High School

 

I notice I tell stories about my teens but for some reason have left a huge gap about high school. I tell plenty of stories of my lower middle class townie buddies I knew then but not many high school ones. I believe much of that had to do with Saint Ray’s being a fairly sedate school environment, except for the usual political machinations you’d see in this kind of prep/catholic school, where staff and students, try to rise up the social ladder. Other than that, the place was far more untroubled than the public schools I attended prior.

**

Saint Raphael Academy was an all boys school till 1975 when the diocese decided to let girls in, probably in keeping with the liberal times and Vatican II’s reformation.

What I had heard was that some of the Brothers and more than a few Nuns were against it because girls, women, were the sole cause of leading young Christian men astray from the True Faith with their slutty, Jezebel ways. Not all the ministry were onboard for the church’s progressive new stance.

My first few days at this new school in September of ‘79 were kind of surprising. The kids, who so few I knew, were a bit better dressed and slightly more monied than the pubic school kids I had known prior. But in general, they were affable and mostly approachable. I would come to learn the only real difference between the two schools, education wise, was that the private ones had better control of their classrooms. Any kids who were “problems” were given a bum’s rush through the door rather quickly and that’s how the private schools kept the peace. I saw ONE fight between two kids in my three years there. At public schools, I’d see one a month.

I had some fear of going to a new school. How hard would it be? Are there any cool kids to know? How do I deal with actual members of the DeLasallians when I hadn’t cracked open a Bible or attended Mass in years and couldn’t name the 10 Commandments to save my life? I wasn’t even sure of remembering the Hail Mary. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee….something something something.”

I became more hopeful by the end of August that year when I had to get the “uniform” needed to attend. It consisted of any kind of collared shirt, Levis’s corduroys and boat shoes. That’s it. That was what was popular for late 1979. The dress code was sort of written in reverse, no sneakers or jeans, otherwise everything else was fine.

I was fifth-teen then and that natural teen exuberance, the anticipation, the excitement that this school could be fun was growing in me. Plus meeting newer kids my age who weren’t the usual little criminals I knew around here had a bit of “good” suspense to it. Who were they? What were they like?

My first class, was an Algebra one and I was sitting a few rows down when this girl, Terri, comes in to which the boys flocked around. She was chatting them up excitedly and then turned to go to her seat in the same row as I. When I first saw her face, I thought she was rather pretty. A sort of a Susan Dey kind of girl, a natural hippy look to her.

As she approached my seat, I then noticed her Levi’s Green corduroy pants, which formed a tight, anatomically correct, very easilyi seen camel toe.

I just stared with my 15 year old eyes. I had never seen any girl with that before in real life. All the girls I had known in jr high school never dressed like that. They all wore generic jeans with hopes of affording the new Jordache designer ones one day, but were too poor as of yet. As Terri approached, I kept staring till she was all of two feet from me when I looked up at her face and she gave me a slight, wry smile then sat down. She knew where I was looking and it didn’t faze her a bit. In fact, she seemed somewhat satisfied that I noticed and was staring.

I had a second thought: Catholic school wasn’t as uptight and strict as I thought it may be if girls like Terri walked around like this.

A few classes later, Mr Girard’s World history, had the same kids and Terri had come in, flanked by the boys and she too sat down with the rest of us. About ten minutes into the class, I then met for the first time, Sister Bernadette Piche.

**

Sister Bernadette was one of those nuns who adopted the newer, liberallized clothing style for nuns, which was to ditch the old black and white habit for conservative casual business wear. It was all greys, pastel blues and white shirts, dresses and the like, totally sexless looking but I suppose if your a nun, that’s the look you want.

The Sister’s liberal tendencies stopped there, at clothing. She did however keep that authoritarian stance. She didn’t terrorize her students but had her own way of maintaining order. If she came across a group of rambunctious boys, she’d slowly walk up, stand and stare with a small smile upon her face until everyone read her message which was, “Cut the shit,” in her own menacing/passive way. She had a near Mother Mary air about her, possibly claiming to being closer to God than any of us were it seemed. It was a calm, unaffected look on her face that also telegraphed that authority that she was God’s Right Hand. I had never been to parochial school before but I managed to read this easily. It confirmed the stereotype I had seen on TV. Some stereotypes contain a kernel of truth.

