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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK246 Jack FritscherHis face disappeared and I was standing alone on the spent hops. I gouged an opening in the carpet of wet waste nearest the sewer trap and slugged a couple shovels down. In two minutes I was soaked through, sweating like other men. I threw my shirt over the ladder rungs, to grab it in scrambling escape should the machine begin flooding with me in it. I was not going to drown like Hank the Tank. I was in the tank and one with the tank. I worked, shoulders, arms, back, legs, to clear the serrated floor, stopping to gasp under the draft of the tiny incoming flue that smelled like the cooler brewery air of the far outside.I leaned panting against the black walls of the tank, larger than my room at Misery where Karg had slugged me across the chest. I paced myself, laughing, knowing I was strong enough to do the job. The shiny copper floor of the tank finally gleamed spotless, flecked with a few brown flakes, like cereal dried on the rim of an unwashed bowl. My jeans were soaked. I was elated, touched sensuously by a strange fatigue of pleasure. I could make it to Louisa%u2019s, I told myself. Dead tired, I would make it to Louisa%u2019s. I climbed out of the tank, shirtless, laughing, popping the can of beer handed by my buddy. In the sweat running salt into my mouth, I tasted the promise of the world.May 14, 1964My cherry depressed Louisa all through the spring into the first of my summers among grown-ups. Lilacs in the dooryards bloomed all down our street the way I always dreamed spring would be in the world. I no longer knelt, kneecaps on wooden kneelers, in the impossible indulgent stretches of introspection. I traded mystic meditation for rational thought on buses between graduate school and the brewery and Louisa%u2019s. I could have cared less that, back at Misery, Ordination Day was coming.In the city, I pulled myself together, hungry for adventure. I walked the night streets of the Loop, eating up the downtown lights of the huge marquees of the brilliant movie palaces, wanting life as perfect and big and sweeping as a wide-screen movie, hoping history would happen to me, doubting it would, buying front-row seats to see Albert Finney in Tom Jones downtown and in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning uptown, double-billed with Richard Harris in This Sporting Life at the Bryn Mawr. The British invasion was everywhere. The Beatles were coming to the Amphitheater.%u201cYou%u2019re begging for it,%u201d Louisa said. She was making me a cottagecheese salad.