Missing the Big Picture (7 page)

After I left Saint John’s, I was curious to see what happened or what changes the school made. After the class of 2001 graduated, there was a sizeable increase from four hundred to over five hundred thirty students in 2005. Enrollment had decreased to approximately 381 students for 2011–12.
³

In 2005, the school made national news when an English teacher and mother of one of the students slept with several of her students. The teacher and a student, who was only sixteen, were found committing a sexual act in a parked car.

The teacher was separated but was still married to a successful businessman and had a history of abusing alcohol.
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The school now has, according to its website, Advanced Placement courses in English, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science, etc and even offers college credit courses from the University at Albany and Hudson Valley Community College. All of the surrounding school districts by St. John’s (Albany, North Colonie, South Colonie), also offer these types of courses. According to the current Director of Admissions, teachers now have to be certified to work at the school. This means that up until 2011, some teachers were teaching multiple subjects that they were not certified to teach. In 2010, on a flier for an open house, the school continued to boast that it had 100-percent pass rates on five Regents exams. However, some of these Regents exams were required for graduation in New York State. On the school’s website, there is no mention about SAT scores, class sizes, or how much the tuition costs. There is only one Christian brother left at the school now, according to the school’s current website. All classes, including religion, are taught by lay faculty.

I thought by enrolling in Saint John’s, my biological father would accept me. In actuality, it didn’t change anything or help me develop any type of relationship with him. The way I see it, if somebody is going to be that big of a douchebag by having a child and never attempting to make any connection with him, that is one less asshole I have to deal with in my life.

I still touch base with some of my classmates from Saint John’s. The salutatorian, who was extremely bright and one of most arrogant students in the school, ended up graduating from Cornell University Law School. The valedictorian, who as a senior led the military brigade, ended up graduating from West Point and became a paratrooper in the army. When he returned from duty, he completely covered himself in tattoos. In January 2010, after the earthquake in Haiti killed two hundred thousand people, he wrote on his Facebook page, “Haiti finally got what they deserve; only now if a hurricane could strike Florida and kill all of the Cubans.” Some of my other classmates have become Albany police officers and have had the privilege of arresting Saint John’s class members. One became a professional blogger, and a few have remained unemployed or are “writers” or “musicians.” Many of my classmates are now married, have great jobs and have beautiful children.

There were also very nice students and teachers at Saint John’s. Overall, though, I felt that the prevailing attitude of Saint John’s was arrogant and unrealistic and that many Saint John’s community members lacked compassion for anybody different from them. I wanted to include these stories in my book so that these individuals could examine their lives. Hopefully Saint John’s can one day become a school operated by Christian brothers, not just lay faculty members. It is very sad that the De La Salle Christian Brothers are close to becoming extinct. There have been many men who have lived full lives that have impacted hundreds of individuals by living as a Christian brother. I hope it can become a place where compassion and the teachings of Jesus Christ and Saint John Baptist de La Salle are not just taught, but are put into practice.

CHAPTER 3

H
IGH
S
CHOOL,
T
HOSE
W
EREN’T THE
D
AYS

If you a hater, I got a full-time job for you.

—Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino

A
s an adult, I dread waiting in a check-out line with a group of teenagers or sitting on a train or an airplane with them. Many seem very happy and laugh at nonsensical things. I’m glad that they’re happy, but most of them time I can never understand how they can think their teenage drama is as important as the situation in Afghanistan or how to fix Social Security.

Even some of my adult friends who work in grocery stores or at Starbucks tell me they remember being as obsessed as those kids are with their social lives. I tell them that I remember high school, too, although I wish I didn’t. First, I was a very awkward teen. I was a late bloomer, and I didn’t start showing any signs of puberty until I was fifteen. I was scared of girls, and I was often very shy with groups of people until I felt comfortable. The worst part of my adolescence experience was that my testicles didn’t descend and my left testicle hung lower than my right one, which was so embarrassing that I was afraid to tell my mother to make a doctor’s appointment.

