Help Me Find the Poem that Doesn’t Suck, that Isn’t Hack

Hey guys, want to see something awkward? It’s an old guy trying to connect with his senior year of high school so he can empathize with his senior students whose minds are focused on things other than school (nobody’s saying that’s a bad thing, all right).

Let’s get some details down, because it’s true, what Robert Frost says, that way leads on to way, and the details are those points of entry I like so much to mention. It’s 1983, I have discovered U2 through the “New Year’s Day” video, thanks to those winter hours spent indoors watching MTV. I’ve hung out with people cool enough to listen to college radio and WLIR, but I can’t get into it: people are actually listening to Flock of Seagulls and the Human League. I’d been listening to Genesis and Yes like so many other suburban kids, but U2 is singing about things that matter, and the emotion seems genuine – it speaks to me. Still, the guitar crunches alternating from speaker to speaker on that Led Zeppelin song we always listen to in Steve Heller’s Dodge Dart as we drive back from Mr. C’s deli where they use Miracle Whip instead of mayonnaise on your roast beef sandwich makes for a good time. Steve has a cassette deck, which makes his car very cool (as does the fact that a Dodge Dart itself would be such a loser car if you didn’t get fired up about the fact that everyone is so aware that it’s a loser car).

It’s March. I’m taking four classes: Art of the Film, Economics, Psychology and Advanced Composition. I’m taking these classes because they are the paths of least resistance to the finish line of high school, and because nobody ever made me do anything when I was in high school. This wasn’t my mother’s fault; she had a lot more to worry about than whether or not I demanded any effort of myself, what with her oldest daughter baing a senior in college, less than two months away from her pre-graduation night deewee. My sister Maureen, a junior at Villanova, is like me, no trouble, low maintenance, except for the hours she would spend on the phone talking guy troubles with my fourth grade sister. My brother, well, he was a piece of work. We were a little disconnected at the time. He had finished high school the year before, but whether or not he had graduated by the moment I’ve selected for this reflection I don’t know. So I was between the brother who was screwing up and the sister who was young; whether or not I put forth effort in school never really came up. So I do about ten minutes of homework a day, usually during class. I take psychology as a social studies class, so I’m ill-prepared for the science, and I disregard it because I want to get to the interesting stuff like dream interpretation. I marvel at how a guy like Mike Felcher has to shave every day and rides a motorcycle to school. I wonder why a boy like me is sitting in the same room with a man like him. I’ll barely do any homework but I’ll stay up all night practically rewriting the entire student newspaper and not give that time a second thought – somehow I’m the editor-in-chief.

The month before I had applied to two colleges: Fairfield and Villanova. I suppose I didn’t have the whole reach-safety-schools in between plan. All I wanted to do was find a school far enough away for me to live at but close enough that I could get home on my own in case my mother needs me. What she would need me for I have no idea, and what I could actually do if she needed me is equally elusive. Nevertheless. I gave up on applying to University of North Carolina because it seemed too far away and there was the possibility of rejection. Boston College came off the list because Mary Sweeney was going there.

If you look at the colleges I was considering you can see how clueless I was about a lot of things. You see a state school in there? No. My mother won’t even let me get my driver’s license because it would be too expensive to have my brother and me on her car insurance, and I’m considering all these private colleges. If she’d told me I could only apply to state schools, I don’t think I would have thought twice about it, but hey, it’s not my fault nobody ever put pressure on me for anything, though maybe I bear some blame for not putting any pressure on myself.

Because it’s March, it’s just around Mary Sweeney’s birthday. She’s turning 18, having a party at her house. This will turn out to be one of the rare places where my two lives meet. You see, by weekday, I’m Mike from White Plains High School, and I hang out with Steve Heller, Jeff Corbin, Rob Sussman, Andy Lazar. I have a desperate crush on Pam Lyons, whose affection, if it was returned, would probably boost me up a lot in the eyes of other guys. On the weekends, I’m Mike, the public school guy who hangs out with the catholic school guys – Sully, Mugs, Hick, Peewee, Dave - and their far-flung friends. Those guys are still my closest friends.

Mary Sweeney and I haven’t seen each other in a few months. In the fall, we were boyfriend/girlfriend. There’s probably some complex psychological reason that I stopped seeing her. Sometimes that’s a euphemism for breaking up, but I took it literally. I simply stopped seeing her. She went to a different school, so it was easy to simply not make the effort to see her. So there was no break-up ritual, just me being such a loser that I tried to believe that ignoring something would mean it didn’t exist. If I had to come up with some insight, I would probably blame shame, the shame I felt about not having a driver’s license, about having to rely on getting rides to go with her to parties in New Rochelle and Larchmont and all those other places her catholic school friends lived. Plus, there was the money shame – it sucks feeling like you’re the only kid out of everyone you know who doesn’t have money. This feeling, like a lot of examples of shame, arises from ignorance, from the assumption that kids who have two parents and live in houses have no money troubles, and from the assumption that paying for college for my younger sister and me would literally bankrupt my mother. It’s been a long time that I’ve felt that shame is the worst possible emotion, because most of it arises out of how you feel about yourself, and only some of it from the things you’ve done.

Way leading onto way as it does, I remember this morning that March 18 is Mary Sweeney’s birthday. Her house therefore will be the social epicenter of White Plains catholic school kids that night, and I’ll be there too, trying to stay out of sight. And then my public school world crashes the party. So in Mary’s backyard, with everyone else in the house, I kiss Pam Lyons for the first time. For a few minutes, until her ex-boyfriend appears, and there’s drama, and I go to find my friends, and then Mary Sweeney is crying, and the whole thing’s a mess, and I’m like, Jesus Christ, this is me we’re talking about – who gives a shit?

I’m five minutes from my self-imposed hour limit.

For a couple of weekends, Pam and I see each other on the sly – she teaches me what the word “clandestine” means. I figure I’ll ask her to the prom. I’ve been saving up, because the whole thing is pretty pricey: not only do you have the prom itself, but then the tradition of taking a limo into New York City to go to a club, then somehow ending up at Jones Beach on Long Island. It’s something like a $300 night, 1983 dollars. But what happens? I create a sort of distance between Pam and me, she hooks up with one of my catholic school friends, and now prom is out of the question, because there’s no way in hell I’m spending that kind of money to go as friends. My disconnect to my weekday life continues almost daily. The guys I hang out with during the week start to take offense to my absence on the weekends – I wasn’t using them, but I can see how it looked that way. Then I get better acquainted with Leslie Hickey on night after Terry Mangan had asked her to go to the prom as friends; it turns out Terry didn’t really want to go as friends. That pretty much sealed my status as a guy to be little more than tolerated with the public school guys. Graduation couldn’t come fast enough for me.

The good news: I used the money I didn’t spend on prom to buy a new set of golf clubs. I played with those clubs for the next fourteen summers, and believe me, I played a lot of golf during that time.

Oh well, time’s up.