Missing the Big Picture Read online

  Another practical joke Eric played on me happened the day after I appeared in the school play Guys and Dolls. The play director required that everybody in the production, whether male or female, had to wear makeup. I would never tell any of my friends that I had to wear makeup, but Eric, Gary, and Dan found out only because they were friends with the play’s makeup artist. The day after the play, I ran into Eric as he was walking to school. Eric approached me very quietly and stared at me for a few seconds. “Are you wearing makeup?” he finally asked. I didn’t even have time to answer because I immediately ran home to wash my face. It turned out that I had already washed off all of the makeup, and Eric was just teasing me. As soon as I left, Eric started laughing hysterically.

  Besides teasing me for wearing makeup, my weight was another area that Eric loved to harass me about. I wasn’t much overweight, but I wasn’t that thin, either. My biggest area of fat was in my chest, which I referred to as my “chubby pecs.” Eric once said to me, “Oh, so how many rolls do you have again?” I decided to lose weight by exercising a lot and occasionally lifting weights; sometimes I chose not to eat, which was my favorite way to slim down. I lost fifteen pounds when I was fourteen, which upset my mother. Fourteen-year-old boys are supposed to be gaining weight and building muscle instead of starving themselves. My mother and I kept my weight loss a secret, since my mother thought that only girls had weight issues. I quickly found out that almost everybody, boys and girls alike, has body image problems.

  Later that spring, Dan had a small gathering at his house and Eric and some of his other friends were in attendance. Eric and his new friends didn’t like Dan that much; they mostly used him for free cigarettes. They also liked playing tricks on me. They thought it would be hysterical if they pinned me down when I wasn’t looking and sprayed me with Dan’s mother’s perfume. I wanted to go home immediately and wipe it off, but the boys made me go to the mall with them instead.

  Another time when the same group was hanging out at Dan’s house, we had a bicycle race. After the race began, I remember riding my bicycle and thinking, “Wow, I don’t see anybody in front of me. I’m killing this race—for the first time, I’m winning something!” Then I realized that the only reason I won was that when Dan said, “Start,” everybody ran into the house and locked me out. The only way I was allowed to reenter was to yell that I desperately wanted to make love to Janet Reno.

  Still, the most entertaining time Dan and I ever had together was at a nightclub called Secrets, a teen hangout on the other side of town. Secrets would often advertise on the local radio that they would be throwing an awesome party with the “water cannon” and that there would be “no dress code.” Anybody who ever lived in the Capital District as a teenager probably spent a Saturday night or two at Secrets. It was the coolest place for a thirteen-year-old to be. The bouncers at the door would mark everybody’s hand with a magic marker. I would never wash my hands on Sunday or Monday because I wanted everybody at school to know I was at Secrets over the weekend. All of the cool kids at Sand Creek Middle School went to Secrets every Friday and Saturday night. Still, even though my friends and I were always there, we were never considered part of the cool crowd.

  One night when just Dan and I were at Secrets, a girl approached me and asked if I was Carmen Missmo’s little brother. I decided to say yes just to see what the girl’s response would be. Did she love Carmen Missmo’s little brother and want to find out what he was up to, or did she secretly hate Carmen’s brother and want to be mean to him? Well, when I answered in the affirmative, the girl was actually delighted. For the entire night, I pretended to be Carmen’s little brother, Chris. The girl who asked me about Carmen was named Christine. “So, Christopher, how are you now?” she asked. I responded, “Well, actually I go by Chris now.” Christine asked me what Carmen was up to, and I made up some silly story. Christine wondered why Carmen didn’t accompany his little brother to Secrets. Pretending to be Chris, I told Christine that he was out bowling with some friends. Christine said, “Oh, I didn’t know Carmen liked to bowl.” I said, “Well, he does now.”

