Latin American families are generally Catholic. I personally never had much faith and it was even more exhausted by my family’s faith and how it had habituated them. As I grew out of my faith and into my major, philosophy, not only was a language fast becoming a barrier impasse but a cultural barrier was manifesting as well. Diplomatic discussions are not easy in a household still beholden to a certain zealotry. I believe Catholicism is Gothic considering the doctrine of original sin and the historical treatment of non-believers. In this entry the perspective assumes a nameless narrator’s. This is in more ways a work of fiction that resulted from many observances I noted through familial interactions wherein I regularly felt a loss of satisfactory intimacy due to cultural differences. Its hard to make a story about little things you just see growing up. But I collected enough snapshots took make a collage, so to speak. I recalled the parental son dynamics of Psycho and What You See In the Dark, while keeping in the perspective of the latter’s 2nd person. Although it is of note, what I have written here is a nameless character who struggles with an abject, internal strife as he engages the superstition of Catholicism by recalling many of my own adolescent interactions with my parents. The character, however, is mostly dramatized to display what a young, fifteen year old suburban, male may struggle with, such as teenage insecurity and masculinity issues.It doesn’t help to be conflicted between cultural outlooks on how to overcome these issues when one feels a sense of ubiquitous guilt of self. I think the family in this story is much less middle class than mine, I imagined them as an even more traditional, non-college educated immigrant family than my own. I did this because it allowed me to tell an internal story that was voyeuristic in that it was so miserable. Not unlike an epistolary, I wrote the passing thoughts of the nameless character as impressed upon a reader assuming that role. My own mother took to praying things away and forcing me to do it with her. In a lot of ways father took to asking me to grow up so that I could help the family.

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“Your houses shall be brown and beige and tan.
Can ethics and aesthetics co-exist
So seriously?  Find pattern in belief
And dream the dream most people want to dream
Of God’s assent.  Now reconstruct a church
That celebrates what’s most unnatural
In nature:  Make your Christ a man who hates
The things you’re not.”

– Karl Rosenquist, “Orange County.”

Catholic Guilt

You were the epitome of teenage neurosis as Dr. McCann diagnosed you as clinically depressed in your private high school’s psyche ward. Dr. McCann did not use a legal pad to annotate your descent toward unspeakably haphazard suicide attempts, he simply stacked white copy paper on top of white copy paper until he seemingly had a mound of abject printing sheets as his notes on you. You didn’t know what to call it. But you knew you needed to talk. Teachers gave up on you before your coaches did. But at least you knew where your father kept his gun. Though, you only knew that you only knew for certain that were troubled because it shamed you.

Your mother’s eyes were like glass until they began to shudder at the nerves, melting her mascara unto Spanglish hyperventilation. You felt what could be called her revulsion. Your father sighed a sigh that not only vacated the aerosol of carbon dioxide and the tar of stucco work from his lungs, but from every last chamber of his palpitating heart. You felt what could be called his resignation.

The electronic bell chimed in the halls, the classroom doors recoiled into their rubber stops, locks clamored in between locker after locker, and then the air stagnated in the campus’ trees amid the summer’s heat. You sauntered under a tree’s shadow of shade, tore your fingernails into the bark, took a deep breath and prayed for this intervention to take. It did not.
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Your mother prayed the rosary once a week for you, she said, “Dios te bendeciría si usted sólo quiserias amarlo.” You held her hand, pitying the way she pitied you but were, nonetheless, her accomplice. Your father went to work, only to come home and toil housework, reminding you, “A tu edad, yo ya había tenido hijos que preocuparse.” You bit down on your jaw as your third row of molars began to tear through your gums with the taste of blood.

Knowing that your parents could not be trusted marked your trajectory toward adulthood. At your age, their lives had been defined. That made you feel less than empowered, still more than privileged. You did the math, so you obviously knew what sex was, but now you had to figure out drugs, drinking and driving all through cautious, empirical means—not to mention covertly, considering both your mother and father’s lack of tolerance would likely result in your excommunication from the home they had built and you were threatening to burn down, one desperate cigarette at a time.

Your father began to threaten you with physical violence again. It was the way of his father. If he could not make an example of you for your sister, he would have to pay someone to sort you out before he made you a bastard.
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“We are made sick and commanded to be well,” began who you would think was your family priest, “and only through suffering and accepting the grace of God can we find true happiness is.” But this was not your family priest speaking, it was Dr. Ramirez, the U.C.L.A. psychologist you were sure wanted to exorcise you. When Dr. Ramirez spoke to your parents in Spanish, it calmed them, though when he spoke to you in English he antagonized your adolescent religious skepticism.

You talked and talked, waiting to be cured, alluding to the physical and emotional child abuse that your afterschool programs taught you to report, though you could never recall the Spanish to defend yourself at home and only knew how to take punches like a man, all of which could not be unlearned. One afternoon, tired of the lies your father and mother had taken to telling your younger sister about your biweekly pediatric check-ups, you were desperate enough to be cured, medically.

You told the psychiatrist the truth. You told her that you had exhausted how much of your life you were willing to deconstruct week after week so that you could reschedule and commence with the half-truths all over again. The psychiatrist never looked up from her prescription pad and you never forgot her inattention after she issued your pharmaceutical trial, on the controlled substances form you were fated to abuse. She rescheduled your litmus follow up. And there you went, lobotomized one capsule at a time.

You took the Lexapro in your pocket, contemplating what it meant to be on the other side of it as the Logo stared up at you. You recalled the side effects. You told your soccer coach, regretfully, that your behavior may become bipolar in hopes that he, as another surrogate father-figure, would grant you the wisdom necessary to either follow through or provide you the blue print on how to “man up”—as your own father demanded of you.

You stared at yourself intently in mirrors, at first naively refusing to gradually adulterate your neurology’s naturalism. You then took the plunge and felt the high. You took them all. It was for a good cause. Soon, after a year of new prescription trials and years of practice, you began to rationalize to yourself why taking a fist full of a prescription only referred to as 80mg of S489 by your psychiatrist also was for a good cause. You were not worried when you began to faint, you only began to become worried when you became prone to flashes of lights, then mirages of the whole spectrum tinting the peripheral of your ocular nerves. Street lights became celestial matter, orbiting like planetary models as they beamed across your windshield. You saw that you were in purgatory. By the time it was not quite simply a bright light, you began to realize that the dice of your brain’s biochemistry had already been rolled. But you had one last epiphany as you watched the ionic bonds of drool break from your mouth in the throes of another headache. You saw yourself as a flat-circle, circling an abyss. As the saliva fell further from you and onto the floor, you saw a snake determined to spend all of time eating its own tail until it choked. You stayed home from school that, you were sick but not in the way you had rationalized. You walked into you parent’s room. You took up your father’s gun. You could say you manned up then.  Pushing it into your last wisdom tooth, you felt like this was the only decision you had made your whole life. It was for a good cause.