Page 196 - What They Did to the Kid

184 Jack Fritscher

October 11, 1962

Pope John XXIII finally opened the Second Vatican Council in
Rome on October 11, 1962, while at Misery, the 16-millimeter pro-
jector funneled its own ray of light through the darkened seminary
auditori um, over our heads, down the middle to the screen. The
movie actors’ mouths had to work around a hole where some wild
boy had shoved a chair through the grainy canvas. The movies were
old, scratched, and wholesome.
The Mudlark, a movie about Queen Victoria, broke off flapping
repeatedly during its three reels that had to be switched by hand.
The lights came up and the boys moaned and I couldn’t be inside
the movie any more.
The sound went out of synchro nization. The frames stuck and
burned and the black-and-white image on screen turned orange and
melted from the center out as we’d all boo. The movies were rated
by the Legion of Decency, but the decency of seminarians required
even stricter watch.
Whenev er anything slightly sugges tive came on the screen, one
of the priests held a filing card across the projector lens. I always
wondered if he watched the scene on the card like his own private
peep show. We snickered our first years at every carded scene, when
the screen went dark, or almost dark, and the top of actors’ heads
bobbed around, and the dialog continued, strident through our
one-string-and-tin-can-loudspeaker tethered on a long cord and set
under the screen.
In our later years, we laughed up our cassock sleeves because
the priests always told us that we were adults who should be acting
like adults and then they whipped out the filing cards. At least I was
able to retrieve a strip of twelve frames that broke off one reel and
save them in my shoe box. The movie was The Left Hand of God
with Humphrey Bogart posing as a priest in China. The thought of
someone posing as a priest intrigued me and I studied those twelve
frames of Bogart’s face over and over, holding them up to the light.
Movies at Misery were far from glamorous: no marquee to stand
under, no coming attrac tions, no popcorn. Most boys filed into the
auditorium in bleary-eyed compul so ry atten dance at movies I called

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