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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 249over coffee in the Union. Perfumed, wrapped in folds of cotton and silk, cupped, teased, combed, heavy with languor, small hands in white gloves, studious beneath a professor%u2019s drone, each girl scanned, computed, sought eligible. I cruised among them, outside their sweet dimension.A tremendous disconnected sense of being unloved, nobody loves me, crossed over me, who had words for everyone and everything at Misery, your mother doesn%u2019t love you enough, with nothing to say to the men at work, not speaking the language of girls, with inchoate desire sounding like a prayer, Dear God, she turns me on, dreaming of them all, of a face, faceless, beautiful, pure, small white breasts, coming to me, me bending to them teaching me, heavy with desire, with vine leaves in my hair, white godlike linen wrapped crisscross, Christ%u2019s Cross, around my loins, heavy with pure virgin love.I thought of a boxing match at Catholic Boys Camp one summer, and Hank the Tank kicking out my teeth in football and breaking my finger, and returning more than twenty times after summers and after Christmases on busses and trains to six million tick tick minutes at Misery. I always went back for more: it took me almost five rounds to lose the boxing match, because I was rough and tough and ready to beat them all up. Louisa intuited some things about me, but she didn%u2019t know everything. She didn%u2019t know about the vast experiments in the South State Street dives, parlors of tattoo and pool, or about Jocelyn. When I experimented with giving up Confession, I stopped telling everybody everything.Besides, Louisa never would have believed the gang of younger brewers, five or six, who let me tag along to Rush Street and Wells, drinking, and then four of us, come on, kid, to South State Street, stepping over winos, where we yelled, %u201cGo-go, baby, go, go,%u201d at the white-booted strippers bumping it out over the ancient plush seats of the burlesque theater. %u201cTake it off, take it off!%u201d Very jokey, very drunk, two or three of the brewers played at playing pocket-pool in their pants and moaning and laughing and mooing like bulls, and we all palsy-walsy went running drunken out into the spring night, stopping in later at the tavern where the older whores came to play tongue tennis, and the guys, come on, kid, enrolling me in higher education, kidded them, the old whoors, all night, buying plenty of drinks, jeweling them down from twenty to five bucks a throw, until all their other prospects had stumbled out, and then laughing in the old cosmetic faces and hooting at them, Oh, sister, how much will you pay us to gangbang you?The bartender laughed. He thought it so funny them, the old whoors, cheated out of their tricks, because the cops could arrest him for