If you look at my birth certificate (or, Birther fucktards, my Certificate Of Live Birth, because I'm actually Kenyan), you will discover that I was not born on Miami Beach, where I grew up and lived until I was 17, but in Miami, at Jackson Memorial Hospital, the big regional hospital there. This is because my mother was turned away, while she was in labor, from St. Francis Hospital, a Roman Catholic hospital, because she was Jewish. (Apparently St. Francis was a big fan of the birdies and cute little furry bunnies, but not so much of the Jews.) I'm not entirely sure how she didn't wind up at Mt. Sinai Hospital, just a couple of miles away, but maybe they weren't fully ramped up at that point (having been created only 11 years before), or maybe you had to have a reservation to give birth there, as in one of your better restaurants, or perhaps the ambulance driver had a girlfriend out in Miami he figured he could stop by and see after dropping Mom off. Or, very possibly, none of those hospitals really wanted to be responsible for my birth, a sentiment with which I empathize, and Jackson just got the short straw.

            In any case, I did wind up born, a fact commemorated in song and story (well, I'm working on the song, and you just heard the story), and born what a Nazi might call reiner Jude--pure Jew, the grandson of a rabbi turned baker (baking being a more-lucrative occupation in these United States of A than rabbing) and the son of a crazy neurotic fuck--two of them, actually--and Jewish as far back as my knowledge of my ancestry goes. What that means, of course, is that I'm a large part Slav; those soldier boys marching through the Pale Of Settlement (where the Czars let Jews live) just loved to stop off in the shtetls, and they'd never heard the phrase "'No' means 'no.'"

(Because of those peripatetic Slavic baby-daddies, my beard used to come in mostly red--I shaved it off when those parts started turning white.) (And when a goatee started being the tiny little ponytail of the '00s, a sign that the fashion boat had sailed without you.) (Red hairs go white first. All the now-salt parts of my salt-and-pepper hair too used to be red highlights.) (But I digress. As you know.)

That I am currently a Christmas-and-Easter Episcopalian--and I might have missed last Christmas (in my defense, it was cold out, which, you know, hardly ever happens in Chicago)--who goes to the Big Gay Church around the corner from me, might indicate that, you know, something happened somewhere between that birth and now. Huh? you might well ask. What happened? And I shall reveal all, except for the parts I lie about or obfuscate, which, figure only about seventy percent. Ninety, tops. At any rate, I'll tell all about how I lost my original religion.

The first thing I ever remember reading was a filmstrip in kindergarten about dinosaurs. (My father had taught me to read before I went to school, because he was sick of me nagging him to read to me.) I loved dinosaurs, and space, and anything scientific. I didn't fully understand the scientific method--I pretty much just took whatever those books said on faith, as one does when one is a kid. (And later, too. Do you know how a four-stroke internal combustion engine works, or do you assume it's just tech-magic and turn the key and go? Are you up on Bernoulli's principle, or are you content that someone somewhere knows what makes a plane fly?)  (I do, by the way, know what makes a plane fly: it's me, sitting by the window, willing that aluminum and plastic fucker up in the air; it's not an easy job, so don't bother me by trying to chat with me if you see me staring out the window, or we will all die.) (As, of course, we will anyway, ultimately.) You might say that my earliest religion, one that didn't even call itself a religion, was one that we all give some faith to, just by getting on the bus in the morning: science.

My family was not super-Jewish. We were more, you know, American. By which I mean, we knew where we came from, more or less, but our only real obeisances to that origin were some quirky ways of doing things. Thus, my mother made pork chops Jewish style (fried in chicken fat, and while my mother was not a notably good cook, anything fried in chicken fat will be at least twice as good as anything not fried in chicken fat, until it, you know, kills you deader than Rush Limbaugh's conscience). We kids got Jewish holidays off from school, and our parents expected us to spend at least an hour sitting in the cheap seats of the nearby synagogue wearing our little polyester suits and clip-on ties and having no faintest idea what the hell was going on with the old guys wailing in Hebrew down below, before we could go off to the movies for the rest of the day. (The real point of a Jewish holiday, as far as my friends and I were concerned. Dude, House Of Dark Shadows was some kick-ass religious instruction.) (And prepared me well for the coming of the True Religion: Buffy-olatry.) There was some expectation that I would have a bar mitzvah, the ceremony in which a 13-year-old Jewish boy squeaks out in his changing voice that he has become a man. (For the non-Jewish kids in the neighborhood, who tended to be Florida rednecks who'd moved to the Government projects on the southern tip of Miami Beach, you'd become a man when you drank your first six-pack and had sex with someone who wasn't your sister.) I was not opposed to this expectation, because a bar mitzvah was a big party, which I liked, where you got a shit-ton of presents, which I liked even more.

