Some People Worship God, Some People Worship Machineheads...

In the morning I woke up and had breakfast with my uncle. He had already finished eating by the time I went downstairs but sat with me as I downed a plate of eggs that the morning cook, Ro, made for me. She was a sweet, stout lady with a shock of short black hair and a Middletown accent, which is like a watered-down Brooklyn one. She had the look of a very hard life and I wanted to pry but I didn’t dare. "I love your uncle," she told me as she set everything in front of me - juice, coffee, milk, sugar, silverware.
"Thank you very much," I said as she set down my plate.
"Eh, no need to thank me," she answered quickly and scurried away.

Vinny and I made plans to go for a drive after lunch, which would be after mass. I half-dreaded attending a Catholic mass for the first time in years, not knowing what to expect or if I would be smote down, but when I took my seat and the service began, the words came as though unleashed from a spring somewhere in my memory. I thought I had forgotten all the prayers, all the responses, but I found myself mouthing the entire mass, his part and mine, as it proceeded. The smell of the candle wax and incense, the hymn books in each pew were a comfort rather than something to fear or loathe. Since my uncle is in a wheelchair, a special altar was set up on a low table on the same level as the pews. It was fascinating to watch him perform the mass from the same spot and then wheel himself in front of the table to give the Eucarist.

People who attend mass on a Wednesday morning are pretty damn devout. What I found curious was that each person honestly looked devout on the outside - the way the held their hands or responded to the readings made it so obvious. There was one middle-aged woman who looked so humbled when receiving communion that I thought she might collapse. You could tell she took the sacrament extremely seriously, as did the tiny woman who gave out the wine. She bit into the communion wafer with a reverence I’ve only seen at funerals or on the faces of pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square.

A blind man sat in the front pew. It was obvious that he attends every day because Vinny and his wine lady had a system worked out for him. He went first, and my uncle wheeled himself to the edge of the pew to place the wafer in the man’s hands, then wheeled himself backwards so the man could step out of the pew and, feeling his way to the right using the pew as a guide, he reached the wine lady, who was standing next to the pew with her one hand resting on it. When the blind man felt her hand, he reached for the cup, and when he finished she stepped aside and let him continue feeling his way along the pew until he reached the end, where a large column sat. Feeling his way around the column, he reached the opposite end of his pew, and after walking through it, took his seat again. It was really neat to see how they adapted so well and I wondered how long it took before they all had the routine down like clockwork as they do now.

So I learned, like it or not, that the Catholic faith is and always will be a part of who I am. I disagree with it a lot, but I’m blessed to have an uncle as cool as Vinny to explain it. "Don’t look for logic in religion," he said later on as we had lunch in a diner. "When you start looking for logic you lose your faith. And what do you have when you lose your faith but a hole in your life? You can try to fill it with boyfriends or girlfriends or material things but it’s no substitute for a strong faith in God, and knowing that, whether you can prove it or not, He is with you and loves you and will take care of you." I asked him about Creationism and he said, "Oh, it’s poppycock. God made the world but whether or not he made it in seven days, I don’t think that is true." Then I asked him if he believed my good friend, who is gay, would go to Hell. "Oh, goodness, no!" he said. "I hate that. I hate when people on earth try to take the place of God and say that someone will or will not go to Hell. Only God can judge people. Now, if your friend is gay then some may say that it is his cross to bear, and in some cases it is. It seems to be a very unhappy life, the gay lifestyle. It is very much based on looks and youth and sex and then, if you are lucky enough to find someone to spend your life with, you can’t get married. It is a very sad way to live."
"So you’re not against it?" I asked, "it" meaning same-sex marriage in my head. I didn’t say it outright because I was enjoying hearing such liberal views from a Catholic priest and didn’t want to jinx it. If he said, "No", then I would take that as truth and proof enough that Catholics can still be cool.
"No, I’m not against it. How could I be against the human condition?"
Jackpot. I convinced myself that by "human condition" he meant the desire to be married to someone and share that quality of life and that was good enough for me. Whether he meant that or not, I’ll never know, but in my head it fit perfectly.

I got Vinny back into the car and realized how inconvenient it must be to be handicapped. I had to park next to the ramp, get the walker out of the backseat, literally pick up his left leg and work it out of the car while he pulled himself up with the ceiling bar, set the walker up, pull him out, make sure he had the walker and his balance, then move the car, park it, then walk back and make sure he could make it up the ramp. If it was that many steps for me just to help, I can only imagine how many steps have to go into his everyday life - getting dressed, taking a shower, going to the bathroom, things like that. I know he has people to help him do some things but not everything. When we got back to the priory, he remarked on this, saying, "It helps a lot that I am comfortable with myself and have faith that God won’t put me in a situation I can’t handle. I went from being very in charge of my life to being completely helpless in six months. If I wasn’t very comfortable with myself and loved myself from the get-go, I would be up a creek!" As he said this, he pulled out his teeth and handed them to me. "Put those on the sink in the bathroom, please." I didn’t even know he had dentures.

