Prep School Secrets Told (PSST)

AN OFFERING OF CORN

2011-12-02T19:39:00.004-05:00

Just as hotdogs, hamburgers, french fries, and Coca-Cola ranked at the top of the list of every high school freshman's favorite foods in the world, so too did fresh corn.

So Nick Corona immediately had our undivided attention when he invited me, Bob Conner, and Alex Turner to his house for a nice corn lunch – since he lived only five short blocks from Christus Prep.

The questions immediately started to pop.

"You mean corn that was left over from your dinner?", Alex asked as he wiped a tiny drop of salivation from his round fat chin.

"No, No!", Nick corrected him. "I mean the kind that you boil on the stove."

Bob frowned and looked a little puzzled. "From the can?"

But Nick just laughed and just shook his head. "No STUPID! On the COB!!"

We could scarcely believe our ears (no pun intended). Fresh corn. On the cob. FOR LUNCH!

I asked if he knew how to cook it, and it was clear from his answer that we were just going to wing it.

"It's easy", Nick scoffed at me. "You just boil it in a big pot."

But that didn't quite reach what I was trying to get at. "Yeah Nick, but for how long?"

But he wasn't going to be deterred. And he ended the debate with a dismissive closing remark. "Long enough."

So be it. We would all just go over to Nick's house and throw some corn into a pot. And cook it "long enough".

No problem.

So as we gathered in the kitchen, and Nick opened his Fridge to fetch our soon-to-be lunch. We had that awesome feeling of "NO WAY" when we saw how much corn there was. I was thinking we would cut a couple of ears in half and share the stuff. Not at Nick's house. His dad was an engineer and clearly had serious corn money. There were eight ears in sum total. EIGHT. That's TWO ears a piece. Fuckin' A!

Alex couldn't contain himself. "We're going to make ALL of it??"

Nick looked at him as if he were completely retarded. "DUH! YEAH!" He then got out a big lobster pot from the cupboard under the sink, and filled it with water. But as fourteen year old kids, you're not really all that focused on water displacement. So our first attempt to put all the corn into the pot yielded a small deluge on the kitchen floor. And Nick moved a little too quickly to get a mop, and promptly slipped and busted his ass on the kitchen floor.

As we stood their wiping the tears from our laughing faces, Nick brought our raucous hysteria to a complete halt by threatening to throw us - and our empty growling stomachs - the hell out of his house.

Everyone got totally serious - and quiet. That seemed to placate Nick.

But in another moment or two, our spill was cleaned up, and the corn was slowly cooking away as we went into the living room to play, "Chaos" - an especially fitting game to be playing given what Nick's future had in store for him.

I have to say though that Nick was totally right. "Long enough" is exactly the right amount of time to cook corn. And when we felt that "long enough" had come to pass, we got out some plates, napkins, butter, and salt. We each took our veritable feast of two ears of corn a piece, and walked back into the living room. There's nothing like breaking bread (or corn kernels) with your compatriots - even when you're fourteen. It was goddamned delicious.

This was one of the coolest things we'd ever done in our first year as teens. We got some friends together. Scored some corn. And cooked it ourselves on the stove without much incident at all. And the best part was that we were TOTALLY UNSUPERVISED (Nick was probably the original "latch key kid").

After we finished wolfing our corn, we got Nick's Siamese cat out (Sam), and proceeded to chase and tackle him till our heart's content.

That's when Nick 's mother got home from work. So we settled down in the living room again and quietly continued playing Chaos.

You could hear Nick 's mom futzing around in the kitchen. The faucet went on, and from the clang of a lobster pot in the sink, it seemed she had started to wash it.

Nick 's mom called out, "Nick, what were you doing with the lobster pot?"

But Nick didn't answer from the living room. He just got up and went into the kitchen where his mom continued to debrief him.

"I was making corn.", Nick explained as the lobster pot clanged around in the sink.

"YOU WHAT!!??", Nick 's mom cried out.

We each felt a distinct, "Uh oh..." and ceased playing Chaos altogether as we listened intently to the escalating dialogue in the kitchen.

"I made some corn for lunch.", he explained further.

"How much corn did you make!?", she cried out.

Without even thinking twice, Nick just nonchalantly replied, "All of it."

"ALL OF IT???!!!!", Nick 's mom exploded.

There was no reply from Nick whatsoever, and our hearts were starting to race. We looked at the table before us, where eight perfectly picked-clean corn cobs were ratting us out. Although we didn’t breathe a word to each other, I would bet money that we were all thinking the same exact set of exclamations: Launch the cobs out the open window in the living room! Put the plates under the table! Hide them under the sofa! Just leave!!

Nick didn't reply to his mom though. There was just this god awful silence. And with each passing moment, it only got bigger and more pregnant. The sound of the refrigerator door finally broke it - like a new mother's water at the worst possible moment conceivable.

And when Nick 's mom fully gazed at the gaping emptiness of the fridge's middle shelf, she gave birth right on the spot to one raging bull of a fit.

Every single one of us wanted to RUN our asses off at the sound of the first slap and shriek as Nick 's mom started wailing on him.

"ALL EIGHT EARS OF CORN!!???" (POW! BAMM! KABOOY!)

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!"

THAT WAS OUR DINNER!!!" (OOF! RIP! CRASH!)

The next thing we knew, Nick came tearing through the living room in all of the panicked desperation of a front-line Spaniard at Pamplona's festival of San Fermin. His raging mother came charging in right behind him. And from the look of focused determination in her blood red eyes, it was clear that she had every intention of thoroughly goring his sorry corn-squandering ass. All of us were convinced we were next, and I myself nearly bolted.

Something kinda creepy then happened.

Nick 's mother saw us sitting there with our eyes ready to drop out of their sockets. And our presence was like a cement block wall that put a stop to her all-out rundown of Nick. And as she collided fully with her realization that she wasn't alone in the house, she came to a screeching halt, fixed her hair, and straightened her clothes.

Then she smiled at us, and sang the sweetest, "Why hello boys." you'd ever heard in your life. I was now keenly aware of every last little hair follicle in the back of my neck. None of us missed the cue. We immediately got up, said our goodbyes, and got the fuck out of Nick 's house with all deliberate speed. We never returned – nor were we ever invited again.

All this over an offering of corn. And to think that this was sacred food in Native American culture. That you'd make pouches of cornmeal and tobacco, and offer it with prayers to the four directions: North, South, East and West - all of the compass points wherein Nick got his ass handed to him in his apartment that day. You'd swear it was all the food that they had to eat for a whole year.

GOODBYE LUNCH

2011-11-20T09:20:00.001-05:00

Because we had 11:00AM mass every day at Christus Prep, it meant you had just 30 minutes wherein to eat lunch. And it also meant that the entire student body got down to the cafeteria at the same time – which was a giant water-buffalo stampede down to the basement from the fourth floor. Beats me how no one was ever trampled to death in the process. But by the time you made it downstairs, got in line, ordered your food (or unwrapped your homemade lunch), and actually sat down to eat, you were down to your last ten minutes. Long story short, you learned to eat your entire meal in one single bite And just as an owl in the forest scarfs an entire mouse down in a single swallow, so too did I learn to eat my lunch.

Burnt Personal Pizza. YUM!

But first you had to acquire your lunch – which was something of a journey. And I'm not sure it was really worth the effort. I mean, who would go out of their way for the prep's famous Pizza Jerky Pies; or the charred red blister-dogs; or even the overcooked hockey puck burgers??

And who can ever forget the grilled cheese sandwiches – which must have been dipped for an hour in that artificial movie-theater popcorn butter. I once scarfed down one of those grilled cheese jammies in a single swallow only to crap it out whole six months later. Makes my stomach ache just thinking about it.

One of the mettle-testing parts of the journey however, was the inevitable encounter with prep's own Chef Ronnie Mack – a tall burly black guy in perhaps his late 40's who looked like he could single handedly replace the entire defensive line for the New York Jets. So nobody ever fucked with him – let alone made a wise crack about the fact that it was impossible to understand a bloody word he was saying. “Hey Ronnie how are the burgers today!”

He'd glare like you were the biggest friggin idiot in the entire country and spew one of his famously incomprehensible utterings, “Eyes pittinum right!'

Without even waiting for you to decide, he'd just serve it right up. Then you'd just walk away in perplexed defeat wondering what in God's name he had just said: Did Ronnie just say he spit in them? Is that the secret sauce?? I could only scratch my head.

I made the mistake once of asking if he had any less burnt Pizzas. He shot me a look like I had just poured ice cold water down his back. I think he said three words to me but managed to make it sound like one: “Nahfuthamunka!” As I grabbed a blister dog and got myself the hell out of there, I kept thinking it sounded a hell of a lot like “No mother fucker!!!”

The encounters with Ronnie were almost the hardest part of the lunch time journey though. There was only one thing more challenging than getting past Ronnie unscathed: eating the food you'd just purchased.

And that's part of the reason why I always envied Alex Turner. Every lunch break, I'd sit down and take a look at the horror show I'd just sunk Dad's hard earned money into while Alex unveiled the most beautiful sandwiches on the planet. They weren't just well prepared. They were boldly architected works of art. And next to my slum of a meal, his was a veritable hundred-acre estate glittering in some faraway, enchanted countryside.


Dead Fish Sandwich.

As I "balled up" to try and eat my double decker dead-fish sandwich(with plenty of ketchup), I looked over to see Alex Turner unveil his magnificently prepared lunch.

"Alex, what kind of bread is that?”, I managed to ask without salivating onto the table.

“Marble pumpernickel rye loaf” , he said without skipping a beat. Up until then all I'd ever known was “Wonder Bread” But it sounded soooo cool. “Marble. Pumpernickel. Rye. Loaf.” It was like a song I couldn't get out of my head no matter how hard I tried.

A typical Alex Turner lunch.

“And what's on the inside?”, I inquired further. Alex conceded that he didn't know, and lifted the bread to have a peek. “Looks like black forest ham, pepperoni, aged cheddar cheese, shaved iceberg lettuce and garlic mayo.”

As my ears struggled to recover from the rumble of my own dumbfounded disbelief, Alex looked up and asked the most unreal question ever. “Wanna bite?”

Before I could get out my outrageously good fortuned, “OH YEAH!!!”, Alex popped the lid off his sandwich and threw a handful of french fries on for good measure. Then he handed me an entire sandwich half. This was more generosity and trust than I'd experienced from any of the neighborhood kids I'd ever shared food with. Back in the hood there was strict protocol around stuff like this. If I happened to be outside with a bottle of 7UP and a hot dog, sure I'd share it with any friends who chanced by. But I wasn't stupid enough to just hand them the whole thing. I'd hold onto to it with both hands and carefully expose only the tiniest edge for mastication. And if any of your buddies wanted a sip of your drink, you always pinched the straw after the requisite 1.5 seconds of suction time had elapsed. No one EVER just put their food or beverage store entirely in the hands of another kid and just hope for the best. That is, except for Alex Turner.

