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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 243%u201cSix-thirty comes early,%u201d she said. She shuffled towards her room, then turned. %u201cSo you got a regular job like a regular guy,%u201d she grinned.%u201cI%u2019m a worker.%u201d%u201cWell, well.%u201dApril 28, 1964The brewery sprawled huge across three industrial blocks. It was red brick, like Misery, but taller, and workers were free to come and go. At the entrance gate to the yard, the amber smell of cooking grains sifted down through the ring of cyclone fence. Men in blue twill stood smoking near the time clock, jowls grizzled from the third shift, but scrubbed fresh in the workers%u2019 shower.I waited near them, glad to be in from the morning cold, listening to their words, trying to find what was to be expected in another new segment of my life. I would make a go of this, the same as my new school. I had to know what I was. I had to push myself in every direction. I had functioned well in the sweet security of the Church, claiming I had a vocation only God could underwrite.I had to know if I had self-reliance, on my own, nothing mystical to fall back on. No terrible sweet ecclesiastical security to remove the ordinary tensions of existence. I willed to worry about food and a roof. Every new meeting made me further incarnate in the world.I watched the men each push his timecard into the clock. Chunk-ping!They were faces marked by their lives, same as everyone else. On Ordination days when the new priests%u2019 brothers came, I always wondered at the telling differences life, not heredity, wreaked. Two brothers with the same bland faces as babies grow up marked with a difference, because the one sells used cars and the other says Holy Mass. The lay brother%u2019s skin is different, creased in premature lines, like my brother Thom%u2019s, about mouths and eyes that have tasted and seen and coped with the stress of real life. If it weren%u2019t for their vocation, I knew seminarians who%u2019d stand in this same line, chunk-pinging their days like their fathers and brothers, not getting plumper in rectories claiming to be gourmet chefs. They flashed the ID of their priestly vocation like a passport exempting them from the slowticking clock on the factory wall. No one, not even Rector Karg, Papal Chamberlain, not even the Pope, the new one, Paul VI, could tell if they were palming off a forgery of a vocation. Where spirituality leaves off and social climbing begins is a thin red passive-aggressive line.