  Dan decided to intervene in my conversation with Christine and ask her, “Didn’t Carmen say that you two had sex?” I was definitely annoyed that Dan had made such a rude remark and tried to neutralize the situation by telling Christine that Carmen would never say anything like that. The funniest thing about that night was that Christine and I actually danced together. I told Christine to call me (Chris) the following day and asked her, “Oh, you still have our number, right?” The truth was I wasn’t Carmen Missmo’s little brother, but I was attracted to Christine and it was a shame that because of my lie the two of us could never be together. Dan would later ask me why anybody would want a girl who would go out with her ex-boyfriend’s brother. However, the night I pretended to be Chris Missmo was one of our favorite outings at Secrets. Dan was my closest friend when I was fourteen. We went to the shopping mall every day that summer to play video games in the arcade and play jokes on people in the mall. When we weren’t at the mall, we were probably watching the movie Mallrats, which was a personal favorite of all of my friends. One time Dan and I, along with our friend Al, got thrown out of the mall for a period of three days because we had a huge water gun fight in the mall’s food court. Al decided to fill his water gun up with Surge, a high-sugar drink that stung pretty badly, especially when it got sprayed in your eyes. There was Surge left all over the mall, and Al managed to get some on people’s leather coats.

  At the end of eighth grade, I was very scared about going to high school. The high school in my district had between seventeen hundred and eighteen hundred students in grades nine through twelve. I was an extremely late developer and by age fourteen hadn’t shown any signs of entering puberty. My friends, meanwhile, were smoking marijuana, and some were even having sex. I’d heard all the stories of the high school parties filled with drinking and experimental drug use, and I never wanted to do anything like that.

  As a child, one of the few things that my mother mentioned about my father was that he graduated from a private, Catholic all-boys high school in Albany called Saint John’s (a pseudonym). My mother told me that my father even offered to pay if I wanted to go there. Anthony’s son, Paul, was also a senior at Saint John’s, and both Paul and Anthony had always considered themselves so superior and never really fully accepted me. I thought that if I went to Saint John’s, I could avoid the big school and get the acceptance of Anthony, his family, and my biological father. I had never met my biological father. He always paid child support regularly for the most part. For the few instances when he was late, my mother would just call him on the phone. I remember thinking to myself, Why can’t I talk to him? Why doesn’t my own biological father want to talk to me? My mother could never answer that.

  CHAPTER 2

  SCHOOL OF HATE—WITH BROTHERS LIKE THESE, NOBODY NEEDS ENEMIES

  Sometimes I would like to ask God why he allows poverty, suffering, and injustice, when he could do something about it. But I’m afraid he would ask me the same question.

  —Unknown

  I enrolled in Saint John’s over the summer. I was too afraid to tell anybody, so I waited until Labor Day to tell my friends that I was going to a private school. When my friends received their class schedules, I just said I hadn’t gotten mine yet. My friends were disappointed that I didn’t tell them, and I played along. I didn’t want them to know that I was going there in the hopes that my father would accept me, so I just told everyone, “I just woke up in the uniform.”

  Saint John’s was a private, all-boys Catholic military high school established by the DeLaSallian Christian brothers. During the 1997–98 school year, approximately 380 boys were enrolled in grades six through twelve. The freshmen class had seventy-two students.

  On September 2, 1997, I began my first day of freshman year, which was called plebe training. The first three days we learned how to march, how to do an about-face, and other basic military pra
ctices. I noticed that there were five students who had gone to the same public middle school as me. In fact, two of Eric’s friends, Evan and Dustin, were there. Evan’s two older brothers had gone to the school, and in keeping with family tradition, he did, too. Dustin was disrespectful to his parents at times, and his family enrolled him in Saint John’s to help him learn discipline.

  There was nothing that I liked about Saint John’s. From the first day, I hated it. It was early September, and the temperature was still close to ninety degrees. I almost passed out, and Dustin told me later he thought he was going to have to catch me. I bought potato chips from the cafeteria during a break, but they had expired on August 17. Later, one of the seniors, who were the military officers, asked me, “Are you having fun?” I nodded my head and said, “Yes.”

