High School Errata

I remember Garry forgot his homework at work and ran to the Sportsplex, without throwing on his winter coat and boots, to retrieve it. I told him that was crazy, that it was -30 out there and that he would freeze his ears off. He shrugged my concern off, and he didn’t.

I remember my high school parka. It was long and beige and reached past my knees. The hood zipped up until it was a long tube that projected from my face. It served me well on those long cold walks to and from O’Gorman.

Between the spring of ‘82 and the spring of ‘83, Lord of the Rings was all the rage. I’d just begun playing D&D and was keen to get a copy. I read it during all my free moments, even while walking home from school.

Not that many of my high school friends were interested in D&D. John Lavric expressed his. I brushed him off. I didn’t mean to, not in a mean way. But I did. I said it was fairly complicated and would take some time to teach him. I didn’t think he would really be interested (he was a car and snowmobile type guy, after all), not really, and it was largely a lifeguard clique thing. So, yeah, maybe I was just being an ass. I don’t know if he was insulted by my brush off. It was certainly pointed out to John as such by Danny Loreto. It thought Danny was a dick for pressing the issue, but Danny and John were pumping iron then together and maybe he was jealous for John's attention.

All those nights at the movies, those classic bits of pastime and drivel, that, once we watch again in our middle years, we are sometimes horrified by how bad they were, but weren’t then: Heavy Metal, The Dark Crystal, the Secret of Nimh, Beastmaster, what have you. There were gems in there, too, but as I recall all those John Hughes films were released in my college years and not in my high school ones. Those and others would come later: Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Diner, Reality Bites. After GenX had kicked in, in earnest, in all its angst and glory.

I'll never forget how serious Garry was when dancing. His moves were smooth, erratic, detailed, practiced. He and his sister Sharron had spent hours refining their moves. Come to think on it, so had Karen and I. So, there may be others out there who’d marvelled at my dancing technique, too.

There are more of these dropped threads, a lifetime’s worth. And I’m sure that I’ll remember more, and better ones, the moment I’ve written this. But I can’t put them all here; there are far too many of them. We all have them, those little moments that fill our time and memory, brought forth again by a smell, a glimpse of a picture, a little thing that your child does, a scene in a film. They rush in, linger for but a moment, and pass, sinking back into those murky depths they came from.

Cherish them when they do. Relive their wonder.

Automotive Escapades

I didn’t get my driver’s license at 16. I didn’t think of it. I didn’t care about it. I walked. I rode my bike. There was the bus. And there was always someone about offering me a ride. Most of my friends had theirs, though. And that’s when the “fun” began. We were teen boys, and no one should have let us within 10 feet of a steering wheel, let along keys. The vehicles of choice were Mark Charette’s 330, replete with its ever so fashionable 8 Track player, Roger Rheault’s new Trans-Am, Chris Cooper’s 3-on-a-tree pick-up truck, John Lavric’s pick-up, or his parent’s Volvo, and Renato Romey’s Firebird. Neither Garry Martin nor I had cars; neither of us had our driver’s license at the time, either. In most cases, there was too much muscle under the hood. Youth and power can be a potentially disastrous combination.

To illustrate this, I present the following cases. Enter a boy, a red-blooded Canadian youth with delusions of immortality, and a thrill of speed….

We were over at John’s place, preparing to go…wherever. We were running a little late, in a bit of a hurry. We ran out the door, piling into John’s truck, among other vehicles when John’s father came round from the back of the house. “John,” he called, “you forgot to bring the car into the driveway, like I asked you.” John looked at the Volvo parked on the street, and said, “Oh, fuck…I forgot.” He rushed back into the house, collected the keys and got behind the wheel. He revved the engine, cranked the steering wheel, and backed into the drive. Quickly. We were running late, don’t forget. The car pulled off the road in a smooth arc. And didn’t appear to be losing much speed. My heart skipped as I watched the car close with the house. When the Volvo did stop, it did so in a screech of tires, a hair’s breadth beyond the bricks within the inset depth of the basement window sill. John hopped out of the Volvo, rounded the car, and bent down to look at the bumper. He looked up at my obviously still anxious features, and wearing a broad smile, said, “Holy crap, that was close.”

Winter time, Renato, Garry and I were in Renato’s car, racing up Ross Street. Why were we travelling so fast? Lord knows. All I can say is that Renato went everywhere fast, but Garry and I never once thought to tell Renato to slow down. We were high school students, reckless, risk takers. And one didn’t nag one’s friends. Or ever appeared afraid in front of them. As we were about to top the hill, we saw another car pull out of Toke Street with the intent to gain our opposing lane. The trouble was, we were travelling so fast Renato’s car was floating on a cushion of air. Renato inched the wheel to the right and the car settled, catching just enough road to find traction. I watched from the back seat as the car we were about to T-bone accelerated, and we raced past, barely avoiding its back bumper. Renato struggled to control the Firebird, fishtailing left and right for two blocks before he brought the beast under control again. A heartbeat later Renato said to a deathly quiet car, “Whoa…that was close.” Did I say that not one of us was wearing a seat-belt?

