Ch 4 part 1 – Letters from Saints and Dark Green Libraries

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Chapter Four – Letters from Saints and Dark Green Libraries part 1

78

My freshman year I transferred to St. Aloysius, an all-boys Catholic high school.  My father imprinted the necessity of a Catholic private education on my palms.  Public schooling was the store brand.  Uncle Ryan got to graduate from a private school.  Timothy had to finish his secondary schooling from a publically-funded institution.  It was as if my father’s public school diploma downgraded his self-worth in the New Orleans discussion landscape within his own transcripts.

In New Orleans whenever anyone asks where you went to school, that space between elementary and college or the truncation of one’s matriculation in high school is implied.  Referring to college would be like talking about a trip to Paris or Rio or Tokyo.  College was some optional venture that was neither assumed nor mandatory to survive in such sludge-work incubators of thought to operate in a functioning New Orleans.  It is also indicative of the low rotation rate of new organisms into the stream.  Surely fish leave the pond for the oceans of Texas and beyond.  To enter implies a marriage or link to some rooted denizen.  Few would primarily utilize logic to end up in New Orleans, especially not financial logic. 

New Orleans was a place one relocated to because the city made your soul breathe.  Wherever you were was probably a string of concrete and publically-traded companies.  Any city in America could offer you a value-meal boxed-life: a Chili’s, a Bed Bath and Beyond, or an interchangeable serving of drive-through America.   New Orleans had chain-gang profiteers in surrounding suburban patches, but there was a soul under New Orleans’ dirty.  New Orleans has the beautiful-ugly.

There was an indelible, remarkable, lion of a soul, black and blue, mucked and true, “ya mama and nem.”  Life looked you straight in the eye.  New Orleans did not put make-up on first or fix its hair.  New Orleans life danced and smiled up all night.  Then she wanted to go fuck in the ally.  New Orleans was a one-a.m.-let’s-go-again still kicking, knocked down and still living.  New Orleans, yeah there was a reason people moved there and it ‘aint got much to do with money.

79

There was the Catholic league of schools: St. Aloysius, St. Ignatius, Holy Cross, St. Baptiste, and Archbishop Shaw.  I ended up at St. Aloysius garbed in crimson and basting in testosterone.  Tim was in his second year of smoking-it-up as an art school junkie in Florida on my parent’s dole and a puddle of loans. 

I was car pooling into this universe of khaki and red with three older commuter kids in the back of a pimped out Chevy Nova with a thumper subwoofer sound system blaring Public Enemy fighting some power that did not appear to match their skin tone or actual tribulations.  But hey, maybe one of their fathers beat them or one of their moms went all Munchhausen when they were younger.  Who am I to judge?

The ride was my introduction to marijuana.  I did not smoke.  I did end up passively inhaling in the non-Clinton sense.  For the few who would care to fake an interest, they may as well have presumed as much.  The stench pollinated my collars and cuffs in the aroma of assumptions. 

My courses were mish-mashed due to an accelerated schedule of sophomore courses which were staggered by level.  Most of my classes consisted of guys who had been in the school in some combination of one, two or in a few cases three years prior to my entrance into St. Aloysius. 

80

There seemed to be a divide between the ability to educate me socially and educate me in the subjects of science, mathematics and the Spanish language.  I was a runt, unqualified to meet the tangible thresholds to practice football or any organized sport requiring inter-squad communication.  My aspirations for extracurricular activities were limited to fear and loathing in recess.  I was a traveling salesmen, a scab player in a strike season.  I had two classes with people in my grade, gym and religion.   

A month in I wanted out.  I was miserable in the wash of testosterone and armpit-mustered pheromones.  I do not recall the name of a single educator nor any measure of education imparted to me other than the off-putting nature of what was like a demagnetized compass foreign to my universal alignment in the single-ed. paradigm.  There were brothers and Christ.  There was a path of crapulent seniors celebrating homecoming football games like mercenaries for Satan reveling war victories.  After my first nine weeks I got an early Christmas present.  I got to return to Troy for the remainder of my freshman year. 

81

Sidney was off in Florida.  I remember having a mini-crush on my history teacher in her thirties.  I had a conversation with her about Led Zeppelin and the Beatles on an overnight Beta Club fieldtrip to Lafayette.  I was playing my walkman cassette player on the bus.  She asked me what I was listening to.  I replied and elaborated into a repartee beyond my years.  There was no Mary Kay Letourneau going on, but as far as relating to anyone in my class thirty-something’s were apparently easier thoroughfares of navigation.

Teenage love is a bastardized aborted incestuous version of itself.  The emotions breed upon themselves with hurricane sheer velocities in rotations ripping the lockers out of school hallways with stories of forever and betrayal.  Such love spawns calamities of death-sentence social suicides.  Kids are gunned down in the gym with fates worse than Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold reprisals based on baring the burden that every future love will be compared to the capricious scars of their first.

