Tolman Tigers

I came across an old high school yearbook of a school I never attended and it threw me for a loop when I read it. Up until 9^th grade, I attended public schools and made friends with kids I had known from kindergarten. When it came time for high school, I followed my brother's path and went to St. Raphael's Academy vs. Tolman High School. I'd say 98% of the kids I knew from my childhood went to Tolman. To tell the truth, I lost contact with most of them when I went to a different school. Everyone moves on or run in different circles and newer friends and paths are formed. That's life. This still happens to me, and you, today.

As I was looking at the pictures of the class of '82 from Tolman, I kept going, “God! That's X or that's Y!” They looked liked as I remember them when I knew them last when they were all around 14. What I didn't see happen to them was how adolescence reshaped them when they hit 18 and graduated.

Some barely changed, others definitely got that adult look, which was more chiseled, more defined. Some looked uglier, others prettier. Me? I got butt ugly at 18! I had enough pimples to fill a bucket full of pus. Yet then, I was at my perfect BMI weight, skinny as a rat and a head full of brown/copper hair. I've put on a few pounds since then. The hair I kept though it's blindingly white now. My acne has long since subsided.

I very rarely run into any of the Class of '82 now and if I did, I probably would have to be told just who they are as we've changed so much over the decades. I'll say this though, personalities don't change too much. All they do is get quieter as they age. The volume is turned down bit by bit.

Why did I go to St Ray's? Well, at 14, you kinda do what your parent's tell you to do and it seemed like the natural thing to do, follow my brother. Was it worth it? Yes and no.

The education at Saints was rigorous. I never met a bunch of taskmasters like the DeLasallian Brothers who weren't kidding, they vowed to take a religious vocation of “educating the youth.” They had the zealotry of a Jesuit missionary in 1650's Canada who still tried to convert Hurons as they slit them head to toe with dull deer antler. Up until then, I didn't know in truth just what a “teaching order” of the Catholic church meant. I found out. My last year, 9^th grade in the public school of Goff Jr High was a damn joke. I went from spinning my wheels and doing great to having to pump mental iron when I went to Saints. It took a good six months to get mentally toned enough to gain back those A's I wasn't getting when I first started. I had come to Saint's with the breezy mentality of my last year in public school, which was vacation.

I did notice this though about a private high school, there is an exclusionary attitude to them. Public schools cast a very wide net and if you've been in them, you learn to be very tolerant of those around you as they come from all sorts of socio-economic strata. You have to do this in order to get along. It also is very egalitarian as well, due to the same reason. There was far less judgment of one another.

Private schools, St Ray's in particular, pulls a tiny, not-very-laden net onto it's ship. Very few fish. In fact, the fish are vetted. Any fish that cannot meet the educational requirements are tossed back. Also, the attitude of many of the kids there was cliquish, aristocratic and the hint of privilege was apparent.

Typically, I could get along with anyone, since I came from that mindset. But I was amazed at the rebuff I could get at times from some people. I took a while before I realized what hurdles that were placed before some of us and that jumping them was no guarantee of acceptance. Fine, be that way. Eventually I found a circle there at the school...and a completely different life/circle among my neighborhood buddies. “East is east and West is west and never shall the two meet.” Damn right, if the St Ray's crowd knew of the crew I ran with, and you've had plenty of examples via the stories I've told here, they'd think me Drug Lord worshiping Dionysus. Well, a bit of that did seep through, I didn't always keep the BS side of me completely secure. Show one face to this group of people, then have the real one for my old time friends. I might tell of the story where I completely passed out in gym one day...and got away with it scot-free...and still manage to keep secure the geek/studious/college bound front I had.

Ok, I'll tell it.

I tried everything once. Luckily for me, I never was one for addictions. So trying things once was just that, once.

My Mom had a cornucopia of Rx on her bed stand and for years and I had never touched it. But there were a few pills that gave a good kick. So, one time in the spring year of my senior year, I noticed she had 5mg Valium. Hell, I thought, why not go through school today completely relaxed?

