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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 235die. I sit tonight without my lord, uh, without my bucko, without my Jack, in eternal November%u2019s eternal Friday. Oh, everyone. Take me as me. Veils stripped away. Be thou my vision, so unlike other men. Flags go up the mast, up from half-mast, to forget, to forget. The first weeks of all the weeks of the world that must pass without him.I want to go to the sea he loved. To see the clouds scud along the sky of Martha%u2019s Vineyard, wind whipping gulls to flight, to watch one impossibly white bird rocket up like a jet, becoming smaller and smaller till eyes ache to see the white spot in the pale flat sky.Press the liquor from the loss into a cider%u2019s cup of meaning. Guinevere mourns. %u201cRoe O%u2019Neill. Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the sky. Oh why did you leave us? Why did you die?%u201dOh world. Oh litany of lost people, bleached girls with tight-lipped smiles hiding braces feather-dusting cosmetics in drugstores. Acne-boys under sudden mop-top hair and jeans and boots trying to be strong, smoking. Bald-headed men with lunch spots on their ties and old women who dress too young. Poor world. Life. Lost so long in the bowels of the Church. Ancient priests slipping down the drains of ancient corridors. How come to world, me, him gone. One world abandoned. I excess.Sitting with Annie Laurie and Charlie-Pop watching the new nineteen-inch black-and-white screen after New Year%u2019s. Jack Kennedy lived and died on black-and-white TV. On television, everybody faking Christmas joy that this year cannot trump grief. My parents, me, the whole country, like the 1930%u2019s Broadway Baby belting it out, proving she%u2019s still got It, then life goes on. Ethel Merman brought to you by Ford Automobiles. Gee, but it%u2019s good to be here! She waves in that vaudeville way she learned. Old tendons in her underarms shadow obscenity under the bright lights. Her brave old sag propped by sequin-cinched waist. She finished getting a kick, a fabulous kick out of you. Annie Laurie likes Merman.Charlie-Pop nods off, waiting for Gunsmoke. Television is all new to me. Amazing. I sit, a weird hybrid of Aquinas and Dos Passos, watching black-and-white TV variety shows like The Judy Garland Show strain desperately to entertain a grieving country. Annie Laurie dislikes Judy Garland. She tried to kill herself. She doesn%u2019t know what to do with her hands. She makes me nervous. She%u2019s a wreck of a woman. My mother doesn%u2019t know she%u2019s a Platonist, and married to a Platonist, and the mother of a Platonist. She leaves the room.Judy Garland, alone on an empty stage, sings %u201cThe Battle Hymn of the Republic%u201d and makes it about Jack Kennedy. Sing it! My God, she%u2019s so scary you can%u2019t turn away. She makes you root for her. Makes