Chapter 29
Jeffee Enters Hell for High School
Mainly it was a horrible experience because if I thought Father Cook was a horrible human being, evil priest; the priests at Don Bosco would make Father Cook look like a minor-league abuser of young boys and men. And again the horrible Catholic school system wants you to dress in another horrible fashion so that you can have the most miserable time while you're in a miserable school to begin with.
All the boys had to wear suits and ties to go to Don Bosco High School - another completely horrible experience. I blame Catholic schools exclusively for my abject hatred of ties and suits to this day. I did not have to wear a silly Don Bosco tie but it was bad enough having to wear stupid suit coat and suit pants and a tie. To me having to wear a suit and tie violates one of our constitutional amendments against cruel and unusual punishment to high school students.
Remember back then in those bad old days, knowing the Catholic Church could do no wrong in the eyes of parents or anybody else; they can abuse the hell out of you physically, sexually, emotionally, whatever. And if any of the boys and girls complained to their parents they would say you probably deserved it. Don't you ever bring charges or say anything like that against a priest or nun again; they are God's servants. Will let me tell you, I think a lot of them were the devil's servants and not God's servants as they were evil, rotten people regardless of whether they were black clothes with a collar and call themselves a priest or nun. They were horrible, horrible human beings and never should have been around anybody else, especially children and young teenagers.
The most evil human being I have ever encountered in my life was Father Ed Mazierick. I think he could've easily worked in one of Hitler's concentration camps and enjoyed himself; he was that mean and evil. He was probably 6 foot six and looked like a middle linebacker. He probably weighed between 240 and 250 pounds and he could give you the most evil stare you ever saw in your life. He had no problem physically abusing any of the students.
Again Catholic priests and nuns in those days were completely above the law, completely above anything; they could do just about anything to you short of murder and get away with it; it's sad.
I can remember one day Father Ed had just lined up all the students who taken lunch the previous hour. Right in front of his door I came stumbling out of the door. Maybe there are 100 students in a bunch of rows looking like a damn army formation. Big Ed was big on law and order, not big on the student rights if you know what I mean.
I come stumbling out the door laughing and joking with a friend. The next thing I know Father Ed grabs me by the hair, starts shaking me violently, yelling at me what the hell was I doing disturbing his formation? I still hate that son of a bitch and I'll hate him the rest of my life; I'll hate him but forgive him because I'm a good Christian and he's not. He was mean, evil and rotten through and through and did not have one good redeeming quality.
I remember one other really sad event that shows how bad life was at Don Bosco. It was the last day of the school year. Everybody of course was thrilled to be getting away from that hell hole. At least we were getting some time off for the summer to forget about that miserable place. The students were little bit happy about that but I still remember the last day of class; just this a school bus started pulling out in front of our building, a student tossed the firecracker out the window. Unfortunately the student hadn't waited another 10 or 15 seconds or the bus would've been rolling and the student would have got clean away. Big Ed stopped the bus and grabbed the student who threw the firecracker off the bus. I figure Big Ed probably burned the student at the stake!
Another legendary character was Father Savage. No priest was ever more aptly named than Father Savage. He was an old, shriveled up, little tiny man who spoke in this most irritating tone and loved nothing better than to give a student detention. I'll never forget there was one legendary moment with detention that was actually worth being in detention to witness.
We had this really fun guy as a student, a good friend of mine by the name of David Weiner. Our school is so rotten and evil that they actually held detention the day President Kennedy was shot; I believe it was November, 1967.
I was a junior in high school when Kennedy was shot since I graduated in ’69. President Kennedy was shot in I believe November, 1968. I still remember I heard about it when I was in my homeroom with our chemistry teacher Mr. Wilsey. Mr. Wilsey continued the legend of Catholic teacher physical abuse because I saw him punch some student right in the mouth in our home chemistry room.
I thought of another great story about good old Don Bosco and shows how asinine the place was. We had this French teacher named Mr. Campo. His nickname was Froggy because he taught French to the students who wanted to take French. One of his other jobs was to supervise the Student Council. Of course that was a total joke since we lived in a dictatorship run by the priests of the order of St. Don Bosco.
We had this legendary student that I will never forget to this day by the name of Richard Rowinski. Richard Rowinski was an inspiration to every student in that school. He actually had a part-time job during school hours. And he lived far away, maybe 10-15 miles away. Richard Rowinski would come in first thing in the morning and he would attend one or two classes and then he would hitchhike home on the highway and not be at school the rest of the day.