  “You’re a lying sack of shit. You’re not having fun,” he replied, and a bunch of my classmates started laughing at me.

  Another cause for ridicule was that I have always walked on my toes. It’s just a habit I’ve never been able to break. People who walk on their toes do not march well. The students in back of me were always tripping over one another. The sergeant, who taught military science at the school, went up to me and said, “Son, were you out drinking this morning?” Once again, I was embarrassed.

  The first day of academic orientation began when the assistant principal for student affairs told us, “You are at the best high school in the Capital District.” In fact, that feeling was shared among the faculty, staff, parents, and students. However, there weren’t really any statistics to demonstrate this alleged superiority. The school has always been private and never has published any statistics about SAT scores or regents exams. I found it ironic that less than five years after making that comment, the assistant principal later left Saint John’s and became an associate principal at the middle school I had attended.

  The first day of classes, the behavior of some of my teachers shocked me. All of my public school teachers had been professional, and most held master’s degrees. In my freshman year of high school, of the teachers for my core subjects (English, math, science, social studies, and foreign language), three of them had postgraduate degrees, but my global studies teacher had a masters degree in English and my earth science teacher had a doctorate in English. Even though I would hear many comments about how public schools were falling behind, most of the teachers at Saint John’s wouldn’t have been qualified to teach at a public school.

  The first English class that I had was with Mr. Ramone, an icon of the Saint John’s community. He was an alumnus of the school and had taught there for close to twenty years. He also served as the assistant principal for academic affairs and was the varsity basketball and baseball coach. The first day of school, he encouraged us to write a schedule of our day and put it on the refrigerator. This daily schedule consisted of school, homework, sports practice, church, and limited time for recreation or socialization. A few weeks later, at the meet-the-teachers night, he actually asked the parents if we had our schedules on the refrigerator and encouraged the parents to enforce them. I was simply there to get an education, just as you go to the dentist every six months for a dental appointment. Like everyone should set aside time for oral hygiene, all high school students should spend time studying. However, my dentist doesn’t suggest a schedule that he makes up for me on how to spend my time and then encourage my family to enforce it.

  Due to his other commitments as an associate principal, Mr. Ramone would often arrive late to class. He would eat lunch during class and was very unorganized. During the last day of the marking period, we would grade other students’ tests. One student asked if there was going to be a curve. Mr. Ramone replied, “Depends if I have a glass of wine with dinner tonight.”

  Like almost every freshmen English class in high school, we had to read Romeo and Juliet. I just considered it an ancient chick flick. I could never understand why teachers try to promote reading in children by giving them the most boring and ancient books to read. Romeo and Juliet love each other and then kill each other because they cannot express their love. For some reason, ninth graders are forced to read this book, and Mr. Ramone’s class was no exception. Of course, we had class discussions on the readings. Mr. Ramone gave a lecture one day on how the character Tybalt was a “coward.” The next day, Mr. Ramone asked us to summarize the discussion that we had the day before. Like a good student, I raised my hand and said that the theme we discussed the previous day was how Tybalt was a coward, and I gave my rationale for this argument. Mr. Ramone then replied, “Would you?” insinuating that I was even a coward. My family was spending six thousand dollars a year so I could discuss how Tybalt was a coward. We didn’t discuss literary elements used by Shakespeare—style, grammar, or tone. No, our class was just about Coach Ramone thinking Shakespearean characters were a bunch of pussies.

  Working in a private school gave teachers more autonomy, so they weren’t censored as much. Each week in English we had vocabulary words that we had to memorize and then be tested on. One week, the word chastity was one of the vocabulary words. In teaching this term, Mr. Ramone said, “Chastity, as in Chastity Bono, the daughter of Sonny and Cher. Of course, she’s the biggest dyke on the planet.” All these years later, I still remember the hate that was being taught at Saint John’s. Regardless of one’s opinion on homosexuality, I have worked with many lesbians, and part of working and living in today’s world is treating all people with respect. This tenet was not part of the curriculum at Saint John’s.

