It was only then that I noticed the kid on the other team who was covering third base standing next to me. Simply put, as I glanced over at him, I noticed that he had the biggest booger I’d ever seen hanging out of his nose. There were always kids when I was growing up who had no idea if they had something coming out of their noses or milk at the edges of their mouths or spit strings between their lips when they talked. From an early age I had categorized several of my friends by their particular bodily oddities and would plan my time with them accordingly. Spit constantly flew out of George’s mouth when he talked, so I avoided having lunch with him. Brian always had terrible milk breath and so I would save my talks with him for when we were riding our bikes so that the wind would carry away what his toothbrush obviously couldn’t. Scott had the world’s dirtiest fingernails and so I would make sure not to trade any snack items with him. But now this kid, well . . . he had a booger hanging that was big enough to be categorized as a chandelier.
As he stared intently at the player at home plate, he would chant the standard “hey batter batter.” But as he did it, the booger would swing either toward him or away from him, depending on whether he was expelling breath or drawing it in. It was hypnotizing, like car-crash carnage that you don’t want to look at but can’t for the life of you look away from. I started wondering if I should tell the kid about it. Would he be embarrassed? Would he thank me? Or would he just get mad and fling it at me, ten years old being the age where the thought of
not
flinging a booger at somebody else was as foreign as checking to see if a booger’s there in the first place.
As I stared at the horror that was dangling from his nostril, I heard a
crack.
I looked up just in time to see the catcher stare up into the sky, scramble toward the backstop, and trip over his mask, which he had just flung to the ground. Before I could process it, I heard the coach yell into my ear.
“Run!”
I looked at him, confused. The ball was going straight up into the air, not out into the field as I knew it was supposed to. I didn’t really understand much about foul balls or foul tips or foul anything, since my mind would wander off to thoughts of Marcia Brady whenever the coach would brief us on the rules of the game. The coach glared back at me and screamed a hot blast of dad breath into my face as he pointed wildly toward home plate.
“
Run,
goddamn it, Feig! RUN!!!”
And so I did. I had no idea what I was running to or what to expect when I got there but I ran. I heard the parents in the stands screaming, I heard my teammates screaming, I heard the other team screaming. I didn’t know what anyone was saying, but I assumed they were all yelling at me for doing something wrong. I had heard those kinds of shouts all season, exclamations that usually had the words
what the hell are you doing?
somewhere within them. Maybe I was running the wrong way. I had no idea. My mind was a blur. I saw the catcher scrambling around in the dirt. He grabbed ahold of the ball and looked over at the pitcher, who was now charging forward toward home plate. One thing seemed clear to me. I had to get to home plate before either one of them did. And so, in a barefaced panic, I tried to run even faster.
I’ve always had a problem with my legs and running. At our school’s yearly Field Day, an event straight out of the
How to Torture the Nonathletic Handbook,
I would usually enter a running race and within the first ten feet of my initial sprint I would try to run so fast that my knees would buckle and I’d end up falling to the ground, belly flopping down and sprawling out like a bearskin rug. And this day, as I started to put on the speed, I felt my knees once again giving way. Fortunately, I was very close to the plate. As my knees started to go out and the diminishing distance between my hips and the ground made the fronts of my shoes start to dig deeper into the dirt with every stride, I saw the catcher toss the ball to the pitcher, who was as close to the plate as I was. As he caught the ball and started to turn toward me to tag me in the chest, my knees went out completely and I collapsed underneath his arm. My fall was so quick and completely out of the realm of what a competent player’s body is supposed to do in a slide that the pitcher never dreamed of lowering his mitt to the level that I was now at. My arms and face slammed heavily onto the plate as my stomach bounced roughly into the dirt. I
oofed
loudly and felt like someone had hit me in the breadbasket with a two-by-four.
Silence.
I had no idea what had just happened and for a brief moment thought that maybe I was dead. But it was then I heard a word that had never been used in conjunction with anything I’d ever done on a baseball field.
“SAFE!”