There were restless hearts gripped like hand grenades right out of pubescent chests.  The lumps were thrown up for a tip-off like a basketball in lunchtime yards.  The savannah devoured fresh carrion.  The lionesses, the antelope, the hyenas, the vultures, the jackals, the water buffalo; they all had a place in the passion-play game reserve.  All animals are of a common ilk.

High school was hell with all of Dante’s subdivisions and rungs.  The divergent consequences for perjury and truth apportioned splayed bodies up on the crucifix.  Carcasses were judged based on their level of attractiveness and inferred popularities.  Assuming a place above one’s social standing was an easy permanent reputational disfigurement.  This could get you crowned Quasimodo king of the fools. 

Wallow-ponds of excrement-consuming benefactor she-cliques existed just to allow the lonely girls to stay in the valued proximity of Queen-Bee allowances.  The diameter of eyes, glisten of hair, smoothness of skin and social acumen parlayed a burgeoning chest to victories in the plastic-cup politics of Friday nights.  These were the tools of the Queen Bee.

Girls and boys played Vegas-games day and night in pre-cell phone tag inside parental jurisdiction.  Preteens previously confined to air conditioned shopping malls evolved into Louisiana can-drink-at-eighteen statutory “you are cute and look old enough there darling” fourteen-year-old NOLA females.  The grasslands were burning.  The white powder was lined up in a dollar roll at Friar Tucks bar.  Mead fare prompted social scares of the occasional suicide with an unplanned overdose combating excess hormones. 

The definition of what it meant to be attractive and attracted to in high school surged in rock-a-bye brains. Dopamine and serotonin drained and stained with depressive and aggressive primer coats.  Everyone searched for the answer in a look that matched just past what they felt entitled to obtain.  The self-perception effect was in full swing.  The unknown potential outcomes played on the poker faces of sophomore real estate. 

High school was lying.  When a boy told a girl he liked her, he had lost.  He must deceive and deny in obtaining her reprise.  Whenever a female or male was certain the positive event had occurred, she or he adapted.  “Maybe if they want me back I do not want them?”  There interest was like a measurement of self-perception of what could have been obtained on a higher level.  Only by having to work harder for it was assurance provided that the correct jurisdictional conclusion was achieved. 

We are all more attracted to a potential suitor when we do not know the probable outcome, when it is not clear if the reciprocal is true.  We do not change with age; maybe with bankruptcy, unshed baby weight held over after a divorce or a threshold of credit card debt, but not age.

This irrational gene protection mechanism leads us to the waterhole of lonely in droves.  We slurp up nothing like a buffet of oats and beer.  We get drunk on the idea of what we are not.  We fixate on a boy or girl that does not actually exist.  We gaze at our transgendered slightly better looking Narcissus in deference to a sublime ideal.

82

I could back away from the melee and claim to be wise enough not to fall for these old tricks.  In the end none of it mattered, because I was absent.  Around the age of fifteen I unplugged from the next decade of everything I should have done.  I became a lost man trapped in a vice-versa body swallowed whole without the knowledge I was supposed to obtain. 

I was in class everyday, present like a time clock.  I was neither absent nor tardy in great abundance.  The record skipped when I hit puberty.  At fifteen this high school apocalypse sucked me into an inter-dimensional wormhole for the next ten years.  I was decimated.

My betraying body quit growing taller past five-foot-eight in tenth grade.  My face became a blackhead drilling platform of acne.  My back was a minefield of puss.  The needle must have become dislodged from normal pituitary gland hypothalamus secretions too fatigued to take part in the reindeer games of teenage wasteland.  Mint made me gag so all I could find was baking soda for toothpaste.  My oral window into my internal was like a police blockade on an interstate asking travelers to exit miles before interaction.  I had no expertise in coquetry.  I was a reticent mess.

I finished the year at Troy in a wrote memorization fashion with a few friends pinned under a windshield wiper like a dry cleaning flyer that gusted off the minute our movements started towards different schools. 

83

I got a letter in the mail from Sidney, a pigeon-crumb toss sort of postcard from St. Petersburg Florida.  Apparently Sidney was writing a sub-set of former friends from Louisiana to touch base in these pre-email days.  I was a bit startled and elated in the communication portal.  I was probably a speed bump jut in her path.  She had indelibly marked my amorous entanglements of pubescent budding into savoring my flawed oasis of a first kiss. 

Sidney - April 12, 1990- Hey remember me?  I’m sure I’m the last person you want to hear from, but I wondered how you were. I know things did not end well between us.  That was my fault, but I still think of you every now and then.  I would like for us to keep in touch.  W/B/S

I wrote back to her in a plumped-package of pages to recount where my life was at the moment.   I remember Sidney’s awe in my introspective teenage graces that could script the illusion of a boy who had it more together than he did when the precipices of voices, breath, and skin were bypassed by ink and loose leaf. 

