Sophomore jinx - Part I

The hardest part of writing about my own life is remembering it. I know people who can pull dates out of thin air, or of their ass, with great ease. "Oh, I was living at 4251 Idyllic Way in the fall of 1972." Yeah, right.

Literally, I have years, huge chunks of time I cannot put together. I can remembers incidents, little squares that happened, like making out with a girl my freshman year of high school at her house. But what was her name? Who was I with? Why was I there?

Maybe it's all the drinking I did in later years that burned my memory like a chemical reaction. I sometimes wonder if it's just the way I lived. When you have no definitive purpose it seems kind of useless to make a point of remembering things. I just lived, stumbled through from one scene to the next without a lot of thought. I guess if I had been a basketball stud I would recall that night I scored 25 against our crosstown rival because it was a moment that was meaningful to me and to others. But I wasn't. I was pretty much alone, feeling my way against the walls looking for an opening. Only now that I've found a little light do I feel the need to look back, to try to literally pick up those squares like a hundred different shards from a broken glass, and glue them back into something that I can actually use again.

I do remember this: sometime in the spring or summer of my freshman year I met Dave Newland.

Dave lived nearby in Danbury, a few streets over in a small two-story white house with a detached garage. I'm not sure how exactly we met, but I do remember that Dave was something special. He was kind of an unusual guy; a little tall with a tangle of dirty blonde hair that he never seemed to care much about. He walked a little bowlegged and had a lazy eye, the result of an accident involving gasoline as a child.

But Dave was charismatic, you were simply drawn to the guy because he was cool and a little tough and a little bit of a bully, even when he liked you. He wasn't particularly good-looking but he attracted girls, maybe because he was a pretty good athlete or because he would steal his parents car on occasion and drive around and buy beer, even though he was underage.

Dave was originally from the Midwest - Oklahoma, and because of that he had that same underlying detachment to Danbury (or anyplace for that matter) that I did. Yeah he was just a kid growing up but he wasn't a local, he didn't really have roots there and probably knew in his heart that eventually he would leave. He also had an older brother, Don, who was in the Navy. I think Dave not only worshipped Don, he took his direction from him. Not that Don was every really around, but Dave knew what he was doing, and tried to do the same, which included getting high and drinking and having sex and pretty much doing whatever the hell he wanted do, but he did it with a cocky sort of air that even kept his parents a little off stride.

My first real recollection of Dave was that he was the first person I ever smoked pot with. It was Dave and I and his little brother Bob. We were hanging out at Dave's house listening to music when he asked me the fated question, "want to get high?"

I'd never gotten high before, not because I had any particular problem with it or fear of it, I'd just never been exposed to it. During my freshman year at Immaculate I had done some huffing, because that's what people were doing. I recall going to a party at a girl named Linda's house one night. She was also a freshman at Immacualte, and was a little overweight, but moderately pretty. She had a bottom lip that stuck out ever so slightly in a permanent pout. But Linda talked a lot about getting high and drunk, and she had big titties and an attitude about her that said if you hung around long enough and nobody was looking, you could probably get a squeeze out of them if you tried.

The party was in the basement of her parent's house, and the drug of choice that night was glue, or rags dipped in gasoline in paper bags. You stuck the bag on your face, covered your nose and mouth and chin with brown paper and took some deep breaths, and for a few moments you were dizzy and stupid and everything seemed very funny. Then you'd have to go find the bag again.

That night I ended up sitting behind the basement bar with Linda and a bag of rags. We kissed with tongues, and she actually let me see those fat freshmen boobs for just a second.

So when Dave asked me to get high it wasn't like I was a complete virgin, more like someone who'd been to third base and was ready to take the next step.

Dave's house was on a cul-de-sac and at the end of the street was an old overgrown field with high grass and trees and a messy pile of dirt where someone had done a perk test and never built anything. Later in the summer that field would become a baseball diamond where a group of neighborhood guys would play ball - usually three nerdy Italian guys against my brother and I in a game of three on two. It was something to do.

