Saying My Stupid Rosary

A Novel in progress

by Tom Bessette

Copyright 2009 BessetteBooks

Bobby Nollette narrates his adventures and observations as a 13 year old growing up in a small city in 1969.

Cast of Main Characters

Bobby Nolette
Bobby is 14 years old and is the narrator of this story. His friends have been calling him Mouse for a few years, which he likes only marginally better than his earlier nickname, Baby. He is a pretty straight laced kid, but still gets caught up in questionable adventures, mostly because he so wants to be accepted and liked, especially by the tougher kids.  All the action of the story is told through his eyes.  His father, Bill,  is a salesman whose co-workers decide to go on strike.  The family income is decimated and the action starts a long slide of less successful years for his father.  His sister, Annie, is now 21 and is engaged to be married.  She speaks of joining the Peace Corps and her parents are very concerned, although her leaving will call off the expensive wedding she is planning.  Bobby’s brother, Billy, called Bummer, 18, has been drafted and is heading off to Vietnam, where he will be wounded in a rocket attack after sending home morose letters about killing child soldiers.  All this, and Bobby is trying to resist being drawn into the bad practices of some of his contemporaries.  Bobby is also strongly questioning the whole Catholic Faith.  He does opt to go to St. Simian the Oppressor Academy, the Catholic high school, because the public high school, with its heathen kids, scares the devil out of him.

Pauly Boulerice
Pauly and Bobby have been best friends since they were four years old.  They are a month apart in age.  Pauly, AKA, Moose, has always been the baseball nut, but in recent months has found girls and has started enjoying the camping trips in the woods that the group does.  Bobby and Pauly are the kind of friends that don’t have to spend a lot of time together and often don’t.  Pauley is starting to show a strong bent towards academic achievement and will be going to a prestigious private school as a high school freshman next year.

Joey Zlotski
Joey an Bobby are starting to become good friends, mostly because both enjoy camping and playing the outdoor games, like Blacksmith, that occupies their nights.  Joey is already starting to be a know it all and is starting to be fairly rigid in what is the right and wrong thing to do.  He can be cold and distant and often treats Bobby as if he is a dumb young kid.  Joey is nearly 15 and is already finishing up his first year of high school at St. Simian the Oppressor Academy where Bobby will attend.  Joey tells Bobby of the terrible initiation he will have to endure those first few weeks of high school. Joey has no nickname; his personality wouldn’t tolerate one.

Freddy Kozinski
Freddy, 15, and called Clunker by the crowd, is the most tame of the wild Kozinski family.  His older brother Ricky, known as Nutso, has been sent ‘away’ for treatment for his dissociative episodes.  Freddy suffers from a similar problem but has it hidden so well, that he is considered the sane one.  Freddy is the one who is always first to start off on adventures and schemes and gets Bobby, and sometimes, Moose, caught up in some really shaky doings. In the interest of doing things first, Freddy is also the first one to start growing zits.

Mike O’Malley
Mike is a classmate of Bobby’s.  He is 16, still in 8th grade, and likes to be called Killer, because he aspires only to be the toughest, scariest kid around.  His father was the cop that got killed when Jimmy Yoder fell off the high tension wires in ‘Burning Second Street Park.  His mother has been trying to control him by sending him to St. Judas Iscariot Catholic School, with its attendant discipline, none of which works with Killer.  He fights everybody all the time, trying to get back at the world for killing his father.  Bobby and Pauly are his grudging tutors, and for some reason, they have grown in Mike’s esteem, after a difficult start.

Nanette Mineau
Nanette, 13, and Bobby have been in the same class in St. Judas Iscariot since kindergarten.  Nanette was once the prettiest and most sought after girl in school, but now, entering her teens, has become gawky and wears glasses.  Now that she is less popular, she and Bobby have become friends.  She comes to Bobby’s for basketball, which she plays quite well.  She likes Bobby and would like to be closer, but he sees her now only as a pal, like one of his buddies.  She seems sexless to him.

Loretta Manelli
Loretta is sultry and knowledgeable for her years.  Dark, sullen, brooding, and magnetic, everybody calls her Foxy. She is 15, in her first year of high school at St. Simian the Oppressor, and has the reputation of being available to the older boys for ‘fooling around’ and for being sometimes willing to teach certain promising younger boys the ropes.  Bobby has a painful crush on her and she knows it and teases him with hints that he may be her next project, which scares the hell out of him.

