As it should be clear by now, a lot of my younger years are difficult to track in a straight line. Part of the reason is simply that decades have passed In this case, I can't differentiate the three years I spent at St. Cornelius because very little of it is formative in a way that makes complete sense. There’s not enough details to connect one moment to the next in a way that makes this a clean narrative.
Even as I assembled this entry, I wanted to go backwards. There’s so many “Wait, there’s this!” to the point that I hope I’m forgiven for leaving a lot on the cutting room floor. As it stands, I do feel like there’s not a lot to place this time outside of 9/11, but it may simply be because we were living in a Catholic school bubble where whatever was important was within a group of 30ish students having to deal with a teacher, McCormick, who we all loathed. Maybe it was warranted, but as I’ve aged, I had to determine that Eighth Grade was one of my worst periods not in terms of miseries and failures, but just because I was wanting to get the hell out of religion once and for all.
The most evident sign was found when talking to other students. A lot of us were forming a fascination with pop-punk music and enjoyed its rebellious spirit. It was the era of Blink-182’s self-titled album which caused Dana and Courtney to print out the lyrics sheet and, during recess, read the lyrics in a mock Tom Delonge voice. They loved to make fun of his inflection on “Dashing things and eating their insides.” Like a lot of students, they were cool. Again, I was the type to crack jokes because it would get a laugh. I had yet to understand nuance. Among the stuff that I was more acceptably getting away with, Dana would tell me to say “Yes master” in a Gollum accent. We were all obsessed with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which was considered the most impressively made film of its time. My dad was the type who made fun of me for buying a regular edition of the movie because he was obsessed with the box set. Despite not watching many special features in the decades since, there’s some pride in owning the extended editions over the originals – which may be one of the few examples that the zeitgeist got behind this behavior so actively.
But I loved Gollum. He was one of the coolest things that I had seen in any film. Fantasy wasn’t my genre, but I could get behind doing imitations of him and snarling with that Andy Serkis accent. Otherwise, it was mostly watching the new Adam Sandler movies while eagerly anticipating the still funny Scary Movie entries. Mom would get movies from Redbox around then and we’d work our way through the serious dramas, including music biopics like Ray (2004) and Walk the Line (2004).
Among the movies that left a strange impression on me was Meaning of Life (1983). When going to Blockbuster, my father decided to get it because he believed it to be a Monty Python movie called “Piccadilly Circus.” To this day, I have no idea what he’s even talking about. However, we watched it all the way through. Maybe it’s because we had watched sex comedies like American Pie (1999) together, but he left it on. Among the endless things to scar a child was decapitation, fat people exploding, families having unprotected sex, and white actors popping out of Black men. It was, understandably, an R-Rated movie that was vulgar and uncomfortable. When reading an anniversary piece in The Los Angeles Times around the time, one of the Python members suggested that it was funny because it “was still offensive.” Having seen it a few times to break free of that initial trauma, I’ll at least give them that.
Another major movie of the time was Punch Drunk Love (2002). Released in tandem with Eight Crazy Nights (2002), there was something alluring because it wasn’t like everything I had seen up to that point. It was in limited release in Hollywood. I begged my Aunt to take me, but she refused. I eventually would rent it from Blockbuster in the same fashion I had rented many movies: to watch at my house with Alex. I can’t say that I understood it. Punch Drunk Love may have been my first arthouse movie. This was also around the time that I was lost interest in Disney/Pixar as a brand. It’s true that they released Home on the Range (2004) to very negative reviews. However, I was “too cool” for Finding Nemo (2003) to the point that I rejected their following movie The Incredibles (2004). Even if I’ve allowed myself to like them, I still struggle to love them as much as films outside that window. We also watched The Ring (2002) one day in class and for weeks after, the girls would make the joke, “What’s a conundrum?” based on a line reading by a youthful actor.
With this context, I can begin to look at Eighth Grade as a larger concept. On the home front, I was still living at my “original home.” My parents were a few years off from announcing a separation. It was evident that they had something going on, but there was little that a preteen could do to change the discourse. At the time my father was most persuasive. Maybe it’s because I spent the most time with him and he was being cool by allowing me to listen to KROQ 106.7 while doing work with him. He was still not into rap music (even The Beastie Boys), so there was some allure about the few minutes I could get away with it. He was very much designing himself as the cool dad, and for that time I’d say he was successful. Maybe it’s because he knew other parents so he at least could communicate with them when preteen antics became too dull for him.
