Smoke

Chapter Five

By the time I reached high school, I already knew I did not belong there.

At least not in the way they wanted me to.

Catholic school worked well for kids who could sit still, follow structure, study quietly at home, and somehow absorb information simply because adults told them it mattered. I tried. I honestly did. Every afternoon I would leave school fully intending to study that night.

Then the bell rang.

And suddenly I was free again.

The moment I walked out those doors, school disappeared from my mind almost completely. I would get home and immediately drift toward the things that actually made my brain come alive. Music. Electronics. Television. Poetry. Computers. Taking things apart just to understand how they worked. Anything visual. Anything alive.

Homework felt impossible.

I would sit there staring at assignments while my thoughts scattered in ten different directions. The boredom physically hurt. Then the next morning I would walk into class and feel that horrible sinking realization all over again.

I forgot.

Again.

At that point all you could really do was fake confidence and hope nobody noticed.

They always noticed.

Most of the teachers did not seem to know what to do with me. I do not think they hated me exactly. I think I simply frustrated them. Religion teachers especially. I questioned everything constantly, usually in ways they did not appreciate.

Even back then, my brain approached belief scientifically.

I believed in God. I still do, in my own way. But I also believed the Big Bang happened. Evolution made sense to me. Honestly, the idea that existence itself exploded into reality almost strengthened the idea of a higher power in my mind instead of weakening it.

Something had to start all of this.

Something had to light the fuse.

The problem was that Catholic school did not always leave much room for uncertainty. You were expected to accept certain things first and ask questions later.

My brain did not work that way.

I thought deeply about everything.

Probably too deeply.

Especially for a teenager.

At the same time, I carried around constant anxiety I did not know how to explain. Looking back now, I was probably depressed too. Back then nobody talked much about those things. Especially not boys. Especially not in large Catholic working-class families where survival itself already consumed most people’s energy.

So instead I disappeared into music.

Music felt bigger than school. Bigger than church sometimes.

My tastes were all over the place. Air Supply. Billy Joel. Styx. Then harder stuff like Pink Floyd, AC/DC, Twisted Sister, Bon Jovi, and Judas Priest. Some nights I wanted romance. Other nights I wanted noise loud enough to shake thoughts loose from my head entirely.

I loved all of it.

Comedy too.

Every Sunday night I listened to Dr. Demento alone in my room while the weekend slowly died outside my window. Earlier in life I listened sober with my brothers nearby somewhere else in the house. Later I listened alone, high as hell, while novelty songs and absurd humor floated through the darkness of my room.

That strange late-night radio show became part of my ritual somehow.

The weekend ending.

School waiting again Monday morning.

Smoke hanging quietly in the air while music and comedy temporarily drowned out the noise inside my head.

My brothers belonged to different generations inside the family.

I always thought of them as waves.

Mike and Frank were the first wave. Already adults by the time I really understood the world around me. Frank was rougher. A partier. The kind of older brother whose stories already sounded half legendary to younger kids listening nearby. He once told me he received his draft notice for Vietnam right as the war ended. History changed his life by timing alone.

Mike was different.

Mike followed the path my parents hoped would work. College. Religion. Stability. He repaired copiers for a living and stayed faithful long into adulthood. But he was also one of the biggest scientific influences in my life. I used to go over to his place and sit beside him programming his Commodore 64. No floppy drives back then. No saving anything. If the power went out, everything vanished and you started over from scratch.

I loved it.

The computer responded logically in ways school never seemed to. You typed commands and the machine obeyed. Systems made sense if you learned them correctly.

Mike existed somewhere between my father’s structured world and the chaos that came later.

Then there was the second wave.

Eric. David. Tom.

That generation shaped my teenage years the most.

Eric was probably the biggest drug influence in the house for a while. My parents worried about him constantly. When he eventually joined the Marines and got shipped out, I think my parents honestly felt relief as much as pride. They believed structure might save him.

David still smoked some after Eric left, but less heavily. Mostly I remember him sitting in his room listening to albums on his stereo system like music itself was sacred. Eventually he met a girl, followed the Catholic path, got married, started a family, and built a life that looked stable from the outside.

Tom stayed quieter. Shy around girls. More into drinking than drugs. He usually spent nights at my other brothers’ houses drinking beer before driving home later. Back then people looked at drinking differently. Functional drinking barely even counted as dangerous in a lot of working-class families as long as everybody made it home alive.

Then there was me.

Too young to fully belong with them.

Too old to remain a child.

Mostly just watching.

My father tried hard to keep me away from drugs at first. I remember sitting on the floor watching television one afternoon while Tom walked through the living room obviously high out of his mind. One of those anti-drug commercials came on showing an egg frying in a pan.

“This is your brain.”

Then the egg hit the skillet.

“This is your brain on drugs.”

My father looked at Tom walking through the room and muttered:

“Fry baby fry.”

Even then I understood the joke carried real fear underneath it.

Still, I became fascinated with that world anyway.

Not because drugs looked cool exactly.

Because the people around me seemed transformed by them.

My brothers would sit around listening to music while getting high, and they looked peaceful in ways I rarely felt myself. Looser. Connected. Like for a little while life stopped pressing down so hard on them.

I wanted that feeling.

I wanted connection.

I wanted quiet.

So eventually I started smoking too.

And honestly, for a while, it helped.

Music sounded deeper. Thoughts felt larger somehow. Sometimes I would lie there listening to albums while thinking about God, existence, the universe, mythology, love, and whether any of us were here for a reason at all.

I wanted spirit journeys.

I wanted to understand something bigger than myself.

At school I had fallen in love with writing by then. My English teacher actually encouraged it. That class felt different from everything else because imagination mattered there. I kept journals constantly. Wrote poetry. Learned mythology and Homer’s journey. I was in love with love itself back then. Any girl who showed me attention immediately became important in my mind even if I could barely speak back to her because I was so painfully shy.

Being number eleven out of twelve children teaches you how to disappear quietly.

You learn to observe.

You learn to blend in.

Sometimes you become invisible without even realizing it.

I wrote a poem once called Death of a Poet.

I still remember pieces of it.

At the time I really believed that.

I believed nobody wanted to read my writing anymore.

Looking back now, I think I was simply becoming older and slowly learning how adulthood buries parts of people before they even notice they are disappearing.

But maybe the poet never really died at all.

Maybe he just went quiet for a very long time.

And maybe these pages are proof that he finally found his way back.