So in comes Sister Bernadette to Girard’s history class, she stops, looks around, smiles and calmly says, “Terri Norenson….a word with you please.”

Terri gets up with that perfect line of her tight ass showing through those corduroys to follow the Sister out.

We don’t see Terri for the rest of the day. Sister sent her home due to those pants.

The following days Terri had returned but in knee length skirts and the tightest white shirt/sweater combo she had. As the days progressed, the hemline on other skirts she had kept creeping higher and higher and we’d see more undone buttons on the shirt. By the end of this change, all she needed were pigtails and carry a giant lollipop to complete this Lolita Catholic Slut Girl look.

I now get it. At 15, she was wanting to be loved by all the boys around her, to be seen as pretty, to be validated, to be popular and rise in the ranks. If a girl wanted quick attention from teen boys, there’s an easy way to get it. Terri unfortunately chose skank fashion in a school patrolled by the hem measuring Bernadette.

A few days later in home room, I mention I hadn’t seen Terri at all. I was told that she had been kicked out for “causing a disturbance.” What disturbance I ask? What had she done? She punch someone out? Dealt drugs from her locker? I was never a catholic school kid and what it took to get you kicked out of a public school...were real felonies, real crimes, real reasons why the police would be called in.

Scott P. who sat next to me laughingly says, “She got kicked out for causing a disturbance in every guy’s pants!”

Too bad she was gone...she was great entertainment for us boys.  

 

The other thing about Saint Rays was that it drew on kids from far richer backgrounds. My experience with public schools was that they drew on every one from every background, so you see this everyday and learn to accept it. In order to get along, you have to tolerate all sorts of people.

Saints, on the other hand, had some kids whose Dads were hundred-thousand-airs. Perhaps there was one or two millionaire families in there but I wasn’t sure. The rest of us were lowly middle class schleps.

One girl I remember, came from a family that owned an home heating oil delivery business. To her great luck, she was born pretty, tall and blonde as well. Talk about winning the lottery w/o having to do anything at all.

**

In our homeroom one day, we boys see a brand new 1982 IROC Camaro pull in. It was the latest edition in midnight blue with a pearl flip-flop top coating that made it iridescent like the inside of a sea shell.

It parks, and we see home heating oil girl get out of it, carrying her D&D cup of coffee and coming into the building. We boys immediately figure she got Dad’s car this morning. She comes into our home room, goes to her little clique of other born pretty/rich girls and excitedly says:

“Come see what Daddy got for my birthday!”

The girls come to our window and ooh and ahh at the car. We boys just stood there stunned, dumbfounded and look at one another in disbelief.

I thought, “She got a brand new sports car for her birthday?!!”

Home heating oil girl goes on about how she put in a little thingy that spurts out a tiny puff of White Diamonds perfume inside the every hour. She also mentions that she put a small suitcase in it with two other changes of clothing, “Just in case.” To top it off she says she put her teddy bear, “Angel” in the backseat, buckled in as well.

This, is what she did with an IROC Camaro, turned it into a mobile version of her bedroom.

We boys later say we’d take that very same car, and slam on the accelerator on that straightaway east of the school on Walcott St to see if we could get it burn out for 50 yards straight.

That school was the first time my seeing how the other half lived...or inherited. Before Saints, I had never known of a family that took vacations to Europe. Or girls with real diamond earings. One kid boasted of living the entire summer at a beach home on the Narragansett shore. It was then I first was introduced to people, kids who manage to escape the barbs of life. All the ones I had known up to that point had some sort of road rash from life, either from homes where finances were tight, awful parent(s) or say just a day to day grungy life of living on the shittier streets of Pawtucket, where parents advanced as far as they could, to a factory job. Some of these Saint Rays kids I knew, had parents that could shelter them that well. I couldn’t parse that at the time. How the hell could you duck life’s barbed wire and incoming missiles? I still didn’t fully understand how a thick wall of money could armor you, for years, against that. I didn’t know then yet what that really, truly meant. I do now. Money can be one hell of a tool if you have gobs of it.

