Chapter 5: Matucket High

1998 to 2001

Some other stuff happened at Matucket Middle School that proved important. For one thing, by the eighth grade we started to differentiate with some of our classes, like they did in high school. We all took a standardized test, one of those things where you had to fill in the circles with a Number Two pencil. That was done near the end of seventh grade and would be used to assign you to classes in the eighth grade. “That would be the smart classes versus the dumb classes,” commented Bo Effner.

I nodded to my friend. “Maybe so, Bo, but I would bet that if you were assigned to the smart classes that meant you were smart enough to know the guys in the dumb classes could bounce you off a wall.”

He grinned back. “Yeah, maybe they would be, at that. You’re looking awfully smart, there, Grim!”

As it turned out, Bo was one of the kids assigned to the smart classes, which consisted of Algebra and Biology. The rest of us, which included me, simply took Math Eight and Science Eight. We would get that stuff when we got to high school. Mom wasn’t all that happy about it, since she saw what I scored on the test and simply sighed to Dad. Dad gave her a wry smile and said, “So he’s not going to meet hot chicks at Georgia Tech, I’m guessing.” That was where Dad went to college. Mom had gone to Georgia State, where she became a nurse.

“Right now, I think I’d settle for M-Triple-C,” she sighed. That was Matucket County Community College.

I didn’t think it was that bad. I mostly got B’s and B-’s, with the occasional C+ tossed. I figured as long as my grades were good enough to stay on the football team, I was happy. That was looking probable, too. While Matucket Middle School didn’t have a football team, Matucket High did. The eighth grade would be my last season playing Pop Warner football, because after that I could play for Matucket High. That assumed I would be good enough. Pop Warner was big on giving everybody a chance to play and not keeping records and statistics, Coach Fusco told us more than once that Matucket High would be playing for keeps. If you weren’t good enough, nobody was going to make them put you in for so many plays a game. Instead, you’d be riding the pine until you quit. That was not my plan, not at all! I wanted to play!

Towards the end of that last season, a couple of guys the same age as Coach Fusco showed up and talked to the Coach. They both had on high school sports shirts, and they spent a lot of time talking to Coach Fusco along the sidelines during the games, while he was often pointing at each of us. They were taking notes on us! After the game (we won, of course!) Coach Fusco ordered some of us over to talk to them at the end of the bench. I noticed that everybody sent over was in the eighth grade, like me.

“Fellows, I want to introduce you to Coach Halifax from Matucket High School and Coach Melman from East Matucket High School. Most of you fellows will be going to school at either Matucket or East Matucket next year, and you might be interested in talking to them if you plan to try out for the football team,” said Coach Fusco. With that he split us into two groups based on our current school and divvied us up between the two coaches.

I ended up in the group facing Coach Halifax. He started off by saying, “Nice game today, fellows. I’m glad to see you won. That makes me think you guys might be good enough to try out for junior varsity next year. I want to see a show of hands. If you plan to try out for the Matucket Pioneers next year, raise your hands.” The Pioneers was the name of the Matucket High School teams. East Matucket’s teams were called the Warriors. I immediately thrust my hand up in the air, as did almost everybody else present. “Great!” he continued. “I am going to pass around a sheet. I want everybody interested to write down their name, their address, and their phone number. I will be contacting you and your parents, and we’ll have a meeting and go over some rules.”

Coach Halifax then handed over a clipboard with a bunch of forms on it, and a pen that was tied to the clipboard with a chain. He handed that to Brax Hughes on the end of the circle facing him. Brax started filling in the form while Coach Halifax kept talking. He explained that there would be tryouts over the coming summer, and we had to earn our way onto the team, and that it wasn’t automatic. He also said we had to keep our grades up, which got a few groans. He was the coach of the JV team, the junior varsity team, which was mostly the ninth and tenth grades. Varsity was the eleventh and twelfth grades and was run by Coach Summers. You had to do well on the JV team to make it to the varsity. I waited my turn to fill in my name and information on the form.

