Page 97 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 85

because there has never been a high-school graduation at Misericor-
dia, and as long as there is an Ordination Day, there will never be a
high-school graduation, because our focus at Misericordia is on the
priesthood, and that, he said, closes the subject.”
The next day the breach between students and faculty became
even more strained. Gunn stripped Porky Puhl’s last tatters of hierar-
chy. He shipped him out of Misery, on an hour’s notice, for perform-
ing a scientific experiment on some sophomores.
Porky had put eight boys—each in a separate shower stall—and
measured their privates. One kid got scared and told in Confession
to a priest who refused him absolution until he told Gunn.
After that Gunn treated us like we all knew, I mean really knew,
what Porky had done in the shower and all. Father Gunn rounded
up the bunch of us senior boys and wondered, he said, about group
guilt and one bad apple. It was one of his longest spiritual lectures,
lasting over two hours.
Lock sniggered that Porky must have really been concerned
about “the shortage of priests.”

April 16, 1957

Late the following night, after lights out, I slipped out of the dormi-
tory in my pajamas and robe. I carried my hard-heeled bedroom
slippers in my hand until I stood barefoot outside Father Gunn’s
dimly lighted door, where I stuck my toes into them and stood on
my sloppy crushed heels. I knocked and knelt down on both knees
on his threshold.
He opened his door and looked down at me, kneeling, looking
up at him. “Tell me,” he said, “everything.”
“Father, I think you ought to know...in view of what’s been going
on and all that Hank and Ski...Mr. Rimski and Mr. Kowalski, that
is...have been caught locked in the storage room...Sometimes Porky
Puhl was in there with them. They’ve been exercising, I guess, is all
they’ve been doing, because here’s this book I found on gymnas-
tics that’s from the library stacks. It’s been taken out without being
stamped...Also there were some, I think, secular periodicals, health
magazines from Charles Atlas, stuck under the stored mattresses

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