That Takes Ovaries! (5 page)

I was shocked by my own actions, but that soon turned to feelings of triumph, because the surprised woman at the far end of the lobby heard me and nodded yes.

Thinking myself generous, I turned to the man, pointed to the exit, and said, “You can leave now.” We didn’t believe in calling the police in those days.

The Pope was coming!

Everyone was saying how wonderful this was because he had never come to the United States before and we all knew him to be special—he was a social change activist in Poland, after all. It was 1983. I was teaching at a Catholic women’s college in New York City, and like some kid might do with a rock star, I took off three days from work to follow the Pope around as he appeared at various locations.

For the appearance at Yankee Stadium, a colleague gave me two free tickets. I gave one to my friend Bea. We were so excited. But when we arrived, we weren’t happy at all; our seats were very, very far back. We were able to see, but not much. Home plate looked like a speck. The stage looked like a dollhouse. Bea and I took off, determined to get closer.

At each new level down we simply pointed south and told the ushers we had seats “down there,” and in each case they let us through without actually looking at our tickets. Before this I had had no idea how easy lying could be!

As we proceeded down, we suddenly made it to a layer of cops. It was the honor guard for the Pope, made up of New York’s finest, and they all seemed to be Irish Catholic men. Now, you have to imagine the scene here. There were thousands of policemen in the stadium. I mean, the rest of New York was being totally ignored. These blue-uniformed officers paraded around
the inside perimeter of the whole stadium, three deep. Just as we made it down to this cop level, the police right in front of us started to line up and march forward. Bea and I joined their line and marched forward with them toward the stage. No one tried to stop us.

Bea grabbed my arm and said, “God is taking care of us. We are invisible.”

“What?” I said in disbelief. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but it certainly seemed no one was noticing us—two plainclothed women, one Black and one white, in a line of big, burly Irishmen in blue. As I marched, I experienced a fit of laughter, mostly out of fear.
Would they catch us? Arrest us? Shoot us?
I started to pray.

We kept up with the police line and soon we made it onto the field where the symphony was playing and where all the important people sat, such as the cardinals and the rest of the Church hierarchy. When the cops sat down, we did, too. We ended up in a row with about a hundred elite police right in front of the Pope. I mean,
I got to shake his hand!
That night I called my mom to tell her about it and she said she already knew, she’d seen me on TV—live. The next day I saw I was in all the main photos of the event: one hundred policemen, Bea and me, and the Pope.

You might remember me. I was the girl in your gym class that everyone described as “chubby.” I always came in last, heaving and beet-red, when we ran the mile. I hardly ever hit the ball. I
wore a shirt two sizes too big in an attempt to hide my body and my shorts, which rode up my inner thighs as I walked. Maybe you acknowledged this by calling me “Heifer,” “Bertha,” or “Trailer.” Until I was sixteen, that was all I encountered in gym class.

Then in 1994, on the first day of my junior year in high school, Ms. L. walked through the door. Ms. L. was the new gym teacher. She was young, fit, and sported a shortish brown haircut that gave her a tomboyish look. She was a skilled camper and could survive in the wilderness for weeks. She preached teamwork, effort, and enthusiasm until we took these as gospel. Most important, she instilled confidence in all of us.

By midsemester, our class was practicing rappelling off our gymnasium balcony. Ms. L. had taught us to handle her hightech equipment like experts. While we were in action, she paced around the balcony checking our technique and shouting directions as if we were on a real mountain. Once we got the hang of it, we found rappelling to be relatively easy.

Then she taught us how to ascend.

This was the setup: The climbing rope was secured to the balcony. Both the ascender and the belayer wore harnesses that attached them to each other. The climber used a combination of larger ropes and smaller looped ones, as well as metal clamps. Throw on your helmet, stick your foot into the first loop, grab the clamps and climb. Sounds easy, right? Well, when the first boy in our class tried ascending, he sure made it look that way.

In two minutes this boy had climbed twenty feet with barely a drop of sweat on his brow. But when he climbed over the balcony, he exclaimed, “That kicked my ass. That was no joke, man.” His words threw all of our confidence out the window. This guy was one of the best in the class, and even he struggled. Despite this, Ms. L. still asked the dreaded question: “Who’s next?” We all stared off in different directions and stood in awkward silence, as if she wouldn’t notice us if we didn’t look at her.

