There were two priests who taught chemistry. One was a funny guy and a relatively easy grader. The other was about one hundred fifty years old and, we guessed, had been friends with St. Ignatius of Loyola, Jesuit #1 himself. Though the classroom was small, he spoke through a microphone on his lapel, which projected his voice out of an amplifier on his lectern. He had the gravelly voice of someone who had smoked two packs a day for sixty years and the posture of one who still got in fistfights while in line at CVS. If Robert Loggia had a tougher, less ethnic uncle, it would be this priest. Worse, his grading premise was more or less, “You start with an F and must work your way up from there,” as though he wanted to personally destroy not only your GPA and chances for admission to a good college but your life and your home as well. After a few weeks in that class, I swore off science forever.
The yin to the GPA’s yang was the all-important SAT score, which took three years of intense schooling and a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and put them into one, easy-to-read number based on a three-hour test given on a Saturday afternoon. We were yentas when it came to SAT scores, sharing ours with a friend or two with the promise not to tell others (only to find out our score had made its way around the school by the very next period) and dishing about who aced or who bombed the test.
It became apparent that SAT-takers fit into three camps. The largest was made up of those kids who scored about what they should have scored on the SATs; their grades matched their scores. The two other groups were the outliers, either good or bad. Some kids with perfect GPAs scored well below what they should have, thus confirming our suspicions that they spent every waking moment studying because their parents beat them with a cane. Then there were the kids who got terrible grades who killed the SATs, thus confirming our suspicions that they had serious drug or alcohol problems. I was in the majority group, having scored about what I expected to score. I was fine with my score and only took the test once. The two most stressful experiences of my high school career (that did not involve contemplating professing my undying love to a girl who up to that point had assumed I was a homosexual) were taking my driving test and taking the SATs. Once I got what I came for from both, I never wanted to think about either again.
In terms of both my grades and my SAT scores, things were what they were by this point in my academic career. My GPA wasn’t going to move drastically in either direction based on what I did my senior year. And even if I did take the test again and prepared hardcore for it, my SAT scores weren’t going to increase by triple digits. As I endeavored to make myself more appealing to colleges, there was only one area in which I could improve quickly: extracurricular activities.
Extracurriculars were the weakest part of my game. I played no sports; failing gym my sophomore year had not inspired me to go out for track or pick up a lacrosse stick. (I did, however, effect a remarkable increase in my ping-pong prowess.)
I wasn’t in many clubs. I joined Students Against Drunk Driving, but so did 95 percent of the student body. I think all you had to do was say “I am against drunk driving” and boom, you were a member. Because I hung out with some of the guys on the school newspaper, they bestowed the honorary title of Headlines and Captions Editor upon me. This meant that right before the paper went to press I was called in to read it over to see if I could come up with any funny captions. Mostly, I was not.*
I could always say on applications that I worked a real job for real money and that was my main extracurricular activity (and by doing so, queuing the violins and playing the “indigent kid” card—my understanding was that colleges loved that “overcoming adversity” shit). But it wouldn’t hurt to buff up the resume with something high-impact, something that showed leadership and commitment to a cause greater than learning new ways to masturbate, but one that did not require years of toiling away in the yearbook office in order to finally rise to the position of editor or traveling from debate to debate semester after semester to become team captain.
I could do a service trip.
I could sign up to spend a week in some impoverished place to build houses and help locals and live in a hut and learn about a new culture. There were a number of options available through the school. If a service trip didn’t look good on my transcript and give me something to write an application essay about, nothing would. One week away from home and I’d have my high-impact extracurricular over and done with. Perhaps I might even fall in love with a local native girl, who, after showing me flirtatiously the right way to prepare rice or fish or trees or whatever native people eat, would take me behind a hut and blow me as if the apocalypse were nigh. Yes, that might work.
But there was a problem with this plan. It would require me to go to some impoverished place to build houses and help locals and live in a hut and learn about a new culture. The learning a new culture thing I could get behind, but all the other stuff? Bleh. It sounded great, and I had little doubt it would look terrific on my resume, but, I mean, have you ever actually swung a hammer? Like, a bunch of times in a row? It’s terrible. And let’s be honest. My imaginary native girlfriend would prefer whatever jock was on the trip once she saw me faint upon encountering a bug or heard me shrieking in terror during a stormy night.
Fortunately, there was another avenue I could pursue, an extracurricular that would look terrific on my record and require very little work. And what little work it required would be fun: student government.
To be president, vice president, treasurer, or secretary of the whole school was a leadership position that would demonstrate my commitment to a greater, non-self-loving good. I had some experience in student government, as I had been a homeroom representative sophomore year, and I knew that to be an officer was not such a difficult gig. There was a monthly meeting, a few official appearances at freshman orientation and pep rallies—and that was pretty much it.
