Paul Feyen

I first met Paul 68 years ago at the Hogwarts School of Catholic Witchcraft and Wizardry.  If you look closely at your program you’ll notice a picture of Paul arriving the first day at Hogwarts.  Notice he’s holding the broom and magic carpet we were all required to have.

Like Hogwarts, the seminary had four teams that you were drafted on.  Though we were in the same class, we were on opposing teams, so it took us a while to become friends - mainly because Paul’s Rambler team was the seminary equivalent of the Slytherins.

Paul was a fascinating character, a combination of trickster, clown and worry-wart. You’d usually see the worry-wart first. Paul had this way of twisting his forehead into a half-bewildered, half-angry look and then bemoaning some imminent disaster that only he seemed able to conjure up. We’d all start kidding him about it, and finally his face would begin to relax and he’d let out that deep-throated chuckle from a resonant funny-bone deep in his chest. The chuckle always signaled his transition from dread to amusement.

According to Paul, his family were all worry-warts, so he came by it honestly. His primary worry in the seminary was flunking tests. He’d blown a Religion test in his freshman year and been demoted from the “A” group to the “B” group.  This had totally freaked his dad out and Paul was terrified it might happen again.  So, even though he was very smart, he became convinced he couldn’t pass any test without cheating. He’d spend enormous amounts of time devising ingenious ways to cheat. I remember one time he showed me the bottom of his wing tip shoes where he had written an entire set of test answers on the instep. Most of our professors had taught the same classes for years and were too lazy to change the tests, so he could always find cheat-sheets handed down by someone’s older brother. The one time Paul’s cheating didn’t work and he ended up getting a “D” on a biology test, he blamed the guy sitting next to him for having written down the wrong answers.

Even though he was always terrified of getting caught, Paul broke all the rules: He had a transistor radio hidden in his closet; he talked out the window after lights-out; he smoked in the bathroom. He did all sorts of stuff, but the faculty never caught him because he had such an innocent facade.  They even put him in charge of the student store  - which he’d furtively unlock at night for friends who wanted free candy bars.

Paul always loved sports and was an effective, and crafty, competitor.  When his  Rambler team played the Indians in basketball, he neutralized Al Potter’s rebounding by standing on his feet under the basket. Later in life, his fanatic dedication to the Oakland Raiders won him a spot on one of their billboards wearing an eyepatch.

Paul’s humor would often catch people by surprise, suddenly emerging from behind his serious facade when you least expected it. And he loved practical jokes. Once he intercepted a package for Dick Ganci in the seminary mail room. Dick’s mother had sent him a brand new pair of shoes, so Paul unwrapped the package, took one shoe out, and carefully re-wrapped it. The daily mail call was a big deal, a public event, and Ganci eagerly tore open his package in front of everybody, only to find a single shoe.

Since I was a practical joker myself, Paul and I were often became co-conspirators. One time we were in the local drugstore on a walk and saw a very realistic rubber worm on a joke rack. It was brownish orange, the same color as the Chef Boyardee type canned beans that were often served in our diningroom. That night at dinner we managed to slip the worm into a serving bowl headed to one of the tables, then watched as a hungry seminarian ladled up a huge spoonful of kidney beans with a four-inch earthworm dangling from it. Several guys at the table started gagging and reported it to the seminary bursar who charged into the kitchen after dinner to interrogate the French-speaking nuns who were our cooks.  By the time Paul and I got to the kitchen, he’d cornered a bunch of nuns who had no idea what he was trying to convey with his frantic finger wiggles.

Near the end of our seminary career, Paul and I ended up on opposite sides of the seminary culture wars.  I became a radical activist, questioning and challenging everything from the rule to the liturgy. Paul wasn’t at all political; he just wanted to keep his head down and get ordained. We’d still collaborate on the occasional prank, but our ideological paths began to diverge sharply. I finally left the seminary and moved to the Haight Ashbury. Paul stayed in and got ordained.

That’s not to say he didn’t keep breaking all the rules, but he performed competently enough as a priest that the bishop never found out about his shenanigans - not until he hooked up with one of the local nuns, Kathy Tobin.  At that point the bishop made him an offer he couldn’t not refuse: leave Kathy and accept a transfer to the diocese of Fresno. For Paul the jig was up. He thanked the bishop, took off his Roman collar, and got a job selling textbooks for Prentice Hall in Minnesota. By then he’d found that his insecurities and worries could be successfully masked with alcohol, a strategy quite popular among many of his fellow salesmen.

Paul and I didn’t see each other for several years, not until the early 80s. By then he was drinking heavily, wilder and funnier than ever. He’d even gone to the College of Clownology and become certified as Gus the Clown.  By this time, I was living in Denver  with two kids, managing a sandwich shop. One night I got a call from an irate customer who claimed his wife had been hospitalized that afternoon after eating one of our sandwiches. The guy described all the ingredients in the sandwich and said he was going to sue me and the restaurant. I started desperately apologizing and was about to hang up and call our lawyer when I heard Paul’s distinctive chuckle coming from the other end of the line. He’d called the restaurant earlier that day and gotten a description of our premier sandwich so that he could totally nail me. I loved it.

Our class had its 25th reunion in 1986, and the first person I saw there was Paul. He

had a new video camera to film the event. (That was another thing about Paul: He was always up on the latest technology.) When I shook his hand, I could tell there was something very different about him. He didn’t seem as caustic as before, not as cynical.  He was still charming and witty, but more subdued and serious. Something had clearly changed.

Earlier that year, at Kathy’s insistence, Paul had stopped drinking. What I was

experiencing that day was a new Paul, one I’d never known before. He was talking about  feelings and values and beliefs, topics he’d always cynically avoided before. He was just as funny and engaging as ever, but now he was much more present, with an intensity that was almost disarming.

Paul’s original priesthood never had much of a spiritual quality about it. He’d always been pretty superficial and pragmatic, a guy who could competently fake his way through anything, from Latin tests to ordination. But starting that day in 1986, and continuing for the next 40 years, I would watch Paul transform that original, cynical priesthood into something beautiful and real. I would see him take the Serenity Prayer to heart, tap into his true authentic self, and start

ministering to hundreds of his peers across the country. I’d see him find his true priesthood, first by confronting his own demons, then by bringing the rest of us to a level of honesty we might never have experienced without him.

And the amazing thing . . . he kept us laughing the whole time.

For that, I’ll be eternally grateful to my dear friend, Gus the Clown.