Teachers were supposed to do roll every class. So whenever they would call Richard Rowinski’s name, we would make up some kind of excuse like he must've had to go down to see Father Ed in the principal's office or he was out in the bathroom. We would come up with some kind of an excuse just about every day and that would cover things most of the time.
One time we were having nominations for the student council representative in the sophomore class. Some of the students thought it would be really funny to nominate Richard Rowinski for the student counsel job because they knew he would never be there and that would get him in trouble because Mr. Campo, the French teacher, I was telling you about, would always be there at the Student Council meetings.
Somehow or other for once I actually did achieve something in high school and I was nominated to be the student council alternate in case the regular student council representative couldn't be there. Richard Rowinski won and he was elected our student council representative.
My guess is that Richard Rowinski was never at any student council meeting. So of course I had to go in his place and represent the sophomore class. Naturally Froggy, Mr. Campo, our French teacher, and student council overseer would be at the student council meetings and immediately I would get the question of: “Where is Richard Rowinski?” Then I have to come up with some kind of phony excuse why the hell he wasn't there.
Even someone as dumb as Mr. Campo quickly caught on that something was going on. Another great little story about Mr. Campo was that when he would be in our class supervising the class taking an exam he would actually take his chair and put it on top of the desk. He would sit in the chair on top of the desk and put on his sunglasses so students couldn't see where he was looking during the exam. He was a living legend to all of us.
Let me tell you the ultimate, final, funny story about Richard Rowinski that led him to be expelled from Don Bosco High School. We had this other student named Paul Zealney; well Paul Zealney’s only nickname was “fly face.” That tells you that Paul Zealney would not be one of the leading jocks in the school and he was a rather funny looking individual that everybody liked to do nasty things to.
One day Paul Zealney had about the nastiest thing done to him that anybody could do. We had this bathroom that unfortunately was right next to Father Ed's office. One day Richard Rowinski takes the notebook of Paul Zealney and brought it into the bathroom. To put it in nice terms, Richard Rowinski took the notebook of Paul Zealney and put a bunch of poo-poo into the notebook.
Unfortunately for Richard Rowinski who walks by just as Richard Rowinski comes out of the bathroom with this notebook full of poo-poo but Father Ed. Big Ed quickly figured out that there was something wrong with the notebook and when he found out what was wrong with the notebook; Richard Rowinski was expelled from Don Bosco High School.
The sad thing about Richard Rowinski being expelled from high school was this; he was in his junior or senior year. It turns out that the tuition for Richard Rowinski had been paid by his local Catholic Church since he was a freshman. After he was expelled, his family had to pay back all of that tuition to the local church. I think that might've run into the thousands of dollars so very sad ending to a unique and colorful character and I hope he had a great rest of his life as I don't think he missed going to Don Bosco. You didn't get a diploma from Don Bosco, you got a pardon.
One classroom was this big huge room with a very high ceiling that was the old gymnasium in the old days of Don Bosco. I think Don Bosco goes back to around 1900 or so. Students have been suffering there for many, many years – I'm sure Don Bosco was even worse back then.
One other funny thing about that room; it was the home room for all of the students who were live-in students at Don Bosco. There were a whole bunch of live-in students there and after I grew older and wiser I think to myself how horrible it was just a be a day student to Don Bosco. May God have mercy on all of the students that not only had to go to school there but had a live there too.
One funny thing about the desks in the old gymnasium. They had a flip up top; if you lifted the top up, there was enough room in there to store a lot of stuff. All the students that lived at Don Bosco would store a lot of stuff in the desks. To protect their valuables, the students had a combination lock to lock the desk so if somebody else is sitting at the desk they couldn't open it. At least that's what the live-in students thought.
We had a bunch of crazy and wild students and when they got bored just sitting at the desk they would be playing with the combination lock and if you play enough with a combination lock enough magically the combination lock would unlock.
The students didn’t remember the seventh commandment – thou shalt not steal. Believe it or not there were students at Don Bosco which was a good Catholic high school, who would steal your dirty underwear if they could.
They looked inside the desk and stole anything that looked good to them. The poor live-in student s(literally they were poor after their stuff was stolen) would never know what hit them. After the students would steal what they wanted, they would relock the combination lock. The live-in student would come back later and open their lock and say: "Where's all my stuff?" Really funny. I know I shouldn't laugh at that but to this day I will laugh at that, I'm sorry, forgive me but I found that funny.
