Page 85 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 73

made us do. Especially in the shower. I could go in a stall and be
alone, the only time I really was unseen by someone. I could pull
the plastic curtain and listen to the water run down all over me,
not minding the flaking paint on the Army Surplus sea-foam-green
walls or the voices singing four different songs in the other stalls. It
was worth it to play a hard game, or endure the slave labor on the
free afternoon, to get to take a shower and be alone.
The luxury was kind of a reward, a treat added to the maximum
two showers a week. I dawdled a long time even though Rector Karg
counseled us to enter, briskly scrub down, towel off, and exit. He
said not to luxuriate.
But I refused to hurry, even when other sems scuffed by in shower
shoes impatiently flicking, hard, harder, hardest, at the plastic cur-
tains with their towels, or sloshing buckets of pee over the shower
top to drown boys in sport. I wasn’t luxuriating or interfering with
myself or polluting myself. I was drenching myself in privacy, won-
dering at what Lock termed the nondirective failures of the priests.
I was simply being alone for a while in the wild communal world
of boys.
The shower and the Confessional were almost alike, except the
priest was there to listen when I went to confess twice a week, late
on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” I was kneeling.
The darkness of the Confessional smelled like the wet hair and
aftershave of the seminarian who had confessed in the box before
me.
“It’s three days since my last Confession.” Outside the heavy
green curtain, I heard the shuffling sounds of the thick-soled, thick-
souled lines waiting to confess. Through the Confessional screen, I
saw the priest bent over, his ear close to the screen, an inch from my
mouth.
“These are my sins,” I whispered into his holy ear. “I’ve espe-
cially been watching against sins of uncharitableness and have fallen
fifteen times since my last Confession. I was inattentive at morning
prayers twice and was careless in saying the rosary three times. For
these and all the sins of my past life, especially sins of disobedience,
or any unknown sin of impurity, I am heartily sorry.”

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