A battle with basic human conscience was raging within me as I fought with all my might to do right by Alex's good hearted and generous offer. And I'm saddened to confess it was a battle I shamefully lost. A line from, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” comes to mind.

“...when you get that [delectable sandwich] right up there in front of you.... No man alive could resist that”

And this is basically what happened. I was so overcome with hunger pangs – and so blessed/cursed with one BIG fucking mouth – that I shoved the entire sandwich-half down all at once.

Goodbye Lunch!!!

I think if it hadn't been for the visually unbelievable aspects of that, Alex would have just reached over the table and kicked the living shit out of me for the entire rest of the afternoon. Instead, he dropped into a state of complete shock and kept exclaiming, “OH SHIT!!!!! YOU ATE HALF THAT MOTHER JUMPER!!!! HALF!!! OH SHIT!!!!”

So shocked was Alex that he had to get up out of his seat and stomp around while he emoted. Everyone at our table was eagerly asking what had just happened. All Alex could say over and over again was, “HALF!!!! GOD-DAMN!!!!”

As I watched this unfold, I did my best to chew vigorously while paying careful attention to the most viable exit spots around me. I barely had time to savor the deliciousness of both the sandwich and the depth to which I'd just totally punked Alex Turner.

“Settle down Mr. Turner”.

Sometimes I felt that Mr. Pox possessed the power of apparition. I'd swear on graves that the man materialized from out of nowhere at least half a dozen times during my tenure at the Prep. And always at the worst possible moments.

Everyone at our table looked up in surprise. But there he was. Mr. Pox. Where the fuck did he come from???

We quieted down as Alex took his seat again and peered down at his unexpectedly scarce lunch. He looked up at me as I continued to chew and just started to laugh his ass off. He whispered pointedly, “You owe me half a lunch man.”

Here's the funniest part.

That was the first of perhaps ten or more of Alex's sandwiches that I utterly decimated. He had this strange fascination with watching me scarf them down. And each time he passed a sandwich half to me for “a bite”; and each time I'd promised never again to wolf the entire thing; Alex would erupt in shocked disbelief as 50% of his lunch disappeared down my gaping Rican maw.

“NOT AGAIN GODAMMNIT!”

CAT SOUP

2011-10-09T19:13:00.020-04:00

One adolescent young man's quest
to stay warm, eat well, and laugh

Christus Prep's annual retreats rocked big time. And there were at least three reasons for that.

First, it was time away from school. Three whole days in fact. You heard me right. Christus Prep graciously gave us three days of spiritual retreat time every year. On their dime! Believe it or not!!!

And second, you got to hang out with your best buddies – and prank your classmates in all sorts of creative ways (which I'll explore in some detail later).

Third, you got to sit down with your comrades at the end of a long hard day of spiritual questing, and enjoy a nice hearty bowl of Cat Soup – wining, dining, and feline-ing (to echo the late/great Catullus).

I guess I should say something about the “4th point” but it breaks the “three-point” cadence I'm rather fond of. So if there were a fourth point – and I'm not saying there is – it might center around the absence of parental supervision. Sure the faculty looked after us as a collective. And they did a damned good job of it. But it was a far cry from the unrelenting micromanagement of daily life with Mom and Dad. Way far. Which meant for example that if someone's 15 year old son showed up at the retreat-house smelling slightly of vodka stolen from Dad's liquor cabinet back home, chances are pretty slim he'd get caught and taken to task. You're probably wondering how it is I can say this with any sort of confidence.

Well the fact is that me, and three of my colleagues (who will go unnamed) did exactly that – daredevil stunt-loving risk-takers that we were. One of us copped a bunch of vodka from some Dad's liquor cabinet (the missing amount of which was replaced with water – genius huh).

And to make it all look innocent, he decanted the stolen vodka into an empty bottle of Heinz Vinegar ™. Or so he told us.

Then we plotted to go to the retreat center as a group, and get utterly wasted along the way.

That's what I call keeping the “spirits” in a spiritual retreat!

Of course there's always the hilarious part – even if it feels really sad and sorry in the moment. We would discover at the most inopportune time that the vinegar bottle contained so little vodka, each of us got maybe half a shot glass to drink. And that was a paltry amount of hard liquor to fend off the marrow-chilling cold that happened to descend on New York City on this particular evening.

None of us knew it at the time however. We just disembarked from the #1 train at 242nd street in the bronx, and happily (or cluelessly) trudged westward as we sought to walk our way to the Hudson River Retreat-house - and get toasted while doing it.

So you can imagine our surprise – and the raging collective indignation that followed – when our buddy produced the near empty bottle of vinegar perhaps an hour later - in the bitter dead of night. “Who wants to take the first sip?” he graciously inquired. I couldn't hold back the panic in my face as I exclaimed that his bottle had leaked to near empty.

“It didn't leak stupid! That's all I could get!”

Vodka-Pilfering loser defends himself.

Everyone exploded in angry vitriol as our colleague argued pathetically that we didn't need more than he'd taken – since it was hard liquor for God's sake.

We eventually let it go however as it was simply too fucking cold to sustain an argument for more than a few minutes. Each of us took a tiny sip from the vinegar bottle and soldiered into the darkness of the Hudson River Valley. Done deal.

By now we'd lost our bearings, and had no idea what direction to walk in. If we had only known that a mercifully big hot bowl of Cat Soup was just a few short hours into our future we would have fallen to our knees and thanked God the rest of our days thereafter.

But we didn't know that. Didn't have a fucking clue in fact. We only knew one thing: that trudging through the cold winter darkness in the dead of night hurts like a mother fucker. You have no idea.

True to our biological heritage however, we refused to ask anyone for directions. Not that there was anyone to ask mind you. But on the rare occasion that car chanced by us, not a one of our frozen-teared faces had the gumption to inquire. How do we get to the retreat house from here? Sounds like a simple question doesn't it. A simple inquisitory gesture no? Well that's easier said than done for a bunch of 15 year old testosterone giddy kids lost in a Hudson River Valley winter.

It wasn't until about hour three, when we couldn't bear the excruciating pain of our own self-sufficient bravado that we flagged down a passing car to finally confess that we had no clue where we were and needed some guidance. To this day, all I can remember was the extreme discomfort I felt as I sat with my comrades in the back of this guy's Buick - who was supposedly making good on his promise to drive us there. Not until I saw the retreat house up ahead did I settle down. Until then I felt like a helpless, frozen, teen-aged murder victim.

Cat Soup would make it all better though. Sure would. Nice hot “Sopa De Gato” - sounds extra yummy-in-the-tummy when you say it in Spanish doesn't it?

When that black hearse-like Buick finally stopped, I got out as quickly as I possibly could – lest the teen-slaughtering serial killer who drove us there changed his mind.

We got our bags from out of the trunk and practically ran into the place. I'd never felt more bitterly frozen to the core than I did on that particular night. Even in -20 degree ski trips to Vermont later in my adult life. We got ourselves situated then went onto our respective rooms. All but one of us made a secret pact to prank the living shit out of our sorry, vodka-swiping colleague. It was all his fault that we endured so much hardship.

We joined the rest of our classmates – who were sitting in a circle in one of the conference rooms. Everyone was talking about their aspirations for the weekend and all I could do was sit and shiver violently. You could clearly read the expression on their faces: DAMN those dudes look fucking cold!

It literally took me an hour or so to get warm. And when we finally broke for the evening and I was in my room unpacking, my roll-on underarm deodorant was still frozen solid. Truth be told.

But that was well after dinner. Well after we sat down as brothers to enjoy that unforgettably delicious and comforting bowl of hearty Cat Soup I've remembered so fondly all these years.

Dinner time at Christus Prep retreats were always mirthful occasions, and it wasn't unusual for people to get up and sing songs – like Joey King's famous "Schaefer Beer" jingle. And that's how we got the evening kicked off. With dramatic flourish, Joey climbed up onto one of the tables in the cafeteria and began:

"The most rewarding flavor in this man's world."
..."The one beer to have when you're having more than one"

Same hold true for Cat Soup though. A real man's broth to sip in the dead of winter time. Satisfying and delicious. Seconds all around!

We told nasty-ass jokes too - and Father Sullivan tee'd it up for us with an unforgettable classic.

"So this guy goes into a Japanese restaurant and is having the meal of his life with his friends when he suddenly realizes that he's got to take a monster dump."

Father Sullivan hadn't even gotten to the punch line and we were already laughing our asses off.

"The guy excuses himself from the table and proceeds to walk into the men's room - done in a beautiful, minimalist Japanese style. All very ritzy and clean."

Father Sullivan had our undivided attention. It was like campfire-story telling hour in the woods with your fellow boy scouts. And we couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen.

"So he gets himself onto the throne in one of the stalls, and proceeds to take this Anaconda-Monster dump. But when he reaches for some toilet paper, he panics. There's none in his stall. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Just a strange round portal on the wall of his stall beside a curious little sign that he's got to lean in real close to read."

Father Sullivan leans in to look closely at the thin air in front of him as he starts, "No toilet paper. Must use hand. When done, place hand in portal. Fingers cleaned by human lips."

"The poor guy is horrified, but he's desperate. So he suppresses his utter disgust and proceeds to do as the sign says. He wipes himself with his hand, and then places the horribly soiled thing into the portal."

We were so riveted and grossed out at the same time, that no one noticed the aroma of hot cat soup wafting through the air.

"Unbeknownst to the hero of our story, on the other side of the stall is this big fat Samurai warrior holding a pair of bricks, just waiting for some fingers to emerge on his side of the portal."

Everyone sat a little straighter in their chairs as they braced for the impact of the punch line.

"When the guy's hand is fully in sight, the Samurai warrior extends each brick-holding hand outward, and utterly smashes flat those shitty fingers. The guy immediately withdraws his hand and does the most common, involuntary first-thing that anyone with smashed fingers would do. He shoves them in his mouth as if to somehow ease the pain."

BAAARRRRRRFFFFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We must have laughed for an hour though. First, because Father Sullivan's joke was so perfectly gross. And second, because it was Father Sullivan who told it!

When the room quieted down, GT Finnerty stood up for a short but hilarious one- liner.

"Hey, how does Jesus Christ whistle for a cab in New York City?"

The entire class repeated the question back to GT.

He took an exaggeratedly deep breath, and placed the very center of his palm upon his mouth. Then he made a loud whistling sound - which of course could only be the sound of air pushed through the nail holes of some poor crucifixion-surviving spiritual figure's palm.

We fell out of our chairs laughing as the aroma of cat soup grew more and more delicious - which brings me to the “sharing” that stands out most in my memory that night: Eddie Fralin's coincidental, but instructional diatribe on “Cat Swinging.” Apparently, this was a bonafide sport in Eddie's neighborhood. Maybe even an art.

So as Eddie stood up to address us, he explained that all you have to do to swing a cat “just right” was “grab him by the tail and 'do like this'.” He then made frenzied cowboy lasso gestures above his head repeatedly.

