It’s ironic that a kid who quit high school would be asked back to give a motivational speech, but that’s exactly the invitation I received the other day. I never felt much a part of any school I attended, high school most of all. My weight was the trouble. When you’re fat, you’re excluded from the various social groups. I think one of the reasons my joke about carrying a nine-by-twelve rug to nursery school goes over so well is that everyone carries some kind of burden in life.
In high school I was a hippie. I had long hair and did whatever I could to buck the norm. I was a radical looking for trouble. I once got in trouble for refusing to stand during the national anthem. I didn’t do it because I had anything against the U.S. After all, my father was a veteran. I did it to irritate this one teacher who was a real stiff rod. That and my fondness for antagonizing authority.
This teacher was a real rigid goofball, and when I refused to stand, he hauled my butt down to the assistant principal’s office and started to spew out this patriotic nonsense about his being a veteran who didn’t risk his life so some anti-American commie punk like myself could desecrate the flag. That got me to spouting off about your being a disabled veteran. We yelled at each other for about fifteen minutes, while the assistant VP, a short, squat man with a bald head shaped like a nosecone, watched with his feet propped on his desk. When we finished yelling, he told us both to get out.
However, it was gym class that accelerated the end of my education. I hated, absolutely hated, gym class. Undressing my fat body in the locker room was the worst ego-shattering experience of my teenage life. If the kids weren’t cracking jokes about my weight, they were staring at me. Some weren’t as obvious as others. But I knew that they wanted to see what someone as fat as me looked like. It’s the same way people look at someone who’s missing a limb. People freak at anything that deviates from the norm. These days especially, they treat fat like a disease, like they’ll catch it if they get too close.
While changing clothes, my heart would pound so hard waiting for the first giggle, trying to cover myself until I could get the undersized gym shorts on. I’d burn from embarrassment, feeling the blood flush my skin. Then I’d have to trot out onto the field, usually arriving late, where this sadistic little gym teacher with a big, bushy mustache and bowed legs would make me run and jump when all I wanted to do was hide.
The coach, as he liked to be called, always had this idea that he could take a guy who had been fat for ten years— me, for instance—and slim him down in ten months. I hated him for that, but I hated myself more.
It got to the point where I would do anything to get out of gym, including skipping the entire day of school. All I could think about was this one horrible hour. It filled me with so much fear and anxiety that I couldn’t cope with the other hours in the day. As such, going to school became unbearable. Finally, I knew it had to end. I couldn’t continue living with this stress. Then one day the twerp with the whistle roared the three words I dreaded.
“Take a lap!”
“Oh no, not laps,” I thought.
I hated laps. I couldn’t do them. I was fat. I smoked. I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to do them. I’d walk.
“Pick it up, Anderson!” he’d shout. “Move it!”
“Screw him,” I thought. And one day I just refused to do it.
“No,” I thought, “I’m not going to run the lap.”
Coach asked me what I was doing.
“I’m not going to run the lap,” I explained calmly. “I can’t, and you can’t make me.”
It wasn’t very dramatic, at least as dramatic moments go, but the mini-mutiny I staged had a lasting effect on me. I was immediately ordered to get dressed and told to report to the chief gym czar, an even more demented, disagreeable fellow. I got dressed and walked out the door.
However, instead of going into the gym office, I turned the other way and walked right off the school grounds. “You know,” I thought, “I’m never going to come back here.”
Signed,
And I never did