Catholic Boy Pt 2

Our education was based on euphemism, attenuation and accommodation.

— Edoardo Albinati, The Catholic School.

      The peak of my academic career at St. Xavier occurred early on, two or three weeks into freshman year. Our first English assignment was an essay on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Before handing back the graded papers, “Mr. Doral” (about half the teachers at St. X were laypeople, including two women) announced that he would read one exceptional effort aloud. Two sentences in, I registered first shock and then pure pleasure — the pride of recognition. (I wouldn’t feel this thrill again until, decades later, my son was introduced as the top-ranked student at his high school graduation.) My essay positioned the slave Jim as a better role model to Huck Finn, and a far wiser man, than any of the novel’s white authority figures. Soon but not soon enough, I gathered this obvious interpretation, not to mention the deep well of skepticism from which it sprang, would not be shared or countenanced by the vast majority of my instructors. Also, this was the first and last time during four years of high school that my nascent writing ability was recognized or acknowledged in any way. 

***

     Absorbed by twice-daily swimming practice plus homework, I barely registered the absence of women during freshman year. But the stultifying aroma of an all-male atmosphere seeped into my pores, spreading until it turned my stomach. In the spring of 1973, St. Xavier won the Ohio state swimming championship. In a school-wide PA announcement, I was acknowledged as a member of the winning 4 x 100 yard freestyle relay team and the only freshman on the varsity squad. Much to my confusion, right after this recognition crackled through the loudspeaker located next to the clock, our Spanish teacher sneered and mocked my achievement — out loud, in front of everybody. I neither expected nor desired an “atta boy” pat on the back. Yet it took a minute to comprehend why “Mr. Bilgerman” (also head baseball coach) was so contemptuous.   

      Swimming was widely regarded as a less-than-manly pursuit by participants in the “ball sports.” And Bilgerman’s baseball squads, as well as St. Xavier’s football and basketball teams for that matter, traditionally had never ranked high in the city league, let alone triumphed on the state level. All right then, he was jealous. Still, his unexpected and humiliating insult in the classroom seriously deflated my ego. He planted a seed of doubt, a sense of difference, in my developing self-awareness. There was a masculine standard, unspoken but understood, that I would never meet. 

***

      Forcing people to act contrary to their own natures is the ultimate proof of power. —ibid.

***

     My extracurricular interests  – science fiction, Kerouac’s On The Road, New Journalism, rock and roll above all else – bobbed up to the surface during sophomore year. I read and re-read Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. What attracted me to the story of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters was not only the drug experimentation and psychedelic music, but also Wolfe’s flashy, shape-shifting descriptive prose coupled with observant reporting. Around this time I encountered the rock critic Lester Bangs at the public library, writing about exotic creatures such as Lou Reed and Iggy Pop in Stereo Review. And at home I’d become mesmerized by Pauline Kael’s movie reviews in my parents’ copies of The New Yorker.   

       In English we studied poetry and drama while drilling vocabulary for the SAT test the following year. Two more formative sophomore memories: reading Sophocles’ Antigone between heats at a spring swimming meet, and voluntarily memorizing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. I was far from a gloomy death-obsessed teenager, yet the Bard’s wintry imagery struck me then, and strikes me now, as incomparably haunting and beautiful.

      That time of year thou mayst in me behold

      When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

      Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

      Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 

      In history class that year, we read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. How on earth did that happen at conservative, 99% white St Xavier? While I can’t recall any accompanying discussion or explication, Malcolm’s clear-eyed tales of his (pre-conversion) ghetto wild life stayed with me forever.

     The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

Before or after Easter 1974, in lieu of a Spring Break, St. Xavier High School uncharacteristically decided to broaden the curriculum (and our growing minds) with a period of extracurricular programming devoted to “The Arts.” 

Predictably, it did not end well. A screening of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter with Alan Arkin got interrupted just minutes into the movie, by a snickering student in the peanut gallery. The film was abruptly terminated and so was Arts Week. In the following years, we stuck to our regular pre-Easter program of study days, mid-term exams and a brief vacation.  

      Nobody else cared about finishing the movie, or Arts Week. My fellow students were mostly pissed about having to resume our routine. A few years later, however, I caught The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter at a campus film group; by then it seemed overwrought and corny, but gaining “closure” was satisfying.

       Long after I graduated, my father pointed out a guiding principle of my high school that was so obvious that I’d never noticed, or just took it for granted: St. X emphasized math and science at the expense of every other subject save religion. This was practical in the short term, but tragically short-sighted in my dad’s view, which was interesting coming from a chemical engineer and industrial salesman. As evidence, for two consecutive years at St. Xavier my history class consisted of a varsity athletic coach talking (and joking) about his World War II experience — every day. It wasn’t until college that I realized the liberal arts and social sciences were regarded as serious academic disciplines in the real world.

Catholic Boy: Part 1

       It became known as the Circeo massacre, one of Italy’s most infamous incidents in a decade lavish with violence. In 1975, two young women, Rosaria Lopez and Donatella Colasanti, were held prisoner by three young men. The girls were drugged, tortured and repeatedly raped. Lopez was drowned in a bathtub. Colasanti lived, but I find I cannot type out what she endured.

     The novelist Edoardo Albinati attended the same school as the killers. In “The Catholic School” — a 1,200-page slab of lament, accusation, exorcism — he anatomizes the world that produced them. His critique expands in widening concentric circles to indict their prestigious all-boys school, neighborhood and faith, the national cults of fascism and “familism.” Rape, torture, murder: These are not violations of society’s norms, according to Albinati, but their fulfillment.