Grinning sadistically, he added, “Then you let go all at once and watch him land on a tree or something.”

"Then the cat runs off into the night like a banshee until you get him again the next weekend. You just lure him with some Purina. Falls for it every time.”
As we chuckled good heartedly however, Eddie went on to add a gruesome twist to his cat-swinging tale (no pun intended).

“It can get a little boring after a while. So to make it more interesting”, he disclosed, “You get a large wooden board and drive big long nails through the other side of it.”

“Then you swing the cats at the board and they land like this!”

Eddie struck an eerily convincing pose - that of a contorted cat figure hideously impaled upon a wooden board. I couldn't contain myself. It was freekin' hilarious.

As I wiped the tears from my eyes, I found that the laughter and good cheer helped to warm me up tremendously. That's when the servers brought out the first course of the meal. You guessed it.

HOT CAT SOUP!!

Cat-soup (Japanese Style). Miso HUNGRY!

As a generous helping was placed on the table before me, the reality of a piping-hot bowl of soup was the soul of heaven's mercy in that particularly moment. To me (and my fellow frozen comrades) anyway.

I wasted no time getting my spoon deep into the heart of that bowl. And I loved the way my glasses fogged up as I blew on the first mouthful to cool it just right. It was god-damned delicious too. Except for those bothersome little bone bits that I had to keep spitting back out.

But I was undeterred. Soup bones and all, I greedily slurped up my soup as if it were the last bowl I would ever have in my life. And it didn't matter one iota that the little bone-bit pile on the table beside my bowl only grew taller and wider as I slurped away. Every new mouthful was better than the last.

That's when the room erupted in laughter from Eddie Fralin's table. And it seemed that the entire class got up to go and see – all at the same time. And the more people that arrived at Eddie's table, the more the laughter rolled on.

So I ran over to see – fighting off my intensely curious classmates as I went. When I caught sight of what rested on the table before Eddie, I buckled and practically fell to the floor in pieces. He had meticulously gathered together all the bones in his soup(and the bones in the soups of all his immediate neighbors), and carefully laid them out on the table in the shape of a cat. It was every bit as hilarious as it was gruesome.

Eddie looked up at the crowd gathered around his table and proclaimed, "As you can see, I've managed to reconstruct the cat."

And that's how we came to call it, "Cat Soup". F'ing Classic.

But it was nothing compared to the “cold soup” that our not-enough-vodka pilfering colleague was soon going to get. We had plans for his weenie Heinz-Vinegar-Bottle carrying ass. Big plans.

He was probably just getting ready to retire for the night as we filled a small waste-paper basket full of ice-cold water. Probably walking around in his room barefoot and wearing his nice toasty winter jammies. He was maybe even feeling so cozy and snug that he didn't hear us snickering outside his door as we leaned the water laden waste-paper basket against his room door at a dangerously precipitous angle.

Then we knocked and ran off to watch at a distance.

Like any suspicious kid from the Bronx, he barked out “Who is it!?” Twice in fact. But he wasn't just a streetwise city kid. He was also a naively trusting Christus Prep student safely tucked away in a Hudson River Valley retreat house.

So when he didn't get an answer, he did what he would never have done at home. Not in a million Bronx years. He opened the door.

You could clearly hear the shudder of cold in his initial cry of “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!”

And you could totally hear the waste paper basket land on the ground – followed by the sound of a merciless, unrelenting gush of water pouring totally into his room.

“SHIT!!! FUCK!!! DAMNIT!!!!”

Inside the room of a vodka-pilfering loser

Beautiful, truth-articulating, spontaneous exclamations. Made all the more hilarious by the sound of bare feet clapping on a large water puddle.

His initial exclamatory cries were then followed by the scream of dawning realization.

“YOU MOTHER FUCKERS!!!!”

Damned straight. MF'ers every one of us. Down to the last Cat Soup making, tail swinging, vodka pilfering, 15 year old hooligan in that retreat-house. And to think – we had two more years of these to go.

By the way, that vodka-pilfering loser I keep going on about was yours truly!

copyright 2011 - Silas Martinez

THE THINGS WE'VE BROKEN

2011-09-30T17:23:00.005-04:00

There's the old saying, “You don't know your own strength.” Looking back at the years between say eleven and eighteen, this particular saying takes on a kind of evolutionary briar patch of truth. There comes a time in every teen's life when he's just discovering what his own strength is – which is kinda hard to do since the freekin' thing keeps changing on you. Every year in fact!

And that's just how it was for GT Finnerty – our oft' beleaguered class president. He just didn't know his own strength. But at least I can say he was well on his way to discovering the bounds of it!

But that's what we liked most about our class President. He embodied our class spirit: If you don't have the slightest fucking clue about something – just dive in head first - or foot first if that's what suits you best!

Like the day GT broke one of the toilets in the men's room. Seems like a somewhat difficult thing to do yes? After all, those things are made of industrial-strength porcelain – and built to take the weight of even the fattest-bastard-assed among us!

But I guess that the guys who designed these things never took into account GT's steel-toed, size 12, fat-heeled monster boots! No sir. If they had, then GT would never have been able to punt the edge of that particular ill-fated toilet bowl into the ceiling of the men's bathroom – on the 2^nd floor if memory serves.

But I dick you not. GT booted at least a 9 inch section of toilet bowl rim right into the freakin' ceiling. No lie.

But as hilarious as this was, the 10-some-odd wads of sopping wet toilet paper busted quite alot of gut in addition my friends. Let me explain.

A day or so after getting our Senior lounge privileges back from Father Itchin, we were gathered upstairs doing nothing but counting the hours to our graduation in June. Out of the blue, GT announced that he was going to go take, “the first senior-lounge-privilege dump since our rights had been restored.” And that's exactly what he did.

So while the venerable president was off making good on his declaration, a bunch of us went to the upstairs bathroom to soak a shit-load of toilet paper in water. And by the time we were done, there must have been 10 or so baseball-sized toilet paper balls dripping away in each of our villainous hands. It was hard to keep from collapsing in laughter while we waited for our presidente to emerge.

The last few seconds of it ignited in such a blinding flash that I can't possibly capture every little nuance experienced in the glittering microseconds-seconds of it. But all at once there was a toilet flush, the shattering clang of what sounded like breaking glass, and a bathroom door bursting open.

None of us had any time whatsoever to totally go through our respective “what the fucks” regarding the clanging noise. We barely had a moment to wind up and gun our sopping toilet paper wads at GT Finnerty. But we managed to unload the entirety of our arsenal on him. All at once in fact.

GT's panicked exclamation of, “Oh Shit I can't fucking believe...” was brought to a dead halt in the hailstorm of wet TP that rained down on him from everywhere.

Two seconds later we collided full in the face of the realization that every single one of us failed to hit him. Wad after wad of wet toilet paper stuck on the wall behind a very disoriented GT. We were utterly dumbfounded.

GT stood there looking at us as he started to piece it all together in his own head.

And before he could even say anything, Alex Turner exploded in such a total fit of laughter that all he could do was point and gasp for air. Moments later I caught sight of what had set him so totally off. There on the floor were GT Finnerty's glasses. But that wasn't the funny part. The FUNNY part was the left lens – which bore a giant wad of sticky wet toilet paper practically nailed to it.

View from GT Finnerty's left eye - Closeup.

One of us had managed to peg GT right in the eye - so hard in fact that his glasses went flying off of his face. But it happened so fast that no one saw it. God forbid, but if it hadn't been for his glasses we might have well blinded the poor son of bitch. But as we fell to our knees guffawing, GT yelled at us to get a grip. “I've got a serious problem you stupid galoots! I broke the fucking toilet!!”

None of us could serious-up enough to listen with empathy. GT's declaration only served to sink us even deeper into our abyss of hopeless laughter. We immediately stumbled like a pack of cackling hyenas into the men's bathroom to practically suffocate in the hilarity of it all.

The sight of that shattered toilet and bits of porcelain everywhere was more than any human adolescent kid could possibly bear.

The only person not laughing – understandably – was GT Finnerty himself. As he disappeared through the double doors on the second floor, “I gotta go tell Father Gudski” were his last words.

Unfortunately for GT however, he still hadn't quite come to terms with the limits of his gargantuan might. It would take a few more episodes. Nor was it the last time he would utter the Father Gudski phrase.

It didn't help matters at all however, that GT's toilet-punting was followed shortly thereafter by his infamous drop kick on Bob Conner. Personally, I blame it all on the two week suspension of our Senior-lounge perks. This led to such damming of pent up affect in our class's collective consciousness that it just overran us all. Led Zeppelin's, “When the Levee Breaks” comes to mind.

It was just after lunch on a sunny spring Tuesday. Our lounge privileges had only been reinstated for perhaps a week or so, and we were upstairs in our homeroom celebrating it all: wrestling, shouting, carousing, and living up to the true meaning of a timeless beer drinking ditty once sung heartily in ancient universities throughout Graeco-Roman history. “GAUDEAMUS IGITUR JUVENES DUM SUMMUS!!!!”

“Let us rejoice therefore, while we are young!”

That's when GT fixed his sights on Bob Conner who was standing up against a wall in the back of the room. And when Bob realized he was being targeted by GT, he seemed to freeze like some prehistoric critter in the face of a giant T-Rex. GT let out a bellowing war cry as he leapt into the air and raised his toilet bowl shattering boot right at Bob's face. Luckily, Bob had the presence of mind (or the right genetically programmed “flight” instinct) to dive sideways at the last possible second.

But GT was already committed fully, and couldn't halt or change direction. He went foot first and full speed into the wall.

In my four years at Christus Prep, I had pissed away many a pair of pants in torrents of gushing laughter. But to my memory, no raucous moment in the whole of our time there would best the totality of bladder bust that followed.

As GT's entire leg went through two layers of sheet rock – and ended up resting on Father Jordan's desk on the other side of that classroom wall – we fell to more pieces than anyone could ever possibly count in a thousand years.

It took all the strength I could muster to stammer over to father Jordan's office just so I could cry at the sight of GT's leg sitting atop Father J's desk – surrounded by gaping sheet rock chunks and dust.

GT turned white as a ghost and immediately went off to turn himself into father Gudski. They returned together perhaps ten or fifteen minutes later only to find we were all passed out on the classroom floor still eagerly squandering every last cent of our laughter - while we still had life left in which to do it.

Father Gudski looked pretty damned shocked at the sight of the wall crater. But I don't know what troubled him more - the damage to school property or the sight of the Prep's Seniors fallen out all over the floor.

“Ok. Everyone downstairs! NOW!” Father Gudski yelled. He rarely raised his voice however, so we all wiped the tears from our eyes and got the hell out of there pronto.

Not sure how it was all paid for. But I think from that day onward, GT started to come to terms with his own strength.

I still laugh to myself whenever I read what GT wrote in my yearbook. “Don't ever forget the fun we've had and the things we've broken...”