Chris and John were in Chris’s parent’s new car. Ozzy Osbourne was singing “Flying High Again.” The volume was deafening, likely trailing bass for blocks. Chris hit a pothole, the car skid to the ditch, and Chris and John felt the car begin to roll. And it did. Both were thankfully wearing their seatbelts this time because the car came to rest on its roof. John told me later that “the stereo stopped playing while we rolled. At least I think it did, because I don’t remember hearing it. And when we stopped rolling, we were stuck there, hanging from our seats.” And then he chucked, his grin ear to ear. “Just then,” he said, “all was quiet. (Pause for effect) And then when the stereo began playing again we hear Ozzy sing, ‘Momma’s gonna worry, I’ve been a bad, bad boy.’”

I did not become wiser with age, or learn from our earlier recklessness, either, as evidence will show. I’ll skip ahead a couple years, I’m 19, out of high school, through my first year of college and working at my first real job as a student at Kidd Creek Mine. I’ve money in my pocket, money to burn on gas. And still oblivious to potential harm. I was cruising, driving my mother’s ‘79 Malibu. Man, what a car! V8, rear wheel drive, prone to fishtailing due to its oversize engine and weight distribution. Way too much power for my limited experience; I’d only passed my driver’s test and received my license the summer before. I made a pit stop, stopping to visit Dan Loreto and Anthony Lionello, up in Moneta. They were playing baseball, but took a break when they saw me pull up. We chatted for a while, but not for long; I had to get home. So, I jumped back behind the steering wheel, promptly forgetting my seatbelt. I peeled out, rounded the Flora MacDonald playground, and headed back north up Balsam and drove right through the stop sign at Kirby without seeing it or slowing down.

Halfway through Kirby, I saw a big black shape loom in my peripheral vision. I glanced left and saw the toothy maw of a grill bearing down on me. Time slowed to a crawl. I realized that the truck about to hit me was travelling at immense speed. I realized that there was no way I’d clear the intersection before I was hit, no matter what speed I was travelling at. I leaned to the right, I suppose in an attempt to retreat from the truck that’s about to hit me, and my left arm instinctively rose in the feeble hope of warding me from harm.

And then the car crumpled around me. Titillation sparkled as the glass flew. My arm caught most of it. The collapsing door thrust me further into the passenger seat. The Malibu was thrown from the grill of the pickup and I felt the tires scrape and skid on the asphalt. The car crashed into the black, wrought iron picket fence at the corner, scraping it hard. I heard metal tear.

I rose up from the passenger seat, sliding back into the now too tight driver’s seat. And tried to crank the steering wheel to correct the car’s travel, to hold it straight. The car responded, but it did so grudgingly. The wheel was stiff and tested my strength, but I did manage to set the car against the curb. It came to a stop. I put it in park. And reached to release my seatbelt. Oh, my numb mind said, when I couldn’t find it, it wasn’t on. I tried the driver’s side door. It wouldn’t budge. I reached over and tried the passenger’s. Neither did it.

I noticed than that there was broken glass around me, and saw that the driver’s window was broken, shards of glass jutting up from the door, so I tried to roll down the other. It wouldn’t roll down. I was determined to be free of the car, so I reached out, onto the roof, and pulled myself past through the driver’s side empty space. I almost blacked out, actually saw the edges of my vision narrow, but I didn’t. I pulled myself through the window space, and miraculously didn’t fall to the asphalt. I set one foot on the ground, and then I collapsed. I rose up, and made my way on weak, unsteady legs across the street, where I flopped down onto a stretch of grass there.

I looked back and saw a trail of blood leading back to the car, smears of blood on the roof, on the door. It dawned on me that, oh, that must be mine.

More details resolved to my sluggish mind. I’d parked in front of the Loreto’s house. I heard screen doors crash open.

Two thoughts crossed my mind. My old man’s gonna kill me, was the first. And, my insurance is gonna go sky high. I began to giggle. I couldn’t stop.

That’s when I heard Mrs. Loreto scream, and saw Mario Senior rushing across the street towards me.

High School Hierarchy

This may seem a bit of a rant. It’s definitely angry. I hope that it burns of defiance.

Was I popular in high school? I’d have to say, no. If anything, I was quiet and shy, especially around the girls, especially around the girls I had a crush on. I asked Penny Deluce what the girls thought of me, back then, and that's what she told me; she said she and her friends liked me, too, maybe not in the way I wanted, but it’s nice to be remembered kindly. Was I aware of my lack of popularity? I’d have to say, yes, that I was. Did that lack of popularity hurt? Yes, sometimes. But not always. I wasn’t exactly a pariah, either. I was invited to parties when I was finally old enough to attend them, more as the years passed. I even threw a few.

