The Pancake Breakfast

I attended a Roman Catholic High School about 15 minutes and a few towns away from where I lived. But it often felt like it was a few states away. The students came from all over Long Island, most escaping subpar public schools, some for a highly regarded sports program, and others because that's where their older siblings or kids in their jr. high school had gone. I was probably there because of all three. We wore uniforms to mask our individuality and were taught by brothers who took vows of celibacy, poverty, and education. Let's just say that we were a group of kids that wanted nothing more than to express ourselves outside of the moral confines that we found ourselves in each and every school day. This expression would eventually find it's way into the school day too, but I'm not trying to desicrate anything or anyone. I'm thankful for the education I recieved and would not have traded those experiences for any other high school existence. In four years, I learned how to think for myself and to embrace a continued persuit of knowledge and understanding. I also fell in love with the ideal of the free spirit.

So here I was going back to school with no friends. September was not that much fun. The only solice I had was swimming practice after school. I would swim for two hours, knowing my interactions would be at a minimum because I was underwater most of the time. But things were bound to change. As it turned out, the random distribution of students in my grade had put me into multiple classes with faces that were familiar from the year prior. There was this one kid who I first encountered in the cafeteria when I was a freshman. He walked over to me and took my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and proceeded to write PHUC U on the inside of the cover. I turned to him and said "fuck you!" Gene was a lanky korean skater, with long ass bangs and the back of his head buzzed. This school year, Gene sat in back of me in Global Studies and was my lab partner in Biology. He was good friends with this kid Sam, who the year prior had made fun of my spiked hair on a semi-regular basis, as we sat in math class. Sam sat next to me in French. The three of us were in Gym class together, with a number of other loosely connected kids that were destined to be up to no good for the forseable future. I didn't skate, but I sort of fit the profile and a lot kids thought I did. I was more into boogey boarding, but soon it was surfing. I guess it came from growing up in the water and having cousins that lived in San Diego. I guess at the time I was more of a poser really. I wasn't going for that I just looked like someone I wasn't.

October meant homecoming, which was marked by a morning pancake breakfast followed by a football game. Now, I wasn't really into football or social gatherings, so I wasn't planning on going to something like that. But out of the blue, Gene asked me if I was going, just out of curiousity. When you have no friends and someone asks you what you're doing, no matter how against your constitution it is you say you're doing it. He could have been asking me to go to knock off a liquor store and I would have probably done it. As it turns out no one was going to watch the game, it was really just a reason to be free in a place where we were asked to conform on a daily basis. That's what made going to school on nights and weekends fun. We got to dress and act the way we couldn't during the week. Well, to this day I remember eating pancakes with all these kids I barely knew and wondering if it would last. Someone took a picture that ended up in a year book, to this day that's the image I most remember from high school. From that day on I had two friends that I would experience life with.