Fat Chance!

copyright 2011 - Silas Martinez

BRONX VS COUNTRY

2011-01-09T15:43:00.002-05:00

1. First Night in the Sticks

Lying awake in the darkness - unable to even see my own hand in front of my face – as I fought with all my might to put off taking the monster leak that was practically threatening to assault me physically. And I might have prevailed over my dire need if it weren't for the bitter fucking cold. Although it was late June, it felt like the temperature had plummeted thirty degrees. And there I was wearing my summer pajamas. The thin cotton blanket I had wrapped around myself might have been a brown paper bag for all the good it was doing me.

Getting down from my top bunk-bed wasn't the biggest problem. I felt I could manage to fumble my way along a short excursion down the ladder - even in the creepy darkness. It was the walk across the barn to the main entrance, and the journey over the field to the out houses that gave me pause.

When I couldn't stand it any longer, I started to slowly make my way down the ladder feeling like I'd just surrendered myself into the slavering jaws of whatever hungry beast lurked in that pitch darkness. Tears welled up in my eyes as I wanted to RUN to the outhouses, but could only take baby steps given the zero visibility. You might be wondering why I didn't just switch on my flashlight. Well, because I didn't have one. Being from the city, there are always street lights on, and getting up in the middle of the night to pee - while creepy nonetheless - wasn't a blind foray into the unknown. I had no idea it could get this dark at night, metro-hick that I was.

As I shuffled toward the barn entrance like Helen fucking Keller, I couldn't help but realize that she probably would have gotten to the door about ten times faster than I did. But I thanked God when I finally reached it, and succeeded in feeling up the walls until my hands stumbled onto the flashlight hanging on a hook beside the door. I stepped outside, switched it on, and aimed the beam to get my bearings.

The funny thing about needing to go is that once the idea is in your head that you're very close to finally relieving yourself, the urgency increases exponentially. Now I was on the verge of pissing the only long pair of pajama pants I’d packed, and started dancing around like a wild Cherokee doing his last desperate rain dance around a roaring fire as I weighed my options.

I spoke a quiet, "Fuck that." to myself as I took in the distance between me and the outhouses - and the lonely solitude of the dark. I decided instead to pick a tree near the barn and take care of business right there and then.

But another set of warnings went off in my head. How much sense does it make to be standing out in the wilderness, spotlighting myself like salami in a Deli case while I'm helplessly peeing, when God knows what man-eating beasts are out there just waiting for easy prey?

I bolted across the fields to the outhouses feeling like I was running to both my own doom and my own salvation all at the same time. I burst into the room and took care of business. To my memory, it was the most gratifying leak I'd ever sprung in my whole life.

While I didn't need to run back to the barn as fast as I could afterwards, a cracking sound from within the brambles to my right sent me bolting pell-mell back across the field. I threw open the entrance door, aimed the flashlight beam to point myself in the direction of my bunk bed, and then Helen Keller'd my way back to it. Mission accomplished.

When I was back in bed, I suddenly remembered the bitter cold again, and the deafening quiet of the countryside that would take another week to get used to.

Welcome to Chartreuse(pronounced shar-trews) in Newry, Maine.

Despite the misery of my first night there, the annual summer visits to Chartreuse were actually one of the best perks of being a student at the Christus Prep. A priest named Father Owen Flynn had his retirement home there - which he named after an Abbey in France - and he was gracious enough to open it up to any prep student who wanted to get out to the country and relax. And it didn't cost anything to go, apart from minor food expenses and some help with the upkeep of the property. Even transportation was free, since the Prep faculty drove us there/back in the school van. My brother and I spent a couple of months there in the summer of my sophomore year - along with several of our fellow classmates.

The eight hour drive north provided us with plenty of time to plot our objectives for the summer-long stay: defy authority, prank our classmates, get stoned, and score with the local farmer's daughters. Although these were predictably, even hopelessly adolescent male objectives, we would in fact achieve every one of them - but not exactly with the kind of dominating totality and glittering heroism we'd hoped.

I was in no condition to make progress on any one of our objectives when I arose to my first morning in Chartreuse however. I stumbled, barely awake down the grassy hill from the barn, and across the red covered bridge that traversed the winding brook which ran through the property. I shuffled into the mess hall next to Our Lady of the Snows Chapel, and sat down to join my classmates. My only hope at this point was to get a nice hot cup of coffee and a decent breakfast. And I was well on my way to doing that when Joey Walsh (a freshman at the time) walked into the mess hall and sat down. Father Sullivan (who was our Religion teacher at the Prep) called out across the tables to him, "Hey Joey - any mail out there?"

Joey replied with a terse, "Nope" and sat down to eat. Mr. Sellick (who taught advanced math) and Fr. Sullivan then stood up to joyfully sing what would turn out to be their favorite weekly jingle.

"Oh you can get the mail on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday!"

[Some free-style choreography followed]

"You can get the mail on Thursdays, and Fridays, and even Saturdays!"

[sweeping, exaggerated arm gestures]

They then stopped, and spoke in an exclamatory, two part harmony, "BUT THERE IS NO MAIL ON SUNDAY!!"

Applause followed, and Joey just sat there looking totally had. The faculty had struck first, and it was funny to see that grown men and adolescent boys had some objectives in common. Ok, so maybe it was a little bit of a lame prank. And maybe it got repetitious over time. But divine intervention can sometimes transform a lame prank into a classic. And that's exactly what happened a week or two later when John Doyle went off on his very first Sunday mail quest in Chartreuse. When he returned, our beloved faculty members sprung to their feet to perform their little duet, and announced once again that there is no mail on Sunday. John broke down and started crying. I felt badly for him, but it was worth it to see Mr. Sellick and Father Sullivan rush over to apologize profusely for their mail-prank gone wrong. In the end, John managed to do what no one else had done: get the better of Sullivan and Sellick.

2. IDLE HANDS – NOT!

There was always plenty of work to do in Chartreuse, and we rotated through chores: repairing pot holes along the dirt road, painting and repairing the outbuildings, cleaning the bathrooms, helping in the kitchen, and cutting the grass.

Because I'd never run a lawnmower in my life, and I thought it would be cool to operate serious gas-powered machinery, I immediately volunteered myself for grass-cutting duties. Three of us joined another guest who'd already been there for a week (Jeb - from Rhode Island Christus Prep), and the four of us headed off to the tool shed to get equipped. But there were no lawnmowers to be seen in the shed, and I wondered if someone else had gotten them first. Jeb reached over to a couple of hooks then handed each of us a sickle. Pretty damned disappointing.

Cutting grass by hand isn't entirely funless though. It's true that you get all sorts of grass juice on your hands as you make progress, but it smells nice, and you can easily wash it off. You have to observe some important safety rules - like making sure you're far enough away from fellow grass cutters so that you don't accidentally gut someone, and looking down into the grass to spot any hidden rock outcroppings in advance. The shock-wave of hitting rock with your sickle can smart.

As I worked to cut the grass on the baseball field (it was about two feet tall), and making great progress, I would've been perfectly happy doing so if it weren't for the "flying kamikaze" wasps (FK’s for short – pronounced, “fucks”). Every couple of minutes you had to stop your sickling to shoo one of them off. They made your work irksome and frustrating, and they never gave up. There must of have been hundreds of them - but they had some interesting rules. First, they stayed hidden so you'd never really see a swarm of them anywhere. And only one FK at a time would attack a particular person. They never worked in teams and they never competed with each other.

But their circling fly-by pattern was by far the most curious thing about them. An FK would start orbiting you from about ten feet away. With each pass, it would closen until it finally plunged into your hair. You could almost hear them cry out "Bonsai!!" just before they hit.

Then you had to do the skin crawling job of picking the thing out of your hair. I can't tell you how many of them I'd killed in my first few hours of sickling, but they were unrelenting - and suicidal. Even when you swatted one hard, it wouldn't fly off in terror but persist in its mission to land in your head. I had an especially hard time in the beginning because they looked a lot like yellow jackets. It took a while before I realized that they didn't sting. They just pestered.

I finally went back to the barn and got my baseball cap, but to no avail. FK's were happy to plunge into any hair that stuck out of your cap. They weren't choosy. In the end, I got a t-shirt, draped it over my head, and secured it with my baseball cap. That actually worked. The FK's wouldn't even try if they didn't see any hair to plunge into. And that became the standard uniform of a Chartreuse grass sickler. Everyone adopted it, and from afar, we all looked like a bunch of Arab Sheiks cutting grass out in the fields. We started calling each other Sheik as a result - which devolved over time into pejoratives such as Weik, Reik, and Deik.

2a. Bring Out Your Dead!

Afterwards, we headed off to the bathrooms and washed up at the sinks. That’s when we chanced upon the famous, “Dead Bat”

We found the luckless critter in a door jamb. I'm sure it seemed like a perfectly cozy spot for a bat to hang and rest at the time he landed there - until somebody slammed the door shut. So we peeled him out of the door jamb, and put a string around his neck. I know that sounds like a somewhat cruel and disrespectful thing to do to one of God's creatures, but fact is that the divine spirit that had once occupied that little winged container had moved on to bigger and better things. So we said a little prayer for him, and then headed back to the barn.

Some of the floor boards upstairs had fairly large holes in them and we slipped our dead bat-on-a-string down one of them, and lowered him to what we thought might be eye-level for an underclassmen. It was only swinging around downstairs for a minute or two when John Doyle(how lucky can you get), wandered over. He looked up at us with disdain, snatched the bat with his bare hands, and unfolded it to its full wing span. He clearly thought it was toy.

When he realized it was a 100% certifiably genuine bat corpse, he ejected it from his hands and bolted wildly away, shrieking in terror. You would have sworn from his reaction that our dead bat had transformed itself into a red hot coal, and blistered both of his hands.

We high fived each other and then went downstairs to retrieve our bat. But the underclassmen had confiscated it for their own purposes – and later that night John Doyle had his second close encounter with it. This time in bed. We could hear it all the way upstairs.

3. THE QUEST FOR BEER

When work detail was over, we'd put stuff away and break for a short mass just before lunch. Then we'd have the rest of the day to ourselves.

Hitchhiking to town was a favorite activity of ours and once I got over my city kid's fear of being kidnapped by some van driving serial killer, it was a perfectly useful form of transportation. The prep faculty encouraged us hitchhike also - which was reassuring although we never traveled alone either. Just in case. Town was where we picked up vital supplies such as Freihoffer’s chocolate chip cookies, beef- jerky and Coke. And of course beer - which we tried buying on our very first trip into town.

As we argued outside the package store over which one of us looked the oldest, we couldn't even agree on what to get. One person thought that a simple pint of whisky would suffice, while another thought that trying to buy hard liquor would only get you carded. Same went for a case of beer. It was too much. In the end, we agreed that starting small and working your way up over time was the smart thing to do. So the two oldest looking among us drew straws and the "winner" (Carl Andrews from New Jersey Christus Prep) got to go in and buy a 12 ounce bottle of bud. That was our big plan. Get one bottle of bud. Everyone can have a sip. But Carl got carded when he tried to pay, and we failed to score even a single lousy bottle of beer. It probably didn't help that the proprietor watched us arguing for ten minutes outside and then drawing for straws.

