Kevin Sampsell - A Common Pornography - A Memoir

Dad never found out that I was skipping so much. I did go to the class just enough to earn a certificate. It said I was a confirmed Catholic.

I went toa friend’s church with him when I was sixteen. It was much more exciting than the dull Catholic church that Dad and I went to. I told Dad I was thinking about switching churches, not realizing it would be a big deal.

He was not happy about this. Mark had gone to Mass with him before, when I was a baby, but somehow was able to get out of it eventually. I was the only family member who went to Mass with him. I used to wonder why Mom didn’t go either, but Dad explained to me once, with a dismissive wave of his hand, that she wasn’t religious. He thought I was having a spiritual crisis and made an appointment for me to see the priest, to have a talk with him at the church offices.

Dad explained to me that the church I wanted to go to was a Protestant church and that the word Protestant came from protest . “The Protestant Church is for people who protest the Catholic Church,” he explained. “The Catholic Church is the original faith and Protestants were the people who left the Church.”

The priest chided me lightly with a mix of pity and disappointed detachment when I visited him the next day. I looked around at the office, which was down the street from the church, and wondered if he lived there. There were alarming signs of normalcy—a television, regular clothes draped on the arm of a couch, some mystery paperbacks, a dusty refrigerator. I nodded and half-listened to his lecture, but mostly my mind wandered. I realized that the part of Mass I would miss the most was communion. For some reason that was never clear to me, I wasn’t supposed to eat an hour before church started. So by the time everyone lined up for the communion wafer, I was starved and ready to consume what essentially was a snack to me. In fact, I thought it would be amazing to break into the church some night and steal a whole box of the things. I imagined myself chomping away on them as I watched TV.

The priest cracked my daydream by asking if I wanted to put my soul in danger by abandoning the church. I felt bad because I hadn’t been listening close enough to what he’d been saying, so I simply said no, I didn’t want to endanger my soul. I would remain a Catholic.

After church the following week, the priest shook my hand and gave me his best look of forgiveness.

After this “lapseof faith” (as Dad called it), he acted a little more cold to me at church, sitting a couple of inches farther away and never looking my way. At one Sunday evening Mass, I suddenly started to feel warm and queasy. I was stuck between an older obese man on my right and Dad on my left. I told Dad that I needed to go to the bathroom, but he acted like he didn’t hear me. It was still early in the service and one of the third-string priests was monotoning some particular passage so heavy with ancient metaphor that it made my sickness speed up my throat. I threw up a little on my pant leg and Dad looked at it and shook his head, as if to say, You’d better not do that again. The obese man on my right had his eyes closed as if he were sleeping there. I looked at Dad and hoped he would let me out. When everyone finally stood up for the main gospel, Dad looked at me and said, “You stink. Go wait outside.”

I walked over to the bowling alley instead and played Centipede for twenty minutes, watching the clock carefully. A white smear of sick dried on the left leg of my black pants.

A year orso after the fire, we were still living in the small, windowless apartment. A ten-year-old girl named Jaynee and her mother lived in the apartment above us. I don’t think she had a father and her mom was rarely seen. Whenever Dad wasn’t rebuilding the old house, he was hanging out with this little girl. They’d watch TV, go for walks, and play games together; things he’d never do with my brothers or me. Matt and I were curious what the deal was. They seemed to be keeping secrets. I even remember Jaynee going to Mass with us once. We suspected Dad of being a pervert. (Even before Jaynee, we noticed how he would always stare at young girls.)

We began following them on their walks and watching them through the window curtains when they would watch TV, sitting close together on the couch. Even Mom sensed something and acted tense whenever Jaynee was around. The whole family, except Dad of course, began to secretly hate Jaynee. We’d sometimes split up with walkie-talkies and spy from the bushes or trees that lined the alleyways and ditches of our neighborhood. I don’t think we were jealous of them, but on some nights we’d lie in bed and hear sounds from upstairs. We wondered what was inside her heart.

This is howI learned what the word monotony means.

Instead of using the money from the insurance company to hire builders for the house, Dad decided to “save money” by doing it himself. What he hadn’t bargained for was that it would take him much longer to get it done that way. So for four years we lived in an apartment that was too small and too ugly. Matt or Mark or I would take turns helping Dad do different things at the old house. The first few things, like smashing down walls with sledge hammers and sorting through ashen remains, were fun. But then came the boring stuff like measuring and insulating. Our big job then, as Dad’s assistants, was to keep the tape measure in place, or hold the flashlight when the afternoon became night.

We’d have to do this for hours each day. If it seemed like we weren’t needed, we’d ask Dad: “Can I go play next door with Darren?” And he’d say: “No, I might need you to hold the flashlight.”

Each morning would become a game between my brothers and me of who could leave the apartment fastest. The last one always lost. “Say, Matt, I mean Mark, I mean Kevin, don’t go planning anything today. I’ll need your help over at the house.”

The whole rebuilding process was slower than anybody ever thought it would be. Help became the most painful word for my brothers and me to hear.

The day thatMt. Saint Helens blew, I thought it was Doomsday. I spent the morning in church with my dad and when we came out around noon, the sky was dark and ashen, as if the sun had disappeared. Instead of going to the church basement for doughnuts, everyone stood frozen and talked quietly on the front steps of St. Joseph’s.

Someone said, “Well, it really happened.”

It was probably a half hour later when I finally caught on to what was happening.

The next morning, I went out with the neighbor kids and we gathered as much ash from the sidewalks and car hoods as we could. We filled up tiny bottles that formerly held Gerber baby food. Someone said the bottles would be worth money someday.

It was spring break when this happened, and when I went back to school the next week, everyone had bottles of ash to show.

The hydroplane racesthat happened on the Columbia River were a big event every summer in the Tri-Cities. The population of about 100,000 swelled to 150,000 for race weekend. The scene at the actual race site was like a big wild party, with people lined up along both sides of the river—the Pasco side and all through Columbia Park on the Kennewick side. There were bleary-eyed union workers freely swigging beer, stereos cranked up loud, scantily clad headbanger girls, the smell of sweat and cocoa butter lotion, and some fistfights here and there.