But that day it was an initiation field, the start of something big for me. Not that I would rocket away from that moment to become some sort of big pot head. In reality I never did like marijuana that much, though I smoked my share of it. I never really like the loss of control I felt with pot. Plus pot was like internal truth serum to me. Whenver I got high I would go deeper inside and start looking at myself and staring straight at my flaws like a kid with a face full of pimples and a mirror. I really didn't like looking at myself that much.

What was more important about that day was that Dave trusted me, that he pulled the joint out of his pocket which he'd quickly rolled in his room and showed me that not only was he cool, but I was cool too. He trusted me, he said that when he fired up the splif and handed it me.

The greatest part of that memory was after we were done and walked back to his house and up to his room on the second floor. Dave had one of those standard 1970s stereos that everyone had in their room - receiver with a record player, couple of speakers. But he also had two killer sets of headphones and two headphone inputs. The record he had on the turntable that day was Bachman Turner Overdrive's second album, BTO II, the one with Taking Care of Business on it. But we didn't listen to that song, he dropped the needle at the start of the album instead, and we each grabbed a set of headphones. He laid across his bed, I sat in a chair.

I don't remember being ridiculously high that first time, though I was definitely feeling something. I remember being happier than I'd been in awhile and laughing at silly shit, and being a little nervous about maybe seeing Dave's mother when we came in his house.

What I remember more than anything was what the pot did to the music. Bachman Turner Overdrive was an okay '70s band with a few hits, but that day they were the Beatles and Stones, Verdi and Thelonius Monk rolled into one. The music was so clear, crisp, like the band was right there in Dave's room or in my own head. You could hear the friggin' drumsticks tap the cymbal heads, feel the bass thump right through your heart, and every word was as deep as the Bible. Music. I'd discovered a new coping mechanism -somewhere else to hide. Music. Music and pot. Beautiful combination.

The first song he put on by the way was called Blown.

A fucking masterpiece:

I used to smoke my brains out
Fly thru the sky
I used to really freak out
Didn't wonder why
I heard the Stones a rollin'
And I'd roll too
I didn't care what I was doin'
As long as I was with you
I was blown
And that's what you are now
I was blown
Didn't care why or how
I was blown
Ran and jumped and screamed
I was bloown
Right inside a dream

I used to tell my story
Right out loud
I sure was in my glory
I sure was proud
But then one day I fell down
I couldn't get up
People crowdin' all around
That was when they locked me up
I was blown
And that's what you are now
I was blown
Didn't care why or how
I was blown
Ran and jumped and screamed
I was blown
Right inside,
Right inside
Right inside
a dream

In the beginning - Part I

This is how I picture my life:

Years and events are arranged on a gameboard with little colored squares, each one representing something of significance. My squares aren't formed into a nice rectangle so that you have perfect symmetry and can loop around the board and maybe hit something you missed the first time around. No, it's all stretched out in a long line with a distinct beginning but no tangible end.

While the squares are all connected, they aren't necessarily consecutive. In other words, you don't have to do my imaginary life board in a logical order. That's just the way it's laid out, like perfect pieces of a puzzle that form a sort of dysfunctional road. Each box is a perfect square, and they're like Monopoly spaces with colors at the top and descriptive words. And just like that game there are good squares and bad ones - Park Avenues and jails.

My board has specific incidents on it, not big huge general time chunks like infancy and adolescence. It has moments, things that have happened that influenced or moved me or brought me to my knees. There's a box for an afternoon at a candy store in the Bronx in the mid-1960s when my parents took my brother and sister and I in and said we could "get something." My brother and I picked out comic books - he a Superman, me an Archie and friends. My sister spotted a dusty plastic bag above the counter, hanging with other toys. It was a package with a little cylindrical pump and a handful of balloons. She insisted she had to have it despite my quiet protestations of embarrassment. She got it and blew balloons up in the car on the way home, then never looked at it again, as i suspected she wouldn't. The whole scene pained me, though I'm still not sure why. Maybe it was the sheer impermanence, the little fit she had, my parent's willingness to make her happy at any cost.