Let me finish the other funny story about this old gymnasium before I get on with the legendary detention incident involving David Wiener. Like I said this room had a very high ceiling and it was very long because was a gym so only a part at the front of the room had desks – in the rest of the room it was just empty. For whatever weird reason back in those days, I guess because Father Ed thought it would create less chaos on campus, instead of students changing classrooms like in a normal high school back in those days, the teachers changed classrooms and the students just sat in the classroom waiting for the next teacher.
Of course every now and then the teachers would get hung up; something would come up so the old teacher would leave and the new teacher didn't arrive. So all of us high school students were on our own and believe me we took full advantage of that few minutes of precious freedom from the sadistic rulers that Don Bosco High School gave us.
We had this one favorite game that we loved to play. We would practice kicking field goals in that gym and here's the way we would do it. One student would be the snapper; we used this sneaker for our football. Then the snapper would snap the sneaker to the holder, the holder would put it down with his finger on the top of the sneaker with the bottom of the sneaker lined up for the kicker and then the kicker would kick a field goal. Another student would be standing maybe20 feet in front with his arms raised into the air and he was the goalposts.
Like I said it was a riot, we had a great deal of fun playing football before one of the teachers would come by. I remember one day the game went a little bit haywire. While the student was kicking the field goal somehow he hooked the sneaker to the left and the sneaker was way up high in a window sill way at the top of the room. The sneaker was like 40 feet off the ground and the sneaker stayed up on top of the little window ledge way the hell up there.
Just after that we heard the glass breaking and the student knew the teacher was coming into the classroom; everybody panicked at this stage. We played deaf, dumb, and blind and the evil ones never did find out we kicked the field goal and broke a window. The sneaker was still at the top of the window sill 40 feet off the ground. Whoever that sneaker belonged to needed get a new pair sneakers as now he only had one. There was no way in hell you would be able to go up there and get that sneaker down. For all I know after 40 years that sneaker is still sitting on the window sill.
Meanwhile back at detention…
All of us students are sitting there with evil Father Savage sitting up at his desk which was raised off the ground on a little stand about 6 or 7 feet off the ground; looked like a judge and his court room. I guess we were the prisoners in front of him.
Now let me finish the detention story and enough dictating for tonight less the motherboard explode. I have dictated about 220 pages of my wonderful biography so far. I think I'm going at a pretty good pace and I will take a break here as my voice gets tired. I can only do this so long; I like doing it but I can only do talking so long.
So like I said I believe it was in November of 1967 President Kennedy gets shot in Dallas Texas. I forget why I got detention but I was in the detention hall; again that big, old, gymnasium. David Wiener was there and many other students were there.
We were sitting there for an hour or two of detention and then we get to go home. Something happened that I'd never experienced at any of the other times I was ever in detention. Of course being obsessive – compulsive and suffering from Asperger's Syndrome, I was very quiet and passive in detention – people with my mental illnesses have this incredible urge to please others at the discomfort of themselves. I was a pretty good boy – pretty quiet and invisible.
One quick example of my invisibility. Big Ed prided himself on knowing all of our names because authoritarian figures have more power when they know your name. One day there was about 100 of us in the school cafeteria and for whatever reason I did something wrong and Big Ed wanted to get my attention but as he was looking at me he couldn't remember my name. So Big Ed had to say you know the student at the back table with the yellow tie. The other students played along and immediately one after another would chime in: "Me Father, you mean me?” Then big Ed had to say no, no the other student, the other student. Finally he tracked me down and pointedly asked; “What is your name?"
After we started detention, about half an hour later, the telephone on Father Savage’s desk rings, that woke us up. Father Savage picked up the phone and of course we could only hear what Father Savage was saying; we couldn't hear what the person who called him was saying. But we can quickly figure out who had called and why she had called.
We are listening to Father Savage. And all of a sudden Father Savage is listening and listening and not saying anything and finally Father Savage says: "Yes, Mrs. Wiener, your son David is in detention. Yes we know President Kennedy was shot today, no, we didn't cancel detention and you think we should have canceled detention because President. Kennedy was shot." This goes on and on. Mrs. Wiener was castigating Father Savage in probably the best possible language. I'd love to have a tape of what she said. I we were enjoying the hell out of it – watching Father Savage squirm in front of us.
