The Kyyote's Howl

Each day, for those four years, began with Physical Education.  School started at 8:00 A.M. and at 8:15 we were expected to be standing on our assigned number.  There were a series of lines consisting of numbers from 1 through 50, one for each coach’s PE class, painted on the blacktop outside of the locker rooms and the gym.  There were matching numbered lines outside of the girl’s locker room about 40 yards away.

“Dressing out” for PE required us to put on our uniform tee shirts.  These tee shirts were like two tee shirts sewn together.  On the outside was the red side with black lettering, and on the inside was a black side with red lettering.  The red and black were our school colors, and teams could be formed and identified by wearing one or the other of the two colors on the outside.  Each student wore red shorts, and in those days, shorts were short.  Not hot pants short, but almost. 

There was one more piece of clothing the boys were required to wear.  That was a jock strap, sometimes called a “banana hammock”.  To this 14 year old boy, it was one of the strangest things I had ever encountered.  There was an elastic band that went around the waist, just like normal underwear, only about twice as wide.  In the front, there was a triangularly shaped piece of elasticized mesh fabric about four inches wide at the top where it was attached to the waistband.  The fabric was gathered to a narrow point, placing the point under and behind the male parts of our bodies.  Attached at that point was another band of elastic that emergered from the place where the sun never shines, coming up each side to find its way under, around, or over each butt cheek and join the waistband at the sides, above the hips.  This jock strap seemed like it had been the brainstorm of some French fashion designer after spending too much time looking at native tribes in the National Geographics.  It was supposed to provide support for us boys during our physical activities.  I had been a very physically active kid all of my life up until then and had never felt the need for any support that my white cotton briefs hadn’t been able to provide.  The contraption had the ability to put its parts into places on my body that caused a continuous desire to find a way to move those parts to some more comfortable locations.

From about 8:05 until about 8:13 boys and girls would emerge from their respective locker rooms and mingle around before reporting to their numbered spots on the blacktop.  Those eight minutes were some of the most exciting minutes of each day.  The boys ogled the girls in their shorts and tee shirts.  It is hard to explain this to younger generations, but in those days girls wore dresses and skirts that were required to reach their knees.  At the junior high school girls weren’t allowed to wear red on Fridays because it could incite too much excitement.  Seeing those girls who were growing into women’s bodies wearing shorts and tee shirts was quite a new and wondrous experience.

But, there was danger involved in allowing oneself to become too lost in the scenery.  There was always the chance that some idiot would sneak up behind you and jerk your shorts down around your ankles, leaving you exposed in your jockstrap for all of the girls to see.  There was little that could be done that was more embarrassing than that.

At 8:15 the coaches would emerge, and the kids would scramble to find their places on their numbers.  Coach Gastineau was a Marine Corps veteran.  He was a big man, and wore a crew cut.   I’m sure he been an offensive lineman in his high school and college years.  The first words out of his mouth were almost always, “Alright, knock off the grab ass!”

Once attendance had been taken, the boys would be sent to the starting line to run the “Big Loop”.  The Big Loop was a run of about three quarters of a mile.  It was a torturous way to begin each day.  One of the kids, Billy, was an enormous, overweight kid.  When we were at the junior high school we had a seismograph that relayed data to UC that measured and monitored the seismic activity along the San Andreas Fault.  We would coax Billy into jumping up and down next to the seismograph to record the “earthquakes” he would produce on the black smoke covered cylinder as the needle jerked back and forth wildly.  Each day, during the Big Loop Billy would get about two or three hundred yards into it before hurling his breakfast.

The Big Loop went about 100 yards in a line from the starting line to the school parking lot.  It made a right turn then, and went about 300 yards along the parking lot sidewalk before coming to the end of the parking lot and the school grounds.  There, it turned right again, and after about 50 yards the trail rose to the ridge at the top of the man-made hill on which the football stadium bleachers were built.  The trail ran the length of the football field, ducking behind the press box before descending to the level of the field again.  At  the end of the football field it turned right and began the final 300 yards to the finish line.  Once all of the boys had completed the Big Loop, they were sent off to play other sports.  Every so often, the Big Loop would be run for a time and your time would be recorded as part of your PE grade.

Tom’s house and Tom’s backyard was on the other side of the chain link fence that separated the houses on his block from the school yard.  More importantly, his backyard was directly behind the press box.  Almost every morning we would run the first half of the Big Loop, but when the trail went behind the press box we would run down the hill and climb over the fence, and spend the next 45 minutes or so eating chocolate chip cookies and drinking milk, and watching morning cartoons.  About ten minutes before the end of our PE period we would climb back over the fence, and blend back in with the others for a few minutes before the whistle would signal us that it was time to hit the showers.

PE was one of my favorite subjects.

