Shortly after the school year started, I decided to look for a part time job. I liked working during the summer in Chicago and it was great to have some spending money. Literally next door to Central Catholic going towards Pitt university was a retirement facility for the elderly. There was an advertisement that a dishwasher was needed. I walked in and applied. They hired me almost straight away.
Junior year photo. School pictures were always taken at the beginning of the year. Freshly cut flat top alongside Craig and Jason Cooper: Collectively Hi-Top Fade United. Mike Dayton has the loosely done tie and Evan Dean with the rock star hair.
Training lasted exactly one day, and I was shown all the responsibilities in the kitchen area. There were a hell of a lot of pots and pans to be washed and everything had to be put away in a particular order. My shift was to be 4:00pm to 9:00pm. I cannot confess to being terribly excited or enthused about my new responsibilities, but it was a job. Well, my first night on the job was a boring, hard slog. Five hours of washing large steel pots in this giant sink and hanging them up where they need to go. There was no interaction with anybody. This was a job for an ex-con or something. It sucked. Soon enough 9:00 pm rolls around and there are still things that need to be taken care of. Well, I had decided that my shift ended at 9:00 pm. If there was stuff that still needed to be done……well, that is what tomorrow is for. Right? Maybe not.
A day or two later I received a call from a lady at the facility who informed me that my services as a half-ass dishwasher would no longer be required. My mom caught wind of the conversation. Instead of giving me an earful for getting fired in my first week of employment, she reacted with empathetic humor. That was her way of diffusing my humiliation, and tellingly conveyed that she did not expect much from me. I did not like the job, but I was thoroughly embarrassed about getting launched after a few days. The dishwashing job was a tough gig not only because it was hard work, but you were completely alone. There was no camaraderie with co-workers to help make the job more bearable. A more practical option would have been to apply at the nearby Giant Eagle supermarket to work the front end of the store or become a stocker. That would have made far more sense as I would have been supervised. My mom should have marched my ass down to the Giant Eagle the same day I got the pink slip from the old folk’s home. But she did not and my depressingly familiar pattern of failure in Pittsburgh continued.
Side note: Another kid from Central, Jason Cooper ended up working at the retirement home as a dishwasher. He was either mixed race or albino. Jason was smaller and slighter with a big flattop. Full credit to Jason, he lasted longer than me!
There was not a hell of a lot of note that occurred my junior year at Central. Once again, I did not participate in any intramural sports. It was almost like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde scenario. I was boisterous, cocky and a complete goof in Chicago, then I would regress into a relative low-key, amiable wallflower in Pittsburgh. At school I did start up a friendship of sorts with a kid named Mike Bogucki. He was skinny with dark super curly hair that was cut short. Mike was above average academically and had a good sense of humor. Physically he bore a slight resemblance to Beavis and Butthead. Mike could have been their cousin from Pittsburgh. I was seated behind him in Mr. Saville’s Geometry class and that was probably how we started talking.
Mike had a wicked and cutting sense of humor. That trait combined with his goofy appearance would greatly amuse me, even when I was the target of his barbs. He would keep a dead poker face and his voice would never rise above normal conversational tone. In fact, his facial expression would never much change. I can remember his morning after assessment of Prince’s appearance on the Arsenio Hall show. This was early September and Prince had begun promoting his forthcoming album Diamonds and Pearls. Mike starts out by posing the question, “Did you see that fruitcake last night on Arsenio Hall?”. I laughed and confirmed that I had. “That guy is some kind of fruit. All that jumpin’ around and all the balloons falling all over the place.”. I continued to laugh, but then Bogucki acknowledged the obvious. “Tell you what though, the guy is some kind of performer. He knows how to put on a show.”.
That is when I knew I had my opportunity and I jumped in, “You loved it. You couldn’t get enough of him jumpin’ around and shakin’ his ass”. Mike’s response was swift and curt, “Ah, get the fuck outta here. You watched it as well!”. I laughed again before we had to settle down for class. Little did Mike know how big a Prince fan I was. He would have roasted me over the coals had he known!