In the end, we asked a stranger to buy a six pack for us, but he just laughed in our faces. At least he didn't take our money first. It was utterly disheartening, and I couldn't shake the thought that even an eight your old kid could buy a six pack of beer in the Bronx for crying out loud.

We weren't going to give up that easily though, and we went over to The Barn for a bite to eat. "The Barn" served some of the tastiest burgers on the planet - and all the beer to wash them down with that you could possibly want.

We failed miserably however, in trying to sneak a beer order in with our burger order. And it was especially embarrassing to tell the cute and sexy waitress that each and every one of us had left our ID in the car.

When we got back to Chartreuse, three of us decided to walk off our dejection by strolling along the brook that wound through the property. Once we were far enough away, Bob Connor unveiled a cigar, and we all shared it like a joint as we progressed along the brook - which was a pretty damned scenic stroll - and one that we would take many times. Bob warned us not to inhale. Otherwise you get sick. As it turns out though, some of the smoke still manages to get into your system, and I eventually found myself enjoying a moment of dizzy headed oblivion just before crashing to my knees and wretching out what had earlier been a delicious Barn-burger with mushrooms, cheese, and onions.

It was a lot better looking and tasting going down than coming up.

I got zero sympathy from my comrades however, and they laughed their asses off at me. And worst of all, they gleefully told every last “Chartreuseur” in the place. I was the brunt of many jokes thereafter.

That would be the closest I'd come to getting stoned in Chartreuse.

4. BLESS ME FATHER FOR I HAVE….UM.

Confession. They provided that particular spiritual service even in Chartreuse - lest we find ourselves before our maker unpurged of all our iniquitous deeds. The first time it was held, I thought it would be easier to disclose my list of ills to dear old Father Owen than to Father Sullivan (whom I'd have to face back at school).

When it was my turn on line, I told Father Owen about the bat, the attempted beer purchase, and the cigar. I related further that I'd lied, was evil to my buddies etc etc.

He didn’t seem the least bit phased, and he nodded understandingly, as he took a moment or two to weigh my sins. He then began to explain that at my age it isn't unusual to feel certain urges. And that those urges, while perfectly in line with being 15, might lead a young man astray, and into the sin of fondling the genitals. It was hard for me to keep a straight face but I managed to hold on. At some level I guess it was rather grandfatherly that dear old Father Owen said a word or two about the birds and the bees.

It got more challenging though, as my confession turned unexpectedly, and decidedly into a full Court Inquisition.

"Have you perhaps felt and succumbed to such urges?", he asked me.

I couldn't believe dear old Father Owen had just asked me point blank if I'd ever whacked off! I felt totally trapped. If I lied in confession, would that be considered a venial sin, or a mortal sin? Would I go to hell?? I wondered if I could just skip this question entirely, or even take the 5th. And as my mind feverishly raced to calculate a way of answering the question without disclosing anything, the solution was suddenly, gratefully right before my very eyes: confess my lie to Father Sullivan afterwards.

So I told father Owen that I'd never in my whole life succumbed to such an urge.

After an uncomfortably long moment of silence Father Owen spoke an especially disbelieving, "NEVER!?"

I felt like I did my first night in Maine - needing to take the piss of a lifetime as I lay in the cold darkness. With as much conviction as I could muster, I declared, "No Father. Not ever."

But Father Owen pressed on. "Not ever to the point of wasting the seed?"

At this point I had to squirm in my chair to contain myself. Not only was I being asked by Dear Father Owen if I ever whacked off, but if I’d ever blown my wad!

If there was a moment in my life when I truly wanted to “choke the bishop” though, this was it.

I could barely get out my, "No", and perhaps this was why Father Owen didn't appear to buy my story. Still, he directed me to say a few, "Our Fathers" and "Hail Marys". And while that's usually a tell tale sign that confession is over, my sense of relief was short lived. Father Owen had one last friendly suggestion.

He advised that I might take a Rosary to bed with me every night, and wrap it around my folded hands before going to sleep. This way, I would be reminded that the prayer position is the proper position of the hands at night - and the Rosary would serve to keep them from wandering!

When it was over, I got out of there as fast as possible, and practically ran back to the barn where I could totally succumb to my fit of laughter. I didn't make it though, and I dropped down onto the grass part way.

As I sat in there recovering, I couldn’t help but muse over what Father Keezer had once referred to as, “The Church’s Official Position on Masturbation” Heck, I was laughing before he’d even disclosed what the official position was! And was he serious? Was this codified in some sort of official Vatican document?

Father Keezer responded to my initial laughter with a look of disdain, then continued, “The Church’s position is clear: Let it get hard but don’t touch it.”

I practically fell to the floor laughing. And yes, I was accused of lacking any sort of maturity whatsoever. Are you kidding me? You’re going to tell me that there is an official “don’t touch” church position on masturbation? That there might even be some thousand year old parchment tucked away in the Vatican’s temperature controlled archives that actually sets it forth?

Word???

I can envision it now. Some medieval church scholar is translating from Aramaic into Latin an ancient clay tablet from like the year 1 AD. He comes across a few indentations on the side of the clay. But unbeknownst to him, the “side note” was a set of instructions to the original scribe’s apprentice regarding the clay itself, “Let it get hard, but don’t touch it…”

Our medieval translator then mistakes it for behavioral guidance, and jots down what eventually becomes the church’s “Official Position on Masturbation” – the “Templum Excolo Pro Manus Turbare”.

Imagine an ornately calligraphied capital letter “P” embellished with gold-leaf over gesso on dried lamb’s skin…upon which is written...

Well I for one would love to get a copy of that for my fireplace mantle!

As brimming with self-help tips as Father Keezer was however, it’s not fair to single him out. Truth is he wasn’t alone in the minions of well-schooled church “officials” who lectured on human reproduction and sex.

There was Sister Terri Palmer our Biology teacher. And although she was actually a lot better than Father Keezer, it was still funny to bump up against the wall of her celibatory vow. Like the day she conducted a walkthrough of the reproductive sex organs. She had a couple of anatomically correct pull-down charts, and she began with the female anatomy.

Sister Terri got out her long wooden pointer (yes folks, sometimes a long wooden pointer is just a long wooden pointer), and showed us where all the “naughty bits” were – as they say in the UK. You could hear the sound of pointer to chart as she directed us to observe, “The vulva” (Tap), and “The breasts” (Tap. Tap.) Pretty exciting stuff, although my Dad’s nudie books were still more interesting – and inspiring.

Then Sister Terri pulled down the male anatomical chart, and although the poor guy in the drawing was barely “hung”, she nonetheless did her due diligence. She pointed toward the genitals and said, “This is the penis”

But there was no “tap” sound of pointer to chart this time. Sister Terri could only bring herself to gesture at the penis-drawing from a safe distance. That didn’t escape the notice of our class however, and someone invariably asked for clarification. “Which part Sister?”

Sister Terri began to grudgingly move the pointer closer to the penis on the chart when she suddenly realized that she’d innocently revealed a smidgen of prudishness before the entire class - and we had brought the fact of it to her attention. She totally laced into him.

“You Mr. Brady are a big baby”, she started. “In fact, I’m going to build a play pen in the back of the room and put all the babies in it. And you are going to be the first one there!”

I can’t tell you how many times we’d hear that particular speech from Sister Terri, but it was a real broken record with her. It would’ve been better if she’d gotten a play pen built in the room, and actually sent people to go and sit in it. Maybe even throw in some diapers and a pacifier for good measure.

Poor Brady though. I felt badly for him. It was a very keen observation on his part, whimsically – even harmlessly – communicated. She might have allowed herself a warm hearted chuckle over it instead. But she just continued with her class, and asked if anyone had further questions.

“Is it ok for the father to suck from the mother when she’s still lactating?”, asked John Kelly.

The entire class went silent, and it was clear that John wasn’t trying to crack a joke or anything. He asked an honest question and he put it to Sister Terri straight.

She sensed it too.

It took her about ten seconds or to answer him, but to her credit she didn’t jump down his throat and ridicule him for his honest curiosity.

“Next question”, she replied.

Now that was a funny answer, and the class couldn’t contain itself after she uttered it. We only had five minutes of time left, so she just dismissed us early saying that we needed the extra time to grow up. She should have joined us.

It’s a little curious that while Sister Terri couldn’t bring herself to stimulate with a long wooden pointer the depiction of a penis on a chart, she had no qualms about feeling a bun or two when the chance came her way – at school assembly for example. If Sister Terri was seated in a spot along one of the many benches, and you had to squeeze past her to get to a seat next to your friends, you might’ve indeed gotten a helping hand from Sister Terri as she reached up to actively assist you along your way. We all learned to avoid her like the plague, but she was a very wily coyote – a skilled huntress who knew that she’d do better arriving “late” for assembly, than she would by being early. She became so famous for her “handiness” that we dubbed her, “Sister Terri-ère Palmer”.

I was still sitting on the grass recovering from my inquisition with Father Owen when Bob Connor walked by and asked what was so funny. At age 15, frank discussions about masturbation are way off limits, so I just recanted John Kelly’s famous “titty-suck” question.

A moment later, I remembered how Bob thoroughly relished spilling the beans to everyone about my unfortunate cigar encounter, and a perfectly vindictive thought made its way into my awareness. "Bob”, I said, “You gotta go to Father Owen for confession. He's totally cool."

5. THE CASCADES

A couple of weeks after my inquisition, we were in Mass at the "Chapel of the Snows" - a small shed on the property that had been setup as a makeshift chapel. Father Owen was saying mass that day, after which he asked us all to remain for an announcement. He related it had come to his attention that some of us had discovered the local nudists that bathe in cascades where we often went to swim. He wanted to be clear that the proper response of a young Christian gentleman was not, "to have a look-see." But rather, to swim elsewhere or come back home. Given my experience in confession, I couldn't help but imagine how Father Owen came to learn about our carefully timed trips to the cascades, at precisely the moments that would ensure the presence of young naked ladies aplenty. Did somebody break down under the duress of Father Owen's unrelenting, private interrogations? Did someone confess not only that he had fondled himself into a seed-wasting frenzy, but was driven to do so by tormenting thoughts of all those shamelessly naked women at the cascades?! Was it Bob Connor????

Thereafter, Tuesday afternoons became known as "Look-See" day, and in keeping with our quest to defy authority, trips to the cascades continued without interruption. Father Owen never mentioned them again. Nor did the administration ever move to stop us.

You might wonder how we came to discover naked ladies at the cascades. Well the truth of it, is that they actually came to discover US.