The next time, we’ll climb behind the wheel.  I hope you will come along for the ride.

The first day of high school our Home Room teacher, Miss Koner began by assigning our seats as she took attendance.  We were seated in alphabetical order at tables.  There were six tables per row, with an aisle in the center, and three rows.  Each table had two students facing Miss Koner’s podium at the front and center of the room.  I was seated at the last seat on the right side of the first row.  Next to me was a kid named Tom who shared my last name.  Miss Koner was our History teacher and our counselor, and as such, we students would remain together, as Miss Koner’s students for the next four years.

The small town we lived in was called a bedroom community, a suburb just a few miles south of Oakland and across the bay from San Francisco.  It was mainly a group of different housing developments built around what had been the original town’s center.  The original town had been surrounded by farms and fields, that on its western side reached eventually to the mud flats of the San Francisco Bay and two larger towns on its north and south with some hilly land squeezed between them to our town’s eastern side.  

At the end of World War Two, the lingering effects of the Dust Bowl, the G.I. Bill, and other factors combined with the opportunities that industrial growth on the west coast along with the sheer beauty of the California coast had brought about a tremendous period of population growth to the San Francisco Bay Area.

My father, who had spent his time in the Navy during the war on Saipan, an island in the South Pacific, and my mother with her teaching degree had joined the migration to California.  The move actually came in two phases.  It seems that my father had a car and no money, and his best friend had some money for gas but no car.  So, my father and his friend and his friend’s wife drove west to Oxnard where they found work.  Once my father had made enough money he sent for my mother and my two brothers to come join him.  About a year later my family moved north, to Richmond, which was one of the roughest places in the entire Bay Area.  I had been born in Oxnard, and a year later, our family moved into the brand new  three bedroom, one bath home in the tiny town along the bay.  That home cost $9,200.  Each of the homes on those newly paved streets were quickly filled with young families.  As soon as one development had been sold, another would begin and quickly sold out.  All of the kids in the town pretty much grew up together.  There were only two junior high schools, and they fed the single high school.

Tom and I had gone to different elementary schools, but had gone to the same junior high school.  His house was in a newer subdivision, and I hadn’t known him at our junior high.  That first day, in Miss Koner’s History class was my introduction to him.  We became best friends that year.  

I had never been a serious student, but I had always been pretty good about behaving properly and paying attention in class.  Tom had a different approach. 

Miss Koner was probably in her 50′s.  She had a brilliant mind and had gotten her degree from the University of California at Berkeley.  She knew her stuff.  Each day, she lectured and we were supposed to read the assignments and take notes during her lectures.  But, to be kind, she wasn’t a pretty woman.  She had white wispy hair that kind of radiated from the three inch bald spot on the crown of her head.  Her skin had some kind of condition that sometimes required her to wrap parts of her arms and legs with what appeared to be Saran Wrap.  Her skin was pale white with pink blotches.  On her face she wore a thick layer of white powder that was intended to cover the blotches.  Her lips were painted with dark red lipstick which covered, but didn’t fill, the deep crevices in them.  She had two very large front teeth that broke through her red lips, often picking up a partial coating of red along the way.  When she took attendance she snarled whenever she came to an vacant seat.  She had all of the warmth of an alligator in Alaska during January.  She scared me, without even trying.

Tom was kind of crazy.  During Miss Koner’s lectures he would start vibrating in waves brought on by silent giggling, for no apparent reason.  He would whisper to me to lick my arm and smell it.  I would hiss, “No!” back at him as quickly and firmly as I dared without drawing her baleful stare.  He would make sure that she wasn’t looking and slyly lick his arm and smell it like he was some kind of connoisseur of fine wines taking in the bouquet of an expensive cabernet sauvignon.  That invariably would bring about a new wave of silent giggles and tiny vibrations.  I would sit there in disbelief, first at his actions, and secondly at his willingness to do his crazy things considering the risk involved.

His favorite move was to place his left elbow on the table, raise his left hand to the left side of his face so that she was unable to see his nose and the right side of his face.  The silent giggles would begin, along with the waves of shaking that accompanied them.  Before long, snot bubbles would appear from one of his nostrils, grow in size, and then disappear back into his nose only to be repeated a few times, and then more silent giggling would follow.  I would try with all of my might to ignore him, to disregard his display, but try as I might I would eventually have to start trying to stifle my own silent giggles.  Of course, she could not see him, but she always spotted me when I tried to whisper for him to knock it off between my own giggles.  There was one day when, fed up with the mischief coming from the right corner of the front row, she fixed her daggers shooting glare on me, snarled, and dared, no ordered me to tell the rest of the class what was so funny.  There was no way I could tell the class about Tom’s insanity and snot bubbles, so I tried, with a mixture of remorse, fear, and a weak denial to avoid any more trouble by saying meekly, “Nothing”.  I had hoped that it would signal to her that I was sorry for interupting her lecture and would not let it happen again.  Instead of appeasing her, it was like being confronted with a coiled and rattling diamondback rattlesnake and trying to push it away with a pencil.  I was quickly handed a pass to the Dean of Boys office, my offense and her signature scratched onto the pink paper.

