Memories of Marquette High School
The teachers weren’t benefiting from the 3,000 dollars per student. They were under paid for their labor at an extensive preschool-like day-care on a high school level, and they made that known the whole ride through. It was more like, one day, two men got together and spotted a respectable school, a business man and a hungry priest, and said, “Alright, how do we do this?” This is where all the rich kids went and there daddies rubbed elbows with the superintendent. Take care of my boys and I’ll make sure they take care of you come football season. It was enough to make you rip your own eyes out and puke blood all over the floor, not only to blind yourself and drown out the sounds of repetitive Brittany Spears, football, religion and V8 engine backwash, but simply to see if anyone would notice, over all the talk, such a terrible scene in the back left corner of the classroom .
We were all doomed to be clean cut, tightly tucked in with khakis and collars. The school was very anal about this. It’s not only RAPE to force a teenager to wear faceless combinations of clothing, but my word, it’s just plain rude. It felt very immature on their part. You’d think that the whole world had changed since 1951, but not Marquette; they never grew up. The only difference now is that they’re not allowed to hit you, which works both ways I think.
Between hall monitors and evil teachers and red headed fat women who get wet at the thought of swift embarrassing punishments as if it were the on comings of a double glazed apple fritter bear claw with a mouth watering squeeze of lemon, – well, between that and the class periods 3 minute breaks – its hard to find time to sneak out into the hallway over to the statue of the good Virgin Mary and pull out all of the free condoms you got from the planning parenthood clinic to decorate it. Time is a factor, but you MUST be appropriate, practical, and faithful to the image in your head from the night before when you dreamt of all this macho muster going down. And Jesus Christ! Don’t forget to pull out that empty gallon of Skole Votka to play part as the cherry on the cake before you go. Virgin, my sweet Brazilian ass, and just think of all the high fives you’ll get next week when they find out it was you.
There was a unity among some students and teachers, they weren’t all bad. In fact, a lot of them were pleasant and brilliant. When a 17 year old and a 46 year old can look around each other, and both of them see the same colors of the chaos that goes on -well then both parties can evade feeling so alone, and hold on to that blissful connection brought from the comfort and mutual understandings of being a social minority. That’s how the bonds were made for the rare of us, and they were good. I still hold them dear.
One would think that all the bad out weighs the good. It does. They’re all a bunch of sodomist blood whores, power-mad and money-hungry. They’re open to the idea of F-ing you in the A if it’ll up their wallets a grand. They didn’t end up graduating me, but they sure as hell promised they would, just so long as we kept pumping $3,000 a year. Shit happens and sometimes the bad out weighs the good. And although I went down, I walked away with a reverence that of a small diamond -strong, beautiful and lightweight.
Strong enough not to be broken after all this time, and so light it doesn’t even show up on the balance beam, but if it did it might have enough good stuff to set the difference at a medium.
