Sophomore year, I was also required to take biology. My teacher, Mr. Patterson, was himself was a former Christian brother. He was known for his odd and eccentric behaviors. He would drive around the parking lot during his lunch break for fun. Patterson once told my biology class that he used to test drugs for Benedictine monks. He would usually go to the faculty lounge each day and say, “I am coming down from the mountain today.” Most of the teachers just appeased him and never knew what he was talking about. Mr. Patterson believed that the best teacher was one who did the least. He actually made fun of students for wanting to take notes and for being so dependent on them. He would often deviate from the assigned curriculum and make us write short essays on oceans or the Eurasian gypsy mouth—a special type of insect that wasn’t even included in most high school biology curricula.
In tenth grade, I really wanted to give Saint John’s a chance. I decided to get more involved in extracurricular activities. I wasn’t athletic at all—I was made fun of because I couldn’t do a pull-up—so I joined the speech and debate team instead. Most every Saturday, the team would meet students from different schools and have debate competitions. My main motivation was that I could meet girls, which actually made me feel like even more of a loser for having to use the debate team as my main way of trying to find a date. My mother still worked part-time at a local grocery store, Price Chopper, so the group’s faculty advisor, Mrs. Brady (also my Spanish teacher), drove me to and from the debate competitions.
I enjoyed the speech and debate team very much. It was a very positive experience because I got to meet other high school students and socialize with my classmates at Saint John’s. I wasn’t a debate person and I didn’t enjoy spending hours researching why the death penalty was wrong, so I participated in something called declamation, in which each competitor was judged on how well he or she presented the speech. In my first competition, I came in third place and won a trophy. There were only three people in the competition, but I was very proud of the award. It was like when I worked at Home Depot and won the Cashier Olympics; I was so proud that I put the Cashier Olympics accomplishment on resumes and job applications for the next three years.
During my time on the debate team, I got to go to Chicago, Boston, and other high schools in the Capital District. In the spare time we had between the competitions, I would mainly socialize with some of the girls I met. There was one girl I ended up having a crush on—Janine. I never dated her, and she thought I was weird, but I enjoyed her sense of humor. One time she broke into a chemistry lab and pretended to be Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.
Mainly I remember Janine because for years when I had to defend myself to other guys, as I hadn’t dated anybody or done anything sexually with a girl, I said we made out so that I didn’t seem like a complete prude. It worked well. There was actually a senior student who got kicked off the team after getting caught receiving oral sex in the hotel room at a debate competition, so my claim was certainly plausible. People had seen me talking to her, but she didn’t know anybody from my school well enough to have heard the rumor. It was adolescent gold.
If there was one thing that I took away from my experience on the speech and debate team, it was the quote that I referenced in the speech that I gave almost every Saturday, which was from an unknown author: “I take people as I find them, I like them for who they are, and not despise them for who they are not.” As a sixteen-year-old, I would practice this speech to make sure that I had spoken clearly, demonstrated good body language, and had good stage presence, but the meaning of the speech, and especially that quote, was as foreign to me as organic chemistry.
I turned sixteen that February. My mother told me in the weeks and months before my birthday that over the summer I would have to get a job somewhere. She told me that she worked when she was sixteen and actually had to pay rent. I wasn’t expected to pay rent, but my mother wanted me to experience what it was like to work as soon as I could, even though she had just received a promotion that increased her salary by about fourteen thousand dollars. She was promoted to a senior computer programmer/technology specialist and had the luxury of quitting her part-time job as a bagger in a grocery store.
Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I started looking for a part-time job. Since I had gotten into that fistfight a year earlier, I had spent a lot of time at home and my mother thought it would be a good way for me to branch out, meet people, and boost my self-esteem. While I really wanted to get a job at Hannaford (a local grocery chain in Albany), mainly because the cashiers got to wear cool jackets, I ended up applying at McDonald’s and started working there in April 1999.
I would spend my days in school with students who came from financially sound families, and during the evenings and on weekends, I would spend my time working with co-workers. Some