Sidney - April 28, 1990- I was scared to write, I thought you would hate me.  I was so insecure when I moved here.  I don’t fit in with the hippy-metal heads, rap crowd, preppies or snobs.  Sometimes people stay away from people because they don’t understand them.  You confront life head on.  This guy I was dating for six months is seventeen.  He is now dating a twelve year old.

Sidney responded with her life and times of claiming to want to love and be back together with me again if she could.  She wrote how sorry she was for treating me with such cold disengagements.  I recognized the impracticality and improbability in the rickety quickly-processed constructions of Sidney’s requests.  I simply stated that I would much rather a friend, an outlet to script the events of my days in a reciprocated correspondence.  I knew this would bring me joy.  I also figured the boyfriend she invariably just broke up with would be replaced in due course if Sidney gave her self sufficient time for social recuperation.  This would stem the need for pipedream romances.

Sidney - May 9, 1990 -My mom finally put me on the pill (BC).  I think you are right about why my old boyfriend is with a twelve year old.  He can control her and has no commitment.  He chose a fucking seventh grader over me.  I am afraid of growing old and being completely alone.  My dad left when I was two.  Then my sister left to live with her dad when I was nine.  Then I moved to Florida and left my friends.  I HATE saying goodbye!

The bargain was struck.  I had my first and only pen-pal.  Sidney and I wrote for about five years. 

Sidney -May 26, 1990 -You are right about Brandon.  I need to let go. He is no longer the same person.  It is good that he is moving.  I will not have to hear about him and his twelve year old.  

I went out Friday and met this guy who is twenty-one and moving to New Mexico.  That is not going anywhere, but I had fun.  My friend Rachael was dating this guy Amine for four months.  Amine said he had to marry someone to get a visa to stay in America.  They broke up and still slept together.  Rachael had a positive pregnancy test.  When Rachael told him, Amine told her, “I can’t bring you home to my family, it would be a disgrace.”  So Rachael cursed him out and left.  She went to the doctor and it turned out Rachael wasn’t pregnant. 

I got drunk once and slept with a guy and regret it more than anything.  My mom found out and told me I was a low life whore who deserved to feel like shit because I was shit.  

My mom wants me to be the perfect daughter.  It disgusts her that I am pro choice.  I know the only constant thing in my life is change.  I hate CHANGE!  What you said about the truly immature man is the one that says he is all grown, is so true.

84

I only saw Sidney again once on a random summer Tuesday.  Sidney surprised me.  I talked with Sidney on a curb of a parking lot.  Sidney had ear piercings, shoulder tattoos and the same curious smile. The conversation was not memorable in content, only that Sidney made the effort to seek me out.  It was rare and precious.  

Through the years we traded tales and happenings, summer jobs, the guys she dated, the girls I didn’t.  I had a friend I could not see, but would find in my mailbox once every month-and-a-half or so in red or purple girl-ink, sometimes with stickers and the occasional photograph.  Our letters slalomed through my high school and college years like little inserts pretending someone out there cared enough of me to ask how I was doing.  Even if we never really talked and I never saw her, I could still think of Sidney fondly.

                Sidney

June 16, 1990 - I am finally over Brandon.  I think I was holding in the pain, because I needed someone in my heart.  Sometimes it is hard to look people in the eye, because they will know how I feel.  Do you pray, not on your knees, but talk to God?  I never believed in condemnation to hell.  I believe in understanding.  Some people take religion way too far.  What do you think?  I am hoping my dad will teach me how to drive this summer so I can get a permit. 

July 16, 1990 - My social life has come to a complete halt. Ouch!  Terry and I went on five dates.  He never bothered to call me back.  I called, but Terry has caller ID.  I visited my dad in Maine this summer.  We went to this old lighthouse on the Atlantic.  I finally got to talk with my dad and get some peace.

July 29, 1990 - I am trying to get along with my mom the best I can.  It is like we are rivals now.  I am accepting things.  My mom is always trying to pick my brain and make me exactly the way she is.

August 17, 1990 - Brandon left town for good.  My friend Shawn and I went to shoot pool at the beach.  Shawn started kissing me, but he has a girlfriend!  We dated before and I broke things off.  I am in a whirlwind.

September 6, 1990 -I love Shawn as a friend.  Shawn thinks he means it when he says he loves his girlfriend Natalie, in what he thinks love is not what love really is.  I have only been in love once. 

Brandon was my best friend.  I was comfortable and safe.  He would walk in a room and no matter how miserable I was, I would smile and feel like anything was possible.  Brandon became my life. 

When it ended I was crushed.  I would have done anything to make Brandon happy.  No matter how much Brandon hurt me I still loved him and hoped.  One of my problems is I always believe I deserve the worst.  When something good happens it shocks the hell out of me. 

I want a guy who is a gentleman, intrigued with my mind and my body, to open doors, something to share other than sex.   Maybe one day I will meet someone like that.

