The enormous staunch-Catholic family and Mrs. Loach's clergy dream

texture · UNDATED (Loach's childhood/youth, pre-E.T.A.)

• When: UNDATED (~Loach's childhood and young adulthood, before E.T.A.)
• What: Loach grew up the youngest child of an enormous old-school Catholic family; his mother's most fervent wish was that one of her countless children enter the R.C. clergy. The siblings scatter instead: the eldest boy is killed in the Brazilian O.N.A.N./U.N. joint action (event 2); the next dies "of ciquatoxic food-poisoning eating tainted blackfin grouper"; a sister, Therese, ends up a between-rounds card-girl at Atlantic City prizefights, "so that hopes for Therese becoming a Carmelite dimmed considerably"; one Loach falls helplessly in love and marries right out of high school, and another burns "only to play the cymbals with a first-rate philharmonic" — now crashing away with the Houston P.O.. Barry, youngest and emotionally under Mrs. L.'s thumb, felt his own true calling from childhood not to the priesthood but to athletic training ("ever since he first slapped a Band-Aid on an X-Men figure").