Before I walked into the school building, I popped one 5mg tablet and waited. It did the trick in about 45 minutes. But, thinking wrongly, “if 5mg is good, another 5mg would be better? Right?” So I popped the next one in Miss Michalzych's english class. Oh dear, big dam mistake!

My next class was Rhode Island History with Mr Woodside. I can remember slouching and oozing in my chair to the point I was going to drip off of it onto the floor. I sat there, taking down notes a mile a minute and not really drawing any attention. I probably looked just more bored amongst all the other bored kids there. Here's the funny thing though, the notes I took were indecipherable afterwards. I wrote outside the lines, angled up, angled down, my usually shitty penmanship was even worse. The notes looked like a 3 year old's attempt at cursive. I still have that notebook as a reminder.

The next class was gym with Mr. Saar Sorentine. The 10 mg was really kicking in and I went to my locker to get my gym clothes and felt soo damned tired that I just lay my head on a cafeteria table to sleep. I might have gotten away with it for a few minutes when Saar came in, shook me awake and told me to get my ass in the gym. I went.

We were playing stickball with too many kids. So the batting lineup was about 50 feet long. I stood there, barely trying to keep my eyes open when it was my time to bat. I knocked one out far enough to get to first base. When I got there, I sat down.

Some kid shouts out, “Hey Saar..look at Ron!”

He turns around ,seeing me sitting there and thinking I'm just acting goofy to bust his balls, tells me to stand up, I do.

I last about 60 seconds and sit down again.

Again I'm told to stand up. I do for even less time. I sit back down, the next thing I see is that I'm looking up at a bunch of astonished kids and one coach looking down at me. I had fallen over backwards and passed out. They said my head hit the wood floor with a “THUNK!”

I then remember being carried to Saar's office. They lay me on the couch and get the nurse. Funny thing about valium, or booze for that matter, it's a truth serum to me. I started yapping my mouth off about what I thought of the school. I held nothing back apparently.

Saar, who was sitting with me, kept telling me to “Shut up” as I kept spouting my criticisms deeper. I finally shot at him, 'Jesus Saar...you DO know what half the teachers and administration thinks of YOU, don't you? C'mon...I know you know this! They think you're a buffoon!”

“SHUT UP!” he yells. I submit. I keep my mouth shut.

The school nurse finally comes and she looks me over and tells Saar maybe an ambulance should be called. I then sit straight up and freak. SHIT! If they do this, any blood test will betray me!

I have to come up with a real good excuse to explain why I passed out. I manage this magnificent lie, I told them I hadn't eaten in three days. The nurse then runs to get me a soda, some cookies and such and I drink/eat it all down. Weirdly enough, it did the trick as the sugar probably boosted me up somewhat...or...I was past the peak of the high of the valium. Either way, I was looking healthier.

“You're probably hypoglycemic..why didn't you eat for three days?”

I tell some off hand lie about why I haven't. As I become more lucid everyone's happy and a friend, drives me home as they didn't trust me to walk it home.

The next morning, I made the mistake of telling this same friend just what knocked me out. Of course, it shot through the school in less than an hour. But being gossip, it was deniable even with my admission to my friend.

So that little episode betrayed me somewhat...oh well....

**

To tell the truth, had I gone to Tolman, I would've gotten as much education as I could soak up. You can send a stupid kid to the best school on Earth, guess what? They'll be stupid upon graduation. So no matter where I went, I would've gotten as much as I could from it. But...it was a school with far less stricture like St Ray's had. Saint's is where “putting on a front” was necessary and afforded some great practice. I can imagine what other crew's I might have hung with had I gone to Tolman? The Broadway one run by Ozzy M.? The one at Crook Manor? The Attleboro ones? Who knows. Probably best I was in the Slater Park one...a nice, middle class, somewhat upwardly mobile style of punk-ery. Our territory had nice houses, picket fences and ice cream trucks up and down the streets in summer.

No, there were never any “gangs” in our town, just associations.

Seeing those faces in the yearbook reminded me of how we all ended up. Most of us survived to profitable middle age. A few of us died, went insane or just schlepped though life as they did in their teens. I saw one of us made it all the way to Merrill Lynch's Bond desk in Manhattan.