Page 218 - What They Did to the Kid

206 Jack Fritscher

My Jesuit gave me copies of two recent Broadway plays, A Street-
car Named Desire and Suddenly Last Summer. He said that the author
understood human nature, Christianity, and God. “Literature,” he
said, “precedes psychology and theology. Freud turned to Greek
drama to find names for his conditions. In these plays you may
rather quickly find the face of God.”
Actually, rather quickly I felt bound to study for finals, so I
skipped the plays, but after four days of deep study, I fell suddenly
depressed. The Fathers of the Church in the “Patrology of Ancient
Christian Literature” were dry texts we studied in Latin and were
tested on in Latin. The Fathers lived 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 confine-
ment of their own choosing, seemed insane, like psychosis transub-
stantiated 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 “Church History,” “Exegesis of the
Old Testament,” and “Ascetical Theology” 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 the Virgin Her-
self appeared to me, or then 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 teeshirt, holding the Jesuit’s Sud-
denly 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.

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