PINTA PARADE

                   

The third week of Physical Education we take a break from round the clock hooping to perform state mandated tests.We are to see how many push up and sit up we can perform in a minute. A steel machine with pincers takes our body fat. The encore is that we are given fifteen minutes to run as many laps as is humanly possible.

Coach Simmons is already impressed. I did 80 sit-ups in one minute and 71 push-ups. I haven't told him that I run Cross Country. I haven't told him that I have a race in a couple of hours. Somehow I figured I wouldn't run in PE on the day of my race.

I shouldn’t be running so hard. I have a race that night.

 

Coach Simmons keeps looking at  me. I am taking off. Juniors and Seniors are exempt from taking PE. I am lapping everyone on my fifth lap.  

I am wearing high tops rather than  my traditional shoes. I am running the way I always do. I am pushing myself. I am oscillating around the orbit of the gymnasium. I am passing everyone insight. I am thinking about my cousin's record planted on the wall less than 100 meters away.

At the end of fifteen minutes I have 69 laps. Just short of three miles.

Coach Simmons has a smile on his face.

 

                                                                        ***

“Do you remember me, Dave?”

I turn around. There is a ginger-haired girl. She is wearing the same patriotic garb as the rest of us.  My glasses our off. I tilt my head.

“Laurie?”

“Looks like you made it down here okay,” She says, with a smile. Her boobs look larger in her red PE shirt.

It is Laurie from last summer. Laurie whom I met while waiting for the bus to go to ICC. Laurie who took a poetry class last summer at Manual, the teacher who ironically was Pam.

I ask her how the poetry is doing these days.

“I actually kind of gave that up. I don’t want to be a poet anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t think that its something I’m very good at.”

I want to tell her that I used to listen to Def Lepard and think about her reading poems to me.”

I think you’re incredible at it. I think you are brilliant.”

Laurie shrugs. She says she thinks it was just a phase or something she was going through.

                                                         

                                                                ***
In the shower room the boys are expected to walk into the open showers completely naked, the majority of heads concentrating in skewed directions so as if not to inadvertently make contact with the keen part of their peers anatomy, the chrome overhead nozzles in the row of protruding showerheads look like something the Tin Man might empty and shake over the urinal during the seventh inning stretch. All the while showering.

You think about  the fashion in which the females are slouging off their red tops, reeling down blue shorts. You think about an cup-clad shell-braissered mermaid trying to free herself of her fins in slithered wiggle.

 

 

You continue to skate through a slipped martinets of  time, students ferrying nylon back packs like a Neanderthal man and a fresh kill, students looking clueless, popular girls wearing shoulder pads forming acute angles, cupping fingers over giggled braces,  girls holding books in front of their chest in almost mammogram fashion.

All the girls are wearing shoulder pads.

You next race is tonight.

You sometimes feel all alone even though you are surrounded by flesh all the time.