There's a box for my first real drunk in a cow field beside the high school football stadium in Centerville, Ohio in 1973. I was with a guy named Mike Adams, a good-looking but painfully cocky freshman I couldn't stand, but hung out with because there was no one else. There was a football game going on, I can still see the rows of bright lights pointing down at the nearby football stadium and can hear the occasional single raw-throated voice of a Friday night crowd in Ohio. I was supposed to be there in the stands caring if Centerville High School won. I wasn't. I didn't. I threw-up.

There are boxes for my wedding and babies being born and for college graduations and rehabs. It's all there, step by step, inch by inch, a jumble of a road that in some ways I created and in others I did not. I only had to walk it.

I know this is a little ideal, this whole road thing, but it's what I see when I close my eyes and try to think back and remember where the hell I've been and try to reconstruct what happened back there that may have triggered behaviors and events later. There's much I've forgotten, and much I've had to re-create through research and phone calls and cigarettes at night on the back porch searching the stars. The questions have been the same for years: How? By what route? Why for Godsakes? Why? I've traced and re-traced my line a hundred times, stopping at various moments to examine them. I'm in bed once, just a kid, and I have the measles. I'm sick as hell and running a high fever. That particular day my aunt, my mother's twin, has promised to take me to the circus - the Ringling Brother Barnum and Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden. The Greatest Show on Earth. But I am sick and laying on the bed hot and aching, and my brother has gone in my place. That day I think I hallucinated. I recall seeing and "feeling" images around and on me. The images were animals, circus animals. They were drawn with simple white lines like stick-figure cartoons. One of them was an elephant. He sat on my chest and head, and his weight was light, but real. Years later in my journey I went to an acupuncturist who would push needles into particular points in my body that he said were connected to specific areas and fields of energy. He hit the elephant like a dentist accidentally tapping a root when he's drilling. I felt him again, his thin translucent heaviness pressing down on me. There was something there, some box, some step I had failed to see. I added it to my life line.

After so many years of holding these moments in my hands and sorting through them, I think I've discovered a flaw. I think it is this: my visual has a definitive beginning, and it begins with me, a nine-pound little fat kid born in a hospital in the northeast Bronx, NY. But in actuality, the line started well before that. There are boxes I never saw, though now I know I've felt their influence. Boxes that started with my parents, who were walking their own paths and happened to stumble on me like a baby left in a basket on a marble stoop. Isn't he cute?

It's like the singer/songwriter Elvis Costello wrote in Accidents will Happen, "it's the damage that we do and never know/ it's the words that we don't say that scare me so."

It's actually the little brightly-colored life boxes that I never saw that scare the hell out of me. What do you suppose I missed?

A lot. I know I missed my mother's parents, an angry mom of her own who ruled with the iron fist of an old queen. I missed my father's own parents, his dad a handsome but sad Irishman with a head of thick hair that turned grey early. He drank and drank and drank. He did not give my father anything - no decent home, no decent clothes or education, no real guidance. He brought all that into his own fatherhood.

I missed my parents, still with bad complexions, at the tender ages of 16 and 17, having sex one afternoon on the floor while my mother was babysitting. They conceived my brother right then and there, and several months later they were married because you had to be married. It was 1957. My parents were children. About a year later, I came along, chubby and cute with a mouth to feed and shitty diapers to change and they took me home because they had to.

I missed all those boxes, but I know they led to mine. That's the start, really, a couple of children in a hospital in the Bronx in the late 1950s with a one-year baby and a new one now in their arms and on their hands.

So that's how it started.

People I still hate - #1 Perry Simone (Part II)

A big part of the problem with being a loner or a loser is that you literally lose touch with what other people think and how they act. By the time I got to high school I was living in my third state in 14 years, had suffered occasional abuse at the hands of my red-haired mother, and had been consistently counseled that I was a directionless dolt with little upside. Perhaps because of that emotional concoction, I had developed coping mechanisms that veered between jumping up and down in search of attention and love, and crawling inside my own head looking for something positive to hang onto. Anything, really. I'd created my own little reality, an island where you could tell people to go fuck themselves and there were no consequences. You could just walk away and everything would be just swell in the morning, as if it never happened.

