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They Were No Good by Mike Finley © 2019
I have a good friend today who doesn’t feel about things the way I do. Pete criticizes me, for instance, for needing to be loved. Which I do. To him, it is a dagger in the gut, to be accused of being needy. It is a sophisticated, grown-up, mocking insult. I answer, like a child, “But I don’t mind saying I like being loved. And I like loving as many people as I can. That’s kind of the deal people can make with one another. Is that so wrong?” I love even him. He is funny, and intelligent, and wonderfully well-read, and I know he loves me, too, because not many people are willing to be his friend for thirty years, as I have done. And I know he is loyal, that when the chips are down, he is always there for me. Solid. But Jeez.
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So I’m driving him and our dogs to the dog park, and I unwittingly left Rubber Soul in my car radio. I realize I am in trouble, but not before he hears a bar or two of “I’m Looking Through You.” “Could you turn that off, please?” “Sure, no problem. Not a Beatles fan?” “Well, they’re not very good.” My body turns inside out. All my organs are dangling on the outside of me. That’s how taken aback I was with his statement. “They’re not very good?” All I could do was repeat his words. “We only like them because we were young when we heard them. They’re nostalgia.” Now, I know where he was coming from. He was saying they weren’t good in the way that Mahler, or Dante, or Rembrandt were good. Academy-approved good. And what he was saying -- that the music we love places an emotional garland around our youths. It’s sentimental. I’m doing it big-time in this memoir. 3
But Jeez. I did not respond, but I simmered. We walked the dogs, I dropped him off, and then my mind went into high gear attacking Pete’s proposition. He wasn’t just obviating the Beatles, he was snuffing out everyone I loved. The Stones, the Temptations, the Singing Nun, the Who, Harry Belafonte, the Beach Boys, the Kinks. He was committing this mental genocide so he could feel above it all. Didn’t he know how much they suffered? Doing what they did involved enormous amounts of pain, poverty, depression, self-hatred, and worse. They were cheated, physically attacked, driven mad by drugs and confusion. For every act that made it through to stardom, another hundred acts were broken like bundles of sticks. Everyone died, one way or the other, putting a few tunes in our heads. They suffered for us. So we could rock. I think of Little Anthony, who spoke to every breaking heart there was. Hear him singing: I know you … don't know what I'm going through, Standing here … looking at you.
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Tell me Little Anthony did not suffer for us all. Those songs encircled us in lassos of love, they were given to us and us only. They were our treasure, they were the passports we carried through our generation. They laminated us against the losses and failures we experienced. They bound us to one another in perpetuity. They were our insurance against despair. Oh, Pete! Oh, and they were too good. Very. In my outrage I left out my own history. Before I heard the band in question, I heard only Gregorian chant, song by pubescent boys at a minor seminary in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. This was how every day began, at 5:30 p.m. The boys slide from their bunks and tiptoe to the porcelain trough to brush teeth and spit. Now dressed, we pound down two tall flights of stairs and exit into the still-dark morning.
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Down at the pond the ducks are quacking. The footfalls of all us boys -- 71 enrolled in all -- pound on the planks to the priests’ residence. We enter the rectory and pass through an underground corridor to climb three final steps to the chapel entrance. From the darkness of the tunnel, everything suddenly becomes light. A dozen tall, lit candles. The censer, swinging. Fragrant smoke rising to the ceiling. We kneel on the bare boards. Our knees have gotten used to it. Before them is the crucified Christ suspended, and below him in a mosaic, plastered to the altar, the breast of the mother pelican, jetting blood to feed her babies. We all believe that while we slept through the night, Jesus was up on that cross, limp as a dishrag, suffering nonstop for us. That’s when I first heard the band in question, at age 13, in November of 1963. I was a first year 6
student at a school for boys wishing to become priests, run by the Society of Mary, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I heard it on our homemade radio in the basement, where the boys played shuffleboard and ping-pong. The song was “Please Please Me.” My recollection is that this happened within a few weeks of the Kennedy assassination. I was playing table tennis pong with Bill Grooms, also from my home town of Amherst, back in Ohio. I heard the sounds and my head jerked away. Grooms scored a point one because I wasn’t looking. I liked records, and my family had a stack of 45s back home in Ohio. Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Peggy Lee’s “Fever.” We also had Broadway musical LPs -- My Fair Lady, Camelot. My teenage sister Kathy had a bunch of Elvis Presley records that she adored. This is the stanza that jumps to mind. I will refer back to it at some point: I don't want to be your tiger Cause tigers play too rough I don't want to be your lion Cause lions ain't the kind you love enough 7
But this song was different. It was really fast, faster than any song I knew of in the Bobby Rydell era. And it had a weird harmonica bit, then several very insistent voices that reminded me most of the Clancy Brothers records my mom liked -- there was a reediness and a recklessness about their harmonies. It sounded like they were selling something, and issuing some kind of challenge to whoever heard: “Here we are. What do you think?” A few days later I caught another song, “Love Me, Do.” And the disk jockey gave their name: Beatles. They were in England. That was weird, too. While “Please Please Me” was fast, “Love Me Too” had a strange, slowed down rhythm. And the sound was nothing like the polished pop records you heard in the juke box. It was kind of messy. You suspected they were playing their own instruments. That was unusual. And they had the same personality from song to song. Kind of a crazy personality. Because I was at a seminary, I was ill-equipped to follow up much on this discovery. We only got to listen to the radio between 7 and 8 pm. On Saturdays we walked to an ice cream parlor near 8
