Big Mike: The Greatest Feeling Ever

The usual suspects, plus some new ones, are screaming bloody murder over Barack Obama's invitation to address Notre Dame's graduating class next month. You'd be excused for thinking he'd submerged a crucifix in urine for all the outcry it has aroused.

Obama is wishy-washy about abortion, a stance not good enough for the extremists among the right and the Catholic church. They want our elected leaders to equate abortion with the Holocaust and the genocide of Indians in the Americas, something Obama won't do. Of course, there are probably quite a few who are a lot less agitated about the latter two issues than the first.

I'll make one pronouncement about this whole tempest before I go on to the meat of the post. I'm all for people hollering their fool heads off about Obama's invitation. I hope they protest, stage prayer-ins, and wave placards as passionately as if an ND quarterback had been jobbed out of the Heisman. That's the strength of the United States - our freedom to tell the President to his face that he's full of shit.

I only wonder if these same right-to-lifers were as outraged when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush spoke at Notre Dame commencements months after their elections, considering their giddy infatuation with capital punishment, a practice the Church considers as evil as abortion. I think I know the answer already.

Anyway, I was raised Roman Catholic. My parents sent me to St. Giles elementary school and then Fenwick High School, both in Oak Park. My parents and I attended church every Sunday at St. Giles.

The mass lasted an hour, which to my seven-year-old brain was the equivalent of the Holocene Epoch. I spent that near-eternity resisting the urge to giggle, enduring one or more waves of nausea induced by a nearby worshipper's excessive perfume or body odor, kicking my legs, staring at the pew back in front of me, and waiting for the blessed end of the ordeal.

That was signaled by the glorious moment wherein the priest would announce, "The mass is ended, go in peace," to which the proscribed response was, "Thanks be to god." Sometimes I'd be sitting within yards of my school chum Albert DiPrima. The two of us after a while started responding Thanks be to god in loud voices of dramatic relief, after which we'd giggle surreptitiously to each other. One day, though, we must have gone too far because I received a sharp rap on top of my cranium from my father's knuckle and Albert's father led him out of church by the ear.

After mass, we'd come home, Dad and I would strip out of our jackets and ties and Ma would shed her girdle and begin frying up bacon and eggs. My brother Joey would join us for breakfast. He'd reached the age allowing him to skip mass, a passage I anticipated as deliciously as receiving my first drivers license.

We'd sit around the kitchen table as Ma served up the grub, my father busy buttering four slices of homemade bread, one of which I'd invariably snatch away from him, which - now that I look back on it - must have been his plan all along. Those breakfasts were among the fondest of my childhood memories mainly because the torture of church was over at least for another week.

I never could figure out this religion business. The nuns at St. Giles taught me in catechism class that my first duty as a Catholic was to love god. Hmm, love god - what the hell did that mean?

I'd seen pictures of Michelangelo's fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel portraying god and various other hallucinations. So I adopted that image of the old bird. I was still left with the question, How do I love him? I tried hard to make it happen when I went to bed at night and said my prayers. I didn't exactly know which prayers to say so I silently repeated the mantra, I love you god, I love you god, all the while imagining I was kissing the cheeks of Michelangelo's deity.

One day, the St. Giles principal, Sister James Mary (don't ask me why she'd adopted a male saint's name - suffice it to say that catholics are just whacked when it comes to sex), visited our catechism class and informed us that loving god was the greatest feeling we'd ever experience. This was at odds with my own empirical observations based on my tentative forays into more immediate gratifications under the covers.

That moment completed a process that had begun a few years earlier when Sister Jerome (another gender-ambiguous nun - it's a wonder I'm not even more sexually fucked up than I am) ordered us never to watch or listen to the Beatles because, well, just because.

I knew that Sr. Jerome had to be wrong because the Beatles with their long hair and Beatle boots and cool suits were, well, cool. And if Sr. Jerome was wrong about the Beatles, what else could she be wrong about?

So, by the time I was 12, I'd quit the party, er, the church. Thank Michelangelo's deity I did, otherwise I might be one of those blowhards hollering about Barack Obama's invitation to speak to the Notre Dame graduates.