How was I to know that Perry Simone didn't live on my island? How was I to know that on the other side of that door that afternoon was not only a skinny little Italian kid with a Napoleonic complex, but two huge Simone sycophants as well who happened to double as his high school bodyguards?

I didn't know, but I found out. It started the very next day in the Immaculate High School cafeteria when my new best friend approached as I sat at a table with some other freshmen. Perry pushed through some nearby doors, leaned over and told me come in the hall. That's when I met his goons, two oversized upperclassmen with their ties slightly loosened. One had thick blonde hair and red, red lips. The other was black-haired with a hint of a five o'clock shadow on his sharp jaw. I never learned their names, but I saw them both up-close because one or the other immediately grabbed me by my tie the moment I entered the hallway and jacked me up against the industrial painted cement block wall.

"Think you're tough freshmen? We're gonna kill you. We're going to rip your balls off and feed them to you . We're gonna torture you." Perry Simone stood behind them sneering, pressing his fist into his little dark palm. They pushed me. They tightened their tie grip to choking capacity. They breathed on me.

I said nothing. What was there to say? I'd spoken so eloquently the day before.

The routine went on for months, mostly in hallways, sometimes outside, whenever they saw me they bullied me. I lived in constant fear, knowing always precisely where I was and whether Perry and his boys were anywhere in the vicinity. I would sit in class and constantly glance out the doorway. Were they waiting?

You'd think they'd tire of it after awhile. It took some time. I suppose they had nothing better to do and I was such an easy mark. Only once did I speak, stand up as much as I could with my tie snug against my windpipe. As the gorillas roughed me up in the hall by the cafeteria one morning I squeaked to Perry Simone that I knew I could kick his ass, and if I ever saw him alone I would do just that to the little bastard. Some big stand I made.

The worst part of all this was that there was no one to share it with. Oh, to have had a friend, another wimpy loser I could at least have shared my misery with, someone who could have said "yeah that happened to me once, I hate those people," and we would devise creative ways to make them suffer. But there was not a soul. I certainly wasn't going to the school administrators or teachers, it just wasn't done. As low as my self-esteem and self-worth were, it could only plummet more if I crawled to some adult whining about being mistreated by several of the fine young Catholic students of Immaculate. I couldn't tell my parents for a number of reasons. Mainly I figured they wouldn't care and would find a way to blame it on me (well, it kind of was my fault, after all). More so, I was afraid they would; that they, my father especially, would feel embarrassed that his foul-mouthed son had caused his family name to be disrespected. I was afraid he'd make a big deal and I would end up in the Principal's office, a priest probably, fingering Perry Simone and his posse, and the next day I would be alone again in the hallway pressed against cement blocks with my tie embedded in my Adam's apple. No thanks. No thanks at all.

So I tolerated it. I stumbled through much of my freshman year at Immaculate in fear and loathing and quiet desperation. Always, no matter where I was, there were three constants in my head - failure, Perry Simone, and two goons with a penchant for ties.

It was not a stellar year. One of the highlights was that I met a kid I actually liked who treated me like a human. His name was Ralph Scozzafava, another Italian, dark skinned and gangly. Ralph was a bit of a jock, a basketball player who had played on the middle school team and had plans to do the same on the freshman team at Immacullate. Ralph was actually a pretty good ballplayer and pretty serious about it. In fact long after I left, he became an all-state player at Immaculate. Ralph's seriousness convinced me that I too should try out for the freshman basketball team because that's what you do as a high school freshman, you get involved, you try out for teams, as if everyone is equal and you just pick and choose what activites you want to get involved with. Let's see, I'll do basketball and prom court. I suppose that I didn't tell Ralph that I had little to no experience and less talent as a basketball player, and he must have been cool or kind enough not to mention the fact that I was not tall and not gangly and not really much of anything.

