Free Outside Looking In by Garry Wills

I renewed acquaintance with its members. Phil was buried in a plain wood casket, and Daniel preached an eloquent sermon based on the raising of Lazarus. In the plane on the way back, Dick told me his story of the pope’s beanie. He and a Holy Cross classmate, on graduation, went to Rome and attended a Mass at Saint Peter’s. The pope at the time was Pius XII, who came into the basilica carried on men’s shoulders in the sedia gestatoria. It was his practice to throw his white skullcap (the zucchetto) into the crowd as he passed. Dick and his friend scrambled for the prize, and had equal rights to it, so they agreed to rotate possession of it when they went home. But when it was Dick’s turn to have it, he loaned it to his mother, who started passing it around to friends to cure their various ailments. He never got it back. (I dedicated my book on the rosary to Dick, though he was not much of a rosary sayer in his last years.)

John Waters
    A quite different Baltimore institution was the moviemaker John Waters. He was just beginning his weird career when we moved there—filming on the streets of his hometown with amateur equipment and friends as his only actors. I went to his “world premieres” at midnight in a local theater after the regular runs were over for the day. He brought a red carpet and searchlight to the events. His “stars” entered through thin ranks of fans. The first movie I saw, in 1968, was Eat Your Makeup. Despite his “underground” fantasies, and compliant actors who did stunts like eating a dog turd for the camera, he came, later in his career, to make more conventional films—like Hairspray, which led to the lavishly remunerative Broadway version of the story.
    But there is nothing conventional about the Christmas cards he still sends out every year, cheerfully ghoulish creations. He claims that the first card he created was a conventional Joseph-Mary-Jesus crib scene on which he replaced the baby Jesus’s face with that of Charles Manson. I did not see that one, but I did see the card that re-enacted his police mug shot (from a time when he was arrested for restaging the Kennedy assassination on a Baltimore street)—he made it a Christmas card by putting a Santa hat on his photographed image. Another year, his “card” was a clear plastic Christmas-tree ball, with red lettering on the outside that said “Merry Christmas from John Waters”—inside, on its back, little legs in the air, was a dead cockroach. One of my sons has a collection of all the cards John sent us. It is one of his most prized possessions.
    Knowing John helped me in 1973. I was part of the crowd at a counterinaugural protest at the beginning of Nixon’s second term. The police dispersed us with tear gas and chased us from the midtown area. As we fled, we tried to evade the police by streaming into an underground garage, a poor tactical decision, since they trapped us there and brought up a bus to put us in after arrest. John was there with his camera crew, filming for background scenes in his next movie. There was a TV camera crew there, and perhaps the police thought John and his actress, Cookie Mueller, were with it. (They were better dressed than the rest of us.) At any rate, when the police tried to push me onto the bus and I showed them my Esquire press pass, they paid no attention until John came over and said, “That’s all right. He’s with us.” I went free, vouched for with the police by the auteur of Pink Flamingos, the dog shit epic.

Unitas and Berry
    We were in Baltimore during the glory days of the Baltimore Colts football team—a team full of stars: John Unitas, Raymond Berry, Lenny Moore, Alan “the Horse” Ameche, L. G. Dupre, Gino Marchetti, John Mackey, Artie Donovan, Eugene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, Jim Mutscheller, Alex Hawkins, Jimmy Orr, Lenny Lyles. I had not been a Colts fan before we moved to