My first party I attended was my sister’s. I had to be invited. It would have been quite a feat to have kept it secret from me. I did live in the same house. And I was actually invited, and not just because I lived in the same house. My sister was not at all concerned with my social status. In fact, she was my coach when it came to helping me figure out how to navigate all the obstacles thrust in my way. She taught me how to dance, and we practiced how to jive together. I guess she didn’t want her brother to be a geek. And I wasn’t, not really. At her party, I was the disk jockey. It was fun. And her friends treated me well, for a kid. I think they were especially impressed with my LP collection, since I had just about everything they wanted to listen to.

But in school, I can’t say that the “cool” kids or the jocks had much to do with me. Nor I with them. As I’ve said before, I was fairly heavily involved at the pool, first as a helper, then as a guard and instructor. I had my crowd, our weekend outings at the mall and arcades, kickin’ back time at the beach, at the pool, and in basements, routing through others’ collections to rout out my next purchase, my next favourite LP, my next favourite song, my next obsession. There was homework, there was TV, there was the cinema on Friday nights (Mark Charette worked there and snuck us in every now and again). And there were books.

But the evidence was there. Leafing through the old yearbooks, I’m astonished how little the yearbook crowd actually knew about us, if they even gave us a second thought. The pages are thick with the popular crowd, with the basketball teams, the volleyball teams, and hardly ten pages passed without the popular girls crowded together in the fame, mugging for the camera. Even the supposedly candid shots were always of them. There were a few pictures of us, one of John Lavric here, his hair quite a bit longer than in his class photo, another of Garry Martin there, a couple group shots, no more. I’m sure I saw my back in one of the photos once. To be truthful, we weren’t really a school spirit, rah, rah, rah bunch. John worked for his dad and was one of the first of our number with a car, Garry and I spent most of our time at the pool, without much spare time for school sports. There were few extracurricular activities that interested me, us. Gerry Gerrard was in hockey, not an O’Gorman staple. Mark Charette and Roger Rheault were in basketball, but few others. John and Dan Loreto began working out at a gym. Chris Cooper was in Cross-country running, but somehow didn’t grace those pages. Gerry, Mark and I were in Track and Field (Roger, too, I think), but it was held too late to make the print deadline (although it always did in the RMSS yearbooks, I’ve since learned, leafing through my wife’s).

So, were we pariahs to those “cooler” kids? Maybe.

Did we care? Yes. And no. We were the geeks and freaks of our school, in our day. And we liked that just fine. We were into our own things, sometimes that meant sports, but for whatever reason they weren’t the “right” sports. Whatever.

And as it turns out, it took years for the rest of the world to catch up to us. We were gamers. Pre-home-computer. The arcade era. And the arcades were teeming with us, not a jock or a popular girl to be seen. It seems like everyone plays them now, not that I have for more than a decade. We played Dungeons and Dragons. We read horror, science fiction, and sword and sorcery novels, watched every genera of escapist movie ever made, modern, classic, silent, red menace, anything we could see at the theatre or the video store. In the aftermath of Lord of the Rings, whole hosts of superhero movies (to be clear, I never cared for superhero flics), and decades of fantasy gaming, 100,000s of thousands of people now play roleplaying games and attend every type of escapist convention imaginable. FYI: I was never part of the costume crowd. To each his own. If you love it, go with it.

That said, I never liked being invisible to others, either. Reading what was written about my friends and I in the O’Gorman Yearbooks, what was inferred, what was obviously bullshit made up by strangers, it’s no wonder that I did not purchase my final yearbooks.

I remember that the burbs to be published about each of us being distributed throughout, beforehand. I was shocked when I read mine. It was vicious, backhanded. I went to the writer and told her in no uncertain terms what I thought of her description. I even went to the principal and complained, told her what I knew it meant. And demanded that it not be published in the yearbook. Was it? No, it wasn’t. Some shallow, banal piece replaced it. What was it? I don’t remember either, now. Thankfully, I suppose. Not having that book allows me distance to the insult, and its flaccid replacement. Am I imagining that long ago slight? Not a chance. We remember the hurt inflicted upon us far more than any other memory. Why? In hopes of never having those hurts repeated.

What did that long-ago editor think of me when she wrote that blurb? Was it indeed spiteful? And if it was, what did she think of reputedly meek little David Leonard venting his red anger in her face? His not being so expectedly compliant. Not being such a victim.

Compliant? Meek? Victims? If they only knew. I remember us well. Geeks? Sure, why not; but we were also fearless, adventuresome. We were daredevils, speed demons; bright, tech savvy and replete with curiosity, loyalty, and love.