I was certain that the umpire for some reason was telling the pitcher that his tag of me was “safe.” But when I looked up, I saw the pitcher give me a dirty look and roll his eyes.
And then I heard an amazing sound.
The parents in the stands and all my teammates started cheering for me. I looked over and saw parents on their feet, the coach smiling and wiping his brow, and then all the kids from my team running over. I got up, my stomach aching and my face scratched from hitting the gravel that had covered home plate, and headed toward them. They surrounded me, cheering and smiling and laughing. They all fought to pat me on the back, on the arms, on the head. I had never seen this group of guys so happy to see me. It was such a foreign experience for me that I remember actually pushing their hands away. It was too strange. In some weird way, their boundless approval was almost as disturbing and frightening as their disapproval of me had been throughout the season. I saw that the only way I would ever get these guys’ respect was to have success on a baseball field. That had I been thrown out at the plate or fallen earlier or not run at all, things would have been business as usual, with my now smiling teammates shaking their heads and muttering the customary “God, what a fag” under their collective breaths. My one random act, performed only because the coach had yelled at me to do something that I didn’t understand and would never have done on my own, a robotic following of a command that entailed no skill on my part outside of running for my life so as to avoid getting yelled at, had all of a sudden brought me the respect of my peers. It didn’t matter who I was at that moment, nor what I knew of this world. I was simply a guy who had mindlessly scored a run. It all seemed so hollow and shallow that I was overcome at the hypocrisy of it all.
Well . . .
Actually, that’s not true. I loved it. Hey, what can I say? For once in my life since I joined the team, I wasn’t being referred to as a fag or a homo or a girl or a pussy or a retard or anything else that you’re not supposed to call other people. I was the kid who, even though it was for a very superficial reason, these guys all liked very much at this moment. And I’ve never forgotten how great that moment felt for my entire life.
After the game, as we drank our celebratory bottles of Faygo red pop, the conversation got around to the next season. Several of the better players on our team were talking about their plans for the future.
“I think I’m gonna try out for Pony League next season,” said one of them. “The coach says my hitting is good enough now.”
“Yeah,” said another kid, “I’m gonna try out, too. I was thinking maybe I’ll try out to be a pitcher.”
I looked around at them, my newfound friends, and for the first time felt like baseball wasn’t so bad. It now seemed as if my time on the team had actually been okay. I had gotten some confidence and felt kind of cool being able to say for the past few months, “I can’t hang out today. I’ve got a baseball game.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding thoughtfully as I looked around at them all, “I’m thinking about trying out for Pony League, too.”
They all stared at me for a second, then the best player on the team raised his eyebrow and said, “Are you kidding, Feig? You’re way too big of a fag to play Pony League.”
And with this, they all started laughing at me, harder than they’d ever laughed at me before.
Oh, well, I thought, at least jocks are consistent.
At the end of the season, after our team banquet and after we had signed each other’s programs and after the coach had given us all autographed Tiger baseballs and told us that we had been great players, I came home, took off my baseball cap, and hung it on the post of my bed so I could see it as I fell asleep. My nightmare season in Little League was over, and I knew there was no way I would be playing again next year. I felt relieved, and yet I felt proud that I had made it through the entire season, save for the four-game shopping odyssey my mother and I had taken. And as I stared at my baseball cap hanging next to my head, I realized that the season hadn’t been such a nightmare after all. True, it hadn’t been the least bit fun, and most of the time it had been downright painful, but it hadn’t been a complete waste of time, either.
I mean, after all, at least I now knew for certain that I was too much of a fag to play Pony League.
Ah, who am I kidding? Little League sucks. It always did and it always will.
Sorry, Coach.
THE GYM CLASS ARCHIPELAGO, PART I:
THE WORST GAME IN THE WORLD
T
here was one class that I never enjoyed, that I faced each day with stomach-twisting dread: gym class.