As a way to get in in shape for basketball, Ralph decided to run on the cross country team and I decided to join him. Big mistake. ven then I was smoking cigarettes pretty regularly and I hated to run, still do. I ended running in two races, finished 21st once and in the other someone stepped on the back of my foot in the first hundred yards and my running shoe came off. I had to stop and put it back on - a deficit that only added to my glaring deficit. I finished somewhere near dead last. It didn't matter, really. I sucked at cross country and knew it. I quit after a few weeks, turned in my tank top.

Later I actually did try out for the freshman basketball team. Despite my failure at cross country, Ralph and worked out several times at the local YMCA in advance. Ralph, by the way had stuck with cross country for the entire season. For the tryouts my mother bought me three pairs of new cool tall white athletic socks with colored rings near the knees. I think she wanted me to look good. I recall that actually thought I had a shot at making the team. I was not then a good judge of my own abilities. During a scrimmage in the second practice I hit an outside jumper, pure luck, but I thought maybe it would draw some attention, raise an eyebrow, cause a spark. In the end, Ralph made the team. I was cut the end of that second day, and was left with a new pair of unused socks for gym class.

In the spring I tried out for baseball. I was cut. I couldn't hit worth a damn. Not much of a fielder, either. Somewhere in there I also got myself in trouble with another kid, this one a cool jock, a basketball stud named Bob Bollinger. He was a senior and perhaps the coolest guy in a school of pretty uncool people. To balance the catholic uniform he would shed his blue jacket with the Immaculate crest on the breast pocket. He would undo the buttons at the wrists of his dress shirt and jam his hands into the pockets of his fitted grey dress pants. He had moderately long brown hair parted in the middle and would walk with a long bouncy step so the sleeves and the hair would bounce along with him as he walked the school hallways. Cool. Because he was at the opposite end of my spectrum I noticed him, and to get attention I would sometimes undo the buttons on my sleeves, jam my hands in my pockets and walk around Spanish class doing Bob Bollinger imitations. Who the hell I was to be mocking a popular jock I don't know, but I do know word apparently got back to him. His sister Laurie, a buck-toothed but attractive freshman was in one of my classes. At some point I got word that Bob Bollinger was "after me," wanted to kick my ass for my mocking his cool. He never did and I never actually spoke any words to or with him, but the threat was there, and my own need for attention and acceptance had once again turned on me.

I also fall madly in love with a girl named Margaret Tihman, she too of Italian descent who wore her black hair parted down the middle with two long pieces from either side of the front wrapped tautly around her temples and were held together in back with a barrette. She had the locker next to mine at school and I would hint at my passion but she never bit. In reality, Margaret was equally in love with Danny Fitzgerald, who had been the star of the junior high basketball team and would go on to star on the freshman hoops squad at Immaculate, the one I was cut from. Margaret and I never amounted to anything. I called her once on the phone and had a brief, awkward freshman conversation, one of those that what's not said speaks louder than what it is.

I also got drunk that year for the first time. I met a guy at Immaculate named Brian Rowe, who became my personal hero for a short time. He was an athletic kid but not a jock, good looking, tight curled brown hair, funny, charismatic, the kind of guy who could easily float through any of the tight-knit high school groups and be accepted. The best part was that he didn't really give a shit whether anyone liked him or not. Unlike me, he was supremely confident.

We got drunk one night at his house where I spent the night. He got into his parent's liquor cabinet and we drank deep swigs of gin from a clear bottle. I did somersaults on his parent's wall-to-wall carpeting and loved the dizzy, loose unfettered feeling it gave me. Brian thought I was funny. I loved him for it.

As for Perry Simone, he and the goons did eventually fade away, their hallway harassments growing fewer and fewer as the year marched on.

