Brothers' Boy Coming of Age in California Personal Essays

Gerald Haslam
An Essay From the Book
Coming of Age in California
Devil Mountain Books
Walnut Creek, CA


Part Two

Academic demands at Garces were democratic and relentless but also charitably realistic. I particularly recall the Brothers insisting that the world was not an easy place, but that work and work alone might allow us to prevail in it. Says Justin Meyer of Silver Oak Cellars, another football player, whose father was a railroad laborer, "What really happened is that they made it possible for us to dream of being things our folks couldn't even imagine. When that happened, it was up to us to succeed." Not making an honest effort at things seemed to be the great sin.

Recently, I read Wilfred Sheed's observation that "more kids come to hate the Church through its schools than through anything else that happens to them...they're not going to pick up any religious instruction that's worth much anyway at that age." By high school, I had come to distinguish between two distinct breeds of Catholicism which, for want of better terms, I identified as "Theirs" and "Ours," categories created after observing certain acquaintances.

The former group - intense, mystical, and guilt-ridden - even included a few somber boys who wandered about with their hands clammy and solemnly discussed having "a vocation"; the latter bunch, far more populous, was more concerned with a vacation; its Catholicism was snug, intimate and irreverent. Like my buddies, I opted for the latter approach, taking the New Testament at its word: honest mistakes could be pardoned. Interestingly, we're all still Catholics, though none of us is in imminent danger of canonization. Religion was of course central to the school's curriculum, but it was in general handled lightly and pragmatically by my teachers. Oh, I encountered a couple who seemed to be reincarnations of Jonathan Edwards, but mainly the Christian Brothers offered a thick-wristed piety, oddly comfortable and comforting: everyone was imperfect and everything was forgivable...but don't push it, Buster. By the time I was a senior, religion class was often the site of debates over doctrine and dogma, our doubts rebutted but not quashed. My perception was that narrow canons were finally less important than how you lived.

I remember Brother Raymond, a handsome, husky man with forearms like Popeye's ‹ he always seemed to be surrounded by mothers during parents' nights ‹ telling us that it didn't do any good to roll your eyes to the sky in prayer if you didn't make your life, whether digging ditches or performing surgery, a long, sincere, Christ-like effort to better the world, thus a prayer.

Many of us came from families where mother attended Mass while father attended a neighborhood saloon, so we had identified religion as an interest peculiar to females. But we could in no way view Brother Raymond (or Brother Gerald, or Brother Justin, or...or...or...) as feminine in any sense threatening to our emerging masculinity, so we took his advice seriously, or at least I did. And I still do.

Most of the Brothers certainly seemed to gear their own lives that way, working hard to guide their reluctant, rowdy charges. Many years later I learned that within the order, teaching was viewed in supernatural terms, its performance not distinct from working for the individual Brother's own personal sanctification. I recall especially sitting with muscular, gray-haired Brother Justin, an ex-professional athlete, his jowls dark, his upper lip wet with perspiration as he hunched over a sheet of paper. His eyes were grave as he said, "The test says that maybe sales, or...," he hesitated, "maybe carpenter?" ‹ his voice rose because he couldn't believe it. He was trying to interpret a vocational aptitude test I had taken, and the intensity of his concern astonished me. There was no show of masculine casualness, no indeed; this man, who looked as though he could pin Strangler Lewis, was not hiding the fact that he cared about me, about us. In fact, they all did, and that sense of concern remains my strongest memory from that time.

That was all years ago. Today Garces has changed. The Christian Brothers are gone, and so are the Dominican nuns. Its athletic teams were number one in the state last year among schools its size, according to the C.I.F., and ninety-six percent of its graduates matriculated to colleges. But there is much less variety of social caste: far fewer kids like Fuzzy Martinez and Don Maracini, like Quincy Williams and Sal Peņa, - fewer fights, fewer farts, and fewer back-of-the-class floor shows. Garces is a prestigious prep school ‹ its rough edge softened by time and affluence. But I find it difficult to imagine that the school could be any better.

I can still hear the muffled echo of gaseous explosions from the back of the room, the roar of Brother Gerald on the attack, the hiss of a dirty joke whispered in the deliciously dangerous environs of a classroom. I can see the student who dressed in black, rolled his eyes heavenward, and pretended he was already a priest, and his afflicted stare when he caught sign of one of those back-of-the-class anatomical displays.

Most of all, though, I remember the certainly and rigor of the Brothers. They were good men and true and I'm grateful to them.

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