**

Before school shootings became the thing to do, before they installed metal detectors at school doorways, I can tell you how many guns were inside Saint Raphael Academy in 1982.

The answer I am going tell you was three.

In one locker there was an Army Colt .45. In another a Mossberg 12 gauge pump action shotgun, the last locker had boring S&W .38 special. And I will not name names.

Why were they there? It wasn’t because these three wanted revenge for a lifetime of bullying or some sick hope to go out with a bang. It was a competition, a sort of show and tell between some of the kids to see if they could smuggle in firearms and keep them in their lockers for at least a week w/o being caught. The joke of it is? All the kids knew they were there and not one school official was told. No one was ratted out because we all knew they weren’t going to be used. It was for “fun.”

Again, nobody wanted to exact revenge in the worst way. It was all ballsy attempt to to do something w/o the adults ever finding out. Though I do wonder how that one managed to sneak in a 40 inch long birding shotgun with a muzzle that meant business when you saw it.

In time, those weapons were quietly snuck out and back home.

I’m loathe to mention real names here when I tell not so kind stories, though if I hate your guts enough I will. Also, if I was present with other witnesses when I saw this or that happen, well...I’ll divulge.

Brother James Dries was a hot headed math/chemistry teacher who joined St Rays in my senior year. He seemed out of place, a 1950’s sort of abusive, tyrannical religious type amongst the far more laid back Brothers who were at Saints. Dries loved to yell, strut his dominance in the classroom and I saw him once, fling his briefcase at a kid outside the building. Why he did that I have no idea.

In May of our senior year, we all had our credits to graduate no matter what happened, we had satisfied the state’s requirements, so we generally fucked off when it came to classwork.

Mike and I had Dries for chem II one super hot late May afternoon and everyone in the class was half asleep and languid with the heat. No one was motivated to do anything nor listening to Dries go over some chem equations from the book.

Behind me I hear Dries say, “Mike, go to the board and do Question 7…”

A few seconds pass when I hear WHAM! It was the sound of metal stool being slammed onto the granite top of a table. It then had bounced its way to the corner of the room, totally shattering the quiet of the room.

“GET UP THERE WHEN I TELL YOU TOO!” bellows Dries.

I had jumped in my seat from that noise and turned around to see what it was. I then see Mike, rolling his eyes as hard as he could, get up and go to the board to do the equation.

I watched as Dries walks back to the front of the classroom and remember what my brother had once said about guys like him, “Short person behavior!” Meaning you have little, short guys who become tough when anointed with some authority. What’s typical, those kinds of people wield the power like a baseball bat and never realize when NOT to use it.

A few years after graduation, and the fact I had to pass by Saints all the time to get to 95S, I’d occasionally see old teachers walking between the two buildings. One day, there’s Dries, flinging his briefcase at a kid on the sidewalk. I thought of pulling over, picking up that case and flinging it back at him. But the thought of standing in front of a judge explaining why I assaulted a man of the cloth made me think twice.

A Truth...

 

 

 

So I break my own rules about revealing stories I’d never write. I’ll tell you a story that was secreted away from most until I discovered it a few years later. It then explained the empty Sominex bottle I saw in my brother’s desk drawer that ended staying there for years.

**

Saint Raphael Academy would hold sometimes tours of their school for parents of kids who attended. It was a PR event and a way to scare up some newer attendees from the younger brothers and sisters. I was brought along by my parents one Saturday in November of ‘75, after which we’d do the usual shopping at Ann & Hope, Sears and the like. My brother, who was 15, was old enough and too bored with shopping to come along anymore so he stayed home.

Up until then, the only religious people I’ve seen sort of close up, were priests who said Mass and the one nun I knew during “released time” which was the back door for us public school kids to get prepped for our First Communion. I was never a parochial school kid till high school so I had little up close experience with the various members of the church.

When my parents and I came to Saint Ray’s tour, I was surprised to see these particular priests who roamed the halls who weren’t really ordained priests. They were DeLasallian Brothers, a Catholic teacher order. They are less ardent and militant than the Jesuits who will teach you whether you liked it or not! I had never known there were various divisions within the church who specialized.