It was definitely better than other members of my family. The period started at an unclear time, but it developed in college into something more notorious among my family. My Uncle, generously, was an addict who suffered a variety of problems throughout his life. My dad had certain impressions of him that rubbed off onto me and I never got to know him well. He always came across a bit simple-minded. His reputation was far scarier than anything he actually did. Then again, he was the type to call me up to send a message to my father. I must’ve said something doubtful because he would reply over-defensively claiming that he found God and things were going to work out. By high school, he would have a restraining order from my grandparents. They were kind, caring, and maybe easily manipulated due to their devotion to Catholicism.
But during this time, I remember that he was staying with us at the original house. I know this because somewhere in our driveway was his Volkswagen Van. You may know the kind. It’s the same type as The Mystery Machine in Scooby Doo. Some could argue it was a hippie van. Given that my father was keen on buying cool cars at the time, it is understandable that at some point it became his. However, there was a period where My Uncle was living out of his van. He’d come in for the evening to talk and be nice, and then disappear. On one occasion he was in the backyard using our barbecue pit and accidentally sent the flames, I’ll just say, “a mile high.” I’m still not sure what that was about.
As far as I remember, he never directly hurt me. I was always siding with family as to why My Uncle became a notorious figure. The stories were always damning enough. On one occasion, he babysat me and my sister. We watched my Spider-Man (2002) DVD together. It must’ve been a rough night because even for an uneventful evening, we were looking for excuses to send My Uncle to his van. Maybe we went to bed early. Anything to avoid being around him.
As for the van… it became one of my father’s key forms of transportation for a time. When we’d leave his work, he had a game where he’d open the side door and drive down the road. The idea was for me to catch up and jump in. Given that this wasn’t in a highly populated area, it wasn't nearly as dangerous as it sounded. I think of it like those montages of people train-hopping where they throw a bag in and then project themselves into the car. I was also keen to sneaking into the back of his pick-up truck (with cover) and be driven home while sliding around the back, just out of sight of any passerby’s.
This was also around the time that we came to adopt my favorite cat: Tiger. He was an orange tabby, hypothesized to be the offspring of my dad’s older and deceased cat Maynard due to an uncanny resemblance. Because we had dogs, he was the type to hang out in our driveway and waited until we were friendly enough to allow him to live inside. While there’s no significant stories to share here, he would come to mean a lot over the next 18 years. He was neutered a bit later than he was supposed to, which mean that he was large and fat. He had a very feeble meow to accompany his tank-like appearance.
To return to school, the McCormick year was always doomed to be my least favorite. She designed her class as hard-nosed, possibly attempting to prep us for high school. With that said, you can only get so much essential lessons from a Catholic school when you plan to transfer to public. With some regret now, we joked about how she was probably wearing a wig. When talking to friends on AIM, I would call her “Baldy Han” (a bad play on Obi-Wan). Elsewhere, I kept up with U.K. Alex on MSN Messenger where we talked for hours into the night and got to follow his journey through his just as aimless school years.
Then again, Alex was the adventurous type. He worked with a lot of musicians as he got into his 20s. He’s toured Japan with Zebrahead. He knows how to network with the best of them. However, in the early 2000s he was still the antagonistic young brat that we all were. The difference was that when he came to visit, he was game for my father’s very grabby games of “purple nurple” and pantsing. While I have given him clearance to use it as a joke (the ambitious bugger also does stand-up), there was also another moment where he pantsed me on a camping stop on our way to Sacramento, CA one summer. Because I didn’t wear underwear, it came across as more shocking to everyone. In ways that make me feel even less enthused about my father, he would joke about how it must’ve been “too cold.” Honestly, the amount of humiliation he’s put me through over trivial things definitely has caused an endless speculation around self-guilt.
