He stopped his new Thunderbird and put down the electric window. “No fucking way! Get it off.”
“Dad, I’m Pope John—the Twenty-Third!’”
“You heard me. Get it off. Now.”
The Pucci was banned. Dad wouldn’t explain, but later, during an argument with my mother, I heard him use a new phrase.
“The boy is a goddamn queer, Norma—it’s obvious.”
Rush continues: “Lying on my bed, I thought: What’s a goddam queer?”Sent away for his sexuality and gender-fluidity, Rush was unceremoniously kicked out of several boarding schools. At the first, which was also a Catholic seminary, he ordained himself as the resident acid dealer instead of the priest he’d piously thought he’d become. His older sister, Donna, turned him onto LSD at the age of 12, and introduced him to the cult-leader-esque Valentine, a sensuously beautiful psychedelic drug dealer who speaks of “Christ,” “Love,” and sacramental drugs. Rush started selling psychedelics as an underclassman after being fronted a thousand capsules of “the pink LSD” by Valentine, which he also takes almost daily and fearlessly, thinking of them as a sort of “brain vitamin.”With Rush’s father’s near-attempts to destroy him; his later being kidnapped at gunpoint by two homophobic would-be murderers and jumping out of the bed of their truck at 70 miles per hour; and his journey across and around the country to end up a naturalist-slash-survivalist living on the mountain above us, not to mention the profound spiritual war of his family at the center of the narrative, the first feeling to hit a reader of this book is shock that its narrator is still alive.“Charlie don’t say that, he just needs a challenge.”
“The discovery that I made when I was in the mountains; I thought I was weak and it turned out I was strong,” he says, sitting at the table, smiling and pursing his lips playfully. “Well, this was the thing they had withheld from me, is I didn’t know that was my birthright. I didn’t know that I was actually a really tough person. My favorite word in reviews of this book is ‘bad ass.’ Because once I realized I was bad ass and could do fucking anything, life changed. But it took me a long time, because I had taken on everybody’s bullshit that because I was a fag, I was a fairy. And I was fairylike in any number of ways, but I was actually tough as nails.”"There is one line in the book that is very close to how I see life. My friend Sean, he’s mocking my beliefs, and I say, I would rather believe in too much than too little. And that is how I look at life.”
Dad was more of a mystery—a dark planet, exerting only vague astrological influence on his offspring. He walked with a limp, a steel brace on one leg from the car crash of ’64. He was still strong, though, and steady. He could be quite charming, always ready to amuse guests with a story or a joke. But to a child, to a son, he had nothing to say. He seemed unsure around kids, uncomfortable, even guilty. I knew something bad had happened to him, something that couldn’t be talked about.
There was always silence in his wake.
Reading over the passages of his father’s abuse, I wondered how I could tell Rush I loved his father. But that is the remarkable miracle of the old “technology” of writing. Over a long enough spectrum of experience, and with the eyes of a good enough artist, even the sins of hatred and violence can be absolved by the miracle of human love and familial forgiveness. And after I do tell Rush I love his father, his demeanor softens, he smiles, laughs maybe. “I love him, too,” he says. “You’re the first person who has said that, and I’m really thrilled to hear it.”Every Sunday, our family went to church, but Dad went during the week, as well. He went to confession often and took Communion every day. I was intrigued by the idea of his soul—and even more intrigued by the idea of his sin. What could it be?