Boarding School (5 page)

“He needs to be,” Mr. Stuart continued, “the last person you see before you leave the campus and the first person you see when you return. And if you don’t know where he is when you need him, then you have to go and hunt for him. Because we never want to have a situation occur where your parents call wanting to talk to you and we have to tell them that we have no idea where you are. If ever you can’t find the AOD, look on the bulletin board out in the lobby. If he’s not around, he’ll usually leave a note hanging there that’ll tell you where he is.”

I didn’t know at this moment, but within a few weeks I came to understand what the older students already knew. It seemed that soon after the school year was under way, a majority of the teachers—out of laziness mostly—would hand the book over to students so that they could go off and do personal things which interested them more. Heck, I was even made the AOD one Sunday afternoon so the teacher who was supposed to be carrying the book could take a nap without being disturbed.

Another duty of the AOD was to go around to all of the dorms at lights out every night to make sure that all students were accounted for and that all lights were indeed turned off. But within a week we knew that only two of our teachers actually took this part of their job seriously. The rest of the faculty couldn’t seem to care less about us. In fact, most nights Matt and I could have taken off at practically any time we wanted and gone someplace, if there had actually been someplace for us to go and a way for us to get there.

“And also,” Mr. Stuart had one more issue he wanted to raise before he was ready to sit down again. “Does anyone need to go and see the baba?”

At this point I had no idea what this man had just said. Was he making some sort of a reference about sheep? I looked around the room quickly for clues but all I could see was hair rippling across heads which were shaking to indicate a general disinterest in whatever it was our headmaster had just offered. And then I realized what it was that Mr. Stuart was talking about. During this era— the early 1970s—it was the style for guys to grow their hair out. A few students, like the head waiter, had hair past their shoulders and nearly all of us had our hair covering our ears. So the negative reactions around the room were in response to the offer to be given a haircut.
Oh, that’s it,
I thought to myself. I was still getting used to the accents and many odd habits of speech I was hearing for the first time in my life such as the New England tendency to drop the letter “R” from the end of words where it really belonged. So when I heard the word “baba,” I had no idea that Mr. Stuart believed that he had just said the word “barber”—which of course he hadn’t.

Finally, Mr. Stuart called for the cook to come out of the kitchen to be introduced. The man who made what I considered some of the worst institution food I had ever tasted was a large overweight African American with an extremely disagreeable personality. His name was Thomas Jefferson, and the only thing he said to us of note was that he never wanted any one to come back to his kitchen to ask him for seconds. According to the man whom the Academy catalog referred to as a famous chef, we were always given plenty of food the first time around, so there was never any need for us to return for more. As the man spoke, I got the impression that he really didn’t care at all for kids. Later, I learned that the theory among the students was that Thomas was skimming money off of the food budget so he could pay for the shiny new blue Camaro he always kept parked just outside the kitchen’s back door.

When the announcements were finally over, it was nearly time for all of us to leave the dining room. By now, Matt and I were acting the way that new roommates typically do when they first become acquainted. That is to say, we were doing everything together. So with the opportunity now before us to go into town, as soon as lunch was over we took advantage of it together.

The one o’clock van was packed with kids wanting to taste freedom again, and because we had arrived early, we were able to count ourselves among the chosen few. The van was driven by one of the teachers. Students were expressly forbidden from driving the school van for insurance and other more obvious reasons. And when we finally disembarked at the Duncan Donuts, Matt and I were joined by a new friend we had made earlier that day.

Frank DeVierno was a year older than we were and was from New York City. Actually, Brooklyn was the borough where he lived with his mom, his sister, and his grandparents. This was his second year at the Academy and with his streetwise persona, he came across as a kind of tough kid who knew everything about everything. Matt and I weren’t sure if he was tagging along with us to be helpful, or because he had nothing better to do and wanted to see how two boys from other planets would be spending their afternoon. Because by now, it seemed to be known all over school that we westerners were different.

