Creative Nonfiction: Selections from David Sapp

Catechism

We were Catholic simply because Dad grew up Catholic and remained so because President Kennedy was Catholic. We rarely missed Sunday mass at Saint Vincent de Paul, the limestone Neo-Romanesque church surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence on High Street. I was baptized at the marble font near the altar. I blundered through my first confession and cranky Old Priest made me repeat it, but I survived first communion, catechism, and confirmation though I don’t remember learning much about compassion. I played a trumpet solo, “O Come All Ye Faithful,” for a midnight service but I messed up and the choir members wouldn’t talk to me or ask for another solo after that. I learned to love Bach before I knew who Bach was when the organist played the “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” during recessionals. I was an altar boy for a couple of weeks for 7:00 am weekday services. Old Priest always added a single drop of water into the sacramental wine. Young Priest tipped one drop of wine into the water. 

When my mind wandered during Old Priest’s tedious homilies (He liked to spell his sermons. For Mother’s Day it would begin: “M is for the many gifts mothers give us. O is for all the other things mothers bestow . . . .”), I gazed at the large stained glass windows between the arches – exquisite depictions of the life of Mother Mary in vivid red, blue, green and amber: Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Assumption. I knew all the stations of the cross from small paintings in the aisles around the perimeter of the nave. Like a medieval peasant, my appreciation for the pictures made up for my lack of memory of prayers, liturgy, or the lives of saints. Mom was a little worried when, at five, I played priest in the basement with a cardboard box as my altar, an Oreo cookie as the communion host, and a cup of Kool-Aid for the wine. I was mildly religious (though never protestant) for a brief time at fourteen before becoming more preoccupied with the mysteries of girls. Mass each Sunday was what we did. It was predictable and comfortable, familiar and unchanging from year to year, season to season. 

Mass was our Sunday routine before Mom’s hysterectomy. Before she was convinced that not all of the softball-size mass was removed, that it was cancerous and not benign. Before her paranoia, always lurking at the periphery of our lives, rudely surfaced. Before the police brought her home for trespassing at the rectory. (After all, she surmised, she could use the washer and dryer there any time she wished because she belonged to the church and put an envelope in the offertory basket every Sunday even when money was tight.) Before she was arrested and committed to the state hospital for harassing Old Priest. Before languishing in the psych ward. Before the threats of Thorazine and electroshock. Before Dad brought her home and still she glued candy Lifesavers to strategic locations on a Playboy centerfold and mailed it to the Bishop of Columbus. Before we lost the house and the dry-cleaning business. Before her rage turned on our family. Before she began throwing coffee cups and jelly jars at Dad’s head. Before Dad removed his hunting rifles from the hall closet. Before Dad, then my little sister and I, moved out, leaving her too alone to search for sanity.

Around Christmas, just before all this, before Mom’s mania became our new routine, Mom, Dad, my little sister, and I went to mass as usual in our Sunday best and took our usual spot in the pews, on the left, four rows back. At first, as always, we dutifully stood-sat-kneeled, stood-sat-kneeled. Mom was part of the decorating committee that each year hung large red ribbons and green garland boughs throughout the church. She was eager for us to see her work. She wanted to be part of and contribute to something rather than spend long, sad afternoons napping in a dark bedroom. Soon after Old Priest walked down the center aisle with the altar boys carrying the cross, gospels, and incense, Mom began crying quietly. We later learned that, the day before, the other ladies in the group unanimously rejected Mom’s decorating innovations, and after she went home, switched it all to what was originally planned. Old Priest sanctioned the reversal. No one told Mom. The mass was well underway when Mom pushed past us in the pew, left through the side door and into the sacristy where the vestments were kept. This room led directly to the altar. Dad followed and caught up with her just before she rushed Old Priest who now stood, arms uplifted in prayer, before the parishioners. My little sister and I stood frozen in the congregation, listening helplessly to our mother’s sobbing and cursing. The organ and a hymn muffled the worst of it. Dad somehow coaxed, wrestled, and half-carried Mom out of the building, and after a little while I led my sister by her hand to join them in the churchyard.

Sundays were different after that. Certainly, I saw indications of the true nature of people in other boys and girls. Cruelty was present: the teasing, an occasional bloody nose or a sock in the stomach, the ostracization and tears – the usual and customary torment of a child navigating the playground or the neighborhood. I never quite comprehended the brutality of other children, but I accepted that it existed. But this was different. Priests and church ladies weren’t supposed to behave so callously. They weren’t meant to cause suffering. This was the beginning of the end of my naivete. Love was now rare and conditional. This was my catechism in compassion.