Mr. Saville’s Geometry class was a pain in the balls. It was not as bad as Algebra II with Brother Clement, but the class was hard. I also had little to no interest in the subject. I was getting by with a high D at the time. I think my first test score was a 73 or 72. I just wanted to pass. Well, word starts to spread that there is an available copy of the upcoming test. Rumor was that Saville would give the same test to our class as from the year prior. There was an available copy of the test for sale. Mike gets ahold of a copy and so do I. It is honestly the first time that I had ever thought about cheating on a test. “Don’t be a dumbass and get 100% on the test. Then Saville will know something’s going on. Especially with your stupid ass.”. Mike never missed a moment to kick me in that spot when he had the chance. I would laugh off the insults, but there was part of it that stayed with me. I scored a 93 on the test. Saville was none the wiser. I think I finished with a 74 in geometry.
Mike was involved in an indoor basketball league of sorts and told me that I should join. I went a few times and I remember this kid had the ball streaking toward the basket. I was coming from across the court so he could clearly see me. He rises to lay the ball in the basket. I timed it perfectly and blocked the ball off the backboard. BAM! The sound reverberated around the gym. What a momentarily great feeling. To the kid’s credit he did not let it bother him. A few minutes later the same scenario played out and this time he pump-faked, I flew by and he popped it in the basket.
I only went a few times to the gym with Mike. I honestly cannot tell you why I did not go more frequently. I should have gone there as much as possible. It was winter and there was not much else to do. It really was inexplicable. I completely dropped the ball, so to speak. I had checked out mentally and this is a good example of that indifference.
In the classroom, the same pattern followed where I would do well in subjects such as English and History. Brother John continued as my English teacher and I continued to appreciate his reserved and erudite style of instruction
History was taught by Mr. Cope. He was a bigger personality and exuded a more extroverted, confident presence. History was one of my favorite subjects and I was engaged in Cope’s afternoon history class. I recently looked up Mr. Cope in the yearbook and he had a quote next to his name that resonates with me, “No matter where you go, there you are.”. Pittsburgh and Central Catholic were not the core reasons I was struggling.
Afternoon history class with Mr. Cope holds good memories. A cocksure presence mixed with a certain charisma helped hold the class’s attention.
Throwing in the towel……………
During my junior year I began to consistently badger my mom about letting me go back to Chicago for my last year of high school. I had returned to Chicago for Thanksgiving in the fall of ’91. I clearly remember going downtown to Water Tower to see the film Cape Fear with a bunch of the kids from Gospel Outreach High School: Danny, Meredith, Ranjit, Robert Garcia, Nathan, and Michelle Ahmed were the familiar faces. Going to Chicago and revisiting my friends was feeding my desire to leave Pittsburgh. I relentlessly pestered my mom on the subject. I did not construct any particularly compelling reasons from a practicality standpoint. In fact, it did not make ANY sense to leave Pittsburgh before senior year. Graduating from Central Catholic carried a certain prestige. It was unquestionably a good school. I would be walking away from a reputable educational institution to go to Gospel Outreach High School. A school founded by evangelical, religious zealots with less than 40 students and had been in existence for less than five years.
Most parents would have slapped me upside the head and told me to man up and make the best of it. Once again, my mom just was not the type. She recognized that I was unhappy in Pittsburgh and that I had failed to acclimate. My attempts to adapt to my surroundings had been half-hearted to put it kindly. As much as it flew in the face of logic and common sense, my mom eventually acquiesced to my request. I would return to Chicago for senior year.
This was the lifeline that I had been hoping for! The effect was twofold. I now had more of a pep in my step, at least from a mental health point of view. The glass was now half full. It also helped me justify my well-established pattern of not engaging at Central. One foot was already out the door. In retrospect, this was such a shame in many respects. I took the easy way out.
Reflecting on Central
In 2020, I contacted Central Catholic and inquired about the availability of yearbooks from 89=90, 90-91, and 91-92. I was pleasantly surprised when they responded that the yearbooks were indeed available and then shipped them to me at no charge. However, I should not have been that surprised. Central Catholic was and still is a rock-solid high school.
I combed through each yearbook, looking at the photos from 30 years ago. Aside from my school photo, there is not a single image of me in any of those yearbooks. I fully expected this, but it drove home the point of what a lack of presence I had at the school. As vibrantly alive as I felt looking back at the summers in Chicago, the regret and sadness of having made no impact at Central weighed heavy. In fact, aside from student ID of 1990 and yearbook class pictures, I don’t have a single photo from my time in Pittsburgh. Not even from my confirmation that occurred in May of ’92. That blows me away, but in a way, it is quite fitting. I had always dismissed those years as a waste and an empty period. A void in time that I put to the side as a misfortunate detour.
