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Forbidden Fruit
by John A. Ward
When I was a child, and up until the time I left home at twenty-one, I was a practicing Catholic. We were expected to go to confession every Saturday and Mass every Sunday, and receive Holy Communion at Mass. God help you if you weren't in the state of grace when you received communion, because you would go straight to hell.
The Ten Commandments were the law. Most of them gave me no trouble. I would occasionally take the Lord's name in vain, fail to honor my father and mother, and bear false witness, but they were easy to avoid. The one I had the most trouble with was adultery. Not adultery itself, because technically, either you or your co-conspirator has to be married for you even to have a chance of committing adultery, but there were lesser included offenses. These consisted of fornication, heavy petting, light petting, necking, French kissing, masturbation, and looking at pictures of naked or semi-naked members of the opposite sex. I could always count on adultery to give me something to confess. So week after week, I knelt in the dark as the priest slid back the partition and I said, "Bless me Father, for I have sinned." I recited my litany of offenses, said my three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys, made a good Act of Contrition, and promised never to sin again. It was a vow I upheld until next time the serpent reared its ugly head, which happened with a regularity rivaling flatulence on an all-bean diet. Yet I perpetuated the farce because I believed, on each occasion when I purged my soul, that surely that time I was on the road to sainthood.
I may have been naive and innocent, because I had no sibling of the opposite sex close to my age. So, I had to learn about sex the best I could by myself. I had nobody I could ask about what the other sex was like without crossing a forbidden boundary. My brother Charlie and sister Catherine were about six years younger than I and a year apart. Once I heard Charlie ask Cathy if she had a thing like a barrel between her legs like he did. From the ensuing conversation, which I heard only from the hallway, it sounded like she showed him that she did not, and they had a dispassionate discussion about their anatomical differences.
Edward, my son, and Kelley, my daughter, were also born a year apart. Ed once told Kelley in the bath, when we thought they were too young to have noticed such things, that she had a penis when she was born, but he cut it off. Anne had to assure her it wasn't true.
Although I was close to celibate due to the extreme fanaticism with which girls protected their virtue in the fifties, I believed I was living in sin because I thought about sex all the time. Yes, even thinking about it was a sin and the surest way to think about something is to try not to think about it.
I was saved from damnation when I met Anne. After that, whether I believed in sin or not, I didn't care. I felt heaven couldn't be much better than what we had together. I stopped going to confession. I threw myself into sex with abandon. Damn the libidos and full speed ahead. I think I was a pagan all along. I just had to find out. Like Eldridge Cleaver said, "Just because a cat is born in an oven doesn't make it a biscuit."
I tried to go back to the church after we moved to San Antonio. I even got Anne to go to a few meetings with me until one of the deacons, who was facilitating the group, told her that it wasn't enough to lead a good life to get into heaven. You had to be holy, too. That was the end of it for her. She thought it was the stupidest thing she had ever heard. It was akin to the time a nun told her that animals couldn't get into heaven. With Anne walking out, that was the end of it for me, too. I committed to being mortal. I followed her and the snake, as Adam had followed Eve before me. The killer angels closed the gate forever behind us and we inherited the earth.
John A. Ward was born on Staten Island, attended Wagner College in the early 60's, sold his first poem to Leatherneck magazine, and became a scientist. He is now in San Antonio running, writing and living with his dance partner. He has published in Doorknobs & Bodypaint, Clockwise Cat, Apollo's Lyre, Toasted Cheese, Green Tricycle, Ascent Aspirations, Alighted Ezine, Lit Bits, Cenotaph Pocket Edition, The San Antonio Express-News, Antithesis Common, Wild Child, Static Movement, Greenbeard, Holy Cuspidor, Idlewheel, Cautionary Tale, Sentence, Sun Poetic Times, Byline, Quirk, ken*again, R-KV-R-Y, The Smoking Poet, Long Story Short and Rose & Thorn. Links to his work can be found here.
