Chapter Five: Burnout At St. John's U.

It’s September of ’87 and “Here I go again on my own” is playing on every radio in the USA. It’s also a very fitting description of what I am doing, education-wise. As a good chunk of my fellow Stuy graduates are Ivy-league bound and many others are going the SUNY and CUNY routes, I decided to stay local and go to class with several of my neighborhood friends, at St. John’s University in Jamaica, Queens. There’s Mikey P, Jimmy F, Jeff A., Donna S, Anissa M. and good ‘ol Dave R., my former St. Stan’s classmate. It’s nice to run into them in the hallways, but somehow, like freshman year at Stuyvesant, I felt that I didn’t fit in there. I wasn’t energized to compete with my classmates, like I did at St. Stan’s or Stuy. I wasn’t even religious anymore, at all. I had my doubts about religion since the 7th grade. I was asking all the tough questions that Sr. Magdalen did not want to answer and it made her dislike me more than a bit in 8th grade, plus some of my Stuy friends were not ashamed to admit their doubts about religion. All of that was convincing enough for me. By the time I reached St. John’s, I was an atheist at a Catholic University. I totally felt lost and I knew in my gut that I had picked the wrong major, Accounting. But there I was, taking Accounting 1, Economics, English Literature (which I was never into) and Theology (which I was not interested in, at this point). I basically went through the motions that fall semester. I studied enough to earn at least a ‘C’ in each class, with a ‘B’ in Accounting I and Economics. I spent more time focused on working after school, as a foot messenger for a Wall St. firm and hanging out, under aged in a few bars in the East Village, than in studying and did even more of both, the spring semester. It’s a wonder that my grades slightly improved in the 2nd semester, taking Accounting II, Creative Writing, Economics II, and Theology II. I finished the year with a GPA of 2.95 but, I knew that either my major would change to something more interesting or I would transfer to a CUNY like Hunter or Baruch or I would drop out completely and spend some time soul-searching for what I wanted to do career-wise. Right at the end of class for the summer, I was hired by UPS as an overnight, truck loader. I worked on 43rd St. and 12th Ave. from 4am to 9am. Perfect hours for stumbling out of the bar and going to work, NOT! Even though it had very good benefits, including college tuition help, I was not disciplined enough to keep the job. I actually went there drunk several times. I quit after three months. Certainly not the smartest thing I’ve ever done. As for my school situation, by August ’88, I knew I wasn’t returning to St. John’s, but I was still undecided what to do. I contacted CUNY and the only school that would accept me at this late date was Hunter, but I would have to go without a major and maybe decide by the Spring of ’89. I registered and decided to take Economic courses, towards that major. I was happy to see some familiar faces there. There were several former Stuy classmates, including one female that I had a massive crush on, Sami and also my former St. Stan’s classmate, Lynn L. I thought maybe Hunter would be fun, but the issue of still not being sure of the major and just complete laziness compelled me to withdraw from all of my classes, after a week. The thought in my mind was, maybe I’ll focus on work and land a great job, that could become my career, or I would be inspired to choose what I would really want, as a major, and return to school. Unfortunately, neither would happen.

Chapter Four: My Stuy Years

There I was, out of over 13,000 applicants, one of the 450 freshmen entering the school in September 1983. I was the only St. Stanislaus grad from ‘83 entering the school that year. It was a fantastic opportunity in so many ways. Besides the great opportunity to be enrolled in probably the very best high school, public or private in New York, with some of the best teachers that you will find anywhere and the absolute cream of the crop of NYC students, it was also a chance for me to start all over with a new bunch of classmates, many of which from completely different backgrounds instead of the mostly all Catholic classmates I had for eight years. Also the new teachers, some of them would be highly enjoyable and interesting, and others, who I would despise on a daily basis. I would also find out quite a bit about myself, as a teenager and the first real opportunity to experience the idea of meeting girls and maybe having a date or two.
Realistically, I knew that my chances of dating were very slim because of one very basic problem, I was very painfully shy. I could hardly look any nice girl in the eye, and talking to them? I was deathly afraid of that. I did make a couple of female friends early on, but maybe they were only really classmates that I happened to sit next to. I also made several male friends, but our conversations were usually very short, because a period was only 40 minutes, and with all the classes and studying, and traveling that most of the students had to do, from all five boroughs of NYC, and a whirlwind of different students all around, a far cry from the 21 classmates I had in 8th grade. I also think that being so different from the kids that I was used to, spooked me out a bit. I didn’t really understand where most of these new classmates came from, and that made me end up feeling fairly outcast and inferior, in some ways.
Grade-wise, I held my own. I did ok in Ms. DiBellis’ Algebra class(I had her both semesters), Dr. Bindman’s and Ms. Evans English classes, Mr. Tiseo’s Italian class(I did have a slight advantage there, being half-Italian) and gym was always an automatic 95 or higher. The other subjects, especially the Science class, which was biology, freshman year, was a bit more challenging for me. I usually ended up with a 70-80 mark. I use the excuse that we were not taught science very well at St. Stan’s and I had to play catch-up at Stuy. Now I know that some of you will say, wait a minute, isn’t Stuy known as a math and science school? Well yes, but the entrance exam was Math and English, which were probably my two best subjects. That’s why I passed the exam. I didn’t do really well in History either. It seemed like a lot of facts and figures to remember and Mr. Lugo, who I had fall semester was someone I didn’t really like too much. I barely passed that class. I did a little better with Mr. Hendricks in the spring. I ended up with an 83.5 average for freshman year, which as a B- average isn’t bad, but with all the brilliant students in the class, I was certainly in the bottom half. The one joy that I had was being able to make the bowling team in my freshman year. I didn’t get to really compete in the matches too much because only the top eight on the team usually got to play. I bowled when someone else couldn’t make it. We did win the PSAL Manhattan championship, but I didn’t really make a difference. I knew that I had three more years to shine, though. With all the all other extra-curricular activities at Stuyvesant, I didn’t really participate in anything else, which I regret. I was in the choir at St. Stan’s from 3rd grade through 6th. I can’t explain why I wasn’t involved in the Concert Chorus, the Gospel or Renaissance Choir. I guess my shyness really prevented me from being active.
Sophmore year brought 300 more students to the class, from all the graduating junior high schools in the city. As the year started, I did attempt to be a little more active at the school. I joined the computer club for a while and started to hang with a bunch of witty, creative and very funny people. They were unofficially known as the “Lunatic Fringe”. I wasn’t really part of the crew, but I did attempt to hang around them a bit. I wasn’t as witty as them, but I held my own, in my opinion. My grades were pretty much the same as Freshman year. I finished with an 84 average as a Sophmore. I can’t explain how I got through Chemistry class with Ms. Bulgaris, considering I barely could figure out what the heck she was talking about all semester, and I cut that class quite a bit, just from boredom. I absolutely loved Geometry class with Mr. Jaye. It was fun and I did really well on his tests. I was distracted by the beauty of a certain English teacher I had, but of course, being very shy prevented me from even looking at her an inappropriate amount. Speaking of attraction, I started to notice a certain female classmate a lot(I’m choosing not to mention her name), but once again, other than a few small talk conversations either in the auditorium or at lunch, we didn’t really get to know each other very well, but she has stuck in my mind, ever since. She is someone that I would refer to as the lady of my dreams. Luckily, that’s over with now, but I freely admit that it was an unhealthy torment for me, for a long time. I was in a few classes with this girl, and I was certainly distracted by her presence. It’s hard to explain, it was just something about her.
There were also a few girls that hung out in my neighborhood, who had my attention at that time, but they looked at me as a good friend, but not someone that they wanted to be involved with romantically. That was a dilemma that plagued me for a very long time. Before I was so shy and not very popular, I didn’t really give anyone a chance to know me very well, which was a huge mistake.
At least my activities outside the classroom gave me some joy that year. The Stuy bowling team went all the way to the PSAL Championship match. We bowled against Susan Wagner HS (from Staten Island) and I had the highest score, a 193, but our team lost the city championship by 6 pins. That was a heartbreaker. I still agonize over why I didn’t bowl a 200, to this day. Those lanes were easy at Maple Lanes in Brooklyn. Oh well. I was still proud that we went all the way to the city finals, and I still have that medal somewhere in a box.
As I moved on to junior year, the fall semester, for me, would be my favorite semester of the eight. Two teachers I had, made the Stuy experience a lot more enjoyable for me. One of them would be fairly predictable, for those who know about Stuy and the legend of Frank McCourt. I had him for creative writing and it was amazingly enjoyable. He had an incredible sense of humor and his stories were absolutely captivating. I was among many of his students that strongly suggested that he put all of his stories together in a book. His incredibly sad and disturbing childhood stories became the amazing bestseller “Angela’s Ashes” and I honestly cannot say that I am surprised by his success at all. That’s how riveting a story teller he was in class. He also was a tremendous inspiration to students who wrote. I never really considered myself to have any skill in writing, before his class. Since then, I’ve always had the itch to want to write something, but I never really acted on it until the last few years, with my blog “Late Blooming Stuy Guy” and what you are reading right now. Back to the class, the boost I received by the experience was the way that Mr. McCourt allowed everyone a chance to shine. He wanted everyone to come up to the front of the class and read what they wrote each week and the positive response from my classmate for my writing made me feel great, and that newly found confidence affected my work in every class from then on, at Stuy.
The other teacher that brought me a lot of joy, was a lady that was a very important part of my early childhood development. Her name was Ms. Latham, yes the same Ms. Latham that lived across the hall from me and was my babysitter from time to time. You can imagine how excited I was when I found out that she was promoted to teach at Stuy and I would have her as a teacher, but, I would realize that it would be also very stressful for me, because I knew that I had to really excel in her class to not disappoint her. It was trigonometry and I was focused on not letting her down. I also had the circumstance of having “The Lady of My Dreams” as a classmate. I knew that Math was her best subject and I would probably be competing with her to get the highest grade in the class, and I was right, as I finished with a 98 in the class and she had a 99. It was a great experience and I was happy to have another chance to thank Ms. Latham for her role in my childhood.
I also had Mr. Rutkowski for Music Appreciation, which was interesting because he was also my Bowling coach. The funny thing is he didn’t show any favoritism towards me, but he didn’t really need to. I’ve always loved music and did well in the class, anyway. It ended up being a very good year grade-wise for me, with a 92.5 average. I knew getting into an Ivy League school was not going to happen at this point, even with a 1220 on the SAT, but I felt that I was certainly smart enough to be at Stuy and that I belonged and I was proud of myself.
In the summer of ’86, I had a new job. I worked down the block from my building on Avenue A at a place called Kim’s Video. It was a fun experience, but it was weird, in the sense that my co-workers were mostly punk rockers and I certainly didn’t fit in with them. The owner was a nice Korean guy that had an interesting taste in videos. They would rent all the latest releases, but some very odd choices as well, like Eraserhead and Attack of The Killer Tomatoes. Considering how the neighborhood would change due to gentrification and become a super trendy area, he was ahead of his time with his taste in movies. I would work there for more than a year, and would get to see a lot of movies for free.
I would return for Senior year and feel a myriad of emotions. Excitement, that we ruled the school and were just a year away from college life. Also that I had become a little more confident that I could get along with classmates and have stronger friendships, but also sadness that I wasted the first three years being so shy and hesitant to talk to everyone. I was also realizing how amazing the Stuy experience really was and in some ways, I wished that I had more time to be there. I had a few interesting classes that year, like Mr. Phillips for Statistics. I enjoyed the class (had a 97 in it) and found him to be a lunatic. I swore that if he told that silly “sneaker story” one more time, that I would vomit. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I know he talked about it a little too much. The spring semester would be a breeze, only four classes, including gym, but I had to deal with hell on Earth for Pre-Calculus, Mr. Fisher. To say I despised the man is a huge understatement. He was the nastiest, dirtiest piece of crap that I’ve ever met. I tried for weeks to get transferred to another class, but no luck. I had to deal with him and just get through it. One morning, I was not feeling well and did not study a certain few pages of problems. With my luck, he calls me up to the blackboard to solve one of the problems. I wasn’t sure of myself, and hesitated to answer the problem. He yelled, “Go sit down, you moron” and the class laughed. I was totally embarrassed and wanted to go home. I was angry the whole rest of the semester and put a damper on my graduation excitement. I did end up with an 85 in the class and after scoring a 93 on the final exam, I told him; “Am I still a moron?” Surprisingly, he laughed and shook my hand. I guess I should feel lucky.
As we approached the final months at Stuy, I had a tough decision in terms of college. I was accepted at Pace, St. John’s, SUNY Albany and CUNY Baruch and Hunter. I did not make SUNY Binghamton and NYU. I knew that The CUNY schools would be the most affordable, but a bunch of my friends from childhood were going to St. John’s and they had a good Accounting program, which would be my major. I decided to go to St. John’s.
As the spring semester, and my Stuy days were winding down, I was surprised by the number of classmates that would come by and wish me luck, and those who were willing to sign my yearbook. It made me realize that even though I was shy and not very outgoing, others realized that I was a nice guy and that I was part of the class. I truly wished I had another year to get to know these people a little more and it dawned on me that I was lucky to have those four years there.
Graduation day arrived and it was cool to have the ceremony at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. The one thought in my mind was “Darn, I’m going to miss these people”, Though I knew there would be reunions in the future and with 750 classmates, I was certain to run into some of them as the years go on. It really felt good to be a Stuy graduate. The question would be: What would I do with that experience?

