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latent anything means you can never be sure
what
you are. If a heterosexual can be a latent homosexual, then a John Bircher can be a latent commie, a nun can be a latent whore, a minister can be a latent murderer, and a jazz virtuoso can be a latent rock ’n’ roller. Experience becomes meaningless—becomes irrelevant as a measure of interior reality, because the feelings you actually feel might turn out to be less real than feelings you never felt in your life.
    ———
    I mustn’t leave out an especially charming, if brief, episode in my life of this period. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college I worked as a lookout at a bookie joint in downtown Omaha. This wasn’t my father’s establishment. Bert worked behind a three-inch-thick steel door in a cavernous bunker under a cigar store known as Baseball Headquarters. My bookie joint was a small operation up a flight of stairs and separated from the public and the police by nothing but a locked door with a window in it, which was my station.
    There was no baloney about passwords. If people walked up the stairs, as they mostly did, then they were players, and I unlocked the door and let them in. If they
charged
up the stairs, then they were obviously cops, and I made them wait while all evidence of wrongdoing was disappeared—a practiced routine that occupied perhaps twenty seconds. Then I let them in and we all sat around playing gin rummy or solitaire till they got bored and went away.
    The summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college I worked as a lookout at a bookie joint in downtown Omaha.
    The high point of the summer for me occurred one afternoon when the toilet-paper salesman made his quarterly appearance. After writing up the order, he paused at my station and asked what I was reading. Feeling rathersmug, I gave him a look at it: Joseph Conrad’s
Nostromo.
The toilet-paper salesman shook his head disdainfully and said that a bright youngster like me shouldn’t be wasting his time on such lightweight reading as that. He tore a sheet out of his order book and gave me a list that included Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason,
Sartre’s
Being and Nothingness,
and Keynes’s
General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.
    A horseplayer by the name of Angie gave me the benefit of his life’s experience in this useful principle:
    You can beat a race, but you can’t beat the races.

F OUR
             
In the Quinn household,
notions of God and Heaven belonged to a generalized childhood fantasy that included Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Rabbit. Small children were taught to kneel down at bed-time and pray “Now I lay me down to sleep” because it was a cute and harmless “part of growing up.” I suppose the presumption was that, at the appropriate time, such whimsies would uproot themselves and be left behind, like baby teeth. Religion was not avoided as a topic of conversation; it simply had no existence.
    When I was eleven, however, it came to my attention that my brother was “having instruction” in the Roman Catholic faith. I don’t recall that he encouraged me to look into it; encouragement wasn’t necessary. As far as Iwas concerned, if he was doing it, it was clearly a thing to be done. Dennis joined the army before completing his instruction (or at least before sealing the matter with baptism), but I saw no reason to follow his example in this procrastination. I took instructions and was baptized before the beginning of eighth grade.
    I couldn’t possibly have known that Catholicism was the ideal and very worst choice of religion for a child predisposed to believe that making oneself perfect is tantamount to making oneself lovable. This isn’t to say that Catholicism insists on perfection; but if
you
insist on perfection—hunger for perfection—indeed, want to lose yourself utterly in the pursuit of perfection—Catholicism is the religion for you. The Church can definitely show you how