The Saddest Man in the Room

It was a day of contrasts. There was the blessed relief—though come to think of it, what relief is anything less than blessed?—of having nothing more to do than sit in the ophthalmologist’s office, ignore the television, and read a book. Remember that? There was a time, before the machete of productivity lanced into my life, when I could read for hours on end. Now? I can only do it when held hostage by a plane or an appointment.

Then it was come home and face the problem of the day: Is there anything in the world that needs my attention? The pope is busy off settling the issue of the Ukraine: Shouldn’t I, decades younger, be sorting out world hunger?

It’s perhaps what I’ve come to believe is Christmas lag, this feeling that for three months—this is Puerto Rico, Mister—I have stopped my life and played at being jolly, and that comes at a price. Because now, when I have to get back to work (which is all I really wanted, anyway) I have no energy, I feel cheated and depleted, and all I want to do is look at the ocean and not think.

Which could have been why I was pondering the old pope, whom I hectored and scolded and drove—well, for a pope—into early retirement. Had I been fair to the man? Would my father, still setting standards two decades after his death, have approved? Shouldn’t I let them man speak?

So I went off to the café, since I thought whatever coffee I consumed would need to be of professional strength and quality, and since I feared I might need some social pressure to keep the expletives reasonably in cheek (in both senses).

And so I left the apartment, and began counting after the third gay couple passed my gate: In all, there were seven couples, with me trotting behind the last and grinning. Why? Because on the other side of the street, there were streams of straight couples—right off the Disney cruiser—going the other direction. Oh, and with their heads directed rigidly forward. Presumably, they had checked out the local, or rather imported, fauna, and were going back to the ship, thank you very much.

So I found myself in the café, one gay men among many gay men, since one thing gay men do well is sniff out the unusual, the quaint, the quirky, the offbeat… and that, of course, set me thinking. How do we do that? Does gaydar have an app that triggers alerts? Had all the gay men instantly connected electronically and social networkedly? Had the most popular posted on Instagram, or whatever it is?

So everybody was being fabulous, but the aging queen in the corner? Listening to the—perhaps—only interview Ratzinger (as he then was) ever gave in English. Time to be fair: He can do what I cannot in either English or Spanish, though I did have to wonder for three or four minutes what all this “doctrine of the face” was all about. Which then made me wonder: Where did English get its “th” sound (Yes, Educated Readers, I know that technically it’s a phoneme….) if not from German? Well, well, another thing I didn’t know.

So I listened to the man, and found him intelligent and occasionally charming. As well, deeply conservative and—I hate to use this word, but here goes—intellectualized.

How easy it would be to say that he was out of touch—even three or four years before he had become pope. His point—a valid one—was that he was much more in touch than the rest of us.

There’s the two thousand year history of the church, for one thing, and that, for someone rigorously trained in theology, is not a heritage to be tossed lightly away. And then I remember an interview about Ratzinger by Hans Küng, who said that Ratzinger had once been liberal, and had worked on Vatican II. So what had happened? In 1968 or so, the student movement had rocked the universities of Europe, and taken over classrooms. And Ratzinger, with his carefully planned and researched lectures, was no longer Herr Profesor, of whatever his title was. Instead, his lecture hall was infested with unwashed, longhaired youth, all demanding… well, whatever it was they were demanding.

It wasn’t an easy time for the men who had spent decades being groomed for and buying into a system that had seemingly held for decades, if not centuries. Küng dealt with it, continued his intellectual liberalism, and went on to challenge the concept of papal infallibility. Ratzinger withdrew, and became increasingly more conservative.

Nothing about his life could have been easy. He was a German surrounded by Italians; he was a professor put to do a bureaucrat’s work; he was defending the century’s old traditions, theology, and moral teachings of the church. And the rest of the world?

I gazed on them, these gay men in their 20’s, and tried to resist the impulse to think that they had come on their freedom too easily, that they had gotten off too lightly, and also that they had been cheated.

“I don’t wish that you were straight, it’s just that your life would have been so much easier,” once said my mother, and who could blame her? She must have worried, on sleepless nights, if I had gone to a gay bar, met the wrong guy, and ended up assaulted or dead in a back alley. It happened to a guy I knew. And it happened a lot in the 50’s, when my mother would have been in her 30’s.

Then it was time to worry: San Juan is fine, and two guys holding hands? Well, the occasional raised eyebrow doesn’t inflict much pain. But St. Lucia? God forbid, Jamaica? It occurred to me to run down to the pier, and suggest to the captain of the ship that he sail away from San Juan every evening at five PM, leisurely cruise around Puerto Rico a few times during the night, and then re-dock in San Juan for the next seven days.

Ratzinger was then attributing the priest abuse scandals to—well, I’ll make it short. We are all sinners, and that’s the thing about Christianity. If Christ could eat with sinners, we’re all called upon to acknowledge our own sins, and the clergy is no less immune. Oh, and then there’s that moral relativism thing.

And so I looked at Ratzinger, and looked at the gay men, and looked at myself. What had we all paid, and what had we all gotten?

Well, I had thought about my mother’s statement at the time, and had told her: Being gay forged some elements in my character that came in handy later. I moved to Puerto Rico and was and am an outsider. Rather, I have learned to make a place, and allow others to make a place for me, in which I can be comfortable. Living in the shaded area of the Venn diagram? Being gay helped with that.

Or fighting what seemed like a battle on all sides to get my mother to her death? Well, telling the CEO—or rather one of his executives—of Walmart that I was gay (and knowing perfectly well that my own officemates would be talking about it as well) made that possible.

Of the rest of the men in the café? I can’t be sure. I can only tell you this: Ratzinger, with his discipline, his intellect, and what I suspect has been his sacrifice seemed the saddest man in the room.     

       

(Then, to make the contrasts all the greater, I came upon this….)