Much of my adolescence was spent trying to understand why I could not close the space between the words. With Shannon, however, I got it: this was Shannon we were talking about. Like others before her whose significant stature allowed them to go by only one name—Madonna, Cher, Liberace—Shannon was the “it” girl of the Pre-Eighth program. Typically, there were only two things I could offer a girl I had a crush on. The first was that I was smart. This was a flimsy offering at best; there were a number of connections that needed to be made in the mind of the crushee between me getting a ninety-seven on a religion test and me being successful later in life and providing her with a nice house and an ample clothing budget. Besides, every guy in this program was smart, which negated this positive. The second was that I was funny. But as I already knew, funny only got me in the front door—and never down into the basement make-out room.
I couldn’t do athletic (see basketball expertise, above) or tough (my record in the few schoolyard scraps I’d had was 0-1-3—or 0-2-2, depending on whom you asked), two other qualities that most girls found attractive. And while I didn’t consider myself not good-looking, in hindsight I realize that I was particularly ugly during this period in my life. Because I knew I was going to be among the poorer kids in the program, I overcompensated by dressing well. Or what I thought was well. While by any standard the early to mid 1990s was not a great period for fashion, this was especially true if you were a South Philadelphian who purchased all of your “nice” clothes from a “stylish” shop known as Gigolo’s, whose target customer base was the IZOD and IROC-Z crowd. So while the rest of the kids wore sports T-shirts or other normal twelve-and thirteen-year-old kid clothes, I came to class each day decked out head to toe in Z. Cavaricci, eager to prove that my family had plenty of money—just look at my awesome clothes! Except they were not awesome. Not then, not now, not ever. And I ended up not looking like a student, but like a student’s Italian-American lesbian aunt who dressed really, really tackily.
The author (right), dressed as a middle-aged Italian-American lesbian aunt, with friends from the Pre-Eighth program.
And none of this takes into account that Shannon showed no inclination to look for a boyfriend. This didn’t stop many of the guys from acting like the program was a seven-week talent show in which the winner was awarded Shannon’s heart. At every opportunity, the males paraded in front of her or otherwise tried to get Shannon’s attention through words or acts that could be boiled down to, “Hey, look at what I can do well, Shannon! It is my sincere hope that this increases your opinion of me!”
Add it all together, and though I had a crush on her so heavy that at times I could barely stand, I knew it was a lost cause, an endeavor not even worth exploring. I was content with my consolation prize, her attention and her friendship. Shannon would tell me about her hopes and her dreams and her plans for high school and beyond, and I’d smile and nod, happy to be in her presence, wondering what her hair smelled like (my guess: cinnamon in the fall and “crisp breeze” for the rest of the year).
Though I knew that Shannon would not attend the Prep, the experience of meeting her was a big reason why I decided that I wanted to go to high school there. Not only was the Prep everything I imagined it would be, but I had met and befriended a stunning, charming girl the first time I went there. Win-win.
The Pre-Eighth program was the easy, fun part. If I wanted to go to the Prep, making it happen would be a little more difficult.
In Classroom 107 at the Prep, on the November morning of the high school entrance exam, the proctor, taking roll call, called out, “Conrad Benedetto?”
Conrad Benedetto? What the hell kind of name was that? In my part of town, if you weren’t named after a saint and your last name didn’t have a whiff of Gaelic or end in –ski or –sky, you were considered a weirdo. (There was no Saint Jason, but there were three other Jasons in my class of eighty students in elementary school, so Jason was also acceptable.) But Conrad Benedetto? Was Otto van Mascarpone also in the room? How about Wolfgang Amarillo?
That I wanted to attend the Prep was met with mild disappointment from my dad and grandfather, who wanted me to be a Neumann man. I could understand my grandpop’s wish that I continue the tradition he had started almost fifty years before, but I found it more interesting that my dad wanted me to go to Neumann. By his own admission he didn’t remember most of his senior year, and he was not exactly a booster for the school, regaling me with tales of high school hijinks that usually involved the heavy use of drugs on school grounds. I think his interest in my going to Neumann was related more to the Prep’s oversize price tag than to his desire to see his son at his alma mater. As for grandpop, he had about a dozen male grandkids. One of them would go to Neumann for sure, so he’d get over it.
My friends were a little more vocal. That I didn’t want to go to the same high school as almost all of them led to various rebukes and insults along the lines of “fancy boy” to “what, you’re too good for Neumann?” It was just a school, I countered. It was no big deal. Besides, it wasn’t like I was moving or anything. We’d still hang out all the time.
In contrast, my mom was thrilled and supportive. Though the school’s annual tuition was equal to about two-thirds of her salary, it didn’t matter to her. If a requirement for my matriculation at the Prep was that she had to wrestle a lion, she’d show up an hour early to stretch before the match, manhandle the lion, and then ask for another.