What do those people think of us now, I wonder? Do they, at all?

Do we care?

Dance Hall Daze

We finally took over running the dances.

Of course, there came a time when my grade became the seniors, Grade 12, and 13. Were we the role models one would expect of such mature individuals? We who cursed throughout our high school years, gambled in the halls, were nearly expelled, raced about town, spent all our money on gas, and video games and LPs? We rose to the occasion, as you’d imagine.

I recall Sean Quinn spinning a few dances. I remember Chris Cooper doing the same. Where did they get the music? Did the school have an album collection? I don’t think so. It did have its own sound system or lights, as far as I remember, but I won’t say that under oath. So where did all that music come from. From us. Chris had oodles of albums, milk cartons full of them. We all did. (Personally, I didn’t have any milk cartons, although I was always on the look-out for them, if never actually laying my hands on them; the world had gone metric, and the new ones weren’t compatible to LPs.) But not one of us had enough to run a dance with. There were too many types of music for one person to have copies of everything everyone wanted. So, we pitched in, much like, I believe, all the disk jockeys prior to us must have done. I remember Chris borrowing a number of albums from me, from Mark Charette, Garry Martin, and John Lavric, as well. And I recall the dances being as good as all the others we’d attended, but different. We spent as much time behind the table as in front of it. Well, they did. I’d hang out there with them, but I wanted to be dancing. I wanted to have my arms around a girl.

The Christmas dance was our finest hour. It was hopefully going to be the best one yet. We all helped to hang decorations, set out the chairs and such. And when all was in place, we still had hours to spare.

I went home to get myself all dolled up. Silk shirt. Parfumed. Probably Hai Karate!

Chris and John went over to Dan Loreto’s house. I suppose they may have gone home first. I suppose they must have eaten something. I do know that Mario Loreto Sr. fed them homemade wine. John, from what I gather, understood homemade hooch. Chris did not. Mr. Loreto handed them small glasses of homemade wine, strong as moonshine, light on the tongue as air. They had one, then another. John begged off a third; Chris did not. I don’t know how many glasses slipped past Chris’s lips, but there were more than a few; there must have been. Undoubtedly, more than enough. Because those glasses did not hit Chris directly. It was a brutally cold night. And Chris and John and Dan were numb with it.

Their supper finished, the wine drunk, they made their way to the school, in advance of we participants, to deliver the music and begin the night’s festivities. And that’s when the wine hit Chris. To say it hit him like a ton of bricks sounds like a cliché, but you’d have to have seen Chris, and not fail to imagine that Monty Python 16-ton weight not resting atop him.

I arrived. The music was playing, newish stuff that no one danced to yet, but familiar enough that it set the mood, got people excited, got their feet tapping and their adrenaline pumping. It was loud, spilling out into the hallway from the gym, into the hallway, out through the door and into the street. I stowed my parka in my locker, changed from boots to shoes and began to make my way to the gym.

That’s when I saw Chris, held aloft between John and Dan, headed toward me and away from the gym. Chris was polluted. No doubt about it. He was drunker than I’d ever seen him.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said, like any good Catholic boy would say within the confines of a Catholic school, “what the fuck happened?”

John was calm. He also wore a grin that stretched from ear to ear. But he was calm. “Well…” he said, drawing that out with a chuckle trailing after it, “Chris dipped into the pot a few times too many.” He explained what had happened, how it happened and when it happened. And he said that Chris was okay when he left the Loreto’s, but upon leaving, he declared that he may have had a little too much wine. They bought him some coffee somewhere, but it had little effect. Chris was getting drunker by the minute, beginning to stammer, weaving on his feet. But what was to be done? The dance was about to begin. They drove to the school, Chris claiming that he would be alright the whole way, an obvious lie by all reckoning, but duty called. And Chris was never one to shirk his duty. Back out in the cold, he seemed to get a little better. Hope prevailed. Not enough, but, one can always fall back on hope when all else fails.

They thought we could cover for him. There was John, Garry, Renato, Anthony Lionello, Sean Quinn, and hell, there was even me, who could pitch in and get Chris through this nightmare. We could feed him albums, spin them for him with a little coaching. It was going to be alright, they told themselves. Hope prevails.

Of course, once they got Chris to the gym, and into his seat behind the turntables, the heat hit him anew, and it was obvious that Chris ought not to be in faculty’s view. So, they needed to get him outside, and most likely home, before all went awry.

And that’s when I came in.

“All we need to do,” said John, “is to get Chris a little air,” bustling past me.

And right into Sister Fay.

She looked Chris up and down, and inquired as to Chris’s state.

“He’s just a little under the weather, Sister,” John explained.

Sister Fay was not convinced, I imagine.

Chris looked up, took the principal in, and said, “Oh, hello, Sister.”

And promptly threw up all over Sister Fays’ shoes.