the highway. The juke box had some surf records -“In the warm California sun.” “Sugar Shack.” But no Beatles. Then I got a single-page letter from my brother Pat. He has written me maybe five letters in my entire life. The front page gave some news about what was happening in the family back in Amherst, Ohio. The back page, however, had a pencil drawing of some kind of insect, and the phrase Ringo Starr. I did not know what that meant. Maybe I would learn more at Christmas in Amherst. I had one friend at the seminary -- one person that I felt liked me, and I liked him. The rap on me from my cohort was that I was “immature” -- an odd thing for 14-year-olds to call a 13-year-old, right? The friend’s name was Bob, and he was nothing like me. He was extremely skinny, even for a 14-year-old, no shoulders, no chin, just dandruff and a clip-on tie. He was not destined for a soccer team. He spoke in a nasal, adenoidal voice. He was always pushing his glasses up. 9
Bob was big city -- Oak Park, Illinois -- and he was very intelligent, in a way I had never known. He knew grown-up things, like what liberal and conservative meant. He had opinions. And he talked to me as if I also had thoughts and opinions, or could be taught how to have them. He was kind. And he was the first friend in my life who saw something in me. My favorite memory was that we passed a notebook back and forth in study hall, taking turns writing scenes from a nasty little play satirizing the egomaniac priests and gung-ho seniors. It was all written in the backdrop of Rome at the time of the clampdown on Christians. Bob’s writing was deeper than mine, but I thought my gags were better. The play-in-a-notebook had a title: “Praxis For Prefect.” We kept the notebook very secret, in Bob’s locked desk drawer. The seminary was a very routine place, and there were surprisingly few areas where you could just be friendly with a friend. But Bob and I found a way. There was a duck pond at the base of the 10
seminary hill. Perhaps 300 yards around. Priests circled the duck pond whispering from their breviaries, and pointing things out to the air. The ultra-pious kids did likewise, peeling off a decade on their rosaries. I never got that. But Bob and I just found our place in the circle and talked about whatever, including the play. And on Saturdays, we climbed up the seminary farm hayloft ladder, and swing the bale door open, and dangled our legs and exchanged play ideas and talked about our families. His family sounded super-smart and neurotic. My family was a mess. I once had the feeling, talking like this, that it was awfully intimate, like when boys kiss girls. But surely that was wrong. Another time, we sat beside one another in the music room, down under the old mansion where the priests lived. Lesley Gore was on the turntable, singing “All Alone Am I.� Suddenly Bob stood on the sofa, threw on a kind of scarf or boa, and began dancing from one item of furniture item to another, like a fairy from a fairy tale. I sat in silence. 11
Late in the school year I was called up to the rector’s office. The rector was like the CEO of the seminary. He thought he was very urbane and smart, but he was really just cruel. “I see you’re friends with Mr. Dubiel,” he said. “Yes, good friends,” I responded. He drilled deeper. “You know, it is important, especially at your age, to be wary of sins of the flesh.” “Pardon me, Father?” I was trying to picture flesh sinning. The only flesh I had experience with was the crayon color. “Aquinas called it concupiscence, and it applies to all temptations of lust.” I knew what lust was -- raping and humping and like that. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked, genuinely perplexed. “I think it would be best if you and Mr. Dubiel only saw each other with a chaperone on hand,” he said. I didn’t know what a chaperone was, either. 12
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I said. “I’m saying cool it with Mr. Dubiel. We know what you’re doing.” And he flung the play notebook through the air, and it landed at my feet. “Yes, we know everything,” he said. Friends -- I gradually figured out what the rector was saying, and I felt a wave of deep shame come over me. For the rest of the school year, I could not look Bob in the eyes, or speak to him, much less write plays or walk around the pond. They gave Bob the same talk. We were in disgrace. And I felt bad that I did nothing to stand up to this railroading that I barely understood. I betrayed the friendship. When I left the seminary, being 14 now, I was getting interested in fleshy things. Not with boys but with girls. I never went back to the church. But the incident haunted me through the years. In my thirties, I thought I could piece together my seminary memories into a novel. The book I wrote was similar to the play Bob and I wrote in the notebook. We made fun of the priests and the prudes. 13
But when I got the story of Bob and me, the tone changed. It became a kind of shy, doomed love story. I knew what the rector had done was wicked. I wrote the book to set matters straight. It was called The Usable Book, after our chapel hymnal/prayerbook, Liber Usualis. I even had Alex Hailey’s agent peddling the book for me. So I had hopes of it being the next Confederacy of Dunces. But literary fashion had moved past Roman Catholic memoirs, and I was screwed. Then I found a way -- too elaborate to explain -- to call Bob Dubiel. I was very nervous, but excited to talk to him again. “Hello?” “Robert, it’s your old friend from the seminary -Mike Finley.” Silence. Then, we began catching up. Bob surprised me with his new calling, as a kind of faith healer using shamanic processes to work through deep traumas, to heal people using the spirit. Still Catholic, but crazy Catholic. 14
That was closer to Jesus than anything we heard at the seminary. “Bob,”I said, “I need to ask you a question. We were tried and found guilty of being sexual with one another. Is that your take on it, too?” “Then, I need to ask, Were you gay? Cuz I didn’t know what that even was.” “Oh, heavens yes!” Bob told me that half the school was blowing the other half, in the showers, in the dorms, in the priests’ residences. In the rector’s quarters. And the gayer you were, the farther you went in the Marist system. Bob had made it through Novitiate, but not to Holy Orders.” I felt great relief at hearing this, but I had another matter to discuss. I told him about the book I wrote, largely about us, and our mysterious friendship. “I was hoping I could send you a xeroxed copy of the book, just so you know what I was thinking at the time.” He agreed to look at it, and I sent it to him. But I never heard from him again, and it’s been like 25 years. 15
I thought for a long time I had offended him, or he did not like the characterization. Over time, however, I have concluded that Robert did love me. It was all new to him, too -- he was no predator at fourteen. I think the book made him sad, because it was a first-love situation, and I tried to cash in on it.
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