Unanimously, the people spoke: Of course they should be included! How else would chaos be assured?
Clement was given a very—and I mean very—small part as a rock in the Catskill Mountains. Along with several other urchins, he placed his face in a scenery cutout; in unison he and all the “mountain rocks” were supposed to bellow: “POOR RIP AND POOR WOLF.”
That dramatic line occurred immediately after Rip Van Winkle drank some kind of potion and dozed off. The mountain rocks were supposed to say the line three times. Wolf, by the way, was Rip’s dog. He didn’t fall asleep, but the mountains felt sorry for him anyway.
After that scene, about ten seconds overall, the Catskill Mountains were never seen onstage again. Sister Thomas was taking no chances.
Likewise, I was given a bit part. I was a Dutchman. Along with five other guys, I was to pretend to roll a bowling ball and say: “THE FLAGON, THE WICKED FLAGON!”
The “wicked flagon” was a large cup from which poor Rip had sipped. Apparently, that cup was wicked. Perhaps it had French-kissed another cup.
Anyway, it took me days, but I learned my line, and Clement had his dialogue down as well.
As performance day approached, Sister Thomas was feeling mighty good about things. She was actually jaunty, putting the finishing touches on everything Rip Van Winkle. Her two class pets had the lead roles—Richie as Rip and Diane as Dame Van Winkle—and all was right with the world.
Then it happened, as fate dictated. Two days before airtime, Clement approached me on the playground.
“Billy, we have to do something.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all, but he continued.
“All the eighth graders will be watching, and I said we’d do something.”
“We, Clem? We? Are you insane? So what if the eighth graders are watching? So’s every nun and priest in the parish, plus my mother and your mother.”
“Yeah, it’ll be great.”
“What’ll be great?”
“When we wreck the play.”
For the first time, I saw Clement clearly, even though I’d known him since he was five years old. He was truly demented. By the seventh grade, Clem was already shaving a couple of times a week, and his outlook on life was far beyond that of the average twelve-year-old. On that spring day more than forty-five years ago, I stared hard at my pal, and the gleam in his eye said it all: I don’t care.
“Clem, I don’t want to die. I can’t wreck the play.”
To this day, I can still remember the sadness that crossed Clement’s face. His compadre was chicken, his pal a wuss. He silently shook his head and walked away.
For a second, I felt terrible. Then I regained what little sense I had. To sabotage Sister Thomas’s play was a truly desperate act. There would be no escaping the inevitable retribution certain to follow. Why didn’t we just lie down on the Northern State Parkway?
To my discredit, I did not try to talk Clement out of his insanity, perhaps because a large part of me wanted to see Sister Thomas humiliated. But I knew Clem was going to get hurt; there was no doubt.
Soon the day arrived and the auditorium was packed. From backstage, we peered out at the assemblage: parents, teachers, students, even the parish pastor, Father Code. This was big.
Somewhere in the crowd sat my mother. No way my father was going to sit through Rip Van Winkle unless he had a number of flagons filled with refreshment, and that was not happening. But Mom was actually looking forward to seeing her son in his dopey Dutchman outfit. Moms are amazing.
No question but that Sister Thomas thought she was Steven Spielberg. She ran from one kid to the next, making sure the costumes were fitted correctly and nobody was throwing up. We were all nervous—everybody, that is, except Clement. He sat serenely backstage, but I knew that look.
Wayne was really scared. Dressed in a shabby canine outfit, he was playing Rip’s dog, Wolf, and had to crawl around following the leading man, Richie. Even though Wayne had no lines, he was petrified.
Clement noticed Wayne too. And then I noticed Clem noticing Wayne. Uh-oh. I remember thinking that somehow this was not going to turn out well for Wayne.
The curtain rose, and for the first few minutes everything went swell. Sister Thomas sat to the right of the stage, following the script on her clipboard. Most of the kids were stage left. Nobody really wanted to hang close to the notorious nun.
