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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 255%u201cAn ex-seminarian is one who didn%u2019t get over it.%u201d%u201cHumph! Jesuit! I hope you didn%u2019t mind my grilling you in the Student Union.%u201d%u201cNo.%u201d%u201cHow did you find it? I%u2019m curious.%u201d%u201cThe grilling?%u201d%u201cThe seminary. I think you were there a very long time. How over it are you?%u201dHer apartment was one of those semi-furnished flats fitted out with odds and ends. The orange couch, where she enthroned herself, sitting with her feet up, her knees folded under her, all in black, was the center of the room. Piles of cushions scattered in small archipelagoes across the floor. She said furniture was bourgeois, and marriage, and religion, and how did I like sitting cross-legged as a beatnik in a beanbag chair?Behind her, in blue, greens and yellows, a print on textured cardboard, of a painting, %u201cby Carrington,%u201d she said, a portrait, head and shoulders, of a florid young man, %u201cyou notice, but, of course, you think you look like that, romantic, a lover, painted by a woman,%u201d a prize, British, imported, from the bins of textured cardboard paintings sold at Barbara%u2019s Book Store in Old Town.%u201cActually,%u201d I said, %u201cI%u2019m, uh, trying to be honest.%u201d%u201cAs an artist,%u201d she said, %u201cI%u2019m interested in faces, portraits, films cast from life, faces, not actors, real people, and real writing, personal, reflexive.%u201dAt Misery, I could have projected her, Jocelyn Jennings herself, face and body, from real dreams. I had known her apartment, if not her, already far back, distracted by Plato in Misery%u2019s chapel, dreaming about a Greenwich Village garret. I was not disappointed she was so literary, so bohemian, so free, so pretentiously beyond the pretenders preening in the Misery opera and chant society.%u201cI was in the seminary longer than most murderers are in prison, but don%u2019t get me wrong, as fub duck...%u201d%u201cFub duck?%u201d%u201c...fucked up as it was, it was one of the most positive experiences of my life.%u201d%u201cWhat did they do to you?%u201d%u201cThey never did anything to me.%u201d%u201cThey never touched you?%u201d%u201cThey never touched me.%u201d%u201cMaybe not your body.%u201d%u201cI tried, really, to be creative, find myself, get the most out of it.%u201d