My School Years: St. Stan's

September 3rd, 1975 was my first day of school at Saint Stanislaus. I can’t say that I remember a whole lot of what occurred in those first days of school. I do know that it must have been quite unusual to suddenly be around a whole bunch of new kids and not just my class, but the 1st and 2nd grade classes were together in the same room. Sr. Fidelia taught both classes. She did have all of the 1st graders sit together on one side of the room and the 2nd graders on the other side. I did make friends relatively quickly, especially with the boys and girls who lived in a housing co-op a block from my building called Village View. I had starting hanging out with some of them, before starting school. There was Peter Jarema, Allan Heck and Paul Kim. Also, there was Roman Strawa and Johnny Miller., who were in 2nd grade as I was starting 1st grade. There were also a few others who my brothers had already known. Like Joey Opalka and Lynn LiCausi and Diane Krawiec. Attending class every day helped make the other students become very familiar over time. I got to know Helene Bracero, Helen Bala, Susie Gregorczyk Jose Guzman and Jose Marrero very well over those years.
Sr. Fidelia left a negative impression in my mind. She was frightening with her meanness, at times. Two incidents, involving me, stick out in my mind. She was a brutal disciplinarian, and she loved to punish late-comers to class by grabbing a ruler and slapping the students on the hands with them. I usually wasn’t late, because my mother would walk me and my brother Rocco to school. I think there was one day, where Rocco was a little slow getting ready for school and we ended up being a few minutes late. She did her usual punishment and whacked me with her ruler. I cried and later complained to my mother, that I was whacked on the hands for something that wasn’t my fault. The next day, my mother came into school and demanded to see the principal and complained that the discipline was excessive. I think the principal agreed, because it didn’t really happen anymore. The other incident was something where I truly deserved my punishment. In an attempt to try and fit in with the more mischievous students, because I was usually very well-behaved, I listened to my classmate Allan, who advised me to get friendlier with Lynn, a female classmate, by lifting up her skirt. She screamed, both classes laughed at me and Sr. Fidelia grabbed me by my hair and yanked me down the hall to the principal’s office and made me write 100 times: I must behave in class. I also had to say I’m sorry to Lynn in front of both classes. Being a very shy young boy, that was way more difficult than all the writing I had to do. I was also intimidated by the issue she had with her fingers. Two of them were severed, apparently by an incident involving a meat slicer, where her hand slipped. She had tape over her fingers and that issue caused me to want to keep my distance from her.
Despite these moments of behavior issues and this unusual nun, I did very well in school, right from the start. My report card was full of A’s and B’s and it was always an A in Math. I wanted to be the smartest student in the class and I felt that my competition for that honor was Lynn and another girl named Bretta Robertson. They were both very smart and pretty girls. As a little boy, I was really excited about learning and some classmates really respected me and others probably learned to dislike me a bit. At the end of 1st grade, Sr. Fidelia thought I was smart enough to skip 2nd grade and go straight into 3rd, but the principal didn’t want the school to lose a year’s tuition and offered to allow the skip, if my parents paid the year’s tuition. My parents refused to do that, even though I was excited with the chance to move ahead to 3rd grade. I went into 2nd grade and the school decided to keep our two classes together which were now 2nd and 3rd grade and the 3rd grade teacher, Ms. Martel became the 1st grade teacher. I was happy because it gave me another year to really get to know the 3rd graders, like Johnny M., Johnny Zadubara., Cheryl Grogan, Denise Hart, Donna Spatafora and several others. A sad thing happened right after Christmas/New Year’s vacation. The day after New Year’s, January 2, 1977, my grandfather, Guiseppe(Joseph), passed away from a heart attack, basically a block from his building on St. Mark’s Place. My family really mourned his loss and also many people in the neighborhood, he was there basically since he came to this country from Ellis Island. I missed a whole week of school, which I was not happy about, but I continued to do very well, grade wise. I also started going to an after-school program at a place called the Cardinal Spellman Center, located on 2nd Street. Some of my St. Stan’s classmates went there and also many students from another school, Most Holy Redeemer, which was located on 3rd Street. I started getting to know many of them. One that became a very good friend for a long time was Nick Marzulla. He was a funny, sarcastic, smart guy that was really into sports. We hit it off pretty well and spent a lot of time in our youth hanging out together. His parents were always very nice to me and I spent a good amount of time at their apartment on Orchard St.
I also spent an increasing amount of time hanging around the buildings of Village View. I had already known several of the kids who were friends with my brothers. I liked to tag along quite a bit with those people, because it seemed that they were having more fun than those who were my age, plus some of the younger friends liked to make fun or pick on me a bit. I didn’t really enjoy that and it started to snowball into a steady problem that made a shy boy go deeper into a shell. It was something I had to deal with throughout my young life.
3rd grade was interesting to me, because it was the first time we didn’t have to share a classroom with anybody. Also, for the fact that our teacher, Ms. Patricia Naughton was a lot nicer than Sr. Fidelia. She was tough when she had to be, but the class, on the whole, behaved well. There were several new students in the class, including Dave Ropiak, who was a brilliant child that was skipped ahead from 1st to 3rd Grade. I’ll assume that his parents paid a full year’s tuition for him to be skipped ahead. The year as a whole, wasn’t very eventful, but I do have to say that I started to think about some of the girls in the class, in terms of who I liked. I was undecided who I liked the most. Sometimes it was Lynn, sometimes Bretta, sometimes Diane, but it didn’t totally occupy my mind. I was only 8 years old. I was more focused on Reggie Jackson and the Yankees winning the World Series and on Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gee’s. Also, that I was glad that the Son of Sam was caught.
4th grade started off on a bit of a downer when I found out that Bretta was moving to New Jersey. As I mentioned, she was a favorite of mine and I was disappointed. It was time to have another nun as a teacher, Sr. Mary Vincent. I enjoyed her teaching a lot more than the last two. She made it fun to learn in her class, and I really excelled. I had straight A’s on the last two report cards. I also joined the choir that year and enjoyed singing at church, even though I was picked on at times, for doing that. I was told that I was a sissy for joining, but I didn’t care. The music teacher, Mr. Perry, was skilled at teaching music, and I enjoyed it. I was also excited that my brother, Rocco was graduating. I loved him but I felt overshadowed by him, in a way. He was one of the more popular guys in school and I wished that I was as popular. Once he did graduate, I continued to do very well grade-wise, but I never felt that I truly fit in.
5th grade was a fairly eventful year for me and the class. Ms. Aguila was the teacher and she always struck me as being quite unusual. Her teaching style was a little different from other teachers I’ve experienced. Somehow, I was able to do exceptionally well in that class. I had straight A’s on all four report cards. I’ve always been a little proud of that. It was the last year with Paul Kim as a classmate. He moved to Yonkers afterwards. He was one of my favorite classmates and I missed him. There were also several new classmates, including a buddy of mine that grew up around the corner on 6th St., Jimmy Duval. He always was a very funny guy and was so cool to be around and I also knew that he would never make fun of me, like many of the others I hung out with. He became probably my closest friend for the last four years at St. Stan’s and we would always walk home from school together and talk about what went on in class. There were other interesting new classmates, Like Kevin Murray and Kris Williams that were both fun guys that made the class laugh quite a bit.
I had a bit of a health issue that popped up in that school year that was difficult. I started getting a lot of headaches. Some that would make me very nauseous or vomit quite a bit. It caused me to miss a good chunk of days of class. It was a mystery for a while to figure out what was causing them. It seemed to be at least once a week, if not more that it was occurring. My mother took me to the doctor, then another doctor, then a specialist. Since my mother and my aunt Marie had migraines, it was pretty much assumed that’s what they were. The question was what was triggering them. Over the course of time, I realized that nearly every time I had chocolate, I was getting a migraine. Obviously I had to stop eating it, which was a big heartache because I loved it, whether it was a candy bar, a chocolate egg cream or a bottle of Yoo-Hoo. There were also situations where stress was causing them and I did cut back a bit on hanging out with those who were making fun of me all the time.