She was horrified. We were horrified. We also had to bite our cheeks to keep from bursting out laughing.

Somehow, she allowed that he had the flu, even though the smell of wine was rising from his pores in a flood.

How’d the dance turn out?

It was one for the books!

High School, Trials and Tribulations

I’m of mixed mind about O’Gorman. I loved my friends. I loved the times we had. I even loved how small the school was when compared with the others. One would never be lost in the teeming masses. That said, there weren’t that many places to hide, either. Everyone knew who you were. There was precious little wiggle room when it came to reputation, to clique membership.

For me, the worst aspect of attending O’Gorman was the never ending apparent need to canvas for money. It seems that I was always knocking on doors, begging sponsorship for this activity or that. I feel for all those kids forced to do it now, but at least they are fund raising by selling something tangible, like chocolate, cookie dough, pepperettes, something that allows the sponsor to come away with something they want. Not so us; we canvased neighborhoods, asking, begging, indifferent households to sponsor us for basketball marathons, dance marathons, whatever. And I heard the same line over and over again, “No thanks, I support the public-school system.”

Then there was the dress code. We didn’t have a uniform like the students at O’Gorman do now, but we did have restrictions on what we could wear, and that was NO jeans. Denim jackets were okay to travel to school in, but not for class. I suppose their original intent was that all students would wear wool slacks and skirts, but no one ever wore such items on a daily basis then, anymore. That left cords. Did I mind? Not particularly. Everyone else wore them, too. But as I didn’t own any khakis then, they did make for some sweaty exams, come June. So, one day I wore painter pants to an exam. They were the newest thing; they were certainly cooler. I know now that they were actually jeans, just not the denim one remembers. Butch McMillian, one of our teachers, saw me waiting to enter my exam, and took a long sideways look at me. Then he approached. And pressed the fabric between his finger and thumb. He asked me if they were jeans. I said, no, they were painter pants. He then told me, no, they were jeans. They don’t look like jeans, I said, so how was I supposed to know they were jeans. He thought on it, and in the end decided that they were unlike jeans enough to not send me home. But he did tell me not to wear them to school ever again. Good thing; there was no way I’d have been able to get home, change, and return in enough time to arrive prior to the start of the exam.

John Lavric was not so lucky, but then he was, too. John had been sent home once for God knows what dress code infraction one day. What that infraction was is lost in the fog of time, probably a punk or metal t-shirt (John had a bunch of those). What I do remember was that we were surprised to see him back in class right after lunch. He explained that just as he’d arrived home, his father came home for lunch, something that rarely ever happened. Upon seeing John at home and not in school, he asked why. John told him why. His father was livid. He ordered John into his truck, and drove John back to school. He ordered John to sit in a chair outside Sister Fay’s office, and without asking to see her, without waiting to be ushered in, he stormed into her office, interrupting whatever she may have been doing. For the next five minutes, John heard his father yell at Sister Fay. He said, in no uncertain terms, that for the money he was paying for John to attend O’Gorman, John could wear anything he damn well pleased, so long as there wasn’t a curse word or a naked woman on it, and if she had something to say about it…. When he left Sister Fay’s office, he told John to get back to class, and without looking back to see if John DID go back to class, he left to go back home, to work, to wherever he had a mind to go to. Jeff O’Reilly was not so lucky. He wore a rock and roll tee shirt to school one day, likely with the Monk’s “Bad Habit” cover on it. He did not have John’s father as an advocate. He was told to wear it inside out, or to go home and change.

But having John’s father storm into Sister Fay’s office didn’t win John many brownie points. Neither did our onsite gambling. About the same time that I was invited to the other clique’s blackjack nights, there was a rash of gambling throughout the school. How prevalent was it? I don’t really know, but I remember there were quite a few card games being played. John, Chris, Garry and I were no exception. Small stakes stuff, with matchsticks subbing in for nickels. Sister Fay caught wind of our game, and called us to the office to explain ourselves. We weren’t the rich kids; they'd been seen gambling too; in fact, they’d been playing right next to us, but a blind eye had been turned on their game, as the school would never risk their parents’ financial donations. Not so ours. And so there we were, jammed into St. Fay’s office, treated to her stern gaze. John had balls like on other, an icy calm at times. When Sister Fay asked us, “Were you gambling?” he denied the suggestion of our gambling for money without pause, and following his lead, so did we. Strength in numbers, and all that. Mob courage, too, for that matter. We denied any involvement of money. I’ve said it before; we weren’t stupid. To admit to actual gambling on school property may have invited expulsion, even if only for a short time. And had we been, there’d be more hell to pay at home than there’d ever been at school. I don’t think she believed us, but she didn’t have any proof, either. She knew we were playing cards. We’d been seen doing just that. And we admitted to doing just that, but not to any actual exchange of money. Any further supposition was just that.