 

 

 

My Blue One Hundred Percent Polyester Leisure Suit

I looked good, really good, in my blue one hundred percent polyester leisure suit. Aunt Jane took up sewing pants for my cousin Jimmy and Uncle Pat. After they were adequately garbed, she thought of me. At first, I was skeptical as I never imagined handmade clothes would ever look cool enough to wear anywhere, never mind passing scrutiny in the halls of my high school. But after I was happy with one pair of pants that fit perfectly, she proposed a leisure suit. I said sure. I picked blue as the color, and Aunt Jane found the perfect hue. It wasn’t cobalt or cerulean – which resembles sky blue. Definitely not navy. It was somewhere between midnight blue in the Crayola crayon box and ultramarine blue, an oil paint color I was learning to admire in art class. And a few years later in art school, when I discovered Prussian blue, that exquisite color that created black holes of depth in paintings, I thought of my blue one hundred percent polyester leisure suit. Then there was Yves Klein’s blue. In his Anthropométries, at a Paris gallery in front of a well-dressed and well-coiffed, champagne-toting audience and accompanied by a string orchestra, nude women slathered his patented blue paint on their bodies and made impressions on white surfaces around the room. My blue one hundred percent polyester leisure suit wasn’t quite that blue, but it was close.

I wore my blue one hundred percent polyester leisure suit to the Valentine’s Day dance. This was the same year disco took off with “Saturday Night Fever” and John Travolta in his white, big pointy collar, tieless suit. The disc jockey was preoccupied with Bee Gees, ABBA, and K.C. and the Sunshine Band in the school cafeteria. Disco was composed for dancing; however, I do recall some difficulty dancing to Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music.” I enjoyed how the cafeteria was transformed as during the week it was a socially dangerous minefield of cliques, a confusing landscape of acceptance and rejection. I was at ease dancing anywhere. I was confident that my blue one hundred percent polyester leisure suit would fit right in, garner notice, or even be discussed. This would redeem my poor performance as a freshman: as I did not drive yet, Dad chauffeured my date and me; I was not aware of the protocol of corsage and boutonniere so neither of us had the required flowers; and my attire was a miserable sweater vest.  We sat silently and sullenly through most of the dance. Now as a junior, I was wise to the way of the world. I brought my girlfriend, Barb. I drove and we exchanged flora. And of course, I was wearing my blue one hundred percent polyester leisure suit. Barb was a silly, giggly girl who laughed at everything I said. That’s why I was so taken with her, I suppose. She was a mediocre clarinet player, and I was a mediocre trumpet player in a concert band. In identical uniforms which included white spats, we got to know each other during football games and marching band, talking and teasing between fight songs and ignoring the Mount Vernon Yellow Jackets. I don’t recall ever seeing her without her vivid blue eyeshadow (a shade somewhere between cobalt and cerulean). She sewed and embroidered matching blue denim shirts for us to wear while walking around the mall. On our first date, after Jaws at the Knox Drive-In, I put my hand on her thigh while we cruised up and down Main Street. 

Two years older than me at the time of the Valentine’s Day dance, Barb was out of high school and working as a teller at the First Knox National Bank downtown. She made her own gown for the dance. From her neck to her ankles, it was a solid red. Just red. As I worked at Ron’s Pizza, I could not help but think of a large tube casing of uncut pepperoni or salami. We had fun. We danced every dance though her long dress obliged her to take only tiny furtive steps. Entirely sheathed in synthetic petroleum-based polymer thread, my blue one hundred percent polyester leisure suit did not allow for any breathability and halfway through the dance, the accumulated sweat became rather uncomfortable. But that was fine as everyone at the dance was encased in the same fabric and suffered equally. I later learned that heat releases chemicals in polyester which are known carcinogens. I don’t recall wearing my blue one hundred percent polyester leisure suit anywhere other than that one dance. My blue one hundred percent polyester leisure suit is buried in a landfill somewhere, hidden off a back road in Knox County, Ohio. Researchers state that the color in polyester will not fade over time and that it may take 300 years or more for the fibers in my blue one hundred percent polyester leisure suit to decay. My blue one hundred percent polyester leisure suit turned out to be my best chance for immortality. I asked my wife about her experience with polyester, and she recalled her date, Willy, wearing a lime green one hundred percent polyester leisure suit to Homecoming. Not forest green, viridian or chartreuse. Lime green.