The DeLasallians wore cassocks with this odd cardboard thingy scrunched up to their neck. I never asked any of them what it meant as I kept a closed mouth while my parents did the talking.  

LaSallian Brothers. They usually don't smile this much.

 

As my parents spoke to one, the brother turns to me and asks, “Are you going to come here in a few years? (Always gotta keep the school’s quota packed and paying!). I told him, “I don’t know” with a shrug.

“Whaddayamean you ‘don’t know!?’” he bellows.

I was taken aback by that. This Crusader for Christ in his magical outfit scared me some. My Dad interjects that it was more than a few years (like five years) before considering that idea. I was nine then.

After this we go shopping, the typical weekend for us here. When we come home, I begin to notice my Dad, then my Mom, marching up and down the stairs to my brother’s bedroom. I ask what’s going on and they both blew me off. OK, I know when I’m being cut out from what’s going on.

I then see Dad brewing a pot of coffee and brings up a large cup of it to my brother upstairs. I ask, because my brother rarely drank coffee. OK, something’s up and I have to ask again. “What’s going on?”

“Ken’s just very tired...he needs a pick me up.”

Ok, I’m nine, I got an answer and go back to watching the Three Stooges.

Then a second and third and a fourth cup of coffee goes upstairs.

OK, weird I think, but a lot of times I just kept to myself when I heard or saw stuff I knew I’d never get a full explanation for. If I got a tiny bit of a reason or explanation, I knew it was all I knew I was going to get and generally, if the topic wasn’t deliciously juicy, I’d accept being brushed off. You’re a kid, you get the brush off all the time.

Finally Ken comes down, looking like one of his next morning’s hangover or a very rotten case of the flu. He eats dinner with us and no one is really talking.

That whole episode dies that night. The next morning comes as if nothing had happened.

**

My brother would keep a journal and hide it in his room and being the younger, nosy brother, I dug it up one day and I got read all about his private life a few years after the coffee “event.”

It was mostly about his school days, getting drunk or high at various friend’s homes and hanging out, wasting time at the Stop n Shop mini-mall near our neighborhood. Some of that was eye opening as I got to see a teen’s life as a fifth grader. When ever I was mentioned in it, I was characterized as the “annoying kid brother.” As I read the daily entries, I come across and read about “Ann.”

In those pages, my 15 year old brother gushes about this Ann who was classmate and a Stop & Shop mini-mall loiterer as well, like all other teens in this area hung out at. He describes her in great detail about how she looks, holds herself and any conversation he has with her no matter how trivial the topic was. He then starts wondering if she “likes” him in any small way. This goes on for weeks and the descriptions of her become like a daydream.

Then there’s a good month, a long gap, before he writes again.

The next several pages, stunned me. I had no idea of what had been kept from me.

In due time, he had finally asked out Ann and she unfortunately declined to accept. My brother being a decent writer, he managed to expertly detail the event, even including that horrid cold November day, the ice spots on her driveway and the flurries flying around him as he walked away. I remember that passage well.

He writes how crushed he was. How certain he felt she’d say “yes” and how his entire world felt like it collapsed. He took her “No” as a complete rejection of his entire being. There was nothing left.

Then I read how he would escape all that, by waiting for that Saturday when he knew he’d be alone because, “My parents and brother will be going to a Saint Ray’s open house and go shopping after.” Leaving him alone the whole afternoon. He goes on to describe how he swallowed a half bottle of Sominex (sleeping pills for those of you who don’t know) and also writes of the aftermath of “not doing it right” and Dad’s coffee cure.

“HOLY FUCKIN’ SHIT” I say to myself as I read this. It then explained the Sominex bottle in his drawer, that I’d see for years, which he probably kept as a reminder. Odd curio to keep around though.

I was 14 when I read that and I had no real life’s experience to parse it.

I do now.