Lastly, we of my grade were gipped out of a senior school trip. When we were in Grade 11, we watched the Grade 12s and 13s leave for New York City. Needless to say, I was envious. I was also terrified of the prospect of such a trip. It was New York, after all! New York was the landscape of countless crime dramas, gangster films, and the home of graphic violence on the news. But it was also the Big Apple! Broadway, Times Square, the Yankees! Who wouldn’t want to go there? We couldn’t wait to go, ourselves. But, the next year, my last in high school, there was no school trip; and not the next year, either. Then, miraculously, when we were finally out of O’Gorman’s hallowed halls, the Grade 12s and 13s were off to Europe. Was I mad? Did I feel slighted? You bet I did.

To this day I wonder, did they hate us that much? Or was it simply that there weren’t enough chaperones lined up? Teacher disinterest? No one to organize the trip? Did something especially bad happen during the last trip? Not enough money? All I know is that there was no suggestion that there would be a trip for my grade while we were there. Not a hint of one.

I’ve made up for my lack of travel experiences since then. So many places. So many adventures. Backpacks, buses, planes, trains, and automobiles. Boats, ships, catamarans, even an outrigger. Where? The Caribbean, Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, Egypt, Ecuador, France, Italy, Canada from coast to coast, the American Midwest, L.A., San Francisco, New Orleans, Alaska.

And yes, New York, too.

The Pool

When compared with the politics, social pitfalls, and ever shifting landscape of who hung out with whom, who was dating whom, the Archie Dillon Sportsplex was an oasis of calm, of known rules and expectations. The staff changed relatively slowly, as the older teens left for university, and younger ones arrived, first as helpers, then as guards and instructors.

Whereas in school, cliques and friends were segregated by grade and age, rarely mixing, at the pool, all ages were thrown together, regardless of age, regardless of school. We met, got to know each other, learned to work and play with one another. Even the adults, who made up the small maintenance staff and management. What they thought about working with a bunch of teens is anyone’s guess. We certainly didn’t ask them.

Early on, when I was but a wee helper, I recall Anthony Loreto, Cecil Guenette, Rhonda McIntyre, and my sister, among others. Later on, there was Jodie Russell, Christine Racicot, Janice Milton, and Wendy Rochon. Then Garry Martin, Henri Guenette, Sean Light, and Susan Spencer. There were the Senkus twins, Astra and Alma. Later still, Jeff Chevrier, Jeff O’Reilly, and Neil Petersen.

We shared a common history, swimming lessons at the Schumacher pool, summers at Gilles Lake and the Mattagami River. We’d grown up in the water, took lessons together for years, passed CPR and National Lifeguard. Was there politics and pitfalls, romances, rifts and grudges? Sure. But I guess I flowed with it more. These were my friends.

I still had my group of friends at O’Gorman, mainly Garry, John, and Chris. And new ones, too. Renato, Mark, and Roger. And comfortable acquaintances. Gerry Gerard, Sean Quinn, Andrew Rose. We attended dances together, hung out at Top Hats. We spent hours in each other’s basements listening to LPs, watching the digital displays of the EQs rise and fall. Talking. Shooting the shit.

But in that Timmins has always been a cliquey town, those friends at the Sportsplex became my clique. We shared the same experiences.

There were parties, late night after hour swims; there was skinny dipping, not often, but it happened.

And there was work. Lessons to be taught. Swims to guard. Chaos reigned during public swims, far busier then, than now, I expect. The kids would wait at the change room doors, much like we had at the Schumacher pool, half spilling out, and waiting for the bell. And when it rang, they’d run out. We’d yell at them to WALK, and they would slow to a rapid duck walk. I had to bite my cheek, lest I burst out laughing.

We’d rotate through guard positions, 15 minutes per station, scanning the sea of flowing, bobbing heads for that one kid who might actually be drowning, bobbing and splashing for far more urgent reasons.

Older teens would jettison from the high diving board, slapping the 60-inch steel vent tube before plunging feet first into the deep end, falling far too close to the wide mobile divider that separated the deep end from the shallow for our comfort. They’d often time their leap to splash us as we crossed the walkway, something our boss, Tory Kullas, wanted us to kick them out for. Personally, I didn’t care. We’d race across the walkway when they did it, breaking our own rule of never running on deck, not that any kids ever called us on it.

Once, I watched a late teen do a running dive off the high board. Halfway through his arc, he saw how far he’d overshot. I heard him growl, “Oh, shit!” as he descended. And I heard the loud low hollow drumming of his head on the divider as he entered the water. His lower legs had still to enter the water when he hit. I stood up on my chair, my own legs shaky! I was sure I’d just seen a spinal injury, if not a full on broken neck or fatality. We’d spent hours training for spinals, but I never thought I would actually have to perform one. I was off the chair, at the water’s edge, before I saw him swim under the surface to the deck. He clung to the tiles, held his head.

