My Old School
Donald C. Wood
Published Nov. 2002, Skyline Literary
Magazine, 2(11): 43-46
One afternoon
in my younger, restless days I found myself in the
gymnasium of my old junior high. I had pedaled my bicycle along
the streets I once grudgingly treaded on my way to school and
light-heartedly skipped on my way back home. Already the days of
the old gym were numbered; most of the main building had already met
its destiny – a great iron ball hanging from the end of a cable
attached to a massive crane. It perched confidently on a hill,
gloating over what was left of my former prison.
The gymnasium
had been stripped of most of its adornments. The only thing still
attached to the wall was the giant white panel proudly displaying the
“Kitten Fight Song” in big maroon letters. They say that a house
isn’t a “home” without decorations and personal nick-knacks, and I
guess a junior high gymnasium isn’t a “gym” without those team spirit
banners hanging from the rafters. The place seemed icy – frozen
in time – stripped of its very history. But it wasn’t
lonely. Keeping it warm and alive for me, if only for the time
being, were a bunch of kids playing basketball on the dull, faded
court. I sat there on the far end of the bleachers, near the
small door by which I had made my timely reentry – the well-weathered
lone wolf alumnus in from the cold.
The children
weren’t very good, but I was taken by the vigor with which they
struggled to polish their skills. I imagined myself down there
with them on the old court where I, too, had dripped my sweat and shed
my blood years before. There I was – the gawky one with legs like
a stork, flailing my arms as I tried to block the drive of the enemy’s
power forward. There I was again – on my back with his footprint
on my face. My naïve melancholia survived the reality attack
and reasserted itself – parrying with images of bubbly cheerleaders
hopping up and down on the sidelines. I slipped into a deeper
trance as their voices found their way into my willing ears. My
light whiskers and my slightly jaded attitude – the visible and
invisible effects of the extra years I had put on since leaving the
place – seemed to fade away and I was lost.
I got up and
brushed my butt off quickly with my left hand – my right arm had hit
the glossy surface first and the elbow hurt like hell. By the
time I stood and started toward the other end of the court, my team
members were way ahead of me. Sweat poured forth from my forehead
and blurred my vision, but I pushed on, trying to catch up with the
other guys. I was a forward myself, after all, and therefore
should have been up front. Too bad, I always thought, that I
wasn’t just a little bit taller. If I had been more gifted in
height I probably could have passed for a center instead, and then my
lack of aggressiveness and low level of dexterity might have not been
so noticeable. Back down the court again, attempting to block –
that’s what I usually did. Our team wasn’t so strong anyway; with
a name like “The Kittens” what could you expect?
Fortunately
for us – regardless of our season record – our classmates, our parents,
and the cheerleaders never let us down. Charlene was a
cheerleader. She was the best. With her straight flowing
auburn hair and sparkling blue-green eyes, no one could hold a candle
to her. She wasn’t nearly as busty as the other girls, but she
had a smile that could melt your heart like butter on a picnic table
under the summer sun of Texas. That was her effect on me.
She and the others cheered for us. They cheered and cheered, and
we ran back and forth from end to end of the court, hoping to win this
one, last home game. I don’t know how I did it, but somehow I
found myself under the basket at the end of the match – perfectly
positioned for an easy shot. Big Tom Bradshaw – the country boy –
came driving down the center of the court with three defenders clinging
to him like cicada shells. He saw me and we made eye contact for
a fraction of a second, and I knew from the look on his bony face that
the ball was coming to me. They had left me open, after
all. Just about the time Tom reached the free-throw line he leapt
into the air – pushing off with one of those lanky legs and massive
feet of his – and heaved the ball to me with one great catapult-swing
of his right arm. The ball hit my open hands with a loud smack as
I left the ground, and then flew upwards with no spin – a “brick” as we
used to say – hovered over the hoop for a moment, and then fell through
just as the buzzer rang. I had made the last basket of the game,
heroically narrowing the margin of our loss to only ten points.
It was my only time to score during that match – during the whole
season, actually. As a matter of fact, those were the only two
points I could claim responsibility for in the duration of my entire
basketball career. I was really more of a bench warmer, anyway.
But I didn’t
care all that much about that. I wanted Charlene to think
seriously about me, and I thought that my last-minute score had
helped. I had seen her smile and heard her cheer as I made that
shot. I knew she was calling for me. I knew that I had
finally made the ultimate impression on her. I had proven
myself. It was a long time coming. You see – Charlene and I
went way back, and she was practically destined to be my girl.
