Interclass School Games

I’m not sure what else to call them, but I recall we had them at both Pinecrest and St. Theresa, where the school made up teams of members of different home rooms and grades, named them particularly cool and evocative names like the blue team, the red team, green, etc., or some such, and set the teams to compete athletically for points. Sort of like team Olympics.

Pinecrest was held in the warm spring months, so the sports were relay races, high jumps and the sort. I was especially good at the sprints, somewhat good at high jumps, disastrous at throwing events. We’d compete, and the teachers would award the points to the winning teams, and after completing the full circuit of events, the points were tallied and the three teams with the highest scores won gold, silver, and bronze. I don’t remember actually winning a medal, although I do remember once or twice being confused by who actually did win an event, not keeping the actual number of home runs or whatever clear in my head. Paying close attention to details like timekeeping and unmarked scoring was not really my strong suit back then.

St. Theresa’s was held in the winter, but the events were pretty similar. The one I recall most of all was a simple one. One team had to kick a soccer ball through the opposing team, each player in turn, and the team that kicked through the other the most got the points. I knew I would do well at this one. I’d played soccer at recesses since grade 1 and was always good at it. I could always kick long and far, and with reasonable accuracy. There were no other rules than those simple ones; so, when my turn came, I prepared for the kick by setting up the ball on a built up, make-shift tee of snow. I set the ball atop it, stood back, and having already figured out who had guarded their end the worst, decided to kick through them. I decided to keep the angle of the kick as secret as possible to the very end so the other team wouldn’t be able to shift their goal keeping at the last moment, as I’d seen them do, skipped the first couple steps, and then quickly wound up and kicked hard. And realized my mistake the moment I connected with the ball; I’d stacked the tee too high. My instep kicked the ball, not my toe, and the ball went high, not hard and deep as I’d intended. It went oh so high, like a pop-up fly ball in baseball. I watched the ball as it rose, as it seemed to hang in space forever, and I cursed. It was the easiest catch of the event. I didn’t win a medal at that particular Olympics, either.

Roughhousing

Boys will be boys. You remember. You don’t even have to remember. All you have to do is observe your kids, your grandchildren, the kids in playgrounds, or at the mall as you go about your day. It doesn’t take much to set boys off, to try to take each other down, or test one another’s strength. It’s all an alpha male thing, jostling for position, each one trying to rise to the top of the heap. It’s a sex thing, showing off, inviting girls to notice ME. Should girls be present, it can escalate pretty quickly. It can become a fight in the blink of an eye. Worse still if one of those boys likes the girl present; and it can become a desperate bid to save face if circumstances turn for the worse. Of course, girls needn’t be present, either. I wasn’t immune.

One day, back in Grade 8, Garry Martin and I were sent on an errand. Classes were in session, the halls empty. As we were about it, we began to joke around, and began to push and shove, never actually meaning to hurt one another. If anything, we were just having fun, giggling the whole time, muffling our laughter so as not to get in trouble for disturbing the classes in session, or the hallowed peace of the halls. We started to throw shadow punches and Kung-Fu kicks, always sure to be wide of the mark. Mind you, some of those came pretty close as we ducked and weaved in and out of range. Then I closed in, just as Garry began to thrust out a leg, his body becoming somewhat horizontal. Committed, I could not, for the life of me, check myself. But I tried. I skid to a stop, piked my body. I felt the psychic thrust of the foot approaching me. And then I felt a tap. In a slightly sensitive spot. Not even a tap. Let’s just say there was enough contact to say there was the hint of contact. And my entire world contracted with that touch, into that moment. I don’t think I’d ever experienced that much pain in my entire life, and I’d experienced some pain by then, riding into parked cars, falling off fences, that time I fell off my bike and landed in the hospital with a concussion. It exploded, rushing out from that central spot and cutting off all sensation everywhere else. Already piked, I crumbled. It must have seemed a seamless flow of motion when observed from without; you’d have to ask Garry. Garry was instantly horrified, seeing me down on the floor, clutching at my crotch. He rushed forward and whispered a panicked, “Are you okay?” when it must have been obvious that I wasn’t. I think we both thought that unless I got up pretty quickly, we’d be in shit, first for fighting, then for breaking the rules for roughhousing, and for not going about our chore like little automatons. Thankfully, that all-encompassing pain left me as quickly as it came, but I was tender for some time, certainly unable to do more than shuffle for a few minutes. Needless to say, whenever I see someone get kicked in the nuts in a film and continue to fight, I call bullshit.

