Page 297 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 285

a stoker’s shovel in after me. It cut through the wet heat and landed
on the cushion of waste.
“Take off your shirt,” 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. “Every fuck ever worked in here says it’s
too goddam hot.”
His 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 brew-
ery 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’s, I told myself.
Dead tired, I would make it to Louisa’s. 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, 1964

My 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 impos-
sible indulgent stretches of introspection. I traded mystic medita-
tion for rational thought on buses between graduate school and the

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