 

 

 

Desire Was an Entirely Different Matter

I am thinking of all those young men who, just before being shipped off to war, were ready to love and marry the neighbor girl they grew up with or a sweetheart they’d met only a few weeks before. There was a plethora of pairs of crisp uniforms and white wedding gowns on church steps before storming Normandy or remote Pacific beaches. This readiness is not uncommon but instinctual. And I have wondered how much simple animal biology, the instinct of our species, contributes to the predicament of love. David Attenborough could narrate these forces of nature. I admit, this readiness is overly romanticized, but I latched onto its rules and trappings as eagerly as anyone desperate to discover happiness in another person. If this was an illusion, fine. So be it. I was bruised too black and blue from waiting for love to do anything but surrender. 

Love arrived before desire. I loved you before I met you. I knew you before we spoke after that awkward get-to-know-you circle of the peculiar, divorced and depressed at the singles meeting in the basement of Mulberry Street Methodist Church. It looked more like a sad AA meeting than a support group for the lonely. There was silent smoking guy, too serious bible-carrying guy and Al, the sweet, scruffy divorcee who stopped us at the door to gauge my intentions as we attempted to quietly ditch the meeting. In the circle I announced that I was an artist though I was working as a delivery boy for the pharmacy downtown. You grinned a little.

Your pastor convinced you to attend. I discovered the meeting place and time from a poster in the drugstore window. What the hell? Why not? I made you laugh more than once over cake and soft drinks. The white, too-sweet, frosted dessert seemed out of place. Stale doughnuts and bad coffee seemed more fitting. (At some point along the way, I made it a requirement to make you laugh at least once a day. This was a good routine during our years of marriage, kids – aging. Just the other day I got you laughing so hard you nearly peed your pants while hobbling cross-legged to the bathroom.) Though I had not quite distinguished love from desire, a few days later I was certain of you and certain of love after I first kissed you – you sitting in the white wicker chair in my ratty apartment. What were you thinking, all smiles who couldn’t or wouldn’t stop smiling – this guy with no kitchen sink, only one chair and a twenty-year-old Ford with questionable seat belts? But the Ford was a pretty baby blue. The same shade as my blue polyester polo shirt you found endearing. It was your smile, not the kiss that caught me.

But desire was an entirely different matter. Of course, there was passion; however, oh, I don’t know, there seems to be a difference between passion and desire. There is obsession in desire. When you first told the story, I imagined myself sitting in your Chemistry class one row over and one desk back. When I was in school, I wouldn’t be caught dead in Chemistry. I was the weird kid who hid in the art room making Cubist paintings of still-life, Nixon, and JFK. But I yearned to be there, somehow transported in time and place. I cannot explain my voyeuristic infatuation. I suppose I was a budding, fetishistic pervert. However, my mania was a harmless, isolated, and temporary obsession. For you it seemed to be about good fashion. A suit and tie would do it for you. Rock your world. You bought me a trendy ensemble, a stylish shirt, pleated trousers with cuffs and suspenders. Your desire was to dress me in your preferences. Humor was a priority too but ripped abs or a bit of stubble on a chiseled chin not so much.

Before school, before leaving your bedroom, wallpapered in bright yellow stripes and white daisies when you were nine, you scrawled a few key formulas on your thigh. Blue ballpoint pen glided across your skin. The plan was, as needed, to slide your skirt up along your leg and refresh your memory with blue hieroglyphs. Never mind that you chickened out at the last minute and did not use the prompts. The good girl. The principal’s daughter. Just knowing the formulas were there was a comfort and was enough. There was something exciting in the prospect of cheating, though – the chance of getting caught. In my fantasy, you did look at your leg. You surreptitiously inched your hem up over your knee until your crime was exposed. I stole glances across the aisle – the teacher unaware that I was failing my test while you were unaware I ogled you cheating on your test. I wasn’t sure which was more thrilling, your thigh or the transgression.

And I imagined I was your scribe. Not a tattoo artist. As this would have been 1977, few girls brandished tattoos, tattoos being largely limited to anchors on rough, weathered sailors. But I would draw more than formulas. I would draw you – your portrait, your eyes, your mouth, or you a reclining Venus again and again across your back, thighs, belly, breast. I would draw your ears twenty times or give you extra fingers and toes if you wanted it so. I would promote you to general by drawing elaborate epaulets on your shoulders. I would draw synopses of our first days together: our walk to the abandoned chapel outside Gambier; dinner at the Thai place on Main Street where the plum wine was thick and sweet and potent; grocery shopping after midnight; and that avocado salad on your rickety card table where we were so nervous we could hardly eat – both blindly confident of love and passion or desire or maybe both were sure to follow.

