High School Hell

Hell is endlessly interpretable. The gospel of Luke records Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the Dives (rich man), in which the beggar Lazarus has the satisfaction of seeing from Heaven the rich man in the “place of torment” and pleading for a drop of water to “cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.” Melville’s Ishmael speculates that Lazarus, were he exposed to a frigid New Bedford night, would willingly “go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out of this frost.’

Dante envisioned hell as nine concentric circles: the vestibular limbo, hell’s suburb, so to speak, which contained the non-Christian good and virtuous, followed by those whose perdition was caused by lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery—and at the frozen center of that last, the ultimate practitioner of treachery, Satan himself. Using Dante, medieval scholars proposed elaborate architectural models of hell, complete with the likely measurements of its pillars and vaulted ceilings, which a 24-year-old Galileo, in a lecture on Dante’s Divine Comedy, showed to be mathematically unsound, thus setting in motion what would later emerge as the sciences of physics and structural engineering.

Puritan apologist Jonathan Edwards devoted a sermon titled “The Eternity of Hell Torments” to proving, with implacable logic, the pain-stained doctrine that “the misery of the wicked in hell will be absolutely eternal,” and in his flinch-inducing “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” presented, in tactile terms, just what those condemned to hell would, absolutely and eternally, experience: “The wrath of God burns against” the unredeemed, “the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow,” and the “old serpent is gaping for them; hell opens its mouth wide to receive them.” Possibly, though, hell can be escaped. A modification of Edwards’ traditional “for all eternity” doctrine, known as “the harrowing of hell,” holds that Jesus, between the time of His death and His resurrection, preached to the inhabitants of hell, with those particularly receptive to His message translated to Heaven.

More recent theologians, holding up a wet finger, perhaps, to the slipstream of a current, less doctrinaire religious sentiment, have, as an alternative to the soddenly medieval Punishment Model of hell, proposed the Choice Model, wherein hell is not torturously punitory so much as what a person chooses—hell, in effect, honors personal choice. For the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, hell is a non-experience: at death, one undergoes a “soul sleep” from which only the righteous will ultimately be awakened.

Mark Twain advised readers to “Go to heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.” Robert Frost considered hell “a half-filled auditorium.” Shakespeare’s Ferdinand, in The Tempest, asserts “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” For General William Tecumseh Sherman, hell is “war;” for Emily Dickinson, “parting;” for Voltaire, “loveless hearts;” for Jean Paul Sartre, “other people;” for Dick Gregory, “a liberal scorned;” for Milton Friedman, “a bureaucrat scorned.” For me, hell was, and remains, the four years I spent at an all-boys Catholic High School, operated under the curatorial powers of the Christian Brothers.

I began high school struck out, unswingingly struck out, slump-shouldered-slouching-back-to-the-dugout struck out, struck out with three high, hard fast ones guaranteed to make each day’s passage through the school doors an entrance into Stygian darkness: I was overweight, “husky” my mom said, but, in reality, needle-inching-up-to-the-red-zone overweight; I was tracked into Academic Latin, the college prep sequence; and I liked to read, not young adult literature, mind you, but canonized literary works—John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neil, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost, e. e. cummings. Now, try as I might, I could do nothing about strike one, though much later, when I was ready for it, and over the course of several years, I did lose over a hundred pounds. As for the second strike, despite an impassioned appeal to the principal, Brother Cyril, to be allowed to take Woodshop, I was informed that no deviation from my prescribed Academic Latin track would be permitted—so, goodbye radial arm saw, hello Caesar’s Commentaries. The third strike, being a grievous offense against the law of adolescent masculinity, I held as a closely guarded secret, going so far as to take the non-Hardy boys books off the shelves and stuff them high up on a closet shelf when my best friend spent the night. I even swore my parents to secrecy, fearing they might, in their pride at my precocious reading habits, mention it to the parent of a classmate who would in turn mention it to their son. Still, I was WikiLeaked, and by none other than Brother Jerome, who caught me sneak-reading For Whom the Bell Tolls during a study hall and mentioned it to the other Brothers at dinner that night, one of whom subsequently let it slip to a student, who told another, and, before long, I was outed and outcast. In the thickly vertical and horizontal world of an all-boys Catholic high school, I was the decidedly oblique other.

