JOLO

I was born in 1961, yes, a year where the first man in space happened, the Berlin Wall construction took place, our President at the time, John F Kennedy, suggests all Americans to start building bomb shelters, and the Peace Corps and the World Wildlife fund are established. A mixed bag for sure, but a window to how the world was changing. What was not changing was the tradition of the Palmiotti family getting their children to attend a catholic Grammar school and I did just that after a whirlwind vacation in kindergarten. I do not use the word “vacation” lightly folks, because what happened in the next 8 years was anything but, and something that scared me to this very day in so many ways, only an investment in over 15k in therapy bills could hope to diminish. We can talk about that another day, but for now, let’s get into a specific memory that is easily accessible for me to write about.  

The year is now 1967 and after being fitted in a navy-blue jacket and pants, I am sent off to OUR LADY HELP OF CHRISTIANS catholic school in Brooklyn, off avenue M and Nostand Avenue for anyone that cares. This neighborhood was mostly Irish, Italian, Jewish and Spanish. Small private houses and an avenue of 8 story apartment buildings. A lot of stories in-between to tell, but let’s now jump ahead to the 6th grade- my age at the time, a whopping 12 years old. That awkward age where my skin was manufacturing zits on a daily basis, my haircut was still under the guidance of my mother and talking to girls was as frightening and thrilling as the cyclone rollercoaster in Coney Island. My story this time concentrates on one of the school penguins, a nun that everyone feared and for good reason.

Her name was Sister Joseph Loretta, a name that took up almost all of the blackboard as she wrote it in white chalk so the entire class could see and, in this case, hear. A long and involved name for 6th graders and we did what we do best and gave her a code name, a name used between us and one never to her face. We decided her name from now on would be JOLO for short. This seemed to fit perfectly. she even looked like a Jolo.  At that time and taking into account I was probably 4 foot nothing, Jolo seemed like she was eight feet tall, thin as a tree branch and had a face that seemed in a constant mêlée with gravity as her chin seemed to be towed an extraordinary length south of the rest of her cold facial ensemble. She had the steel blue eyes of a ravenous shark and an angry dead stare that would make even the apostilles think twice trying to reason with her.  

 

Out of the gate, this nun had a major problem with me and my very existence. Not because of anything I actually did, but because a few years prior she had my brother Anthony as one of her students and my brother was far from an angel. Very far, like two steps from hell kind of distance. My brother had too much energy, likes to take things apart and take things that were not his and had a mouth on him, all the things you should pack away before taking a step into a catholic school.  I heard from fellow students older than me that the two of them had a special relationship that involved a principal and my parents having weekly visits. Now remember, compared to my brother, I was a pretty quiet kid up until then. Remind me to tell you how I didn’t speak till I was five one day.  Walking in to Jolo’s class, I was instantly behind the eight ball and add that she was probably going senile, so that didn’t help my case. It just didn’t matter the dozens of times I corrected her when she called me Tony, she always thought I was my brother and without being provoked, at the most random of times, she would either hit me with a wooden ruler, sneak behind me and dig a piece of chalk into my scull or take one of my own math books and slam it down on my hands. Needless to say, I feared going to her class each and every day, and because of her, 6th grade was the longest grade of my scholastic career.

JOLO AND THE TOWER OF DOOM

This little tidbit is the reason I’m going to hell but will get a good room with A/C while there. I had a friend Keith that lived around the corner from me in Brooklyn and we became good friends when we met in first grade. He was a bit wilder than I was, which I blamed on his trigger happy Irish mother who chain-smoked and won the award for worst cook, given to her annually by her 6 famished children. This woman made hamburgers using hamburger helper without any actual meat involved while always sporting a cigarette that had an ash so long hanging from the filter edge it defied all conventional understanding of gravity. Keith was one of the many kids that would drop by my house every Sunday around dinner time and politely compliment my mother’s cooking till he worked a meal out of my mom. I couldn’t blame him. I ate at his place once and the mystery meat and beans made me appreciate my own mother’s worst meal. Anyway, Keith and I were always sneaking around the school between classes and after hours and plotting some kind of silly adventure. So, on a particularly sunny day in April, Keith told me he ripped off a pack of cigarettes from his older sister and he got matches as well. Something new we can set on fire! How exciting!  So, off we went up the stairs past the floors with classes, past the teachers’ lounge… all the way up to the bell tower in the attic of the school building to finally be able to smoke those suckers with no one around.

