When I found Mad on a drug store's magazine rack (early 1960s), I'd been Catholic-schooled in New Jersey for a decade to believe that White is Right; the West is the Best; God is a Guy. Beefy school nuns assured that all non-Catholics are pagans; thinking sin is the same as doing it; the pope is infallible. They banned doubt:
1) A pontiff declared an official "close of revelation," meaning God
had finished revealing all info worth knowing, and only my church
possessed said revelation.
2) Priests posted in church vestibules the infamous Legion of Decency,
a list of books and films forbidden "under pain of sin."
3) Nuns said hell's worst regions are reserved for ex-Catholics, especially
apostate priests. I wanted to ask about apostate nuns, but feared
another face-whacking.
The nuns' grim scenario brought mixed emotions: I was grateful to have been born among The Chosen yet felt jilted to learn that life is so pat and predictable. "Maybe that's why Christ is never shown laughing," I wondered while queued one Saturday night to confess my weekly dose of impure thoughts.
Mad supplied what catechism denied: humor, doubt, satire. It emboldened me to question the religious dogma into which I'd been born, along with inherited compulsions to be:
1) pro-union and anti-employer
2) pro-Democrat and anti-Republican
3) pro-Irish and anti-British
4) pro-Catholic and anti-Protestant.
Novelist Tom Robbins said it better: "Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere — the sudden revelation that there is a there out there."
Mad mag skewed my behavior. On a Friday night in May while hanging out at the local McDonald's, I heard a beep-beep from the adjacent highway. Turning, I saw the speeding red '55 Chevy of Bob Massey, a local rowdy. I recognized his car, but not the odd geometry of a face filling the passenger's window. The jowly mug had no eyes, nose or ears — yet a long mouth that ran. . .vertical?
"That's a butt!" I gasped while experiencing what Zen calls "derailing the logical mind." I'd been mooned. I made the sign of the cross, certain I'd seen sin. I also giggled. Later I told neighborhood pals, and we resolved to try it. The rest is local history.
