The friends I chose at St. Monica Catholic High School in Santa Monica were guys like me: non-studiers and screwups. The longtime dean of the boys’ school, a tall, black-haired, hellfire-and-brimstone bipolar whackjob Ireland import called Brother Daniel, nicknamed the group of us “the Tailenders” and made sure to let us know as often as possible that we were candidates for expulsion.
Brother Daniel, like his clerical sidekicks, always dressed in black robes. He was athletic and a former soccer player. He was also a show-off and a bully. He presided over the school’s monthly assemblies on the basketball court in the boys’ gym. Brother Dan was all about jumping his victims in front of an audience.
He would select his prey just before the assembly began. While everyone in the student body was goofing off in the stands as we awaited the opening prayer, Daniel would single out some unsuspecting chump and summon him down to the floor.
In front of the entire student body, this direct descendant of Jesus would stab the kid in the chest with his beefy forefinger, then slap him with a couple lefts and rights until he covered up or went down. Brother Dan was a master at the cheap shot. Throughout my four years of high school, his performance would be repeated again and again.
One of Daniel’s favorite stunts was to ambush guys from behind in the crowded halls between classes, when pushing and shoving was a necessity in order not to be late and therefore sentenced to after-school detention. The varsity football players and seniors were almost full-grown men, and Brother Daniel was their size. The jerk would notice two guys “playin’ the part of the fool,” sneak up behind them, grab them by their shirt collars, and slam their heads together.
All of our teachers at the boys’ school were men. Some were laymen, but most were Brothers of St. Patrick (bad-tempered Irishmen and nighttime boozers who’d bartered their sex drive for a green card in order to move to America). Probably a few of these guys were closet cases, but in those days, as teenagers, we just assumed they were misguided weirdos.
My first personal thumping at the hands of a brother happened when I was a ninth-grader. I came up with “a smart-ass fool’s answer” in an oral English exam, and after my classmates stopped snickering, Brother Serenus (a guy my height) caught me flush with a right to the jaw.
It was early in the semester and it was the first attack on any of us that year. Soon, being punched out by a brother became a badge of honor. You could brag about it for a week. A few of us even began to do it intentionally. We liked provoking our favorites, usually the smaller, thinner brothers.
Most of the physical discipline at St. Monica occurred in the hallway or at lunch break in the yard, opposite the girls’ high school, when the upperclassmen would show off. Correct Christian deportment and “acting a gentleman” was a big deal to the Brothers of St. Pat, who’d spent their teenage years before coming to America in some gloomy, unforgiving Irish seminary hellhole.
The second time I got badly clobbered was by Brother Chrysosdom, several months later. He’d called on me to read aloud and I began on the wrong paragraph. As a kid Brother Chris had been an amateur boxer in his spare time, so he made sure never to punch his students in the face. Instead, the hot-tempered welterweight employed alternative means of punishment. His best trick was to unload a flurry of hard face-slaps—six to ten in succession, usually—without any warning. Smiling benignly and casually, he’d walk down the row and request that his victim stand up. The slaps came at you so quickly and hard that you couldn’t cover up. Many of us, me included, caught on to his MO after the second or third episode, so when he’d start down our aisle we’d jump up and put a few desks and bodies between us and Brother Chris. Unfortunately, Brother wasn’t particularly selective. He’d unleash a combo of slaps on whoever else might be grinning at the mistake and was close by. The guy was an authentic badass in the Gene Fullmer tradition. The kids he’d slapped stupid were almost always awarded great respect by their peers because of Chris’s ex-boxer reputation. After you’d taken a beating from Chris, you were “the man” until the end of the month.
Report cards came out every three months and mine were always bad. Out of necessity, I began forging my mother’s signature. I’d done a decent job of convincing her that the school had changed its report card policy to twice a year, and I was in the clear for a few months until my brother Nick, who was two grades ahead of me and attending the public Santa Monica High, informed her that I was a liar. Nick never missed an opportunity to zing me to our parents, and he’d always cover his tracks by convincing our mother to say she had discovered my deceptions on her own.