Many years before, when we sat next to each other in our third-grade
class, I had given her a ring. It wasn’t much – just a little
plastic thing – but it had cost me plenty. I had spent at least
an hour out in front of the corner store feeding coins into the toy
dispensers and cranking the shiny chrome dials until I finally got a
clear plastic ball that actually held a ring. I gave the other
thirty or forty that I had bought with my hard-earned change to the
kids playing on the school field, except for a few that contained
Bazooka bubble gum. It had taken a lot of courage to give the
ring, but she accepted. Although she never wore it to school, I
had faith in her – I knew she was wearing it at other times. We
were able to play pretty well together at school back then, but things
changed as we grew, and I became too nervous to try giving her better
rings later.
So I had known
Charlene since before she ever became a cheerleader. I had known
her since before she started to look like a woman. But I had
become unable to even speak to her by the time we made it to the
seventh grade. When we passed each other in the hall, my heart
would pound violently against my ribs like a wild animal straining to
escape its cage. My head would go cold and spin in circles.
I found myself looking the other way intentionally so as not to be put
on the spot. I tried to be cool and seem indifferent because I
was ashamed of my fear and insecurity. It was a difficult game to
play, but I guess I got used to it. Eventually it became normal
for me to be that way with her. I tried to convince myself that
it was a stage that would later lead to our union in love and
marriage. And even when I lost my faith from time to time in the
future convergence of our respective paths, my fears would be dispelled
in an instant by the sight of her sweet face. I remember one time
in particular when she flashed that tender smile at me from across the
courtyard when we happened to be walking in different directions
beneath the blue sky. She was wearing her cheerleader outfit and
running for reelection. I guess it was the beginning of our
eighth year of grade school. “She smiled at me!” I merrily sang
to myself on the way back to class. It was probably about that
time that I had the chance to impress her with my jumping
ability. One day when the cheerleaders were heading out to the
court to practice, we members of the basketball team were warming up
for our drills. One thing we used to do was line up and run in a
wide circle, passing beneath the basket. Each of us would take a
great flying leap toward the hoop and attempt to grab it, pulling it
down and forcing it to “snap.” Succeeding in this was considered
a mark of high kinetic prowess. I had never before managed to
snap it, but that day I finally did – I broke the barrier, and I did it
right over Charlene and her fellow cheerleaders as they were making
their way along the wall behind the goal. It was not quite
enough, I knew, but it was a step closer to her heart.
In the eighth
grade we used to have dances. They were held in the
cafeteria. I think the girls enjoyed them most. They were
always clustered together, wearing their dark, skin-tight designer
jeans and frilly tops. Boys usually roamed around looking for
chances to ask a girl to dance or frolicked in little groups like
children, soliciting contemptuous glances from their emotionally
superior female classmates. It so happened that a dance was
scheduled for the night following my famous last-minute basket. I
went with high hopes – for it seemed that the time was right for an
all-out attack. I was determined to reclaim Charlene for myself
in the wake of my personal triumph on the court. If I could score
there, I reasoned, I could score anywhere. As the music of
Journey, Van Halen and Duran Duran shook the walls of our dining hall,
I searched for Charlene. Finally I spotted her, surrounded by her
friends in a tight cluster. All of them were taller than
she. I had my courage for a change, so I sauntered right up to
her, cool and confident. Her friends – in whom I was not
interested in the least – seemed to notice me first. All of them
looked at me with smirks on their faces, and finally Charlene broke off
in mid-sentence to turn and meet my gaze. The sweetness of her
expression melted my heart in an instant and I stammered slightly as I
managed to say, “May I…have this dance?” Hands went toward mouths
and faces turned toward each other in my peripheral field of vision,
but Charlene did me the decency of keeping her hands at her sides and
her eyes locked on mine. My confidence was beginning to break, so
I asked again quickly in exactly the same fashion. With
detectable trepidation, my angel said “sure,” and I took her hand in
mine. We had held hands innumerable times in the past, but now it
was different. Her touch was more than simple contact between the
flesh of one creature and that of another. It was the
reaffirmation of all that I had hoped for and believed in over the
previous three or four years since we had begun to drift apart. I
boldly led her to the dance floor and held her in my arms. We
danced slowly, turning smooth circles among the other couples who could
not have been dancing together out of destiny, I knew, but only due to
chance encounters. I was sure that we were different, and we were
finally united. It was going to last. Turning and turning
in a delectable haze, I relished the feeling of her body – now so
womanly – against mine. Stranded together on our misty deserted
island we spun until I suddenly found myself alone, and thunder shook
me to my senses just in time to see her back as she walked away from
me. In the middle of the song, she had released my grasp and left
me there to fend for myself as the tide came in and washed over me,
obliterating our island paradise.
