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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Never
Have Your Dog Stuffed by Alan Alda |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Sentimental Readers looking for a sentimental,
family-focused memoir will enjoy reading Alan Alda’s
Never
Have Your Dog Stuffed. A departure from a typical A
hulking figure in black, she carried a yardstick and
looked like she wasn’t afraid to use it. Sister Mary Frederick taught
geometry and stood over me in the front row while she glared at the people
behind me. I would look up into her nose with fascination because she had
three nostrils. I often wondered if this was what attracted her to geometry
or if, possibly, too much geometry could triangulate
your nose. I
was twelve and I had come down out of the mountains of Tujunga to go to a
Catholic school in But, still, I needed
to belong. So I adapted by becoming part of the system. We were asked one day
to take turns giving a talk before the class, and I realized I could use my
performer’s instincts for this. Instead of just a talk, I gave a full-out
sermon. I combined pathos, saintliness, spontaneous jokes, and animated
gestures in a passionate mix. While I spoke, I could hear the nun behind me
stifling a laugh, and I knew I was in. If you can make a nun laugh, can God
frown? I became an enthusiastic convert to the religion I had been born into.
When we went to mass, I went all the way and took Communion. I knelt at the
altar and opened my mouth as the priest put the large flat wafer on my
tongue. This would be the first food in my stomach since dinner the night
before. My stomach would be growling, yet the taste of the thin disk made of
flour and water had a special terror for me. This was, after all, not bread,
but Jesus. Not a symbol of Jesus, but Jesus himself. I shut my eyes, and
talked myself through it. Don’t chew on it. Don’t even let it touch your teeth.
Above all, don’t let it stick to the roof of your mouth. oh,
God, you did it. You let it happen. God is stuck to the roof of your mouth.
How are you going to get Him off? You have to get
this off and swallow it. what if it just gets hard and stays there? You can’t walk around
for the rest of the day with God in your mouth. oh,
God. Melt, melt. Taking Communion also
meant going to confession the day before, on Saturday And that meant coming
up with a string of sins that included every conceivable transgression,
including some that weren’t technically sins but showed my goodwill. I didn’t realize I was
working my way into a corner. Along with the praise from the nuns came a
catch. The catch was that if you didn’t do exactly what they said, you would
burn forever. If you didn’t go to mass every week, you would burn. If you ate
meat on Friday you would burn. If
you didn’t believe that the priest could turn bread into God, you’d burn. And
if you didn’t actually believe what you believed
you believed, there was probably a way for you to burn longer than
forever. It put you in a kind of desperate bind, which was not good, because
the ultimate sin, the unforgivable sin, they said, was despair. Who
would choose despair? I wondered. And why would an all-knowing God pick on
you for falling into a bottomless pit that you would have avoided if you
could? My curiosity was making me ask dangerous questions, even as I was
working on belonging. And
I did want to belong. The school slanted toward the quirky in a way that I
found appealing. The monsignor who founded it had named it And
I liked the monsignor. He seemed smart and decent. He was always talking to
the students about tolerance, when we would fall in early in the morning to
salute the flag. But the monsignor’s nonconformity had its limits. My
parents and I went to mass every week at his church, and one week he devoted
his entire sermon to a movie playing then in theaters. It was a light comedy
adapted from a Broadway play. A group of Catholic watchdogs, called the
Legion of Decency, had decided that seeing this movie would corrupt
everyone, including adults, because it
dealt with an unmarried woman who was pregnant. To prove how disgraceful
the film was, the monsignor told us one of the lines from the film. He read
gravely from a sheet of paper: “‘You’re pregnant?’ one character says. ‘A
drugstore on every corner in The
monsignor looked up from the page. “And they think that’s funny” he said
scornfully. It sounded to me like a well-constructed joke. I
wondered why he didn’t think it was funny It didn’t get a laugh, of course,
because he gave it a terrible reading, but that was no reason to knock the
writing. My
thoughts were interrupted when I realized he was asking the congregation to
stand and take the oath of the Legion of Decency. We were supposed to swear
that we would never see this film or any film banned by the legion, under
pain of mortal sin. The entire congregation stood. I don’t know why, but I
wouldn’t stand. I was fourteen by now. I still wanted to fit in, but
something in me wouldn’t let me stand. Along with everyone else in the packed
church, my father stood. I still wouldn’t budge. He seemed embarrassed and
gave me a nudge with his knee. I didn’t move. He looked down at me and gave a
jerk with his head, as if to say, “Come on. This doesn’t look good.” But
I wouldn’t move. I shook my head from side to side. I was not going to stand.