85

I went to St. Baptiste far removed from Fortier, the public school where most of my Troy friends ended up.  I was on my own again.  I headed towards a co-educational establishment integrated by gender in a private school financial numbers crunch.  I started my pursuit of wisdom foolishly begging for differences in managed aroma of hairless armpits in the hallways.  I remember the sardonic nature of depression setting in before I even realized the leech had such a grip on me.  The despondency was viral.

Sophomore year in high school is the crucible of human existence.  The chemicals being refined within the machinery in each skull barter with the feasibility and rationale to continue the physical plant’s continued existence on a daily basis.  Self-definition is at a premium.  It is the oasis of water in a desert that only seems to be spurting out hydrocarbon Kuwaiti-rain pimples.  Black-locked wellheads cap sanitarium emotions.  We yearn for morphing nations of children to grant us citizenship. 

Everybody wants to plant a land-claiming flag in a social sect or ritualistic activity.  We want to segregate our own proprietary rights that can not be stolen through some exploitable legal-social loophole. 

86

I was in everyway no and completely different. I cracked a few bats trying to find a reliable place to eat lunch.  Every day I got up to the plate, searching like a Chamois hunter.  The next day the positions would change around the cafeteria into starting lineups that did not include my name.  I was in every facet ancillary to the dynamics of the cogs for the successful operational game-plan of normal. 

Red-bean Mondays to fish Fridays made me want to puke my guts out.  I wanted to stand up on one of the tables and expiate for my apparent sins by retching my cookies over the center table in an anomaly of social ignominy so robust that the entire school could talk about.  I could be a popped-pimple.  I could have a name tag definition of “that kid.”  Why did he do that?  Somebody would ask.  At least somebody would be interested in at minimum criticizing me, faking an interest to make fun of my inability to keep my esophagus from becoming a two-way elevator. 

After seven innings of failed iterations, I started spending my lunch hours in the library.  I re-pocketed my lunch money for indulgencies like cassettes and video game rentals.  I met this kid Sal by the magazines. 

We read Rolling Stone.  My interest in punk rock began to swirl into my heavy metal pillars.  Operation Ivy was setting the flagstones to where my musical interests would wander out to.  They broke up the day their album released.  Tim Armstrong and Jesse Michaels snagged me back into the world of the Clash and the Ramones.  This quicker, faster, melodic genre of political and socially conscious anti-authority battle cries called me.  In the backdrop I had Metallica’s, “And Justice for All” arbitrating the harsher chords of my junior high experience. 

Sometimes I felt like I had pulled the shortest straw sequestering myself in the library rafters, reading and learning in books.  The subject of life was being taught out there sitting on the benches and the concrete blocks by the fence line.  Sal and I were Indians teepee’d up in the library.  All the cowboys shot their smoking guns off in the downstairs corral.  Kids planned weekend and after-school respites from the time blocks you got letter grades in.  I had an alpha average in everything, but schoolyard. 

87

Sal was in a few of my classes.  Sal was taller than me with as-long-as-the-school-would-allow black hair.  Sal had a quiet nature that assumed he would rather be left alone than be bothered.  I could respect that.  Isolation was a defense mechanism, a crutch, and broccoli. 

Sal and I talked, but most of our verbalization was filtered by the historical library practice of hushed conversational tones and pertained to music, sports, or girls.  Occasionally we formulated complaints about faculty or grim assholes we deemed excessively fraudulent by our sophomoric judgment.  We could give a shit.  No one gave a shit what we thought.  If anything we were the idiots for not realizing how weak we were for keeping to our selves.  We were so fantastically different, unwittingly the same.

Sal bragged about going to confession.  He made up outlandish sins to get reactions from the priests.  Sal confessed to lying to clear things up in an ambiguous forgiveness to preserve his absolution.  Sal made up escapades about Saturday nights.  He was tempted by God and fate and succumbed to evils that never existed.  He wanted to see how tight a seal high school reconciliation confession had between parental and administrative fallout.  Sal found humor in the assigned penances.  He would just talk to God instead. 

88

I found this one book, Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl.  Frankl was a Holocaust survivor.  He was a psychologist.  He was stripped of everything; every material possession, knowledge of family, every non-mandatory sinew of muscles to prompt the movement of a skeleton.  Every contact of love in this tangible world was gone.  His most prized physical possession was his psychological theory notes.  They were taken away when Victor entered the concentration camp.  Frankl chronicles his and some of his fellow Jews daily strive to find meaning in the lowest denominator of humanity.  Emaciated men vanished.  Shells too weak to labor were placed in ovens, gassed or shot if the expense of a bullet warranted expending in the Nazi budget.

Frankl developed his psychological school of Logothearapy, concentrating on man’s necessity for meaning.  In finding meaning, the ability to process surfaces.  Man is constantly searching for that why, that reason.  What is the meaning of this?  Why does God make me suffer?  Why did God bring this storm?  What did I do to deserve this pain, this war, this rape, this death unwished for, and ultimately this suffering? 