This was not good.  It meant that my parents would be contacted.  Of course, there was no way I could rat on Tom.  There is a code of honor that cannot be violated.  But, my mother was a teacher in the same small district and so my shame was also her shame.  Now, back in those days, “Spare the rod and spoil the child”, wasn’t a saying, it was a belief commonly held by almost all parents worth their salt.  By that time, I was too old to beat, and that made the situation even scarier.  What do they do when they can no longer beat you?  This one would get kicked up to my dad to deal with.  No one really knew what happened when something was beyond my mother’s level of discipline.  I mean, what comes after belts, hangers, switches, and metal pancake turners?

My father was a typesetter at a newspaper, and carried lead type around all day.  His forearms looked like Popeye’s.  All he had ever had to do was give us kids a look.  If you got that look, you didn’t waste time wondering why.  You just stopped doing whatever you were doing, and tried and hoped that you could just leave the room. 

When I got home from school that day, my mother told me that I would have to tell my father what I had done.  That was the worst!  That meant two or three hours of mental torment dreading what would be the the unknown hell that was to come.

When my dad got home I refused to step forward to die voluntarily, so my mother jumped in.

“Tell your father what happened today”, she said.

My dad looked at me, and I told him that I had been sent to the Dean’s office for disrupting my teacher’s lecture.  My dad got this slightly annoyed look on his face, and steam came from my mother’s ears.  My dad confined me to the house and yard for a month of hard labor.  If I wasn’t doing homework, I was to be pulling weeds in our backyard, of which there was an endless supply.

The next time will be a look at PE and Coach Gastineau.  I hope to see you then.

He thought back to that day twenty some years ago.  He sat on a shelf in a sporting goods store in a small town in Texas.  The boxes on the shelf around him held an assortment of balls, all with a thin layer of fine gray dust on the top of them.  The owner of the store had long ago ceased to need the meager income that the store provided to live on, and the items on the shelves served as an excuse to keep the store open and provide a meeting place for his cronies to drink coffee, tell stories from their youth, and to eulogize their friends, as the members of their group diminished over the years, more than to supply the needs of the small and dying community.  The town’s high school’s graduating class had fallen to 47 the previous year.

There were the golf balls in their box, shiny white, dimpled, with red logos marking them, like eggs from the hen house of some strange golf birds.  Like those tiny men who walk into a bar and state, “I can whup any man in the house”, the golf balls took great pride in their toughness and ability to travel farther than any of the other balls.  They dared to be hit with drivers, iron clubs and remained true enough to find a little cup in a green.

Next to them was a baseball proudly displayed in its box with the cellophane window.  The smooth white horsehide cover with the hand stitched red seams proudly claimed the title of “America’s Pastime”.

Then there was the giant of the group, looking like a shiny polished cannonball, perhaps a relic taken from some centuries old man-of-war.  There were the three mysterious white dots that seemed to be some sort of code that called attention to the only member of the group with its own name, written in white cursive, “Dick Weber”.

Next to the bowling ball, almost as large, was a soccer ball.  The beautifully decorated geometric shapes, stitched together that almost magically created the cover of the sphere.  The soft, padded panels reflecting the dim light contrasted with the hardness of the pressurized air that was contained within the ball.  The soccer ball never missed a chance to remind the others that it was the most popular ball in the world.

On the end of the shelf he sat. He knew that he was different.  To him, when he looked at the other balls, perfectly round no matter which direction he looked at them, he seemed to have been deformed during his creation.  It was as if his maker had taken a perfectly good round ball and decided to make a cigar out of it but gave up half way through the process when they realized the insanity of the idea.  His skin wasn’t smooth and lacked the luster of the other balls.  Finally, there were the laces.  They were there, but they were never intended to be loosened or tightened, and worst of all, as if his deformed oblong shape wasn’t bad enough, the laces ruined his balance.

During that year, at different times, each of the balls had been claimed and taken home by customers.  He had been the last, not surprisingly to him given his odd shape and dull appearance.  He had been dusted off and had been placed under a Christmas Tree, with a tag taped to his laces that read:

To: Drew
From: Santa

Merry Christmas!

That morning, he found himself in the arms of one very excited 7 year old boy who alternated from leaps into the air and running tiny five foot long laps, all the while shouting “Yes” over and over again.  He could only guess that this boy named Drew, in all of his excitement hadn’t noticed all of his imperfections.  The excitement was infectious and he decided that he might as well enjoy it while it lasted.

