Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (12 page)

“A nice man like that? Please.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Mom. He’s really, really nice,” I agreed, “but also really, really gay.”

“David, stop it!” she scolded.

My mom was born without gaydar, so she usually misinterpreted outward signs of homosexuality as heightened exuberance and tended to think calling someone gay was an insult, the sort of taunt fifth graders use on the playground.

“I’m not trying to insult him,” I explained. “I’m just saying that while I think he and one of your daughters might become good friends, maybe even best friends, that’s as far as it’s gonna go.”

“Well, if you won’t ask for his number, I will!” she said before storming off.

Convinced I was just being an asshole, my mom returned to her seat. With her pissed off and my father suddenly a Stepford husband, I decided to check in with Father Aberdeen.

“Enjoying yourself?” I asked, assuming he was having as much fun as the rest of the pack.

“I have to be honest,” he said hesitantly, “I’m not entirely sure why I’m here.”

“Huh?” I grunted, thinking maybe that third heart attack was about to kick in.

“Well, I’m often invited places by parishioners and usually I understand why,” he explained. “But I just don’t feel much of a connection to any of these people.”

I could totally relate, but I was also totally confused. My mom made it sound like Father Aberdeen lit up like a damn Christmas tree when he heard about the benefit, especially the Maureen McGovern part.

“I’m sorry, Father,” I said. “My mom told me you were dying to come here today—sorry, no pun intended—so that’s why I brought you.”

“That’s funny. She told me that you really wanted to come and that you really wanted to bring me,” Father Aberdeen replied, his brow slowly furrowing.

We had been duped, set up by my mom, who was more than your run-of-the-mill manipulative Catholic lady. She was a full-on con artist.

As our reality sunk in, Father Aberdeen and I turned our attention to my mother, who was laughing it up on the other side of the table as if she were at her own bachelorette party. I hoped she would see us trying to burn a hole right through her with our eyes, but before she had a chance, a waiter announced that it was time to hit the buffet. Distracted by the prospect of food, Father Aberdeen and I set our mounting anger aside in hopes of stuffing our faces. Unfortunately, however, virtually everything on display appeared to have been breaded, double-battered, wrapped in bacon, sautéed in butter, covered in sour cream, marinated in Crisco, and then deep-fried a couple of dozen times before being hosed down with a mixture of gravy, hot sauce, and melted cheese. It was as if someone were on a mission to give Father Aberdeen that third heart attack. Still, I needed my strength, so I piled my plate high as Father Aberdeen grabbed a couple of carrot sticks and trudged glumly back to the table.

My mother, on the other hand, seemed almost delighted with the menu as it gave her the chance to break out that bag of heart-friendly sandwich supplies she had hidden under the table this whole time.

“Can I make you a turkey sandwich, Father?” she said while spreading assorted meats across the table like a guy selling fake Rolexes on the sidewalk. “I also have roast beef, corned beef, ham—basically if it comes in cold cut form, I’ve got it!”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I can’t really eat that stuff because of that thing about my two heart attacks and how I almost died.”

“What?” another woman at our table asked, apparently alarmed.

“Nothing,” my mother assured her. “Now, Father, what’ll it be? Turkey sound good?”

“No, thank you,” he said.

“All right, ham it is!” my mom said. “Davey, here, pass this slice of ham over to Father and if he likes it I’ll make him as many sandwiches as he wants. And don’t worry, Father, my hands are perfectly clean.”

While Father Aberdeen was beyond uninterested, I was just plain mortified, my eyes slowly glazing over in a way I recognized as having preceded the few fainting spells I’d ever had in my life. I was pulled out of it, however, when my mother announced it was concert time and we were all going to get McGoverned whether we liked it or not. Since she didn’t want to make any of the other attendees jealous, my mom asked our group to play it cool as we made our way to the black stretch limousine waiting downstairs.

“If anyone asks, we’re just taking a cargo van down to the concert—nothing fancy, nothing special, nothing anyone needs to get worked up about,” she said. “Got it? Now everybody just keep moving.”