He actually refused treatment, refused to allow us to call an ambulance. But he did leave. My legs were weak for an hour.

I had my Zen moments there, too. I’d take a flutter board (a kick board), and hugging it to my chest, would roll endlessly in the hot pool, buoyancy and centrifugal force carrying me through rotation after rotation. My mind cleared, sound receded. Calm. Bliss.

Pitfalls of Peers

We were all trying to find our way through those formative years, some more successfully than others. Friendships were reassessed, and we are all shuffling whom we hang out with.

We all learn new things, adapting as we go. Learning about ourselves, too.

John Lavric introduced me to punk and metal. Punk stuck. Chris Cooper opened my eyes to Ska Revival, Reggae, and Post Punk. Garry Martin loved New Wave. Garry was a bit restless, always in need of motion. New Wave and dancing was a pressure release valve. Dan Loreto was very much a Classic Rock guy. John, Renato Romey, Roger Rheault and Mark Charette had cars. I did not. There were girls. There were bullies. So much to absorb, so much to assimilate.

How did I do at negotiating those pitfalls? I have my opinion on that, but you be the judge.

One day I was walking towards the school, up Joseph, with two of the aforementioned gamblers (see earlier memory, gambling in high school). We were in sight of the school, literally at the corner of the “senior” building, when suddenly the two of them jumped me, trying to wrestle me, and at times throw me, to the ground. I gripped them, then I somehow (I’ve no idea how I managed it) managed to get both in a headlock, and we hit the ground together, probably not what they’d been expecting. They struggled. I held on. From what I could see, they were turning red. “Are we done yet?” I asked. They said we were, and I let go of them. Upon rising, I saw other members of their steady clique further on. That should have told me something. But I brushed that bit of foreshadowing aside. They said we were done, and so I thought we were, until I’d learned otherwise. I refer to the night they took me to the cleaners.

After they took me to the cleaners, there was a spat of punching. I don’t know who started it, or why, but I understand the whole alpha male posturing thing now. Only the jocks and toughs participated. But I did, too, once. I agreed to this to vent my rage on one of the gamblers. Stupid, really. The rules: Each took his turn, balling up his fist and driving it into the fleshy bit of the other’s shoulder. The scrappers pulled this off with a rapidity and an accuracy that boggled the mind. Was I good at it? No. I was never a fighter. But I did connect solidly a few times. I know I did because I heard it. Most of mine were glancing blows, though. Not so the other guy, who took the time to aim, and he punched me repeatedly. I was bruised and sore for days on end afterward. But they did leave me alone, after that.

As I said, there were girls. Crushes and likes included Sandra, Dawn, Patricia, Gretchen, Mona, Elaine, and Carole, among others. I suppose we all fell in and out of love with dizzying regularity. I discovered young love makes one stupid, though, gullible in one’s aim to please.

Carole asked me if I wanted to play a game. I was flattered and agreed. She pulled out a quarter and traced its edge on a piece of paper (then palmed the original coin, unseen, and produced a new clean coin), then said all you have to do is roll this coin off your face onto the pencil circle and you win the quarter. She proceeded to do so. Her coin landed outside the circle. It’s hard to do, she said. She traced the coin again, telling me it got easier with more circles.

So, I rolled it off my nose. Missed. She traced it again. I passed the coin to her but she said she’d already done it and wanted to see if I could beat her time. Of course, the rules said I could not roll the coin off the same spot, so I tried off my cheek. Missed again. Repeat a few more times.

A crowd had gathered, a teacher among them. After a few more attempts, Paula Soucie looked in, and gasped.

“David, you need to stop this, right now,” she told me.

I was obviously confused so she took me by the arm and lifted me from my seat, and said, “You need to stop this and wash your face.”

I was then surrounded by laughter.

Paula threw a look of disgust at the assembled onlookers. And an even more vicious one at Carol.

As we left the room, Paula explained the trick I had been a victim of. Shocked, I hid my face and rushed past those giggling faces in the hall until I reached the bathroom.

I looked on my pencil marked, crisscrossed face in the mirror.

Crush ended. In a heartbeat.

The Arcade

We lived in them, investing a petty penny in them, one quarter at a time. Not on pinball, though. Pong gripped us at a young age, and we were the video arcade generation. I remember four arcades we haunted, specifically, vividly, their sound, their smell, their occasional breeze of cannabis, although I can only remember the names of two.

The first arcade I ever found myself in was in the basement of the 101 mall, name unknown. It was primarily a pinball arcade, having a long row of them running from entry to the back wall, but hidden from view, back behind the klaxon and whoop and lights of the pinballs, and lurking behind a couple pillars, there were a few Atari stand-up games, Asteroids, among them. Asteroids requires no explanation, not to my age group. It’s forever imbedded in our minds, I think. I can’t say what the others games were.