The boy quickly threw his clothes on and grabbing him ran outside.  Almost before the boy had cleared the closing door the boy had dropped him and kicked him before he could hit the ground.  He flew a few feet into the air, hit the ground, and after bouncing a few times in randomly different directions he wobblingly rolled to a stop.  He realized that it hadn’t hurt him at all.  As a matter of fact, it had felt good for some reason that he could not explain.  He was embarrassed at his inability to roll properly, like other balls, but the boy seemed unconcerned about that, just as he had been about his imperfections.

Over and over Drew repeated the steps of dropping him, kicking him before he hit the ground, running one way and then the other, tracking him as he bounced one way and then another until he rolled to a stop and was picked up again.

In a few minutes, Drew’s father came outside and showed Drew how to hold him with Drew’s tiny fingers placed into the spaces of his laces so that Drew could throw him with a spin and his blunt pointed ends faced Drew’s target and back at Drew.  He was beginning to see a reason for his laces and his pointed ends that seemed to allow him to cut his way through the air.

Drew took him along wherever the boy went.   He went to school with Drew and during the summers the two were inseparable.  Drew introduced him to the boy’s friends and they welcomed him with open arms.  They all kicked him, threw him, caught him, and ran with him in their arms.

One day, a couple of years later, as Drew walked past the small man made pond that was part of the 9 hole golf course, he saw one of the golf balls he had shared the shelf with.  It had a smile or a frown, depending on which way one saw it.  The shine was gone and little spots of gray mud partially filled the dimples of the ball sitting in the mud under two feet of water.

A few years later he spotted the soccer ball as Drew walked past the elementary school, as Drew tossed him into the air and then sprinted ahead to catch him before he could hit the ground.  The shiny layers of the panels had become scratched and dull and had begun to separate and peel away.  The soccer ball had become a kick ball.  He remembered how he had envied the soccer ball’s beauty and the symmetry and precision of the stitched together panels.

Over those past few years since he had become Drew’s constant companion, Drew had learned to throw him through the air farther and more accurately than any of Drew’s friends.  When Drew’s friends caught him they would invariably have to run towards Drew to close the distance to have any chance of being able to throw him back to Drew.  When they threw him he wobbled like a drunken ballerina.  When Drew threw him he seemed to spin like he had been launched from a lathe on an invisible wire strung through his center ffrom end to end and attached to Drew’s target.

Not long after seeing the soccer ball turned kickball, he spotted the baseball in a yard with a sign attached to the fence which warned, “Beware of Dog”.  It was no longer covered by the smooth white cover with the red stitches.  It was a thick layer of slimy dog saliva that covered the baseball now, and kept the string from unravelling, carried in the mouth of a Saint Bernard.

When Drew was in his second year of high school, he led his team to the 6 man high school state championship, breaking every passing record along the way, a feat he repeated the next two years.

He and Drew spent less time together than they had before high school.  The high school had their own footballs, and he had met Drew’s high school sweetheart.  Jenny, a pretty blonde with enormous energy and a love for Drew that was even greater, had soft hands that were pretty good at catching him when Drew would throw him to her.  Her passes had a tendency to cause him to wobble a bit, and sometimes stray from her intended target, but Drew never failed to catch him in spite of it.

One day, during the summer between Drew’s junior and senior years at the university, Drew and Jenny stopped at the second hand store in town.  Drew held him casually, as though he had always been a part of Drew’s body that Drew could remove, throw, and put back into place.  As Drew and Jenny browsed through the store he looked down into a wire bin on the floor and there was his old friend Dick Weber.  Gone was the polished shine, and the once smooth surface now more closely resembled the moon’s surface.  Drew and Jenny had gotten married earlier that spring and they were hoping to find a crib for the baby Jenny now carried inside her.

The happy couple welcomed their son to the world on Thanksgiving Day.  Working together, they had managed to finish school and receive their diplomas the next year.  With the arrival of their son David, Drew had placed him on a kicking tee on the large oak dresser the couple shared.  There he sat, close to the person that had taught him about love, and his own beauty.

Drew had taken a position as a history teacher and coach of the high school football team in a town close to where Drew had grown up.    Jenny had taken a position as a third grade teacher at the elementary school.

A few years passed and the young family settled in to their new home.  David was growing like a weed and was now in the first grade.  One night, Drew walked over to the dresser and picked him up.  He loved the feel of being in Drew’s hands.  It had been a long time since he had that feeling.  A horrible thought came to him.  He remembered what had happened to the other balls when they were no longer needed or wanted.  Then he saw the small paper tag with a strip of cellophane tape attached to it in Drew’s other hand.  On the tag was written:

To David

From Dad

Merry Christmas!