The cascades were a stunningly gorgeous piece of nature; a set of roaring waterfalls that emptied into a deep pool of dark waters, surrounded by rock out-croppings that had been worn smooth by who knows how many millions of years of floods and torrents. There were so many perfect nooks to park your towel and lie down that you'd swear that someone had planned and built them by hand. There were lots of ways to unwind there. You could lay down and sun yourself to sleep; swim in the exhilarating cool of the water pool or enjoy the friendly pelting of falling water on your head. You could just BS with your friends, or simply listen to the lulling sound of the falls. If there was ever a heaven to be found on earth, this was it. And it was just a ten or fifteen minute walk along the dirt road that led to Chartreuse, but far enough away to be perfectly nestled in privacy. It was difficult to believe how often we had the place entirely to ourselves.

We were gathered there one afternoon, when the first young lady of the summer showed up. My guess is that she was maybe in her early to mid twenties. But more to the point - or at least to what teenage boys (and men for that matter) notice most - she was pretty, and very curvaceous. We all pretended not to notice, but the fact of the matter is that she had our undivided attention.

She picked a roomy little spot about twenty feet away from us. As she started to undress, she suddenly stopped, and looked right at us. Every single one of us immediately diverted our eyes. We felt UTTERLY busted, and feared she was just going leave.

"Excuse me", she called out, "are any of you gentlemen opposed to nudity?"

If reactions had the capacity to manifest themselves physically, you would have seen about ten bright-red exclamation points spring forth from out of each and every one of our heads. That nobody could muster the strength to speak was the funniest thing on the planet. All of us - almost simultaneously - shook our heads vigorously to communicate our collective, and emphatic, "NO!" She grinned broadly, and you could tell from the look on her face that she was thinking, "Aw... Aren't they just *so* sweet."

Having secured our gentlemanly permission, she gingerly proceeded to undress. And each time a layer of clothing was shed, each of us wondered if she'd reached her limit. And each time we felt she wasn't going to go any further, we were delighted to see boundary after reasonable boundary disregarded entirely. She didn't stop until she was completely, and totally, butt spanking naked.

And if you thought she was curvaceous and amply endowed with clothes on...

When we felt it couldn't possibly get any better, she picked up her towel, gathered her things, and sat herself down among us - as nonchalantly as if she'd been in our circle of friendship her whole life long.

"I'm Michelle", she said as she held out her hand. First naked lady I'd ever touched (or seen) in my life. We all sheepishly introduced ourselves as towel after towel was draped over lap after lap. Then we just sat there in stupefied silence. How on earth do you talk to a deliciously curvaceous, naked woman sitting two feet in front of you when you're a teenage kid???

But she was so gracious about it, and had no qualms keeping the conversation going. Gradually, the chatting made us feel more and more at ease, and in very little time, we were perfectly comfortable. "Where are you boys from?" A simple question, but because we were from all over the east coast, it yielded a lengthy, and rich set of replies. We talked about home, and how we came to be at the cascades. It was hard to know where to look, and hard to find the right spot to rest your eyes. But since there were several of us present, we each got a chance to check her out while she was engaged in conversation with someone else in the group.

When we finished talking, she lay down on her towel to sunbathe and her ample breasts rolled and quivered ever so slightly sideways as she came to rest on her back. She didn't simply lie there like the dark curvaceous Sahara resting in a perfectly sumptuous peace under the summer sun. Over time, Michelle turned on her side, slept on her belly, curled herself up, and stretched herself out into every tantalizing and enticing pose her God given femininity had the capacity to assume.

And if you thought she was beautiful dry...

Michelle went and got herself beneath a small shower of falling water just before leaving. And when she came back up to the rocks to dry herself, the sun lit every bead of water on her skin and hair. I couldn't help but notice her glinting bush as she walked over to get her towel. Every now and again, I'd get a sprinkle from the water that dripped off of her body and bounced off of the rocks (lucky me huh).

This was all we could talk about for days on end. And just like bear cubs looking to imitate the bluster of their grizzly elders, you'd swear by our roaring bravado, that each of us had thoroughly ravaged her right there on the rocky slopes of the cascades, when in fact, all we did was chat and stare. Chat, stare, and eventually "seed-waste" in private solitude! Chalk one up on the list of objectives though: score with the local farmer’s daughter. I know I’m stretching it some but have a heart in indulging me one small delusion of conquest.

We would never see Michelle again unfortunately. But we began a veritable stake-out of the cascades from that moment on. Eventually, we came to discover that Tuesday afternoons were the best times to encounter female skinny dippers. Oddly, they were never accompanied by guys. It was mostly young women in groups although once there were girls our age there. And it was a boon to us that Michelle had broken us in - so we didn't behave like a bunch of gaping first-timers at subsequent encounters. We made them feel at ease - just as Michelle had done for us.

6. TUESDAY’S END

I'll never forget the LAST time we encountered naked girls at the cascades. We were doing our usual look-see Tuesday walk-over, when Willis Dunn(a freshman) spotted a bunch of girls undressing at a location along the way. We knew the spot. It wasn't as good as the cascades, but it was still pretty decent. But Willis didn't have to scream out, "YO FELLAS CHECK IT OUT!!" to get our attention. He could've whispered it. We were walking right alongside each other for Christ's sake! And it was certainly unnecessary to point excitedly at them.

The girls all looked up at us from their private little nook, and promptly proceeded to put their bathing suits back on. And Willis's rude and loud gesture totally sank all hope of quietly going down there to at least enjoy the bikini watch.

So we just walked on to the cascades and sat down to sulk. Willis was so mercilessly excoriated by the lot of us, that he left and went back to Chartreuse. We never forgot it, and Willis would never live it down. Especially since we never ran into any more skinny dippers thereafter. We blamed Willis for that. Clearly the rumors of teenage gawkers at the cascades had spread like wildfire, and permanently degraded the quality of our little trysts.

We decided that we needed to teach Willis Dunn a lesson.

7. A RAID IS BORN

Patrick Duffy (from Brooklyn Christus Prep) suggested that we water balloon him. I pointed out that we couldn't just burst into the freshman barn dorm only to pummel Willis Dunn with water balloons. If we were going to go through all that trouble, we might as well pummel them all.

So we hitched a ride into town and entered the local five and dime to buy some balloons for our planned festivities. The store in Maine only sold the "500 pack", however, and that's what we wound up purchasing.

Being good Catholics steeped in the hallowed tradition of wasting nothing, we filled all 500. Even with the 10 or 12 that broke, it was a monstrous amount of water. I don't know where the guys dug up all those tubs and baskets to keep the balloons in, but just looking at the arsenal alone was enough to asphyxiate you with laughter.

We went immediately to bed after vespers that night - we had a lot of work ahead of us and it was important to be rested. Because the freshman all slept in the downstairs part of the barn, it helped our plans enormously. They were never the wiser as to why we were all going to sleep so early in the evening.

When our alarm clock went off in the dead of night, we slowly and quietly got up, armed ourselves, and tiptoed downstairs to the freshman dorm.

We didn’t turn on our flashlights at first – just for the sake of achieving maximum surprise. So the first wave of water balloons we tossed, were just thrown blindly in random directions. We knew they had hit their mark though, from the first set of screams that pierced the cold Newry darkness.

That’s when the flashlights went on, and all hell broke loose.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone in my entire life repeatedly scream, "I'll K I L L you!!" with so much primal, fully throated indignation - nor do I believe I ever will again (hopefully).

But as my brother Joshua stood beside his drenched bed, soaked to the bone in his sopping wet jams, he truly meant every last syllable. He was so blind with rage that he didn't even seem to notice or care about the fresh set of water balloons that were exploding on his head and body. Word to the wise: if you're ever the target of a water balloon raid at 2:00AM, on a cold country night in Maine, don't call undue attention to yourself.

Joshua wasn't the only one of the underclassmen screaming bloody murder however, and you'd swear from the agonized shrieks and howls that we were eviscerating them all with blunt swords.

The reactions - like the water balloons - continued to erupt as we pressed deeper into their turf, and it must have been especially terrifying for those who occupied the nethermost reaches of the downstairs barn. They probably had no idea for their first few waking seconds what in God's name their classmates were screaming about. But I'd bet big money that they feared the worst!

As the raid expanded outward, we competed fiercely for the honor of being the first person to strike a specific underclassman. In the mayhem of it all, we'd nearly forgotten about Willis Dunn. He had already gotten out of his bed and moved himself off to another part of the barn. But we were on to him. We had determined in advance which bed he slept in, and he wasn't going to get away with it. After we ballooned the daylights out of Willis while reminding him for the thousandth time how he ruined our Look-See Tuesdays, we proceeded to trash his bed. But Willis had resigned himself to his fate and didn’t really react very much. It was a little disappointing. But when we launched a series of water balloons into his clothes chest, Willis broke down and started screaming every last obscenity he could conceive in the moment - although it was hard to understand him amid the ear piercing cries of his brethren.

I went back upstairs to replenish my stock of ammo, and when I returned, Willis Dunn was still emoting vociferously in what seemed like the semi-conscious state of a torture victim. He had a pretty thick ethnic accent, and all I could make out was the word "KITTOY!"

That's all he kept saying.

I ran past him and toward the very back of the barn and many of the underclassmen were just sitting there staring at us in a shocked, but well soaked disbelief. A bunch of us swung around to chase a couple of freshman who decided to try running away but they were quickly taken down. We were standing in front of Willis again who was looking like the sorriest losing contestant in a wet T shirt contest. He was still frantically yelling, "KITTOY KITTOY!"

When that failed to get our attention he started stomping his feet and pointing wildly. We followed his finger and suddenly realized what he was trying to tell us.

Miraculously - and I mean M I R A C U L O U S L Y - no one had thrown so much as a river pebble at John Doyle. He was sitting there in bed, dry as the Oklahoma dust bowl, peeking out from his covers at the sheer pandemonium exploding around him. Two seconds later, John was utterly monsooned from every direction imaginable. I had to take a break after that to go upstairs and laugh my fucking ass off. GET DOYLE(GIT DOY) - that's what Willis Dunn was screaming at us!

By the time it was over, there was a good 1.5 inches of still water on the floor. We had to let some the freshman upstairs to sleep on the floor while the water downstairs seeped through the floor boards and into the ground. Some opted to wait it out downstairs. They were too angry to accept any kindness. Not sure I blame them.

The underclassmen were all drying out their mattresses and pillows in the sun the next day. Then Father Itchyn (the school Principal) - who'd come up for that weekend - rounded us all up. Man was he mad. I guess that after the Paul Murphy lab-flooding incident back at school that year, he was a little sensitive to scenes of severe water damage - even in an old cow barn.

As punishment, we were made to wait table for the freshman over the period of one week - at every meal. It was worth it though, and still an Epic achievement of another summer objective: prank the underclassmen.

8. CLOSING VESPERS

Just a year or two ago I was raking the leaves in my back yard when the bells of a distant church began playing, "Salve Regina". The peace and stillness that settled over me was so palpable that I sat myself down on the front steps of my house and just relaxed. Until that moment, I'd never fully realized or appreciated that our nightly vespers experiences in Chartreuse left any kind of impression.