Of course David Wiener was turning bright red in the audience figuring that this would probably get him put in the dungeon or something when his mom finally hung up but the rest of us enjoyed every minute of that. Everybody was very sad the day President Kennedy got shot and isn't it sad that I remember that day because Father Savage held detention the day President Kennedy got shot and Mrs. Wiener had a call up and bitch and complain that they never should've held detention; that they should've sent everybody home. But that's the way Catholic schools run their school system. They don't give a crap about anything except treating you mean, rotten, and dirty.
A other quick story about Father Savage that will illustrate what a rotten, miserable human being he was whether he's a priest or not. Being a Catholic school they were big on masses and confession and all the little rituals that go with being a Catholic. Once a week they would hold confession in the little chapel at Don Bosco and there were two confessionals where students could go you know to confess our horrible sins. The ones should've been confessing were the priests and not the students.
The students would march into the chapel and then they would see Father Savage go into one confessional and then a nice priest like Father Al would be in another confessional. Every single student would line up for confession with Father Al and not one student would line up for confession with Father Savage. And even evil Don Bosco High School could not force a student to get in line and tell their confession to Father Savage so we did have one other little bit of freedom.
I thought of one other funny thing about Father Savage that I'll say and then I really will wind it up for tonight as I'm tired. Father Savage was old, I guess he was maybe in his early 70s who knows, and he looked older than Father Time.
Father Savage had a hearing problem so he wore hearing aids. Students quickly figured out how to drive him crazy and he didn't even know that they were trying to drive him crazy. Students would start talking to him in a normal voice then they would start talking to him in a very loud voice and then they would start whispering to him and then they would actually just start mouthing the words and saying nothing. All the time Father Savage would be putting his hand up to his hearing aid and trying to adjust it because he thought there was something wrong with his hearing aid. That was the funniest thing you ever saw. All of us had to try and keep a straight face while the students were doing this and Father Savage never caught on to what we were doing – it was so funny.
Let me tell you about another very infamous priest at Don Bosco High School. His name was Father Al DiCarano. His nickname was Little Al, because Father Al DiCarano was a little tiny guy and we had this other priest named Father Al Sokal that was rather big and fat. So naturally the other nickname was Big Al for this priest and Little Al for Father Al DiCarano.
Let me tell you one great story to show the stupidity of Father Al DiCarano and in general the whole teaching order at Don Bosco High School. I still remember my sophomore year I had to take geometry from Father Al DiCarano. I had absolutely no math ability whatsoever and never in 1 million years would've taken that class except it was forced on me; like most things in the Catholic Church – they force it on you – they don't ask you to be a volunteer.
Father Al DiCarano had this habit of requesting homework every day. Unlike a normal human being, here is the way Father Al DiCarano collected homework. We sat in maybe four or five rows like I said in that big huge old gymnasium that had the very high ceiling. And remember like I told you earlier, the teachers who were sometimes priests changed classrooms – not the students.
When the teacher left from the class immediately before Father Al DiCarano came in to teach geometry here's what would happen. Many of the students who sat in the first two rows would immediately move over to like the fourth or fifth row because we had lots of empty desks in that classroom so there was always a place you could move to. Very few students will be sitting in the first or second row when Father Al DiCarano came in to teach geometry.
Usually at the beginning of class Father Al would collect the homework from the previous day. To say he was a little bit absent-minded was to put it mildly. What would usually happen is one of two things. A student would give Little Al any piece of paper with geometry–like writing on it and little Father Al would think the student did his homework. He never checked what a student turned in; he just accepted the piece of paper and thought you did your homework. If the students said I'm sorry Father I don't have my homework, little Father Al out would make up a red mark in his book and punish that student with a low grade or a zero for the day or whatever the hell he did.
Like I said Little Al would walk down between rows one and two. Then Father Al would be walking facing the front of the classroom when he walked up between rows three and four. His back would be to us the students sitting at our desks. When he started walking up rows three and four all the students who had hidden out in rows four and five would tiptoe behind Little Al and go back and sit in rows one and two. That way they didn't have to do any homework. Little Al was so dumb he never noticed that suddenly there were a lot more students in rows one and two Van when he walked down there the first time. I'll never forget that – another great moment in high school history.
Little Al had this other little quirks that were kind of stupid for him to do and students took full advantage. For whatever reason he loved to give a lot give a lot of what I would call snap quizzes. Suddenly he put some geometry problems up on the board and you had a quiz. The next day Little Al would pass back all of these geometry quizzes with the grade written on them in red. To put it mildly, many students got failing grades on these quizzes.