In 6th grade, Mr. Doyle was the teacher and I found him to be interesting in some ways but a little unusual. He liked to play music a lot in class. Sometimes it would be classical, sometimes the Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel. I personally enjoyed it, being a music fanatic, but I could imagine for those who were more into other types of music, it was pretty boring. He certainly played more Beatles songs after December 8th, 1980 when John Lennon was murdered. I always had an appreciation for the Beatles, but didn’t comprehend how much of a hero John Lennon was to me until after his death. I learned about how he was such a peace activist and stood up against the establishment. I was sad to think of what he could have done, if he wasn’t murdered. It was the first celebrity death that had that kind of effect on me.
I wasn’t really much of an athletic child, though I did play softball and punch ball and a little bit of football and basketball, at the playgrounds and parks. At this point, I did find the sport that I enjoyed the most in my youth, and most of my life, for that matter: bowling. My parents would sometimes take me to bowl, with my brothers just to have a good time. Joe had become a very good bowler by then, with his very nifty hook shot. He was in the leagues and had won some trophies already. He also worked at Bowlmor Lanes, behind the counter, assigning lanes and renting shoes. Rocco wasn’t a bad bowler either, though his shot was more very hard and down the middle of the lane. I used to just roll the ball down the middle with two hands and didn’t do very well, but Joe worked on having me actually put my fingers in the holes and shooting the ball like a normal bowler. Once I did that, my scores improved quite a bit, enough for me to join the junior leagues at Bowlmor Lanes every Saturday morning. That was the end of my cartoon watching on Saturdays. My mother ended up getting hired as a bartender on Saturdays, but was mostly making cheeseburgers and fries for the kids who were bowling. I made a few new friends there, including Jace Rafter and Danny Marks, who I bowled with for a few years and Jeff Katz, who would later become a High School teammate. I was very hooked on the game and would participate in leagues for the next 30 years, but that first year, I only averaged a 97 but would continue to improve through the years. My first bowling ball was a Columbia 300 Red Dot and I had my name put on it. In my youth, it was a prized possession.
At this point in time, I started noticing girls a little bit more. I was 11, and though I didn’t quite reach puberty yet, I was paying attention to the friends who were starting to discuss being involved with girls. The two that stick out in my mind are Allan, who always seemed to be chasing after girls and Peter, who is the person who first told me about the birds and the bees, in graphic detail. Thanks for that, Pete. I also hung out with Roman quite a bit, who started to become pretty active with the girls in the neighborhood. I, of course had no such luck, and wouldn’t for a long time.
7th grade would become my most enjoyable year at St. Stan’s, by far. The teacher, Mr. Broughton, was an incredibly enjoyable and understanding teacher. He certainly taught with his own style, which was something that the principal and nuns of St. Stan’s didn’t really appreciate. After missing 18 days of class in 5th grade, mostly because of headaches and 13 days of class in 6th grade, mostly because of boredom, I only missed one day of class in 7th grade. That’s how much I enjoyed being in that class. He always was real and very honest with us, which was very much appreciated, for sure. He also liked to take us on class trips. We had several, including four in the final week of school. We also put on a wonderful play. We did a take on Grease that was truly remarkable. He was very skilled with teaching all of us dance moves and I feel that it was the most enjoyable play that I was ever involved in.
I was sad that Angelique Rivera was not in our class anymore. Her family had moved to Queens. I had always gotten along pretty well with her. There was a wave of new classmates as well. Richie Vasquez became a buddy of mine and Theresa Cruz was a favorite of mine as well. There was also Michelle Vasquez, Leslie Diaz, Maria Bassini and Patricia Venditti.
One thing that I was proud of that year was that we had a Math contest and I was the winner for the class. I then competed with the top 7th graders in each catholic school in Manhattan and I finished 2nd out of about 25 schools. I remember Monsignor Karpinski met with me at the rectory, congratulated me, and gave me $20. He said “Don’t tell your parents I gave you this or that I’m sitting here with a big bottle of wine”. He had obviously drunk a lot of it.
I also had my first real teenage crush that year. As I stated earlier, I spent a lot of time hanging out by the Village View buildings, near where I grew up and though I knew most of the girls who lived there, I was always very shy when the girls were around and I never really gave them a chance to get to know me. There was one specific girl who caught my eye. Her name was Theresa Dougherty, and I can’t really explain what it was about her, except that she was a very smart girl and she was friendly enough for me to at least have some interesting conversations with her. Nothing ever really came of it and her family moved away in the beginning of the summer of ’82. Her brother Bryan was very cool as well and I would miss them after they moved away.
One thing that sticks out in my mind about 1982 is how good the music was that year. It is my favorite year when you consider that “I Love Rock N Roll” by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, “Open Arms” by Journey, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell, and “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League were all hits that year and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came out at the end of the year. I was an avid Billboard chart follower and I religiously listened to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. I would root for certain songs to go up the chart each week and I became a music trivia expert. You could give me the name of a song or an artist and I could tell you the peak position for nearly every song. It was useless information, but it was fun to amaze people with that knowledge.
At the end of the summer, I had a fight with Dave Ropiak and he busted my nose. That is the only bone I have ever broken in my whole life. I still say it was a lucky punch, but anyway, I felt like the Elephant Man with a mask on my nose for a week. Luckily, the doctor removed it the Friday before the start of 8th grade. You could imagine the embarrassment if I had to walk into class with that on my face. I guess I should have taken that as a sign of how 8th grade would be for me. After all the good feelings I had with the experience of Mr. Broughton’s class the year before, I absolutely despised Sr. Magdalen and couldn’t wait to graduate. She was mean to nearly everyone in the class and many mornings I dreaded the thought of being there. One morning she sent me back home because I didn’t do a homework assignment. She also kicked Jose Guzman, one of my closest friends since 1st grade, out of the school for repeated missed homework assignments. She was also a very strict grader. Hardly anyone received any A’s in her class. The one thing that angered me the most was the process of testing to get into high schools. I first took the co-op exam for entrance into Catholic high schools. I made every school, except for Regis and I had picked La Salle Academy as my first choice and made it. I then took the test for the top public high schools, at Stuyvesant and I picked Stuy as my first choice, because it was the best and it was within walking distance, only nine blocks from home. When they came back with the results, they announced that no one from the class had made Stuyvesant, but that was not true. The school secretary, Dorothy Luckashenak(thank goodness for her) called my mother and told her that I had made it, along with my classmates Lynn and Dave and that she should go to Stuy and talk to them about letting me go there, because it was probably past the deadline to commit. That is exactly what my mother did. The story was that I had originally missed making it by one point, but there was an error in the answer key and I had actually scored the exact amount needed to make it. Apparently, Sr. Magdalen knew this and didn’t tell me. When she found out that I was going there anyway, despite her actions, she told me that I was making a mistake and I wouldn’t do well there because I couldn’t compete with these other talented students.
From that point on, I was very unhappy with her and I was counting the days until graduation. It also left a bitter taste for St. Stan’s for several years for me. I only attended one event there over the next six years, until they closed in 1989 due to lack of attendance, which was the graduation for the class of ’85, because I had several friends in that class. The rest of the year was fairly uneventful and June 18th, graduation day was a very happy day, though I would miss my classmates after that day, I was thrilled to know that I would be attending Stuyvesant in the fall.