In one memorable case he stole a cigar box full of rare coins Mom had been collecting—two hundred dollars’ worth of silver quarters and half-dollars—then blamed me. He’d spent the money on beer for his pals, but it was me who caught the rap.
Nick also destroyed the property of his siblings for no apparent reason. My brother Jim’s choo-choo train was a prize possession. Nicky smashed it to bits with a hammer for no motive other than meanness and that Jimmy loved the toy.
He’d wait until an occasion when we had family visitors with children of their own to the house, then blame the guests’ kids after they’d gone and the discovery was made.
John Fante and I stopped communicating almost entirely when I was sixteen. Over the preceding few years there had been a few physical incidents between us. Nothing serious. A slap. A push. Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, he grabbed me by my neck, dragged me the length of the house, threw me out the front door, and then locked it. Other than those things there was no consistent pattern of physical confrontation.
But now that I was a teenager I found it impossible to sit in the same room as him. Because I had come of driving age and had a license, I’d leave for school in the morning and not return until nine or ten at night.
I was bigger than my father now, and I refused to put up with his nasty tongue or take his shit or back down. I stood my ground and yelled, “C’mon, old man. I’ll break your jaw right here. I’ll put you in the hospital.” The result was that John Fante stopped speaking to me entirely.
My first arrest as a teenager happened when I was with my high school pal Wally. Walter Mulrooney was red-haired, tall, and Irish. We were in the tenth grade together. Wally had recently become famous in school after another badass clergyman, Brother Aloysius, had punched him out in the hallway, then attempted to jam his tall frame into a floor-level wall locker.
Wally’s moms and pops were separated, and he would eventually begin to date a sweet, pretty girl from my Malibu neighborhood, Marilyn Torbuth. His old man caught his cab before we went into the first part of our freshman year. Then his moms received a small life-insurance settlement, and Wally conned this woman, who didn’t know how to drive and was working at domestic jobs, into buying him a year-old, shiny, two-tone Ford coupe. Wally’s okeydoke was to persuade her that he’d be able to take her back and forth to work and drop his younger brother and sister at school. She bought the scheme. Three months later the Ford was a mistreated wreck as a result of Wally’s drag racing and learner’s-permit motoring skills.
My friend had been well tutored in street smarts and Catholic grammar school petty crime, and was a decent thief. One of his newest moves, out of necessity, was to siphon gas from parked cars.
One Friday, after ditching school at noon, Wally and I found ourselves penniless with his Ford’s gas gauge on E. We were ten blocks from St. Monica in the upscale Palisades neighborhood of Santa Monica when the Ford ran dry and quit.
We pushed the car to the curb of a wide residential street. Wally opened his trunk and came up with a length of plastic hose and a two-gallon gas can.
He selected his target—a station wagon parked nearby. Ten minutes later, with me as lookout, Wally’s can was full and we were pouring gas into his Ford.
We were pulling away when two cop cars screeched to a halt—one in front of us, the other against the rear bumper of the Ford.
Three hours later my mother and father appeared at the Santa Monica Juvenile Detention facility. Joyce Fante had never whacked me as a teenager. That day, after the silent forty-minute drive back home to Malibu from the police station, she let me have it.
To this day I can remember what she said, word for word: “You disgraced me. If you’re going to be a thief, be a good thief! Don’t get caught!”
My pal Wally wasn’t so lucky. He already had a juvenile record in Santa Monica. He was given two options: #1, time in the slam; #2, a hitch in the military. Wally took #2. He had just turned seventeen and with his mom’s consent he enlisted in the army.
I never failed a class in high school because kids like me with bad marks were permitted to attend summer school, which was where I spent my vacation every year. I was suspended twice, once for behavior and once for vandalism, but never expelled.
My best classes were always history and English. I was good at padding writing assignments. I could vamp on a subject for a page or more in longhand. It saved me and helped me graduate from high school. Toward the end of my senior year, though, I was summoned by the principal and told I would have to attend junior college because I lacked math and science credits.