During the summer of 1999, before I transferred back to public high school, I mainly worked my part-time job, forty hours a week or more, at McDonald’s. I really didn’t have any expectations of school; I was more concerned about taking AP U.S. History and AP English than meeting girls or finding a relationship or a clique of friends.

When I was at McDonald’s, I enjoyed working with Sam, who just started working there a few months after I did. I had known Sam since third grade. Sam was smart, athletic, and had a good sense of humor. He played golf and baseball and had great grades, too. He actually made the time working with all that grease bearable. We used to talk about the girls who would come in or just make fun of our co-workers or the customers. He was easy to talk to.

Just before school began that summer, I was walking home from McDonald’s and heard a car horn and someone yell, “Hey, Donovan!” It was one of the kids from Saint John’s who I remembered—and didn’t like—from the bus freshman year, so I politely yelled back, “Shut the fuck up, asshole.” A few minutes later, he stopped his car, got out, and asked me to repeat what I was yelling. I told him that he had a nice car, and then he started laughing and got back in his car. His name was Mike, and I absolutely hated him. Once he got back in his car, I asked if he was still going to Saint John’s or if he’d been kicked out and had to go Colonie High School, since he only lived a few streets away from me. Mike said, “No, I’m still at Saint John’s, lucky for you.” He didn’t know that I had transferred, and I felt a smile come over my face. I then told him, “You don’t know how happy I am to hear that.”

I was very nervous my first day as a junior in a new school. The way that South Colonie worked was there were two middle schools and one high school. So of the 450 students in my class, I went to middle school with half of them. The school at the time had over eighteen hundred students. This was very different from Saint John’s, with only seventy-two students in my class and four hundred students in the entire school. In fact, I wasn’t the only student in my class to depart from Saint John’s after my sophomore year. The class went from seventy-two students to graduating fifty-five.

I remember seeing some people I hadn’t seen in two years. I just wanted to go up to them and yell their names, but then I realized that would be socially inappropriate, so I just walked to my locker. Even though I was a junior, I didn’t really have any typical junior classes. I took AP English and AP U.S. History. Colonie offered biology for freshmen students, chemistry for sophomores and physics for juniors. At Saint John’s, I had to take Earth science as a freshman, biology as a sophomore, and chemistry as a junior. I was in Spanish 3, when all the other Colonie juniors were in Spanish 4. I took Spanish 1 in middle school, but Saint John’s made everyone repeat Spanish 1 as a freshman. So, for two classes, chemistry and Spanish 3, I was with sophomores.

My biggest fear going to a new school as a teenager was finding out who to eat lunch with. Most teenagers plan this out as soon as they get their schedules. I didn’t really talk to anybody at Colonie, so I just walked in the cafeteria and found a table. My nerves were eased when I saw Ray, somebody I knew from Sand Creek Middle School, who was friends with Eric. Ray was known for his short stature and his off-the-wall sense of humor. Once in seventh grade, Eric and I went to his house to hang out and I waited in his driveway while Eric went inside. I remember smelling something and wondering if I forgot to wear deodorant, so I nonchalantly smelled my armpits. A little while later Eric brought me inside and introduced me to Ray’s mom. After the introductions, he said, “We all saw you smelling your armpits.” Everybody laughed.

A few weeks later, Ray came to my house. We lived on the second floor of my grandmother’s house. Ray went up the stairs first and found my mother relaxing in her bra and underwear. When I sat down and ate lunch with him that day as a junior, he told all the other kids that the first time he met my mother, she was in her underwear. He would speak of this incident until we graduated.

I barely knew the other kids at my lunch table. They would refer to me as “Jewish kid” because they thought I looked Jewish. Anytime they needed their garbage thrown out, they just said, “Jewish kid,” and it was my signal to grab their trash and throw it out. It was humiliating, but I just didn’t have any other place to sit and eat lunch. I couldn’t eat by myself, and I did like Ray. He was really funny, so I just put up with it. I also got picked on because no matter how much I tried, I always walked on my toes. One time Ray was behind me and yelled in front of the crowd, “Luke, it looks like you’re walking with a pole up your ass.”