I must admit that I didn’t mind gym class as much when I was in grade school because, back then, it was literally just running around. We pretty much played easy games like kickball and tumbled on foam mats and never really worked up a sweat. And for that reason we were allowed to do it all in our school clothes. I liked dressing nicely when I was a kid and wouldn’t have been caught dead in a pair of Sears Toughskins jeans. No, I liked to wear dress pants, or “slacks,” as my father always called them. I guess I just associated jeans and dressing badly with the kids I was afraid of, kids who were always punching each other’s arms and shooting at squirrels with their BB guns. I figured that if I dressed nicer than them, I could avoid being like them, as if a bully gene were ticking inside me, ready to go off the minute I pulled on a pair of Wranglers and threw a rock at a bird. When I was in grade school, polyester was all the rage and my closet was filled with it. I always wore polyester bell-bottoms in a host of fashion-defying designs. They all had some amped-up plaid pattern on them that even the least discerning Scottish clan would reject and cuffs big enough to keep a wallet in. I’ve always thought that because of all the polyester we humans encased ourselves in back in the 1970s, if a nuclear bomb had ever gone off, we might not have died but we would have definitely all been laminated.
One interesting science fact I discovered in grade school was that gym floors and polyester pants don’t mix. Because I used to love to run and fall down and slide, and the first time I wore my polyester pants in gym, I ran and fell down and slid and my pants melted onto my knees. Anytime I’d create the slightest amount of friction between the floor and my dress slacks, they would immediately turn into a liquid. After an hour of gymnastics, my plaid pants would look like a Jackson Pollock painting.
But, fortunately, melted pants was about as bad as it got, and gym class wasn’t too tough in elementary school.
When I got to junior high, however, I was confronted with something that I found quite disturbing—gym clothes. You see, being told I had to wear gym clothes in PE class meant I had to change into them. And changing into them meant I had to go into a locker room. And going into a locker room meant I had to take
off
the clothes I wore to school and put
on
my gym attire. And taking off my clothes and putting on my gym attire meant that I had to do all of this in
front
of my classmates.
And this was not something that I wished to do. At all.
See, I was an only child, and so I never had to take my clothes off in front of anybody. Even my parents. If clothing had to be changed, I’d always disappear into the privacy of my room, close the door, pull down my shades, and come back out after the transaction was complete. Even when I took a bath, I’d go into my room, disrobe, wrap a towel around myself, and then saunter from my bedroom to the bathroom as if my aluminum-sided house were a Las Vegas health spa. And my parents were not allowed to watch as I dropped the towel and entered the water, which was covered with a thick layer of Mr. Bubble, my bathtime guardian who made sure my in-tub nakedness would be hidden from any prying eyes. I had the system all worked out. No one on this earth would ever see me with more than 40 percent of my body exposed at any one time. I even told myself that after I was married, a system would be worked out between my wife and me to insure that no full-frontal viewings of my manliness would ever occur.
And then suddenly, thanks to a guy named Mr. Wendell, our new gym teacher whose burly physique and gruff attitude told me that he would not agree with my theory that “sports are stupid,” I was expected to show 100 percent of myself to a bunch of kids I had grown up with, I didn’t know, or who didn’t like me.
Where was Mr. Bubble when I needed him?
On the first day of class, Mr. Wendell told us that we had to bring in a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, sweat socks, and a towel, and that we would be changing into our gym clothes every day before class.
“Mr. Wendell,” I asked timidly. “Do we
have
to change?”
My question was immediately met with a mixture of laughter, jokes, and insults.
“What’s the matter, ya fag?” said Norman, having made the transition from normal kid to heinous bully a couple of summers ago. “Can’t your parents afford to buy you clothes?”
“Yes,”
I said, trying to defend the honor of my family. “I was just wondering, that’s all.” Jerks, I thought. Didn’t they know how traumatic this whole thing was going to be for me? Didn’t they care how overly sensitive I was?
“Hey, Feig, maybe they’ll let you wear a tutu.”
Clearly, they
didn’t
care.
