That's what it's come to: I’m at a total loss as to how to proceed with the article. The more time that passes, the more I realize how much I've been affected by my conversation with Sondheim. The other side of Proposition 313 seems an increasingly ironic subtitle, especially so the more patronizing Heinrich becomes. To be completely forthright, I'm feeling more alienated from Heinrich and the church than I ever have from Rachael Sondheim and the rest of the ACLU combined.
I know how I sound, but please don't worry- I'm not hypnotized and I'm not going awol on you. This is still our big opportunity and obviously my overriding concern is the fight to keep Hetracil legal - but I refuse to just run through this on autopilot. What we're trying to do is going to affect so many lives - we've got a moral, Christian obligation to make certain we're considering every implication of our goal.
The fact is, regardless of what anyone thinks of her, Sondheim has brought up a question which will not go away. It's not something we can run away from.
Before we go there, and since many of you have asked anyway, let me disclose a few details of my personal 'medical history,' so that you can better understand the conflict from my perspective.
You already know that I'm young, but I'm going to date myself here - I was fourteen and in the eighth grade when Ratnakar Shetty isolated Dionysocholine. Despite the subsequent media frenzy that ensued, I was completely oblivious to his discovery. Hey, I was an American teenager - you’d have had to hit me upside the head with a rolled-up newspaper in order for current events to effect me directly.
In my defense, I did have an overwhelmingly full plate: My father had just uprooted my family by relocating us to New York City from Lorain County, Ohio. It wasn't something he wanted to do; He was told point-blank that to resist the move would mean the end of his job, and even then it remained a difficult decision.
My parents were deeply rooted in our Ohioan church community and were apprehensive about the prospect of raising my sister and me in New York City. In the end though, the deciding factor was their discovery that our church had a sister mission in rural Pennsylvania. Though it was a two hour drive from our corporate apartment in Manhattan, it closed the deal and my family's weekly Sunday pilgrimage was born.
As if the culture shock of moving to New York from Ohio and leaving my two best friends wasn’t bad enough, our family’s closeness to the church set us apart from the other kids at my school and made it that much harder to assimilate.
As you'd expect, joining Junior High school in the middle of eighth grade was a nightmare. Teams had already been chosen, and by the time I arrived, even the leftover kids had ended their suffering by banding together in symbiotic clusters of safety. For the first month, I thought that I hated school- I just didn't know how good I had it. It wasn't until one day in the spring, an Ash Wednesday, that I found out what I was really in for.
It was freezing cold that morning- my father woke us up when it was still dark outside, and then lead our half-conscious bodies out into the car. I got my seatbelt on over my shoulder and quickly fell asleep to the moldy velour smell of the backseat. I was awakened by the my father when we arrived at church, and after spending a sleepy ten minutes inside, followed my sister back into the car, ashen crosses smeared over our foreheads.
The next time he woke us, it was because we had arrived at school. It was eerily quiet outside our public school building, and so I knew that we were either very early or very late. My father announced neither, ushering us out of the car with a nod and a pursed smile.
We were late; It was after Homeroom and we had missed first period entirely. I knew that we'd get into trouble, but I couldn't help being glad that we were late enough to have missed a whole period. That way, the halls were filled with students and we could, inconspicuously for the time being, blend into the crowd.
My comfort was short-lived though, ending when I walked into our grade's hallway at precisely the wrong time. All my classmates were penned into their natural habitats, grazing as they waited for the second bell to ring. I felt their eyes on me as I entered the corridor, but there was nothing to do but look down and make a path toward my locker.
Now, though our school didn't actually have a football team, a boy called Davis Sevin was the captain of our football team. Given the evidence, any undergraduate sociologist worth their salt would have instantly recognized him as the Danny Zukko of our class; Slickly mussed hair, skateboard at his side, a conglomeration of girls flirted with him while the other boys fought for his attention He had never said two words to me before that day - he was above donning to ignore me - but on Ash Wednesday he brought a couple of the girls from his royal court over to my locker. They just stood there as I was opening my lock, or trying to, fumbling again and again under the pressure of observation.
I spun then dial to the right, five complete rotations or more, trying to call for a fresh slate, a reset, a do-over. I could feel them next to me, hovering, staring at the charcoal cross that was smeared onto my forehead. Finally Davis spoke in his affected hip-hop drawl.
“What-up, Jesus?”
I felt my face burn with the snickering of Davis' girls, and of the relieved kids all around me. I looked down and continued to spin the lock.
“A-O,” Davis declared, “How do you get a priest to fuck a nun?”
I was frozen, halfway expecting divine intervention to occur as a result of Davis’ forbidden incantation. In Ohio, kids got sent home for saying the s word or taking the lord’s name in vane.
“My man!” he called again, loudly, as if trying to wake me from a trance, “How do you get a priest to fuck a nun??”
