Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings Read Online Free PDF Page B

streets and ash heaps and high murder rate, was a grim place to grow up, no effort was made inside the walls of Our Lady Queen of Chewbacca High School to make us think otherwise. The hallways of the high school were some of the most dangerous thoroughfares in town. Grown men didn’t like walking those halls. Because of the town’s mining tradition, much of the school was dug underground. If you weren’t careful, one wrong turn and you could get lost for days. Rumor had it that somewhere in the deep, past the teachers’ lounge and further down into the subbasement, there was a Minotaur. It seemsalmost too mythological to believe but this Minotaur, which did in fact exist, came from the deepest recesses in the earth. Minotaurs are born of fire and anger. No man can kill one unless equipped with the arrow of Theseus. Ahhh, now I’m just listing Minotaur facts to show off! You got me! Anyway, there probably was a Minotaur in the basement of my high school but it’s one of those unconfirmed facts. There were, however, some classrooms that kept a canary in a cage in the corner. The oxygen could get pretty thin on some days, and if that canary dropped it was an unorganized scramble to see who could get out alive.
    Carrying my flute through the halls with my impossibly beautiful hair put a fat bull’s-eye on my back from the beginning. I knew if I was going to make it through those four years I needed to find the toughest guy in school and show him I was not one to be trifled with. On my first day I went right up to Han Solonski, a big lump of a Pole, and I beat him within an inch of his life. The poor dumb lug didn’t know what hit him. (It was a brick. I used a brick.) After that day no one dared bother me. I was number one. No one ever officially declared that I was number one, but I knew it. I had posters made. It was pretty obvious.
    I can’t say I was much of a student. The good sisters, bless their hearts, showed a lot of patience with me but it just didn’t take. A word about the good sisters, and all nuns for that matter. I’m no Catholic; in fact I have an irrational and unexplainable dislike for the Catholics. They’re a grubby bunch of sour sacks if you ask me, but even the Catholics I talk tohate nuns. I mean, you’re always hearing about stone-faced old hags rapping kids on the knuckles for not paying attention or stern old maids pulling children through the halls by their ears. First of all, if any nun would have tried any kind of nonsense like that in Haggleworth they would have gotten socked in the puss. I would have been the first in line to do the socking. I’ve socked old ladies before and believe me, it’s not pretty. But the nuns at Chewbacca who tried to put education in me were nothing like the repressed old maids we all think of when we think of nuns. No, I don’t know why—maybe it was a papal order from the Vatican—but the nuns we got at Our Lady Queen of Chewbacca were very sweet and very, very gorgeous. The whole lot of them across the board could have been
Playboy
centerfolds for sure, but they gave their lives over to Jesus Christ. There were about twenty-five of them there in the high school and they ranged from age eighteen to twenty-two. Jesus was their lord and master, and what a lucky guy he was, because these ladies were absolutely stunning. Maybe God sent the very best to Haggleworth because it was so close to hell. Who knows? All of them were five foot seven inches tall and built like Raquel Welch, with legs that went on for days.
    Of course, we never saw the nuns out of their habits and hats, except when they taught wrestling or during swim class, but other than those two hours every day they were as buttoned up as Eskimos in a snowstorm. I’m gonna admit it: When one of those nuns showered with us after wrestling practice there were more than a few boners on display. It wasn’t veryrespectful of us but it was hard not to think of them as just ordinary women even though