I arrived in gym class the next day with a new pair of gym shorts, a freshly purchased T-shirt, the first pair of sweat socks I’d ever owned, and a brightly striped yellow and orange towel my mom used when she went to the beach. My classmates and I stood around with our gym clothes in hand, waiting to hear what we should do next. All the other guys’ gym outfits looked very athletic and broken in. Had they all done this before? I wondered nervously. Had these guys actually played gym-type games outside of school? And in the proper attire? I guess the problem was that my best friends were mostly girls, and that while these guys were playing football and basketball, I had been sitting around the house with Mary, Sharon, and Stephanie playing Mystery Date and Art Linkletter’s House Party.
“All right, ladies,” said Mr. Wendell, sounding very much like Sergeant Carter from
Gomer Pyle, USMC.
“Follow me and we’ll assign you all a locker.”
Mr. Wendell took us into the locker room. It was scrotum-shrinkingly cold in there, and the cream-colored cinder-block walls and rows of dented brown lockers looked very much like the room in which I saw a drug-dealing football player get shot on a recent episode of
Starsky and Hutch.
“All right, gents. This is the locker room. You’ll be changing over in this area, where the lockers are. And get yourself a lock, too, since you’ll be leaving your stuff here every night.”
I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why we would need to lock up our gym clothes. If somebody really wanted to steal my shorts, they were more than welcome to them.
“Now, over in this cage is where we keep all the equipment. You may only enter here with my permission,” he said, as Norman and his cohorts made faces at each other that seemed to indicate they planned on going inside it
without
his permission at some time in the future. Why anybody would want floor hockey pucks and miniature traffic cones was beyond me. But, as I was about to find out, there were a
lot
of things about being a twelve-year-old boy that I didn’t really understand.
“And over here are the showers.”
Showers? For what? Washing the equipment?
“Each of you will be required to shower after every class. No exceptions.”
I figured I must have died and gone to hell. I guessed that when I was looking down at my English book on the bus that morning, the bus must have exploded suddenly and now I was dead and didn’t know it, as if I were in a
Twilight Zone
for kids. That could be the only excuse for someone’s telling me I was going to have to bathe in public.
I looked into the shower room. It was big and cold. White tile. Lots of nozzles sticking out of the walls. A drain in the middle. And NO DIVIDERS. NO STALLS.
Why in the world would we have to shower? I wondered, too confused to panic. I take a shower every morning before I go to school. I shampoo and blow-dry my hair. I brush my teeth. I’m the cleanest seventh grader this school has ever seen. He can’t possibly be talking to me.
“Do we
all
have to shower?” I asked Mr. Wendell.
“Of course you do, ya fag! What do you want to do? Stink all day?”
Again this came from Norman, a guy I once saw wear the same T-shirt with a faded KISS iron-on for one week straight. And now he was nailing
me
on the topic of hygiene.
“All students must shower after class, Mr. Feig. I don’t think you’d want to sit next to yourself in math after you’ve played a few games of basketball.” Why not? I wondered. The idea of breaking a sweat during a game of basketball was as foreign to me as putting horse shit on bread and eating it like a sandwich.
“All right, boys. Change into your gym clothes. We’re gonna have a little fun on your first day.”
I normally responded to the word
fun.
But since this was gym, the only fun thing I could imagine happening was class being canceled.
I guess I must have had an abnormal amount of hang-ups for a twelve-year-old, because no sooner were the words
change into your gym clothes
out of Mr. Wendell’s mouth than all my classmates just dropped their pants and changed. None of them really seemed to care that they were standing around in front of each other in their underwear. I, however, immediately froze. I suddenly knew I couldn’t undress in front of them and so figured that I would wait until they had finished and headed out into the gym before I would remove my stylish polyester slacks. And so, in order to stall, I sat down on the bench and immediately pretended to become very interested in my towel. I studied a small piece of the weaving as if it were an equation that had to be worked out. It was all I could think to do but it didn’t float.
“Hey, Feig! Quit starin’ at your faggy towel and get dressed!” Norman again.