My School Years: St. Stan's

September 3rd, 1975 was my first day of school at Saint Stanislaus. I can’t say that I remember a whole lot of what occurred in those first days of school. I do know that it must have been quite unusual to suddenly be around a whole bunch of new kids and not just my class, but the 1st and 2nd grade classes were together in the same room. Sr. Fidelia taught both classes. She did have all of the 1st graders sit together on one side of the room and the 2nd graders on the other side. I did make friends relatively quickly, especially with the boys and girls who lived in a housing co-op a block from my building called Village View. I had starting hanging out with some of them, before starting school. There was Peter Jarema, Allan Heck and Paul Kim. Also, there was Roman Strawa and Johnny Miller., who were in 2nd grade as I was starting 1st grade. There were also a few others who my brothers had already known. Like Joey Opalka and Lynn LiCausi and Diane Krawiec. Attending class every day helped make the other students become very familiar over time. I got to know Helene Bracero, Helen Bala, Susie Gregorczyk Jose Guzman and Jose Marrero very well over those years.
Sr. Fidelia left a negative impression in my mind. She was frightening with her meanness, at times. Two incidents, involving me, stick out in my mind. She was a brutal disciplinarian, and she loved to punish late-comers to class by grabbing a ruler and slapping the students on the hands with them. I usually wasn’t late, because my mother would walk me and my brother Rocco to school. I think there was one day, where Rocco was a little slow getting ready for school and we ended up being a few minutes late. She did her usual punishment and whacked me with her ruler. I cried and later complained to my mother, that I was whacked on the hands for something that wasn’t my fault. The next day, my mother came into school and demanded to see the principal and complained that the discipline was excessive. I think the principal agreed, because it didn’t really happen anymore. The other incident was something where I truly deserved my punishment. In an attempt to try and fit in with the more mischievous students, because I was usually very well-behaved, I listened to my classmate Allan, who advised me to get friendlier with Lynn, a female classmate, by lifting up her skirt. She screamed, both classes laughed at me and Sr. Fidelia grabbed me by my hair and yanked me down the hall to the principal’s office and made me write 100 times: I must behave in class. I also had to say I’m sorry to Lynn in front of both classes. Being a very shy young boy, that was way more difficult than all the writing I had to do. I was also intimidated by the issue she had with her fingers. Two of them were severed, apparently by an incident involving a meat slicer, where her hand slipped. She had tape over her fingers and that issue caused me to want to keep my distance from her.
Despite these moments of behavior issues and this unusual nun, I did very well in school, right from the start. My report card was full of A’s and B’s and it was always an A in Math. I wanted to be the smartest student in the class and I felt that my competition for that honor was Lynn and another girl named Bretta Robertson. They were both very smart and pretty girls. As a little boy, I was really excited about learning and some classmates really respected me and others probably learned to dislike me a bit. At the end of 1st grade, Sr. Fidelia thought I was smart enough to skip 2nd grade and go straight into 3rd, but the principal didn’t want the school to lose a year’s tuition and offered to allow the skip, if my parents paid the year’s tuition. My parents refused to do that, even though I was excited with the chance to move ahead to 3rd grade. I went into 2nd grade and the school decided to keep our two classes together which were now 2nd and 3rd grade and the 3rd grade teacher, Ms. Martel became the 1st grade teacher. I was happy because it gave me another year to really get to know the 3rd graders, like Johnny M., Johnny Zadubara., Cheryl Grogan, Denise Hart, Donna Spatafora and several others. A sad thing happened right after Christmas/New Year’s vacation. The day after New Year’s, January 2, 1977, my grandfather, Guiseppe(Joseph), passed away from a heart attack, basically a block from his building on St. Mark’s Place. My family really mourned his loss and also many people in the neighborhood, he was there basically since he came to this country from Ellis Island. I missed a whole week of school, which I was not happy about, but I continued to do very well, grade wise. I also started going to an after-school program at a place called the Cardinal Spellman Center, located on 2nd Street. Some of my St. Stan’s classmates went there and also many students from another school, Most Holy Redeemer, which was located on 3rd Street. I started getting to know many of them. One that became a very good friend for a long time was Nick Marzulla. He was a funny, sarcastic, smart guy that was really into sports. We hit it off pretty well and spent a lot of time in our youth hanging out together. His parents were always very nice to me and I spent a good amount of time at their apartment on Orchard St.
I also spent an increasing amount of time hanging around the buildings of Village View. I had already known several of the kids who were friends with my brothers. I liked to tag along quite a bit with those people, because it seemed that they were having more fun than those who were my age, plus some of the younger friends liked to make fun or pick on me a bit. I didn’t really enjoy that and it started to snowball into a steady problem that made a shy boy go deeper into a shell. It was something I had to deal with throughout my young life.
3rd grade was interesting to me, because it was the first time we didn’t have to share a classroom with anybody. Also, for the fact that our teacher, Ms. Patricia Naughton was a lot nicer than Sr. Fidelia. She was tough when she had to be, but the class, on the whole, behaved well. There were several new students in the class, including Dave Ropiak, who was a brilliant child that was skipped ahead from 1st to 3rd Grade. I’ll assume that his parents paid a full year’s tuition for him to be skipped ahead. The year as a whole, wasn’t very eventful, but I do have to say that I started to think about some of the girls in the class, in terms of who I liked. I was undecided who I liked the most. Sometimes it was Lynn, sometimes Bretta, sometimes Diane, but it didn’t totally occupy my mind. I was only 8 years old. I was more focused on Reggie Jackson and the Yankees winning the World Series and on Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gee’s. Also, that I was glad that the Son of Sam was caught.
4th grade started off on a bit of a downer when I found out that Bretta was moving to New Jersey. As I mentioned, she was a favorite of mine and I was disappointed. It was time to have another nun as a teacher, Sr. Mary Vincent. I enjoyed her teaching a lot more than the last two. She made it fun to learn in her class, and I really excelled. I had straight A’s on the last two report cards. I also joined the choir that year and enjoyed singing at church, even though I was picked on at times, for doing that. I was told that I was a sissy for joining, but I didn’t care. The music teacher, Mr. Perry, was skilled at teaching music, and I enjoyed it. I was also excited that my brother, Rocco was graduating. I loved him but I felt overshadowed by him, in a way. He was one of the more popular guys in school and I wished that I was as popular. Once he did graduate, I continued to do very well grade-wise, but I never felt that I truly fit in.
5th grade was a fairly eventful year for me and the class. Ms. Aguila was the teacher and she always struck me as being quite unusual. Her teaching style was a little different from other teachers I’ve experienced. Somehow, I was able to do exceptionally well in that class. I had straight A’s on all four report cards. I’ve always been a little proud of that. It was the last year with Paul Kim as a classmate. He moved to Yonkers afterwards. He was one of my favorite classmates and I missed him. There were also several new classmates, including a buddy of mine that grew up around the corner on 6th St., Jimmy Duval. He always was a very funny guy and was so cool to be around and I also knew that he would never make fun of me, like many of the others I hung out with. He became probably my closest friend for the last four years at St. Stan’s and we would always walk home from school together and talk about what went on in class. There were other interesting new classmates, Like Kevin Murray and Kris Williams that were both fun guys that made the class laugh quite a bit.
I had a bit of a health issue that popped up in that school year that was difficult. I started getting a lot of headaches. Some that would make me very nauseous or vomit quite a bit. It caused me to miss a good chunk of days of class. It was a mystery for a while to figure out what was causing them. It seemed to be at least once a week, if not more that it was occurring. My mother took me to the doctor, then another doctor, then a specialist. Since my mother and my aunt Marie had migraines, it was pretty much assumed that’s what they were. The question was what was triggering them. Over the course of time, I realized that nearly every time I had chocolate, I was getting a migraine. Obviously I had to stop eating it, which was a big heartache because I loved it, whether it was a candy bar, a chocolate egg cream or a bottle of Yoo-Hoo. There were also situations where stress was causing them and I did cut back a bit on hanging out with those who were making fun of me all the time.
