Middle School Gym

You know how the Milgram experiment revealed that ordinary folks were capable of cruelly hurting one another with electric shocks just because "authority" told them to? Back in 1990 our the gym teachers re-created that experiment with volleyball.

Last night I watched some kids getting ready for a wrestling match at school and the squeak of their sneakers smacking the wood floor and the dusty slide of the blue mats and that hollow, piercing gym whistle was an almost-pleasant reminder of seventh grade gym. They had us trained like Maoist soldiers, not that we appreciated it at the time.

They lined us up everyday, hundreds of us, in tombstone-perfect rows. If you weren't in your spot, you were marked absent and punished accordingly for cutting. I had a purple T-shirt with my first name Sharpie'd on the front, my last name on the back, according to strict regulations. I lived in daily terror of having my sneaker's laces not being up to the teacher's standards: we had heard stories from kids a year ahead of us that if we didn't have our laces tight enough, the teachers made you sprint across the gym. I heard if you whined that you couldn't participate due to "your monthly visitor" the teachers hit you in the face with a box of Kotex. I heard that they were relentlessly cruel with occasional weigh-ins, shouting your weight across the room to one another so it could be recorded on a giant chart in the girl's locker room so everyone could see if you were "healthy" or "overweight" or "morbidly obese". These weigh-ins occurred in our underwear so they could also ascertain scoliosis and a back brace would be immediately issued and you would have to wear it outside your clothes until your eighteenth birthday.

Ah, rumors and memory! Marry those two together and you would think I spent two years at Rura Penthe* (see my footnotes at the bottom of this posting).

I was slow and silly and un-athletic; to survive, I had to lay low, not incur the attention, thus the wrath, of the two imposing women in charge of getting us ready for the Presidential Fitness Challenge. They wore tiny golf skirts; they appeared as mean and hard as human tennis rackets. I can't remember their humanity, but I know they weren't cruel. It was just...they really, really wanted us to play some serious volleyball.

They set up the nets in October and we played endless games until June. I know we must have played pickleball and at one point there was that awkward unit on social dancing, but volleyball dominates my memory. (Regarding the social dancing unit: the sincerest wish of my heart was to slow dance to Timmy T's "One More Try" with this one particularly special young man, but 'promenading' with him in sweaty gym togs was a real slow burn for me too). Anyway, the endless chanting of "we're gonna rotate/our team is real great" sung by a handful of popular girls with impressively high bangs kick-started each game. The rest of us plebians shivered in our canvas shorts and prayed that college and beauty would come to us soon.

When did it start to get ugly? With a wheeze of a whistle, the teachers' pressure and our general anxiety created a maelstrom of cruelty and betrayal. (I mean, at that age I was likely to collapse in tears if someone told me I had a little comma-size smear of pen on my face. Forget the agony of a missed serve in a playoff match).

First, we were divided into leagues and told to bond as to face the common enemy.

My comrades (completely on board with me in my general disdain for the absurdity of gym class and the utter seriousness it was treated) became Lord of the Flies when that volleyball game started. Your best pal from Math would scream and cry if you missed a ball; that nice, quiet boy on my bus with the Gumby T-shirt issued a grimace and silent treatment for my every missed serve. And I don't even want to talk about Renee, that exchange student from Argentina who had us in such terror of losing I think I faked sick the day of the "play-offs". I heard he was actually seventeen and still in seventh grade, but again, that could be rumor. It could also have been the mustache.

Speaking of exchange students, there was once this boy from Paraguay who visited us in third grade named Unito (Unido?). A rumor circulated that he was kissing girls on the rubber-tire dinosaur jungle gym thing on our playground, so he was deported back to Paraguay. Looking back, he probably was just visiting for a short time and just went home. But I think about that kid all the time, especially when I see kids in red shorts. What if....Unito really was sent away somewhere terrible? I can't really worry about that right now.**

You think you know where my volleyball memories are going. You think this is really about how volleyball messed me up for life, how I was bullied, etc. Well, all of that is true, BUT I will say: there was one game where all eyes were on me. It was my turn to serve. The boy I liked was cheering me on like orphans in Guatemala would be systemically executed if I missed; the cool girls were chanting my name in a creepy singsong, as if twenty minutes earlier in the locker room they didn't inform me that I needed to start shaving my legs; the teachers huddled from afar, hiding their mouths with clipboards, discussing the probability of my missing and the amount of time until happy hour. It was intense I tell you!

Guess what? I popped that ball cleanly over the net. Kenny on the other side of the net neatly hit it back; our team spiked it down and the game was over. We cheered briefly and shuffled back into the murky depths of the locker room. The moral of the story is: sometimes we exceed expectations. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition***.

Also: has anyone heard from Unito?

FOOTNOTES

*Klingon Prison Colony
**this is a random story I tell my students about the dangers of racial stereotyping/Othering/red shorts, etc.
***or Rura Penthe.