CHAPTER SIX

            Working one of the first novelty concession games of chance at the Saint Anthony’s Feast was a highlight of John’s early life.  It was the “Shoot the Clown and Burst the Water Balloon Game” in which participants, after paying their quarter, shot a steady stream of water into one of the 12 open mouths of a row of plastic clown heads.  If the water stream were held steady, the switch that opened the gas gauge that filled the balloon on top of the clown’s head turned on and the player who could cause a balloon to burst first, one the prize. 

This game was revolutionary for its time.  Before this, there was only the big round free spinning wheels with numbers and a clicker. The worker would give it a shoving spin, saying “Where she stops, nobody knows.  .  .Give Lady Luck a try, folks!  Only a quarter to play and a quarter will take the prize!”  And another was trying to get the ping pong ball in the tiny fish hole and take home a “beautiful Asian goldfish, straight from the kingdom of China!”  And you would doubtless take home a tiny fish that would probably die on the way home from shock due to the ping pong balls rapping against the sides of its bowl all night at the carnival.   

John’s job at the carnival booth was to entice players from the tightly packed crowd around them who were like sardines, inching up the narrow Greenwich Village streets.  Other game of chance, sausage and seafood booths lined both sides of the street.  John and his buddies had to convince and cajole people from the crowd to come up to the booth and plunk their quarters down and try their luck.  The more John exercised his caustic wit and insulted people, the more they wanted to try his game. 

It wasn’t long before John realized his quick, sharp wit was an asset and could draw contestants up to the booth with their hard-earned money to prove their manliness.  “C’mon, guys, show the little ladies you know how to handle a gun! Or maybe it’s too big for ya’?”  Or,

“Did he tell you he loved you, but he’s too cheap to take a chance on ya’, lady?”   He took no prisoners and anyone within the sound of his voice was fair game.  He carried it so far a couple of times that when he flipped the switch to turn on the water to shoot at the clowns, he often found twelve water pistols pointed at his face instead of the clown’s heads.  However, he brought in money.  Everyone else working the same booth averaged about three hundred dollars each shift, but John consistently raked in eleven or twelve hundred dollars per shift. 

Fat Sal, the man who owned the concession, split his profits with the church but never told the priest John took in more than three hundred dollars, and then he kept the difference for himself.  John saw Fat Sal pocket the cash and the man turned around and shoved a five-dollar bill in John’s pocket, saying, “You didn’t see a thing, kid, right?”

*  *  *
            In a remarkably short time, John Petrocelli had been tossed out of five high schools, four of which were Catholic.  He wasn’t what one would call a “bad kid” but he wouldn’t rat on anyone and simply could not take getting hit by anyone.  However, he ended up being expelled from Catholic school for fighting, which sounds contradictory but perhaps not.  You can be the judge.

John attended LaSalle Academy, a Catholic High School on Second Street in the Lower East Side.  Many of his friends, whose family could afford the tuition, went there as well.  He was the clown wise ass and challenged authority at every turn. He made perfectly timed smart-aleck cracks that broke the class up into hysterical laughter, which did not please the teaching clergy very much.  He mastered comedic timing like a pro on the stand-up circuit, causing other students to howl and even toss up their lunch in a fit of laughter and he still likes to “perform” today, impromptu, for a crowd or in an elevator, in a friendly gathering or in a crisis.  He simply loves to entertain and utilize his glib improvisational talent.

At the beginning of his second year at LaSalle, geography was one of his early morning classes and he was sitting in the back of the room, where he always felt safer than closer to the front.  And that was because the teachers could slip up behind you if you weren’t on the back row and crack you on the side of the head, which felt like a mini-death to John at that age.  In geography class, a smaller boy sat behind him and couldn’t stop talking.  He was so small and frail he reminded John of a premature baby in a teenaged body.  From his seat behind John, he was invisible to the teacher, but he kept whispering, engaging anyone who would listen.  On this particular day, the teacher, who was six foot two inches tall and walked bent over with the posture of a question mark, told John to shut up.  The one thing John could never do was rat on anyone, so he let it go.  Where he came from, a person could get killed for ratting somebody out.  A few minutes later, he was knocked almost into semi-consciousness by a flying geography book of over five hundred pages weighing several pounds, which had been thrown deliberately by the “lay” teacher and had whacked him on the head.  He didn’t even know where he was for a few minutes.
John stood up and walked slowly to the front of the room, then hurled his six-foot, 135-pound frame straight into the teacher’s chest, like a bull charging a matador’s cape.  The teacher went flying over the desk and John spent the next year in detention.  He had a small room to himself during the day with nothing but a desk and a copy machine available for companionship.  He was bored out of his mind and began writing quips mocking the teaching profession as he knew it at LaSalle Academy.  One of his friends, Frank Arricale, was a clever caricaturist with a natural talent.  John and Frank decided to put out their own school newsletter, using the copy machine sitting in the corner of the room John had to stay in for the duration. 