From these three strikes, other indignities flowed. Latin came naturally to me; I liked it and was good at it. However, Brother Cletus, the Latin teacher, had a less than assured command of the language, and, to double-check student responses in recitation sessions, would often look to me and ask, “What do you think, DeNuccio?” With a subtle nod or shake of my head, I held the power to determine a fellow classmate’s grade for the day. I confess that, for the sake of sheer survival, for the sake of the possibility of my growing into adulthood, but not, I fear, for heaven’s sake, I invariably nodded, even if the translation was a spaghettied mess. And Brother Jerome, the secret sharer of my reading, continually called on me in English class, for I did not have it in me to say, as most of my classmates did, “Sorry, Brother Jerome, but I don’t know. That’s a tough one.” I was the know-it-all sprout of crabgrass in the smoothly-raked Zen garden of studied male adolescent ignorance, and my reputation as an apple-polishing brown-noser was, it seemed to me, calligaphied on every cinder block of every wall in the school.

But the frozen center of my private high school hell occurred in a physical education class where my being overweight was but on display. Filing into the gym one morning we saw a trampoline, the gift of a generous alumnus. The instructor, a muscular fireplug of a man, an erstwhile record-setting fullback at the local college who had been drafted but subsequently cut by the Baltimore Colts, gathered us around the trampoline. “You guys should feel honored,” he said; “you’re the first class to get to use this thing.” And then, scanning the twenty-two of us, his eyes zeroed in on me, and a tight, almost imperceptible smile, creased his lips. “DeNuccio, get on up there and let’s see what this thing can do.” I’m sure my face shone with desperation. I’m sure my eyes pleaded. I know I wished the universe had a cliff that I could hurl myself over. “Go on, get on up there.” I clambered up.

At first he told me to bounce, which I did, nimbly and proficiently, despite my never before having been on a trampoline. “Higher,” he barked, and I bounced myself up, up toward iron-trussed ceiling, adroitly, in control, landing squarely, letting the recoil fling me straight up and down. “Butt drop,” he commanded, and I landed squarely on my butt, straightened back into upright form as I hurtled upward, and landed, in perfect balance, on my feet. “Gut drop,” and I landed on my stomach and, again, righted myself in midair. “Forward flip,” and I performed a perfect somersault, everything tight, curled, everything efficient, no flailing arms or splayed legs, landing back on my feet; “back flip,” and again I executed. “OK, get down,” he said, and then, to the class: “See, boys, you can be athletic, even if you are fat.”

It was a crushingly cruel remark. But what could I do? I was fifteen years old, taught to respect my elders, to obey those in authority. What could I do? He had promised himself, and the class, amusement at my expense, he had expected the overweight kid to embarrass himself in a flurry of spasmodic contortions, and when I had failed to deliver it, when I surprised him off-balance and teetered him toward his own embarrassment, he righted himself by jacketing a compliment in a cutting insult. I was just a boy. He was an adult. What could I do?

What could any of us do? We were all boys, all of us, and we were all, at breakneck speed, travelling desperation road, suffering the honed-edge anxiety of not knowing what to value, what to believe, when to open our hearts and when to shutter them; of not knowing how to look forward but not wanting to look back; of yearning for release, for title to ourselves, and feeling that prospect tug us off-center, feeling it fissure our confidence and make us bright with fear, and masking that fear with a smooth, hard, impassive veneer of “cool.” All of us filled with words yet finding what we wanted to say too ponderous for our tongues to articulate. All of us playing hide and seek with ourselves, and good, so very good, at hiding, but fitful and indifferent at seeking. All of us aware, vaguely and apprehensively, that we were headed for a larger world webbed with denser entanglements than those that governed our clearly coded high school world, a larger world that would demand that we be other than what we already were. All of us huddled warily into ourselves, all clenched jaws and pocketed hands and smiles that never quite made it to our eyes. What could we do? We were all boys, just boys, and each of us knew the truth of what Virgil had said over two millennia ago: “Each of us bears his own Hell.”