Yes, Patricia Lockwood’s ‘PriestDaddy’ is both a Priest and a Daddy
A memoir of one helluva raucous, rockin,’ bombastic iconoclastic dude
Someone I’d rather read about than live with.
Especially if the writer is the poetic virtuoso, Patricia Lockwood.
She makes it her story. Even the part that happens before she’s born. Generously damning verbal arrows nail her subject to the rectory wall. And each time, Priest Daddy shapeshifts to another dimension of the demonic, without escaping her pen’s grasp.
Which makes the reading of PriestDaddy delicious, no matter how dastardly his deeds.
Wait, Priest Daddy? Is there such a thing?
Apparently. If you come to the priesthood after marrying and starting a family and pass the Psychopath Test. If this priest daddy is any indication, the bar is pretty low.
Priest daddy, AKA Father Greg Lockwood, when not robed for rites, lives in his ever-thinning underwear. His halcyon days include speedos, motorcycles, and the steady, heady rockin’ rhythms of his many electric guitars. Hardly clerical material.
But then, he goes off to war. In a submarine where they watch The Exorcist seventy-two times. As Patricia explains it:
Put yourself in his place. You’re a drop of blood at the center of the ocean, which pays and tense soundtrack all night long, interspersed with bright blips of radar. Russians are trying to blow up capitalism and you’re surrounded by dolphins who know how to spy and the general atmosphere is one of cinematic suspense. All of a sudden you look up at a screen and see a possessed twelve-year-old with violent bedhead vomiting green chunks and backward Latin. She’s so full of demons that the only way to relieve her feelings is to have sex with a crucifix. You would convert too, I guaranteed it.
Greg chose the Lutheran faith for his first ordination.
Why remains a mystery, but Patricia speculates that he was attracted to its founder. She describes him as a snout-faced man who spewed insults from every orifice and believed he had the power to fart away the devil.
In this, she captured Priest Daddy eloquently as well as accurately. Here’s a dude who grunts and farts and blasts guitar noise, action movie soundtracks, or Rush Limbaugh rants at the world in lieu of actual conversation.
The language angel must have skipped him and given his daughter a double dollop of verbal gymnastic mastery.
This is a man who teaches his kids to swim by dropping them in deep water. Making them hunters by giving them rifles and tying them to trees. His righteously-raised grandchildren call him Big and Scary. Not grandpa or pop-pop. Big and Scary.
The memoir, ‘Priestdaddy,’ tells two tales.
One looks back at Patricia’s childhood terrorizations, offset by a variety of ‘experiences’ including crazy road trips with her devout and paranoid mother.
On one such trip, they stop for the night, go into a bar, and order drinks. When Patricia’s husband Jason points out the man at the other end of the bar making eyes at mom, she flips her hair, Texas style, and calls herself a cougar. Then reveals that if he actually comes any closer, she’ll off his penis with a swift kick.
Patricia’s husband Jason collapses with appreciation, this mother-in-law being almost worth his literal night sweats around dear old dad. Patricia confesses that her mother proves herself to be the person you wanted with you in a crisis. She was someone who willingly went down into the underworld and came up again as pure levity.
That levity’s the saving grace for those otherwise intolerable nine months she and her husband Jason spend going back under that rocking and raucous roof in their thirties. Not by choice but because they’ve sunk from option-less to sheer desperation.
With a well-earned poetic license, Patricia jumps around in time from chapter to chapter. Which gives the reader breaks from Priest daddy’s nefarious doings. Much appreciated since those doings include making excuses for the sexual misdeeds of his fellow clerics.
Enter the Seminarian from Chicago
Juxtaposed against this backdrop is Patricia’s budding girlhood friendship with a young seminarian. He lives in their rectory and fights his own thinly-disguised lust. She describes him thus:
He was born, like many seminarians, at the age of sixty-five, with a pipe in his mouth, and a glass of port in his hand. He is tall, but he hunchs slightly under the weight of tradition, and whenever he emerges from the dark rectory into the sunshine, he blinks like an overeducated cave creature who is in the process of evolving away several of his most frivolous body parts. I expect his voice to be ponderous, but when he opens his mouth, he rolls out the broad and hilarious vowels of Chicago. I love him instantly and beyond all reason, in the way you love people you’re going to be able to write about.
She never once mentions his name. Instead, she gets off on innocently teasing and torturing him with verbal forays into the ways of forbidden flesh. He doesn’t protest too much and is curious to learn the meanings of wanking and furry. You know, like in case a future parishioner has to confess those sins.
Failing at Singing
Patricia blames her poetic success on her spectacular failure at singing.
Though it wouldn’t be failure compared to my non-ability, it works well for her chapter-long prose poem about her and her sister’s musical adventures called, simply, Voice.
Let me be honest: my voice sounded like the final cry of someone killed by a falling piano.
But my sister could sing, she could really sing. All her words were set to music. She had height, white sound, and roundness — when she opened her mouth, the forward curves of doves came out. When I listened to her, my hearing flew out of the coop of my head and then came home. I knew it was art because it drew the senses slightly out of my body, and they leaped to meet the art in the middle of the air.
If I could write like that, I’d never say another word of regret about not being able to sing. Patricia’s words not only sing, they fly, they float, and they soar. As high in eloquence as they dig low into decadence.
Speaking of which, let me bring Priest Daddy back from the wings since he’s not a backstage kinda guy.
Patricia shares a rare image where he finally locks step with his ecumenical brethren. It happens on Christmas. Not that one rate Christmas where he’s ‘home.’ but the composite Christmases where he and his counterparts work.
[On December 25, priests] must rise early, put on their vestments, and bring Jesus into the world through the legs of mother church. Picture a priest’s Christmas. He says two or three Masses in the morning, then walks through the old snow to an empty rectory, cutting a hard, black shadow. He enters a kitchen that was last remodeled in the 1970s, with marigolds printed on the linoleum, and reheats the dinner the housekeeper prepared for him the day before….The priest is alone among old Life magazines. He is tired. All that lifting of the arms; all that dry singing, rattling with the seeds of Latin; all that blessing, and handshaking, and smiling. He turns on a small television and rubs the antennae….When he falls asleep on the couch the black cat with a patch of white on her throat comes up and licks him, hoping that he’s dead and that she’ll finally get to take his body and eat. No wonder my father distrusts them.
He distrusts cats so much, I imagine Patricia having a field day deciding which among his rants to gift her readers with. This one has the added beauty of revealing and reveling in Priest Daddy’s ultra-conservatism:
My dad despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean Hillary Clintons covered all over with feminist leg fur. Cats would have abortions if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun.
Now I know why Patricia Lockwood writes poetry and memoir. I’ve explained above how she comes across her poetic gifts as a booby prize for not singing like her sister.
Now I get why she writes memoir. With a character like Priest Daddy Father Greg in the house, how can a writer invent a fictional character who comes anywhere close?
I rest my case. Read Priestdaddy. At. Your. Own. Risk.
Marilyn Flower writes humor to laugh the changes she wants to see and make. She’s the author of Creative Blogging: Ninja Writers Guide to Character Development and Bucket Listers, Get Your Brave On. Clowning and improvisation strengthen her resolve during these crazy times. Stay in touch!