"Salve Regina" was the prayer we'd sing every night in the Chapel of the Snows before turning in. We'd then quietly make our way back across the covered bridge and up the hill to our barn. No one would say a word, and I'd look up at the extraordinarily starry Maine sky - a vision that never failed to bring every thought in my head to a complete halt as I gazed into its timeless depth and mystery. I'd never seen so many millions of stars at night - nor realized the impact that city lights had on their visibility.

As the bells continued to ring, I sang to myself and mused at how the good lord had stowed away this experience in some forgotten corner of my brain - so we could one day break it together like fresh baked bread in gratitude for our years of camaraderie and fellowship at Christus Prep.

THE WEIGHT OF A FRIEND

2010-07-03T18:35:00.015-04:00

As I walked down the aisle of Blessed Sacrament Church in Manhattan's west side, I couldn't shake the feeling that this wasn't really happening. It just couldn't be true. I kept thinking that somehow I'd see Dan O'Malley sitting at one of the church pews along with every other one of our classmates as I marched onward. But he wasn't. He couldn't be.

This is what occupied my thoughts on that sunny July morning, as I assisted my classmates in shouldering Daniel O'Malley's casket along the path to his final resting place.

But there was something else I was bearing that morning in addition to the weight of my friend: the weight of my own grief.

And at age fifteen I just didn't know how to even begin having that. As I bore Dan down the aisle toward the Church's exit doors, I struggled between the need to be alone in some small, quiet place in the world, and holding it together before a church packed with hundreds of people I didn’t even know.

Just sixty days ago, it was May, and our school's track team was gathering for a meet on a sunny spring Saturday at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The cool of the early morning, and the fresh smell of spring was everywhere, as we picked a grassy spot on the open field to sit down and prepare for our respective races. But we were a lot more interested in watching the girls’ track teams stretch out in their little tank tops and shorts, than in warming up.

And even though the girls were there to run and get all sweaty, they always managed to look as beautiful as possible. One particularly curvaceous, and pretty group of young ladies caught our collective eye on that morning, and we were commenting to each other about how great it would be if...

Dan then made a very modest proposal to us: that we go over and talk to them. He said it very nonchalantly. It wasn't any kind of dare, or some sort of contest or ego trip. It was a very matter of fact suggestion.

But it felt more like a proposal to walk across a tightrope or stroll along some cliff’s edge, and I didn’t think any of us felt we could cope with the consequences of faltering.

No one responded. We just looked at him in dumbfounded silence. So he calmly stood up, and called out a very good natured, "C'mon guys".

Dan might’ve used this opportunity to poke fun at our inexperience and trepidation. But he didn’t. And that’s why we trusted that he wasn’t just going to lead us to our much admired group of young ladies, and let us hang.

So we all got up and followed him, and I for one was intensely interested in how he was going to manage this. It turned out to be so easy, simple, and straightforward that I felt a shocked disbelief. Dan uttered what to my ears was the lamest and most sorry self-introduction conceivable. And I had a hard time believing how successful it was. I felt a total sense of, "NO WAY!"

"Hello ladies", Dan began as they smiled coyly at him. "I'm Dan. I love 'Talking', and 'Pepsi'.”

That’s all it took. He greeted them, and disclosed two innocuous personal details that were actually quite true. He did love talking - often you couldn't get him to shut-up. And he sure loved drinking Pepsi – by the gallon practically. And that’s how he broke the ice, and got the conversation going. The girls all giggled and blushed, and Dan then graciously introduced us.

With just a modicum of compassion, Dan bore the weight of us in our first steps along the path of not simply courting girls, but more deeply, facing and dissolving our own terrors; dispelling hopelessness; pursuing our heart's longing; the thrill of taking risks.

We were at the Church’s exit doors now, and I felt especially concerned over how we were going to coordinate carrying Dan down the steps leading to the sidewalk. I looked outward to see the thronging New York City news media gathered in force: The trucks, tripods, film crews, and the sounds of frenzied shutters clicking wildly. It felt so invasive, and disrespectful, that I wondered how it could even be legal.

Because Dan had been shot and killed by kids who were even younger than he was - and for no apparent reason (perhaps it was a gang initiation) - the press was all over the story. I just never imagined that their right to be here was so boundless, and that they felt no qualms about entering into the private space of a grieving family to conduct their cold, hard business.

As we began our descent down the steps, it was hard to believe that only a few months earlier, we were together again in Mr. Keller's English class - and in the presence of Dan's cheeky classroom ribaldry.

We had been tasked with presenting a short essay on any subject that was part of current events in the news/media, and of some personal interest.

Most of us wrote and presented essays on hijackings and nuclear proliferation (yeah sure - like these were important personal issues.) But Dan, whom I believe had been influenced by the mad ravings of Reverend Donald Wildmon, had this to declare: "I'm against sex on television!" (The class groaned)

"But I have a very good reason" (more groans)

"And the reason I'm against sex on the television is that I keep falling off!"

"That's enough Mr. O’Malley.", lectured Keller.

You could always count on Keller to cut a good speech short.

Joseph Kenney (who was the class nicotine addict) then got up to say that smoking in the men's bathroom should be permitted; that claims about fire hazards were exaggerated since everything in the men's bathroom was made of marble anyway. To which Dan replied, "Ever try wiping your butt with marble toilet paper?"

Keller lectured yet again, "That's enough Mr. O’Malley.”

It might seem that Mr. Keller was something of a prude who had little patience for Dan, but that’s not quite true. Keller also coached the track team and we spent a great deal of time driving to meets with him, and kidding around after races. Dan and Mr. Keller were actually pretty close – which is why I think Dan felt Mr. Keller would tolerate his classroom excesses.

We had reached the foot of the steps, and I was face to face with the reality of helping to place Dan's casket on the gurney that stood before us. It may sound like a simple physical exercise, but the reality was something else entirely. It was time to put my friend down, and let him go. Managing the encounter with my own feelings of unpreparedness in surrendering to that particular reality, turned out to be the far harder thing.

In the finality of my last respects, it didn't matter what I felt. It didn’t matter what I was or wasn’t ready for. It took just a few short moments before the task was completed, and he was wheeled away.

After the service, we convened in a small group to secure a ride to Dan’s house where his parents were hosting a small luncheon. As we waited, I spotted the man who loaned me his tie for the service, and I made my way over to return it, and to say thanks once again for his gesture.

When I first got to the church that morning, the school principal took me aside, and asked if I would accept the honor of helping to carry Dan's casket. I related to him that I wasn’t properly dressed for that. I’d left home in such a state of agitated haste, that I’d forgotten to wear a tie.

A stranger who was standing within ear shot of the conversation then extended his hand to me and said, “Here you are son.”

He’d taken off his tie and loaned it to me. It was a simple gesture, but very human at the same time, and I felt so grateful for it. Because of him, I was properly attired to perform one last service for my departed friend.

“Thank you so much for lending me your tie Mr. Pressman”, I said as handed it back to him.

“No problem Silas”, he replied. “And please, call me Gabe.” As I turned to walk away, he added, “I’m sorry for the loss of your friend Silas”. He said it so sincerely though, and I didn’t know how to reply. I just said thanks once again and made my way back to the group.

As we got to Dan’s house in the Bronx, the idea of a post-service luncheon seemed a little out of synch with the sad reality of our loss. But this was just my "kid's inexperience”, and the luncheon itself was where I began to feel some sense of our collective coming to terms, and making peace. A group of us gathered in one corner of the living room, and began to talk. What stands out in my memory now isn’t so much the content of our discussion – but the absence of one topic in particular.

When the shooting first happened, none of us could stop obsessing about how the perpetrators should be punished - far beyond the extent of law. Even when we started reminiscing about Dan, it eventually led to what we would do to the shooters if they were under our "jurisdiction".

A day or so before the service, however, Dan's dad gave an interview to the press, and he was asked how he felt about the boys who killed his son. He simply relate that he bore them no animosity whatsoever, and expressed his hope that the shooters would have a chance to rehabilitate themselves; that they would still somehow grow up to fulfill their lives.

As long I live, I don’t believe I’ll ever forget what that felt like.

The heroic obligation to avenge the death of our friend that all of us keenly felt was bared for the petty smallness that it was. We lost all taste for the perpetrator conversation thereafter. And I truly believe Mr. O’Malley’s example – a gift really - may well saved the soul of each and every one of us. What would we have become?

What would we have done? Organize protests at the trial of the perpetrators? Draw up large placards that screamed for justice? Write letters to state officials calling for the maximum juvenile sentences possible? I shudder to think that we may have wasted years of our lives tracking them; waiting for the sentences to be done; organizing a “special welcome” for them on the day of their release. God knows how it would have hardened and embittered us otherwise.

But it wasn't about the perpetrators anymore though. It was about healing the anger and hurt in the lives of those who loved Dan, and remembering the joy he brought us.

And another such joyous moment – another "pièce de résistance" - came in Mr. Jacques Noir's French class.

"Mr. Noir!", Dan called out like some kid yelling to his friend in the back alley of a Bronx apartment building.

"Oui RO’Malley!", Noir called back in kind. (Noir used to pronounce Dan's last name with a prefix of "RO" for some God-forsaken reason).

"How do I say, 'Lady of the Evening' in French?", Dan inquired.

The class sank into a dead silence.

Mr. Noir – who was a stern man with quite a temper - reddened as he roared, "You Lee-mow-nod RO’malley! How cood yew esk me sutcha-than??!!" (Mr. Noir used to call anyone who was “being an idiot”, a “lemonade”. In French, it was pronounced, “lee mow nod”. I never got that.)

With surprising self assurance - if not complete and utter shamelessness - Dan disclosed further, "Well in case I'm ever lonely in France, I'd like to at least know how to ask for one."

Noir calmed noticeably, and uttered a genuinely sympathetic, "Ahhhhh..."

Reminds me of the line in Goethe’s Faust about God conversing so humanely with the devil himself. After some consideration, Noir replied, "Dame de la nuit."

The whole class exploded in laughter and Mr. Noir stood there laughing right along with us.

In retrospect – given Dan’s way with the ladies – I think that “Dame De La Nuit” would have been a far less likely relational encounter for him than “Dame Du Jour”!

When we were all back in school in September, Father Sullivan organized a two hour memorial service for Dan. Our entire class went upstairs to the 4th floor chapel and just sat around on the floor in a circle. No readings. No sermons. Father Sullivan then opened the floor up to all of us. It was our time to just talk about how we were dealing with the absence of our friend.

And it’s here that I leave you with my fondest recollection of Daniel O’Malley.

In another of our English classes, Mr. Keller directed us memorize and recite Robert Frost's, "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." To add interest, he asked for an interpretative recitation.

Like everyone else in class though, I did nothing more than spit it back out, since what in God's name is an "interpretation" when you're fifteen anyway? But being a little beyond his years, Dan O’Malley managed to find his groove in it. And I laughed so hard when I first heard him recite this that I never forgot it. First because it was wicked funny, and second because he had the sheer guts to say this in a Catholic School English class.

