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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK236 Jack Fritscherthe anthem a hymn. Lifts us up and carries us onwards. Glory, glory Hallelujah. Close-up: painted face of Garland in torture. Her hands framing her face like white gloves around black face in a minstrel show. She carries us on, JudyJudyJudy, always a favorite of PeterPeterPeter. Picks the nation up. Television%u2019s prerecorded chilling crescendo of background voices. Mechanically reproduced audience. Sent to glory hallelujah. She tried to kill herself, but couldn%u2019t do that. Glory, glory, Misericordia. Back a tremble, a hit on TV. Lady of the World. Shredding emotion with all the feeling she can pull out of a top hat and tails. Katharsis, catharsis.Don%u2019t make me cry. Don%u2019t let me feel. Stop her, stop her. Let me be sick first. I have to think. Stop. The world begins to glut me. The world. The word. What is the word? What is the word made flesh? What is the world made flesh? Stop the World! I Want to Get Off! I seek to pull my life from the wreckage of eleven lost years. The clock is ticking. The chase is on. Move it or lose it. Make up for lost time. No more circling the drain. Is it always high noon when your shadow stands around your feet in a puddle?February 1964In February I came from the family limbo of Peoria, north, to a new life in a new school in a new city. I met Joe and Louisa Bunchek in the Chicago Sun-Times classifieds. They provided board and an attic room for twenty dollars a week near the Loyola University Lakeshore Campus. They were real and suited my mood. They let me alone at first, only expressing wonder at all the books I had moved in for my first semester in graduate school.%u201cThose Jesuits at Loyola,%u201d they said, %u201csure make you crack the books.%u201dThey introduced me to visiting company, even on my way through their kitchen to the bathroom, as a seminarian.%u201cThe last two boarders were in the seminary too,%u201d Louisa reminded her guests who were all relatives. %u201cGod must sure think we need watching over.%u201dEveryone smiled as I disappeared into the toilet. Someone was always coming and going at the Buncheks. They lay in wait outside the bathroom to stare at me, glowing like a holy picture, when I came out.Alone in the kitchen, sitting with Louisa Bunchek, I felt she was racier than any woman I%u2019d ever known. Night fell fast in deep winter in Chicago%u2019s Rogers Park. I liked her.Outside the back door, across Sheridan Avenue, closed by the loveliest blizzard in the world, I watched a lone woman sit reading in the ornamented glass ticket booth, frosted like an igloo, under the bright marquee