Am I the only one who still views seventh grade as the nadir of his existence, all these years later?
My version of seventh-grade hell is the garden variety experienced by small-town boys whose peers don’t think they live up to the local norms of appropriate masculine behavior. In my case, the small town is Kane, Pennsylvania, tucked in the northern woods of the Allegheny National Forest. And the torture of choice is the “growler”—a quick fisted twist on my downy chin, accompanied by the snarled chant “Davey boy! Faggot!”
But seventh grade isn’t all bad. There are times when the pure hellishness of it is interrupted by brief moments of bright pleasure I know I shouldn’t be enjoying.
Take gym class, for example. Some of the most excruciating experiences in my sad-sack junior high career take place amidst the smells of industrial disinfectant and adolescent sweat in the boys’ gymnasium, but the gym is also the place where I start noticing things.
We are scheduled for phys. ed. on the very first day of seventh grade. Since two gym teachers had retired the previous spring, both the boys’ and the girls’ phys. ed. classes have brand new teachers this year. The name of the girls’ teacher is Mrs. California, which I find a bit misleading. Although she is blond, she is not from California, nor does she in any way resemble a beauty queen.
The new boys’ teacher, Coach Fiori, on the other hand, might just win some beauty contests. Twenty-two and fresh out of Slick Stone State College (where it seems every gym teacher in the state has studied), he is a classic seventies dreamboat: sculpted muscles covered in thick body hair, a square jaw below a jaunty mustache, a thick head of curly dark brown hair. He is the Marlboro man, Mark Spitz, the cowboy in the Village People.
And Coach is dead serious about physical education, as we learn on that first day. In elementary school, our weekly sessions with the gym teacher had been rather casual. We would report to the gym in our regular school clothes and then perform some minor calisthenics in time with a song called “Go, You Chicken-Fat, Go!,” which Mrs. Jensen played for us on a beat-up old record player. A young redhead, Mrs. Jensen was nice, but she was decidedly unambitious when it came to both her own career and our physical well-being. So she used the chicken-fat record with every single class, in every single grade, every single day.
Coach Fiori has a much more ambitious agenda for us, and the first item on that agenda is making certain that we’ll be properly equipped for serious athletic exertion. We are each issued a pair of blue cotton shorts imprinted with the Kane Wolves logo and a gummy white box on which our mothers are to write our names in block letters with a permanent marker. We are also issued a thick reversible t-shirt, blue on one side and red on the other. Aside from showing our pride in the school colors, these shirts will allow us to form teams without reverting to the old-school shirts-and-skins trick (which we will later use in high school, to my great shame and delight).
Coach explains these two items to us and then gets even more serious as he pulls out of a small box the item that my dad had always called a jockstrap, but which Coach Fiori now refers to as an “athletic supporter.” An athletic supporter, he tells us, is a crucial element in the practice of physical exercise, and its use will be mandatory in every single class.
After this long exposition on our required uniform, Coach takes us downstairs to the locker room to explain his policies there. First, we will all be issued an identical black Master combination lock. We can only use the locks he provides, since Coach has a Master master key to these locks and needs to be able to inspect our lockers for possible contraband. Second, we will need to bring a towel from home, because showering will be mandatory at the end of every class, whether we’ve sweated or not. The coach will keep a checklist on which he will note our shower compliance for each class.
Coach’s no-nonsense approach to dress and hygiene is further reflected in the rigorous curriculum, which he also explains to us on that first day. Each month, we will study a new sport, timed to coincide with the sports seasons of small-town Pennsylvania high schools. We will have flag football in September, basketball in January, and track-and-field in May. We will wrestle in February and do rope climbing to coincide with the national Presidential Awards in Physical Fitness. (We will not, incidentally, ever have a unit on soccer. In the 1970s, soccer in the U.S. is a sport played only by the wealthy and by immigrants, and we have neither in Kane, Pennsylvania.)
Coach will begin each unit with detailed instruction on the history and rules of each sport, which we will have to memorize, since he will test us on them in a written exam. For example, I will forever remember that the first intercollegiate football game was played between Princeton and Rutgers, even though I had never heard of Rutgers before that first unit in seventh grade.
These written tests are a godsend for me, because I have no problem memorizing all the material and then regurgitating it on the test. And I need the A I get on the written tests, because I always do miserably on what Coach calls the “skills tests.”
As their name suggests, skills tests evaluate the quality of our performance of various sporting activities. We might get a score based on how far we can throw a football, using the proper technique. Or how quickly (if at all) we can climb a rope to the twenty-five-foot-high gym ceiling. How many pull-ups we can do, or how quickly we can run the mile.
I am chubby, weak, and tragically uncoordinated. Worse yet, I throw like a girl, no matter what type of ball I’m throwing. And I have absolutely no interest in sports. So the skills tests are invariably humiliating for me. Not only do I always get a low score; worse, my classmates snicker during my performance and then incorporate its inadequacies into their later rounds of daily harassment.
Even more traumatic than the skills tests—although significantly more enjoyable—are the mandatory showers at the end of Coach’s classes. Part of this is shame about my lumpy body, having to expose to the other guys my pointy boy-titties. And that lumpy body simply refuses to sprout body hair of any type, even as my classmates develop tufts above their bigger-than-mine genitals and in the pits of their more-muscular-than-mine arms.