But Eighth Grade was full of classes that I probably should’ve taken more seriously. Our math class was taught by a police officer who had a Paul Blart appearance (though less rotund) who would occasionally break from lecture to discuss more PG-rated stories about his work. The only one I remember now was about how he had to test the sobriety of a paraplegic one time and wasn’t sure how to do it. We had a kind-hearted music teacher named Betancourt who encouraged me to sing for school-sanctioned assemblies. Among the more recognizable was Bette Midler’s “From a Distance” and the recently released “God Bless the U.S.A.”
In order to build enthusiasm around anti-littering practices, the school also did a “voting” system where students would pick three songs every week. From those three, they would attach the name to trash cans and whichever one was fullest during recess would be played at lunch. We got some Good Charlotte and The All-American Rejects in the mix. It was a fun gimmick and a good enough chance to feel like this Catholic school was with it. After all, I was rushing home to my grandmother’s house to watch Total Request Live. Getting to hear “Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous” while eating was a nice way to ease the tension.
Things from there became more conflicting. I was never what you’d call “the worst student,” but my work was not reflective of where it was even five years prior. On one occasion, I forgot to do English homework and spent lunch writing the most obvious garbage imaginable. Vice would read my paper and you could tell she was frustrated that I hadn’t put any thought into a real answer. My slacking may have not tanked my grades enough to fail, but the line of defeat was closer than it had and would ever be until college. I pushed my luck. Maybe it’s because the work was getting harder. Maybe it was that I really didn’t care.
But hey, I passed middle school on the first try. That’s good right? I am aware that it came with some setbacks. There was the nun who had taught me in sixth grade. At some point I forgot to do a replica project so I had to work on it for eight hours in one day just to submit it for an open house. Research papers would prove to be difficult until college. With that said, I got to learn about the mummification process, which to a kid looking for any way to make school fun was nonetheless enjoyable. Hearing that they pulled guts through the nose was bizarre but very much in my wheelhouse.
At another point, we were learning about more modern history, including World War II. Before I get into the story that changed my life, I will focus on a funny one. Because we were introduced to the symbol days before, some students had drawn swastikas in their notebook. Brent had a handful in clear sigh when the principal showed up one day. While I don’t wish to suggest anything of Brent’s behavior, the fact that he got taken out of class for it is the funniest accident imaginable.
However, the story that really stuck with me was learning about The Holocaust. This was around the time of The Pianist (2002) and I remember seeing Life Is Beautiful (1997) somewhere in my youth. So we learned about the basic outline such as Kristallnacht and concentration camps. It wasn’t as morbid as it could’ve been, but it encouraged you to empathize with the struggles of Jews.
But the story that made the biggest difference was a thought exercise. The teacher would tell us to pack a suitcase. Whatever we put in there would be all that we had from our life. As you were forced to flee your home and go someplace foreign, what would you find useful there? When the teacher suggested its parallels to Jews escaping Nazi-occupied Europe, it somehow opened up the culture in ways that left a permanent endearment. While I don’t think I appreciated our visit to The Museum of Tolerance a few months later, I would come to find connection with Judaism. The symbolism and teachings appealed to me and those “could be worse” stories have formed a certain mentality. Maybe it was because it was “different” from Catholicism, but I became curious to know of a world beyond the one I had been taught for eight years.
I was loathing the more religious elements of my school lessons. I liked to scoff at the idea that I was getting a C in Religion because “How could I fail what I believe?” It made no sense. I was still a respectful and reliable altar server, but there were a few run-ins that made it clear that my mind wasn’t entirely focused on reverence. At one point I got accused of drinking too much wine from the chalice at communion. On several more occasions, I was so bored of whatever we were doing that I slammed my hand onto the pew so that I could do the Vulcan salute. Thanks to that, I still am able to do it ambidextrously.
At other points, I was just being a brat to be a brat. During one class ceremony, we performed a dramatic retelling of Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree.” It had students walking to a microphone to recite a few sentences’ worth of script. The event went fine, but there was something that encouraged me to lean into the microphone and yell “Support the library!” Like a lot of what I did, it was stupid and poorly planned. However, the thing that sucked most of all was that what would’ve otherwise been a forgotten memory turned into a recurring joke among the other students.
I would also get detention for it. By the skin of my teeth, I barely missed getting three detentions, which would’ve been suspension. Given that it was three demerits per detention, there had to be a gradual build to each one. Instead, I kept finding ways to land immediates. There was another one where I was doing arts and crafts with a group. The student said “These scissors suck,” and I said, “Take these scissors, they don’t suck.” Because McCormick heard the exchange, she gave us each detention for the word “Suck.” It was eventually demoted to a demerit, but the ridiculousness of the act was enough to make us resent her for the remaining school year.
