It was 1969. That grand upheaval of a Promethean year replete with Woodstock; the Stones' Altamont Concert; The Beatles meeting for the last time at Abbey Road; the release of Midnight Cowboy and Mario Puzo's novel, The Godfather; Casey Stengel's New York Mets; Joe Namath and the New York Jets; Mickey Mantle's retirement; the death of Ho Chi Minh; the death of Jack Kerouac; the revelation of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam; Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders; the year I scored a driver's license. That late summer-early autumn care radios blasted The Rolling Stones' "Honky-Tonk Women" and even Catholic boys dreamed of "gin-soaked bar-room queens." Not incidentally, I spent my sixteenth birthday at a mortuary beside the bier of my twenty-year-old cousin (Gary DeNinno, CCHS '66) killed during military maneuvers. On that very day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon - which I quickly adopted as my personal allegory.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of all this is that I never noticed my transition into consciousness. One day I was taunting hippies and wearing my letter sweater and the next day renouncing short hair and wearing bell-bottoms. I feel sure that this change had not so much to do with introspection or even maturation, but the fact that the approval I so craved issued from a brand new direction. I had been a little too young to chart its migration, but cool had switched from linebackers to hipsters and I, despite my adoration of sports and all things dubbed manly, wanted to be cool. I had realized that girls, at least the cool ones, wanted sensitive boys, not killers; love beads, not school rings. In other words, I see myself, at least at the onset of my consciousness, as more of an opportunist than a mendicant. The sheer weight and random of history - call it the crucible of turning sixteen in 1969 on the very day of the moon landing - worked its dizzying influence on me, slowly and without my ever calling it anything. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were not long in the ground; Pittsburgh, like so many other cities in America, had been torched with racism; kids were marching and burning draft cards. In two years I'd have one of my own. There was something seductive about being a soldier, but I didn't have killer instincts and it was only a matter of time before I admitted it to myself. My future had arrived.

I was taught at Central by an enclave of precocious, bearded, long-haired, war protester teachers, some of whom were purportedly jailed at the big Mayday rally in D.C. Those mad young men put into my hands books like The Stranger; Herman Hesse's Demian, Siddhartha, and Steppenwolf; Bellow's The Dangling Man; Man's Search for Meaning; Manchild in the Promised Land; The Naked and the Dead; Rabbit Run; Waiting for Godot. They sent us out to see the films Easy Rider and Brewster McCloud. They screened for us what I assume must have been the ghastly, terrifying Night and Fog: the stripped, spindly bodies of gassed Jews being scraped into ditches by Nazi bulldozers.

In Greg Lehane's English class, we listened to and studied as texts Tommy, the Rock Opera; Let it Bleed; Volunteers; The White Album. He signed my yearbook, "Let it be." He recited aloud Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Its last line, "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose," haunts me to this day; and at the time made me "feel physically as if the top of my head [had been] taken off," a sensation Emily Dickinson cited as proof that a poem had hit its mark.

I enrolled in a class taught by Dave Phillips - he wore cowboy boots with his coat and tie and drove a Volkswagen bus - called The Literature of Protest. Imagine that (34 years ago) in today's arid, book-banning high school curricula. Our text was Protest: Man Against Society, edited by Gregory Armstrong. A dangerous tome to put in the hands of high school students. A literary Molotov Cocktail. I don't know how Mr. Phillips got away with it. But we thought it was a gas. Reading Andre Malraux, Francoise Gilot, D.H. Lawrence, Mario Savio, Jerry Rubin, Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." Included, as poems, were Paul Simon's "The Sounds of Silence" and Peter Townshend's "My Generation." Canonizing the entire volume were selections from Saint Matthew's Gospel and an essay by Thomas Jefferson.

On another day, Mr. Phillips staged a role-playing exercise in which he confronted us with the mock situation: You have just been drafted and are about to be sent to Southeast Asia. What are you going to do? Vietnam was raging. We were all closing in on age 18. Sacrificial lambs with our necks on Uncle Sam's chopping block. One by one, we sat in a chair across from Mr. Phillips and mumbled and stumbled our ways through his cold-eyed interrogations. It was painfully obvious that none of us had plans, much less philosophies, though the words, "Canada," and "Conscientious Objector" surfaced again and again as well as the simple responses of "I don't know" and "I guess I'll go." Mr. Phillips stared each of us down, reducing our half-baked prattle to the baloney we all along knew it was.