 

 

 

Pompeii

In the older wing of Elmwood Elementary, in Mrs. Mendenhall’s fourth-grade class, we wrote on actual black slate blackboards. I liked how smoothly the white chalk glided across the surface when practicing our first multiplication problems and how words and numbers were more prominent due to the contrast. Mellanie sat beside me, Robin ahead and Darcy behind me. I was in love with all of them for different reasons and for much of the school day, my attention focused on impressing them instead of the current lesson. I drew pictures for them and passed notes which inquired: Do you like me, yes or no? Our wood and metal desks were used by decades of students before us and creaked and groaned when we opened the lids or shifted in our seats. A baby-boom class, nearly forty of us filled the classroom with tall windows and high ceilings. The floor was hardwood, and there was a coat room with old iron hooks behind the main blackboard. The room had character, unlike Miss Smith’s modern third-grade room with cinderblock walls, tile floor, flimsy plastic chairs, and green chalkboards with yellow chalk. There was a sense of history there. And our beloved Mrs. Mendenhall was part of that history as we learned, to our astonishment, she was a teacher to many of the parents of our classmates.

Across the hall was an equally ancient library where the books, all worn and musty, were probably thumbed since the 1920s. We visited the library just once that year. (I am not sure why only once. This puzzled me.) The book I chose to take to my desk was about Pompeii. I don’t remember much more than the title except for a general fascination for a city buried by a volcano. I don’t remember what I read or the illustrations. I am fairly certain there were not enough illustrations. I do remember the pages were yellowed and brittle. I was probably more captivated by volcanoes than Rome or archeology. I doubt that I knew where Pompeii was located, despite a National Geographic map of the world pinned to my bedroom wall. Maybe I searched the subject at home in the World Book Encyclopedia, but I don’t remember having done so. Mom and Dad seemed unaware of Pompeii’s existence, and I have a vague memory of enjoying the idea that this was something unknown to them, something esoteric and entirely mine. Mrs. Mendenhall smiled when I showed an interest in the book. That stood out as pleasing her was important to me. What I remember most is that I made a vow to myself – the kind of vow, its seriousness of intent, that was not typical of kids my age – that I would see Pompeii one day.

Twenty-five years later, I recalled my fourth-grade vow while traveling by tour bus past the arched lines of crumbling aqueducts south of Rome. Now an art professor, I was guiding a tour of Italy with an odd assortment of students, parents, and senior citizens. Luigi, the driver, a handsome, well-groomed middle-aged man, owned one tape of ABBA and played it on our way to every destination. By the end of the trip, we could easily perform a sing-along – but didn’t. It took several weeks to get “Dancing Queen” out of my head. He saved me from buying a suspicious Rolex from a sketchy character hanging about the cameo factory in Sorento. Each day we greeted each other with “Buongiorno, Luigi. Come stai?” “Bene, molto bene.” Our tour guide talked primarily about her boyfriend’s obsession with Lamborghini and Ferrari. Before we entered Pompeii’s main gate, so agonizingly near, we were required to lunch at an unremarkable cafeteria. The rigatoni, the same diameter up and down the boot, was simple but delicious. One of the parents, the mother who in Florence had no idea what to do or where to go and sat sulking on the steps to the train station all day, loudly demanded “IN-SA-LAAA-TA,” salad, the only Italian she’d learned during the trip – as if saying it louder increased comprehension. In Italy, what Americans know as salad was a novelty and rarely ordered as an entrée. The servers simply shrugged. It was queried, why didn’t Pompeii have a McDonalds like in Ravenna? Most of the group were hot, thirsty, and easily bored with street after street of identical brick ruins. The student who found the Disney store in Rome to be the highlight of her trip was especially despondent. Our lazy local guide led us to only the most convenient and well-worn sights. He did point out a bit of quaint Roman pornography in one of the frescos, verifying that human sexuality was as hilarious and inventive then as now. 

Despite the lackluster interest, I could not help myself. I was thrilled. Possibly, a morsel of my enthusiasm transferred to the rest of the group when I picked up where the incompetence of the local guide left off. I pointed out the basilica and curia and their functions, the location of temples Jupiter and Apollo in the forum. In the House of the Vettii, a dry lecture in an Ohio college classroom came to life. Here was the atrium, tablinum, impluvium, triclinium, cubiculum, and columned garden peristyle – elements of the domus. We found the curved theater and tested its acoustics. The group grew quiet when we looked over the haunting plaster casts of victims trapped beneath the pyroclastic ash. A few of us (I forgot who) trekked to the far edge of the city, to the amphitheater, a modest version of Rome’s Colosseum. We climbed to the top seats, and I attempted to imagine the carnage and clamor that occurred there 2,000 years ago. I laughed at two teenage boys from another busload of tourists wrestling in the center of the arena. Over my shoulder, Vesuvius, a soft bluish mound, loomed benignly and silently on the horizon.