In 6th grade, Mr. Doyle was the teacher and I found him to be interesting in some ways but a little unusual. He liked to play music a lot in class. Sometimes it would be classical, sometimes the Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel. I personally enjoyed it, being a music fanatic, but I could imagine for those who were more into other types of music, it was pretty boring. He certainly played more Beatles songs after December 8th, 1980 when John Lennon was murdered. I always had an appreciation for the Beatles, but didn’t comprehend how much of a hero John Lennon was to me until after his death. I learned about how he was such a peace activist and stood up against the establishment. I was sad to think of what he could have done, if he wasn’t murdered. It was the first celebrity death that had that kind of effect on me.
I wasn’t really much of an athletic child, though I did play softball and punch ball and a little bit of football and basketball, at the playgrounds and parks. At this point, I did find the sport that I enjoyed the most in my youth, and most of my life, for that matter: bowling. My parents would sometimes take me to bowl, with my brothers just to have a good time. Joe had become a very good bowler by then, with his very nifty hook shot. He was in the leagues and had won some trophies already. He also worked at Bowlmor Lanes, behind the counter, assigning lanes and renting shoes. Rocco wasn’t a bad bowler either, though his shot was more very hard and down the middle of the lane. I used to just roll the ball down the middle with two hands and didn’t do very well, but Joe worked on having me actually put my fingers in the holes and shooting the ball like a normal bowler. Once I did that, my scores improved quite a bit, enough for me to join the junior leagues at Bowlmor Lanes every Saturday morning. That was the end of my cartoon watching on Saturdays. My mother ended up getting hired as a bartender on Saturdays, but was mostly making cheeseburgers and fries for the kids who were bowling. I made a few new friends there, including Jace Rafter and Danny Marks, who I bowled with for a few years and Jeff Katz, who would later become a High School teammate. I was very hooked on the game and would participate in leagues for the next 30 years, but that first year, I only averaged a 97 but would continue to improve through the years. My first bowling ball was a Columbia 300 Red Dot and I had my name put on it. In my youth, it was a prized possession.
At this point in time, I started noticing girls a little bit more. I was 11, and though I didn’t quite reach puberty yet, I was paying attention to the friends who were starting to discuss being involved with girls. The two that stick out in my mind are Allan, who always seemed to be chasing after girls and Peter, who is the person who first told me about the birds and the bees, in graphic detail. Thanks for that, Pete. I also hung out with Roman quite a bit, who started to become pretty active with the girls in the neighborhood. I, of course had no such luck, and wouldn’t for a long time.
7th grade would become my most enjoyable year at St. Stan’s, by far. The teacher, Mr. Broughton, was an incredibly enjoyable and understanding teacher. He certainly taught with his own style, which was something that the principal and nuns of St. Stan’s didn’t really appreciate. After missing 18 days of class in 5th grade, mostly because of headaches and 13 days of class in 6th grade, mostly because of boredom, I only missed one day of class in 7th grade. That’s how much I enjoyed being in that class. He always was real and very honest with us, which was very much appreciated, for sure. He also liked to take us on class trips. We had several, including four in the final week of school. We also put on a wonderful play. We did a take on Grease that was truly remarkable. He was very skilled with teaching all of us dance moves and I feel that it was the most enjoyable play that I was ever involved in.
I was sad that Angelique Rivera was not in our class anymore. Her family had moved to Queens. I had always gotten along pretty well with her. There was a wave of new classmates as well. Richie Vasquez became a buddy of mine and Theresa Cruz was a favorite of mine as well. There was also Michelle Vasquez, Leslie Diaz, Maria Bassini and Patricia Venditti.
One thing that I was proud of that year was that we had a Math contest and I was the winner for the class. I then competed with the top 7th graders in each catholic school in Manhattan and I finished 2nd out of about 25 schools. I remember Monsignor Karpinski met with me at the rectory, congratulated me, and gave me $20. He said “Don’t tell your parents I gave you this or that I’m sitting here with a big bottle of wine”. He had obviously drunk a lot of it.
I also had my first real teenage crush that year. As I stated earlier, I spent a lot of time hanging out by the Village View buildings, near where I grew up and though I knew most of the girls who lived there, I was always very shy when the girls were around and I never really gave them a chance to get to know me. There was one specific girl who caught my eye. Her name was Theresa Dougherty, and I can’t really explain what it was about her, except that she was a very smart girl and she was friendly enough for me to at least have some interesting conversations with her. Nothing ever really came of it and her family moved away in the beginning of the summer of ’82. Her brother Bryan was very cool as well and I would miss them after they moved away.
One thing that sticks out in my mind about 1982 is how good the music was that year. It is my favorite year when you consider that “I Love Rock N Roll” by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, “Open Arms” by Journey, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell, and “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League were all hits that year and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came out at the end of the year. I was an avid Billboard chart follower and I religiously listened to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. I would root for certain songs to go up the chart each week and I became a music trivia expert. You could give me the name of a song or an artist and I could tell you the peak position for nearly every song. It was useless information, but it was fun to amaze people with that knowledge.
At the end of the summer, I had a fight with Dave Ropiak and he busted my nose. That is the only bone I have ever broken in my whole life. I still say it was a lucky punch, but anyway, I felt like the Elephant Man with a mask on my nose for a week. Luckily, the doctor removed it the Friday before the start of 8th grade. You could imagine the embarrassment if I had to walk into class with that on my face. I guess I should have taken that as a sign of how 8th grade would be for me. After all the good feelings I had with the experience of Mr. Broughton’s class the year before, I absolutely despised Sr. Magdalen and couldn’t wait to graduate. She was mean to nearly everyone in the class and many mornings I dreaded the thought of being there. One morning she sent me back home because I didn’t do a homework assignment. She also kicked Jose Guzman, one of my closest friends since 1st grade, out of the school for repeated missed homework assignments. She was also a very strict grader. Hardly anyone received any A’s in her class. The one thing that angered me the most was the process of testing to get into high schools. I first took the co-op exam for entrance into Catholic high schools. I made every school, except for Regis and I had picked La Salle Academy as my first choice and made it. I then took the test for the top public high schools, at Stuyvesant and I picked Stuy as my first choice, because it was the best and it was within walking distance, only nine blocks from home. When they came back with the results, they announced that no one from the class had made Stuyvesant, but that was not true. The school secretary, Dorothy Luckashenak(thank goodness for her) called my mother and told her that I had made it, along with my classmates Lynn and Dave and that she should go to Stuy and talk to them about letting me go there, because it was probably past the deadline to commit. That is exactly what my mother did. The story was that I had originally missed making it by one point, but there was an error in the answer key and I had actually scored the exact amount needed to make it. Apparently, Sr. Magdalen knew this and didn’t tell me. When she found out that I was going there anyway, despite her actions, she told me that I was making a mistake and I wouldn’t do well there because I couldn’t compete with these other talented students.
From that point on, I was very unhappy with her and I was counting the days until graduation. It also left a bitter taste for St. Stan’s for several years for me. I only attended one event there over the next six years, until they closed in 1989 due to lack of attendance, which was the graduation for the class of ’85, because I had several friends in that class. The rest of the year was fairly uneventful and June 18th, graduation day was a very happy day, though I would miss my classmates after that day, I was thrilled to know that I would be attending Stuyvesant in the fall.