The summer over and now back at OLMC, eighth grade so far had been enjoyable because it had been unlike any of my previous years of school. For the first time, school did not require rote memorization and recitation (“Name the beatitudes! Who was the nineteenth president!”). Rather, there was more interaction between teachers and students. Mr. Bruno, the prototypical cool male teacher who had previously talked to us about being nicer to young ladies, did not make us recite presidents eleven through twenty, but asked us who we thought had been the best president and why—and what made a “good” president, anyway. In religion class, while the Catholic party line was that the devil was a red dude with a tail who lived underground and was a real asshole, Ms. Peterson taught us about other religions, which many of us didn’t even know existed (“You mean, there are people who are not Catholic?”).
English class was the most different. Long accustomed to diagramming sentences and reading boring books, Ms. Flynn blew our minds when she said we could read any book we liked and keep journals about them that we would then pass around to our classmates. So I could write in my journal a note to Vic about anything I wanted, as long as it mentioned something about the book I was reading. While it may sound like a recipe for disaster, it actually worked. Sure, my friends and I might write long journal entries to each other embedded with private jokes that bore no relation to what we were reading, but we also read books—a lot of books—and discussed them in our journals. Ms. Flynn approached the writing portion of language arts class in a similar way. We could write whatever we wanted—poems, essays, short stories, plays. Then we’d break into groups every few classes to workshop what we’d written. One notable work was Mark Hutton’s tour de force short story, “The Day I Spilled Hot Chocolate on My Privates,” in which he wrote about the day he spilled hot chocolate on his privates. If this isn’t in development at Fox right now, the entertainment industry really is dying.
But despite being turned on to reading, writing, and learning like I had never been before, no amount of love of learning would get me into the Prep. It all came down to the entrance exam and one number: ninety-eight. Ninety-eight was the minimum I’d need to score on the entrance exam to qualify for a scholarship. If I got the scholarship and also a work grant and some financial aid, my family could make it work.
I was nervous for the spelling bee, knowing that Brutus was on the line. But going into that bee, I was confident and didn’t feel so much pressure, because I knew a top-seven finish would get the job done. With the Prep entrance exam, I was much less confident
. Ninety-eight did not leave a whole lot of room for error. I didn’t know how many questions there would be, only that the test was multiple choice and would cover English and math. But if it were one hundred questions, and I got three wrong, no Prep. My high school career—and my entire life—could hinge on one single question. When I lost the bee, my consolation was that my quest for a dog was not over. While I was not going to get my Brutus anytime in the near future, I could get a dog in a few years, or maybe when I went to college, or certainly at some point in my life: when I was an adult and had my own house, I could get dozens of dogs if I wanted to. With the Prep entrance exam, it was different. I either got the scholarship and went there or didn’t get the scholarship and went to another high school. There was no “maybe later . . .”
The lesson I took from the Brutus experience was that life is not a Disney movie. When it comes to competition, you fuck up, you’re done; someone else is there and ready to win what you’ve lost. While my parents promised that they would do their best to find the money even if I didn’t get the scholarship, I wasn’t going to bankrupt the whole effing family just so I could go to a private high school with a pool and Latin classes. I needed that ninety-eight.
You know how trauma victims black out much of the circumstances of the accident that injured them? “I remember being on the train tracks, I remember seeing the train’s headlights, and I remember waking up in the hospital bed.”
I remember Classroom 107. I remember Conrad Benedetto. And I remember getting a letter in the mail some time later congratulating me on my Ignatian scholarship to Saint Joseph’s Preparatory School. And with a letter came a brochure with smiling, fresh-faced student council officers on the cover, whose contents I could recite from memory.
football line
For the first dozen or so years of our lives, our decisions are made for us. What we eat, what we wear, where we go to school and the type of schooling we receive, what God we do or do not worship, what kind of movies and TV we watch, what music we listen to, where we travel—we’re just along for the ride and accept what may come. We produce little, consume everything, and that which we consume is provided by our parents or the authority figures in our lives.
But then, slowly, things start to change. Right around puberty, we begin to assert greater control of our lives and start to make those decisions previously made for us. Now you can wear whatever you want, even if your parents forbid you to, by, for example, changing clothes at a friend’s house before school. No sweets? You can stop at Dairy Queen every day after class and no one will be the wiser. If your lame-ass dad bans all gangsta rap in the home, you can always listen on your headphones. Raised Evangelical Christian but thinking the whole pagan thing is more your speed? There are plenty of message boards and meetings (presumably secret, presumably in the woods) to explore. Indeed, from my understanding (which consists of my thinking about this for the first time as I write and making shit up as I go along), puberty gives a child the opportunity to assert his or her individuality, often in defiance of his parents’ wishes.
It is around this time that the first major decision on which we have any input presents itself: where to go to high school. Most people would agree that the consequences of this decision are great and that it involves a traditional milestone in one’s life. Of course, our parents have a significant amount of input on this one, too. Cost is a major consideration, as it was in my case. But at the same time, it is difficult for any parent to force his or her child to attend a high school he doesn’t want to attend. So this is a kid’s big chance to speak up and be heard.
