CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY process whereby words were transported from your head through a typewriter to a typesetter into metal artfully arranged, which produced a printed page. If there was a heaven, it had to have a composing room. The printing plant over which I first lusted was a squat green building on the wrong side of Market Street called the Garrett Press, which produced shoppers and dreary house organs. (I began putting out newspapers there when I was thirteen and was still at it nearly two decades later at Ramparts, which, to keep me amused, published two newspapers, one of them a daily.) I had found my place in the sun in this dark, dingy printing plant which I thought of as King Solomon’s Mines. I would stand bent over the makeup forms for hours on end, drunk with the ordeal. I became ecstatic when, in violation of all union rules, I was allowed to handle a piece of hot type. The hours I spent in the company of printers came to exceed those in the classroom, and gave me quite a different view of the universe than that afforded by the Brothers of Mary. I spent my spare time and money on pilgrimages to the out-of- town newspaper stands, which were located between skid row and the red light district. I would step obliviously over the bodies of winos and dodge around hookers to reach the delicious racks of stale newspapers, and come away burdened with as many copies as my money could buy of the New York Daily News, the defunct Los Angeles Daily News and its also dead- and-gone successor, The Mirror, at the time I had a crush on tabloids. Often at night I traveled to Mecca, which was the rundown sports department of the San Francisco Examiner, where a kindly, drunken old Hearst deskman would let me stand around and drool over the teletype machines. My traveling companion in these excursions was my high school sports editor, a burly football player named Jim Clifford, who had the reasonably balanced view of our journalistic calling that it came somewhere after football and girls. One evening as we stood watching the teletypes pound and ring in the news a slight incident occured that was illustrative of where my head was at this point in young manhood. A copyboy dumped off several copies of the advance “ bulldog” news section of the Sunday paper, printed early to be trucked off to the boonies and filled with undated features about trout fishing in Alaska and publicity stills of aspiring Swedish starlets with their titties showing. “ Jez-zus, look at that!” Clifford said, staring at a large front-page photograph of a girl with a cleavage as deep as the Grandi Canyon. But all I noticed was the unusual red headlines in a typeface the conservatively madeup Examiner normally reserved for world wars. “ Wow, that’s really something,” 1 replied to the salivating Clifford. “ That’s beautiful! Can you imagine running 60 point Cheltenham italic in red ink?” Clifford gave me a very strange look, and all the way home on the streetcar that night he read the sports section in silence, occasionally glancing up to stare at me as if I were some sort of nut. The Brothers of Mary were so delighted to be rid of my person that they made me the valedictorian, a gesture they had cause to regret when I delivered an X-rated speech. I took at least one of them over the wall with me. He was a beanstalk-tall and scarecrow-thin friar with a mordant sense of Christianity, one Brother Nunes, a high-speed talker with a clapped-out sinus that occasioned his voice to come out his nose with the pitch and whine of a jet engine. Brother Nunes was constantly taking hits off a Vicks Inhaler, a habit he claimed I drove him to by my didos on the school paper, which he had the unwelcome detail of moderating. He described himself as hounded by the furies of Irish Catholic teenage journalists manques. My co-conspirator in driving the good Brother to burn his black gabardines was Dan O’Neill — who in the sixties became the enfan t terrible cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle, the creator of III. EYEBALL TO EYEBALL WITH THE JESUITS At v e a re ri d o u d s e t c i a m d e e s p d a u s r t i n I g h th a e v e c h b e e c e k n called licentious,-profligate, an adventurer, a sensationalist, a wastrel, a capitalist guerrilla, a boozer, a corporate wrecker, a degenerate, a wheeler- dealer, and a pirate, among other things. There exist sufficient grounds for most of those appellations that they could be regarded as faint praise unto the truth, which is that all I am now or may be considered to be 1 owe to the Jesuits. Jesuit college education was a continuing Congress of Wonders, at times approaching the delirium of a mushroom sect. One professor spoke confidentially of untertaking scientific experiments in support of the little-known theory of Justinian that homosexuality was the cause of earthquakes. Theology units were earned by becoming versed in the finer points of religious etiquette, such as if one’s gums were bleeding one could swallow the blood and still receive Communion without breaking one’s fast, but if one cut one’s finger one could not suck it, finger blood apparently being of a different theological type than gum blood. The instruction concerning women seemed peculiar even the comic strip Odd Bodkins, syndicated in some 300 papers while he was still in his early twenties. He was fired at the peak of his popularity for outrageously inserting Morse code obscenities and recruiting messages for the Irish Republican Army in his strip, and thereafter went underground in Belfast, where he drew propaganda comic strips for the IRA. After letting the two of us loose in the world, Brother Nunes quit. in that insensitive time of the mid-1950’s — women were worthy to receive Communion on their tongues, but no other part of their anatomy could come into contact with the Host; the rules were different for men. If a woman lay dying and for some ungodly reason had to be an- nointed on the mouth, her lipstick must be first wiped off or else the sacrament of Extreme Unction, like vaccination under the wrong conditions, might not take. Seniors were required to take a Last Chance course in the Catholic dos and do nots about sex; when, on occasion, a married student, as none others could dare to speak on the subject for fear of scandal, would raise a practical objection to the explicit instructions, such as how could a priest know what gives with sexual foreplay, the answer would invariably come, in the manner of the Jesuits, in another question: Did a doctor have to endure cancer in order to treat it? Sex seemed to be the only exception to the general principle of plasticity characteristic of the Jesuit approach to moral and religious absolutes. Their Hard Line on carnality led them, historically, to some extremes, such as removing the stairs to 218 CLOTHIERS 218 SW Broadway 241-3085 Mon.-Sat. 11-6 BULL PEN TAVERN Beer & Wine Excellent Canadian Bacon, Cheese & Tomato Sandwich Live Entertainment Friday& Saturday 1730 SUV. 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