  During the school year, I would see Mr. Ramone go up to a student, grab him by his throat, and say, “Don’t mess with me. I’ll screw you, and ask anybody I’ve screwed before—you don’t want to get screwed by me.” When one student asked a question and said, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” Mr. Ramone replied, “Well, whoever told you that was lying to you.”

  For math, I had Mr. Robertson. On the first day of class, he had the students fill out cards with information such as their name and phone number and their favorite movie. My favorite movie growing up was Christina Applegate’s Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, but since I was an extremely insecure teen, I lied and said Independence Day or something like that. When one of the other students said Showgirls with Elizabeth Berkeley, the teacher’s response was, “You just like looking at those big ol’ hooters.”

  If there is one teacher that anybody who went to Saint John’s remembers best, it would have to be Mr. Fuller, the global studies teacher. Mr. Fuller had been teaching at Saint John’s since the early 1980s, and his thick Long Island accent was evident in words like “Incers” instead of “Incas.” No student ever had Mr. Fuller who didn’t receive detention. If you showed up without doing your homework or it was of poor quality, you got an automatic detention. Mr. Fuller also assigned detention for students who didn’t have their books covered or if they failed a test; he even once put somebody in detention for not putting periods at the end of his sentences. Paul, Anthony’s son, had Mr. Fuller three years earlier for global studies and told me that at the end of the school year, Mr. Fuller asked if there was anybody who didn’t get detention. Two kids raised their hands. He gave them detention for not receiving detention.

  The first day of class, Mr. Fuller slammed the door and made everyone take out a piece of paper and a pencil and write down the rules. The first rule was that there would be a test every day. Not only was Mr. Fuller’s main duty to teach global studies; he also tried to teach all of his students the importance of being honest. He would always say, “Global studies will come and go, but honesty will always stay.” Whenever he assumed that students had cheated or lied about doing their homework, he would say, “You’re a liar and a cheat. Get out!” Once he told his students that in the ideal world, on the first day of class he would assign a large amount of homework, then the next day if somebody hadn’t completed the assignment he would, quote, “Shoot him.” Another time he told the class, “I think you should kn
ow by now not to mess with me.”

  There were very few students who did. If anybody ever tried to be comical, he would always yell, “Clown, clown, clown!” In other classes, many of the students whose parents didn’t pay enough attention to them tried to be rude and obnoxious in an attempt to make everybody laugh. This never happened in Mr. Fuller’s class—although Mr. Fuller was himself kind of a comedian. The difference was that whenever he made a joke, all of the kids were too afraid to laugh.

  Mr. Fuller was a stickler for spelling. Two words that every ninth grade student at Saint John’s had to memorize were archaeologist and anthropologist. If a student got one of these words wrong, he made the student yell out the window, “I can spell anthropologist!”

  One time, Mr. Fuller observed a student smoking a cigarette in the parking lot. When it was time for global studies, Mr. Fuller walked up to him and said, “So how was that cigarette this morning? Pretty soon you’ll be working at Mobil for the rest of your life selling cigarettes to shitheads like yourself.” He then proceeded to call the student “shithead” three times in front of the other classmates. The student transferred a few months later. Oddly enough, the students once observed Mr. Fuller smoking a cigar on a school field trip.

  Mr. Fuller enjoyed teaching and liked to add his personal opinion to history. He referred to Massachusetts as “the state that keeps hiring a murderer as U.S. senator” and said that the only thing JFK did that was noteworthy during his administration was die. During the second or third day of school, he told the class that global studies was the most important class—the only class that mattered. He dismissed math, saying we should just use a calculator, and who cared about rocks in earth science? As for Spanish, if anyone was going to visit a Spanish-speaking country, he could just simply say, “Two dollar, two dollar.”