"Who's woods these [be]? I think I know. His ['pad'] is in the village

- though he will not see me stopping here to [smoke a joint, and drink some beer.]

My little horse must think [I'M] queer

to [not have brought my woman here]"

Mr. Keller interjected, "That's enough Mr. O’Malley..." And this was all we heard of Dan’s gut busting interpretation. The rest of it went with him all those years ago.

Looking back, I can't help but note the parallel between the cutting short of Dan's hilarious recitation, and the sudden, unexpected interruption of his young life. Nor is it lost on me - however portentous or not - that Dan never got to recite the final line in Frost's poem, "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep."

It's been many years since I was honored to bear the weight of my friend through his untimely journey homeward, and I feel especially privileged in the here and now to usher into the world anew, something of Dan’s irrepressible spirit, and his over-brimming love for life.

copyright 2010 - Silas Martinez

RANDOM PROJECTILE

2010-03-14T15:00:00.015-04:00

“No one is going to believe that it was just an accident.”

That’s the one thought that kept repeating itself like a really bad frankfurter in Chris Powell’s being as he sat outside of Father Itchyn’s office. It was even starting to turn his stomach – exactly as if he’d wolfed down one too many of those tasty, tube-shaped rat-steaks you get from skuzzy sidewalk vendors anywhere in the city 24 x 7. Yeah, they’re good at first. But you pay for them dearly later on.

As he sat there digesting it all, and nervously waiting for his appointment with Itchyn, he belched it up yet again, and just shook his utterly defeated head, “No one is going to believe it was just an accident.”

The wait outside of Itchyn’s office was a well known tactic – for those of us who’d seen our share of action anyway. Whenever you were in trouble, he’d always leave you hanging outside his office for at least fifteen minutes. You might think that this would give you time to make up a really fantastic excuse, but that never happened – at least not to me. What does happen is that you wear yourself down with stress and worry. And by the time you make it into Itchyn’s office you’ve totally puree'd your own resolve.

So when the large, dark oak door of Itchyn’s office swung open, Powell had already reduced himself into a state of dejected resignation. “Inside Powell.”, Itchyn called out.

Chris entered the room, and sat down in the green winged-back leather chair before Itchyn’s desk.

“Who said you could sit down Mr. Powell?”, poked Itchyn as he savored the start of his little domination game. Powell promptly stood up and apologized.

An Enhanced Interrogation

Itchyn wasted no time in getting the interrogation underway, and he turned the white-hot spotlight of his attention fully onto his prisoner. “I’m certain, Mr. Powell, that you have a good explanation for what happened today.”

Powell said simply that it was just an accident - as weak and lame as the god's honest truth sounded. A totally random, and unintended event.

But Itchyn wasn’t satisfied with such a terse summation of it, and he pressed further. “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. It was an accident?”

“I didn’t mean it father”, Powell pleaded. “I just threw it at Jim Bertini.”

Itchyn looked askance at Powell and expounded a little further, “Well Mr. Powell, I was led to believe that you ‘accidentally’ threw a projectile at one of my finest staff members.”

The hyperventilating Powell rushed to put it all in context. “I threw it at Jim Bertini Father – but it bounced off him”

“Oh. So now it 'bounced'!” Itchyn mocked as he reflected it back to Powell from his Principal's perspective. “First it was 'just an accident'. Then you deliberately threw something. Now you’re saying it was a random projectile that merely ‘bounced’???”

Powell started to become unglued, and made an appeal to Itchyn for a witness. “You can ask Jim. We were just kidding around. I swear father, it was just an accident.”

You could practically smell the frankfurter fumes in that barely digestible little tube of a truth. Nevertheless, Powell was allowed to call a witness to the stand.

So Itchyn phoned Mr. Pox to relate that he wanted Jim Bertini’s ass down in his office as soon as possible. Powell started to settle down as Father Itchyn went on to impress upon him that his standing as a student in the school was made possible by the Church’s generous underwriting. “The church invests thousands of dollars in this school to subsidize your education. And it’s my job to make sure that their money is well spent. Do we have a meeting of the minds here Mr. Powell?”

They were interrupted by a knock on the door, and Mr. Pox simply opened it enough to push Bertini into the office like an annoying piece of furniture you can never find the right spot for. Then he promptly closed it.

Itchyn shot Bertini an evil look as Bertini just stood there feeling like a secondary character in an ancient Greek tragedy, slowly and helplessly petrifying before the gaze of Medusa.

“I don’t believe I have to explain to you gentlemen how serious a situation this is do I?”, asked Father Itchyn.

“No father”, they responded in two part harmony.

Itchyn began filling out a form atop his desk, and the very fact of that put new fear and worry to the twisting stomachs of his detainees.   Without looking up from it, he pointedly asked them, "Would you agree that it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a Christian young man to conduct himself with proper decorum at all times?"

Powell and Bertini could only bring themselves to nod as they sought to discern a word or two on Itchyn's mysterious, and seemingly ominous form.   Itchyn checked a box on it and continued.

“And would you agree further that striking a teacher with a projectile goes against the standard of Christian conduct we seek to cultivate here?”

“Yes Father”, they admitted as Father Itchyn's paperwork grew more densely scribbled.

Itchyn continued to gleefully slow-roast Powell and Bertini as he skillfully turned them over the fire of his authority, like a couple of dead, plucked chickens on a spit. They were really starting to cook and redden now.

“And is it therefore reasonable to conclude that humiliating one of God’s servants before an entire class of students is grounds for dismissal from this school?”

You could practically hear their skin start to crackle and pop, but they couldn’t muster the fortitude to reply.

“I ASKED YOU A QUESTION!!”, roared Itchyn.

The sudden and drastic change in decibel-level shook the two to their foundations.

“Y-Yes Father!”, they fully surrendered.

Itchyn's marked the final checkbox on his form as the feeling of doom and finality engulfed his prisoners.    He looked squarely at Jim Bertini and said, “While I consider the possibility of contacting your parents about your future in this school Mr. Bertini, there is a minor wrinkle in this incident that Mr. Powell indicates you can iron out for us.”

Before Itchyn could get another word out, Bertini was practically on his knees denying any involvement, and squarely placing the blame on his classmate, “I didn’t do it Father! Chris did it! He threw it during our Latin class!”

“Tell him how it bounced of your head Jim!!”, the desperate and red faced Powell cried out.

But Itchyn snapped at Powell before Bertini could reply, “Not another word from you Powell!"

The projectile had in fact bounced off of Bertini's head and onto their teacher however.   But it seemed for some reason that Itchyn wasn't especially keen on exploring it.

The interrogation was over, however, and Powell could only hang his head in unconditional surrender.

Sentence Pronounced

Itchyn took a moment to bring the session to a conclusion with a hint of flair and drama. He turned leftward and rightward in his swiveling chair. He looked squarely at Bertini, then squarely at Powell.   He leaned toward his desk, took pen in hand again, and put his signature to the form that sat there.

He pointed a finger at Bertini. “You. Get back upstairs to your class.”

You could see from the look on Powell's face that his tiny boat of hope had sunk to the very bottom. Bertini gratefully turned and practically bolted out of Itchyn's office.

Bertini got detention for it though – which was a damned light sentence given that he and Powell were totally having a projectile war in the middle of Sister Angela's Latin class. But neither wanted to elaborate on that point before Father Itchyn.

It didn’t go nearly as well for Powell. He got suspended for three days, and his parents were notified. I’m sure it sucked to be Chris that night at home.

He would’ve felt a whole lot worse had he known that back in the faculty lounge, the teachers were having one hell of a hearty laugh about the so called, “accident”. And Sister Angela was not amused to find herself bearing the full expense of treating them. In fact, she felt quite stupefied over her discovery that the empathy and commiseration she fully expected to receive didn’t have a tiny shred of material existence.

Although she thoroughly succeeded in getting everyone's attention when she stormed into the faculty lounge and slammed the door behind her, the ambiguity with which she then articulated her situation to her colleagues was out of alignment with her stormy entrance.

“They hit me with a spit ball here!!”,  she declared to them as she stuck her right shoulder out to show them.

She sounded like little girl complaining to her Mommy about an incident in the school playground.

None of the teachers laughed at first, but when Sister Mary Anne – our elderly school librarian - replied to say very good naturedly, “Oh, I’ve had worse than that Angela”, it coaxed hearty chuckles from all the faculty members who were gathered.

Father Jordan couldn’t resist toying with her. “Where did it hit you Angela?”

Sister Angela took him seriously.   She gestured downward with her head, moved her eyes toward the right side of her body, and said more authoritatively, “Here!"

But Father Jordan was not letting on in the least. “You mean on the arm?”, he teased in feigned confusion as father Sullivan reddened in contained laughter at his chair.

Sister Angela let out a short breath of frustration and repeated her gesture more emphatically, "H E R E !"

But Father Jordan refused to stop playing the clueless dolt.   He was having way too much fun with this. "You mean on your arm Angela?"

Muted guffaws from her colleagues finally ignited the core of her rage, and she exploded.

“ON MY TIT!!"

"MY RIGHT TIT!"

"OK?!!”

Sister Angela's disclosure triggered an avalanche of faculty laughter that Sister Angela simply could not comprehend. But she refused to give up trying to win at least of smidgen of support.

“You don’t understand! It went down my blouse!” she cried out to them in a further plea for compassion and understanding.

That just made it worse as faculty member after faculty member busted at the seams. Even Sister Mary Anne was smiling broadly.

Sister Angela couldn’t fathom why they didn't comprehend her predicament. And how could they possibly laugh? It seemed she concluded that her sheepishness in getting to the heart of the matter was the reason for it, and she resolved herself to speak what she initially dared not say.

We’ve all heard about the straw the broke the camel’s back, but Sister Angela’s final disclosure was the log that crushed and pinned it to the ground. “IT WENT IN MY BRA!”, she yelled at the top of her lungs.

Father Jordan was barely able to get his final question out as he fell to pieces laughing, “How did you get it out Angela?!”

Shocked and offended, she turned and stormed out of the room as Father Itchyn went out behind her. “Ok folks, that’s enough”, he lectured his staff members as he left the room. When the door clicked shut, the room was practically quaking in faculty laughter.

And Chris got suspended for it. Then they told his mom and dad.

How f’d up is that?

Still, Father Jordan asked a great question. While I don’t know the final answer to it, I can relate that Sister Angela certainly did NOT pick the spitball out of her bra with her bare hands, right there in Latin class, before her gaping students. Instead, she ran shrieking out of class as fast as her straight skirt would let her. She darted across the hall to the faculty elevator, and pressed the living shit out of the down-button.

As she suffered through waiting for it to get there, she jumped up and down in cold, wet revulsion until its doors finally opened up before her. Then she bolted inside and practically shattered to tiny pieces, the elevator's "door close" button.

She probably took something like twelve showers that night.

copyright 2010 - Silas Martinez