First Daze of School: Gates-Chili (Part II)

So hopefully you read part one of this blog, First Daze of School: Cardinal Mooney. If not, read it. I’ll wait. Go ahead. Seriously. I’m waiting.

Read it? Comment on it? No? Go back. Comment on it. Anything. Praise. Hated it. Whatever.

We good? All set?

Good. Now. I am working like a dog. Freshman and Sophomore year. I’m basically working to pay my tuition, and expenses to a Catholic High School, Cardinal Mooney--but you already know this. You read Part I, right? Of course, right. Still clocking in up to forty hours a week. While going to school full time. Of course full time. Not many high schools offer a part-time status. They might. I just never heard of it before.

Naturally, working all these hours, and going to school, my grades tend to suffer. I wind up on academic probation for most of the two years I attend. C’s and D’s and the occasional F plot the pages of my report cards each quarter. I don’t go to parties. I don’t go to football games. I mainly socialize at work with the people I am spending 40 hours a week with. I hardly know any of the students at Mooney. Don’t get me wrong, I had friends at school, just never got to bond with them outside of the institution.

I realize as I am completing my sophomore year that, I am indeed retarded. I can go to Gates-Chili for free, and be banking, or at least enjoying the thousands of dollars a year I am making as a kid fifteen years old. (Not to mention I am saving for a car. But that car, that first car—that’s an entirely different blog yet to be written).

So I decide to make the change. I head on over to Gates-Chili. I register. I tour the campus. I ask the advisor all kinds of important questions. “And jeans? I can wear … jeans? And T-shirts? How about sneakers? Can I wear sneakers?” Having to wear a tie since I was five years old, the idea of going to school without one, baffles me. Doesn't seem possible, really.

As that summer ends, and my junior year looms on the next calendar page, I go back-to-school shopping. No more cowboy boots for me! Nope. This year I buy Guido boots. These are like cowboy boots, but they are only ankle-high, and zip up along the inseam. I also purchase a pair of two-tone jeans. White on the front of one, leg, grey on the other. Then opposite that on the back. Grey and white. I grab a turquoise mesh tank top, and a gray cotton sport coat—one where I can roll the sleeves up to mid forearm. I’ve grown a bit of a mullet, with naturally curly hair, and don’t look too different from John Oats from Hall and Oats, while mentally thinking I look more like Don Johnson from Miami Vice. And if you are too fucking young to get these references, google them.

Always plagued with a touch of O.C.D., I drive myself and my brother to school in what is my new car. A 1976 Plymouth Valarie. It’s 1986. And this car never should have made it off the assembly line. But it’s mine. It runs. What more does a 16 year old want, besides a black Trans-Am with T-Tops and buck-seats?

Early, my brother goes off with friends and I slink around hallways, completely lost and looking for the cafeteria. (I am not worried about my locker. I found where it was the day before. And I had mastered Master combination locks. Could open mine in mere minutes now! Three to the right, two to the left, once to the right! That’s right. I got it). There are a few people inside the cafeteria. I mosey into a short line, pick up a tray. Select a doughnut (this is long before the bagel craze ruptured the doughnut spotlight), and a thingy of chocolate milk.

I pay, exit the line, and choose a table near the cafeteria entrance. And why not. I’m looking good. Decked out in new duds. About 5’8”, 110 pounds. Lean with muscle from busting my ass at the party house. The zippers on my Guido boots are un-zipped, because I saw cool kids in the mall wear them that way, and dammit, I’m cool too. I keep my car keys on my cafeteria tray, because if I put them in my pocket, no one is going to know I have a car – and didn’t have to take the bus to school like some common surf.

Looking around the cafeteria, scoping the babe situation, I shake my chocolate milk carton. I grab onto opposite ends of the waxed tabs and pull …

And by pulling, I really mean, jerk.

And when I mean jerk, I actually mean, flounder with little show of muscle control.

The carton parts, splitting open – to me it is in slow motion, so everything should be fine. However, this is not what happened.

Instead, I pulled open the corners so hard that chocolate milk exploded from the mouth of the container. Stains covered the white of my jeans, the stomach of my mesh tank-top and the rolled forearms of my sport coat. Spots of chocolate spray the lenses of my glasses, hiding from immediate view the new horrors bestowed upon me and my fashion statement!

I pick up my keys, the tray of untouched purchases forgotten, and lumber Frankenstein-ish out of the cafeteria in search of a bathroom – of which I have no clue where a one might be!

Eventually, I do find one. And, despite five minutes until homeroom, douse paper towel with water and attempt to rub out stains, ignoring the fact that I am soaking my pant legs, so that it looks like I just finished thoroughly pissing in my pants …

And like my first day at Cardinal Mooney – unfortunately for my readers – the remainder of that day of school is blacked out, blocked from my memory. Beatings? Might have happened. Stuffed into a locker? Surely, it’s possible. Swirley’s, I don’t recall …

Till next time …

Love,

Chase N. Nichols

--Follow me on Twitter, or don’t. I don’t really care!

First Daze of School: Cardinal Mooney

I thought it only fitting that since school is starting I would tell all of you about my first two days of high school. Not consecutive days, mind you. See, growing up I went to a Catholic elementary school. St. Theodore’s. From kindergarten through eighth grade. Now, where I live there were three Catholic High Schools to consider, and only one public school. My choices, in order of price-tag were, Bishop Kearney – which was an all boy’s school – was immediately scratched off my list; Aquinas – also at the time an all boy’s school, cheaper admission than Kearney, but still all boys – was scratched off the list as well; and Cardinal Mooney. Then there was Gates-Chili. Free.

