we would not be receiving the holy sacrament of confirmation, not at this school, not this class. Not Academia Santa Teresita’s eighth grade class of 1980.But no one left the school, and on graduation day, all 54 of us marched together, stepping in rhythm, boys and girls one next to the other arranged by height, while over the loudspeakers the music we had chosen for the occasion played on, the theme from the movie Midnight Express.
I was lucky with movies as a kid. One of my best friends was born just about a month after me, lived across the street from me, and his parents owned the neighborhood movie theater. El Grand, as it was called, showed daily double features, a different double feature of last run flicks each week. Samurai, western, action, horror and war movies followed one another in endless succession. If it had fighting, screaming and bleeding they would show it, though once in while, to break the routine, they’d show some slapstick comedy such as the Terrence Hill/Bud Spencer classics. It was a great theater, but it was no Paradise, and no one wrote any concept albums when they tore it down in the 1990s to put a drive thru bank in its place.
But from the moment we could run, El Grand was our home base. It was a big theater in the main business road of our neighborhood. Within a block there were pinball machines, a bar, a drug store, a hardware store, an empty lot, and lots of questionable people.
The theater itself was a classic, with uncomfortable seats covered in red velvet, sticky floors, a huge screen, and a balcony for those who wanted to watch the movie with a bit more privacy, or for us to throw spit wads at unsuspecting patrons below. For the first few years of our time at El Grand we explored its every corner. I don’t remember watching any movies, just the sound of gunfights and blood curling screams constantly in the background as we ate or threw free popcorn, ran through the aisles trying to tag each other, or played hide and seek through the darkened back hallways of the building.
At some point though, the movies started to get interesting. I think it was probably around the age of 10 or 11 when we started sitting for whole scenes, and not just to catch our breath or hide among the patrons. I do not, however, recommend watching stuff like the Omen if you are a kid going to Catholic School. Nor do I recommend watching I Spit on Your Grave if you are just entering puberty. But I will say that if you have a short attention span, there is nothing that will teach you to focus your attention quite like watching a girl your age, fuck herself with a crucifix and projectile vomit on a priest’s face. Once our attention was focused we started to really watch the movies, sometimes watching both movies back to back taking breaks only to go outside to harass the bums.
And so we get to Midnight Express, a movie loosely based on the true story of Billy Hayes, a young man who gets arrested in Turkey for possession of hashish. He is then made an example by the courts and sentenced to 30 years of medieval suffering in a Turkish prison. At the end he gets out, but not without the kind of suffering that in the movie was mainly represented by having to bite off the tongue of a snitch, and getting raped by a very scary Turkish guard.
We liked this movie a lot, but when I think about it, we liked it as much as we liked the Omen, or High Plains Drifter or Enter the Dragon or any of a number of movies during those days which included body parts being bitten or cut off in some semi-clever way. The thing that made Midnight Express stand apart from the rest, however, was not its violence, but its theme song, a Giorgio Moroder instrumental that became an instant hit in our occasional driveway parties.
It's hard to believe now, but back then some parents liked to put on driveway parties for us kids. A stereo would be dragged out to the driveway, a table would be set up with food, sodas, and other treats, and while the grown ups sat on the porch talking about their grown up things, we boys and girls would wrap our arms around each other and slow dance to songs like How Deep is Your Love or Do That To Me One More Time. Well, when i say we, I mean they; I personally did not do any dancing. It was beyond my comprehension how I could ask a girl if she would put her arms around my neck while I put mine around her waist so we could slowly and supposedly romantically spin around in circles. And it's not that I had any problem communicating with girls, two of my best friends were girls and I got along just as well with the girls in my class as I did with the boys. I had even kissed a girl, though more as a game than romantically. Dancing however, was not just about moving in circles with a girl, but it involved a whole other realm of being that turned boys into requesters and girls into rejecters or accepters. It involved a whole new way of dealing with the opposite sex that seemed to actually involve our gender, as well as an uncountable number of rules, rules that no one had explained to me.
Most of my friends, however, seemed to know the rules by heart, but to me asking someone to slow dance was the same as asking someone to make out with me, which was the same as asking someone to have sex me, which was the same as asking someone to marry me, which was the same as asking someone to have a baby with me, which for an eighth grader was, well, a little intense.
And it wasn’t just the slow dancing, these were the dancing 1970s. The driveway parties featured disco and salsa music with steps more complicated that most car engines. Yet somehow all the other 53 boys and girls in my class had managed to learn them. I guess not having had a father around and being an only child might have something to do with how by the age of thirteen I still couldn’t dance like John Travolta or Roberto Roena.
Lucky for me the graduation ceremony at the church didn’t require me asking anyone to do anything. My walking partner was assigned to me based on her height, and all I needed to do was stand next to her and walk in step and down the aisle to our assigned pews while the theme from Midnight Express played over the loudspeakers.
After the music was over and we sat down, the lengthy graduation ceremony began. But I quickly realized that the ceremony couldn’t be long enough, because afterwards there was a graduation party, and really, in eighth grade 1980, who wants to go to a graduation party? Not me that's who. I could see the party clearly, 52 pairs of boys and girls dancing the night away in a disco fever, while one angry girl stood alone waiting for me to ask her to dance. We would stand there through song after song while I tried to calculate in my head the best possible way one could go about the task of asking a girl to dance. And since I am cursed with a good imagination, it turns out that the possibilities for asking a girl to dance are endless.
