Rivethead - Ben Hamper [13]
Spurred on by parental badgering and fueled with the heady octane of boobs galore, I pulled off an amazing stunt my freshman year at St. Mike's. I wound up making the honor roll! Apparently, my leftover cronies from St. Luke's found this development hard to grasp, for on the list saluting the honor students that hung on the bulletin board in the school lobby someone had scrawled the words “How?” and “Why?” next to my name. I didn't have a ready answer. What could I say? “I owe it all to the persistence of my drunken pa and a hormonal yen for watermelon teats?”
Before my sophomore year, they closed down St. Michael's. Shit, I thought, right when I was gatherin’ a groove. The diocese decided that the small parish high schools were a thing of the past. In other words, resorting to the norms of Catholicism, they had fond a more lucrative method of bleeding coin out of the flock.
Ground was broken on the northern border of Flint and construction began on this enormous structure that would consolidate all of the area's Catholic high schools. Say good night to St. Mike, St. Matt, St. Agnes, St. John, St. Mary and to those southside swine, Holy Redeemer. What was wrong with them Redeemers, anyway? Couldn't they find a saint to lift a name from? Seein’ as how they annually mopped ass on the football field, possibly St. Joseph of Namath would have been appropriate.
The braintrust at the diocese ran into the same predicament when they settled on the name for the new high school we were all about to attend. They called it Luke Powers High. Hmmm, Luke Powers. I must have skipped right past that guy during Bible Study. Surely, there had to be more saints out there without earthly monuments celebrating their good deeds. Luke Powers? It sounded like a cowpoke from an old episode of The Big Valley or the name of some pockmarked pump jockey down at the corner Sunoco.
During the tenth grade of Powers, I was able to bluff my way onto the honor roll once more. It wasn't so much attributable to any sense of goal-setting on my part, I just had nothing else to do but hit the books as I baby-sat my younger brothers and sisters night in and night out. My mother was now working the second shift at McLaren Hospital. My father was quickly becoming an endangered species at home. That left me in charge of six kids to cook for, delegate chores for, clean crappy diapers for, officiate rumbles for and to safely stow in bed and bunk. When all grew peaceful, I would flip open the books.
Powers was significantly different from the small parish schools I had attended at St. Luke's and St. Mike's. My classmates weren't middle-class kids. These were not the sons and daughters of the assembly line. Most of the new blood at Powers hailed from wealthy families. Some of them weren't even Catholic. Their parents just deposited them here as a means of avoiding the turbulence of schoolin’ down with white trash and blackies and hoodlums and druggies and things that go bump near the water fountain. None of them possessed any shoprat heritage nor were any likely to spend a lifetime affixing trunk lids to the ass ends of Buicks.
Things were definitely on the upswing my sophomore year at Powers. My honor roll status delighted my mother and seemed to soothe my father's doubts regarding my factory-bent tendencies. I was even beginning to think I might defy my shoprat heritage after all. I became interested in poetry and spent long hours up in my bedroom concocting silly little love poems that combined all the worst elements of Rod McKuen and my hippie mentor, Richard Brautigan. I actually penned my own large collection of poems called “Intestines of a Balloon.” Ouch.
I did discover that the poetry, as awkward and schmaltzy as it was, drew great favor