Late in the spring of my freshman year I was caught smoking in the bathroom at Immaculate, another uncalculated risk that did not pay off. I had taken to going to a first floor john at the school where the majority of the smokers hung out; a bathroom that was always thick with blue smoke and toughs in blue blazers. Instead of stepping into a stall, I stood out in the open by the urinals puffing away. That day a door opened, a teacher appeared from a cloud and I was dead to rights despite my late lame attempt at discretion, which included turning my back to the urinal, my hands and smoking cigarette behind me. I backed up and dropped the offending smoke into the ceramic piss pot. It hissed but continued to smoulder. Of all the smokers that morning only two were sent to the office. Busted.

So I did end up in the Principal's office. He was not a priest, but he was a prick. At my father's request I was suspended from school for three days AND given an in-school suspension which included the humiliating job of cutting the school's grass after classes were over in the afternoon. My dad felt I needed to be taught a lesson I would not forget. He was right. Between dad and the prick of a principal, they also collectively decided I was not Immaculate material, and when the school year ended we permanently parted ways, Immaculate back to its Immaculate conception of itself, me back to my futile attempts at finding something that would set me apart.

That summer before I started at my next school - Danbury High School, home of the Hatters (Danbury was a former hat manufacturing town), I had one last glimpse of my past, or perhaps my future.

I was alone, as always, riding my white ten-speed Iverson bicycle. I had crested the hill on Birch Road and turned right onto Middle River Road. I noticed another bike was there riding slowly along the side of the road which was marked like a river with a shore of loose brown dirt on the sides. The kid was about my age, thin, wiry, riding an expensive green ten-speed, an Italian job, not like mine which my parents had bought at the Gold Circle discount store.

I recognized him right away. Who could forget? I'd know him now, the black hair thrust to his eyebrows, the small tight mouth, tiny teeth, the dark skin, the snarl. Simone, fucking Simone, alone and in my neighborhood.

Yeah, I thought about it for a moment, about kicking over his bike, about confronting him, about doing something tough and awful and redeeming, something that would balance the scale for just one bloody moment of a terrible year that had done nothing but reaffirm my uselessness, my immaturity, my nothing. This was the moment when the music was supposed to swell and the bad guy gets pushed out the window and glass shards scatter in slow motion and the crowd, all of whom have been bullied at some time too, gasps and applauds.

I rode toward him slowly, briefly, then turned away, back down middle River to Birch, home. I was aware of it, the moment, the opportunity.

"Fuck it," I told myself. "What good now? What does it achieve? What does it change?"

Nothing then, nothing at all. I can still see him pedaling slowly, the front tire of his bike coiling one way like a snake readying itself for a quick movement. Fight or flight. I wonder if he knew it was me, if he knew I saw him, if he knew I was scared to death, as always.

That moment I would like to have back. That moment, of all of them that have slipped through my fingers, that I have lost, that I have damaged, I would like to have back. I would like, just once, just once, to have hurt someone back.

People I still hate - #1 Perry Simone (Part I)

Because of a combination of my awkward social skills and my father continually moving us, I ended up going to four different high schools between 1972 and 1976. Two of them were in Connecticut, one in Ohio, one (very briefly) in California. Two of the four were Catholic schools. School mascots ranged from an Elk to a Mustang to a Hatter. No shit, a Hatter.

But no matter how many times I switched schools, or how seemingly unique or alike each of these bastions of public education were, each of the dusty locker-lined halls had one key ingredient they shared - I hated each and every one.

Why? Probably because I mostly loathed myself. Or at the very least I had no fucking idea who I was, and so it was impossible for me to seamlessly slip from one high school aquarium to another. Different if I had been able to associate myself with some accepted pre-formed high school group - jock, stoner, honor roll, gay, nerd, whatever. Unfortunately for me, I was none of those things. In reality I was nothing, in part the result of never having stayed in any one place long enough to figure out what I did well or what I didn't well, and not having had the luxury of finding other people similar to me I could associate with. Even a band of nothings is better than nothing at all.