Where did I get the nerve to do this? And what principle had I heard of
somewhere that I was upholding? I believed everything they told me about
obedience and the teaching authority of the Church, but somehow, going to a
movie didn’t seem like something that should send me to hell, and I wasn’t
going to pretend by standing that I thought it would. I don’t know exactly
what that fourteen-year-old boy was thinking, sitting there on the hard pew,
but as I look back, I like him. A
couple of years later, as it can in show business, our lives changed in a
flash. My father’s seven-year contract with Warners
had run its course, and he was being offered a starring part in a Broadway
musical. He couldn’t leave the studio until three days before the first
rehearsal, when he packed us up in the car and drove ninety miles an hour
across the country. This seemed like fun, and as the nation flew by my
window, I sat in the backseat reading a book about flying saucers. This was
good because when we got to One
day, I opened my desk and saw a note informing me that five of my classmates
would be waiting for me in the bushes after school to beat the crap out of
me. I thought it might be good to find an alternative to this. As
we jostled down the hall between classes, I noticed that next to the
principal’s office was a door with a sign that read, DEAN OF DISCIPLINE. I
looked in and saw a tough-looking priest behind a desk. He looked like a
boxer, or at least a marine. Maybe this
guy can help me, I thought, and I made an appointment to see him. He
listened intently while I explained that five boys were planning to jump out
of the bushes at me. I was hoping he wouldn’t call them into the office and
make me confront them face-to-face. Finally he said, “Well, that’s not
good It certainly isn’t, I thought. Thank God I’ve got somebody who can save me from a beating. But
then I saw he had only been pausing for effect. He went on: “. . . but, if you had to, you’d defend
yourself like a man, wouldn’t you?” I
realized with a sinking feeling that it was no accident he looked like a
boxer. Yes, sure, I said. I would definitely defend myself—one of the first
in a series of lies I made to priests. As
it does so often, this threat to my physical well-being ended in a climactic
confrontation in which I punched the biggest bully in the nose and the others
scattered like cowards. I love this story. Unfortunately in my case it took
place only in my head. Eventually I won out, but I did it using my brains. My
fists stayed in my pockets. I
kept watching the bushes, waiting for them to jump out, but they kept
postponing it. Meanwhile, I kept looking for people I could talk to. The
place looked like a prison to me, with raw red bricks on the outside and
shiny white subway tiles on the inside. I saw a notice taped to a wall one
day announcing that the photography club was having a competition. I loved
photography. When I was eleven I had gone in once a week to a camera store in
Roscoe to hand over fifty cents until enough weeks had gone by to pay for the
used Rolleicord they had laid away for me. And then
I had spent hundreds of hours in the darkroom, developing film, making
prints, until my hands smelled like a tray of hypo. I
went home from school and worked for a week on a picture. A little
nervously, I brought it to the camera club and entered it, hoping I could
find a place in the group. A week later I was in the hall again, and at the
other end I saw Brother Jacob, the teacher who mentored the club. His face
lit up, and he opened his arms and said, “You won!” My picture had won the
competition. I felt flattered and excited. Then Brother Jacob was hugging me,
his muscular arms wrapped around me, almost crushing me, his bony body
clamped to mine, his genitals pressed against me through the thin cloth of
his cassock. This
was suddenly not flattering anymore. I unlocked myself from his iron embrace
and got away as soon as I could. Later, at lunch, other boys who had seen the
hug in the hall laughed about it. “That’s the way he operates,” they said.
“He’s always getting guys in the darkroom and feeling them up.” All the way
home on the bus, I felt deflated. It was a double betrayal. It wasn’t just
the creepy physical advance he’d made; it was also the disregard for the work
I’d done. He’d let me win just so he could get me into the darkroom. I never
went back, even though he’d stop me from time to time in the hall and tell me
how talented I was. I
began to think there was slightly more attention paid to sex here than there
had been in the burlesque theaters. All of us were adolescent boys who were,
of course, besotted with our newfound sexuality Battalions of us were
cranking away through the night, searching for salvation in pungent
imaginary encounters with the goddesses found in cigarette ads. Teachers
would devote hours to the subject of our hobby Once or twice a year, we would
have a three-day retreat, the first two days of which were devoted largely to
what was known as “self-abuse.” They
never fully explained what exactly was abusive about it, except for
references to our bodies as temples. In religion class, Father Quinn told us
one morning, “You know, the average adult doesn’t think about sex all the
time. Not at all. The normal adult thinks about sex maybe ten minutes a day” Well, I thought, I don’t believe this, but okay. I’ll be normal. I’ll get my ten
minutes in right now” I always did what they said, and if at all possible,
I took them literally. Finally
I made a few friends who were smart and, like me, were more interested in
writing than fighting. We were taught English by a bright young priest named
Father McMahon. My friend Joe and I had begun writing a humor column in the
school paper, and Father McMahon said that if we’d write a comedy sketch for
the Thanksgiving assembly, he’d let us skip a book report. This was clever
of him, because I thought I was avoiding work, but I actually worked harder
and learned more than if I had written a slapdash book report. Our little
sketch got laughs from our classmates, and we had that feeling of immense
power that comes from writing words on paper that can make other people feel
something. We
got ambitious. During the summer between eleventh and twelfth grades, Joe and
I and our friend Bob wrote a musical comedy— book, words, and music. The
show, of course, had extremely large parts for all three of us. As
I worked on it, I sat every day at a little table, writing in longhand.
Every few days, someone put a small vase of lilacs on the table. I don’t
remember who put the buds there, but for me the smell of creativity that
summer was lilac. Day by day, I saw a play taking shape, and it was
intoxicating. When
school started up again, we asked Father McMahon to read our script, and he
didn’t flinch; he offered to produce the play on the school stage. This meant
he’d have to pay for musical arrangements, scenery, and costumes. I didn’t
find out until much later how much he Was risking by encouraging us. He had
gone into personal debt to get the play on. The
musical was called Love’s the Ticket! and when we began rehearsals, I suddenly realized I had a
solution to the bully problem. It seemed that everybody wanted to be in it:
basketball players, football players, even the guys who had wanted to beat me
up. Pretty soon, the bullies were
up on the stage. And I had them dancing
in a chorus line. These
were guys who had left me little welcome notes in my desk that said simply
“fruit” or “you faggot.” Now they were working on their dance steps and
hoping their makeup wouldn’t run. This was very close to the perfect revenge. Our
little play was a hit. It raised money for the school, Father McMahon got his
savings back, and I was no longer a fruit. I was relieved that the bully
days were over. Not
quite. Never
Have Your Dog Stuffed is a gentle story about a funny man whose humor
about himself and his life makes for pleasant
reading. Steve Hopkins,
March 23, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Never
Have Your Dog Stuffed.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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