We had that meeting in the spring before graduation from Matucket Middle School. The meeting was held at Matucket High, which was right near Matucket Middle. You had to bring at least one parent with you, and both Mom and Dad came. This time, things were more formal, and there was a lot of paperwork. Parents had to sign permission slips for us to play, we needed a physical, and a schedule for the tryouts and summer practices was given out. Coach Halifax also spoke a long time about safety and keeping our grades up, and I heard a real ration of crap about my grades from Mom and Dad on the ride home.

That rolled over into the other big thing I could do, which was get a job. Once I turned fourteen, on March First, Grandpa promised to let me work for him at the feed mill he owned in West Springs. I wasn’t allowed to go into the mill, since you had to be sixteen for that, but he said I could clean the offices and do chores. If that worked out, I could work in the mill itself when I turned sixteen. I could take a different school bus from Matucket Middle School and Matucket High over to West Springs, where the mill was, and then Grandpa could give me a lift home. Man, that sounded great to me! I could get some money! I was starting to realize that girls were expensive. Dad simply smiled and said he had the same job when he was my age, “ ... operating an idiot stick.”

“What’s an idiot stick?” I asked.

“It’s a stick with a broom on one end and an idiot on the other,” he replied, much to Grandpa’s delight. Both he and Mom and Grandpa laughed hard at that; Grandma sniffed and told Dad to behave.

The girl issue seemed very flexible that spring. While I took Becky Sorenson to the Spring Dance, she broke up with me about a week later to hang out with Wade Lionel. I wanted to deck Wade, but Brax Hughes kept me from doing anything stupid. The next day Jenny Lopez came up to me in the hallway and told me that she had heard about Becky and hoped I was doing okay. If anything, Jenny was even prettier than Becky, and she was sort of smiling and batting her eyes at me and twisting her hair around a finger. I just sort of stammered and tried to make small talk. With that, she gave me a little wave with her fingers before heading off to class, and I watched her walk away. She glanced over her shoulder, smiled, and waved again. I just stood there, transfixed.

“Dude! I think you just got over Becky!” laughed Brax.

“Huh?”

Bo laughed, too. “You’re fucking hopeless, Grim!” They grabbed me and dragged me into class.

I might be hopeless, but I made sure to meet Jenny at her locker at the end of school and got that Grade A smile from her again. Wade could keep Becky if I ended up with Jenny!

My romance with Jenny broke up when school ended. I had no way to see her without a car, and no car without a license, and no license at fourteen. By then Jenny and I had progressed to making out, with a lot of tongue action, but nothing beyond that. She cried on my shoulder the last day of school, but I toughed it out and manfully refrained from doing the same. Then, when she saw I wasn’t crying, Jenny called me a heartless bastard who didn’t love her and dumped me! As we rode home on the school bus, I talked to my brother Jack about it. He was now in the sixth grade and was at Matucket Middle School like me. I told him the truth, that girls were crazy and nothing but trouble, and to keep avoiding them as long as possible! He swore a solemn oath to do just that!

Midway through the summer, tryouts for JV football started over at Matucket High, and Mom drove me over on a Saturday morning to try out for the team. I was still growing and was now five-foot-seven and weighed in at 150 pounds, and I am proud to say it was pretty solid muscle. I had outgrown the junior barbell set and had given it to Jack, and Mom and Dad had bought a home Nautilus type of machine that I worked out on every day. Mom commented that Dad needed to work on it, too, to shed a few pounds. Dad grumbled at that and offered to check Mom’s weight on the scales as well as his own. That got the pair of them to arguing, and Jack, Bobbie Joe, and I took the opportunity to get out of there!

I made the team, and Mom and I got a schedule for the practices and games. Practice was mostly after school, and the games were usually Saturday mornings. The varsity team played Friday nights. They practiced on the main field while JV practiced anywhere else we could grab. That might be the soccer field or over by the running track or on the flat section near the cross-country run. I was told that most freshman would start on the second team, but if we did well, we could work up to the first team.

