A mime is a terrible thing to waste

When I was twelve, my family moved from a working class urban setting to a rural one. The town in which I had lived was large enough to contain a lot of different faiths and ethnicities. The rural town was in the Bible Belt and was overwhelmingly Protestant. My family was one of the very few Catholic families in the county. We drove to another city in another county every Sunday morning for Mass. We were definitely an oddity. There were a couple of other Catholic kids in school. They had learned to play down their faith and blend in. Having attended parochial school and imbued with a strong pride in my faith, I had not figured this coping mechanism out.

I endured prejudice unimaginable to most people. The drill went like this. The rednecks would surround me regularly. I was asked a rhetorical question. If the Pope asked me to submit to a homosexual act, I would have to comply, wouldn't I? I say the question was rhetorical because the first couple of times I tried to explain the infallibility of the Holy Father extended to matters of faith and morals only and the point was moot anyway, I got nothing but angry stares. I was probably the only guy in seventh grade who knew what infallible meant.

It went on. Since I was available to the Pope and the Pope wasn't planning a visit to Hickville, they would take a shot, they said. We went through this three or four times until the local Neanderthal population came to understand that Irish Catholic kids knew how to fight and would beat hell out of them in a pinch. You only had to kick the crap out of one or two before the rest lost their courage.

I was left unmolested. I had a few friends who had more intelligence and sensitivity than a cockroach, only a few. One of my friends was gay. He was into theater. We were friends. The "cool" boys snickered behind my back in the school hallways, partly because I did not shun my friend, partly because I was a Papist. The night we graduated, several of the cool guys pulled my gay friend from a car and disappeared with him. I searched for him as I feared they would kill him. By the time I tracked them down, they no longer had my friend. After a little dust up, I learned where they had left him. I went to the area and found him hiding in a tree. He rode back to town with me. Soon,I left town for college and never went back.

Recently, one of my old classmates contacted me about a high school reunion. I declined to attend. The classmate did send me a brief bio on all the people they had been able to track down. I had already seen a newspaper article explaining that one of my tormentors had become the town drunk. I was surprised upon reading the notes to learn that one of the Cretins was president of an oil company. Others had achieved varying degrees of success, as well. America! What a country!