I would be lying if I told you this boy’s words brought back all of my lifelong gym-class horrors. Instead, all I could think of
was that I was a star in the class, too. I was one of the best rappellers, I had gotten an A on the canoeing skills test, and I had mastered a compass.

My hand darted up and I shouted, “I’ll go!”

Some people appeared relieved, though all my girlfriends threw me questioning looks. I avoided eye contact with everyone and created an aura of purpose around me. I was too busy to think twice. I rushed to put on my harness, adjust my ponytail, strap on my helmet, and swagger downstairs. Once at the bottom of the rope, I attached my harness, checked the setup with the belayer on the balcony, got my feet into the ropes, and grabbed my clamps.

“Belayer ready?” I shouted.

“Belayer ready,” the student yelled down.

“Ascending,” I called out. Before he could even reply, I was off and gone.

Off and gone, that is, until about seven feet into my climb, when I became exhausted—deeply exhausted—and came to a dead stop.

I sat dangling from the rope with my harness painfully digging into my butt and inner thighs. I stretched to pull up the looped ropes so that I could step into them and keep going. Unfortunately, I pulled them too high and could not move them down. Suddenly, the absurdity of climbing up with no ground below to push against struck me. In my tight jeans, my leg battled to defy gravity to get my foot into the damn loop. It felt too difficult. I began to panic. I considered giving up, yet I knew how humiliated I would be if the whole class had to watch the belayer lower me down.

Ms. L. sensed my frustration and began to coach and encourage me. “This is not hard, Beth. I know you can do this. Just get that foot in there and push your body up. Move it!”

I tried, and tried again, and finally I got my foot into the loop. I grabbed the clamps with my hands and felt my quads, hamstrings, and biceps strain as I pulled myself up. I looked above at the balcony: about halfway to go.

Honestly, the rest of the climb was not much easier. I summoned upper-body strength I never knew I had. I mean, you’re talking about someone who couldn’t even do a single pull-up. Then, after one more excruciating rest on my pinching harness, my face met the floor of the balcony. I was almost there. With a surge of optimism (or was it adrenaline?), suddenly my work became effortless. Within seconds I was climbing over the balcony bars while Ms. L. commanded to the belayer, “Pull her in, pull her in. Don’t let her go yet!”

When I was standing on the balcony, both feet on solid ground, I took off my helmet and my head looked as if I had showered. I was heaving, my face was bright red, and sweat ran down my neck. By this time, everyone was clapping. I was the first girl at East High School to ascend. I tried to look humble, but it wasn’t working. I now knew I could run with the best of them, and I figured, why not smile about it?

We’d been warned it was too dangerous to go out into the dark streets of Detroit, but I was hungry and so was Alice. We left the safety of our conference site at Cobal Hall and headed for a diner we’d spotted earlier.

When we arrived at the little corner eating establishment, we
were frozen, and decided it would be in our best interest to take a cab back to the convention center when we finished dinner. As we took our booth, we were happy to see a taxi pull into the cabstand and the driver come inside for his own supper. I asked him if we could be his first fare after his meal. He agreed. Knowing that we wouldn’t freeze on the walk back to the convention center, Alice and I sipped hot tea and settled into the warm comfort of the diner. Within minutes our food was placed in front of us.

I had barely taken a bite of my hamburger when the front doors of the restaurant flew open. In stepped a hip-swinging parade of four meticulously groomed women draped in full-length white mink coats. Two showed off their majestic breasts in white dresses with necklines that plunged to the waist; two wore red dresses with spaghetti straps molded over their petite bodies. All had on six-inch stiletto heels, which they walked in effortlessly.

This impressive ensemble was watched over by a tall, slender man wrapped in a white mink coat and white mink hat. His suit was red, and the wind blew his coat open just enough to reveal a shiny lining that perfectly matched the crimson color of the ladies’ dresses.

Alice whispered, “Those are real hookers!”

“And you know what that makes
him,”
I said, and we started to giggle.

Our laughter snagged the attention of the man in mink. He moonwalked backward, came to a dead halt in front of our table, snatched off his Blues Brothers sunglasses, threw his hands in the air and sang, “Ladies!” He pulled out a chair and sat down at our table.

Alice gathered her belongings and slid one arm into her coat. I was about to follow her lead when I noticed the women who had come in with him were seated at a nearby table, snickering at our fright. My internal defense mechanism clicked. I have never been one to be intimidated, and I wasn’t about to start
now. I touched Alice’s arm to reassure her, then addressed the gentleman: “I didn’t hear anyone ask you to sit down.”