Flight of Passage: A True Story Read Online Free PDF

summer, when the weather was good, my father rode into his job in New York City on his motorcycle; in the winter, when there was snow, we rode to church on Sunday in a horse and sleigh. Now my brother was proposing that we fly coast to coast in the family Piper Cub. In the abstract, these ideas of ours always sounded insane. But then again they really weren’t, considering us.
    But the afternoon was ruined. My father was distracted by my brother’s idea and was terrified that he was going to say yes too quickly, and he didn’t have much heart for swinging the ax. Kern was distracted by the fear that my father would say no, which made him dangerous with a chain saw. Eventually they both lost interest in the wood pile and wandered off, and I finished splitting the wood myself.
    My brother’s timing could not have been worse for me. I was backsliding again, in trouble at school, and my father was furious about it. We had barely spoken in weeks. Any objections I might have had to my brother’s coast to coast plan weren’t going to count for much now.
    That fall, I had enrolled as a freshman at Delbarton School, a Benedictine preparatory academy a few miles from our house. Kern had spent three years there and was now a senior. My father was very concerned about this step in my educational career. From kindergarten on I had been that most awful and perplexing kind of student—the academic star who was also a disciplinary terror—and my father was convinced that by sheer force of will and concern for my own future I could be cured of this schizophrenia. Because of AA, he was an advocate of the power of positive thinking. Several times over the summer he called me down to the library to deliver his favorite disciplinary chat, the “good kid” lecture. Essentially, my father said, I was a “good kid”—good at my studies, good at sports, good at making friends—but I was forever endangering my academic reputation with these “jackass stunts” of mine. He thought that I had done an excellent job of pulling the wool over the eyes of my grammar school teachers, but the Benedictines up at Delbarton were highly educated, sensitive monks, and they would see right through my antics. Over the summer, I was supposed to be “mentally preparing” myself for starting over at a new school, the enormous strides I was going to make in my behavior. For the duration of the lecture I nodded attentively and fixed my face with a purposeful, optimistic expression, and sometimes I even meant it. The conversation always ended the same way.
    “All right son. That’s the program. Cut out the bullshit, and behave. Kern’s been up there for three years now and I haven’t heard a single complaint. It’s a new school for you, a clean slate. Deal?”
    “Deal. Dad, I’m going to work on this.”
    Hazing was a big part of Catholic school life then. Every year, during the last week of September, the monks at Delbarton allowed the seniors to run this dumbass little institution called Freshman Initiation Week. Freshmen were required to run around the campus all day in these hideous green-and-white beanies, and to carry shoeshine kits, just in case a senior who had already had his shoes shined by twelve toadying freshmen decided that he needed still one more. At lunch, freshmen enjoyed the privilege of finishing off the seniors’ half-eaten chocolate puddings. Afterward, the seniors stood around in a large group, calling out useful suggestions, while the freshmen made passionate love to the Greco-Roman statues in the formal gardens.
    One morning that week, up at the bus stop in Morristown, a senior picked me out from the crowd of freshmen and instructed me to “moon my ass to traffic.” It was a straightforward assignment. All a freshman had to do when a senior told him to moon his ass to traffic was hang his butt out on Route 24, shake it vigorously at a few passing cars, and then quietly drop back into the crowd and become an anonymous