On a warm Good Friday, in the full knowledge of the solemnity expected of me, I chose instead to go for a ride with Hank Miller on his motorcycle. I was thirteen, in eighth-grade, in the beginnings of what was to become the living bad dream of my adolescence.
Hank lived a couple of doors up the street and was, at twenty-five years old, a grown up. But not quite. Hank had gotten out of the Navy at the end of the war and had remained one of the kids. But, he was cranky. He could be a real pain in the ass, and he had an authority problem that showed up in not being able to hold on to jobs. Otherwise, Hank was harmless. What he had going for him in our eyes was that he had a car, he had a Whizzer motorbike and he had just purchased a used Harley-Davidson motorcycle with a big, wide buddy seat.
Once in while, Hank could be prevailed upon to let me take out the Whizzer. It was a political tour-de-force on my part, and based on that alone, I know now that I should have pursued a career in sales. To ride a motorbike, you had to have a driver’s license and to get a driver’s license, you had to be sixteen. Again, I was thirteen. The thrill of riding a motorized bike while evading the law was topped only by being seen by any of my fellow eighth-graders while doing it. My schoolyard status went into orbit.
To be offered a ride on the motorcycle was the big time. With its immense padded, leather seat, the smell of burning oil and the harsh, dominating roar of its V-twin engine, that Harley told the world and everyone in it that you were there. This was before helmet laws, and there was no way on earth for a thirteen year old to appear cooler than to be on the back of a cycle. Hey, look at me! That and the sheer joy of flying through a warm afternoon, of laying over on the corners and accelerating out of the turns, was an experience beyond any amusement park rides on roller coasters. Wow! Good Friday or no, Jesus would have to wait.
We rode up through lower Bucks County, back roads, narrow and tree-tunneled with staccatoed shafts of sunlight on the blacktop. My generation meets in lamenting the suburbanization of the countryside surrounding the city. It’s all true. In April of 1951, when Hank and I roared past the woods and farmlands of Southampton and Hulmeville, the first of Levittown’s sample homes had just opened. Today’s traffic-jammed intersections with turning lanes along endless strips of shopping were just like everyone thinks they remember them; dusty, two-lane, tree-shaded country crossroads. Of course, none of that meant anything to me. I was a city neighborhood kid, and those rural scenes were as unreal to me as the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. It’s difficult to mourn the loss of a world you never a part of.
Joyriding that Good Friday with Hank had deeper connotations relative to my fall from ecclesiastical, if not divine grace. Hank was not one of our kind. Hank and his family were Protestants. Not only was I spending the hours of our Lord’s agony in an adrenaline rush on the back of a Harley, I was doing it with a Protestant. From beneath the sound of the engine and the wind came the voice of Sister Mary Matthew. “And you call yourself a Catholic? Look at the kind of example you’re giving. You, who have been taught better, you, who know better.”
About two-thirty as we zoomed along under the great trees on Roosevelt Boulevard, I shouted into Hank’s ear, “drop me off at Inky. I got to see somebody.” “Inky” being short for the gothic edifice that was the parish church of the Incarnation of Our Lord. Fortunately, Hank’s decelerating approach to the church was a discreetly low rumble, and I was able to jump off almost unnoticed. His roaring take-off was folded into the sound of the massive pipe organ coming through the open side doors of the church. I caught a whiff of incense as the muted voices from inside beginning the “Tantum Ergo.” The prodigal son was home.
My sense of religiosity, of being once more a part of the mystical body of the church, wasn’t quite strong enough to lure me into the building. In elementary school, there had been no escaping Sunday mass with your school class. Roll was taken and accountability was rigorous. The prospects of having to attend something as overwhelming as the Three-Hours Agony services on Good Friday were like watching a movie where Paul Muni is sentenced to the chain-gang or Cagney gets led off to the electric chair. I remembered making the mistake of walking into a Mission or a Novena, or going to the wrong mass, one that turned into a procession and a full high mass. Trapped late on a sunny Sunday morning inside the church building, numbed by Latin rituals and surrounded by every old Irish lady in the neighborhood. Oh, no. Bitten several times, I had been warned.
Standing on the corner in the warm sunlight, listening to the last choruses of “Oh Holy God,” I could see, and be seen in the context of my community. That meant getting a chance to look at the girls coming out of church, and the collateral if minor bonus of letting those adults who saw me assume I had just spent the last three hours in prayer and adoration.
I walked into the house just a few minutes behind my mother and got a, “just where the hell did you disappear to this afternoon.” I gave her my best earnest look and answered that I had just come up Fifth Street from church. And, I hadn’t really lied.
Tags: 1945-1955, 1951, adolescence, bucks county, catholic, fifth street, good friday, harley-davidson, incarnation, james cagney, memoir, motorcycle, novena, oh holy god, olney, paul muni, phildelphia, protestant, roosevelt boulevard, saturday evening post, suburbanization, tantum ergo, three hours agony, whizzer motorbike