Okay, let us play revisionist history. A game of what could have been. Realistically, how could I have adapted to Central? Ultimately, it would have meant staying in Pittsburgh for the majority of the summer. Maybe a two week visit to Chicago in June, then back to the Steel City. Then I would have been forced to figure out what to do during the summer in Pittsburgh. This would also have presented me with the opportunity to play football at Central. I had the mentality and physicality to do well at football. I would have also been introduced to a weight room which would have significantly changed my physique. I still remember in fall of freshman year moving bags of cement while the football coach was watching. It would have been after intramurals. I saw him take note of the sheer intensity of which I was going about the work. I could sense him watching and I tore into the task with even more determination. That was the only time we ever crossed paths to my knowledge. I was the sort that if someone had backed me, I would have run through walls for them. There was a crazed intensity that I possessed that was never tapped into during my three years in Pittsburgh. It lied dormant under a malaise of indifference.
Football would have been the trigger that could have functioned as the gateway to me integrating at the school. If I had made the decision to stay for the summer and stick it out it would have led to desperate level of investment on my part. Looking back, I could have easily seen a version of myself playing football, basketball and track. I look at the Cheeseboroughs as a reference point of where I could have been. But I still would have needed someone who would have identified something in me. Someone to give me a pat on the back and more importantly a foot up the backside when I needed it.
There is a lot of woulda’ coulda’ shoulda’ in the paragraph above. I coulda’ been a contender I tell ya! I was such an odd mix of insecurity and outsized ego. But mentally, I could not or would not give myself over to letting go of Chicago. It was a mental block that held me back and ultimately retarded my progress as a young man at Central.
I really do wish I had opened up more with some of the guys at school. Besides for Tim Ryder and Mike Bogucki, it was guys like Cornell Jones, Tom Adrian, Chris Connor, Mike Dayton, Jonathan DeSalvo, Evan Dean, the Cheeseboroughs, Kevin Klingensmith, Kris Apt and even Brad Martin. But I did not and only have myself to blame. If you do not invest yourself in an endeavor, you are not going to get much back. If you do not put yourself out there in the mix, then you are going to end up on an island.
Tom Adrian and Chris Connor sitting on the stairs at Central. The other dude had a name that sounded like he should be a manager of a South American soccer club: Diego Bustamante.
I was always an outsider in Pittsburgh and that mindset never changed. I willingly sleepwalked though most of my Central Catholic life as a docile, dulled out, faded version of myself.
It still stings to confront the realities of my high school experience in Pittsburgh. I do wonder why I was not more mentally resilient. I loved sports so much and one of the most important qualities that you need as a sportsman is mental fortitude. But I was very young and very sensitive. I was not the sort of kid where incidents would happen, and I would just brush it off. They would make their mark on me, then sink in and stay. The result would be that I never wanted to be in a position to suffer those negative experiences again, so I retreated.
For decades I never took any time to consider the fallout of that 3-year period from August ‘89 until June of ’92. Getting overweight and out of shape. My failure to make the basketball team. My struggles academically. My repeated inability to pass the goddamn driver’s permit test. Getting fired as a dishwasher after less than a week on the job. There was a significant cumulative effect. I was a seventeen-year-old with very little true confidence and that wrecked incredible damage on my own self-belief as a person. Truthfully, in all likelihood I was suffering from depression. At what level it remains difficult to pinpoint, but I was depressed.
Qualities that I did learn from my time in Pittsburgh were humility and self-deprecation. I had ample occasion to develop both traits in those three long years. Long term, I probably became a more empathetic person as a result my time at Central. I saw the kids that had it much worse than me at Central. The kids who were at the bottom of the food chain. There was a big, overweight kid by the name of Bob who was in our homeroom freshman year. He was loud but with some clearly effeminate traits. Jeez, did he catch a ton of flack during his time at the school. But I always remember that he barked back. Full credit to Bob. That had to of been a tough existence. Another kid who seemed to get picked on was Tom Wypychowski. He was skinny and a bit odd looking. It is not as clear to me why he was a target, but he also would respond back when picked on. But those guys must have had a really rough ride.
When the last day of junior year came to an end, there were no goodbyes or farewells to anyone at the school. I slipped out of Central Catholic without much of a trace in early June of 1992. I walked out of the side doors located near the PBS studio onto Fifth Avenue for the last time with a smile on my face. It was a stunningly beautiful early June day. I was happy to leave it all behind as a bad dream that had blown me off course. A few days later, I was on an Amtrak train back to Chicago for good.
Gospel Outreach School and High School Memories 1988-1992 