Of course, the excruciating pleasure of those gang showers is the chance to observe—furtively and full of shame—these developments on my adolescent classmates’ bodies. With each stolen glance I memorize a few inches of Tim Giordano’s chest here, and a few inches of Jack Herman’s ass there. Then I take these images home and add them to those I had collected earlier, until I am able to construct full portraits of my favorite naked classmates in the gallery of my mind.
Gym class continues to torment me all through junior high. But in eighth grade there is one moment of resistance, one time when I rescue myself from the lowest low of that three-year nightmare.
Coach Fiori means well in making Jack Herman my partner during our unit on wrestling. Although I genuinely detest the mud of flag football and the heart-scorching exertion of running an impossible required mile, wrestling is my most hated phys. ed. subject. On the one hand, it’s just gross: both the rubber mat we use and the more developed of my classmates bear the nasty smell of adolescent sweat. On the other hand, there is the unspeakable danger of being in such intimate physical contact with other boys’ bodies. My subconscious fear of enjoying this contact is so great that I become even more incapacitated than usual when it comes to practicing for and executing the dreaded skills tests. You can’t begin to throw another boy around on a mat when you will barely let yourself touch him—and he can throw you all over the place if you put up no resistance.
It is because I am so bad at wrestling that Coach has made Jack my partner, which is thoughtful on his part, if misdirected. Jack Herman is such a good wrestler that he has already made the high school varsity squad by the time he’s in eighth grade. So Coach thinks it will be perfect for the kid with the strongest wrestling skills to mentor the kid in the class with the weakest skills.
Very bad idea.
Phys. ed. is the only class I have with Jack Herman. Throughout junior high, we take all our classes with the same cohort of students, having been tracked into specific sections based on our perceived aptitude. I am in the highest section, A-1, while Jack is in the next-from-the-bottom, C-1. They are preparing me and my cohort for the college prep track in high school, and they are preparing Jack and his section for Vo-Ag—the vocational/agricultural track. But because of sex segregation in the junior high phys. ed. program, the school combines two sections for gym class, so that both the boys and the girls will have a full class of thirty students. This is why Jack and I are in the combined 8A-1 and 8C-1 boys’ gym class.
Looking back, I can place Jack into a category that has always been especially dangerous for me: short guys with ripe bodies and an intellectual inferiority complex. Jack is several inches shorter than I am, but everything important is ripe and full and exactly where it’s supposed to be. I try not to look, but I can’t help it.
When Coach pairs me with Jack for wrestling, Jack pretends to be happy to help, but he immediately finds opportunities to use the situation to torment me in ways that will grow increasingly intimate. When Coach sets us up in the start position, Jack whispers into my ear, “I’m going to fuck you up, you big faggot.” He links his short arms, one over my shoulder and the other through my crotch, and then yanks so hard that my balls send pain shooting through my entire body.
Although he is shorter than me, Jack is way more muscular, and he is mean. He throws me around like nobody’s business. And since I never resist, I go flying and invariably hit the mat with a resounding thud. Jack particularly likes practicing a move called the “pancake” on me. As I know from the written test I had aced a week earlier, the pancake involves taking a standing opponent and slamming him to the mat in such a manner that the opponent lands flat on his back. It’s kind of like an upside-down belly-flop dive, but when Jack does the pancake on me, it hurts worse than a belly-flop dive, since I am hitting a thin mat on a hardwood floor, which yields way less than a pool of water.
As the dreaded wrestling skills test approaches, Jack isn’t teaching me a thing, and he’s throwing me around in more and more aggressive and painful ways, whispering “faggot” into my ear more and more boldly each time. I feel desperate to get out of the situation but can think of no respectable way to do it, until it comes time for the skills tests themselves.
Coach asks Jack to take his skills test first, so he can model correct form for the rest of the class. We take the test with our previously assigned partners, so Jack demonstrates the double-leg takedown on me, and then the half nelson, receiving perfect scores on each. But when I hear Coach say, “now do the pancake,” something inside me says “no”—no no no no no no no.
Jack wraps his arm around my shoulder and nearly kisses the word “faggot” into my ear. He lifts my soft hundred-pound body above his head and into a perfect horizontal position, so I will hit the floor perfectly flat. But the no in my head pulls my arm out of the perfect horizontal and down toward the floor at a ninety-degree angle. My hand flattens out to break my fall, and my shoulder lets out a perfect CRACK before sending me tumbling to the side like a bad foul ball.
My shoulder hurts like hell, but I couldn’t be more relieved. Coach Fiori takes me off to the side and massages my shoulder a bit. He then tells me to sit out the rest of that day’s skills tests and replaces me with a tough guy Jack doesn’t hate for the remainder of Jack’s exam. Later I am taken to the doctor, who assures me I have only sprained my shoulder and that it will heal quickly if I just keep my arm in a sling for a week or so.
When Dr. Aquino strictly forbids me from any wrestling whatsoever during the rest of the wrestling unit, I nearly hug him.
David Blackmore (he/him) left his small town in Pennsylvania to earn a BA from Harvard and a PhD from UCLA and spent years as a professor of English and Latin American studies at New Jersey City University. Two years ago, though, he returned to Pittsburgh to complete his memoir and to take a position as writing coordinator at Chatham University, where he teaches pedagogy and literature courses to MFA He recently used his faculty tuition benefits to take the leap and enroll as a student in the MFA program, since he had not previously studied creative writing formally. David’s book-length manuscript Chemical Works Road is now complete, and he has published excerpts in Wordrunners eChapbooks, The Watershed Journal, Rockvale Review, The Fourth River, Northern Appalachia Review, and Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose. You can learn more about David and his work at www.david-blackmore.com.