“So, Frank,” I asked a little later on as we were coming out of a drug store on Main Street. Matt and I had both needed to pick up some things like toothpaste and shampoo and I had also bought a bottle of baby oil. At that time, kids were using baby oil instead of sun tanning lotion because it was believed that the oil gave a person a richer, more natural-looking tan. Anyway, I wanted to have some for the upcoming occasions when we would be lying out on the Academy’s beach after an afternoon of swimming in the lake. “I’ve been all over the campus by now and I haven’t been able to figure out where the pool is.”

Frank then stared at me with a sort of amused look on his face. To me at that moment he resembled a person who had just eaten something he hadn’t intended. “What pool?” he asked.

“The pool on the campus. You know, there’s a picture of it in the catalog?” I was beginning to raise my voice.
How could a guy who had already spent
a year at the Academy not know where the pool is?
I wondered to myself.

Frank then smiled at me. “There’s no pool at Ulster, Clint.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Are you kidding?” I must have sounded as if I was blaming Frank for the bad news. “There’s a picture of three or four Academy kids swimming in an indoor pool right smack dab in the middle of the Academy catalog!”

“Smack dab, huh? I didn’t know people really said things like that. If you ever said anything like ‘smack dab’ in Brooklyn, they’d beat you up.”

This was awful news. I couldn’t figure out how in the world the Academy could advertise a swimming pool and then turn out to not have one. “Oh well,” I said a moment later when I realized that there was no point in getting upset over the issue. “At least we’ve got the lake we can swim in. That’ll probably be more fun anyway.”

“No, you can’t do that either.” Frank now looked as if he was enjoying his new role as dream smasher.

“Well why the hell not?” My voice now rose in pitch. Rapidly I was becoming exasperated with the whole subject.

“Because the guy that owns the Academy doesn’t let us use the lake any mo…”

“Wait a minute!” I interrupted Frank. “You said ‘owns’? There’s a guy who owns the Academy?” Now I was ready for Frank to clarify what he had just said to me.

“Yeah,” Frank confirmed. “Some guy named Zanapolis or something like that.”

“He owns it?” I still couldn’t get this idea to make sense to me. “As in he makes his living off of us?”

“I guess,” Frank confirmed again.

“What’s the big deal?” Matt asked me.

“I don’t know, I just thought private schools were never operated for a profit and were run by boards.”

“Well, we’ve got a board,” Frank volunteered.

“We do?” Matt now seemed a little more interested in our discussion.

“Yeah, Zanapolis and Stuart and I think maybe the dean of students are our board.”

“Well, why don’t we talk to this Zana… whoever he is and ask him if we can go swimming in the lake?” Matt always seemed to believe that there was a simple answer to everything.

“Because he’s never around,” Frank continued. “Sometimes he comes to the Academy in the morning when everyone’s in class to check on the bookkeeping in the bursar’s office, and stuff. But most of the time he just stays away. Anyway, he told Stuart and Stuart told us that he can’t afford to pay for a guy with the right training to watch us all the time when we’re in the lake. So the insurance company made him tell us to stop using the lake. Which is too bad really, because last year we got to go in it all the time. It was a lot of fun. In fact, we even had our own ski boat last year.”

I was nearly sickened by my bad luck. I had missed all of that fun by one year. “That stinks,” I protested.

“Yeah, really,” Frank concurred.

“I can’t believe it.” And I couldn’t believe it. “So there’s no way that we can use the lake ever, is there?”

“What if we go swimming anyway?” Matt asked.

“Then you get detention or suspended,” Frank advised.

In those days there were actually unpleasant consequences which went along with being placed on detention or suspension. So that, unfortunately, was that on the subject of swimming at Ulster Academy.

* * *

For the next couple of weeks I put my efforts into establishing a routine for myself. The classes I had been assigned were like classes in any school, except we always had fewer students in them. For example, my smallest class consisted of only five of us. This fact, of course, was considered to be one of the benefits provided by the Academy. A smaller student-teacher ratio was supposed to mean a greater degree of personal attention for each boy.