The official school newspaper was named “The Cardinal” so Frank and John named their satirical copy, “The Blue Jay”.   The front page was decorated with a hand-drawn picture of a Jesuit brother, exposing his bicep from under a rolled-up cassock sleeve and a tattoo of a heart with an arrow piercing it and the royal blue inked message, “Mother.” 

Frank was a talented cartoonist and John wrote the sardonic, clever copy.  Their favorite Jesuit was fodder for their guns with his lanky frame topped with his balding head and side tufts protruding weirdly from his temples and he ranted all the time about the seven great, deadly sins.  Frank sketched him accurately, depicting him performing every one of the seven sins with a salacious leer on his face, always pointing his skinny finger in the direction of Heaven.  And John peppered the newsletter with his acidic and hilarious commentary, mocking every phase of the routine and the teachers at LaSalle Academy.

Since John was alone all day every day in the small room, he xeroxed as many of the newsletters as he could.  Then, when the school day was over and his job was to clean all the chewing gum blobs off the tops of the file cabinets, he slipped a copy of the newsletter inside the bottom of every student’s desk.  The next morning, when all the students arrived and found the papers, they went berserk laughing their heads off.  The culprit was, of course, uncovered and John took all the blame.  Needless to say, he was expelled and had to make up that entire year by going to summer school at Power Memorial High, which was run by another Jesuit brother.

The first day of summer school, six of the boys were lined up and the stocky Jesuit brother who reminded John of Popeye walked down the line and cracked each of the boys in the face.  When they protested, “What was that for?”, the priest glared back at them and said only, “I do not like transfer students from LaSalle.”

John wondered if Protestants respected “Love thy neighbor” more than the Catholics did.  And for a while he was ready to convert and his jaw hurt from the priest’s blow.  As soon as he saw the girls enrolled in summer school, however, he lost interest in converting and leaving.  The girls were beautiful and one named Candy stole his heart.  He had such a huge crush on her he couldn’t get his mouth to work when he was in her presence.  For two years he had been entrenched in an all-boy’s school, so seeing lovely girls on a regular basis changed his attitude considerably.   

John’s father’s patience had reached “critical mass” at this point.  Time after time, he made appointments for interviews with high school headmasters, trying to find a school that would take his mischievous, unpredictable, nonconformist son.  The Cathol  ic schools wanted nothing to do with a trouble-maker like John.  As a last resort, John’s father arranged a meeting with the headmaster of an expensive prep school.  During the interview, the Director of Admissions looked over his glasses with a menacing expression on his face and asked, “What books have you read over the summer?”

John didn’t speak for a moment, then sat up a little straighter and answered.  “I don’t read books.  I read magazines.” 
“Which ones?”  The man picked up his pen, almost hopefully.
“Umm. . .MAD Magazine, Creepy, Boy’s Life, Famous Monsters of Filmland and Playboy.” 
The interview was over before it began in earnest.  John’s father was seething with anger and could barely speak as they left for the last interview on the list, a school in Brooklyn.

When they reached Boro Hall on Smith Street, John knew there were absolutely no options and his father was in a dangerous state of mind, with his blood pressure nearing the boiling point.  John didn’t even try to make conversation with him while they waited in the anteroom outside the director’s office.
Finally they were called in and John thought the man behind the desk looked hard and more like a prison guard than a school administrator.  However, when he opened his mouth and began to speak, John was startled to discover he sounded eloquent.  He also reminded John of Jim Croce, the famous songwriter who didn’t live long enough to see his work hit the top of the charts and who wrote “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown,” a song emulating a personality type that appealed to John Petrocelli. 

The principal of Boro Hall Academy was a former Marine drill sergeant and conducted a different kind of interview.  As John’s father filled in the blanks on the application, John was aware the expense of this “flea-bag” high school evoked a huge wave of resentment in his dad.  The fee for half a year was as costly as the tuition for a semester in college.  As he finished filling out this ninth application, John’s dad looked at him and said, “If you get thrown out of this school, I’ll kill you!”
*  *  *

John knew nothing about Brooklyn before this, and had never spent any time there other than to enjoy trips to the Amusement Pier at Coney Island, and those were infrequent.  He didn’t know a soul who lived there and was deep-down scared on the first day of school.
He stumbled into class that first day, late by a few minutes, and very nervous.  As he pushed the heavy oaken door open, he heard a roar and a voice bellowed, “Hey!  Look!  It’s Petrocelli!”

