Page 199 - What They Did to the Kid
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What They Did to the Kid                                  187

                  “I can guarantee you, O’Hara, you don’t want experience.”
                  “But I do.”
                  “Experience comes slowly,” he said, “if it comes at all.”
                  “We clergy must see there’s more to films than we’ve seen
               tonight.”
                  “We don’t have to,” he said, “see anything!”
                  I fell back a step.
                  He crossed and uncrossed and recrossed his arms.
                  I took a step back toward him.
                  “Priests need movies like a hole in the head.” He uncrossed his
               arms, extended his wrist, tapped his watch, held it above his head.
               “Night prayers,” he announced. “Time for night prayers. Let’s have
               absolute silence!”
                  “Told you so,” Hank the Tank said.
                  As I stood by Father Gunn, I let the other seminarians walk
               away.
                  Father Gunn was perturbed. “What do you want now, O’Hara?”
                  “I just wanted to say,” I whispered, “that I really like your new
               toupee.”
                  Communication is a brief encounter, I thought. That was my
               sole meditation before bedtime and it wasn’t a good one: too many
               negative un-Christlike thoughts about too many negative people.
               Why try to change the seminary at all? We had agreed to bring light
               after, not before, Ordination.
                  I was angry at Father Gunn for his mean sense of disci pline.
               Every move was a battle of wills. I had been thwarted all evening
               because I hadn’t wanted to attend the picture. The mailman had
               lost the film for a week, delaying the screening to the very last night
               before first-quarter exams. Where was the faculty’s logic? First they
               cut our films from ten to six a year so the movies wouldn’t interfere
               with our studies, and then they pulled a trick like this, forcing us to
               watch sentimental drivel when we should have been studying moral
               theology, physics, and German.
                  I hadn’t wanted to go to the movie because of studies and
               because the last time, some puling high-school boy had sat on the
               floor between the chairs with his back to the screen, holding his ears



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