My School Years: St. Stan's

September 3rd, 1975 was my first day of school at Saint Stanislaus. I can’t say that I remember a whole lot of what occurred in those first days of school. I do know that it must have been quite unusual to suddenly be around a whole bunch of new kids and not just my class, but the 1st and 2nd grade classes were together in the same room. Sr. Fidelia taught both classes. She did have all of the 1st graders sit together on one side of the room and the 2nd graders on the other side. I did make friends relatively quickly, especially with the boys and girls who lived in a housing co-op a block from my building called Village View. I had starting hanging out with some of them, before starting school. There was Peter Jarema, Allan Heck and Paul Kim. Also, there was Roman Strawa and Johnny Miller., who were in 2nd grade as I was starting 1st grade. There were also a few others who my brothers had already known. Like Joey Opalka and Lynn LiCausi and Diane Krawiec. Attending class every day helped make the other students become very familiar over time. I got to know Helene Bracero, Helen Bala, Susie Gregorczyk Jose Guzman and Jose Marrero very well over those years.
Sr. Fidelia left a negative impression in my mind. She was frightening with her meanness, at times. Two incidents, involving me, stick out in my mind. She was a brutal disciplinarian, and she loved to punish late-comers to class by grabbing a ruler and slapping the students on the hands with them. I usually wasn’t late, because my mother would walk me and my brother Rocco to school. I think there was one day, where Rocco was a little slow getting ready for school and we ended up being a few minutes late. She did her usual punishment and whacked me with her ruler. I cried and later complained to my mother, that I was whacked on the hands for something that wasn’t my fault. The next day, my mother came into school and demanded to see the principal and complained that the discipline was excessive. I think the principal agreed, because it didn’t really happen anymore. The other incident was something where I truly deserved my punishment. In an attempt to try and fit in with the more mischievous students, because I was usually very well-behaved, I listened to my classmate Allan, who advised me to get friendlier with Lynn, a female classmate, by lifting up her skirt. She screamed, both classes laughed at me and Sr. Fidelia grabbed me by my hair and yanked me down the hall to the principal’s office and made me write 100 times: I must behave in class. I also had to say I’m sorry to Lynn in front of both classes. Being a very shy young boy, that was way more difficult than all the writing I had to do. I was also intimidated by the issue she had with her fingers. Two of them were severed, apparently by an incident involving a meat slicer, where her hand slipped. She had tape over her fingers and that issue caused me to want to keep my distance from her.
Despite these moments of behavior issues and this unusual nun, I did very well in school, right from the start. My report card was full of A’s and B’s and it was always an A in Math. I wanted to be the smartest student in the class and I felt that my competition for that honor was Lynn and another girl named Bretta Robertson. They were both very smart and pretty girls. As a little boy, I was really excited about learning and some classmates really respected me and others probably learned to dislike me a bit. At the end of 1st grade, Sr. Fidelia thought I was smart enough to skip 2nd grade and go straight into 3rd, but the principal didn’t want the school to lose a year’s tuition and offered to allow the skip, if my parents paid the year’s tuition. My parents refused to do that, even though I was excited with the chance to move ahead to 3rd grade. I went into 2nd grade and the school decided to keep our two classes together which were now 2nd and 3rd grade and the 3rd grade teacher, Ms. Martel became the 1st grade teacher. I was happy because it gave me another year to really get to know the 3rd graders, like Johnny M., Johnny Zadubara., Cheryl Grogan, Denise Hart, Donna Spatafora and several others. A sad thing happened right after Christmas/New Year’s vacation. The day after New Year’s, January 2, 1977, my grandfather, Guiseppe(Joseph), passed away from a heart attack, basically a block from his building on St. Mark’s Place. My family really mourned his loss and also many people in the neighborhood, he was there basically since he came to this country from Ellis Island. I missed a whole week of school, which I was not happy about, but I continued to do very well, grade wise. I also started going to an after-school program at a place called the Cardinal Spellman Center, located on 2nd Street. Some of my St. Stan’s classmates went there and also many students from another school, Most Holy Redeemer, which was located on 3rd Street. I started getting to know many of them. One that became a very good friend for a long time was Nick Marzulla. He was a funny, sarcastic, smart guy that was really into sports. We hit it off pretty well and spent a lot of time in our youth hanging out together. His parents were always very nice to me and I spent a good amount of time at their apartment on Orchard St.
I also spent an increasing amount of time hanging around the buildings of Village View. I had already known several of the kids who were friends with my brothers. I liked to tag along quite a bit with those people, because it seemed that they were having more fun than those who were my age, plus some of the younger friends liked to make fun or pick on me a bit. I didn’t really enjoy that and it started to snowball into a steady problem that made a shy boy go deeper into a shell. It was something I had to deal with throughout my young life.
3rd grade was interesting to me, because it was the first time we didn’t have to share a classroom with anybody. Also, for the fact that our teacher, Ms. Patricia Naughton was a lot nicer than Sr. Fidelia. She was tough when she had to be, but the class, on the whole, behaved well. There were several new students in the class, including Dave Ropiak, who was a brilliant child that was skipped ahead from 1st to 3rd Grade. I’ll assume that his parents paid a full year’s tuition for him to be skipped ahead. The year as a whole, wasn’t very eventful, but I do have to say that I started to think about some of the girls in the class, in terms of who I liked. I was undecided who I liked the most. Sometimes it was Lynn, sometimes Bretta, sometimes Diane, but it didn’t totally occupy my mind. I was only 8 years old. I was more focused on Reggie Jackson and the Yankees winning the World Series and on Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gee’s. Also, that I was glad that the Son of Sam was caught.
4th grade started off on a bit of a downer when I found out that Bretta was moving to New Jersey. As I mentioned, she was a favorite of mine and I was disappointed. It was time to have another nun as a teacher, Sr. Mary Vincent. I enjoyed her teaching a lot more than the last two. She made it fun to learn in her class, and I really excelled. I had straight A’s on the last two report cards. I also joined the choir that year and enjoyed singing at church, even though I was picked on at times, for doing that. I was told that I was a sissy for joining, but I didn’t care. The music teacher, Mr. Perry, was skilled at teaching music, and I enjoyed it. I was also excited that my brother, Rocco was graduating. I loved him but I felt overshadowed by him, in a way. He was one of the more popular guys in school and I wished that I was as popular. Once he did graduate, I continued to do very well grade-wise, but I never felt that I truly fit in.
5th grade was a fairly eventful year for me and the class. Ms. Aguila was the teacher and she always struck me as being quite unusual. Her teaching style was a little different from other teachers I’ve experienced. Somehow, I was able to do exceptionally well in that class. I had straight A’s on all four report cards. I’ve always been a little proud of that. It was the last year with Paul Kim as a classmate. He moved to Yonkers afterwards. He was one of my favorite classmates and I missed him. There were also several new classmates, including a buddy of mine that grew up around the corner on 6th St., Jimmy Duval. He always was a very funny guy and was so cool to be around and I also knew that he would never make fun of me, like many of the others I hung out with. He became probably my closest friend for the last four years at St. Stan’s and we would always walk home from school together and talk about what went on in class. There were other interesting new classmates, Like Kevin Murray and Kris Williams that were both fun guys that made the class laugh quite a bit.
I had a bit of a health issue that popped up in that school year that was difficult. I started getting a lot of headaches. Some that would make me very nauseous or vomit quite a bit. It caused me to miss a good chunk of days of class. It was a mystery for a while to figure out what was causing them. It seemed to be at least once a week, if not more that it was occurring. My mother took me to the doctor, then another doctor, then a specialist. Since my mother and my aunt Marie had migraines, it was pretty much assumed that’s what they were. The question was what was triggering them. Over the course of time, I realized that nearly every time I had chocolate, I was getting a migraine. Obviously I had to stop eating it, which was a big heartache because I loved it, whether it was a candy bar, a chocolate egg cream or a bottle of Yoo-Hoo. There were also situations where stress was causing them and I did cut back a bit on hanging out with those who were making fun of me all the time.