Seated in the strange classroom were all the kids John had known and who had been tossed out of the Catholic school system or had spent five minutes or more in a detention hall.  It was like Old Home Week and as John looked for a seat, the entire class erupted in celebratory applause and laughter.  The teacher in the front of the room slammed his hand on his desk over and over, like an angry judge.  “Order! Order!  Sit down, Mr. Petrocelli!  I’m glad you could find the time to join your fellow inmates!”

His sarcasm was not missed and John knew he had to make a choice early for his days at Boro Hall Academy.  He calmed down and his personality did a 360-degree reversal of behavior.  He decided it was because he knew he was a minor character compared to the hard-core insanity that seemed to be the norm for the rest of the student body.  The enrollment read like a list of “Who’s-Who” of racketeer’s sons, mentally deficient wealthy offspring of big shots, or troublesome delinquents.  There were a few loose, wayward chicks thrown in for spice and judging by the white-trash type of attire they affected, one could guess what kind of infraction they had committed to be admitted to this dumping ground of a school. 

John concluded the teaching staff was as loopy as the misfit students.  He thought Dr. Nagi was right out of central casting.  The man had been a prison camp refugee and his tattooed number on his wrist was still visible, a reminder of the death camps where he had been.  He had a bad eye with a milky film across the pupil and for the other eye, he wore a monocle, which was linked to a sliver chain leading to a retracting onyx button on his lapel.  He had a face like a mad scientist and the cruel kids often made air raid sounds, just to watch poor Dr. Nagi run around the room holding his hands over his ears and diving for cover under his large oak desk-table.  He dressed like the typical college professor but was still considered wildly eccentric and fair game for merciless teasing.

The typing teacher was the very first overtly homosexual John met during that era, and the man seemed always to be worried about something.  His homeroom was one flight up from the first floor and close to the stairwell.  The man was hypersensitive and the vicious kids picked up on this and many delighted in playing tricks on him.  When he tried to correct a student for not being able to type properly, the devious recipient would pretend to be very distraught and would sob crocodile tears.  The teacher would immediately become overly concerned, compassionate and caring, but he could not tolerate anyone crying and would get extremely upset.  The other students, in on the humiliating hoax, laughed their heads off.

One day, one of the toughest kids in the class whose father ran the numbers game around town, pretended to be fiercely suicidal over his bad typing grade and said, “I’m going to kill myself because of you.”  He intuited the gay teacher had a crush on him, probably because of his toned and buff physique, so he exploited the man.  He lifted himself out the window to the 8-inch wide ledge, pretended to fall to the ground one floor below, but actually worked his way over to the adjacent room, climbed in the room next to the typing class, and re-entered his classroom, careful not to make a sound.  The teacher went ballistic, thinking the boy had leapt out the window, and he screamed for the boy not to jump, to please come back.  Suddenly, the tough kid walked up behind the teacher and tapped him on the shoulder, which scared the man so badly he had an asthma attack.  Looking back, John often wonders how some of these teachers survived his generation of pranksters and “bad, bad Leroy Browns.” 

The English teacher made everyone angry and was threatened by the students so often, the principal, Mr. Laquercia, had to teach a special English class for all the kids that were dismissed from the regular class.  He made everyone write a story in a notebook and keep a journal, every day.  And every morning, they had to read aloud what they had written the day before.  John made a huge discovery when he realized this was the most interesting class of his life.

A student named Vinnie wrote about stealing television sets off the back of a truck.  After he read his journal, Mr. L. asked him if his father knew what he was doing and Vinnie replied, “Sure!  He was helping me!”
Had any of us been wired, the secrets that were revealed by these journals could have sent dozens of criminals up the river.

Another memorable journal-writer named Bart, was a muscular disco guy, who dealt drugs and screwed anything that stood still long enough.  He read with great relish about his detailed seductions, the drugs he took that night or other times, his sick humor and the violence that permeated his entire persona.  John was beginning to feel like he was a saint in the midst of Sodom and Gomorrah.  But all of it he observed, remembered and filed away for future use and study, as more conditioning lessons continued popping up in his young life.