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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 183other rules have you broken? I have confiscated your so-called literature books. I suppose you have a transistor radio.%u201dI didn%u2019t say, %u201cEvery single seminarian has one.%u201d I didn%u2019t say, %u201cCouldn%u2019t you find it?%u201d I simply promised to surrender my only connection to music and the news within the hour.%u201cGive the radio to Father Gunn,%u201d he said. %u201cWe shall have to confer much about you. Your status is extremely precarious. We may have to ship you, boy. I suspect you may have lost your vocation. %u201c%u201cThank you, Rector,%u201d I said, %u201cfor your kindness.%u201d And screw you. I was in mortal danger. My soul and heart and intellect left my body and I watched myself walk out of his suite. Oh dear God, protect me. I went directly to my Jesuit, who to that moment had been only my spiritual director and not my confessor.%u201cLet me hear your Confession,%u201d Sean O%u2019Malley, the clever priest from the clever Society of Jesus, said, and sealed his lips with the seal of the Confessional forever.I confessed misdemeanors of the radio, and venial sins of unkind thoughts about Rector Karg, and how one time I had stood for three hours inside the tiny cupboard where the priests locked up their television so I could watch the Academy Awards. I confessed the same venial sins I confessed twice a week every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon waiting in the long lines of boys standing in the chapel at the curtains of a dozen Confessionals. I really and in truth had never committed a mortal sin in thought or word or deed. That was my ironic, intellectual problem: without knowledge of sin, how would I ever grow up emotionally and know anything about life in the world?I was not like any boy at all.I became even more fierce in my self-defense.For a week Rector Karg, Father Gunn, and Sean O%u2019Malley, S. J., rummaged about in my life. I pictured us all sitting at a round poker table covered with green felt, each one fitted with an eyeshade. I held my cards close. I was playing for my spiritual life, my soul, and my vocation. The Jesuit played by proxy; because of his privileged knowledge as my spiritual confessor, he could not talk directly to Rector Karg, who had to believe what I told him the Jesuit told me. Rector Karg was bound in conscience to believe me. His fundamentalism made him dangerous. He was a literalist trying to keep his balance in a trickster world of spirit.%u201cYou,%u201d Sean O%u2019Malley said to me, %u201care facing the world you said you wanted to embrace.%u201d