Growing Up Stupid and Mean, Part Two
In Graham Greene’s short story, “The Destructors,” a group of fifteen-year old boys, playing among the rubble of a bombed London, spend their days playing pranks, and one day they set about the destruction of an old house with a man trapped within, mimicking in their youthful way the destruction in Europe caused by their warring elders.
In James Joyce’s, “The Counterparts,” from Dubliners, Mr. Farrington experiences multiple professional and personal humiliations in the course of one day. By evening, “he was full of smouldering anger and revengefulness.” When he returned home in a drunken state, he took it out on his young son, beating the terrified child with a walking stick for “letting the fire out.”
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Physical and sexual abuse in the Catholic school system has been well documented worldwide over the past few generations. It has cost the Church billions of dollars in court settlements, diminished its moral authority, weakened its political influence, and radically reduced its number of communicants and new recruits into the priesthood. Deservedly so.
Yet during my high school years, the clerical bullies and predators were in their heyday. Marianist Brother Frank Russell, for example, was Trinity’s athletic director, baseball and basketball coach, and a geometry teacher. On the dark side, he was a person who felt comfortable beating students for the slightest infraction. He also felt comfortable groping, seducing, and sexually assaulting students he identified as vulnerable
Like me, virtually all the students at Trinity High school had been processed through Catholic elementary schools. We knew physical punishment was the teacher’s handy method of behavior modification. We learned to be wary and, as much as possible, avoid the offenders. This wariness bred cynicism, distrust, and a sub-rosa belligerence. Combine this cynicism with the undeveloped frontal lobe of the average pubescent fifteen-year-old boy, already teetering on the edge of nuttiness, and you better understand the “hospital liberation scene” from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Everyone knew a Nurse Ratched.
Although Trinity’s faculty featured some fine teachers. Most were mediocre. The worst were usually lay teachers who could not get higher-paying jobs in the public school system and were willing to work at parochial schools for peanuts. Most, however, were able to control the inmates. One could not.
Mr. Dexter Brown replaced an English teacher on medical leave. When he walked through the door, students’ eyes widened. Dexter was a tall man wearing the clothes of a much shorter, thinner person, perhaps a younger brother. His tight slacks spread sufficiently to reveal the top of his fly zipper. His slacks hovered about three inches above his shoes. He carried an old‑fashioned, worn leather briefcase with straps, and he walked in short mincing steps. He had a well‑shaped, handsome face with a curious blank look in his eye. He wore a wedding ring and glanced out at us benignly from under a haircut that looked like a small shag carpet, shaped as though his wife had placed a bowl on his head and circumnavigated an electric razor two inches above his ears. Bob Kelly, sitting behind me, uttered in a stage whisper, what everyone was thinking. "Where the fuck did they get this guy?"
Soon everyone was glancing around, smiling knowing smiles. This was going to be a bumpy ride for Mr. Brown. When he spoke, he spoke in a lispy whisper, and soon commands of "Speak up!" bellowed from the back of the room, followed by scattered laughter. When this wasn't met with decisive reprimand, the inmates grew bolder.
Over the next few days, Mr. Brown had been hooted, ridiculed, ignored, pelted with paper and spitballs‑‑at first only when he turned to write on the board. But soon he was dodging missiles that were being fired head on. It was chaos, but George Wilson tried to rally the class not to go too far. He said words to the effect that “We didn't want the outside to get wind of this. We wanted to keep Dexter Brown.”
But one day, predictably, we went too far. On this day, Eddie Connor -- jaunty, sneaky, and thoroughly amoral, Eddie Connor -- took gullible Robert Newell's school bag and threw it out the window, onto the annex roof just outside the classroom. Newell foolishly crawled out the window to retrieve the bag. While he was out there, Aldo "No Neck" Sansone locked the windows. Aldo stood about five‑five; his head was the size and shape of a cinder block. But Aldo was all muscle. He had been lifting weights for years. He shaved every day and appeared to be about thirty years old. He looked and spoke like a mafia soldier.
Newell knocked repeatedly on the window, but no one let him in. Within minutes, Dexter Brown arrived for class. Everyone sat uncharacteristically quiet and let him begin class. He was oblivious to Newell's confused face in the window. Meanwhile Newell grimaced and mimicked for someone to open the window for him. No dice. In desperation, Newell began knocking on the window. Eddie Connor politely raised his hand to inform Mr. Brown that Robert Newell was annoying him by tapping on the window and would Mr. Brown please ask him to stop. Mr. Brown, looking baffled, went to the window and asked Newell, "What in God's name were you doing out there?" "Newell, now back in the classroom, said "That bastard Connor threw my bag out there!" Dexter Brown turned to Connor and said "Mr. Connor, what do you have to say for yourself?" Connor said: "I didn't mean it. It slipped."
While Brown was questioning Connor, Aldo took Brown's school bag off the desk and tossed it out onto the roof. When Brown returned to his desk to begin class and noticed his bag was missing, he said; "OK, who's the smart aleck who took my bag?" Aldo said: "Newell did it." The gullible Newell began protesting that he did not do it. Mr. Brown said "It's OK Newell. I know you didn't do it. Where's my bag?" About ten voices gleefully yelled": "It's on the roof."
No one could have predicted what would happen next. Dexter Brown crawled out the window to retrieve his school bag. There was a race to the window to see who could lock it first. Dexter Brown, bag then in hand, began tapping on the window to be let back in. At first, the class just laughed and said "no." Then, for a while, we sat in informal social groups and just enjoyed the insanity of the moment, glancing over every few moments to check on our desperate exile. He was now pounding on the window. He even yelled to Newell to let him in. But Newell refused, happily inside the classroom, enjoying his solidarity with his classmates.
But then the laughing stopped. Father Frank Kenney, the Principal, and Brother Richard Pirchner, the algebra teacher, walking across the schoolyard together, were distracted by the clatter above them, and noticed the hapless, hopeless Dexter Brown begging to be let into his own classroom. When we saw the principal, we quickly opened the windows and let Dexter Brown into the room.
The next day he was gone. He had been fired immediately after the class.
Shortly after Mr. Brown’s firing, Father Frank Kenney bristled with anger as he confronted us. Fr. Kenney was a tall man with wavy black hair speckled with gray. He was a generally mild man, patient, always decent and humane: "Do you young men have any idea what you did yesterday?" He paused. "You don't do you? Well, this is a sorry and pathetic episode. That a bunch of cowardly, mealy‑mouthed little shits like you could break a grown man and cause him to lose his livelihood. I hope you all meditate on your behavior and think, in profound sorrow, about what you have done. We try here to teach you the spirit and love of Jesus and his Mother Mary. And this is what you do. You ought to be ashamed."
Fr. Kenney stared into every blanched face. Then he left abruptly in silence, leaving the door open behind him. No one stirred or dared speak until after school. If there was any shame, it didn't last long. There didn't seem to be much fertile ground for shame among this jaded gang of fifteen-year-old boys who, for all their religious instruction, had not yet developed a moral sense. Perhaps this was a “Prague spring.” Perhaps adult models of bullying and bad behavior insinuated themselves and short-circuited compassion. Perhaps we were too young, or too stupid, or just too mean to feel shame. Myself? I learned shame eventually, and in spades, but much too late for Mr. Brown.