The first sign of trouble came when Rip drank from the flagon and slumped to the ground. Somehow, he landed on Wayne’s paws, causing his faithful pet to fall down. Big laughs from the crowd.
Cue the mountain rocks. Remember, they were supposed to say in unison, “Poor Rip and poor Wolf.” But one voice bellowed above the rest, completely out of sync.
Does the name Clement mean anything?
While the other rocks wailed, “Poor Wolf!” Clem drowned them out by screaming, “AND RIP IS POOR TOO! HE DOESN’T HAVE MONEY! THAT ISN’T FAIR!”
Massive laugh from the eighth graders.
Sister Thomas’s face turned Alabama crimson. Those eyes darted all over the place like some kind of crazy pinball game. As the curtain fell for a scene change, Clement bolted. I later learned he fled to the sanctuary of the boys’ bathroom.
I actually prayed to Saint Michael the Archangel for Clem. I hoped that prank was it, that he had established his eighth-grade cred and the play would conclude without further chaos. My scene came next, but I don’t remember it. My mother says I did fine and she could hear me call the flagon “wicked.” But it’s all a blur to me.
However, the play’s climax remains crystal clear in my mind. I can actually see it in slow motion. After Rip comes back from his snooze and all is well in the town, the main characters gather for a bow. But Wayne is not onstage. Instead, Clement is inside the dog costume and is furiously biting Richie on the leg. Rich frantically tries to get away, but Clem hangs on, actually sinking his teeth into the poor kid. There’s yelling, scuffling, pandemonium.
Curtain.
Clement was suspended for two weeks, which was pretty much the rest of the term. There was talk of expulsion, but his mother, a daily Mass communicant, threw herself on the mercy of the court. Clem was allowed to return for a hilarious eighth-grade ride, but I’ll save that for another book.
After the play debacle, Sister Thomas said very little to the class. With only a couple of weeks left in the school year, she gave us our exams and prayed many, many rosaries. Nobody got whacked with the ruler during those final days, even though we constantly discussed a forbidden topic: the hysteria of the performance.
Wayne told me that Clement simply took him out. Wayne was a little guy, and Clem was strong, so the costume hijack was accomplished in seconds. I asked Wayne if Clem had said anything. Wayne said yeah: “Gimme the dog suit.”
Okay.
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I’m Keepin’ the Faith
Billy Joel understands the Long Island experience because he lived it, and I’ll submit to you that much of what I witnessed as a child remains indelible. I remember nearly everything about St. Brigid’s School. Those were great times, and they solidified my relationship with Catholicism, because everything was tied in together: memorable classmates, coming of age, a charitable philosophy, and a sense that life has a purpose if you live it generously.
I may have been in the dumb row, but, eventually, I figured it all out.
After graduation the following year, my father forced me to go to a strict Catholic high school, Chaminade, where my religious education continued. He made the right call. Even though I wanted to go to the public school with my thug friends, my dad understood that I needed continual structure and discipline. To this day, Chaminade leads the league in that. There is no doubt that twelve years of blending academics with spiritual teaching forged my point of view today.
As I’ve written earlier in chapter three, my arrival at Marist College in the fall of 1967 coincided with a growing secularization of that traditionally Catholic institution.
But even as the liberated late sixties blew across campus, I still went to church. On some Sunday mornings, there were about five students staring at the chaplain, a kindly man named Father Leo Gallant. I continued going to Mass because I actually liked the spiritual time-out. Leaving the chaotic college world for a while, I enjoyed getting into another dimension, with apologies to Rod Serling. Mass time allowed me to think and figure out right from wrong. In those years, believe me, that wasn’t all that easy.
To this day, I still go to Sunday Mass. Often, it’s boring. Many times the priest goes on far too long about the mustard seed. Hey, Father, those of us showing up on Sunday have got that down, okay? Fallow ground is not good. Let’s advance the discussion, can we?
