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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 177lived in caves and sat fasting on top of stone pillars and cut themselves with sharp stones and whipped the cuts. I threw them aside and read Suddenly Last Summer which frightened me because, if literature was life, suddenly those Latin histories of martyrs and saints, and especially mystics mutilating themselves and starving themselves and living in solitary confinement of their own choosing, seemed insane, like psychosis transubstantiated into something believed to be bigger than our human experience, when they were just nuts.I needed my upcoming summer vacation. The thought of twenty-four semester hours in %u201cChurch History,%u201d %u201cExegesis of the Old Testament,%u201d and %u201cAscetical Theology%u201d sucked the breath right out of me.Suddenly that spring, I started thinking with a southern accent.I had a vision of heaven and a vision of hell, and either the Virgin Herself appeared to me, or I ate a leftover Easter egg that poisoned me so that I voided myself top and bottom in the white porcelain hand-sink in my little seminary room, wishing Saint Dick Dempsey was around to clean up the mess of pretend-Jesus.I was dizzy, mystical even, beyond making any excuse to Gunn or Karg or the Jesuit. I lay exhausted on my bed, without my black cassock, in only my shorts and my T-shirt, holding the Jesuit%u2019s Suddenly Last Summer.This attack was finally the tuberculosis I once hoped for, to delay my studies, to stretch time to think about being, and becoming, and love, and death. Months of rest someplace. Someplace existential with a veranda. Months defining me in terms of calling and ability. My vocation was absolute surety. A fact. But toward that fact I had so much to do.I trembled, head to foot. God was speaking to me. This was a sign. I would be a priest.The ceiling revolved, going round and round, spinning faster and faster around the light fixture. The transcendence was wonderful.Like the last time, the first mystical time, I ate a stale Easter egg and threw up all over the shower room. Only this time I didn%u2019t throw up.I remembered I had only one mystifying Easter egg left in my shoe box.I passed out, halfway, or fell asleep.Perhaps only minutes, seconds, later, an hour maybe, the door opened. Rector Karg stood there. I saw him, felt him, two hundred pounds of him, staring down. I could not move. His enormous chin protruded out of all proportion. The rest of his face, his eyes, peered down from behind his chin, like peepers over a huge cliff. The light burned in his eyes the way it had when he preached his sermon about self-denial, telling us how one