Page 93 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 81

off my loafer. It was an old trick, done every day to break someone’s
syncopation in the fast march-step of seminarians double-file down
long hallways. I wheeled. The two of us stood, stock still, facing
each other smack in the middle of the silent crowd of boys pushing
out the door past us. My tongue licked across my two new teeth. In
the free-for-all fury of the Mud Bowl, nobody but me knew exactly
who had kicked me in the mouth. He knew. I knew. But I never told
anyone. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. He was afraid to claim
the bragging rights.
His kicking out my teeth gave me the power to get him shipped
anytime I wanted. So did his locked door.
The secret bonded us.
“Screw you,” he whispered.
“You are more pathetic than boring,” I said.
Around our little movie scene, the crowd of milling extras
sniggered.
“Silence in the ranks!” Gunn yelled from half across the room.
“Close up the file or I’ll bring you all about-face.”
In a high-pitched ventriloquist-whisper into the fist of my thumb
over my forefinger, I said, “No! No! Not that! Not the ‘about-face.’ I
might turn and see Hank.”
All the boys near me laughed into their hands and into the
crooks of their elbows.
I turned and walked out.
Hank the Tank was hard behind me as we filed two-by-two up
the stairs, into the chapel where we all knelt together for our after-
supper visit to the Blessed Sacrament.

March 17, 1957
Saint Patrick’s Day

In the refectory, after supper, on the Feast of Saint Patrick, Rector
Karg, in his schnapps, ordered me up the ten steps to the lectern, all
the boys looking up, and made me sing “Danny Boy.” Ha ha ha.
The Irish, Karg liked to say, missed twenty-five percent of
Catholic history, because the Micks were pagans until 500 A.D. In
the last election for U. S. president, when all the priests liked Ike

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