The one universal feature which was true for practically all of the teachers at the Academy that year was that, with only one exception I can recall, every teacher there wore a mustache. I have no idea how such a phenomenon came to be. Perhaps they had all gotten together before the school year and had colluded to grow facial hair. In any event, it was a rather strange thing to see.

The other characteristic which all of our teachers seemed to have in common was a well-developed skill for giving homework assignments. I suppose the theory was that if we were always busy with our studies, we would never have time to get into trouble. Matt and I and the Venezuelan boys next door were all good kids. We always followed the rules of the school which included our nightly observance of study hall. Every so often during this period, at least at the beginning of the year, a teacher would come through our hallway to make sure that we were actually doing our homework and not horsing around, instead. Since we were required to study with our doors open, he would come in and then stand in our doorway for a moment to say hello to us. After our response, he would then move on to the room next door and do the same until he had worked his way past all four rooms on our floor. And when he was satisfied that we were all being diligent in our work, he would then leave us by going through the large wooden door at the other end of our hallway. After that, things for us would become quiet again.

In our little hall, we were isolated from the goings-on of the rest of the school, but in time we began to hear about shenanigans which some of the students in the larger dorms would sometimes pull. This was true for both Ulster Hall and especially the Annex where the kids were all older and seemed to me to be more wild than the average Academy student.

On Saturday nights there were almost never any structured activities for us to get involved in. Occasionally a movie might be run on a portable projection screen that a teacher would set up for us in the library, and this diversion from an otherwise dull evening would help to pass the time for a little while, at least. But in general we were always left to our own devices once dinner had been finished. Also, lights out was later on Saturday nights. Instead often o’clock, we were allowed on this one night of the week to stay up until midnight, thus prolonging our boredom on these occasions. It was on one of my first Saturday evenings when I got to see for myself what my mother had meant when she had expressed her belief that our headmaster was overly partial to alcohol.

On the second floor of Ulster Hall, was a door that led out onto the top side of the foyer which stuck out over the front entrance to the building. The foyer had apparently been deemed unsafe to walk on because it was falling apart, so students were not permitted out onto its deck—ever. Of course on this particular night, some of our more illustrious students had chosen to ignore the “DANGER” signs which were posted on and around this door, to venture out onto the roof of the foyer anyway. And then to further draw attention to themselves, these boys elected to heave giant water balloons at anyone who might happen to blunder by on the drive below. At this same moment, I had just happened to be looking for something to do downstairs in Ulster Hall and was utterly unaware of the events which were taking place upstairs and on the drive outside. So when all hell finally broke loose and the kids on the foyer began to scatter, I was surprised to notice Mr. Stuart suddenly charging into the building from outdoors so he could confront the hooligans and dispense some discipline. An instant later, before I was able to put together that something was going on, the man had me cornered at the base of the main stairway—where I had been standing—and then he began to speak to me.

“Hey, there! Do you bizzawojabizja?” he asked angrily.

“What was that, sir?” At first I thought I was just having trouble hearing my headmaster because the open doorway to the TV lounge was nearby and the sound from the program that the half dozen or so other students in there were watching was blaring out into the north hall.

Right away Mr. Stuart understood from my reaction that he had failed to communicate with me. But incredibly, instead of hoping that I hadn’t caught on about his condition and passing me by so he could run up the stairs and perhaps still capture the young assassins before they could get away, he decided to remain in front of me and give speaking another try. “Buziawoziavizia! Vizia! Vizia!” He was still quite intent on getting an answer out of me.

By this time, I’m sure my mouth was gaping open. “Huh?” All I could do was stare at the man in wonder. I had never in my life seen an adult authority figure behave so strangely. Alcohol had always been present in my family during social gatherings and holidays, but none of the male role models within my parents’ sphere had ever permitted themselves to drink to the point of becoming so out of control in front of others. So I really had no idea how I was supposed to respond in a situation like this.