Frankl found that in the camps, a man could be stripped of every sense of his own self-humanity.  He could be tortured, forced to labor and left a skeleton with a body praying its soul be allowed to rest in death.  He could live on the constant edge of the needle of being eyeballed by the guards for death’s stinger.  Even in this nadir of human kind, Frankl could decide how he would suffer.  He could choose to suffer well.  There was ownership in it, a dignity in a void of dignity.  There was always a choice. 

Frankl discussed how different people rationalized survival and the importance in the mental approach.  Mental approach affected physical health and a person’s ability to endure suffering in the most abominable of human situations.  Even while spitting out the ashes of their family memories they were forced to cremate, there was room to breathe freely. 

Victor talked about being a master of your own suffering.  When the world had ravaged them of every dignity and hope, with translucent skin swaddling an alien carcass, abused with death on the fringe of every whisper or movement; a man could relish the opportunity to suffer well.  A man could be proud that he could be so noble and actually find meaning in suffering.  It was a beautiful, raw, terrifying and empowering thought. 

89

Sidney - October 27, 1990- It upsets me to see you hurting so badly.  I think people just don’t understand you.  I saw Brandon again.  I went home and cried the whole weekend.  I have only dated one person since we broke up.  Life will get easier.

I was, as most are in high school, a ghost in the shell of a hallway.  I had an awkward haircut and an imperfect posture.  I felt the compulsion to be straighter or slouch depending on the suspected audience.  I had nail fungus ravaging my left index finger.  The finger valley became a slice of yellow that I referred to as my conversation finger.  At least it was a potential avenue for discourse.  (Teeth, acne and fungus: there are no freaks among us.)

I remember actually trying to answer my Biology teacher when he asked me “How is it going?” in the hallway.  The arbitrary understanding of bullshit perfunctory nuances reminded me why I rarely ask anyone this question.  Most people simply retort with a “Hey,” or a mirrored interrogatory.  As if the myriad forms of the question of “What’s up?” are actually questions at all.  Never has humanity created such a feckless tool to our lexicon to garden such deceitful idealistic wax-candy fruits.  Retorting honest misery would cause grotesque confabulating traffic accidents. 

90

I had no idea what the fuck was going on other than I had an evolving interest in a girl on the swim team named Laura.  Laura had long curly past-the-shoulder-length golden blonde hair, green eyes and tom-boy athleticism.  She was rough around the curves.  Laura was gregarious.  Everybody knew exactly who Laura was in the high school idiom.  She had a defined marketed-image to assign scientific kingdom, phylum, class, subclass and order.  Laura was above average attractiveness, sporty, no longer a virgin, done drugs and acted out when convenient.  Height statistics were generally non applicable filing line-items for most females.  Females traded body weight for height as the respective primary measurement for avoiding or incurring social ignominy compared to males.

Laura maintained the ability to be a friend to all, and close with none.  One day I explained one of my mind-maps in front of religion class.  Mind-maps were drawn pictures mixed with words and symbols to describe the meaning of a Bible story in what St. Baptiste termed an “alternative assessment” paradigm.  Laura talked to me about how she liked the sanitarium I drew for some crazy Jews ignoring God.  I was a quiet guy.  I showed a propensity to assert my ideas in a quagmire of insecure Biblical analysts. 

Laura and I talked a few times, once even after she finished lunch.  That was more awkward than poignant.  Laura was loitering like a tourist in a hotel lobby.  I was infected with the sophomore mange.  I really just needed someone to talk to more than anything.  I hungered for an outlet, preferably female, soft and compassionate.  I’d take anyone to validate that it was ok to be me.  There were a few phone calls.  My greatest relief of pressure to break the vacuum of my system was writing. 

I began a seven game losing streak of writing notes.  I handed the folded letters off to Laura like batons in a non-revolving relay.  I slipped them in the air-hole of her locker if Laura was unable to be located.  I must have written what felt like at least sixteen to twenty.  I documented my fears and woes and misunderstandings like Morse code to a Navy admiral capable of guiding my ship to port. 

In reality I delivered about five.  I knew Laura had some sort of cartography skills to navigate these oceans of peers and queens, kings and beers.  I kept regurgitating the soup of my mind in hope that Laura would respond.  Parents can not answer these questions.

Laura wrote me back once in a single page front and back note.  Near the end in bold all cap print, Laura wrote, “TALK TO PEOPLE!!”  She reinforced my capabilities.  If I could talk in front of the whole class with reckless abandon, I should make the effort and talk to people.  I needed to give them a chance. 

The words were simple and true, yet fundamentally ignored.  I am by nature a misanthropic loner, a camel of a man capable of surviving on little external stimulus, prepared for the worst.  There are moments when I needed the oasis, when I craved the water of a simple recognition that I was not as bizarre or odd as my mirage mirror reflected.  I could close my first set of eye lids and blacken the curtains.  I was use to it.  I wanted a few friends, but I was comfortable and liked being alone.

