The Work Is Innocent

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He called them the Dark Years. And pictured them thus: he would vomit out his intimate feelings to each person he met (imagining it was his soul he revealed), was quickly humiliated by having done so, and then spat where his vomit lay. All this, and the poor victim was never allowed a response.

But his judgment was too harsh. His compulsion to confess was not like vomiting, it was like masturbation. The humiliation was real, though it came from the mistake of believing his confession was disgusting; only the anger is accurately described. But this image encouraged him to continue the destructive cycle, since it was romantic. A wonderfully violent character creating altars of vomit and saliva, rather than the truth: a perverse boy producing pools of watery-white liquid.

The previous spring, when Richard Goodman was thrown out of a New York prep school, he begged his parents to allow him to live in Vermont with his sister, brother-in-law, and niece, and go to school there. He was afraid of being knifed in a New York public high school. Since his parents had decided to move to Vermont permanently, they figured Richard might as well start early in the high school where he would have to finish his last three years.

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