After lunch but before heading back to the priory, we went for that drive up Rt. 211, through the towns of Wallkill, Scotchtown, and Montgomery. Montgomery is the town where Orange County Choppers, of Discovery Channel’s "American Chopper" fame, is based and I was thinking of going there and asking for an interview from the guys on the show. I wanted to ask them how it felt to go from being some machinehead to some famous machinehead with groupies. I was planning on going later, since I had Vinny in the car and was a little dressed up having gone to church earlier, but I wanted to make sure I could find it. Vinny and I stopped at a gas station and I asked the kid, who was wearing an OCC t-shirt, where Factory Street was. He showed me, and told me that the guys are real nice so I shouldn’t have any problems.

Pulling out of the station, Paulie Sr., one of the main guys on the show, passed us on a chopper. I recognized him from his signature white mustache. He was going a lot faster than we were, but we passed him again a few miles down the road where he had turned onto a dirt road to head back the other way. That was pretty coincidental, I thought. I took it as a promising sign that maybe I would get my interview.

Vinny and I went back to the church and I followed Janet like a shadow, watching her cook and asking her to tell me stories of her foster kids. She obliged, telling me in her Scottish lilt about the one foster child she has legally adopted, a troubled boy named Manuel. "I didn’t want to do it," she said. "But no one else was going to take this child and I knew he would just end up on the streets and in the system." She told me I didn’t have to go to grad school for an M.S.W. to work as a foster care administrator, or even social worker. "It’s like with private schools that don’t require teaching certification for their teachers. You just work for a private foster care place and you could start tomorrow."
"Still, that scares me," I said. "In situations that delicate, I’d feel better having training."
"Oh, sure, that makes sense," she said.

I met up with the priests during Scotch Time and politely refused - my throat was hurting and I was sleepy and didn’t want to make either one worse. We had a nice dinner of country-fried chicken and green beans and afterwards Vinny and I went upstairs and told me more stories of the family. He went to bed at 8 and I went back to Montgomery to see what I could find. Even if I couldn’t snag one of the guys as they were leaving the shop, there seemed to be nice restaurants there where I could at least read my book and watch the Royals spank the Yankees.
The first place I went was OCC. It was easy enough to find and seemed abandoned. It was getting dark but I took some pictures of the shop. There was a beautiful black hummer with custom OCC rims, another white hummer, and a little red Boxster convertible in the lot, along with a beat-up white pick-up truck, the big OCC tractor trailer/RV, and the dirty grey pick-up truck I recognized as the one the youngest son had off-roaded into a pond in one of the few episodes I’d seen. I got the pictures more for my friend Drew than anything else, because he’s a huge fan. Walking around the shop grounds, I toyed with the idea of coming back the next morning, until I saw the sign on the door that said, "Do Not Enter. By Appointment Only." You have to call just to make an appointment, you can’t even walk in and make one.

At first I took this as the shop guys being superior, but I found out later that the place has a lot of groupies that camp out on the other side of the street waiting for a chance to talk to The Great Paulie Teutel (I think that’s their last name?). The town locals call the groupies, "The Hardcores". If the sign weren’t there, then any old redneck could walk in off the street and bug the front desk chick for hours, so I guess it makes sense.

Still, I wasn’t about to call to make one - it would sound crazy, some girl calling and saying, "Uh, hey, I’m just some random chick who lives in a car and is writing a book on nothing in particular and I wanted to come by and talk to the Paulie’s about nothing in particular, just fame, kinda, y’know?" Well, okay, actually I did call this morning and the girl was so nice and receptive but apologized that because of short notice, the guys were too busy. But she did wish me luck on my trip, which was pretty cool.

Anyway, I went back into the center of town and got started talking to a group of old men and one woman on the corner. They laughed when I told them how I had thought I could just waltz into the OCC shop, saying, "It’s changed so much now. We’ve known them for years so this fame is a little strange. Still, they’re nice people, they’ve stayed nice people. But that youngest, Mikey, he is wild! He’s even crazier than they put on the show!" The woman, the little sister of one of the older men, a short Italian woman with a killer Italian smile, leaned over to me and said, "They don’t impress me one bit. It’s just a show about a guy abusing his kids. I wouldn’t give them the time of day and I don’t when I get the chance. And their bikes are ugly. If I had $125,000 to spend on a bike, I’d buy a Harley for $20,000 and spend the rest on a vacation, not some custom Paulie number." I laughed.

Later on, sitting in a bar called Copperfield’s with my copy of "Assasination Vacation" and a diet soda, a middle-aged couple next to me admitted that they think the fame is all a little silly, just a chance for some rednecks to feel akin to other rednecks. "We were down in New Orleans, and here comes this fat couple, probably from Alabama, and they’ve got their Orange County Choppers shirts on, and the guy had a hat, too. We didn’t even say anything. To us, they’re just the family down the street. And it’s just about Paulie being mean to the kids."

Well, I may never get my interview or tour of the shop, but I know what the locals think of the whole thing. And that’s all that really matters sometimes.