The second was Fun and Games in the Timmins Square. It was a long narrow room, both walls lined with games, the change attendant patrolling its length, the cash and kiosk in the middle. I recall Tempest there. Tempest may require some description; I doubt many people remember it, but I loved that game, maybe more than all the others. It had a simple display, even for the time, but it was an adrenaline rush. It took place on a three-dimensional surface, sometimes wrapped into a tube, which was viewed from one end and was divided into a dozen or more segments or lanes. The higher the level, the more lanes, and the faster the play. Enemies entered at the far and crawled, then raced, up the lanes, laying spikes behind them, trying to reach the top to drag the player down into the abyss. What I remember most was that if you spun the level selector at the beginning of the game as fast as it would spin, you would warp up to the highest levels, skipping the lower, less octane fueled beginning. There were others I played, but that was the one I always sought out.

The third was Andy’s Amusements. There were long lines of pinball machines in that one too, but we ignored them and plunged to the poorly lit back where there were ranks of Defender and Stargate games. The games through more light into that dealers’ paradise than the overheads; maybe, by design.

The final one was Top Hats. Of them all, my favourite was Top Hats. Top Hats was our night club. It was our place to be and to be seen, always full on weekends, day and night, the bike racks full, the people spilling out of the open glass doors in summer, out onto the sidewalk, some smoking, all aiming to look cool. In the winter, the glass was dripping, steaming, but never freezing, such was the heat we threw. Coats piled high alongside the machines, jammed in between. And like all arcades, it was loud. Remember how loud they were? The machines blared, the music thrummed, the bass beat, and we were all shouting to be heard over the din and all the other voices reaching out, themselves; and there was laughter. Sometimes we were three deep waiting for a turn on the games: Defender, Stargate, and Pac-man usually had the longest lines. I don’t believe they ever made money on Dragon Quest, though. Waste of space, that game. Too expensive at 50 cents a play, and the laser disk was skippy, and no one had a clue how to play it, but we all tried once or twice, just the same.

I still remember that thrill I felt when I came upon it. How I scanned the crowd, checked out the girls, hung out, bought pop and chips, and got high on adrenalin. How some played, like John Lavric and Renato Romey, with an outward calm that was truly Zen and somehow awe inspiring, only to lose it at the end; while others, like Garry Martin and I, cursed, (okay, Garry didn’t curse, but he found a way) and glared back at the machine as it taunted us with its lights, its music, and ultimately, its threat of GAME OVER!

Entering High School

New beginnings, another reset, as it were.

We all meet a new batch of people when we enter high school, I imagine, as kids change school systems, kids move from other towns, and groups of kids from other middle schools are destined for the same high school but had yet to meet one another. I’m not sure if that last bit applied to TH&VS or RMSS, then; they may have already been set back at the beginning of middle school. Not so in O’Gorman’s case, where St. Theresa met Sacred Heart.

Once again, I found myself in an odd place. I suppose I may have always been a loner at heart, or maybe just an ambivert, but I found my attention split between two, and sometimes three, clusters of friends, and this not counting what would become my core friends, those who I worked with and hung out with, we lifeguards from the Archie Dillon Sportsplex. I still had those friends from St. Theresa: Garry Martin, Chris Cooper, John Lavric, a group that had been rather depleted at the end of Grade 7, when many of our friends and acquaintances had transferred to the public system (when suddenly their parents discovered that they would have had to pay extra for their kids to continue on in the separate system). A few more transferred at the end of Grade 8, too, not many, but a few. No matter, at the beginning of Grade 9 our numbers swelled again. Not by a lot; O’Gorman was not a big school, by any stretch of the imagination, just two single story L-shaped buildings, and at that time, a single portable. Back then, there was only one, just a short frigid skip from the warmth of the main building, years before O’Gorman gained its former nickname, Portable High, after it finally gained full funding from the government and its populace exploded and its athletic field disappeared under the weight of those scattered ranks of prefab buildings.

Groups of friends shuffled, congealed anew. There were new athletic groups (track, cross-country, basketball, hockey), new geeks (drama, public speaking), new populars, new freaks. Smokers, snowmobilers, gearheads, muscle heads, and potheads. Hard to believe, considering the size of the place.

Where did I fit in? Somewhere between the geeks and freaks, the track, and the musicians. Not that I played. But I had begun to develop an enormous record collection, remarkable considering how little I made working at the pool, in comparison with those who worked for their fathers in construction, and those working at the grocery stores. But that was later. Initially, we all survived on allowances. And there was a divide there, too. Rich, affluent, middle class, working class, working poor.

Where was I most comfortable? The pool, amongst the fishes. In basements, turntables spinning. At the video arcades. Everyone else, everywhere else, was irrelevant.