Catholic Memorial

I went to Catholic school almost my entire life, from a very young age in Medford, Mass., to middle school in Reading, Mass., to high school in West Roxbury, Mass., and eventually graduating from Albany, New York. In total I actually attended five high schools in my day, Catholic Memorial (Mass.), Reading High (Mass.), Lawrence Academy (Mass.), Fossil Ridge High (Texas), and Catholic Central (New York). No, my old man was not in the military. I was a hockey junkie, and went wherever the game took me from the time I was thirteen to today even.

This post isn't about my hockey journey, or about all of the schools I attended, it's about one place, and one place only. Catholic Memorial High School. The school itself is located in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. There are no female students. It's an all-male school, with uniforms (dress shirt and tie), the majority of the students are Irish-Catholic, and many of the guys came from South Boston, Charlestown, and Dorchester. For those of you unfamiliar with the Boston area, I'm not going to try to explain those towns to you. You wouldn't understand it anyway. The school was loaded with thick Boston accents, wiseasses, punks, tough guys, wimpy kids, and athletes. Some of the guys were a little bit of everything. The teachers were no different than the students. If you were a female teacher then you had to watch yourself constantly. I'm not goofing either. Some of those ladies got it tough, and not just from the students.

Anyways, we all prided ourselves on being original. Even if you weren't an inner city kid, you tended to act like you were (my brother took that part of it to heart for sure). Everybody in the place thought they were a wiseass, and if you weren't then you quickly learned to become one. It was out of necessity. You had to take care of yourself because people were always coming after you with some kind of bullshit. The hockey players always got a lot of respect, mostly because we were one of the most highly touted high school hockey programs in the country. "CM" won the Massachusetts state championship yearly (at least they did before I got there, and during my time in high school), and was ranked nationally with the top Division 1 high school programs, year after year. We ran the school basically.

This school used to see some really bizarre shit. One time everybody came out of homeroom after the bell and we saw that somebody had just taken a dump in the middle of the hallway. Hilarious. Guys used to draw penises on the shirt of the kid sitting in front of them in class, just because they could. Then this donkey would get up and have about 20 ding-a-lings scribbled on the back of his nice white button-down. We had one teacher who happened to be blessed with a massive chest, well, guys used to open all the windows in her classroom during the winter just to watch her nipples harden up. Then everybody would start throwing out "turkey's done" and we would keep track of how many we could get out before she closed up the windows. Comedy.

After we won the state tournament my Junior year, we all went out and got completely bamboozled (obviously). We weren't supposed to get "allowances" for winning the tournament, but we did any way. We all walked in to school the next day, three or four hours late, and smelling like the inside of a brewery. That might have been the day we dissected frogs in biology and two of my teammates were taking bets to eat the insides. The yellow intestines shit smelled awful, I remember. They did it any way. Or maybe it was the day we were supposed to dissect chicken fetuses, but instead we all took trips to the bathrooms with the eggs and smashed them all over the walls. It was an interesting lecture when the teacher went to the bathroom and found about fifty dead fetuses plastered all over the place. I don't know. I don't remember. Part of my problem is that I've seen so much weird crap in my day, between high school to now, that I can hardly remember any of the good stuff. I guess I'll just have to keep on writing until I remember...