And there were some significant perks. The primary one was a key to the student council office, a small, windowless room tucked away on the second floor. It had a couch, a chair, and a TV with Sega Genesis. A man cave it was not, but it was the most exclusive clubroom on school grounds. The other perk was that as an officer of the school, you were able—nay, you were required—to go to the Prep’s sister schools and sell tickets to our mixer dances during their lunch periods. Spending a portion of an afternoon at a table in the senior’s cafeteria of an all-girls Catholic high school, seventeen-and eighteen-year-old girls in white button-down blouses and pleated skirts everywhere, with their little knee-high socks and their afieanofnwv;svnis;rv snvrhishw.*
The Prep ran its student government elections like most other schools. Candidates campaigned, covering the school with posters and buttons. The campaigning led not to a debate, but to a morning assembly at which every candidate addressed the junior, sophomore, and freshman classes for one minute. Then those three classes spent the day voting. (Seniors were left out of the equation because by that late in the spring, having already committed to colleges, they spent more time in the parking lot smoking cigarettes than in the building caring about student government.)
This was a much better resume-building plan. Any bozo with a week to spare, an iron stomach, and a genuine commitment to social justice could go to some godforsaken place in Latin America or West Virginia and directly and positively affect the lives of dozens of people. But it took a real badass to run a successful high school student government campaign.
The first step was to pick which position I wanted to run for. Class president was immediately disqualified; it was the only position that required any real time commitment. Besides, the president had to give the commencement speech at graduation. No thanks. In theory, class treasurer sounded cool—being the guy who controls the money—but the position was really that of a glorified accountant. As for class secretary . . . who wants to be a secretary? That left vice president.
Class vice president was the highest-ranking position after president, and it required nowhere near as much work. Of course, there was a
chance that the vice president might rise to the presidency if the president were caught in a scandal or otherwise had to resign, but if that happened, that would be cool enough to warrant the extra work (school newspaper headline: “Mulgrew Rises to Power, Jones Resigns in Disgrace amid Cheating/Cocaine/Human Trafficking Ring Allegations”).
Also, our student council had two vice presidents, as opposed to only one officer in every other position. This changed the dynamic of the election. In the other races, friends often ran against friends and there could be only one winner, making for some awkwardness between buddies. But in the vice presidential election there was no such unpleasantness because any two candidates could win. In the other races, it was, “Vote for me!” which implied “over everyone else.” In the vice presidential race, it was, “Vote for me—and any other qualified candidate! I don’t care which one! As long as I get one of your votes, we’re cool!”
Just like most high schools in America, the student council elections at the Prep were more or less a popularity contest. About a third of the candidates had no shot at all. These were the super-nerds. Some were idealists who wanted to effect change but were clueless about their social standing at the school, while others signed up just so they could tell their overbearing parents that they had run. Another third of the candidates were fuckups, stoners, and/or partiers, some of whom were quite popular but all of whom very likely signed up under the influence of alcohol or drugs and had no desire to do any actual campaigning because that would mean less time for listening to Grateful Dead tapes and eating Taco Bell. It was not impossible that a member of one of these groups could win an election. Indeed, the treasurer of the current student council was a card-carrying stoner who was elected based on his promise to bring a Slurpee machine to the cafeteria (a promise, it should be noted, that he delivered on, because his dad bought and donated the machine to the school). But most of the victors would come from the final third of candidates: those with a legitimate shot at winning.
I thought I had a shot. I considered myself popular with the kids in my class and felt confident that, of the fifteen contestants for class vice president, I could win one of the two votes that my classmates had. But because of my lack of other activities, the only underclassmen I knew were the small group of kids with whom I took the bus. To reach the freshmen and sophomores, I had to take advantage of campaign promotional tools and turn myself into a motherfucking brand.
First, I needed a hook, a slogan, something catchy, something above and beyond “Vote Mulgrew for a Change” or “Mulgrew Will Deliver.” A few years prior, a black candidate used the slogan “Don’t Be a Clown, Vote for the Brown” and swept into office in the biggest landslide in the school’s history. My freshman year, a candidate with the last name Bayder somehow got the OK to use the slogan, “Vote for the Master: Bayder for Secretary” and had also won. I needed something similarly catchy or memorable.
One evening after school, I was lying in my bed, going over my options. There were a number of rhyming possibilities (“Mulgrew Is for You” and “Mulgrew Will Rock You”), but all were too corny and most vaguely sexual. So I started to think bigger picture. What did I have to offer the student body that other candidates did not? My opponents were star football players or wrestlers, involved in the campus ministry and community services, leaders in the Model UN and the Spanish Club. I was none of these things.
I stared up at my poster of Jimi Hendrix, kneeling over his flaming guitar, thinking. I really did have nothing to offer in terms of extracurriculars or my involvement in the school. After all, that was the whole point of running: to get myself a good extracurricular. I had no sports practices or responsibilities or obligations of any kind. If I were voted class vice president, it would be my only activity during my entire high school career. And maybe that was my hook.
All the other candidates had a lot of things going on. I did not. No practices, no meetings, no nothing. Once I woke up and made it to school, my day was pretty much obligation-free. So I could promise to dedicate myself in toto to serving as the class vice president. “Every ounce of my being would be your vice president.” That might work.