Once I saw who was on the first team, which was mostly made up of sophomores, I figured I’d make it there my freshman year. I was already bigger than about half the team. Likewise, if you were good at the JV level, you could get promoted to the varsity team, but you had to be either really good or the rest of the guys at that position had to be pretty bad. The varsity was basically the juniors and seniors, with the occasional sophomore thrown in, but nobody had ever heard of a freshman qualifying. Likewise, if you weren’t good enough to play on the varsity team as a junior, they could keep you on the JV squad, but it would be much more likely that one of the coaches would simply tell you that you’d never make it and cut you completely.

Matucket High was mostly the same faces that I had seen at Matucket Middle School. Almost everybody in the freshman class was from the eighth grade, so I knew everybody. That was the good part. The bad part was that now I was starting all over again at the bottom of the ladder. I was back to riding in the front of the bus, while the big kids sat in the back - and those big kids were really big! I was still growing, and I wasn’t the smallest kid in the eighth grade anymore, but some of these guys were still at least a foot or two taller than me. I would never grow that big!

Most of them ignored us smaller guys, but a few were real dicks about it. I wasn’t quite small enough to push around anymore, but some of the other kids were. Bo Effner, in particular, was never going to be all that big, and Brax and I kept an eye out for Bo. Worse was the fact that high school meant a whole lot more changes and freedom, and you could see some kids weren’t going to handle it all that well.

At Matucket Middle School, most classes saw the same group of kids trudging from room to room as a group. Yes, there might be some mixing, but I would have bet that ninety percent of the students in any given class might be in every class with you. Matucket High had a lot more mixing. Dad said that it must have been a computer that figured it out, since no human could ever be that dumb and confusing. In high school more of us began changing classes based on what we qualified for on the standardized test in middle school. Some of us, those who had taken Algebra One in the eighth grade, now could take Algebra Two. Some of us now took Algebra One. The rest of us took Math Nine and would take Algebra One next year. I was put into Algebra One but stayed with Science Nine. I would get Biology next year. I also ended up in a language class, Spanish One. I thought that was totally bogus, but Mom told me to check out all the stores in town. A lot of them, like Wal-Mart and Home Depot were starting to put signs up in both English and Spanish. Then she reminded me that my ex-girlfriend spoke Spanish.

One of the reasons for increased problems was that we were now getting to the point that the oldest kids, the juniors and seniors, might have cars, and had a whole lot more freedom. Freedom is a good thing, but some of them now had the freedom to get into trouble. We had more money, even me, with my part-time job, and we were right down in Matucket, where you could walk off the campus and do stuff. Some of that stuff wasn’t legal, either. I wasn’t going to be a snitch, but some of the kids I knew were buying pot and beer. I knew it was available, even if I didn’t do it.

One of the problem kids I spotted about a week into the fall semester. I was with a few buddies outside the main entrance when an Audi pulled up and a big kid got out. Something about him looked familiar, and I looked closely at him. Then it hit me. I nudged Bo in the side and said, “See that guy, just got out of the fancy car, does he look familiar to you?”

Bo looked him over closely, and then looked back at me curiously. “Was that who I think he is?”

“If you think that was Candy Pants, I think you’re right,” I replied. We both turned back and watched him enter the building. “He’s a lot bigger, though.”

“Who’re you talking about?” asked Jim-Bob Terwilliger. He had gone to Saint Catherine’s, but I knew him from the Spartans, where he was a running back. “Who’s this Candy Pants you’re talking about?”

“Sounds like a queer!” commented Brax.

“That kid who got out of the Audi. He looked like a guy we knew at Matucket Plains Elementary,” I answered.

“That’s Randy Holden,” said Jim-Bob.

I turned to Bo, and we both said, at the exact same time, “Candy Pants!”

“What’s this shit about Candy Pants?” demanded Jim-Bob. I told the others about how Randy got his nickname back at Matucket Plains. Jim-Bob laughed and said, “I’ll have to ask him someday about that. I was at Saint Catherine’s with him. He’s kind of an asshole, though.”

“What’s he doing here? I thought he lived in East Matucket.”

Jim-Bob shrugged. “Got me. He was a year ahead of me, so he’s a sophomore now. I heard he was on the football team here.”

Brax and I looked at each other. “I’ve never seen him,” commented Brax. Brax had gone to Joseph Wheeler, so he didn’t know him from elementary school. I simply shook my head.