This wasn’t the first run of detentions that I had in my three years there. However, it was again the period where I wanted to find small ways to annoy the teachers. In one case, I ended up bothering them by sitting still, facing forward, with a smile on my face for the required 30 minutes. I didn’t do a single thing the entire time, but because two boys behind me were horsing around, there was an assumption that I was in on it. It caused me to be moved to a different desk. I didn’t learn until we were outside afterwards what went down.
Nothing was indicative of how poorly I was treating this school year than English. Every year, we performed something called “Shakespeare on the Curb.” Basically, groups would write their own version of a Shakespeare work. In Sixth Grade, we did The Taming of the Shrew. I played Michael Jackson and did the chicken dance. I never managed to balance my voice in a way that was soft but projecting. When I got it right, the audience usually loved it.
But in Eighth Grade, my grades were not good enough to qualify. Because 99% of the class was still doing it, I had to sit in the back of class reading a book while they got to have fun. I ended up sleeping in the grass for the different performances. I didn’t care what was going on, which I guess spoke poorly of how I saw the other students at the time.
I don’t wish to say that I hated anyone. I think I was just burned on not getting to perform. It started years of resentment towards Shakespeare that was mostly based on believing his work to be outdated. I’d later make the suggestion that it was boring and elitist to only focus on his work when so many great authors that actually spoke to contemporary generations were ignored. I’ve also been less successful at arguing that Shakespeare is more theater than literary, but given my eventual shift into a literary degree, I still stand by that.
This was around the time that parties were getting a little obnoxious as well. I think that I was too busy trying to build an independent personality that I couldn’t give into people’s shared sense of joy. I remember being at a Halloween party and a bunch of seventh graders dressing as grocery store employees on strike. It was a trendy costume, but I was annoyed because it wasn’t funny to me. I feel like I must’ve been saying dumb things because I wasn’t the center of attention in conversations. Being pushed to the fray was uncomfortable, but it’s where I’ve spent so many nights since, forced to be an observer.
Many argued that I was someone who showed up without ceremony. I was simply in the group for a few minutes before somebody noticed. Whether or not I was an abuser of Irish goodbyes is to be determined. However, there were certain people who definitely struggled to enjoy my presence after awhile. I’m sure going to high school made them excited to not see me everyday because to them, I was simply a wildcard without a lot of redemption.
I still don’t know how I was so outgoing in middle school because it’s a mentality that would fade very quickly. I still would have my moments to stand up and do things, but not to the extent that I did then. I liked to joke “I like to offend people” even though I had no idea what that meant. I would crack jokes and give into whatever the girls wanted me to do.
One of the stranger trends that I got roped into and I forget how it started was when I was known as the kid who would eat anything. Maybe it came with being obese, but once others learned that I was willing to give anything a chance, this was a practice abused by many and seen as amusement. It went on for a few weeks before it was finally discovered. People would pile random elements of the lunch order into a single dish and I’d munch away. They’d stare in curiosity, wondering if I could keep it down.
When it finally came out, I remember McCormick calling a private meeting with the boys. I was not allowed to come in, so I stood outside with the girls just waiting those 10 minutes. From what I can recall, it was very much a “don’t do that again” type of response. I wasn’t punished, but that ritual died shortly after.
Another random detail that I forgot to mention in a previous entry is that I had a crush on a girl in the grade above me. Her name was Julia and I think that it became evident that I was enjoying looking at her around school. I don't think we ever have a meaningful conversation. The guys in that grade were cool and welcomed me over now and then. Their favorite thing to do was have me rap Ludacris’ “Gossip Folks” verse from memory which, given that I only knew the censored version, meant it came out very strange. Anyway, once they got word of me liking her, they would encourage me to dance with her at one of their final dances. It was nice. I think I was still too nervous to ever look her in the face. Still, doing it to Michelle Branch’s “Goodbye to You” brought with it an awkward irony.
