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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 245Liar. That%u2019s why I got the job. I feared nothing, because nothing was more claustrophobic than Misery.As the last syrup trickled into the tanks, I climbed a twenty-foot ladder, like Tony Curtis in Trapeze, leading straight above to the hop-jack where most of the waste had settled. A man stood beside it waiting for me, the first time. His cap was pulled down to his eyes and he seemed to have no face. He had an immense potbelly. A worker could drink as much as he could hold. He wore a see-through white nylon sport shirt that buttoned tight across his chest. My chest had strengthened at the YMCA. He motioned me to watch. He turned on the cold water to flush the heat from the hop-jack waste. He said nothing and I felt awkward, the two of us standing like acrobats on a platform, waiting, high above the rest of the plant. Finally he motioned for me to climb higher up the next ladder. I had to do it. Below me was all the world. I had to prove I could function where Rector Karg%u2019s Holy Mother Church was no net to catch me. I peered down at him.He smiled beneath his cap. He placed his hand sideways in his crotch, drove his fingers in flat, index finger up, and pulled his hand out loosely and snapped it from the wrist as if flinging sweat from his fingers. He shook his head side to side, laughing, boy-o-boy. He was making like my buddy signaling me we were both hot and tired. He was telling me I was doing okay. Then he motioned me on, to enter the jack.I peered in through the small porthole door, down at the ladder, into the steel submarine of the copper tank. From theological study to graduate school to this noisy, dangerous factory, and maybe to the war far off in Southeast Asia, I had to meet the world on its terms. That was always my point. Lots of workers become priests. I never heard of a priest becoming a worker. I looked inside the tank, pulled my work gloves on my hands, over the once-broken finger, and vowed I would make it back to Louisa%u2019s, because the stranger, my new buddy, had given me more encouragement in one gesture than any priest.I climbed feet first through the porthole and ten feet down the rungs of the ladder into the isolation tank of the vat. Six inches of hops waste mattressed under my new work shoes. My buddy threw a stoker%u2019s shovel in after me. It cut through the wet heat and landed on the cushion of waste.%u201cTake off your shirt,%u201d he said. He peered down on me through the small porthole at the top of the ladder. The tank was ominous with sprinkler cooling jets. In the showers of the concentration camps, a million Catholic martyrs. %u201cEvery fuck ever worked in here says it%u2019s too goddam hot.%u201d