 

 

 

Nude Models

Two days a week I left my high school English class – Don Quixote and Dulcinea, Catharine and Heathcliff, and Miss Elliot, on whom I had a crush – a little early to drive to Kenyon College for figure drawing. This was my first encounter drawing the nude human form. Well, almost. Terri, a girl I was hoping to date, agreed to pose for a single session and a single drawing, reclining in a black vinyl bean bag chair in the corner of my room. Within a few minutes of scribing the page, my regard of her switched from the romantic to the analytic and aesthetic. I was in love with her, but I was more smitten with the comprehension of how to depict the female form – the desire to make an excellent drawing.

The figure drawing class was held on the upper floor of Bexley Hall, an odd, red brick gothic revival building. The students, all about a year older than me, sat on drawing “horses,” simple bench-like furniture where we leaned our drawing boards and with pencils, conte and charcoal painstakingly replicated a model’s pose on identical sheets of paper. It was an exciting time as I gained a sense of what art school might be like. The models, young, thin, work-study students, were adequate, but the poses were rarely challenging. At the outset of one session, when the usual model didn’t show up, the instructor asked another art student, a veteran of the class, to pose. With no hesitation, he stripped down and took his place. I found this more unsettling than when a model arrived for the pose in a robe. The act of disrobing made him more naked than nude. The models were often situated in a chair on top of a table. One painfully shy girl, on her first day, was so seated and after a drawing or two I noticed that her chair had shifted so that one chair leg was hanging off the edge. I could see the impending disaster but froze because if I called her attention to her peril, she would likely fall. And I was too shy to approach her. When the professor came my way, I would say something to him. But she shifted and both model and chair flipped over and off the table. Somehow, she landed on her feet. Though shaken and embarrassed, she was unharmed, but no longer keen on modeling.

The next fall, at art school, I mounted my drawing horse every Monday morning after art history, just like fourteen other eager 18-year-olds in tie-dye and ratty bell-bottom uniforms. We came to know the bodies of a variety of models, and they became part of our routine. They could be seen in their robes, smoking in the hall, or getting a cup of coffee or soup from the vending machines. We all groaned inwardly and rolled our eyes at one another when Perfect Girl was the model of the day. She was beautiful. Blonde, pale, petite and flawless. For the first ten minutes of our first class, most of the boys were in love with her and the girls were embarrassed for her – for the necessity of her nakedness. But soon we discovered her perfection was impossible to draw. It was as if our pencils refused to latch onto her contours. She was like drawing mist. Equally difficult was Yoga Guy. He had a long thick beard and graying hair that extended to his waist. His poses were extraordinary and daring in flexibility, often striking headstands and other ridiculous yoga positions. However, he was so skinny that if you happened to get a side view of his pose he nearly disappeared. The results on the page were what looked like hairy sticks. And then there was The Adonis. When he shed his robe, the women in the class became particularly quiet, but everyone was in love with him. Athletic, tastefully muscular, and exquisitely proportioned, his poses were dynamic and inspiring. Our drawings were exquisite on Adonis days. In sculpture class we modeled clay figurines of Curvaceous Mom. At forty-something, her body and the way she carried herself projected the confidence of a mother. For boys a long way from home, we wanted her to wrap us up in her arms (clothed of course) and tell us everything would be just fine, that we would be brilliant artists – and maybe take us home for dinner. 

There were a couple of oddballs. The Exhibitionist (aka, Happy-to-See-You-Guy) was a strangely shaped, squat, balding man. The male models usually wore a typical athletic supporter purchased in a sporting goods store. This guy donned a size-too-small black leather apparel obtained from an entirely different venue. Walking past the drawing studio one morning, I caught a glimpse of him posing for another class. He flashed a creepy smile while an obvious erection strained at his inadequate covering. For the painting class Bathing Beauty was integrated within an enormous and complex still-life construction in the center of the room. She couldn’t seem to sit still, the only skill required, and after an hour or so of fidgeting, lost interest in the task, wandered over to the paint-encrusted sink and began splashing water on her body, rubbing her limbs and humming, seemingly heedless of her incredulous onlookers. Her new preferred pose reminded me of a Greek Venus we studied in art history. The students felt sorry for her and after a bit, the professor gently shepherded her from the room.

Years later, as a new professor, for the first figure drawing class I taught, our model Tracy was pregnant with her first child. We were all her family on Tuesdays and Thursdays as we watched her belly, breasts and ankles swell over the course of the semester, her progress charted in the students’ drawings. We threw a little shower for her, and her baby arrived a week after the final critique.

David Sapp, writer and artist, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.