Transitions

Transitions can be hard. So can letting go. I had always felt oddly separate in Grade 7. All the kids around me had come from other schools in groups, in readymade cliques, if you will. Not so me, the lone transfer from the public-school system to the Catholic. Of course, as I said in an earlier memory, thank God for my being set next to Garry Martin in Grade 7 Homeroom. We struck it off that first day, and later, when I followed him out into the playground at first recess and approached him (not without an extreme fear of rejection, I might add), he invited me to stay, introduced me to his friends from Schumacher Public, and soon that small group attracted a few other geeks and freaks, the too tall, the too redheaded, the slightly overweight, the bookish, the poor who were poorly dressed, a few natives down from Moosonee.

But I always pined for my old friends from Pinecrest. I think that’s understandable, but my old friends from Pinecrest living in my neighbourhood didn’t share my nostalgia, it seems, Larry specifically, not to rant on Larry; in retrospect, he had grown up faster than I had, and he and I didn’t actually share the same interests, anymore. What they were then, I could only guess at: girls most definitely (I liked them, too, but I really didn't know this new batch of girls, was hopelessly confused about them, and was terrified that this new batch of girls didn’t like me much, a couple of which were openly hostile to me), hockey maybe (I don’t really know if hockey was in his repertoire, at all). I’d call on them/him weekends, but nothing came of it. Larry’s younger brother Ralph hung out with me for a couple summers, then I outgrew him, we outgrew each other. By then, I was hanging out at the pool more, first as a teacher’s aide (junior life-guard, we called it). These people became my closest friends throughout high school.

But separations are sometimes hostile, fueled by hurt and doubt and the need to sever and move on. Shortly before the summer vacation following Grade 7, I was missing Larry, who I thought my closest friend at Pinecrest. I walked the short distance (just around the corner, really) from my house to his, hoping to find him and rekindle our flagging friendship. I crept up to his fence and peered between the boards to see if I could catch a glimpse of him before ringing the doorbell.

Larry and his new crew rounded the front corner of his house just then, and he and they saw me at the fence.

“What are you doing there?” Larry yelled.

“Looking for you,” I answered.

“What are you doing in my yard,” he said, his voice full of threat. His tone baffled me. And I had no idea how to answer, thinking I just had. His new friends thought this the height of fun, and laughed. I had no idea who these kids were. I’d never seen them before. I still don’t know who they were. I have no memory of their faces.

“Get off my yard,” Larry ordered.

Not to lose face, I didn’t, but I did begin to make my way home, keeping an eye on this menacing group led by my grade school and childhood friend. I wasn’t not fast enough, apparently.

Larry said, “I said, ‘get off my yard,’” again. Now, I knew that this was city property and that his yard ended at the fence, so, I said so. Not the brightest move, because Larry’s pack decided to force the issue. They rushed me. I stood my ground. Again, not the brightest move, as there were 5 of 6 of them. They rushed me, pushed me, grabbed me, surrounded me, and made to push me off balance. I pushed back, more to keep to my feet than to do damage.

I blurted, “You don’t scare me,” and “That didn’t hurt, at all,” or something of the sort.

That’s when the first punch landed, first to the body, then others to the neck and head. Now, I was never much of a fighter, but I fought back, limited mainly to elbows, knees and kicks. For every landed blow, I lashed out, and with every new punch, my fury rose. I remember landing a few vicious elbows to other’s heads. And that’s when the punishment stopped.

We separated, exchanged the expected insults, and then each made our way home.