“All right. I just thought I saw something on my towel.”
“Yeah. Probably lice from your house.”
Everyone laughed at Norman’s joke. They always laughed at what he said. He never said one funny thing the entire time I knew him but to hear the response he always got from my peers, you’d think the guy was Oscar Wilde. But it was clear. I was going to have to put my modesty on hold and change in front of this group of alpha males. So, like that hippie who thought about making love to his girlfriend as he was tortured during basic training for Vietnam in the TV movie
Tribes,
I let my mind remove itself to somewhere more pleasant as I took off my pants.
And as soon as they were off, my face went white.
Because I had forgotten about something.
A few weeks earlier, my mother had gotten into a hobby called Cameo, which was the art of drawing designs and pictures on fabric and clothing with these special Cameo ink pens. And one of the first projects she undertook was to hijack a pair of my underwear and draw a big dark red butterfly right on the back.
And that was the pair of briefs I had absentmindedly worn to school this day.
I swallowed what felt like a pool ball. I was frozen. Did anyone see it? I wondered. My mind started to race, in full panic mode. Trying to think clearly, I reasoned that I should just turn around slowly and put my back against the—
“Oh my God! Feig shit his pants!!!”
I knew I could count on Norman and his keen powers of observation. I suddenly found myself wishing that the school would cave in and kill us all.
“What the hell is that?!” said another kid, staring at my ass incredulously.
I immediately made a feeble attempt to make light of the situation. “Oh boy, that’s my mom’s doing. Ha ha ha. She sort of branded me.”
They didn’t hear a word I said. The whole class was moving toward me, staring at the butterfly on the back of my underwear, all of them with stunned, incredulous looks on their faces.
“My mom’s pretty weird. Ha ha ha.” I tried to defuse the situation but to no avail. What the hell is their problem? I thought, angry and frustrated. Why can’t they just let it go? Who cares what I’m wearing? I’d seen them wear stupid stuff lots of times. Even Norman had once worn a T-shirt that had “Afternoon Delight” written across the front of it. But there I was, looking at this approaching sea of dumbfounded faces, their mouths hanging open, their eyebrows tight and furrowed. They just kept moving in closer, staring at the back of my Cameo-bedecked briefs, trying to figure out what they were looking at. I wanted to turn around and run but I just couldn’t move.
As the famous bumper sticker says, “If you can read this, you’re too close.” Well, now they were too close. And they could indeed read it.
“Oh my God. It’s a
butterfly!
FAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGG!!!!”
All hell broke loose. There couldn’t have been more commotion if someone had lobbed a live grenade into the room. I really wanted to die, and I was trying to figure out how I was going to take my mother and her Cameo pens with me.
“FAG!”
“FAAAAG!”
“FEIG’S A FAG! FEIG’S A FAG!”
They had come unhinged. Apparently they’d never seen decorative underwear and the sight of it had turned them into the kids from
Lord of the Flies.
“What the hell’s going on in here?!”
Mr. Wendell entered angrily. I figured I was saved.
“Feig’s got a butterfly on his underwear!” said Norman, pointing at my ass like he was ratting out a shipping container filled with illegal aliens.
“He does?” said Mr. Wendell, raising an eyebrow. “Let’s see it, Feig.”
So much for being saved.
Mr. Wendell leaned over and took a good close look at my mother’s handiwork.
“A butterfly? That’s lovely, Feig. Was it always there or did it used to be a cocoon?”
And with that, the room erupted again.
“FEIG’S A FAG! FEIG’S A FAG! FEIG’S A FAG!”
That’s right. Just lynch me, boys. I was starting not to care anymore.
“All right, guys, all right,” Mr. Wendell said in a laughing tone, as if he were thinking, Aah, I wish
I
were a lad again so I could join in on the taunting of this sensitive outcast. “Enough of this,” he said with a smirk. “Get dressed and get into the gym.” He started to head out the doorway, then stopped and turned back to me. “Oh, and Feig? You can flutter out with the rest of them.”