I can’t say that dances were ever great other than they were distractions from class. It’s where I made the biggest impact because I forced myself to dance harder and wilder than anywhere else. Hearing everyone cheer me on was thrilling. Meanwhile, the slow dances were fine. I think there was something about touching a girl’s hips that overwhelmed me. I wanted to respect their space. At the same time, human touch has its undeniable boosts of euphoria. Our dances were mundane, save for Alex who I got bored and twirled a few times before it became clear that I didn’t know what I was doing.
But there were so many times that I tried to gain the boy’s attention. One of the most notorious moments of my time at the school was when we went to see School of Rock (2003). The group decided they hated it so we left early. Standing outside the Long Beach Town Center, we were trying to make the night pass faster. As we did, I remember Brent’s mom telling me to walk through the fountain. Taking her advice, I walked along the edge, getting my shoes and lower pants wet. The cops came to escort me out. It wasn’t enough for an arrest, but it was clear that I was wanted off the property. My father was walking up right as we were reaching the edge of the facility. He still jokes about it from time to time. Given how much I see that fountain now, it ranges from being cute to annoying depending on the trip.
Other times, I was amusing the younger kids. Somehow I befriended the fifth graders and they would dare me to do odd things. I licked the ground at one point. On another, I got bored and tossed my backpack through the basketball net in the parking lot. A staff member stopped me after awhile and told me that I was not going to graduate until I replaced it. While it was nerve-racking at the time, I don’t think that I ever did anything to the betterment of that net.
The latter half of the semester also had the basketball season. I wasn’t at any point a good athlete. However, I remember one day talking to Albert and discovering that tryouts were that day. We figured that we’d go. The belief was that I was going to be so bad that they’d cut me immediately. After the first day, it was clear how out of shape I was. I was sore from doing more push-ups. Coach Armstrong was a decent man even if he seemed initially tough. I realized that laps and rigorous exercise came with the territory.
What I didn’t expect was him to not cut a single person from the team. Instead, everyone was a member. I could’ve walked, but decided to stick it out. So for the next few months, I ended up showing up to practice and doing what I could to not look like a total wimp. More often than not, I was the last to finish laps and rarely picked to play a game. One time when we were doing wind sprints, the entire group clapped for reasons that probably had to do with encouragement. I wasn’t wild about playing shirts vs. skins for obvious reasons, but it came to be a great way to feel connected to the group. One kid even thought I could perform a slam dunk by the end of the season, which nobody in our graduating class was capable of doing.
Despite still having weight issues, there was one positive side effect. I felt my size shrink. It was wonderful. I’m still not sure if it’s when I began to develop muscle, but there was more endurance for the rest of my life. Maybe it’s because it got me in the practice of going on walks more and trying to eat better, but it made me feel like I was reaching something more conventionally acceptable.
The issue with being a no name middle school with a team called The Cougars was that we had to travel to different schools and it was difficult to always have the right addresses. This was the Thomas Guide era, Pre-GPS and anything like that. My father was trying to encourage me to learn those pages, but thankfully things changed by the time I finally got my driver’s license. Every now and then, I would get the wrong address and miss the game. It was an odd time.
Our team was decent but we really only had two great players. If they weren’t hitting those shots, we were screwed. I didn’t get to play often. The first time I was out, I ended up fouling immediately and missing free point shots. I was pulled out within seconds because it was clear that I was, let’s just say “inexperienced.” The next time I was chosen for tip off and ended up getting the ball stolen from the other team. I was still the worst player, but it was so good to be on the team.
What was probably the most formative part of basketball was being forced to spend a lot of afternoons in gyms. Just because of how things went, boys usually went after girls. It meant that I got to watch them play while the cheerleaders rooted them on. I formed an understanding that men’s may be more respected, but women were even more rough and tumble. They took more risks and I admired that. It’s maybe why I was quicker to become a WNBA fan than others in my family. I never saw women as lesser players. If anything, they could all whoop me in a game of one on one. Maybe even the cheerleaders could.
I have no idea what our hierarchy was or what place we ended up in. The only thing that I do know is that we weren’t number one. On the day of my first concert, KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Christmas 2003 (Night 1), we had played a game that morning where we lost so bad that we had a mercy call. To this day, I’m still not well versed in any form of strategy and mostly get by on watching how it looks. Even then, that year of basketball meant that I had a lifelong fascination with the sport. After all, this was the period when Los Angeles was at their peak with The Lakers in a threepeat for the ages with Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. You had to be actively ignoring the press to not even hear a stat on the radio. It was a magical, mythical time that is still talk abouted fondly.
