Page 311 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 299

“I’m afraid not,” she said.
“Not even a virgin to the Cinematheque?”
“Another time.”
“Oh, sorry...”
“Ryan, that’s not a ‘no.’”

June 20, 1964

Summer struck with new classes and thunderstorms. Lake Michigan
rose and fell with a week of seiche that ripped the beach raw, crash-
ing waves against the huge boulders protecting Loyola’s Lakeshore
Campus. Huge walls of water rolled in every ten hours, big as tidal
waves. Between bossa nova cuts from the new Getz/Gilberto Verve
album, the radio warned everyone away from the beaches of Lake
Michigan, “The Girl from Ipanema,” where lifeguards stood watch.
Even the constant Chicago wind could not relieve the humidity, and
the suck and pull of barometric pressure, rising and falling, teetered
always on the edge of cyclone and tornado.
I retreated to Louisa’s attic, studying late, feeling unloved and
lost, listening to Stan Getz’ saxophone mix “Desafinado” with the
piano of Antonio Jobim and the guitar of João Gilberto. I hated
the House of Lou Lou. She thought me like other men the way the
priests had thought all vocations were the same. I hated me in her
house. She was too personal. I wanted to escape from my past to
my future. I stopped going to Mass. I thought of Ted in that grade-
school nun’s story, how he committed a sin with his girl and died
in a car crash. The fires of hell got him, but at least he got the girl.
The priests taught that girls were the main occasion of sin, but girls
treated me almost formally, as if they and the world had not exactly
been waiting for me to show up.
Could the world feel what I could not feel? At Misery, I had felt
compassion for the world, but in the world, I lost empathy toward
everyone, victims in burning buildings and children with cancer and
people in ghettos, slipping and sliding since Jack died in Dallas, six
months out of Misery, having gained the world and lost my soul. I
wrote in my yellow legal pads those old lines of Wordsworth that

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