I got off the bed and walked into the bathroom to see just how many ounces we were talking about. I stepped on the scale, and there was my answer staring back at me. I, Jason Mulgrew, could promise you, my fellow students, 236 pounds of class vice president.
It was a hell of a slogan. But 236 pounds? I thought I had been in the neighborhood of “an even two hundred pounds of vice president.”
During junior year, because of my strange class schedule, I had only one free period—seventh. There were eight periods in the day, and most people had lunch during fourth, fifth, or sixth period. By the time I got to my second-to-last period-of-the-day lunch, I was ravenous and gorged myself like a returning prisoner of war. It is no small miracle that I survived my junior year without losing a finger while “eating,” which involved shoving food down my throat as rapidly as possible while grunting and snorting and sometimes barking. Because I was so hungry, I usually doubled up, eating two cheesesteaks or two chicken-finger sandwiches, washing them down with a soda or a Snapple and, if I had room left over, a TastyKake.
A few weeks into junior year, I could tell my clothes were getting a bit snug. But it was fine, I told myself. I had always been functionally fat, which I define as someone who still requires only one seat on an airplane, is able to kneel and rise or buckle his/her seatbelt without assistance, and is not winded by tasks such as clapping or stretching. And I had always embraced being fat. It had become a part of my personality (self-deprecating humor being the primary weapon in my arsenal) with which I made friends and influenced people. I was the funny fat kid, ever ready to call myself out before anyone else did. Everyone in high school has a thing. That was mine.
Yet knocking on the door of two-fifty was a wake-up call, too much of a good thing (or maybe just too much of a thing). But I’d deal with that later. Right now, I had a campaign to run.
For all its brilliance, it was not my slogan that gave the campaign legs, but my buddy Dan’s “green” initiative. Looking at the campaign signs and posters that began to cover the walls of the school, Dan, who was not running for office, made an astute observation. “You know, it’s all white. Every sign is on white paper or white posterboard. You should really use a different color, something that stands out.”
His suggestion was so simple and so obvious that I immediately dismissed it as one of the dumbest things I’d ever heard. (I was also maybe a little upset because, though I planned to roll out my signs over the week leading up to the speeches, about 25 percent of them were completed—and on white posterboard, just like everyone else’s.) The reason that all the signs were on white was because that was a campaign rule, I told him, having no idea whether or not this was true. I assumed it was; all posters and signs had to be approved by Mr. DiNapoli, science teacher and student government moderator, before they could be hung. This was to prevent students from hanging campaign posters with a picture of a pair of titties that said, “A Vote for Rogers Is a Vote for Titties!”
After school, as I was making the rounds hanging a few of the signs I’d already created, I stopped by Mr. DiNapoli’s office. I brought up Dan’s suggestion dismissively, saying what a silly idea it was, that there was no way it would be allowed, I mean, God, what a crazy person Dan was. DiNapoli, finally looking up from the stack of tests he was grading, said that no, there was no law on the books that regulated the color of the posters—just their content. Campaign posters could be any color a candidate wanted.
I went to the library and found Dan. Swallowing my pride, I told him about my chat with DiNapoli and said that maybe he was on to something. And maybe we should go to Kinko’s right away to put his strategy into practice.
An hour later, we were sitting at my kitchen table with every piece of neon green posterboard and every ream of neon green paper that Kinko’s had in stock, as we’d decided that this
was the color most likely to stand out—aside from hot pink, which would have sent a different kind of message at my all-boys Catholic high school. Dan and I spent that evening coloring and scissoring like a pair of kindergartners, transferring the completed white signs onto our new official campaign color. Because the white signs had already been approved, we could start hanging the neon green ones the next morning.
Dan’s idea was remarkably successful. A week later, on the morning of the speeches, Jason Mulgrew was known as “the neon green candidate” more than “the 236-pound candidate.” Other candidates may have had greater resources to spend on campaign promotion, seemingly employing whole teams of Central Americans to mass produce campaign posters, but everywhere you turned, there, among the sea of primary colors and pastels and pictures cut from magazines and stenciled names, all on white paper, was my bright-ass neon green with the slogan “Jason Mulgrew: 236 pounds of VP, every last ounce ready to serve” and a pithy tag, like “And that’s a lot of ounces,” or “Believe me, he’s free,” or “It’s like getting two VPs for the vote of one.” I promised Dan that, should I win the election, he would be duly rewarded with near-unlimited access to the student council lounge (“near-unlimited” because if I was making out with a chick in there during a mixer, which was sure to happen, he would not be allowed in).
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the caption for this one was something like, “Don’t let your school go down the toilet.”
But while promotion was important, it all came down to the speech. For many, the student government speech was the defining moment of their high school career. It was not often that a student got sixty seconds all to himself to address three-quarters of the entire student body. There was some potential for disaster. What was stopping someone from running an entire campaign just for the chance to stand before his classmates and expose himself?
236 Pounds of Class Vice President Page 15