Page 257 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 245

at my physical boldness. I had never seen myself naked. Even as a
metaphor. Oh Jesus! I was no Dryden! I waited for lightning to split
the hot humid night air, lighting my body, finally hearing thunder
roll in from the flat Illinois plains and prairies toward the third-floor
attic of the parish house at 63rd and Cottage Grove and the spoom
tilly in the darkest meanest part of Chicago doggley bedeep where
the main difference between me gaspoom toggley and the black folks
was that I could leave the ghetto any time I wanted. “Lullaby of
Birdland. Doo wah doo.”

September 5, 1963

A few days later, I dared myself to return, despite Karg, to spite Karg,
to Misericordia to begin my eleventh year.
“You came back,” Karg said. Check.
“God told me to,” I said. Checkmate.
“The clock is ticking,” he said.
“Do not ask for whom the clock ticks,” I said.
My summer masquerading as a worker-priest in Chicago fasci-
nated Lock. “How can I now regard myself?” I asked.
“What possessed you to come back?” Lock asked.
“How do you regard yourself?”
“You might have disappeared bongo-bongo into some neat, beat
Chicago writer’s garret.”
“I disappeared years ago. I’m trying to reappear. That’s the point.
I haven’t been seen in years.”
“Then why come back here?”
“Karg was betting I wouldn’t. Nobody can use my vocation
against me.”
“Karg can.”
“No one can use my purity of vocation or purity of intention
against me.”
“He does treat you strangely.”
“I came back for perspective.”
“The only perspective here is Ordination, and getting picked up
by a progressive bishop in a liberal diocese.”
Lock, for all his Vatican diplomatic corps promise, was not much

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