The Wild Boys Read Online Free Page A

the priory door pointing to her flowers.
    “Aren’t my primroses doing nicely.”
    She opens the door of the priory with a heavy brass key at her belt. Down a long hall and flight of stairs she opens another door with her keys. She shows Audrey into a bare cold ward room crayon drawings on the wall. A nun walks up and down with a ruler. The patients are busy with plasticene and crayons. It lookslike a kindergarten but some of the children are middle-aged. The door clicks shut and her voice changes.
    “You’ll find plasticene and crayons over there. You must have permission to leave the room for any purpose.”
    “Now see here …”
    A paunchy guard with a tin helmet and wide leather belt stands beside her. The guard looks at him with cold ugly hate and says:
    “He wants Bob and his lawyers.”
    At six o’clock there is a tasteless dinner of cold macaroni that Audrey does not touch. After dinner the night sister comes on.
    Cots are set up by the patients and the ward room is converted into a dormitory.
    “Anyone want potty before lights out?”
    She jangles the keys. The lavatory cubicles stand at one end of the dormitory. The sister on duty unlocks the doors and stands in the open door watching coldly.
    “Now don’t try and play with your dirty thing again Coldcliff or you’ll have six hours in the kitchen.”
    A dim religious light burns all night in the dormitory. The patients sleep on their backs under a thin blanket. Erections are sanctioned with a sharp ruler tap from the night sister.
    And so the years passed. Sometimes as a special treat there were nature walks in the garden, Bob there with three snarling Alsatians on a lead. The patients could watch a praying mantis eat her mate.
    Daily confessions were heard by the Green Nun on a lie detector that could also give a very nasty shock inthe nasty places while the Green Nun intoned slowly “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
    These confessions she wrote out in green ink keeping a separate ledger book for each patient. Once after a particularly degraded confession she levitated to the ceiling in the presence of an awed young nun. Every night she put on Christ drag with a shimmering halo and visited some young nun in her cell. She liked to think of herself as the nun in a poem by Sara Teasdale.
    “Infinite tenderness infinite irony is hidden forever in her closed eyes.
    Who must have learned too well in her long loneliness how empty wisdom is even to the wise.”
    She was an inveterate hypochondriac and dosed herself liberally with laudanum. As a result she suffered from constipation which could put a comely young nun on high colonic duty. This honor was invariably followed by a nocturnal visit from Christ with a strap-on. In her youth the Green Nun had toyed with the idea of ordering Bob to raid a sperm bank. Then she could claim the Christ child. She put aside these ambitious thoughts. Her work in the kindergarten was more important than worldly glamor, her picture on the cover of
Life
.
    You learn not to have a thought you will be ashamed to tell the Green Nun and never to do anything you would be ashamed to do in front of her. And sooner or later you join the Quarter G Club. Converted patients are allowed a quarter grain of morphine every night before lights out, a privilege which is withdrawn for any trespass.
    “Now you know that dream about flying is WRONG don’t you? For that you go to bed without your medicine.”
    Shivering with junk sickness in the icy ward room all next day he has to look bright and happy as he busies himself with crayons and plasticene. He has learned to draw pictures of the Virgin Mary and Saint Teresa with an unmistakable resemblance to the Green Nun. Crosses are always safe in plasticene. Soon after his commitment he made the error of molding a naked Greek statue. That day sister’s ruler slashed down on his thin blue wrist and he was forced to write out
i am a filthy little beast
ten thousand times in many places.
    Dizzy