Page 253 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 241

Hank the Tank sent me a postcard: “Keeping tabs thru the
grapevine. What movie are you now? Peter says, Angie Dickinson
in The Sins of Rachel Cade.” One of the other seminarians or young
priests was a spy.
In the churchyard, old women and old men pulled on my sleeves.
They wanted exactly what white folks wanted, but they wanted it
revivalistic, singing where the Church met the Top 10, “For Your Pre-
cious Love,” biblifying with Curtis Mayfield, “People Get Ready,”
pushing before them any fresh young priest who could save them
before he became like the old priests silenced by the world and woe
and women and whiskey.
Christ was bread and wine. Christ was flesh. Christ was a man.
How could I ever be another Christ?
With another seminarian, I escaped uptown one night to a the-
atre in the Loop to watch James Earl Jones performing live in The
Blacks. I wanted to hear his voice, learn some secret, see some scene.
I tried to add up the equation: literature plus metaphor equals real
life. Do actors understand literal Transubstantiation? Does anyone?
The other seminarian was happy the theater manager invited us two
white boys to sit front row center, until we figured it out. The play
could not be performed unless at least two white people were present,
and if no white people were available, then two dummies dressed
as white people were to be placed in the front row. The casting was
perfect. Ha ha ha. All the white couples in from the suburbs laughed,
relieved they’d got off scot-free.
I gave the people at Holy Cross Parish, kneeling at the Com-
munion rail, Christ’s body to eat and Christ’s blood to drink.
Actual body.
Actual blood.
No metaphor.
Real.
But it was my body and my blood. They demanded the be-all of
something, life perhaps, and maybe with good reason because they
had been promised life everlasting, and what they got was me, very
Suddenly, very Last Summer. They judged my vocation a sign that
life to me was no riddle. They said, Help me! They cried, Answer me!

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