Page 181 - Demo

%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 169myself to a complete stranger. I was a twenty-three-year-old boy and he was a grown-up. Adult help was at hand, even if he was in the FBI of the Foreign-Born Irish priests working in the States.I went straight to my room and impulsively wrote a short letter to the long-departed Dick Dempsey. Word had come back through the grapevine that he was sick. The implication was he had a...drum-roll...nervous breakdown. I thought Dempsey and I had been so alike, I had a vague fear that if Misery made something go wrong with him, the same thing might go wrong with me. I wanted to get in touch, to be of some help; but even Vatican II had not quite loosened the ban against writing, under pain of expulsion, to any former students. So I took the letter, reluctant to let go of my concern for my former friend, signed it whimsically, %u201cYours truly, Untouched by Human Hands, Raised by Monkeys,%u201d and folded the note paper in a kind of silly ritual, and obediently filed it away in my shoe box of historical treasures, knowing I%u2019d never see him again.Work clears the head. I resolved to stretch my capacity. Once again, the sympathetic older priest, who was himself a writer, hired me at ten cents a page to translate a second volume of Bernard H%u00e4ring%u2019s German moral theology book. The practice at being a working-priest distracted me from the abstract thing I could not grasp.The first day after the nine-day novena to Our Lady of Knock, actually four days before the two weeks to the next appointment with the Jesuit, I pounded on his door. I didn%u2019t cry. I didn%u2019t scream. I simply sat down in his chair and tore page after page out of my copy of St. Thomas Aquinas%u2019 Summa Theologica while I sang the blues and he stared at me.%u201cYou%u2019ve got the Irish flu,%u201d Sean O%u2019Malley, S. J., said.%u201cWhat?%u201d%u201cMost fellas think the Irish flu is drink. Truth be told: it%u2019s depression.%u201d%u201cI%u2019m not depressed. This place is depressing.%u201dHe gave me a bottle of pills.I was turning into Russell Rainforth.I could see stern priests coming to take me away tied to a chair, carried on their shoulders, bleeding from a punch in the face. Soon enough they%u2019d be stashing me in the loony bin between Rainforth and Dryden and Dempsey, in one of those special loony bins for wayward priests we heard whispers about.It was weird how the core of me dried up, midway through March, into the spring when life is supposed to bloom. Somehow the buoyant balloon of my life deflated and clung to my face like the gas mask of the doctor who had circumcised me as a child. Somehow I went dead