Page 200 - What They Did to the Kid

188 Jack Fritscher

to protect his purity from Elizabeth Taylor in Ivanhoe. I mean I try
to be pure, but some of these boys are ridicu lous!
I had to stop myself. I was thinking again. Or reacting. I had to
stop reacting; that was childish. I would become a sane viable adult
only when I began acting. Well, dammit, I had tried after the movie
and received for my grown-up stand a paid religious announce ment
that it was time for night prayers. I hadn’t wanted to see The Long
Gray Line because of its sentimental reviews. I wasn’t some stupid
Danny Boy interested in a corny take on being Irish.
Actually, I was twenty-two and in my ninth year at Misery,
almost a year past college and well into the graduate courses in Mis-
ery’s Theology Department, studying old-style Dogmatic Theology
and Moral Theology and Canon Law. In Pastoral Theology, I was
learning how to hear Confessions and how to say Mass. I was on to
the last leg of preparation for the priest hood with less than thirty-
two months until my Ordina tion Day.
So much to do, I cried out to the Lord, so much to do before I
was turned loose to minister to the world. Urgency and responsibil-
ity and insecurity drove me to study what they offered, to read what
they didn’t, to write continually the papers they didn’t really care
about.
“Misery’s grading system is so strict,” Rector Karg said, “that
if you were studying anywhere else your grade would be ten points
higher. Even at Ohio State.”
I tried to polish myself by writing stories and feature articles
with which I could effectively extend my ministry to spread Christ’s
word and love on earth. So what, I said to myself, if priestly writing
puts art at the service of religion. So do stained glass and Gregorian
Chant. Writing’s purpose is goodness. Someday after some remark-
able visitation of Christ, I’ll actually have something to say. Some-
thing great and inspired and revelato ry to help the world. Something
just short of an epiphany or, maybe, an apocalypse. People always
brag they have some thing to say, but when it comes time to say it,
they take a pencil and go blank and drive people crazy on trains and
busses with their life stories. I knew God called me to invent a special
vocation for myself inside my vocation to the priesthood.
All of America had watched Bishop Sheen sweeping across the

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