In 6th grade, Mr. Doyle was the teacher and I found him to be interesting in some ways but a little unusual. He liked to play music a lot in class. Sometimes it would be classical, sometimes the Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel. I personally enjoyed it, being a music fanatic, but I could imagine for those who were more into other types of music, it was pretty boring. He certainly played more Beatles songs after December 8th, 1980 when John Lennon was murdered. I always had an appreciation for the Beatles, but didn’t comprehend how much of a hero John Lennon was to me until after his death. I learned about how he was such a peace activist and stood up against the establishment. I was sad to think of what he could have done, if he wasn’t murdered. It was the first celebrity death that had that kind of effect on me.
I wasn’t really much of an athletic child, though I did play softball and punch ball and a little bit of football and basketball, at the playgrounds and parks. At this point, I did find the sport that I enjoyed the most in my youth, and most of my life, for that matter: bowling. My parents would sometimes take me to bowl, with my brothers just to have a good time. Joe had become a very good bowler by then, with his very nifty hook shot. He was in the leagues and had won some trophies already. He also worked at Bowlmor Lanes, behind the counter, assigning lanes and renting shoes. Rocco wasn’t a bad bowler either, though his shot was more very hard and down the middle of the lane. I used to just roll the ball down the middle with two hands and didn’t do very well, but Joe worked on having me actually put my fingers in the holes and shooting the ball like a normal bowler. Once I did that, my scores improved quite a bit, enough for me to join the junior leagues at Bowlmor Lanes every Saturday morning. That was the end of my cartoon watching on Saturdays. My mother ended up getting hired as a bartender on Saturdays, but was mostly making cheeseburgers and fries for the kids who were bowling. I made a few new friends there, including Jace Rafter and Danny Marks, who I bowled with for a few years and Jeff Katz, who would later become a High School teammate. I was very hooked on the game and would participate in leagues for the next 30 years, but that first year, I only averaged a 97 but would continue to improve through the years. My first bowling ball was a Columbia 300 Red Dot and I had my name put on it. In my youth, it was a prized possession.
At this point in time, I started noticing girls a little bit more. I was 11, and though I didn’t quite reach puberty yet, I was paying attention to the friends who were starting to discuss being involved with girls. The two that stick out in my mind are Allan, who always seemed to be chasing after girls and Peter, who is the person who first told me about the birds and the bees, in graphic detail. Thanks for that, Pete. I also hung out with Roman quite a bit, who started to become pretty active with the girls in the neighborhood. I, of course had no such luck, and wouldn’t for a long time.
7th grade would become my most enjoyable year at St. Stan’s, by far. The teacher, Mr. Broughton, was an incredibly enjoyable and understanding teacher. He certainly taught with his own style, which was something that the principal and nuns of St. Stan’s didn’t really appreciate. After missing 18 days of class in 5th grade, mostly because of headaches and 13 days of class in 6th grade, mostly because of boredom, I only missed one day of class in 7th grade. That’s how much I enjoyed being in that class. He always was real and very honest with us, which was very much appreciated, for sure. He also liked to take us on class trips. We had several, including four in the final week of school. We also put on a wonderful play. We did a take on Grease that was truly remarkable. He was very skilled with teaching all of us dance moves and I feel that it was the most enjoyable play that I was ever involved in.
I was sad that Angelique Rivera was not in our class anymore. Her family had moved to Queens. I had always gotten along pretty well with her. There was a wave of new classmates as well. Richie Vasquez became a buddy of mine and Theresa Cruz was a favorite of mine as well. There was also Michelle Vasquez, Leslie Diaz, Maria Bassini and Patricia Venditti.
One thing that I was proud of that year was that we had a Math contest and I was the winner for the class. I then competed with the top 7th graders in each catholic school in Manhattan and I finished 2nd out of about 25 schools. I remember Monsignor Karpinski met with me at the rectory, congratulated me, and gave me $20. He said “Don’t tell your parents I gave you this or that I’m sitting here with a big bottle of wine”. He had obviously drunk a lot of it.
I also had my first real teenage crush that year. As I stated earlier, I spent a lot of time hanging out by the Village View buildings, near where I grew up and though I knew most of the girls who lived there, I was always very shy when the girls were around and I never really gave them a chance to get to know me. There was one specific girl who caught my eye. Her name was Theresa Dougherty, and I can’t really explain what it was about her, except that she was a very smart girl and she was friendly enough for me to at least have some interesting conversations with her. Nothing ever really came of it and her family moved away in the beginning of the summer of ’82. Her brother Bryan was very cool as well and I would miss them after they moved away.
One thing that sticks out in my mind about 1982 is how good the music was that year. It is my favorite year when you consider that “I Love Rock N Roll” by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, “Open Arms” by Journey, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell, and “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League were all hits that year and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came out at the end of the year. I was an avid Billboard chart follower and I religiously listened to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. I would root for certain songs to go up the chart each week and I became a music trivia expert. You could give me the name of a song or an artist and I could tell you the peak position for nearly every song. It was useless information, but it was fun to amaze people with that knowledge.
At the end of the summer, I had a fight with Dave Ropiak and he busted my nose. That is the only bone I have ever broken in my whole life. I still say it was a lucky punch, but anyway, I felt like the Elephant Man with a mask on my nose for a week. Luckily, the doctor removed it the Friday before the start of 8th grade. You could imagine the embarrassment if I had to walk into class with that on my face. I guess I should have taken that as a sign of how 8th grade would be for me. After all the good feelings I had with the experience of Mr. Broughton’s class the year before, I absolutely despised Sr. Magdalen and couldn’t wait to graduate. She was mean to nearly everyone in the class and many mornings I dreaded the thought of being there. One morning she sent me back home because I didn’t do a homework assignment. She also kicked Jose Guzman, one of my closest friends since 1st grade, out of the school for repeated missed homework assignments. She was also a very strict grader. Hardly anyone received any A’s in her class. The one thing that angered me the most was the process of testing to get into high schools. I first took the co-op exam for entrance into Catholic high schools. I made every school, except for Regis and I had picked La Salle Academy as my first choice and made it. I then took the test for the top public high schools, at Stuyvesant and I picked Stuy as my first choice, because it was the best and it was within walking distance, only nine blocks from home. When they came back with the results, they announced that no one from the class had made Stuyvesant, but that was not true. The school secretary, Dorothy Luckashenak(thank goodness for her) called my mother and told her that I had made it, along with my classmates Lynn and Dave and that she should go to Stuy and talk to them about letting me go there, because it was probably past the deadline to commit. That is exactly what my mother did. The story was that I had originally missed making it by one point, but there was an error in the answer key and I had actually scored the exact amount needed to make it. Apparently, Sr. Magdalen knew this and didn’t tell me. When she found out that I was going there anyway, despite her actions, she told me that I was making a mistake and I wouldn’t do well there because I couldn’t compete with these other talented students.
From that point on, I was very unhappy with her and I was counting the days until graduation. It also left a bitter taste for St. Stan’s for several years for me. I only attended one event there over the next six years, until they closed in 1989 due to lack of attendance, which was the graduation for the class of ’85, because I had several friends in that class. The rest of the year was fairly uneventful and June 18th, graduation day was a very happy day, though I would miss my classmates after that day, I was thrilled to know that I would be attending Stuyvesant in the fall.

