Chasing Time’s protagonist, Tony Lucas, grew up in Brooklyn in the 1960s. Author Thomas Reilly shares stories of his Brooklyn days in a series of posts.
The piercing shrill of the school bell reverberated within the narrow confines of the hallway as my heart twisted and sank with anxiety. Scanning the long corridor ahead of me, with rows of lockers standing like watchful sentinels, I noticed the door to my destination, the last classroom on the left, slamming shut. Resisting the urge to run, that’s a sure way of getting nabbed, I lengthened my stride and quickened my pace while silently wishing for some magical power to transpose myself. Approximately thirty seconds later, I fronted a frantic group of five students through the doorway, into Mr. Viti’s biology classroom. Scrambling to the back of the classroom to take my seat, I tensed as Mr. Viti yelled out; “You’re late. Go to the principal’s office and get detention slips.” Stealing a quick backward glance, I breathed a tremendous sign of relief as I observed him pointing at my four colleagues who had trailed me into the room. Whether by design or fate, he ignored me. I had narrowly escaped the dreaded punishment.
Detention! I had an almost phobic fear of the penalty. Referred to as jug, to me it represented much more than an extra hour of after-school confinement, but rather an indelible stain on my good character. I had entered my first year of high school a few months earlier in the fall of 1965, fully versed in the art of proper behavior, a cumulative effect of eight years of strict, but not unkind, catholic discipline enforced by the good nuns of my grammar school, St. Anselms. Rarely one to buck the system or create a scene, obeying rules and following guidelines fit my introverted personality to a tee. Yet here I was at Xaverian High School, struggling daily to navigate the quirks of secondary school life where a simple misstep or misunderstanding could easily land you the infamous, pink detention slip.
The number of potential infractions seemed endless and often senseless, and over time it seemed inevitable that every student would succumb to a jug penalty. Visiting your locker between classes—jug. Talking in the corridor—jug. Going up a down staircase or vice versa—jug. Forgetting your textbook for class—jug. Caught working on homework instead of reading an assigned book during library period—jug.
Perhaps the cruelest injustice was the exact situation I found myself in this afternoon. At Xaverian, the end of each class was signaled by the loud alarm bell. From that moment, students had exactly two minutes to navigate the crowded corridors and congested stairwells to their next class before a second angry alarm would signal the start of a new period. Jug was a near certainty for those who appeared late. Today, my seventh-period English teacher had refused to release his class at the dismissal bell, instead opting to keep us trapped for at least one extra minute while droning on about some future assignment. That left a scant sixty seconds for a group of us to navigate to Mr. Viti’s biology classroom, located one floor higher and on the opposite side of the U-shaped building. As the Bangles sang in their 1986 hit, “Manic Monday,” “If I had an airplane I still couldn’t make it on time.”
While I had several narrow escapes during my four years of high school, that one day in biology class, where perhaps nothing more than sheer luck had intervened to spare me, was my closest call with jug. During graduation ceremonies four years later, when our principal was handing out individual honors to various students, I quietly reveled in my own personal accomplishment. Smugly I thought, shouldn’t there be a special award for someone like me who never had jug? Now that’s something to crow about.
Of course, no such award existed. But even today, over fifty years later, I still take a certain amount of pride in knowing that in my own way, I beat the odds in high school that were so heavily stacked against me.
Chasing Time, a suspenseful and heartwarming book filled with unexpected plot twists, is available on Amazon.