Plain language illuminates far better than exegetical text.  The meaning of the note took longer to sink in than to read.  I learned everybody else has got their own version of a teeth accident and a denture.  They have some source of personal insecurity that seems trivial to another teenager or an outsider, but preoccupies their sense of self-worth.  We struggle to over come that. 

Some get it from parents, athletic limitations, acne, rape, a gimp limb, accidental fire scars, pregnancy, religion, epilepsy, money, sexual identity, melanin, substance abuse, sibling attention deficits, dyslexic approaches: all of them are just a magnified difference that appears gigantic internally, that is dwarfed externally by everybody else fixating on their own.  How we choose to deal with what ever that thing may be, is often what defines us.

It is like Springsteen’s secret buried under the darkness on the edge of town.  So much is invested in feeding the secret growing it like a pet monster, befriended and self-defining.  Cutting the fucking leash is the only way out or that dog will clench.  We are all the same.  We just carry around different-faced monsters.  I understood that early on, living it was another matter all together.

91

Between the summer of my sophomore and junior years, Sal and I attended a random student council meeting in the school theater.  Sal invited me to tag along since Sal was a rep.  My summer whirlwind of fun somehow found time for such quests, between working as a lifeguard and mowing lawns. 

I knew nothing of student council or even pondered its purpose or intersection with me, but when proposed a group question I summoned the democratic nobility to participate in the proletariat.  Near the end, I volunteered to attend a statewide summer workshop on leadership called LASC.  I guess the homecoming court was busy and the only mandatory threshold for public service was a pulse.

Three weeks into June, I bussed off to a small college town in nowhere Northwestern Louisiana.  Natchitoches was famous for meat pies and Steel Magnolias.  The morning of departure we gathered in a Schwegmann’s grocery store parking lot, before the days that Wal-Mart conquered like Rome.  Schools from St. Ignatius’ to St. Mary’s, to Fortier to McMain congregated in two big-wheeled yellow birds. 

I immediately felt like Halloween.  I could be severed from a rote ideologue engrained identity.  I could be a Picasso painting.  None of the other St. Baptiste students knew me. 

I was immersed in a bizarre time warp of freedom.  Speaking up was encouraged based on the poignancy of commentary rather than the wealth of soapbox social acumen and the geometry of cheek bones to amplify one’s megaphone.  With this robust confidence of Saturday morning’s departure, I began to speak with the bus pews a row over and to the rear with a group of girls from St. Marina Academy.

There were around six in the flock, led by a queen-bee deemed social butterfly Sharon.  Sharon was Creole, with coco butter skin, taller than her peers with what I would later in life recognize as an impeccable weave.  This hair piece demonstrated a fiscal commitment on her parent’s part to assimilate on a financial level the equivalent of a white girl’s sweet sixteen Acura.  Sharon exuded dominion as captain of her cheerleading squadron.  In the end Sharon suffered like most daddy-issue-girls from a constant pursuit of a mate emulating her opposite gendered parent’s conveyed attributes.

The more lily Marie was a cheer-squad underling entering her sophomore season.  Marie was prodigiously inquisitive, a Harriet Smith sort of girl to Sharon’s Emma.  Marie was into acting in school and community productions and had a mermaid voice.  Marie had long blonde hair with saucer-blue eyes, a pin-up nose with a prying smile.  It was the kind of smile that was pretty and petite with a hook on the tail end.  If you got close enough you just might be able to pry it open like an untaught tulip bulb for endless conversations. 

I was enamored with such access to verbalized discourse.  The adjacent nature of the transport relegated my position above that of a normal serf to a vassal or dare be monarch in my new-found regalia.  I was not feudally bound to question the system.  I had by some manner of chance made quick friends with a group of females well beyond my normal aptitude in such academics of schoolyard.  Upon our arrival we partitioned into clans of endangered environmental leadership animals.  I took up with the brown pelicans.  Marie became a white rhino. 

92

Our groups convened.  We received hints at the week’s events led by two opposite-gendered high school or college-age staffers with an employed-teacher moderator to maintain intermittent participation.  Three-ring circus binders scripted out activities we could consider bringing back to our schools. 

The ringmaster of ceremonies was a man named Mr. Pete.  He wore black-rimmed glass-bottle spectacles with an audacious toupee.  Mr. Pete was a veteran of all things crepe paper, prom, and young-people’s voice.  He had a penchant for crooning Don Ho tiny bubbles and retelling inspiring tales on self-esteem and group dynamics in a teenage paradigm that would put Jack Welch to shame.  As with many of the male high school student council moderators, Mr. Pete was a homosexual of epic proportions.

The week was a marvelous never-land for my Peter-Pan-syndrome infected extremities.  I got to cycle in teenage interaction with a social playground that my kid-fear solitary path rarely intersected.  I swam with the mermaids, scalped with the Indians, flew over the cliffs and un-clocked the crocodiles.  By the end, the dust of my confidence was thick enough to ransack pirate frigates.  I spoke on stage, cried by a candle, and played toothpick in the mouth pass the life-saver candy Olympic events with a Neil Diamond flag ceremony America blaring.  But none of that compared to lunchtime. 