Big Mike: Stupidity Is A Tough Stain To Rub Out

Here's a personal story in honor of the recent anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination.

Growing up in an absolutely segregated neighborhood - Galewood on Chicago's Northwest Side - I never went to school with a black kid until my freshman year of high school. Even then, out of a class of some 250, only two were black.

One was named Dennis, from Maywood. He was the nerdiest character in the world. He wore Coke-bottle glasses and spoke in a precise King's English that would make Steve Urkell look like Jadakiss. He had no interest whatsoever in sports, frustrating the hell out of the school's football and basketball coaches who hounded him daily to try out for their teams. They simply couldn't wrap their brains around a young black man who wasn't a wide receiver or a point guard.

Dennis and I partnered up in Fr. Motl's speech class the first week of school. Fr. Motl felt that the first asset a public speaker should have was the ability to remember people's names. So he instructed us to create a set of mnemonics for each other. In this way, Dennis and I got to know each other and we became the fastest of friends, as 14-year-olds are wont to do.

I forget the name of the other black kid in my class because his time at Fenwick was so short. Let's call him Luke. He was tall, strong, and rangy. The football and basketball staffs had stood on their heads to recruit him from the time he was in sixth grade. He was the greyhound they expected every human of dark complexion to be.

By November, whenever Luke passed a coach in the hall, the coach would gaze upon him as if he were a prized poodle. When Dennis walked past them, they simply shook their heads.

Dennis and Luke had nothing to do with each other since their interests were so wildly divergent. Dennis had joined the debate and forensics team, for pity's sake! This mystified most of their classmates who wondered aloud why these two black guys wouldn't even sit together in the cafeteria.

They didn't have to wonder too long because Luke failed most of his classes the first semester, going on probation. After he failed most of his second semester classes, his scholarship was rescinded and he transferred to a West Suburban hoops powerhouse. I remember reading his name in the papers time and again.

I never read about Dennis in the papers even though he eventually graduated near the top of our class. Things have changed a lot since I was in high school but one thing hasn't: today more Americans know who Plaxico Burress is than Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I wish I could say that Dennis and I celebrated our graduation together. By that time, though, we were no longer friends.

I'd fallen in with a tough crowd that didn't attend Fenwick, which was ironic considering the fact that my parents had scraped their pennies together to send me to the private school just to keep me away from the neighborhood's bad element. We drank booze and fought and passed ourselves off as gangbangers. After every weekend, I couldn't wait to get back to school to show my high-toned classmates what a hoodlum I was becoming.

One day during sophomore year, on the stairway between classes, some poor freshman accidentally bumped into me. I was compelled to set him straight. I put him up against the wall and told him I'd fuck him up with a nigger-knife. See, I'd just learned the definition of the term in my impromptu street classes around Amundsen Park: in an alley fight, a guy who's too poor to own a nice switchblade has to use a broken bottle to achieve the same end. Ergo, nigger-knife.

The kid was duly petrified and I let him loose as though I now owned a significant portion of the world. I might have begun to strut down those stairs save for one thing - Dennis had sneaked up behind me to say hello just before the incident. He'd heard the whole thing. He froze me with a disgusted look. He never said another word to me the rest of our time at Fenwick.

I've related similar tales in these pages and elsewhere. I had to learn my lessons about racial sensitivity time and again. Even though I revered King, Julian Bond, Andrew Young, and even Dick Allen and Marvin Gaye, I still had a vestigial stink of bigotry within me.

It wasn't easy to wash myself clean of the influence of my all-white neighborhood. I'd still lapse into using slurs into my early 20s. It's a lot easier to remain stupid than to grow.

This whole thing came back to me because the other day All-American Bob and I had a debate at Dick's Pizza about affirmative action. All-American Bob said, "Isn't it time we dropped all this silliness? It's over. The fight's finished. They won the battle. They've got a black man as President. Let's move on."

A lot of people probably would agree with him. Few would notice, though, that he repeatedly referred to black Americans - his fellow citizens - as they. It ain't so easy just to move on.