All of these things nudged me, imperceptibly, toward a life of writing. But I had no idea what a real writer was. In Central's Hall of Fame, among the portraits of its untouchable famous graduates lining the first floor hall, there hung, among the athletes, physicians and entrepreneurs, a poet, Samuel Hazo. What in the world, I wondered, staring at him, do poets do? Write poems? Is that a fitting occupation for a grown man?

One afternoon the student body was herded into the auditorium. There on stage at the podium towered a black man with a giant afro, clad in a dashiki. It was the poet, Don Lee, who now goes by the Swahili name, Haki Madhubuti. It was early in his career. His poetry, written in slangy black street idiom, had only begun to appear. He read a poem called "a poem to complement other poems." Having just this second looked the poem over in The Black Poets, an anthology edited by Dudley Randall, I realize I hadn't remembered a single aspect of it. As a high school student, I would have been totally mystified: a longish tirade of collage-like fragments urging African-Americans to embrace the revolution of change exploding about them. What electrified the auditorium, was the poem's thunderous refrain: "change nigger change," which Lee chanted angrily over and over above our all-but-lily-white Catholic heads (not even forty blacks among the approximately 1200 students present).

Looking back, the fact that Central brought this fire-breathing radical before its relatively conservative, impressionable crew of young men is nothing short of outrageous. That they (whomever) even knew who Lee was and were able to cajole him into reading for us is mind-blowing.

I can't claim that I was turned on by Lee's poetry. I did not possess the wherewithal to be anything. I had no frame of reference. But I was shocked and somewhat taken by his unapologetic swaggering bravado. Those words he spat at us: "change nigger change." I have never stopped hearing them.

Not long after Lee, I attended at the suggestion of Central's Brother Jerome Niland another poetry reading. This time at the world famous International Poetry Forum at Carnegie Lecture Hall in Oakland to hear the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, W.D. Snodgrass, who had grown up in Pittsburgh.

I like to think I showed up for the sheer aesthetic pleasure, but that's a lie. I went for extra credit and to impress the girl I accompanied. I don't remember anything about the reading except that it was long and boring.

Surely Snodgrass would have read from what still remains his most famous book, Heart's Needle.

I go out like a ghost,
Nights, to walk the streets
I walked fifteen years younger-
Seeking my old defeats,
Devoured by the old hunger; ("Home Town")

Did he read these lines? I don't know. It doesn't really matter. Like anything he might have read, they would have been to me, back then, at age 16, inscrutable. Gazing at them now, however, they seem clairvoyant, describing perfectly, ironically, the job writers, myself included, embark upon, cannibalizing their own experiences.

Despite my relief when the bearded, shy, cloudy Snodgrass closed his book and thanked us, I was also inexplicably pleased that I had been there listening, and occasionally not listening. As it turns out, everything counted.

In December 1969 Central launched its inaugural issue of Spectrum, a student literary magazine. Mimeographed, pen-and-ink cover art (of which I'm still fond), saddle-stitched, underground at every turn, it had all the virtues, charms and limitations of such publications. It featured rather astute film and music reviews, rambling short fiction and impressionistic, existentially desperate poems that trafficked liberally in what was then known as the "deep image," but were unabashedly passionate.

Spectrum was quite cool, and I was terribly jealous of the guys with poems in it, some of whom were good pals of mine. Mainly because of all the attention lavished upon them, especially by the cool girls, for their candor and depth of feeling.

Fancying myself possessed of a carload of feelings as well, in all likelihood even more poignant than those of my peers. (I was, if nothing else, competitive.) I one day, during the period we pretended to have Study Hall, wrote a story. That afternoon I showed it to a girl. She said it could hold its own with any piece of Western Literature ever penned. Which was good enough for me. It was, of course, a bad story, which led to my writing other bad stories. Pretty soon I was churning out bad poems too. But good or bad is not the point. The point is that I started writing. Period. And I never stopped. What leads a child to do one thing and not another remains a mystery, a conspiracy of place and time and heredity. Plenty of other things, in addition, I'm sure.

I am flattered that occasionally people are curious enough to inquire how it came to pass that I (of all people, I imagine they are thinking) ended up a writer? There is no single answer, but a repertoire of long-winded responses, all of which are genuine, though not necessarily true in the journalistic sense, yet timelessly true in the romantic sense. This, perhaps my favorite, is one of them.

*Originally appeared in the private press anthology, Mystique: The Central Catholic Writers Collection. Used with permission.