The highlight of each day was the collegiate cafeteria, bordered in windows with the glistening St. Marina Academy table.  I got to sit with the cloud of girls like a soft-cotton cushion of welcome beckoning my advice.  Sharon would look at me with a fixated stare propagating an aura of allowance.  Her interest permeated over the females.  Somehow across the span of bus to lunch table, I had gained the confidence as a sage counselor of the teenage-jungle: boyfriends, the state of the world, musical interests, and perhaps the logic of adults.  I was imparting the sophomoric wisdom of a man transcended from fifteen to twenty-five in impetuous ordainment. 

I was amazed at how ready they each were to listen.  I was outnumbered six to one female-to-male in this celestial anomaly of confluences that would only be repeated every seven hundred years when the path’s of orbits and shadows converged.  I soaked it in trying not to understand the why’s or how’s but in the entire expanse of my teenage years the feat would never be duplicated or surpassed in how beautiful and purpose-filled I felt. 

At the end of the week there was a dance, to karaoke and robotic disk jockey tunes that I recognized on about a twenty-percent clip.  The mass-pop selections were far more applicable than punk-rock anthems.  I danced with a few of the girls from our lunch time sessions.  Most of the dancing was done in group dynamics of this no one really has a date or their real-face on Mardi Gras masquerade ball. 

I did get to dance with Marie.  The gambol was like a transient hitch-hiker-seed buried into the cuff of my thoughts.  The evanescent nature of the moment required more time to gestate.  I dismissed potential progression based on two thoughts.  One, the temporal sphere of our surroundings and two, I had spent a considerable percentage of the week giving Marie sapient advice about her boyfriend.  The advice in Marie’s estimation seemed to be dead-on insightful despite me never having been introduced to the guy.

The end of the week of the summer excursion came to a closing ceremony.  Similar marigold buses appeared to extract us back to our native countries.  Kids from Lafayette to Alexandria, Shreveport, to Ruston to Baton Rouge to New Orleans dispersed with a rotund sense of self-actualizing propensity to do-good in their fiefdoms once order and roles could be restored. 

I spoke to the girls on the way back.  Sharon asked what it felt like when fluid flows through a penis.  I also had a salient conversation about Nine Inch Nails with one of the soon-to-be seniors from St. Baptiste, Brad.

93

While I was away from home, our beagle Betsy was murdered in an apparent hostage situation.  The gate was busted open.  My dad Timothy found Betsy limp in furry-mashed blood a block away.  Betsy must have been taken by gun-point or steak-plate in the darkest night only to escape the Machiavellian-master-mind with a stiff chomp to the groin.  Betsy‘s concerted effort to return home and lock the fence kennel behind her had to be foiled by a reprisal truck fender.  For surely no member of the Baker family had voluntarily abandoned ship in seven generations. 

I was distraught in the sense that Betsy was a victim of criminal invasion.  Despite the barking thoughts that Betsy was responsible, I still absolve the dog of all wrong doing.  Like any misguided parent I would rather believe in the manner of fantastic white-fang misadventures that Betsy perished trying to return home rather than the random illogical inhumanity of canine death trying to flee it. 

Maybe one day we can rewrite Betsy’s story in a less-Disney version and sell it to America’s youth without the tax-paying gritty details about how Hunchback Quasimodo was ostracized.  Ariel felt swords slicing her legs with each step.  The Lion King is Hamlet in disguise.  Mulan was originally requested as a concubine by Emperor Yang.  The Fox and the Hound is a slavery metaphor.  For now, Betsy can just be a sad lost puppy on her journey home through impossible odds.  This time she makes it with a celebratory greeting of bits, kibble and a collar worthy of Tramp. 

Disney versions always made me laugh.  Disney plays on the classic semi-orphan Twist-formula of Christ.  I do not blame Walt.  If a tale could proliferate from a small Middle Eastern town to paint the Earth in sympathetic congregational hues, why not replicate it? 

Recipe calls for a child with a deceased or missing parent: Cinderella, Ariel, Jasmine, Belle, Simba, Hercules, Aladdin, Tiana, Oliver, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Mowgli, Pocahontas, Nemo, Peter Pan, Aurora, Mulan, and least we forget Bambi.  Could Disney at least given one of these damn kids, deer, lions, or elephants a two parent household? 

By eliminating one parent from the equation we naturally feel sympathetic and endear ourselves to the character and just as Christ had his missing father in heaven rather than on earth we are bound to have a greater level of concern for Disney’s creation.  You would think the story would get old after a while, but every year we slop it up in hokey-elation to bathe our children.  Now Warner Brothers has Harry Potter to compete.  Lucas has Skywalker.