When I got there, my Dad saw me first. I was crying, by then. He asked me what happened and I told him. I could tell he was mad as hell, but he told me to not tell my mother, that telling her wouldn’t do any good, anyhow. Then he decided I should know how to fight. Fight dirty, he told me. That’s the only way anyone fights, he said. You may not win, but if they’re going to hurt you, make them regret it. Make the fuckers bleed.

John

A John. Not The John. This distinction will be evident in posts to come.
One of my first friends in St. Theresa in Grade 7 was a Native boy. His name was John. I have no clue what his last name was. I can’t even say that I knew him well. I didn’t know him that long. He was a quiet young man, not terribly scholastic. Maybe that was what drew me to him, his unpresuming quiet. He seemed out of place in all the bluster and activity that surrounded him. If you've ever known a North American Native, you'll know what I mean.
As to his less than scholastic nature, he was not stupid. He was just quiet. That said, he was not particularly interested in his studies. I cannot comment on what is schooling was, or where he went to school before I met him, or even how long he had lived in Timmins. But I remember seeing how he struggled. I wanted to help him. He was kind to me, after all. I lent him the notes he was missing once (he'd been away, and had fallen even further behind than he'd already been), he tried to hand them back, but I insisted. John was too shy to insist I take them back. He had reason to; he was moving back to Moosonee, and I would never see him again.
I had to borrow Garry Martin's notes to copy when I discovered that John had left. Needless to say, I studied how my straight-A friend took notes. They weren’t that different from the notes I took. He just retained the information therein better than I did.

St. Theresa, Grade 7

In a few weeks I’d settled into St. Theresa Secondary, I’d mapped out the layoff the land, so to speak, even made a few friends. Garry Martin welcomed me into his group of friends. We were a ragtag motley group of those who didn’t quite fit in anywhere else, but we didn’t just let anyone IN, either. It was a relatively small school, and not so many people as to have unlimited cliques. Some may have tagged us geeks, and that’s bullshit, but not actually wrong, either. We may not have been jocks—there was not a hockey player among us—but most of us played sports; many of us were in track and field, a couple loved to watch football, and Garry and I discovered we were both swimmers (although how we both managed to grow up as pool rats at the Schumacher pool and never share lessons or even meet is still a mystery to me). None of us had girlfriends, so maybe that’s where that came from, not that we didn’t like girls. We certainly talked about them a lot. But we were also still a little young for that, I think. I did have my string of crushes by then: Heather, Allison, and Patricia, by then. But I really didn’t know what I was supposed to do about those crushes. We were each of us experiencing a little arrested development at that time, I think. Or maybe everyone develops at their own pace, in their own time.

I remember playing tag in the school compound. We played with an Indian rubber ball. You got tagged by the ball, you were IT. This guy was chasing me, his name was Archie, I think, but we called him Lou for reasons that escaped me even then. Lou was IT. I ducked and wove between groups of people, trying to keep them between him and me, trying not to get boxed in. Long story short, he boxed me in. I found myself up against the gym wall, turned a little sideways, hands out to ward off the coming pain, waiting for the inevitable that never seemed to come. He made a couple fake throws to see if I’d bolt left or right before finally committing. He tagged me with that hard Indian-rubber, and bolted. The ball being Indian-rubber, and the ground being packed gravel, it didn’t bounce too far. I gathered it up, stretching out the knot of pain he just gave me. The ball was heavy. I looked down the gym wall and saw that Lou was running a straight line, not weaving at all. I took aim, and threw as hard as I could. I didn’t really have much of a throwing arm, I was more a sprinter and a swimmer, and could never throw too well; but this time the ball flew straight and true, arcing beautifully. But as I released the ball, I thought that I’d thrown too hard. I watched the ball as it rose and as it began its decent, then I looked back down at Lou, who was still racing straight ahead without any hint of variance at all, back up at the ball, and back down at Lou. And I felt a thrill rise up in me. I’d actually thrown the ball perfectly. The ball came down on Lou’s head before ricocheting up again, Lou flattened to the earth beneath it.