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with Thomas a Kempis’s
Imitation of Christ
under my pillow. I idolized St. Rose of Lima, who rubbed raw pepper on her face so her beauty would not be a temptation to the chastity of others. I devoted myself to mastering the underground occult lore of the Catholic hardcore—Butler’s
Lives of the Saints
and Augustine and T-Money Aquinas—the way other kids would devote themselves to D&D or the
Foundation
trilogy. My moral compass was shaped mainly by the Second Vatican Council, plus the episode of
Welcome Back, Kotter
where Arnold Horshack refuses to dissect a frog.
    One spring, I even decided to give up evil music for Lent. It meant seven weeks of listening to the radio and wondering which songs were evil and which songs were just
about
evil. I decided the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” was okay because it was anti-devil, but the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” was soft on Satan. I gave myself permission to keep cranking Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” because it was so saturated with evil that it amounted to a critique of evil, but not Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” which was just plain evil. I made a specially edited tape of
London Calling
to omit the nunfucking. These theological judgments made my head hurt, and I was relieved when Lent was over. On Easter morning, I treated myself to “Walk on the Wild Side.”
    My rock heroes were wild-side jaywalkers like Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie, guys who smirked at heartbreak through their inch-thick steel shades. They gave me the hope that teenage outcasts could grow up to be something besides corpses or cartoons. Jesus was my Major Tom. He said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” So did Bowie. It tapped into the whole Catholic idea of creating your own saints, finding icons of divinity in the mundane. As a religion, Bowieism didn’t seem so different from Catholicism—the hemlines were just a little higher. Of course, when Madonna hit, she was a one-woman Vatican 3, but at this point I had all the rock-star saints I could handle.
    At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like
Good News for Modern Man
. They had groovy titles like
The Word
or
The Way
, and translated the Bible into “contemporary English,” which meant Saul yelling at Jonathan, “You son of a bitch!” (I Samuel 20:30). Awesome! The King James version gave this verse as “Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman,” which was bogus in comparison. Maybe these translations went a bit far. I recall one of the Bibles translating the inscription over the cross, “INRI” (Iesus Nazaremus Rex Iudaeorum), as “SSDD” (Same Shit Different Day), and another describing the Last Supper—the night before Jesus’ death, a death he freely accepted—where Jesus breaks the bread, gives it to his disciples, and says, “It’s better to burn out than fade away,” but these memories could be deceptive.
    At Camp Don Bosco, I met another camper who was a Beatles freak, which was like finding gold. Aldo Rettagliatti and I spent hours debating the Paul-is-dead clues and
Abbey Road
(his favorite) vs. the
White Album
(mine). Since we were out in the middle of the woods, with no radio and a load of religious tracts around, we soon got into some Catholic-mystic Beatle talk. We elaborated ideas about the way “Revolution 9” rewrote chapter nine of the Book of Revelation. We took our theory to Brother Larry, but he assured us that the Book of Revelation was too hard for us to interpret, and besides, Jesus didn’t write it, and anyway, everything after
Sgt. Pepper
was crap.
    Socially, the campers split into three groups: tough guys, wise guys, and pussies. The pussies spent the summer in constant danger from the tough guys, while the wise guys tried to
nyuk-nyuk-nyuk
their way out of violent situations, mostly by making fun of the pussies. I was a wise guy, except when my inner pussy would slip out from under my cassock and