Disney did not come up with the main storylines anyway.  They are stolen or purchased from Chinese legends, the Brothers Grimm, Galland, Shakespeare, Andersen, Collodi, European fairy tales, Kipling, Salten or good ole Mother Goose.  So for the purposes of this novel, Betsy’s mother died in puppy birth and the best writers are the best thieves.

94

Back at St. Baptiste the administration of my future was more prevalent.  The idea of SAT training courses came into my consciousness.  What I did in school now had ramifications.  Others could try obstructing obligations, but eventually the bill came due.  Logic had precedence with persuasive mounds of cogent fodder to assault my brain in “What should I do?” 

Classes my junior year allowed me to rely on historical expectation rather than surviving on instinct.  Changing schools was a withered novelty.  It was a relief to settle my brain receptors.  I got to placate what-ifs with known faces, even if I did not talk to most of them. 

If there is one thing human beings are universally adverse to it is change.  It must have to do with the bridging of unchartered synapses in the brain.  A drone can plug into station of the same daily job and regurgitate repetitive output.  To start a new paradigm monthly or weekly or even annually for some people is tantamount to water boarding.  It would constitute disparate treatment according to most union contracts.

95

I joined the wrestling team in winter under Coach Vrooman.  He was a history teacher who advised wrestling for the pay bonus based on guidance from books.  I learned body contortions.  I relished the one-on-one nature of the sport at one hundred and fifty-one pounds of equivalent scale. 

I was average, acne in a singlet and confused.  The fireman’s carry, the full nelson, the grapevine were tools in the belt.  I valued the justice of equivalent physical opposition.  Sometimes the 103 pound freshman could outclass the 240 pound senior in team value.  It was so un-masculine.  Most guys had been learning the art of mat war from the Cobra Kai for years.  I was an eleventh grade virgin and not so sure on when to sweep the leg.

One of my classmates Marvin had epilepsy.  Marvin’s hair was typically disheveled in a manner indicating disinclination to shaping gel.  His intelligence quotient was below one hundred and bathed in the mission of Christian education eschewing a scholastic life typically funded by the public. 

There was a rumor Gretchen Mullen jerked Marvin off at a party on a bet.  There was also a conspiracy going around that Marvin faked seizers on examination days to get out of class.  I guess when you are that skewed shish-kabob kid of your high school class the minions make up all manner of rumors to assert that at-least-I-am-not-him, the germ licked upon the sewer floor of ridicule.  The only time I ever talked to Marvin was during his failed try out for the wrestling team. 

Sidney - January 13, 1991 -How is wrestling?  Have you started applying for colleges?  I am at 121 and my goal is 117, I have already lost fourteen pounds.

96

Anita Hill was speaking up.  America contemplated a peacock strut Negroid pubic hair in a Coke and lessons in a partisan judiciary.  I had a civics class with Sal, this kid Muldrow and all seniors.  The teacher was Mr. William Roberts.  Mr. Roberts was a gentleman, a veteran of the educational disciplines perfecting a series of notes for his civics, psychology and sociology sections with impeccable detail inked out on projector sheets.  His room was draped in the first shadow of what I would later recognize as a professional-style college lecture. 

Mr. Robert’s mutual regard for the subject matter and his student’s maturity to absorb it reflected back from his thinker stature.  We attentively listened.  The class was taught with the lights off.  The plug in transparency projector illuminated Mr. Roberts’ penumbra hand.  He printed out the hierarchy and logic of how our country was constructed.  His mannerisms and inflections shrouded his political leanings masquerading as republican or democrat independent, Whig or anarchist.

We had a four-by-four schedule.  I took all three of Mr. Robert’s courses in a single year, finishing with psychology.  One day Muldrow, the third junior in the room, erupted.  Muldrow was a fourth generation named child with an inherited legacy, who we sometimes referred to as Mulley.  Muldrow was a political junkie of high-school proportions in the pre-internet days of media-cycle party-line bulimia. 

Muldrow was a limber-twig apple-faced Limbaugh-stalker with a freckled façade and self-mocking Richard Nixon double-finger victory salute impression.  I once saw him filch a penny off the floor Sal dropped out his pocket without the motion to hand it back assuming it was his good luck.  He was intelligent and socially awkward and fervently adamant when it came to Republican rhetoric. 

Mr. Robert’s would pick his points to contend with Muldrow.  On one occasion Muldrow responded to a red-haired female in the room countering a contention with a more liberal position than Mulley was comfortable.  In Ignatius Riley agitation Muldrow butted out, “Go inject your self with the Aids virus you Scottish she-wench banshee.”  This got Mulley pitched out of class, like a Mormon Glenn Beck off Fox. 

The rash fervor was a stark piercing view into that teenage borderline of what we now refer to as “going postal” or “Columbine.”  Kids with no outlet, who are pushed to the edge and feel so completely misunderstood, are the Holden Caulfield’s of each American classroom.  This like autism is more common than census numbers indicate.  

Continue to Chapter 4 part 2