In order to have a bar mitzvah, you had to learn enough Hebrew to read (or memorize) some prayers, a section of the Torah, maybe a translation of that day's episode of One Life To Live, so our parents sent us off to the nearest synagogue to be instructed both in the Hebrew language and the meaning of our religion. The nearest synagogue to my family was Orthodox--and if you don't know what that means, think Southern Baptist with sidelocks and tallits (prayer shawls). These guys believed--literally--every word in the Bible (well, the Old Testament anyway) (which they, of course, called the Only Testament) (or I might have made that up): Yahweh made the earth in six days, the sun stood still in the sky to let Joshua get in a little extra infidel slaughtering, the earth was 6000 years old, give or take. (Isaac Asimov famously pointed out that if the sun had stood still, meaning that the earth had stopped its rotation, Joshua and his men would have rolled for a couple thousand miles--inertia's a bitch--and the earth's crust would have melted, because all that rotational energy would have to go somewhere.) As a little teeny science geek, it was the earth-is-6000-years-old thing that bugged me the most. "Uh, look," my geeky little 11-year-old self might have pointed out to the Hebrew school teacher, "Fossils. Big ones. Millions of years old. Lots of 'em." "Ah," said the Hebrew school teacher, "What if God put the fossils in the earth and made us think they were millions of years old?" Eyes, mine, moving side to side in disbelief. "Why? Because he really hates paleontologists? 'Ah, ha ha ha! Watch how I screw with those fossil guys now!'" I do hereby aver and attest that I never flung a trilobite fossil at the Hebrew school teacher; it just, you know, kind of slipped out of my fingers. I was young and did not have good small-muscle control yet. Anyway, he got the sight back in that eye after a few months.

I guess he did anyway; it was shortly after that conversation that I stopped going to Hebrew school, more or less to the relief of all parties concerned. Oh, sure, there were other things that precipitated my divorce from the religion of my birth. Just e.g., the Hebrew school teacher used to give us a quarter to get a snack at a nearby bodega during the mid-class break, and one time I brought back a bag of pork rinds, a situation which he handled quite well: "Heretic! Purify yourself in flames!" Or actually, he just gravely said, to my at-first complete incomprehension, then great embarrassment, "It doesn't matter to me what you do when you're not here, but when you're in the temple..." (And as embarrassed as I might have been, I was also kind of pissed off that I'd gotten screwed out of my snack.) Their religion had come into conflict with my religion, my belief in science, and I was not about to drop my religion to adopt theirs, nor was I about to compromise with their religion. Now, I want to remind you: I was 13 or so. I hadn't done uranium dating on the rocks that contained those fossils; I didn't have the math to understand the science in which I so implicitly placed my faith; I didn't even fully understand natural selection, though what I did understand made sense. I'd read a few books--Robert Jastrow's Red Giants and White Dwarfs stands out--and I thought I understood pretty much everything. (I'm a lot stupider now.) The fact that I'd tied my faith to a religion that actually seems to closely correspond to the universe in which I lived does not mean that I'd overcome faith.

Once freed of the necessity to come in close contact with what I regarded as a fairy tale, I mostly ignored belief and faith, and never considered that my unfailing belief in science and technology was as much a faith as the Orthodox Hebrew school teacher's faith in the Torah's inerrancy. I hadn't much use for religion from then until later on in my teens, and religion hadn't much use for me, a situation that appealed both to me and to the religious. I became a fervent atheist, a position that one cannot logically defend, though I did my best.

T.S. Eliot, Dante and Canterbury Cathedral changed all that, but that's a story for another time.