At the end of eighth grade, I was very scared about going to high school. The high school in my district had between seventeen hundred and eighteen hundred students in grades nine through twelve. I was an extremely late developer and by age fourteen hadn’t shown any signs of entering puberty. My friends, meanwhile, were smoking marijuana, and some were even having sex. I’d heard all the stories of the high school parties filled with drinking and experimental drug use, and I never wanted to do anything like that.
As a child, one of the few things that my mother mentioned about my father was that he graduated from a private, Catholic all-boys high school in Albany called Saint John’s (a pseudonym). My mother told me that my father even offered to pay if I wanted to go there. Anthony’s son, Paul, was also a senior at Saint John’s, and both Paul and Anthony had always considered themselves so superior and never really fully accepted me. I thought that if I went to Saint John’s, I could avoid the big school and get the acceptance of Anthony, his family, and my biological father. I had never met my biological father. He always paid child support regularly for the most part. For the few instances when he was late, my mother would just call him on the phone. I remember thinking to myself, Why can’t I talk to him? Why doesn’t my own biological father want to talk to me? My mother could never answer that.
CHAPTER 2
SCHOOL OF HATE—WITH BROTHERS LIKE THESE, NOBODY NEEDS ENEMIES
Sometimes I would like to ask God why he allows poverty, suffering, and injustice, when he could do something about it. But I’m afraid he would ask me the same question.
—Unknown
I enrolled in Saint John’s over the summer. I was too afraid to tell anybody, so I waited until Labor Day to tell my friends that I was going to a private school. When my friends received their class schedules, I just said I hadn’t gotten mine yet. My friends were disappointed that I didn’t tell them, and I played along. I didn’t want them to know that I was going there in the hopes that my father would accept me, so I just told everyone, “I just woke up in the uniform.”
Saint John’s was a private, all-boys Catholic military high school established by the DeLaSallian Christian brothers. During the 1997–98 school year, approximately 380 boys were enrolled in grades six through twelve. The freshmen class had seventy-two students.
On September 2, 1997, I began my first day of freshman year, which was called plebe training. The first three days we learned how to march, how to do an about-face, and other basic military practices. I noticed that there were five students who had gone to the same public middle school as me. In fact, two of Eric’s friends, Evan and Dustin, were there. Evan’s two older brothers had gone to the school, and in keeping with family tradition, he did, too. Dustin was disrespectful to his parents at times, and his family enrolled him in Saint John’s to help him learn discipline.
There was nothing that I liked about Saint John’s. From the first day, I hated it. It was early September, and the temperature was still close to ninety degrees. I almost passed out, and Dustin told me later he thought he was going to have to catch me. I bought potato chips from the cafeteria during a break, but they had expired on August 17. Later, one of the seniors, who were the military officers, asked me, “Are you having fun?” I nodded my head and said, “Yes.”
“You’re a lying sack of shit. You’re not having fun,” he replied, and a bunch of my classmates started laughing at me.
Another cause for ridicule was that I have always walked on my toes. It’s just a habit I’ve never been able to break. People who walk on their toes do not march well. The students in back of me were always tripping over one another. The sergeant, who taught military science at the school, went up to me and said, “Son, were you out drinking this morning?” Once again, I was embarrassed.
The first day of academic orientation began when the assistant principal for student affairs told us, “You are at the best high school in the Capital District.” In fact, that feeling was shared among the faculty, staff, parents, and students. However, there weren’t really any statistics to demonstrate this alleged superiority. The school has always been private and never has published any statistics about SAT scores or regents exams. I found it ironic that less than five years after making that comment, the assistant principal later left Saint John’s and became an associate principal at the middle school I had attended.
The first day of classes, the behavior of some of my teachers shocked me. All of my public school teachers had been professional, and most held master’s degrees. In my freshman year of high school, of the teachers for my core subjects (English, math, science, social studies, and foreign language), three of them had postgraduate degrees, but my global studies teacher had a masters degree in English and my earth science teacher had a doctorate in English. Even though I would hear many comments about how public schools were falling behind, most of the teachers at Saint John’s wouldn’t have been qualified to teach at a public school.
The first English class that I had was