There’s something anticlimactic about piling into a limousine with a bunch of old ladies, a priest, and parents you stopped talking to an hour earlier. I had always thought these things were supposed to be filled with strippers, pulsing track lights, champagne, and maybe even Sinbad. My mom, however, seemed unfazed, her sheer delight increasing with each block as she went on and on about how nice it was to ride in a limousine to somewhere other than a cemetery for a change. “Tomato, tomahto,” I thought.

At the concert, we sat in the dark enduring Maureen McGovern belt out show tune after show tune as she took just about every number from the American songbook that I never wanted to hear again and not only extended it, but made it “her own” in a way that had me feeling under my seat to see if someone had by some off chance left a gun. There were vocal acrobatics, spoken word intervals during which the band “brought it down,” and a whole lot of cringe-worthy “selling it” in general.

“I’d like to dedicate this next one to my two little boys, Dante and Pepper,” she announced before the string section kicked off yet another number. “They’re Welsh corgis!”

I love dogs, but in that moment I wished nothing more than for Dante and Pepper to be lying dead somewhere that very moment. Even so, between that line and the rest of her stage banter, there was barely a dry seat in the house. Maureen McGovern had come to delight us all. Almost. As far as I was concerned, she represented everything that was wrong with the world. My mother, on the other hand, lapped it up, a “How does she do it?” expression plastered to her face. I thought to sneak out and call someone, anyone, who might be able to talk me through it all, but one look at Father Aberdeen and I saw he was at least as troubled as I was, and I felt too guilty to leave him behind. He must have thought celibacy was a breeze compared to this.

“How are you holding up?” I whispered to him as Maureen McGovern threatened to bring the house down once more.

“I-I’m f-fine,” he answered, a desperate “I wanna go home! I wanna go home!” look in his eye.

About nine or ten hours later, Maureen McGovern finished her sixth and final encore and we slowly filed out of the theater and into the familiar Cleveland mix of snow and rain, like inmates fresh out of the penitentiary.

“Do you two want to join us in the limousine back to the hotel so you can pick up your car?” my mom asked us out front, still riding that unmistakable McGovern high.

“No, thank you!” Father Aberdeen and I shot back in unison before scurrying off in the opposite direction.

As we walked the few blocks to my car we both became giddy at the prospect of freedom.

On the drive home, I tried to engage him in a little trash talking, but he refused to return any of the shots I took at those old bastards we met back at the hotel.

“What about that crazy old bat with the soiled neck brace who kept double dipping and chewing with her mouth wide open?” I asked, hoping to get him going. “Ugh, I thought I was gonna puke!”

Nothing.

I couldn’t even get him to revisit the fact that my mom had completely tricked us both. I was impressed by his self-control, but I resented him for not indulging my need for blood sport.

“Thanks for joining me,” I said as we pulled back into the church driveway a short while later. By that point, I figured I might as well just pretend we’d had a lovely day together after all.

“Thanks for taking me. I … had a nice time,” Father Aberdeen lied before stepping out of the car and into the slush.

As I headed back to my sister’s house, I tried to figure out exactly why my mother would trick her own son and a Catholic priest, the closest thing to God on earth, into the nightmare we had just endured. I came up empty. Later that night, she called to check in.

“That was fun, right, Davey?” she said.

“Fun? That was hell!” I moaned. “Why did you do that to us?”

“Do what?”

“Why did you trick Father Aberdeen and me into going to that, that
thing
?”

“I didn’t trick anybody,” she scoffed.

Then I broke it to her how Father Aberdeen and I had figured out exactly what she had done. The jig was up.

“I thought you’d have a nice time,” my mother said in complete denial. “You must have at least enjoyed Maureen McGovern.”

“I loathe Maureen McGovern!” (Maureen, if you’re reading this, I’ve got no beef with you. You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We’re cool.)

My mother and I ended up rehashing what had gone on repeatedly over the next few days. I was still convinced that her master plan was to get me to hang out with a priest. I was getting older, and though I wasn’t entirely directionless, my path wasn’t entirely clear, not even to me. Though she must have known it was too late to get me to actually become a priest, something I’m sure she would have loved, she probably figured a little priestly influence couldn’t hurt. Even so, forcing Father Aberdeen and me to struggle through an afternoon of potentially fatal lunch foods, virtually every show tune ever recorded, and more senior citizens than a fiber seminar was extreme any way you slice it.