“Hey
man! That was pretty bad Saturday night. You know – the way
that girl just walked out on you at the dance!” This was what I
had to endure the following Monday. It seemed like each guy who
saw me took advantage of the chance to drive the spike she had left in
my heart a little deeper. I tried wearing my heart on my sleeve
instead for all to see, but after all one’s sorrow travels only so far,
and junior high school students do not conduct it well.
Fortunately, I didn’t run into Charlene for a while after she dashed my
dreams to pieces. That gave me some time to wrestle with my
feelings and eventually convince myself that I had simply been holding
her too tightly, or that she was just scared of falling in love with
me. On the other hand, friends encouraged me to forget about her
and look elsewhere. They could not understand my concept of
destiny, and I knew that, so I tried to harden my heart and be
cool. I walked in the halls with my head high and ignored almost
everyone. I even passed my test with flying colors every time I
happened to see Charlene, for I didn’t even look her in the eyes
once. I just kept on going. I was determined to win the
waiting game. I had my doubts, but I promised myself that I would
make my goddess my own one day. I just had to be cool, and never
let on that she had hurt me.
She did it
again, though. She got me. I hadn’t been prepared for
another person to step into the picture, but in hindsight I could later
see that I had been a fool not to brace myself for the possibility, for
Charlene truly was a “fox” as we always said. Seeing her
strutting down the hall hanging on his shoulder was too much for
me. The first time I witnessed the horror-show, I ran outside and
collapsed among the great boulders behind the main building,
sobbing. Then, as I tried to collect all of the facts and reason
them out in my mind logically – to fit them into my grand plan and come
up with an explanation for her bizarre behavior, I had to face a
succession of other episodes that hit me like falling dominoes, one
after another. There was the time that she dropped her notebook
in front of me, exposing a giant heart with another guy’s name written
with hers on the back cover, and there was the time I even saw her kiss
yet another fellow right on the lips after school at the area where the
busses picked up the kids unfortunate enough to have to ride
them. I couldn’t figure it out because Charlene was, in my
reasoning, an angel that had been sent by God to spend her life with
me. In my eyes she was as pure as the newly fallen snow, and she
was completely untouchable. I felt sick to my stomach at the
sight of some common boy being kissed by her – on the lips!
In a way,
though, Charlene eventually saved me from myself. It happened
about two months after the dance incident, and by that time I had just
about exhausted my ability to reason out the terrible conflict between
the real Charlene and the Charlene in my mind. She was still
running around with (“going with,” we used to say) the same punk I had
seen receiving the kiss he clearly had not deserved. He was
chasing her around some concrete steps with a metal rail as I walked
out of the building that housed the English classrooms. I watched
in disgust, the remains of my heart breaking down into even smaller
pieces. They laughed, and she giggled, taunting him like a cheap
tramp. Suddenly my entire image of Charlene – the one I had so
carefully constructed, embellished and cherished in my mind – was
shattered. She was, after all, just like anyone else. He
finally managed to grab her and pin her beneath him on the grass.
She shouted gleefully. He had her in a very suggestive position,
and I once again felt sick to my stomach, but this time for a different
reason. And then she did something that I had not heard her do in
many years – she called my name. She actually had the gall to
call on me for help in her twisted little game. It was my turn,
then, to walk away.
Snapping to my
senses, I looked to the side and realized that the kids playing
basketball on the court had their own audience too, as I had had
mine. No cheerleaders or fellow students, but their parents were
sitting in the bleachers, reading books, newspapers and
magazines. They were as indifferent to their own children’s
activities as they were to my school and all the memories it
held. Only I knew the stories of the old place, and my share was
but a miniscule part. And I – I had only wanted to bask in the
sweetness of my mental junior high school memory album, but I got more
than I had counted on when cruel reality rose to challenge my
well-intentioned nostalgia. So, with one last look at the “Kitten
Fight Song” I got up and walked out, leaving my beloved – and hated –
school to the mercy of the wrecking ball.