In helping me to determine right from wrong, good from evil, and trying to correct injustice, my Catholic faith is invaluable. In public and on TV and radio, I usually keep my religion to myself, because I have a secular job: I’m a journalist, not an evangelist. But if somebody brings up the subject, I tell him or her what I just told you.
Religion has been a very positive thing in my life. Without it, I would never have been motivated to expose bad guys and celebrate heroism. Most media people are self-interested and cautious. But I see my job as much more than a big paycheck and a good table at the bistro du jour. I am on a mission, and it all started in the first grade.
Much later in life, after I had traveled the world as a reporter and witnessed awful things, the final piece of the Catholic puzzle fell into place. Like many people, I often wondered how a just God—that is, the Trinity: Jesus, his Father, and the Holy Spirit—could allow so much pain in the universe. A higher power, the Creator, could certainly stop the madness.
The answer to that vexing question lies in the concept of free will. Christianity teaches that free will defines a human being, separates us from the animals. Human beings have the power to choose which actions to take. Lions do not have that ability; they act on instinct.
Thus, the world of man is a constant struggle between good and evil. And what we choose defines us. The essence of Christianity and most other theologies is embracing good and rejecting evil. If there were no evil present in the world, then there could be no choice. That’s why bad stuff has been on display from the beginning of time.
The endgame, of course, is to earn God’s reward in the afterlife by rejecting evil. And in Catholicism and other Christian religions, the actions of Jesus demonstrate how to do that.
It all makes perfect sense to me. The Christian ethic defines the decisions I make, both personal and professional. But Sister Thomas was right about one thing: I could be a lot better at this.
Finally, my pal Clement died young. I kept up with him through college and he remained a vibrant spirit. But he always had health problems, and, eventually, they caught up with him. I believe he’s in heaven. Jesus could never pass on those laughs.
SAVING THE WORLD
Don’t know much about history,
Don’t know much biology.
—SAM COOKE, “WONDERFUL WORLD”
God does have a sense of humor, no question. After watching me terrorize teachers for years, the Almighty dropped a teaching job right into my lap. And you say you don’t believe.
The year was 1971, the month September, and every weekday morning at exactly six thirty a.m., Rod Stewart’s voice would blare from my clock radio:
Wake up, Maggie, I think I got something to say to you, It’s late September and I really should be back at school.
Well, I was back at school, all right. Specifically, Monsignor Edward Pace High School located in the shabby, tough Florida town of Opa-locka, just north of Miami. (To this day it consistently scores among the highest rates of violent crime in the USA.) This was not the Villages, if you know what I’m saying.
The job happened because the powers-that-were at Pace had a relationship with Marist College and were looking for cheap labor. That would be me. Along with my trusty college roommate, Joe Rubino, I signed on to teach English for less than five thousand dollars. Beginning of story.
Teaching held a good amount of appeal to me. Back in the Woodstock days, I felt I should do something worthwhile with my life; I wanted to help folks. It never occurred to me to sell stocks or insurance. That would be working for the man. While I saw nothing particularly wrong with working for the man, I knew my father had not benefited from doing that, and, again, I wanted to help improve society. Really.
Plus, there was the strong appeal of south Florida. Rubino and I had done the spring-break thing our senior year, hunting for Connie Francis on the beaches of Fort Lauderdale. We never did find Connie, but there were many, many Connie wannabes on display. All I’ll say is this: after I’d spent three years in Poughkeepsie, New York, the sun, surf, and female denizens of south Florida looked mighty fine indeed. So we packed up our gear and headed south.
The first sign of trouble was our assigned “accommodations.” Because we were working for slave wages, the principal at Pace set us up with a low-rent apartment near the school.
“You guys are gonna like this,” he told me on the phone. “Convenient to everything, and there’s a pool.”