Dicky Boulerice
Dicky is one year younger than Bobby, at 13, and he and Bobby are not as close as they used to be.  Dicky is all lost and gone into trapping and fishing and rarely plays with the crowd anymore.  He has all but given up spending any time with his brother, but they all still get together on occasion for a stupid stunt or two.

Sammy DeLuca
Sammy, 13, is the neighborhood kid whose family owns a convenience store where they sell mini hot dogs with meat sauce and ice cream. He is a popular kid, who is sought after when the rest of the gang needs some free treats, which is often.  He is the locals’ connection to the tougher area of 4th Avenue and the old businesses along that street.  He is world wise and a good kid to know.

Luc Breault
Luc is 16 and used to be called ‘Lucky’ but a run of family financial disasters has relegated him to the simplified version of his last name, Bro.  Some kids try to change this to Bra and Luc pounds their faces for them, temporarily ending the crisis.  His family is just barely hanging on, yet still manages to send him to Catholic school.

Norman Kolakowski
Norman, called Worm, is 14.  Bobby met him in the Boy Scouts.  Norman was allowed to join the troop through the intersession of new Teacher John Ehrlich, who knows Norman’s single mother.  Norman is the only Non-Catholic kid ever allowed in the Boy Scouts at St. Judas Iscariot.  His mother is a practicing Methodist and many parents attempt to remove their sons from the troop unless Norman is dismissed.  Bobby’s father championed his inclusion and Bobby stood up, too, as did Father Amyot, which was the real clincher.

Sharon Normandin
Stage name, Sharona, a new dancer at Desormeau’s, she is young and confused and befriends Bobby as her link to normalcy.

John Ehrlich
Mr. Ehrlich is the only lay teacher at St. James and is Jewish to boot, which causes untold controversy among the more conservative parents, which is most everybody. He is just out of school, only 23, and is frowned upon by the insular nuns. He is not a disciplinarian, as are the nuns that make up the rest of the faculty, and he is also inclined to teach the kids how to think, rather than how to memorize.

Sister Mary Ezekiel
She is 67 and has been a nun, and been teaching, for most of 45 years.  She is one of the last of the original nuns of French Canadian extract and still speaks with a near indecipherable accent, causing incredible amusement among her students.  She fancies herself a disciplinarian and yet is stymied at every turn by Mike and his adherents, so not much is taught in her class.  She is eaten up by the 8th graders she has to deal with.

Sister Mary Matthew
The Mother Superior of the school, i.e. principal, she is 48 and energetic and is a strict disciplinarian, both to kids and their parents.  She is not above pressing kids into the convent to do chores, where they get a first hand view of the cloistered lives led by their teachers.

Father Michael Amyot
He is the assistant pastor at St. Judas Iscariot church, which is the church that sponsors the namesake school. He is 45 and seems very friendly towards the boys Bobby’s age.  Very devout in public, very harsh in private, Father Mike, as he likes the boys to call him, lives a private life that includes cigarettes for the younger boys and beer for the older ones that frequent his ‘Discussion Groups’.

Father Robert Archambeault
Pastor at St. Judas.  He is old, near retirement age and is a strict disciplinarian with his parishioners, expecting them to donate whatever money and make any sacrifice needed o keep the church going and continue the lavish lifestyles of the priests.  He is tolerant of the Father Amyot’s relationships with the young boys of the parish in the face of growing questions, but otherwise is dismissive of his younger assistant.

Millar Suprenant
Millar is the bread man in Bobby’s neighborhood, working for Jerzy Bakery, one of a dying breed of commodity delivery salesmen.  He takes Bobby on his bread route on Saturdays.  Often, on the route, in the early morning, Bobby sees interesting tidbits of his neighbor’s lives.

Matty DeCrescente
Neighbor of Bobby’s, he is a small time gambler and numbers runner, and his garden grows great tomatoes, due to ‘special fertilizer’.  He is tough on ‘punks’ and attempts to engage Bobby’s dad in his illegal businesses.