Ken being a 15 year old BOY...became enamored with his first love. He made the mistake of exalting her to a level of heavenliness no one person should be raised too. He fell in love with the idea of being in love, only to have that bubble burst rapidly by Ann’s “No.” Plus there was his own personality quirks that probably never helped either. I get it, you’re 15 and that first major crush hits you and you have no experience nor coping mechanisms to deal with it as it’s all uncharted territory. It’s your first time on a wild roller coaster ride of emotion. I had my own first crush with Dianne K. who never wanted the time of day from me, nor any other boy at her age for that matter. At 15 she just wasn’t ready or interested in guys just yet. Oh well, I moved on w/o the attendant obsessiveness like my brother draped girls with.

Perhaps it’s me, but I didn’t lionize girls at that age. I was more sordid, coarser...driven by plain lust at 15. When I saw a neighborhood girl sprout breasts and hips at 14, and looked in one year’s time she grew to 19 years old, I just wanted her with my 15 year old testosterone filled brain. Some girls “fill out” pretty damned fast and to fruition and she was one of them. I didn’t have grand daydreams of romantic love about her. Well, some maybe but guys think first...with their dick...right?

**

That ugly Saturday so long ago, with my Dad’s cure of massive caffeine boosts to rouse him from all that diphenhydramine he had swallowed had another aspect to it. That was a failure to invite medical professionals into this. Why? I can tell you.

Growing up here, it was a sin to let the neighborhood or others outside of this family to know what was going on, especially anything negative. I have said before I grew up with an Edwardian etiquette and there are some great benefits to it. The major cardinal rule here was: You don’t splatter your life onto anyone else, where they end up having to wipe off YOUR mistakes they had nothing to do with. Keep your fucked up life to yourself! Do NOT let your cesspool run into the neighbor’s yard!

To this day, I really hate wiping other people’s fucked up lives off of my arm when it could have been helped.

Today though, letting your personal filth run down the street annoying everyone else is sort of accepted now. However growing up back then, any neighbor of ours who had fist fights spilling into the front yard got you labeled as white trash fast and demoted on the social hierarchy.

I suppose calling an ambulance to the house would be like waving a giant red flag to the neighbors that day that something soo juicy and gossip-able was occurring. Lucky my brother wasn’t so drugged that a full pot of coffee couldn’t cure.

And it was all neatly and quietly buried.

**

I have never paid much attention to his love life after that really. He had joined the Navy, disappearing for a few years. When he came back the first thing he wanted to do was move out of this house. It was the reason he fled to the Navy in the first place, to escape home. He got himself a tiny apartment in Providence and was gone again.

Since he worked with Trinity Rep he was happily involved on Providence’s art community. He also managed to be a published columnist for a few local newspapers for years. Those circumstances led him to attain a bit of his dream life.

Though as the years passed, his cystic fibrosis was becoming more apparent and wearying for him. He tried to keep up with his social group at various art festivals, openings and such. It got to the point where I ended going along to make sure he didn’t drop at any of these events. Which, I have written before, was how I was introduced to the art community in and around Providence and the various kinds of people you meet at them. It was eye opening for me. I met stinking rich people, hermit like painters who only came out to galleries, many professors from RISD and a cabbie wannabee novel writer who played classical music in the cab for his fares.

And..this one blonde women I kept meeting at these events who palled around my brother, Vicky.

I had finally asked Ken about her and I got this luscious and sort of dreamy description of her. I hear him listing nothing but positives about her and damn near her entire life story.

“Oh Christ, here we go again.” I think. “He’s elevated another one to a Goddess...where did I read this before?”

She spent a few years in his life and came over the house a few times. I know she thought of me as the blue-collar, ill-educated kid brother at times. Thanks to the fact I didn’t know everything about art nor did I dress up when I went to these events with my brother. I make a great impression on people when I don’t care!

Once while I was under my car, sawing off the exhaust pipes with a cutting wheel, I was wearing my old Army jacket from 1980, filthy jeans and probably stinky sneakers. Vicky had come by and I heard her shoot a “Hello” to under the car as she passed me. I pulled myself out from under, covered in rust, metal fragments and I looked like a coal miner. I spoke with her briefly, saying Ken was inside and as I spoke, she looked me up and down kinda slowly. OK, I know that body language. I know a judgment when I see one. She on the other hand was dressed, as best as she could afford, in the latest 2003 NYC’s fashion.