Chapter Two(My Family)

My father, Rocco, was born on March 28, 1936 in Manhattan. His parents, Giuseppe (Joseph) Battaglia and Frances Bonnano were both Sicilian immigrants who came from Palermo in each of their childhoods, around 1920 and met here. My father has an older sister, my aunt Beatrice (who was called Bee-Bee), a younger sister, my aunt Marie, and a younger brother, my uncle Paul. They all grew up in a railroad room apartment on St. Mark’s Place (coincidentally, across the street from St. Stan’s, where I went to school). My father was an average student in school but my grandfather, who ran a fruit and vegetable stand on the upper west side, needed help to keep the business going. My father dropped out of high school after 9th grade to help him. It may have been a disadvantage to not have completed high school, but the experience of working for his father must have been a help later on, as he went to work in the supermarket business.
My mother, Mary, was born on April 21, 1937, also in Manhattan. Her father, Robert Tissier immigrated from Marseille, France in his youth and her mother, Thelma Leslie was half Scottish and half Irish. She has an older brother, my uncle Robert Jr. and three step-sisters, my aunts Jeannie, Jo Ann and Theresa. My mother’s childhood was fairly difficult with her parents divorcing and having to move around several times in her youth, including Brooklyn, on 4th St, 6th St and Charles St. in Manhattan. The constant distractions from her home life affected her ability to focus on studying and she dropped out in 10th grade in high school. She did land a job with New York Telephone as a switchboard operator and stayed there for several years, until she had her first child.
My parents met through my uncle Robert, who friended my father because of their hanging with the same friends at a malt shop on East 5th St. My parents started dating in 1953 and didn’t have an easy time of it, through no fault of their own. My father’s parents, both from a very traditional Italian background, had a hard time accepting my mother, who was not Italian. They stood firm and continued to date. They decided to get married at City Hall in 1957 and saved up for a church ceremony and reception a year later. My father was 21 and my mother was 20. Despite some ups and downs, they have made it work out, for all these years.
My brother, Joseph Paul Battaglia was born in 1961 and was and still is a charismatic, friendly and caring guy that has always been very supportive of me. He was always popular among his friends, classmates and relatives. He was always very active in sports, whether it was playing stickball on 7th Street, basketball in school or in the Village View playground, softball in leagues for many years or probably his best sport, bowling, where he was always among the best in his leagues. He did relatively well in school and graduated from Immaculata HS in 1979. Career-wise, he bounced around a bit, but has been successful in retail sales for a long time. He always liked to be where the action was, which made life fun for him, but probably caused him some problems as well. He met the lady who would become his wife, Rosalie, at a house party in the Mill Basin section of Brooklyn. They hit it off very well, and after a few years, ended up marrying in 1990. They now live in Jamesburg, NJ and have two sons, Anthony and Michael.
My other brother, Rocco Joseph Battaglia Jr. was born in 1965 and has many of the same qualities as Joe and myself, but his focus was always on two things that neither of us really focused on, women and cars. While Joe and I were always perfectly happy with hanging out with the fellas, or watching or playing sports or listening to music, Rocco would always be out chasing the women or driving or working on his car. Those were his passions. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would have been perfectly happy with dating or driving a car, if I could afford either, during my teenage and twenty-something years, but Rocco made it happen, on both accounts. He did settle down with his wife Maria and married in City Hall, but he went through cars like I would go through sneakers. At one point, he owned 10 different cars, over a seven year period. He did drop out of high school in 10th grade, but he pretty much knew exactly what he wanted to do for a career. He wanted to be a tow-truck driver. He always loved cars and saw this as an opportunity to make a good living, despite the stress of driving in New York City. It is what he has done since the age of 17 and I must say that career-wise, he has done the best of the three of us. He has my father’s work ethic and I have to say that I’m proud of him, though I was always closer to Joe than him.

Chapter One(My Early Childhood)

You, my loyal blog readers, will get a sneak peek at the first draft of that book, that I keep attempting to write. Maybe having the responsibility of giving you guys something to read will motivate me to actually finish it. Here's the first chapter. Enjoy!!!



I was born on a Sunday morning in the summer of 1969. It was an interesting time in America, and the world. We had an unjust war going on in Vietnam and Richard Nixon was our President. We were two weeks away from sending three astronauts to walk on the moon, for the first time. Woodstock was a month away from occurring in upstate New York and the New York Mets, for the first time, were actually a contender. John Lindsay was the major of a big apple in decline. The city was in debt as many of the middle class were moving out to the suburbs in droves.
My family was among those you would consider middle class. My father, Rocco, was a supermarket manager. He managed a Key Food, at the time, and did well enough that my mother, Mary, could stay home, and take care of my older brothers, Joe and Rocco Jr. One event that may have made this story different was that my father felt a lot of pressure, raising a young family and having a lot of job-related stress. It may have contributed to him having a heart attack, at the age of 32, in 1968. Luckily, he survived or I would not have been born.
They lived in Alphabet City, on East 11th Street between Avenues B and C, which was quickly going downhill as a neighborhood, at the time. Because of that, and it being a 5th floor, walk-up which was not the healthiest thing for my father, at the time, and the plan to have a third child, which would mean the need for another bedroom, they decided to move into a bigger apartment, preferably a few blocks west, into a safer part of the East Village. They found one on Avenue A, between 6th and 7th Street. A building with an elevator, but it would be slightly more expensive, $100 a month, up from $85(Those were the days.) It would be the only place I would live for the first 22 years of my life.
My early childhood days were relatively normal, by most standards. I was a healthy baby and toddler, except for cases of measles and chicken pox, at the ages of two and three, respectively. I was known for being a fairly quiet little child. My mother claims that I cried less than my brothers did, at the same age, and my interest in television started very early, which may have pacified me quite a bit. The show Sesame Street began in 1969 and I do remember being glued to that show, along with The Electric Company and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. I didn’t miss many episodes in those pre-school days. That surely played a big role in my early interest in wanting to learn, along with having a school teacher for a baby-sitter.
Her name was Nelda, and she lived across the hall from me. She was just starting to teach at a public school on the Lower East Side and there were times when my parents weren’t home, and they didn’t really want to lug a young child around, plus they saw right away that I enjoyed staying with Nelda, because I quickly developed a strong interest in Math and other subjects and she made it so much fun to want to learn about numbers. I was able to add and subtract by the age of 4. Another trick I learned was to be able to say the alphabet backwards very quickly, usually under five seconds. (You try it). I don’t know if that would be considered advanced, but it did convince the principal at the school I would be attending, St. Stanislaus on St. Mark’s Place, that I wouldn’t need to attend kindergarten. She told my parents to just wait another year, until I was six, to start first grade.
My brothers were both already attending St. Stan’s, though it was mainly a parish for those of Polish ancestry. They started allowing others to attend, because of the tough fiscal situation in the city, combined with many middle class families moving out of the neighborhood and the city. It was only two blocks away from home, which was convenient for my mother to walk us and pick us up from there. It was a Catholic school with the church around the block from the school. The families that remained became a fairly tight-knit bunch of neighbors, though some would move as the years went on. My mother made friends with a bunch of other mothers who sent their children to the school. They would usually meet at Leshko’s or Odessa for coffee. They were two Polish/Ukrainian diners on Avenue A that both served great pierogies. The guilty pleasure of my youth was the chocolate egg cream, and both places made them very well, along with Ray’s Candy Store on that block, but I’ll get into Ray’s later on, as that was my first job.
Another thing that I distinctly remember is how much I loved music, as a very young child. If I wasn’t mesmerized by the TV programs I was watching, I would spend a lot of my time listening either to the radio, or to the records, or 8-track tapes, that the other members of my family had. My father was a big Frank Sinatra fan, or other Italian-American performers, like Tony Bennett, Jerry Vale, Jimmy Roselli or Perry Como. Also groups like the Four Seasons and Jay & The Americans. My mother, on the other hand, loved Elvis Presley. She had many of his albums. She also liked what you would consider adult contemporary. There was Dionne Warwick, The Lettermen, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Sonny & Cher, the Carpenters and later on, Helen Reddy and Barry Manilow records in her collection. My oldest brother, Joe was more into rock n roll, like CCR, the Beatles, the Guess Who, and Led Zeppelin, but also soft rock, like Three Dog Night, Elton John, The Brooklyn Bridge, Billy Joel and Steely Dan. Rocco’s taste was a little unusual. He loved disco, but he was also in the Kiss Army. I can’t really explain that. The point is that each family member had an influence on my musical taste, though I will say that I was more of a top 40 fan than anything else. There were certain songs that were popular when I was 4-5 years old that always stuck in my mind like; “Brother Louie” by the Stories and “Dancing In The Moonlight” by King Harvest. Also “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone and “Rock the Boat” by the Hues Corporation. These songs have always made me smile, when I hear them because, they remind me of happy things in my childhood. As you’ll read, my childhood was not always happy.

One of the 17%

Obviously, the Wall Street Occupation and its branches throughout the country, and some parts of the world, has become big enough, that the mainstream media can't ignore it completely. Though the emphasis seems to be on the number of arrests and the moments when the police are knocking people around, in an subtle attempt to dissuade more people from joining the movement. The obvious message is that the top 1% of all the people have 95% of the wealth and the other 99% have to be against the top 1%, but the percentage that matters to me, in my own life is 17%. That's the number of people who are either unemployed or underemployed.
I consider myself to be underemployed, accepting a job that doesn't pay as much as I'm used to. Yes, I'm a college dropout and have been lazy most of my life, but I consider myself to be smart enough to do many well-paying jobs. I would just need a little bit of training. The problem is that so many people are looking for a better position and the people that hire have so many qualified candidates to choose from, that someone like me, who doesn't have experience in that exact job, will be passed over for someone who has experience in that position or someone who is younger. I truly believe that age discrimination does exist, even against me. It's hard to compete against a room full of youngsters who are not set in their ways, which means I either have to be lucky to find a great job or I need to finally get my degree to be qualified enough. That's my dilemma. I don't want to just be a statistic, one of the 17%.

My Audition For "The Failure Club"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMl___t42SQ

Two minutes that could, conceivably change my life forever.......Let's hope! :)