I was very motivated to get good grades and get into a good college. I was taking two AP courses and another college-level course in business from a community college that the school offered. I was nervous about taking AP English, since most students didn’t take any college-level English courses until senior year. Most high school students would agree that teachers and guidance counselors often try to intimidate students and tell them that AP classes will be the biggest challenge of their young lives. I was put at ease when I met the English teacher, Ms. Miller, who was also the class advisor. Ms. Miller was a very pretty Italian woman who was always encouraging. She greeted her class with a smile, encouraged everyone to do his or her best, and instilled a cando attitude among her students. After a big exam or paper, she would reward us with Dunkin’ Donuts.

It wasn’t long before I saw Eric, Dan, and my other former middle school friends. Eric had enjoyed a rise in popularity once he entered high school. He had a brother four years his senior who was in a band. When Eric became as widely known as his brother, he rose in the high school hierarchy.

Dan was also in my chemistry class, which was made up mostly of sophomores but had some juniors in it as well. Dan had failed chemistry the previous year. One junior, Warren, was a popular football player who was well liked by girls, and Dan, as usual, would try to impress Warren. The first half of the year we got along, and Dan was my lab partner. Then Dan started talking to a friend of Warren’s, and they would write notes back and forth to each other in class. One day I saw these notes, and a lot of what they were writing was about me. Most of it was strange—that I would have sex with goats and other bizarre farm animals. They sat right next to me and laughed uproariously at what they had written to each other. After a couple of weeks, I had enough and showed the chemistry teacher a note I had confiscated. I remember her being very bug-eyed, as she seemed quite conservative and straitlaced. That was the end of my being lab partners with Dan. My other lab partners were just a sympathy group. They felt sorry for me because I had nobody else to work with.

In November, my mother celebrated a huge accomplishment for the both of us. My grandmother sold her house, my mother and I moved into a duplex, and my grandmother moved into an assisted living facility. It worked out well for everyone involved. At forty-five, my mother didn’t have to spend hours doing tasks for my grandmother. She was able to visit with her sister and not have to lie about it, since my grandmother was always jealous when my mother visited my aunt or went out with anybody. Plus, my mother didn’t work two jobs anymore and hadn’t for the past year.

My grandmother needed people around her, too. She was always very social and loved being around other seniors. The ladies would often go to the movies, and when there wasn’t enough room in the car for everyone, one squeezed in the trunk. My grandmother ended up doing the Heimlich maneuver once and saved a woman from choking on a piece of popcorn. She even volunteered at the assisted living center’s store, where she could socialize and find out what was new with everyone. There wasn’t a time when I visited that she didn’t have a friend over.

I was very motivated to get into college when I was a junior. Toward the end of my sophomore year, I had slacked with my grades at Saint John’s and just wanted to get out of that school. To improve my resume for college, I decided to join the Key Club, a community service organization, and some other after-school groups.

At the first Key Club meeting, I saw two girls that I knew from middle school, Tori and Zoey. All of us used to be in plays together. Zoey had a great sense of humor and a loud voice—right up there with Fran Drescher. We had some classes together, too—AP English and AP U.S. History.

In AP U.S. History, the teacher made me change seats because Zoey and I were talking too much. I was moved to the back of the class and sat in front of a student named Randy. Randy had a large group of friends, of which Zoey and Tori were included. Randy was very musically inclined and starred as Danny in the school musical
Grease
that year. He was in a chorus group and played bass guitar, too. He was really nice; there wasn’t anybody that he wouldn’t talk to. The first time we talked I remember he was really close to me, and I made him laugh because the closeness of his face made me feel awkward and I moved back in my chair. He wanted to mention to me that scene in
Austin Powers
when the two characters in the tent are simulating sex. Randy and I became friends soon enough; he had a great sense of humor and a very likeable personality.