The highest point of the main school building was this pretty decent sized room that housed a nice sized bronze school bell in a tower that rose up from the main attic room. The bell itself had been replaced years before with an electronic bell system that ran with the intercom system into each class. No one bothered to take it down, mainly because it weighed a ton and it also looked pretty cool from outside.  To get into the tower you had to go to the middle staircase of the school, the one only used by the Priests and nuns and work your way up to the attic door that was never locked- and why would it be. If any student went up there, they got first class ticket to ticket to hell or some abuse that felt like it by the nuns and Priests. Once in, we had to make our way into the middle of the dusty dark space and then climb an open-air ladder that took you right up to the top of the tower landing. The room was round with about 6 feet of planked walking space that circled the area where the bell hung. Around us in the tower were big boxes that had markings of years gone by on them. We opened a few and only found ancient files, bibles, and old Christmas lights strings. Seriously, we were expecting to find violated human skulls used for sacrifices or worn leather bondage gear that the nuns have discarded, but nope. Boring stuff that was of no use to us. More about why I thought all nuns wore leather bondage gear under their habits later on. It had to do with the influence of Underground comics.

There we were, just the two of us hiding out in the forbidden zone of the school tower. We got up without a hitch and Keith broke out the cigarettes and matches and we were gonna do it and in the process become the coolest 6th graders in the history of the school. We lit up, smoked, coughed, gagged and lit up another and another and chilled out, talking about our future dreams, girls and how we were gonna one day buy ALL the fireworks. We were enjoying maybe out 4th long cool pall mall when at the foot of the tower below us we heard something that caused us to stop breathing. A voice from below. The voice of JOLO!

 Jolo’s imposing demanding voice started yelling for us to get down that very instant. Or else! In an instant I saw my own funeral, a small pine box being shoved into a cold bark hole in my own backyard, you know, so my friends can dig it up and light the box on fire and sword fight with my femur bones while playing kick the can with my scull. We were busted and my head was swimming with an unhealthy mix of wanting to run, scream, shit my pants or just jump out of the bell tower window. I needed…no, wanted to experience life outside my 7-block radius, and what I did next was the only thing I could have done with my head so far up my ass in terror.    

I took the biggest box up there and using both feet to get some leverage with the weight inside of it, I pushed it over the edge of the tower where the ladder up was and it hit that nun like the cardboard brown fist of god, knocking her over into another pile of other boxes around her. I couldn’t believe what I had done and in a split second that seemed to last a lifetime, I saw on Keith’s face a smile turns into a complete look of horror at what I had done and what he would get blamed for as well. Just picture the ending scene in Raiders of the lost ark where that Nazi Colonel Dietrich opens the ark and smiles, then realizes all is not good and starts to scream and that is what I saw, minus the actual noise, flames from heaven and all the face melting. Just like that. Seriously.

THIS IS THE END

Panic set in and reflexes took us the rest of the way in an instant. With Jolo still on her ass, boxes blocking her view, Keith and I jumped down the ladder and ran like a bat out of hell all the way back to our next class, which, by the way, was Jolo’s class. We did the best we could to remain calm and sat, trying to keep our blood pressures in check. We knew this might be our last day on the planet. You have to understand, the nuns would hit us if it was called for and if it was too much heavy lifting, would call an ex-golden gloves priest into the room to finish the job. We thought we were dead and now living on extremely little borrowed time and then it happened…Jolo steamrolled into the classroom, her face read, her habit askew and with a look on her face that would liquefy a planet. She was pissed and we were dead.

The rest of the class also felt the air in the class go red as Jolo assertively announced to everyone to stop talking that very instant. Jolo then went on to tell us all that if the two boys who were smoking in the tower would step up and admit it was them up there, she would be lenient with their inevitable punishment. I couldn’t believe my ears. Neither could Keith because he turned to me, just slightly and gave me that look…and a knowing smirk. You see, Jolo wore glasses, those round thick ones that kids can use to burn ants on a sunny day and without them she was blind as a bat. We didn’t say a word up there and she couldn’t make out who we were. Holy shit, and I do mean holy in this case. She didn’t have a clue it was us, otherwise, to be totally honest, we would have been hospitalized by then.

The other realization hit me like a ton of bricks later that day and because of my religious upbringing, I was a bit worried because I came to the realization that I had actually dropped a storage box on a nun’s head and had gotten away with it. Was it God telling me she had it coming in some way, or the devil setting me up with a nice room next to his? Well, I won’t know, hopefully, for a while, but in the end, I made sure I got the hell out of there and into a public school as fast as I could. Looking back, I am sure Sister Jolo had her own story and things that might have caused her to act that way along the way but as a 12-year-old kid, empathy was a bit out of my grasp of understanding. Either way, this is just one of about 400 memories from my childhood that I plan one day to put into one crazy book, and I hope you related and enjoyed my trip back. Oh, and Jolo- wherever you are…Honestly, you had it coming.

 

Jimmy