After high school, the other major decisions are all ours. College or work? Or maybe a year traveling through Europe, having sex with strangers, and “discovering” oneself? After that, is it time for a real job? Or maybe grad school? Or maybe temporarily living with the ’rents while you tackle the next great American novel? Then, maybe, the process of spouse-choosing and marriage? Or a commitment to staying single? To procreate or not to procreate?
These are all heavy, heady choices. But if Malcolm Gladwell has taught us anything, it’s that while the big ones are important, the cumulative effect of the little decisions are just as significant, if not more so, than those big-picture decisions. Or that decisions that at the time seem inconsequential can later turn out to be quite impactful and truly define our lives.
(He wrote a book about something like this, right? It certainly feels like he did. If he hasn’t, he’s probably working on one right now.)
On our first day at the Prep, we were placed into one of seven different homeroom sections, in which we would have the majority of our classes freshman year. The sections ranged from 1A to 1G and were based on what each student received on the entrance exam, which was supposed to correlate to his academic ability or promise. This was not explained to us, but was made evident by lunchtime. The kids who sat together in cafeteria from 1G looked like the smartest kids in the class: the über-nerds. While they weren’t eating with microscopes and protractors splayed across their lunch tables, it wouldn’t have surprised me if they were talking about microscopes and protractors. The kids from 1A were at another section of tables across the room. While you wouldn’t call them dumb, they were definitely boisterous—yelling and carrying on, placing french fries on their crotches as if the fries were their dicks. One guy blew the room open when instead of a french fry, he put a much larger chicken finger on his crotch. Solid move.*
My section was 1F. This made sense; I’d gotten the ninety-eight on the entrance exam, and was placed with a few other 98ers and scholarship kids. I was able to decipher this from our morning sessions, but that was about all I could pick up. The near-mystical quality of the Prep that I had felt throughout the Pre-Eighth program and prior to attending was absent on that September day, replaced instead with first-day jitters and the all-business attitude of the faculty and staff now that school was in session. In the morning, we were herded from class to class for mini-periods—a full day’s walk-through of our roster in half the normal time. We were given syllabi (and were informed that syllabi was the correct plural form of syllabus), and each teacher explained his or her class and what would be expected from us. Then lunch with the geeks and the french fry dicks and everyone in between. After lunch, the afternoon session.
The afternoon session brought together all two hundred–plus freshmen for a series of presentations from the administration. After we were seated in the auditorium, the first person to speak to us was Father Spencer, the president of the school. A tall, kindly man, he had traded in the brown robes of his doppelganger Obi-Wan Kenobi for a clerical collar and the Society of Jesus. Instead of preaching to us about the Force, Father Spencer spoke about the importance of being a “man for others,” a Jesuit ideal. I think this had something to do with Saint Ignatius and social justice and whatnot, but I was feeling pretty sleepy after a heavy lunch of a surprisingly delicious cheesesteak from the cafeteria, so I was zoning in and out.
I perked up, however, when Father Spencer spoke about how the road ahead was going to be difficult, academically speaking. He said that we should expect to have no less than three hours of homework every night. This would seriously cut into the time I had set aside each evening for video games and playing with myself. Then Father Spencer paused for a moment and told us, “I want you to take a moment and look at the student on your left. Now, look at the student to your right. The odds are that one of you will not be here by the end of the year.”
It was a scare tactic. And it worked. You could hear a dozen separate whimpers from the audience, and if you listened closely enough, you could make out the faint sound of someone peeing himself somewhere in the back right of the auditorium. That I couldn’t hack it at the Prep was something I’d never considered. To not just fail a test, or even a class, but out of the high school? No way. This type of defeat was not an option; I could not slink back to Neumann, a failure and flame-out, to the unending ball-busting of my friends. No way.
If it took six hours of homework a night, I would make it work.
After that zinger, Father Spencer gave way to Mr. Kearney, the dean of students and disciplinarian. If Miss Piggy were a man—a really, really pissed-off man—and one bad motherfucker, she’d be Mr. Kearney. Country strong, with heavily pomaded hair and thick glasses that gave his eyeballs a bulging appearance, Mr. Kearney told us how things were going to go. With his face alternating between the various shades of red and pink you’d find in a Hallmark store in early February, he said we were to adhere to the dress code (blazer, shirt, tie, slacks), we were to be on time, we were to be respectful, and we were to be Christ-like. As he said each of these things, he pounded his cantaloupe-size fist on the lectern, showing off a class ring with a purple stone larger than either of my balls. With his multiple Christ references, he struck me as some sort of goddamn Catholic vengeance warrior; I could see him in a fit of rage suddenly breaking a chair over a student and screaming “May Christ have mercy on your soul!” in Latin.
The penalty for misconduct was called “jug.” This was the Prep’s version of detention. Mr. Kearney did not get into the origin of the word, but later we learned it was one of two things: the acronym for “justice under God” or a derivation of the Latin word jugum, which meant “yoke” or “burden.” So if you acted out, instead of getting held after class, you were either going to be served justice under God or possibly strangled, throttled, and yoked as would a beast of burden. Either way, so much scarier than detention.
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