As a card-carrying geek, I’ve never been particularly physically impressive. This is a stereotype, true enough, but all stereotypes have a grain of truth in them. For me, even when I was young and skinny, it has been impossible to do more than a single pull-up. In elementary school, my first P.E. coach [big shout-out to Mr. Mitchell from Riverside Elementary in Orlando, Florida] was this huge Greek myth epitome of 1970’s American manhood. Until then, I thought my father was the strongest man I knew. But Mr. Mitchell, whose carefully constructed obstacle course in the field behind the school was worthy of a contest of Olympian proportions, made me wonder. Back in those days the list of who could beat up your dad was carefully pared down to ‘no one’. Part of the early phase of the course, before he added gigantic tires from some earth-moving machine, was a simple set of horizontal steel bars. You jumped, grabbed the first, and monkey walked across the others using only your arms. I usually fell. The next station was a single bar, long enough for 3 kids to use at once. Here, the idea was to do as many pull-up’s (what are also called ‘chin-up’s’) as you could until he blew his whistle, which always hung with a pair of extra sunglasses (I don’t recall ever seeing his eyes) from a lanyard around his neck. I would spend most of the time until the shrill whistle put an end to my shame trying to complete a single, sad pull-up. It rarely worked. President Carter decided in 1977-78 that American kids should be more healthy. So Mr. Mitchell was training us for some Presidential Fitness contest I always thought meant that the POTUS was analyzing my lack of physical prowess from the Oval Office. About this time I discovered Star Wars trading cards, Starlog, monsters, and Greek mythology. It was all pretty much downhill for me after that. In high school, the humiliation was turned up a notch. Our P.E. teacher, also the assistant coach of the football team, the head wrestling coach, and our health teacher, made sure we knew we were the scrubs who had washed out of the official Athletics program. We would play football, basketball, or run track…and a random half of us (which seemed to include me a disproportionate amount if the time) were required to strip to our waists so our team mates could tell us apart. We were the humiliated Skins in a game of Shirts vs Skins that gave the opponent that was fully clothed the advantage. Why? Sheer humiliation. Adolescence, for boys, brings with it the last gasp of baby fat, the uneven distribution of body hair, and embarrassing situations involving cracked voices, unwelcome erections, and the like. For me, an escape was needed. I took it in the form of what is now called alternative reality (or augmented reality, etc). This was the 1980’s and Madonna was like a virgin, Michael Jackson was moonwalking, and New Wave had been replaced in my heart by Rush and Pink Floyd. So, without a single app or cellular technology of any kind, I made up my own world thanks to the advanced directives in my Dungeons and Dragons training regimen. The mountains of North East Alabama (namely, Lookout Mountain, at whose base my high school had been built in the late 1960’s) became the Black Serpent Mountain in the wilderness of Tarantis (the name of a Judges Guild city-state I owned, if you are a RPG'er). I am slightly ashamed to admit this now, considering my political beliefs, but in my daytime fantasy designed to take me away from the boring, abject humiliation of Physical Education, I pretended I was a slave. This is secretly what many high school kids feel like, forced to go to a school with other awkward kids who you are convinced hate you. Somewhere law and parents insist you remain. Unless you are able to make Mr. Mitchell proud, you are turned over to the city administrators who set you, near naked, to work in the fields. Intent on my white privilege fantasy of oppression, I knew the pain of toiling for my Tarantine overlords. It was all…so very humiliating. A word I keep using, and for good reason. Coach Colburn, a nice guy who once secretly complimented me by calling me a ‘renegade’ (a term he applied with some personal mirth for reasons I would never understand until I dug into this story of marginalized adolescence), would eventually call an end to our ridiculous attempts to play touch football, and we would return to the Dungeons: the basement boys changing rooms in the gym. There, we would dutifully reapply deodorant to our reeking armpits, studiously ignoring the 3 kids with enough courage to take a shower (just the thought of that room has made me reach for a Xanax bottle that is no longer on my dresser), and redress in our clothes. Soon, we would be shivering in our jackets (as a renegade, I wore my father’s old tweed overcoat or his longer London Fog raincoat, de rigueur for 80’s Clash fans) in the Autumn air. The fantasy escape hatch of my life as a toiling slave seems mildly humorous and more than a little bit sad to me now, with so many years passed. I wonder, as I have on a few occasions, what might have happened if I would have tried a little harder. I wonder why I chose to play an ostracized part of a hated underclass in a fantasy to pass the tedium of being an ostracized part of a mildly ignored underclass in reality. I wonder if I had tried to fully engage if I would have been ignored, or felt it so keenly. Fantasies help us deal with things in a space we feel comfortable with. Though these days, saying 'safe space’ means you are a malingerer, or at best part of an over privileged generation of coddled cry-babies. Truth was, Generation-X was perhaps over privileged, but we were not coddled. Why I chose to react the way I did and for the reasons I did are still a little bit hazy. I know those days are long gone, and confronting the most humiliating moments is a masochistic luxury that means next to nothing in the scheme of things. But it’s how I felt, and what I did. The reasons may be legion, and the subtext lost, but the feeling of childish stupidity retains some of its poignant value. I do not mind that this story makes me seem weak, inefficient, and perhaps even unmasculine, in part because I have realized that failure is not a sign of anything and the only weakness was my failure to try. It is a memory many of my friends will cringe at. I expect this, and accept it as I have, with zen-like patience, accepted this memory myself. Our past is but prolog, a poor replacement fantasy for the future. Where I will play Lord and not leper, and by my command the slaves of my failures will be freed.
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