Then Little Al did the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life. He would call every student’s name. The student would go up to Little Al's desk and take up his test quiz from the day before. After every student had been given his quiz, Little Al would go through his classroom roster again and he would call every student’s name in alphabetical order and when a student's name was called the student had to tell Little Al what grade they got on the quiz.
To put it mildly students added a little bit onto the grade they got on the quiz. Just about every student would say Father I got 100, so as the names of the students were being called you would hear: "What is your grade?” and you would hear “hundred, hundred, hundred, and hundred. “
One day a very funny event happened again one thing I'll never forget. Once again Little Al handed out all the quizzes and started marking the grades down and asked every student what grade they got. When he finally got to the G’s, Father Al called out the name Frank Gerimeda. Frank Gerimeda was a little more honest than most of the students but that didn't help him. I believe Frank Gerimeda got like a 40 on the exam. So when Little Al called the name of Frank Gerimeda, Frank said I got an 80. Immediately, Little Al gets up from his chair walks down the first row and grabs Frank's quiz out of his hand.
Little Al takes a look at the exam sees that Frank Gerimia really got a 40 instead of the 80 that he said and Little Al told him for today you get a zero. Little Al calls the entire rest of the roster down to the Z’s and nobody else ever has to show Little Al their exam paper and all the rest of the students are saying the usual hundred, hundred, and hundred. Naturally everybody rubbed it into Frank after the class was over and he was a little bit pissed.
One other little talent that Little Al had was that he was the coach of the tennis team. And believe it or not, Jeffee actually was on the tennis team. Don't think it was some major accomplishment or that I was Boris Becker or Roger Fedderer or anything like that. The reality was that the tennis team wasn't exactly the big jock sport at Don Bosco High School so basically if you went out for the team you had a good chance of making the team.
We actually had this really ratty tennis court somewhere on Don Bosco. It had a wire across the middle of the court but no net. I went over there after school and I would practice my serves and practice shots. I didn't have anybody to hit the ball with but I did what I could. So I actually made the team and I played on the second doubles team. We played a very fancy tennis place maybe 2 miles down the road on Route 17. I can't remember the name of the guy who ran the tennis club, but Billie Jean King hung out at that tennis club, he was like world-famous so we really had nice facilities while we played our home matches.
I remember one great match that I really enjoyed. We were playing this other doubles team that we had beaten easily at their school earlier in the season. And we won the first set pretty convincingly and then the worst possible thing happened. Little Al came over and was standing in the little passageway behind the fence looking into our tennis court. Little Al literally had the evil eye and as soon as he started looking at me and my doubles partner our tennis game promptly fell apart.
After he had been standing there for a while we found ourselves down 5 to1 in the third set. I remember telling my doubles partner Bill: "Hey you know we're really getting buried in this third set being down five games to one game. Hey let's play our best and see if we can at least lose a close match; we don't want to be humiliated lose the third set 6 to 1".
Luckily for us, Little Al finally left the building or left our tennis court as you would say and we started to play better. I won my serve so now was five games to two and then we beat the first guy serving for their team so now was 5 to 3. And unbelievably we came back and tied the third set up 5 to 5 and wound up winning the match 7 to 5. I'll never forget it, one of the great moments in my life when we won that match.
I still remember we came back to Don Bosco maybe 5:00 at night and it was still pretty light. And I still remember there was a track meet going on between Don Bosco and some other school. I saw one of who I thought were my friends and told him about the thrilling match and he really didn't seem too interested. I was interested; I won that match along with my doubles partner and to this day I'm extremely proud of that moment. I earned a crimson letter from Don Bosco in tennis and I still have that to this day and I'm very proud that I earned it.
I also remember at some point I had to walk home from school. I had this really ratty way to my house; I would cut down this hill, walk along Route 17 on the grass not on the highway then I would go across this overpass in Mahwah, New Jersey and then take another shortcut through somebody's backyard (in those days and that most people didn't have their property fenced off and feared for life and limb) so I got home pretty quickly.
I actually find this hard to believe knowing how rotten and evil the priests at Don Bosco were but they actually let students in their senior year drive their cars to the campus and I actually got to drive a car there a few times.
But the reality driving there was not as pleasant as you would think. Most days when I did go to Don Bosco I had to ride my Vespa motor scooter. I guess I was stupid or whatever and I kind of ignored the fact that there were winters in New Jersey and many times I would go there not even wearing gloves or a real coat, just my suit coat and I would be frozen by the time I got to school. I think many of those rides that made me arrive frozen at the high school were one of the main reasons that led me to go to the University of Arizona after I graduated from Don Bosco High School.