Page 164 - What They Did to the Kid

152 Jack Fritscher

same as prayer. Writing was think ing. Ergo, writing was prayer. The
syllogism suited me.
The priests said to look in on ourselves and find our identity
and shape ourselves to Christ’s priesthood. I was finding identity,
or at least ego, but only between moments of almost compulsive
plotting of story lines and distracted delectations on morose fancies
that might lead me to find a potentially popular song hit to be lifted
out of the hymns we sang, the way “Love Me Tender” came out of
“Aura Lee.”
I read The Roman Martyrology looking to adapt story lines of
love and death and faith. I tried to discipline our long periods of
classroom lectures, study hours, and medita tion, like Gunn said, all
the while we were tutored in the manly ways a priest must conduct
himself.
“A priest can never be too masculine. A priest must be a man’s
man.” Gunn advised that when we sat in the privacy of the rows of
toilet stalls, we should concentrate on dropping our voices down
to where we wore our jockstraps to make our voices deeper so our
sermons would impress the men and women in our parishes. Some-
times, in the jakes, when all the stalls were filled, the room echoed
with boys intoning, each competing to be deeper than the others, the
first four notes of “Old Man River.” All advice in any boys’ school
spins into jokes, satire, resistance.
Neverthe less, I prayed for the revela tion of some priestly mystery
to come and shine itself on me my senior year in college. I knew I
was not like other men, not even like most of the seminari ans sitting
in the lounge arguing over “Kumbaya.” But each is God’s image,
I thought, and God has many facets. They’re drips, the Drips of
Dryden, the way other boys were the Sons of a Gunn, and all were
the Friendless Friends.
I vowed to respect both sides and worry only about the impos-
sibly huge job of perfecting, dissecting, correcting myself. No one
had appointed me referee in the seminary civil war. I had no right
to force other boys to my choices of natural discipline, working my
own way to mysticism through asceticism, physical penance, extra
fasting, inserting a pebble in my shoe to hurt my foot when I walked,
tying a hemp cord around the skin of my waist.

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