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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 1577June 20, 1962Tick. Tick. Going home summers was like rowing out in a boat chained to the shore. I paddled out only to be jerked back, tethered forever to the land. I was true to my school and for me girls could not exist. I could not run with the hot boys of the town. They always chased down the same one track, luring the girls who actually existed into cars into parks into bushes for short-breathed twitchings in the darkening twilight. I had to go everywhere alone or with a few other seminarians home for the summer from other seminaries that were not as top-notch as Misery. That was the same as being alone.I sought sanctuary in the dark of movie theaters that disguised my estrangement from a world of couples who saved no place for me. The theater seats could be old and ripped, the floor could be so sticky I couldn%u2019t lift my feet when the mice ran by, the new wide screen could be winging precariously out of the old proscenium arch, but I loved the silver screen and the muted blue lights high in the arc of the movie palace dome.I laid my head back on the seat and stared up at that hypnotic blue circle, losing all my bearings. The cone of projector light flickered and the stereophonic sound bounced around the walls.People sat in two%u2019s and four%u2019s and people sat alone, sitting like me two or three times through the same double feature. The world I was giving up really didn%u2019t seem like much, but the world was all some people had. I pitied them. I pitied anybody who hid out at the movies from the world I was sent back to for three months every summer.Some boys fell in love with the world and never returned to Misery again. I valued the world, but I was not cut out to be part of it. As a priest I would be in the world, but not of the world. I would save people from their worldliness.October 11, 1962Pope John XXIII finally opened the Second Vatican Council in Rome on October 11, 1962, while at Misery, the 16-millimeter projector funneled