Page 161 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 149

I almost liked him for redefining vocation in terms of the person
who was called, and responsible personally.
“You all in one way or another,” Dryden said, “must resist ado-
lescence, isolation, and the lack of counseling the best you can. Opt
for the original, personal experience of life,” he said. “Don’t settle for
the institutional ritualization of experience. That can change, and is
changing in Rome at this very moment.”
He looked at his wrist watch, and gestured to a boy eagerly wait-
ing to turn on the TV.
“This is no commer cial,” he said, “but I’m available at any hour
to any one of you.”
He dimmed the overhead chandelier. His twelve-inch television
sprang crackling snowy to a stark rectangle of black and white com-
ing live from Chicago.
Senator Kennedy smiling.
Vice-President Nixon ner vous.
Questions.
Answers.
Quemoy and Matsu.
Kennedy trouncing Nixon with the two names of those two
disputed Asian islands.
The television picture clicking, podium to podium.
Kennedy punctur ing the air with his driving forefinger.
Nixon leaning back, clinging with both hands to his lectern.
Barrages of the right words. Kennedy unloading, growing more
handsome, articulate, self-assured, youthful.
Nixon disagree ing, his lack of a forefinger, the words not coming,
the sweat running down his nose, streaking the pancake makeup he
used to hide his five-o’clock shadow.
Dryden’s close, crowded room, dark, boiling with smoke,
silhouett ing heads wreathed with rolling blue halos of burning
tobacco.
I was amazed, transformed, transfigured.
Irish Jack Kennedy was the first politician I’d ever seen who
didn’t look as old as my grandfather.
Leaving Dryden’s for night prayers, Lock said. “Some advisor

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