for some of us, we had to fight our way out of a hole To see some sort of daylight

I recall 1977.

I wore Buster Brown shoes and was expelled for throwing snowballs at a school bus.

The principal called me into his office so many times that year that it appeared my a*s had made a permanent imprint on The Chair.

We called it The Chair for apparent reasons.

We insubordinate liked to fancy ourselves as inmates on death row.

One day, I got busted for smoking.

Mrs. Hooper caught me.

It doesn’t matter how I got caught.

Or what happened once I was called into the principal’s office.

The fact is, I did my penance and graduated from sixth grade with most of my balls still intact.

The following year, I was in junior high.

Sure, I was a loner.

But I was a loner with people skills.

I wasn’t what you’d call “goal-orientate” or a “go-getter,” but I knew how to “work a  room” and how to experience those “extremes of emotions.”

I was thirteen.

Smoked a half-pack of Camel Lights a day and drank six cups of coffee-milk before lunch.

I was a true one-sixteenth of a badass.

My parents didn’t know whether to send me to private or military schools the following year.

So they compromised and sent me to a Catholic school.