One of the things that I wasn’t aware of at the end of the school year was that I would be given a special award. Along with Coach Armstrong giving out typical MVP-type stuff, I ended up winning “Most Inspirational.” This was for no other reason than I didn’t give up. I was still the worst player on the team, but it meant a lot to him that I kept trying. I appreciated his mentorship and he taught me a lot about basic exercise and teamwork. There are times where I could see that award as pandering, but overall I think it reflects something that was positive and formative, so I choose to see it as such.
Beyond that, I think a side effect of going through puberty in that environment is having to deal with everyone’s awkward talk. Some students were overtly sexual and found that replacing things with “between the sheets” could make a line dirty. There were plenty of boner talks and Eric loved to try and manipulate me to do something stupid to try and un-arouse him. As for me, I think one time on a bus I found myself curious to look through the arm hole of a girl’s uniform polo to see some skin, even though the angle was impossible. The uniforms were much too chaste for anything to really be achieved.
Because of being friends with Alex, I think that there was some wish that I was more connected to the girls. While it was clear that they accepted me as friend, I think it was the casual type that could never truly be personal. After all, we never were close. I showed up in Sixth Grade and had to find my place in an already established group. Watching girls play mash, I was jealous that they had their own bonding rituals. They seemed much more enjoyable than boys doing sex jokes and repurposing the song “Whoop There It Is!” into catchphrase humor. As much as I didn’t understand women, it always felt like their maturity was much more enriching than mine. After all, how could it not be when you’re taught “Women mature faster than men”? Without having a real outlet to learn things, I mostly picked up my cues from Alex in the rare moments she allowed me to see her personal world which, even then, I didn’t take seriously enough because I didn’t know how to.
To talk about a random trainwreck that wasn’t my own, I want to touch on Robert. Whereas I was doing petty nonsense on campus, he had the most notorious incident. He apparently was the first and (in that time frame) only student to try drugs (I would learn Zack partook because of some random Myspace pictures the following year). While I don’t know if that’s why he ran off campus one day, it became known as the moment where nobody knew where he went. He was eventually found, but it did feel like he was doomed to be the middle school dropout. He would later get in trouble again during a student performance of the Grease number “You’re the One That I Want” where he rolled up random boxes in his sleeves to recreate a tough guy look. The suggestion of cigarettes was enough to piss off McCormick.
As with every year, Laddy did our end of year videos. I remember once seeing him on the side of the freeway filming something. Me and my dad couldn’t figure out what it was, so we just considered him crazy. For our Eighth Grade video, he had us record random dialogue and edited it together to form this poetic view of growing old. Predictably, it featured Vitamin C’s “Graduation Song” somewhere in the mix. Unpredictably, it featured the theme from Mortal Kombat over a random montage. We still have a copy on VHS.
During a final celebration mass for the eighth graders, I remember the younger grades gathering on the other side of the altar at the microphone. They were playing Green Day’s “Good Riddance,” which I remember bugging me because it felt like the wrong context (though in fairness, Archie sang it in the exact same context on Riverdale). However, as they ran through memories, they got to me and said “And we enjoyed Tom’s break dancing.” The room erupted. To some extent, I know that I’m hard on my memory of this time, but I love that I had any positive impression on these people.
One of the stranger things that happened towards the end was a retreat. We were bussed up to someplace that emphasized the intimacy and joy of our memories. There was an effort to embrace a softcore peacefulness that welcomed difficult emotions. It was okay to cry. You needed to make these moments matter. The only things I remember is it included a moment of silence where they played Mariah Carey’s “Hero.” Alex cried during the ride back to her house. Maybe it’s because I didn’t feel close to any of them, but it felt difficult to engage with the intended response. It wasn’t a bad day, but simply one of those weird rites of passages that I couldn’t fully appreciate because I didn’t have eight years of experience to fall back on.
