Acquiring high school freshman social skills was a steep learning curve. I had to learn to keep moving in a hallway without stopping traffic to talk to someone. Also important: not asking older guys any questions.
By the time our team made it to the state championship football game during my sophomore year, I was ready to cheer and stood right at the front of our rowdy section. A senior yelled at me, “Get out of the way, freshman!!” as I blocked his view.
“I’m a sophomore!” I yelled back.
He pretended to be shocked and said something like: “Whoa.” I moved.
Cheverus High School won the state game and the rest of the year was tinged with the victory. This is one of those chapters that mark a turning point in life, though not in the way I expected.
My high school at the time was all-male and we got all sorts of gay slurs yelled at us. I even heard a joke in grade school about it.
Question: Why doesn’t Cheverus have stairs?
Answer: Because fairies can fly.
No one called me a fairy in high school; it was too nice a term for homosexual. I cringed when teens used slurs against me, which happened a lot when I went running with other members of the cross country and outdoor track team.
We ran all over Portland and straight past rival Deering High School. Whenever the team practiced outdoors, Deering students might call us all sorts of names.
Winning the state football championship game meant Cheverus could be seen as tough. I hadn’t figured out a guy could be both scarily intimidating and very gay. The thrill of school triumph prevented deep thought.
Our year of awesomeness continued with stories of football-playing seniors getting in fights. I only caught word of them in passing, because a lot of my Saturdays were booked up watching episodes of Dr. Who on public television.
One tale I enjoyed hearing involved an older student stepping out of a convenience store in a letterman jacket. A guy from another school shouted the line I most hated: “Cheverus faggot!” But unlike when I was running, the letterman jacket guy had friends who popped up and pummeled the teen who had insulted our school honor.
A few of the toughest guys knew me from the weight room. Outdoor track runners had to lift a few times a week while many seniors lifted to stay buff. Another one knew me from my last name – the same as the president’s at the time – and would say, “How’s it going, Ronnie Babe?!” in the hallway.
That guy was rumored to be in a lot of fights, including one in which he broke someone’s jaw. I liked being on his good side.
Around the same time, I had become tired of feeling invisible around my peers. I began to act annoying just to get a reaction from classmates. This included scraping my fingernails on the blackboard as I entered Mr. Moore’s English class. I liked how I aggravated the guys who were popular and made them wince.
But when Mr. Moore looked angry and said, “Don’t do that!” I stopped. I liked him and didn’t anticipate annoying him too.
Any time an upperclassmen knew who I was, it felt good, even the time a senior told me to keep my ass down while I was doing push-ups. Yet I wanted additional recognition.
The same Mr. Moore sometimes went on runs with us at the end of the school day. Before one speed workout session for outdoor track, a few guys did a warm-up run. Mr. Moore, a junior runner and I joined the group but continued on for a longer, three-mile route.
We were heading down Stevens Avenue when the junior and Mr. Moore stopped running. A car had gone by with one door open and almost hit them, they said. In the distance, a guy hopped out of the stopped vehicle and yelled something to us. He had arms that looked puffed out from lifting.
A moment later, Mr. Moore said something like “Forget it,” and we took a turn down Pleasant Avenue. A car’s tires screeched behind us. The muscular guy reappeared and asked if we wanted to start something. Mr. Moore, who looked a little older than we did, said no trouble, that we were just wondering what was going on.
That’s when I saw my teacher get punched. Mr. Moore didn’t have time to say anything else after his “no trouble” comment.
A group gathered around him in a huddle. Another guy began swinging at me. He boxed me in the ears because I was wearing glasses. I was accused of causing problems.
The ambush ended when I was on my hands and knees and taking shots to the kidneys. Buff guy told us nothing would have happened if we hadn’t provoked them.
The teens piled back into cars as quickly as they had arrived. A fat kid in the front passenger side laughed “Ah-ha!” at us, while they drove off.
Mr. Moore’s face looked flushed. The junior ran for help. As we walked down the street, Mr. Moore said he hoped that kid was eighteen, so that he could be prosecuted.
By the time we had reached an intersection at the end of the street, his eyelids had swollen shut like a boxer’s. Mr. Moore said he couldn’t see.
I didn’t lead him far because a senior in a hatchback showed up to take Mr. Moore away. I walked back to school, thinking the whole situation was more serious than I thought because the senior looked worried when he pulled up.
That’s when I became famous. For getting beaten up.
All sorts of guys stopped me when I got back to Cheverus. My brother Pat heard about what had happened while he was playing in a baseball game miles away.
Seniors, including guys who never approached me, now stopped me to talk. I wasn’t hurt. My ears had rung after the beating, but that was all.
The desire for notoriety had become like one of those fairytale wishes that turned into a curse. People wanted to talk to me about the most violent scene I had witnessed in my life.
The junior and I had to go to the Portland Police Department to make a statement. Although I said I never saw Mr. Moore hit anyone, the detective pointed out that I did not witness the entire confrontation. He was right. I was too busy getting punched to be an effective witness.
We visited Mr. Moore in the hospital later in the day, while a doctor talked to him about his upcoming surgery. A wire was put into his broken cheekbone to reconstruct it.
He emerged from the hospital with at least one black eye and a cigarette-shaped bandage covering a wire jutting from his right cheek. When Mr. Moore returned to school, he would wiggle it to show the wire. I winced every time he did.
Another detective had questions for me, this time with a Deering High School yearbook he showed me in an assistant principal’s office. One guy I identified from the ambush went to Deering. I didn’t see him doing anything, but we knew each other from being classmates at St. Joseph’s. The junior and I looked at group photos of students on risers to try to identify anyone else.
After that, I heard nothing. I felt too embarrassed to ask Mr. Moore about any progress in the case.
What I really began to hate was not the guys who attacked us, even though I got second-guessed about how I should have fought back against a mob. The thing I disliked was how my views changed. No longer was I tough by association or part of a group. I thought more about how I had no way to protect myself from strangers throwing punches.
If two people started pushing and raising voices, I wanted to get away rather than see what would happen. I felt vulnerable.
Some days I even worried about that guy I didn’t know and hadn’t seen get hurt, the one with a broken jawbone. I wondered what happened to him after his fight with the “Ronnie Babe” senior. I knew how awful a broken cheekbone looked, and thought that if his beating happened the way I overheard it, he would have looked even worse than Mr. Moore.
The question I wanted to ask Mr. Moore — “What happened to those guys who attacked us?” — could be turned around and directed at lots of people I knew. I had liked going to school games because I started to know a lot more students and could cheer them on.
But after the beating, I went to games with less school spirit because I knew what certain upperclassmen were capable of doing. We weren’t special or different. Students with neckties could be just as violent as anyone from a heathen public school. All the talk about religion and the unofficial Cheverus motto of “Men for Others” had no meaning.
I’m not going to go into how many nice guys offset the bad behavior. Nor will I try to defend what happened by changing the subject to acts of charity. Catholics are raised to show our beliefs through faith and good works. Catholics guilty of wrongdoing can undermine the whole message of how Christianity is supposed to make believers behave better.
After all, I considered myself a nice person when I reveled in the stories of senior brawls. Then I got beaten up and thought a lot more about the kind of person I was.
Unlike St. Paul on the road to Damascus, it wasn’t a bright light that led to me reflecting on what I was doing. I had to witness violence to see what I had been a cheerleader for.