So I sat in the pew listening to the priest tell us to head into the future with faith. And I saw the future and the future ended at the graduation party. In the end, the party would be over and everyone else would go to high school and then college and then they would marry their dance partners and have dancing children who would marry other dancing children. But not me. While the dancers would be busy living their dancing lives, I would be standing in the same spot I stood for the duration of the graduation party. I would still be weighing the pros and cons of the infinite ways one can ask a girl to dance. The years would pass me by, eighth grade graduating classes coming and going. My hair and beard would grow long and my clothing would fray and tatter, and I would stink like the years, and compassionate Catholic mothers would shake their heads in disdain and throw coins in front of me that I would ignore, and eventually my toe nails would grow so long into the ground below my feet that even if I figured out how to ask a girl to dance, I wouldn’t be able to move and I would become indistinguishable from a tree. Except to the girl who, thanks to me, wasn’t able to dance on her eighth grade graduation party. She would show up, take one look at me, and chop me down with a hatchet like so many trees. Then she would turn my wood into pencils that she would use to write novel after novel about the weakness of boys.
These were the thoughts of a young catholic boy on his eighth grade graduation mass, and yes those thoughts finally started manifesting themselves physically, and soon enough my stomach felt like someone had punched me repeatedly, maybe the girl that I wasn’t going to ask to dance. By the end of the ceremony, my stomach hurt so much that I could barely get up from the pew to exit the church. But I did, because at the same time I couldn’t wait to get to the reception area of the church so I could tell my mom that I was sick to my stomach and couldn’t go to the dance. Well, she didn’t care if I went or not, but she wasn’t about to let me off the hook that easy, so since my stomach hurt so much, to the doctor it was. To an obviously sadistic doctor who even though it was obvious that my discomfort was due to my nerves, still he insisted on examining me, just to be sure it wasn’t appendicitis, he said, and I swear I saw him wink.
At this point there was no going back. I was going to say, never mind, I feel better now, I think I’ll go to the party and dance the night away, but it was too late for that, and the truth is my stomach still hurt, and even if I knew it would feel better once the party was in the past, maybe a few decades in the past, I couldn't pretend it didn't still hurt. So I bent over, braced myself and told myself that if Billy Hayes could stand being raped by that Turkish guard, then I could stand this doctor sticking his finger up my ass, even if it sounded like he was whistling the theme from Midnight Express as he did.It wasn't appendicitis, but after that I never again questioned the logic behind dancing. Well, at least not until the big dancing backlash of the early 1990s, but that's another story.
*Painting is Terpsichore, Muse of Music and Dance, by Jean-Marc Nattier, 1739
*Photo is Brad Davis as Billy Hayes in Midnight Express, 1978
For other parts of this series, click on the link below:
Labels: Music from a Catholic Education, Thursdays
6 Comments:
My internet is FUCKED carlos, I'll be back.
I have to say I really am enjoying this series. The music almost pretty tangential to the memoir but it's an amusing read.
The preist shouting blasphemy and all is hilarious!! My hardcore Catholic parents would have approved.
Carlos,
I am personally sorry that I waited to read your post. I had some technical woes, and may not even be able to post this comment, which would suck.
I also enjoy this series you have given us.
I abso-fucking-lutely loved the part where you are glued to floor, as time and people around you move forward with life, as you contemplate how many ways to ask a girl to dance. You get old. Your toenails grow into the floor, and the girl you never saved from dancing alone comes and cuts you down with an ax. That was terrific. I could picture it as a music video. You know how they do that time progression stuff? I really enjoyed this, and everyone else better have enjoyed it too, without offering a lick of commentary.. because they got a deal outta this one.
Always look forward to your posts...
and wow, your religious community (was it?) allowed The Excorcist in that theater? I often wish I grew up in a little city/town. It was pretty much the woods for me.
catholics do it better.
amen to monica.
great fucking post.
HS, i grew up in a major metropolitan area. Santurce would be like our Brooklyn while San Juan would be our Manhattan.
Puerto Rico itself is one gigantic catholic community. Catholic schools are everwhere, most of them fairly small. So while my school would have never allowed showings of the Exorcist, the owners of El Grand showed what they liked. Besides that it was a different time in a different place. As kids an R rating meant nothing to anyone, just like a drinking age didnt really exist. We started watching R rated movies when our parents said it was ok and drinking when our parents said it was ok. Age had very little to do with it, and what it had to do it had nothing to do with limitations impossed by the government or by the MPAA.
And yes, Rosa, catholics do do it better... though we used to say, catholics do it on their knees.
Very Nice Mr. Anaconda. It's a lot like my own Catholic Education. I do recall being threatened with excommunication individually and as a class.
All the kids in my eighth grade class had seen all the cool and scary movies, Carrie, the Omen, the Exorcist, Taxi Driver, Deer Hunter. I didn't see any of those movies. But I did see Blazing Saddles.
I just watched a bulbous priest in draping black robe give a postal worker a hard time. He was mad because he couldn't understand why the bulk mail he had sent was "returned to sender." He said the addresses were good six months ago. Delirious.
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