Which may be the thing. I had those three years which were excellent. I still talk to a few students from back then. However, I am still suffering from a mentality where I struggle to be close to people. The only one that I could say that for was Alex, and we’d see each other for two more years before she went her own way. Everyone who mattered would show up on Myspace by that summer. Just to remind you how horny teen AMAB individuals are, Diego talked about how he was going to get laid on an upcoming student trip. This was months before he started a Myspace group called “I Love My Dick and Balls.” What a lovely bunch of coconuts we ended up being.
As we round the final corners, I feel it’s only right to shift to what was supposed to be the grand finale for the boys. We were going to stay over at Albert’s house. It was partially because he had the most space in the living room for everybody to sprawl out.
Because of the group, there was an excitement of what we’d do with an all-nighter. An early proposition was trying to get Albert to “accidentally” rent porn. We’d flip around some channels that were showing suggestive videos, but nothing compared to what people wanted. Someone joked about Lord of the G-Strings while reciting the plot. As time went on, the idea was dropped and we eventually decided to begin watching Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996). Because it was my first real exposure to the MTV stalwarts, I thought it was the funniest thing in the world. Hearing Butt-Head say “I just realized something. This sucks” was enough to get an entire room of boys to laugh their heads silly. I forget why we didn’t finish it, but eventually the group trailed off until everyone but me was asleep. I stayed up the entire night, eventually watching Dora the Explorer at 4 AM because nothing else was on.
We would attend the graduation rehearsal that morning. The principal was annoyed at our inattentiveness (though, let’s face it, I’m probably projecting. It was probably me) but didn’t think much of it. Once we got our cues, we got our cap and gowns and did the traditional farewell in the church. Because of being a Willett at the end of the alphabet, I had a partial row to myself. For reasons that don’t mean a lot but felt nice at the time, the music supervisor of the day, Betancourt, got to sit next to me briefly before striking up the band. I forgot what we did that evening, but I want to say I asked Nana to get me The Hives’ “Veni Vidi Vicious” and I proceeded to play it throughout the whole summer.
The accompanying graduation dance was another fun occasion, though not nearly as memorable as I’d like to admit. Everyone came in their fancy outfits. They would take pictures in front of the gate leading to the gym before getting a night like no other. For one, we had a real DJ who didn’t need to rent out CD’s from us to play censored version of naughty songs. We got to go full parental advisory, and we got to do whatever we wanted. It was a wild night. At one point, Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me” came on and I remember trying to impress Dana while coming up behind her on a row of sideline chairs. In hindsight, I could’ve broken my leg, but I was thinking it was too cool to be a tad provocative. At another point, I discovered the Lil Jon classic “Get Low." Nothing is funnier than a room of Catholic school kids dancing to a stripper anthem. Eric took the song seriously and put his hands up and down mockingly, as if he was too cool for the game.
The final time that I would see the group as a whole, for better or worse, was at a backyard party. I regret some of my behavior that night because I think it’s the biggest clue that I wasn’t connected to my peers. The adults were gathered in a side lot playing classic rock like Oingo Boingo’s “Dead Man’s Party” which I ended up liking more. But it was awkward to stand around adults drinking beer and listening to music from a different generation. At the same time, I remember not being able to tolerate what the younger generation was. I stood there, desperate for anyone to talk to me. I ended up getting bored and spraying a can of soda on a wall like graffiti. My recklessness had no focus. Part of me thinks I was looking for a fight because even that would’ve been more enjojyable.
Beyond that, the summer came and that phase of life would end. It wasn’t the last time I saw a lot of them, but some things will become clear in the next chapters. The age of religion was over. I was going to public high school and have a fresh start. There was a strange romanticism of it being more dangerous but I wanted to see how things would go. In all honesty, it ended up being miraculous and life changing. But that’s for later.
For now, I want to say that it’s surreal to think how scatterplot the eight years of Catholic school ended up being. OLOR had plenty of good years, but it also produced a lot of insecurities that inspired me to act out. In hindsight, it’s a miracle that as many students at St. Cornelius ended up liking me. I felt like I owed them so much more. I think what was evident was that I was a good kid. I just needed to get through that age where the only way to matter was to be rambunctious and annoying. I was still a long ways off from finding something softer and vulnerable, but high school would find the experimental push that I needed. Anything was better than getting detention because your scissors suck.
Comments
Post a Comment