— Sehgal, Parul: “A Prize-Winning Blend of Fact and Fiction Makes Itself at Home in the Minds of Killers” The New York Times Aug. 6, 2019

       Fifty pages into Edoardo Albinati’s epic novel, I hit pause and lost myself in a mild state of shock. And recognition. I attended an all-male Jesuit high school in the U.S. from 1972 through 1976. Though I’m one year younger than the Italian author, and nobody at my Catholic School committed a rape/murder (as far as I know), from the beginning this book triggered emotions, memories, insights that never let up over the next 1200 pages.

*

       I’ve often wondered if certain deeply unsuccessful or aborted experiences are at least as significant as those that are fully consummated, whether it was worthwhile to live through them as they were, rather than in a more fully achieved and yet unremarkable realization. 

— Edoardo Albinati The Catholic School 

*

      I enjoyed school at first, for a couple years. Learning to read was liberating, until my love of books became a liability. After attending first grade at the local public school, like all Catholic students in our Cincinnati, Ohio parish, I belatedly began second grade at St Vivian. The neighborhood parochial school on Winton Road sat virtually next door to the public Whittaker Elementary  — a distance of several hundred yards, at most. On a spiritual level, this gulf was vast, insurmountable. Or so the Ursuline nuns told us.      

      Maybe half the families in our middle-class suburban neighborhood were Catholic and the rest were Protestant. The Marx family, who lived at the end of our street and kept to themselves, were to my knowledge the only Jews in the immediate vicinity. They probably drove a few miles east to Amberley Village or Roselawn to attend Sabbath services; I don’t remember any obvious synagogues in the Finneytown/College Hill area. 

Mainline Protestant churches were plentiful, yet they barely registered in my youthful consciousness. These tasteful houses of worship – Presbyterian, Methodist and so on – could almost pass for Roman Catholic at least in terms of architecture and design (the absence of crucifixes was a “tell,” like the prominent Adam’s apple on an old-school drag queen). What I noticed, and found slightly puzzling, were the outposts of full-throated Baptist and strident smaller denominations, such as Central Baptist directly across Winton Road from St Vivian, the Church of God on Galbraith Road and the Northern Hills Bible Church on Kirkland Drive, just steps away from the house I lived in until the age of eight. The latter occupied a building that, unlike the cookie-cutter ranch houses surrounding it, resembled (and probably was) an old farmhouse predating the postwar suburban development. The other churches were squat brick school-like structures, offering messages of drive-by inspiration on changeable-letter outdoor signs. These illuminated billboards couldn’t be further in spirit from a solemn statue-encrusted Roman Catholic sanctuary; the local evangelical churches advertised Jesus Christ as if He was the seasonal strawberry pie at Frisch’s Big Boy. In my brief pre-teen juvenile delinquent phase, I fantasized about sneaking out on a Saturday night and rearranging those letters into an obscenity in time for the Sunday services. Of course I never did.

      During fourth grade, spanning the 1967-68 school year, I lost all enthusiasm for school in general and Catholic education in particular. Each year grew successively more difficult. My report cards annually displayed two dreaded checkmarks (denoting need for improvement), in conduct and penmanship. I could never quite figure out what I did wrong, apart from being a sloppy cursive writer; it wasn’t like I fought with other kids or seriously disrupted class. Talking “out of turn” — possibly code for asking inconvenient questions? — was often cited as my repeat offense. In fifth grade, I was assigned to the “advanced” (gifted) class. My placement there soon became a point of contention with the faculty and then, of course, my parents. Though I scored high on achievement and IQ tests, my grades were mercurial, inconsistent — all over the place. Some of this was my own fault, for instance I read a lot though rarely what we were assigned in class. Here my mom was an enabler as she regularly escorted me to the public library yet paid little or no attention to what I borrowed. (Wrongly, I assumed everybody’s mother read so deeply and widely in literary fiction; she devoured three or four novels per week.)

       Unlike the modern education system, where such a wide chasm between my potential-as-measured and actual achievement in the classroom might signal some learning difference or issue, in Catholic School during the Sixties and early Seventies my grades were attributed to a lack of effort. For this I got in trouble. I was punished. You’re so intelligent, why aren’t you trying? I never knew how to answer; I’m trying as hard as I can definitely didn’t cut it. Biannual parent-teacher conferences placed a continual strain on our basically happy home life.

By eighth grade, the impending prospect of high school offered an escape hatch. Continuing in the Catholic system was automatic as far as my father was concerned, and despite my accelerating interest in girls, the nearby boys-only Jesuit high school appealed because of its top-ranked swimming team. In fact, for several years, I’d been a member of an AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) team who practiced at this high school’s Olympic sized facility (donated by a wealthy alum). The coaches kept an eye on me.

      Academically, St. Xavier was a well-regarded college prep school, which made for a rare unity of purpose between me and my dad. There was a small matter of an entrance examination, though when the results were announced, it turned out I’d placed highly enough to receive a one semester scholarship. (Tuition for the 1972-73 school year was $600 if I remember correctly.) Before eighth grade began, I’d been drummed out of the advanced class, so my “St. X” scholarship drew a perplexed, almost resentful response from St Vivian’s faculty. No matter. In my mind, anyway — I was already gone.

*      

Did competitive swimming kept me out of serious trouble during adolescence? Well, not really. Put it this way: I would have sunk into deeper trouble earlier – way over my head – if I hadn’t been involved in athletics. Until the final semester of my senior year in high school, anyway, I managed to keep my head above water (so to speak.) On January 12, 1976 my penchant for mild adolescent misbehavior, and my semi-exalted social status as a student athlete collided. And then my life changed forever.