Sort of like Lord of the Flies: My High School Gym Class

Starting in public high school in 1964, after the sheltered environment of a Catholic middle school, was difficult for me for many reasons, but perhaps my biggest difficulty was adjusting to gym class. In middle school, we didn’t have a gym class, just a recreation period at lunch. Now I was expected to go to gym class, share a locker, participate in exercise and sports activities, and shower afterward.

Nowadays, I gather, students are spared the showering requirement. It wouldn’t have been so bad if during my first shower I hadn’t encountered the ace pitcher from my little league baseball team. Wagging his penis at me, he said, “How would you like to touch this, Palof?” I thought to myself, “I’m a Catholic. I don’t want to touch mine, let alone yours.” I was horrified. I thought that my parents had sent me to Sodom and Gomorrah High!

Our coach was a former Marine sergeant who made us march around the gym while he yelled “Left!” or “Right!” If you turned the wrong way, he threatened to make you carry a brick in your left hand so that you would be able to distinguish it from your right.

One way to try to avoid gym was to claim that you had forgotten your gym clothes. An unfortunate student made this claim one too many times. We will call him Duffy. Every gym student quickly learns that there is a hierarchy of physical fitness. Duffy was on the very bottom. Grossly overweight, he typically wore baggy, stained clothes with one side of his button up shirt tucked in, the other side out. Shy and socially awkward, he compounded his lowly rank in gym class with a low social status outside the class. One day when he insisted that he didn’t have his gym clothes, the coach made another student go back to the dressing area and check Duffy’s locker. Having discovered Duffy’s clothes, clothes that had been festering in the locker for weeks, the student returned holding the reeking t-shirt and shorts at the grip end of a baseball bat.

“He has clothes, coach,” the student announced.

“Duffy!” yelled the coach. “Get dressed!”

Not much further up the fitness scale from Duffy, I seemed to lack all athletic ability. I dangled helplessly at the end of the climbing rope and had to stop short in pain when running around the track. In dodge ball, or, as it was called in our school, bombardment, I watched as the skillful players on each side strove to eliminate the skillful players on the other side so that the game always concluded with us smaller, weaker students scurrying about halfheartedly trying to avoid being slammed in the mopping up action, as balls that missed us would hit occasionally cannonball into the gym doors, the sound thundering through the gymnasium. In wrestling, I could usually struggle only briefly before being pinned. I took no pleasure in the few students that I could pin since their flaccid bodies seem to collapse with slightest exertion on my part. In volleyball, I hit the ball so that instead of going over the net, it flew behind me and through the basketball hoop to cries of “why couldn’t you do that in basketball season, Palof!” Apparently, my abject fear of gym class, my diet of butter laden fried foods and my binge eating of all varieties of Hostess baked goods was not serving me in good stead when it came to the required physical activities.

But one day the routine debasement of gym was memorably transcended. As much as I hated the coach who was our gym teacher, he, at least, like all strongmen, kept order in our little society. It was tacitly understood that the jocks could not go beyond casual, incidental cruelty to us lesser beings. One day, though, the coach was ill, and, unlike other such occasions, no substitute arrived to take his place. Someone in authority, obviously someone who had never read Lord of the Flies, thought it a good idea to put children in charge of children. The jocks in class, who were looked to by the administration as the natural leaders of our gymnasium dystopia, were told that they should put the class through our normal gym activities, which at the time happened to be wrestling.

The jocks soon tired of boring wrestling practice and decided to create a more interesting event. In our class, there was a guy who seemed to be always doing chin-ups. Let’s refer to him as Mr. Chin-up. It almost seemed as if you could enter the gym day or night and find him robotically doing chin-ups. I have no memories of him walking hallways, being in class, no memories of him ever speaking or manifesting any hint of personality. Behind his eyes there only seemed to be a ganglia commanding him up and down on the chin up bar. The exercise had bowed up his shoulders so that he appeared to have no neck, just a burr cut head mounted on a triangle of trapezius muscle.

Mr. Chin-up was not part of the jocular jock ratpack, but he was amenable to being their gladiator. They placed him in the middle of a wrestling mat and then went around the assembled students picking out the smallest and weakest, including, of course, yours truly, to be the combatants against Mr. Chin-up. They spaced us out in a circle around him and explained that, if we all charged him at once, we could get him down and pin him to the mat, winning the contest. Theoretically, this plan seemed feasible. In any event, I suppose I was too afraid to dissent. Having stationed us reluctant combatants, the jocks told us to charge when their leader yelled, “Go,”

When he shouted his command, I ran out onto the mat and leaped up onto Mr. Chin-up’s brawny shoulders and wrapped my arms around him, clinging on and struggling to find some advantage, expecting any moment to feel the collision of other small bodies so that we Lilliputians would topple our musclebound Gulliver. But as I was spun around by Mr. Chin-up, I could see from my perch the ring of pale faces, my comrades frozen to their positions around the mat. For a moment, the crowd cheered me on, and my name rang out in a celebratory clamor, one brief moment of glory before Mr. Chin-up reached around, hoisted me up and dropped me to the mat like a soldier tossing down a duffle bag of dirty laundry.

How glad I was when high school and high school gym classes were over. Now what to do with my life? My father said that I should go to college which meant the closest and the cheapest: Cleveland State. The problem for me was that they had a two-quarter physical education requirement. The first day of class, though, you assembled poolside. If you could swim the length of the pool, you passed on to activities like running, push-ups, sit-ups, etc. But if you failed you spent the term learning to swim and having fun in the water. I had no problem floundering. Both terms. Real fitness, health, and nutrition lie in my future, but for that moment in time I was happy to improve on my high school gym experience.