“You could have
killed
us,” I pleaded with her.

“Oh, shove it.”

Though she could never look me in the eye when we spoke of it, my mom continued to deny the whole thing. As for my father, he finally insisted that the case be officially closed one night after a particularly profanity-laced dinner.

Lest you think this was an isolated incident, this wasn’t the first time my mother had subjected me to torture in the name of self-improvement.

“I signed you up for Typing for Beginners I and II down at Heights High this summer,” my mother casually mentioned to me one day when I was thirteen.

“You
what
?” I shrieked.

I was convinced it was just some sadist plan she had come up with in her spare time. And I knew there was no getting out of it, either. Making matters worse, Heights High was just far enough away from our house that I couldn’t just walk back home on my own as soon as she dropped me off.

“I’ll call children’s services on you!” I threatened.

“See what I care,” she sighed.

My unpleasant memories of that summer aside, one recent afternoon, after watching my friend David, a successful author, hunt and peck around his laptop keyboard, typing with just his two index fingers, I remembered that miserable summer long ago and finally thought “
Oh
—so that’s why she made me do that!”

Still, the idea that my mother might have wanted me to receive some guidance was a tougher pill to swallow.

A few weeks after the benefit, I ran into Father Aberdeen at the local Baskin-Robbins, where he was digging into a cup of sugar-free, fun-free sorbet. Two torture survivors, we dared not speak of that hellish day we spent together. After buying a cone for myself, I asked if he needed a ride home. It was getting late, at least by ice-cream standards, and the church was a good mile away.

“No.” Father Aberdeen shuddered, barely looking up from his sorbet. “N-no, thank you.”

I can’t say I blame him. After everything we’d been through together, I wouldn’t have gotten back into my car either.

Afterward, I went to Miriam’s house to find her sitting in the living room with our sister Libby. I decided to ask them how they managed to avoid being dragged to the benefit.

“We said no,” Libby explained.

Miriam nodded. “Yeah—you just gotta say no to that stuff.”

I turned around and walked upstairs to my bedroom in silence, a black cloud forming over my head as if I were a character in a comic strip.

“Hey, Dave,” Miriam yelled up to me a few minutes later. “You wanna come with us to get Mexican food?”

“No,” I said firmly.

I was actually kind of hungry, but I figured it might not be a bad idea to start practicing.

Tasteful Nudes

It was a typical Sunday, and I was coming down from another red hot weekend of doing laundry and picking up a few things at Bed Bath & Beyond, so I decided to spend a quiet night at home, just me and the Internet. As this sort of thing often goes, it wasn’t long before I started to wander. I clicked on a link on one Web site that sent me to another Web site, where I clicked on yet another link that sent me to yet another Web site and so on and so on until I found myself on a Web site that, much to my complete and utter disbelief, featured photographs of women who didn’t seem too crazy about wearing clothes.

I try not to make a habit of frequenting Web sites like this, mostly because I think they pose too much of a threat to the print industry, but I figured I had come this far, so it felt weird to turn back. Also, I must stress that this Web site was not a pornographic Web site with all sorts of poking and prodding and various fluids, bodily and otherwise, flying about the room from time to time. I’m told those exist but—trust me—this was definitely not one of them—it was simply a Web site that made it its business to showcase photos of women in various states of undress, particularly that state of undress that involves not really wearing any clothes at all (which is to say the best kind). And it was on this Web site that I happened upon a photo of a woman I was pretty sure was the most beautiful woman I had seen in at least the past week. She was voluptuous, exotic, and alluring. She was also totally naked, which was a huge weight off my shoulders since it usually takes a lot of begging, bribing, and tears for me to ever get a woman to do that for me in real life.

“Hello, m’lady,” I said to my computer monitor. Of course, I wasn’t expecting her to answer. I just wanted her to know that I was really classy, a gentleman even.