I began my high school journey at Immaculate HS in Danbury, Connecticut, a private catholic school complete with a stone Mother Mary on the front lawn and uniforms. My mother by the way purchased my uniform from the school the summer before classes began. We didn't know you could buy the damn things from anywhere - they were grey slacks, regular old standard issue grey slacks. Well the pants arrived in the mail and they were not only made of some material without a whisper of natural fiber, they were huge - oversized in the waist and the legs were wide enough for an elephant gam. "We paid for them," my mother said in response to my "you've got to be kidding me" protest. "You'll wear them." And so I did. And I looked like a douchebag. Welcome to high school. Catholic-style.

So began a four-year (actually three years and change) journey of extreme awkwardness and generally bad results. I entered this supposedly crucial phase of young adulthood already at a deficit. I was 14 years old and was working on my third location already. I had no friends. I had no real interests, and I would do or give anything in the world to just fit in, quietly fit in.

And then came Perry Simone.

Perry was a thin little weaselly guy with straight black hair that fell just to the crest of his eyebrows, which gave him an excuse to develop a habit of continually pressing his palm across his forehead, using his pinkie as a comb to move the hair to the side. I believe he was Italian. I also believe his father owned a local insurance agency, because I recall seeing the name SIMONE posted on billboards in Danbury, quietly stalking me even in the car.

I met Perry quite unexpectedly one afternoon as I was trying to catch my bus home from school. Understand, it was early in the fall term of my freshman year and I literally knew no one at the school. I already disliked the place which seemed to me to have attracted all the snotty upper middle class kids whose parents could afford a private school education, or just young Catholics with built-in superiority complexes. For the most part they ignored me, seeing the nothingness I exuded. I would welcome that now as an adult, but as a 14-year old with a catatonic hard-on and self-esteem issues, I had been hoping maybe, just maybe I could find a niche.

That afternoon I had somehow ended up in a strange hallway of classrooms on the first floor of Immaculate, so I was running late for the bus. Not that I was in any great rush to get home to my terrific and loving family, but to give you an idea how out of place I was, even home was a welcome distraction to school. Every afternoon the school bus would drop me off about a quarter mile from my house - at the corner of Birch Road and Fox Den Road. I would get off alone and sprint home, my oversized grey uniform dress slacks flapping at the sides, my plaid tie over my shoulder like a panting tongue. I just wanted to hide, to run, to get out all the energy that was stored inside and had nowhere to go. I would barely acknowledge my mother if she were home, then go into my bedroom, take off my shoes, close my eyes on the bed and disappear.

That day, however, there was nowhere to hide. In my bus haste, I'd pushed through a pair of heavy metal doors heading to the lobby of the school where I at least knew the way to the buses when, wham, there was Perry Simone on the other side.

I had no idea who he was. I would find out later only that he was a sophomore and a complete and total self-absorbed asshole and bully. My first high school acquaintance.

I was a little stunned someone was on the other side of the tan industrial strength door, and worse yet that I'd actually hit him with it. It was not on purpose. Nothing I did was on purpose. And Christ, the absolute last thing in the world I wanted at that moment in my fledgling high school career was to draw negative attention to myself in a strange and potentially savage (my mind) environment.

But there it was, the door, the wiry Italian guy, the tension. I stopped, still holding the door open. Instinct, pure instinct. I was embarrassed, scared, unsure. So I did what I had always done. I made things worse.

"Get the fuck out of my way," I said to the black-haired boy on the other side of the door. It was not the first time I had spoken before I thought, and would certainly not be the last. This was one of those times though that I would pay for the sins of my mouth.

He stood still and stared at me. His eyes were dark brown turning to black. There was something about him that hinted of an old man, the way he put his hands to his hips, pushing aside the blue Catholic school blazer.

"You're a freshman, aren't you," he said? Oh boy, I could feel it already. I was hoping for a nice "sorry" or an "excuse me," some way to duck past my quick trigger stupidity. That's all I ever wanted. A second chance. No luck. Never any luck. Maybe he smelled my weakness from the start.

"Apologize to me," he said. Apologize, like I was a child who had impetuously stomped on his foot. "Apologize."

I didn't. I couldn't. I didn't know how to.

"Go fuck yourself," I said and pushed past him heading to the bus and the sprint home and the only glorious moment I had each day when I tried and I tried to disappear.