Gates-Chili seems like the obvious choice, right? Wrong. The idea of going to a public school after spending nine years in a Catholic environment scared the hell out of me. I’d heard horror stories. Looking at a kid passing in the hall the wrong way surely led to beatings, or books pushed out of your hands, or cafeteria food trays slapped from your hands, wedgies, swirlies, being stuffed into your own locker … That’s the kind of thing I heard happened at public high schools. And me, I wanted no part of it.

Money was tight. My family was far from rich. They seemed to go broke trying to put me and my three younger siblings through St. Teddy’s. I wanted to continue that education – private school. If only to save my ass from unnecessary, and what sounded like, humiliating torture, I planned to pick up where my parent’s had left off. The only plausible way to accomplish this was to help pay tuition costs.

At the end of eighth grade, I turned 14. I contacted a family member who owned a party house, and applied for a job as a bus boy. Tuition was $1,200 a year. This was back in 1984. I made, I believe just over $3.00 an hour, or just under. I can’t remember, and am far too lazy to research labor laws to see what minimum wage was back in 1984. Regardless, if any labor laws had been followed at this unnamed party house, I’d never have made enough money to buy cigarettes without a loan. Thankfully, I worked fifty and sixty hour weeks all summer long. Fifteen hours per week on the books. The remainder paid in cash. No time-and-a-half available, apparently. Maybe the thought of paying a teenager $5.00 was too much for a Mob-facility, pulling in hundreds of thousands a year. Whatever.

I took and pass the entrance exam to Cardinal Mooney. I worked my butt off all summer to save for tuition costs, clothing, and books. And as September rolled around, figured I was golden.

I had/have this tiny bald spot on my head. It began to itch. Went to the doctors and learned a layer of “skin” had grown over the spot, and needed to come off. My grandfather took me. The procedure was performed in the office. Two days before school.

I focused on the fact that I no longer had to wear strict elementary Catholic school uniforms—the yellow shirt, navy blue tie and pants. That I could now wear any color shirt, tie and pants—as long as they weren’t jeans. Wow the freedom of individualism!

And while the doctor jabbed ten times into my skull needles filled with Novocain, I cringed, and maybe cried, and possibly cursed. When the doctor said, “Oops,” and “Hmmm,” I closed my eyes. Pretended not to hear him. Figured it was my overactive imagination. I mean, everyone dreads hearing a doctor say “oops,” and sound perplexed. It can’t just be me.

“Son,” he said. I was not his son. In fact, we were not related. “The needle is broken. None of the Novocain is coming out. I’m going to have to do this over.”

Uh-huh. After a total of like twenty stabs to the head, my skull numbed. I was informed I’d feel scraping, tugging and some pulling, but little pain. I didn’t believe him. He was right though. The procedure was painless. Then. When I have nightmares about it now, it hurts like hell. So the doctor was only half right. But that also makes him half wrong.

Afterward, he wiped the blood that dripped all down my face and the back of my neck, and with gauze, wrapped my head. And cringed—more than when the needles were used—as he told me I’d have to change the bandages, and keep it wrapped like this for the next three to four days. No showers.

School. The first day of high school. As a Freshman. At some new school. Two days away.

Oh, the horror! Sanctuary! Sanctuary!

Of course, this guy was a pro. He’d wrapped my head tight. Looked like a Mummy head, on the scrawny, awkward body of a teenager. The morning of the first day of school, my mother and I wrapped my head. Hair jetted out between strips of gauze. Tufts billowed here and there. I also wore glasses—making this tremendously shameful headgear that much more nerdy.

So with slick cowboy boots (yes, cowboy boots. Up to just below the knee. And no, we did not live in Texas, Arizona, or any southern state where cowboy boots were acceptable. And for the record, I am Italian, with more Mafia in my blood than cattle rustler…), corduroy pants, a white dress shirt, and a tie that looked corduroy and was the same color as my pants (no clue what color. Possibly some shade of maroon), and gauze that resembled what might happen if I let a blind person bandage me, snaking my skull, I went to school.

I will tell you, unfortunately, I do not remember much at all about that first day. I do not recall one second of the bus ride. Or any of the classes. The only thing that stands out is the lockers in the hallway. Mine was right near my homeroom. At St. Teddy’s we didn’t have lockers. We had desks. They opened. We stuffed are junk in there, and in the cloakroom—a dark alley in the back of each classroom, with rows of hooks for jackets and book-bags and lunch boxes.

Next to me was, I would later learn—after the bandages came off and the memory of having seen me wear them voided from people’s memory with the help of the mind eraser Will Smith used in M.I.B.—was Debbie. So as I struggled to figure out how the hell to work a combination lock, figuring out left from right without actually pretending to pledge allegiance, and refrain from kicking the damned door—she seamlessly scrolled through numbers, and unlocked her Master. And then helped me with mine. I’ll give her credit. And for a moment it worked. She smiled at me as she helped.

I thought I was almost clever by not knowing how the hell to align three numbers under an indicator arrow. As if I’d planned it. A slick way to meet women.

Until I realized two things. I pathetically attempted the lock unsuccessfully and frantically for too long to be cool. And I looked retarded.

In watching Debbie Release Her Lock (that is not a movie title, the caps just make it seem so), and then stepping aside to watch Debbie Do My Lock (again, not a movie title—just saying), I completely forgot that on top of my head was a Greek Medusa of gauze and flailing fingers of hair …

Need I say more about that particular first day of school? Ah, no. I think not!

(Look for Part II of First Daze of School: Gates-Chili, Junior Year)

Till next time …

Love,

Chase N. Nichols

--Follow me on Twitter , or don’t. I don’t really care!