By “convenient to everything,” I guess the guy meant to the half dozen drug dealers who lived in the complex. If you were after weed or cocaine, these accommodations were, indeed, convenient. The pool was there as advertised, but a rusty refrigerator had taken up residence at the bottom of it. This wasn’t exactly Surfside 6.
We lasted less than thirty minutes in our new digs.
Checking out of the Horror Apartment Complex, we quickly found alternative housing with fewer active felons on the premises. But, incredibly, the principal was rather put off that we had exited his recommended lodging. His annoyance should have signaled me that we would not be dealing with a rational guy at the school helm, but it went over my head.
Hey, Teach, What’s Up
As I write, I am looking at myself in the 1972 edition of The Torch, the Pace High School yearbook. There I am, sitting in front of a class, hair covering my ears, pork-chop sideburns, and a firm, steely look. I was no Sister Thomas, but believe the photo: I brooked no nonsense. If a kid clowned around, he or she was sharply warned. Second time, an appropriate sanction was swiftly delivered to the miscreant.
Early on, I was tested, as most young teachers are. In my case, I was just twenty-one years old when I began teaching, and one of my assigned classes was senior English. That meant most of my students were seventeen and eighteen years old. Do the math.
One day a blond girl called me Bill in front of the class. This was against school rules, since all teachers were to be addressed as Mr., Mrs., or Miss. In my mind, the girl had intentionally misbehaved for two reasons: attention and the thrill of it all.
I had prepared myself for this. Before the school year started, I had mapped out a game plan to handle what was sure to be some challenging behavior. I was the new, young teacher on campus. Even in my callow youth, I knew boundaries would have to be quickly established or chaos would ensue.
Understanding that discipline is useless without respect (I think I got that from the Sidney Poitier movie To Sir, with Love), I coolly appraised the young girl who had just used my given name.
Miss Jones [an alias], why don’t you explain to the class why you addressed me by my first name when you know that is a breach of etiquette?” I kept my voice calm but authoritative. The “breach of etiquette” line threw her.
“Uh, I don’t know,” she replied.
“So let me get this straight. You decide to break school rules, taking time away from the class, and you don’t know why? Am I understanding you?”
Panic swept across the girl’s face, which was deeply reddening. Every kid in the class was staring at her. What started as an attempt to diminish the inexperienced teacher had somehow gone horribly wrong. She sat there mute.
“Okay, Miss Jones, here’s what’s going to happen,” I said sharply. “You are going to wri
te a five-hundred-word composition explaining your actions here today. This will be due tomorrow. If you behave yourself, I’ll keep your work private. If you do not, I will read it to the class. Are we clear?”
“Yes, Mr. O’Reilly.”
“Good.”
That was it. Word of Miss Jones’s smackdown spread throughout the Pace campus like fire ants on spilled maple syrup. After that I had little trouble in the classroom. Every student in the school immediately understood that, when Mr. O. was involved, humiliation might be just one stupid comment away.
You see, I understood something many adults never get: the worst thing you can do to a dopey teenager is embarrass him or her in front of their peers. You can yell and scream at kids all day long and accomplish nothing. But holding students accountable for their actions publicly has a major inhibiting effect. Not too many kids (or adults, for that matter) want to become an object of public derision.
One caveat here: this doesn’t work on the psycho kids. However, Catholic schools tend to weed them out pretty fast and send them on their way.
Now, there’s no question that I had damaged Miss Jones’s self-esteem, and today the “enlightened” educators who are embedded in the American education system would probably chastise me for insensitivity. But listen up: I don’t care. In the two years I taught at Pace, my methods were effective with hundreds of students, most of whom actually learned some things. Meanwhile, many of the other teachers at Pace presided over undisciplined classroom environments that wasted time and accomplished little. I actually cared whether my students were learning. That’s why I allowed Rod Stewart’s raspy voice to disturb my slumber. I believed it was my responsibility to create an atmosphere where kids could learn important things without disruption. If a teacher can’t or won’t do that, the students get hosed.
A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity Page 8