“OK, thanks.” and she left to go inside.

Back under the car with the tools, I muttered to myself, “Fuckin’ bitch.”

Yanking away on the pipes under the car I then think on her further. She doesn’t come around often that I can make out and I know my brother’s feelings towards her. He lights up like a Christmas tree when she comes around and I know women can spot warmth and “slightly too much affection” when they see it. She has to be completely aware of what he thinks of her because he telegraphs it so clearly. Hell I am a guy and could read it.

I also know she knew of his diagnosis to which there would be no cure, but only stalling the inevitable. What possible future could she have with him when I quietly (and the doctors) knew he’d be gone in a year without a transplant. Everyone else could see he was slipping, but not how dangerously close as I knew. But still, everyone else was aware enough to figure out Ken was in his 4^th quarter of the game but not when the two minute warning would occur.

I think further. What was she up to? Stringing him along? Looking to gain something from his pile of cash? Secretly sponge-ing off of him w/o my knowing it? Did she keep him around as another “male orbiter?” Guys who really like-like a woman but the woman keeps them at bay. Did it give Vicky validation of her attractiveness? Yeah, all negative estimations of this on my part! I could not see how she wanted any relationship with him with a lethal disease like that.

**

When it got so bad, when Ken had to be intubated by the doctors who were tirelessly scanning the transplant list to find the right candidate, I would visit every other night at RI Hospital. He couldn’t talk with that tube jammed down his throat so he wrote questions and answers to me on a legal pad. It was the only way to communicate.

It got to the point where the physicians knocked him out 24 hours a day with heavy doses of morphine as strangling to death is very unpleasant. When your oxygen is low but not low enough to make you pass out..day after goddamn day tortures you.

One night, after work, I had nearly walked into his room when I saw Vicky, sitting there with her back to me. I then quickly and quietly backed off into the hallway. She never noticed me.

I then peer around the door jamb to watch. She sat there, wringing her hands, speaking softly to him and sighing a lot. She told him she’d show him her latest painting, “Tits on the Half Shell,” which was a sort of parody of that old painting.  

 

While watching this I then saw the truth, she did care about him, even if I was not great fan of hers to begin with. I got my answer about what she wanted from him all along, which was just a close friendship. Even if it had incorporated, mistakenly on my brother’s part, a hope to lead to something more in the future.

I then make some noise and came into the room, to give her a second to react to my presence. She got up, faced me and started to tear. She too had figured out how desperate it was getting seeing him hooked up to all that medical equipment.

“OK,” I think, “You may have been disapproving of me but you weren’t of him and you were there in the last months.”

In my head I think further: “I absolve you Vicky. I forgo any animosity I may have had toward you. You can keep yours for me if you wish. This wasn’t about me anyways.”

**

A few yeas after that, while attending Project Object, the remnants of Frank Zappa’s group at the Call, I ran into Vicky on the sidewalk.

She was dressed still to the nines in the latest fashion and still was painting. Though she complained to me that she wasn’t finding art too lucrative a way to make a living. What artist does really? She then points to a guy nearby she said she was engaged to marry she had met a few months after Ken’s passing. She had grown older, in her late 40’s now and was showing it (so was I, getting slowly decrepit from age). I thought that this guy was her final attempt at landing a husband, as she had not had great luck prior in her life.

Be that as it may. At least she was there for Ken in the end, even if he lionized her. In Ken’s mind, she was a hope that could possibly work and think happy thoughts about. He once opined he’d love to vacation in Bermuda for a Christmas with her. I had sat there quietly and thought, “You ain’t going anywhere...not with your dire, unpredictable need for O2 at times.”

There have been times I stepped away from popping someone’s seemingly harmless fantasies, if it’s all the hope they have at the moment. What good is stark reality when it blackens the few months someone has left? When there are no more answers for them, what possible good is unfeeling, hard-eyed advice? So, knowing what I knew, the diagnosis, getting the really ugly facts from the Dr and how Vicky too knew there wasn’t a future with Ken and where this was going to end up, I let many of Ken’s dreams slide. It would be cruel to do otherwise.

Let him obsess over a girl like a teen boy if he wanted.