I go to St. Mel’s grammar school and it doesn’t have a gymnasium. They ran out of money when they were building the school, so what was supposed to originally be the gymnasium became the church. Therefore, there were no phys ed classes. If that isn’t proof there’s a fucking God I don’t know what is.
But then something terrible happened. I went to high school. And St. Francis Prep did indeed have a gymnasium. School was hellish enough as it was, but the idea of having to interrupt the day and change out of your regular clothes into other clothes to have to throw a ball around for forty-five minutes was so unimaginable to me that you might as well have asked me to catch and skin a rabbit. And to make matters worse, since I had never actually taken a gym class before, I was completely inept at everything. The rules to any sport as indecipherable to me as ancient Greek. I could spit out the lyrics to Sweeney Todd at the drop of a hat but held a basketball with the same horror you would a severed head. Going into a locker room for the first time at the age of fourteen, I felt not unlike how I imagine Martha Stewart must have felt, years later, arriving in prison. Nothing in our previous lives could have possibly prepared us for this.
I approached my locker the way Brad Davis approached his jail cell in Midnight Express. This isn’t happening. A horrible mistake has been made. I had not been caught smuggling drugs through Turkey like Brad Davis had, and yet here I was. My fate now to be determined by the capriciousness of a random phys ed teacher. A mediocre, disgruntled former athlete at best, a psychopath at worst. I changed into my gym clothes with the bashfulness of a geisha. A music hall burlesque performer from the 1890s showed more skin than I did. If anyone got so much as a glimpse of my bare shoulder I would’ve been surprised. Taking one shirt off and replacing it with another with the skill of a circus contortionist. I made such a concerted effort to look only at my locker and not at any of the other boys that if a gunman had entered the room I still wouldn’t have turned my head.
Freshman year wasn’t too bad. We were required to take track, badminton, and square dancing. All gay people can run, so no problem there. Badminton nobody could really play, so that wasn’t a problem either. And square dancing, well, God knows why the fuck we were taking that. Was it an ’80s thing? I had no clue. Neither did anyone else. But needless to say I was in heaven. “This is so dumb,” I’d state to whoever happened to be standing next to me, while inside I was furiously memorizing each move. “Allemande left, do-si-do, and promenade!” After two classes I was ready to move to Texas. The short period of my life where I was taking square dancing was perhaps the most carefree time of my entire childhood. I had cast myself in Dancing with the Stars decades before the show even existed. And I was taking home the mirror ball. I was actually good at something in gym. Others would look at me to study my footwork. At fourteen I was already being prepared for line dancing in gay bars. How thoughtful of the Franciscan brothers who ran the school. If they threw a circuit party it couldn’t have been any gayer. Maybe this isn’t going to be so bad after all, I allowed myself to think. Maybe I could do whatever they threw at me and just didn’t know it yet.
But everything changed my sophomore year. What sick fuck would think to follow square dancing with football? In what universe did these two things even coexist much less fall under the same subject heading in a school curriculum. One is light, fun, joyous. The other instilling more fear than a home invasion. Just hearing a football game on television caused me anxiety. Everything seemed like it could break out into chaos at any moment. The heightened aggressiveness felt unsafe, even in my own living room. As if a foot could come through the TV and kick me in the face. I couldn’t get far enough from the sound of it. Sitting in my room with the door closed and something normal on like Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte at full volume. Preferring to spend my Sunday afternoons with Bette Davis and Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn. Avoiding football games and any conversation associated with football took up more time than you’d think. And now I was expected to PLAY this game? Up until this point I had never thrown anything other than a fit.
The first day of football in gym class I decide to try to just blend in. Maybe they’ll go over the rules for those who aren’t familiar with them, I think to myself. I can’t be the only one who doesn’t know them. Maybe it’s not as popular as I think it is. But, of course, it is more popular than I had even anticipated and there is no talk of rules, there is a complete understanding that this is a language we all speak. Except for me. The ball gets tossed around and everyone immediately appears to know what to do. Our phys ed teacher is not unkind, probably thirty, not unattractive, but let’s just say he wasn’t a distraction either. He barked at us in the way these men usually do. Acting out some masculine fantasy from their childhood no doubt. I was unimpressed. I wander off. I’m clearly not going to be able to blend in. I return to the locker room and change back into my clothes, then exit the school and walk the few blocks to Bloomingdale’s, where I wander the aisles trying on outfits I can’t afford. St. Francis Prep is in Fresh Meadows, Queens, right off the LIE and lucky for me it is a few short blocks from a multiplex, Bagel Nosh, and Bloomingdale’s. When things get too much at school, or I need a break, I head out, grab a bagel, and poke through the sales rack of Perry Ellis shirts. One of the perks of blending into the background, having no friends, and doing everything alone is that I have basically become invisible. Nobody really notices if I skip a class or go to the bathroom after attendance and don’t come back. If any of the salespeople think it’s odd that a fifteen-year-old strolls in at 11:00 A.M. most school days to casually try on Calvin Klein jeans they never mention it. I nervously wonder as I hold a Lacoste shirt up to my chest for sizing how long I’ll be able to avoid football. We have gym class twice a week and there are just so many times I can make a French exit before the phys ed teacher notices.
At home I start to consider my options going forward. The stress of how I’m going to continue getting out of gym class begins to eat away at me. Today, I could go online and learn the rules of football, watch a YouTube tutorial, and maybe have a chance of teaching myself, but then there was nothing. I couldn’t ask anyone. It was too shameful. The night before my next gym class I decide I’m just going to go out there and do it. How hard could it be if these idiots can do it anyway? I mastered square dancing, I can master this. Fuck them.
After yet another sleepless night I show up for gym looking like a junkie. Tired and mentally exhausted I steel myself to do whatever is required as I run out onto the field in the freezing November air with my classmates. And the ball comes toward me and somebody screams, “Janetti!” (being addressed by my last name always sent a chill down my spine, nothing good comes of that) and I run away from it. This isn’t going to work, I instantly realize. I can’t just wish myself to play football. I head back to the locker room, humiliated. I hear whispers of “fag” as I retreat midclass. I will never go back.
I begin to plot my next course of action. Every second of every day I am consumed with one thought. Football. It sits on my chest like a piano. There’s no way out, I think, except one. A physical injury that would preclude me from participating. That’s when I decide I’m going to break my toe. A foot or an arm would be too extreme, and how would I even do it short of throwing myself from a moving car. No, a toe is just right. Small enough to not be of any great concern, but broken, would allow me to limp, get attention (a perk!), and with all certainty avoid gym class for several months. Besides, how difficult could it be to break a toe? I’ll do it with one swift move. And the next thing I know I’m in our basement laundry room standing over my foot with a raised hammer like Kathy Bates in Misery. But when I bring the hammer down I move my foot at the last moment. I try several more times. The foot, with a mind of its own, continues to save itself at the last second. I’ve always had a low threshold for physical pain (all gay people do; emotional pain, on the other hand, we are built for) and I’ve quickly discovered the fault in my plan. And then I think, This is insane. I’m trying to hobble myself to avoid throwing a ball. There’s got to be another way. I have to be more clever. And then it comes to me.
The next time I have football in my schedule, instead of going to the gymnasium I head to the guidance counselor’s office and tell her I need to speak with her immediately. Our guidance counselor is Sister Wilma, an ample woman of indeterminate age with a warm smile.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
“I need someone to talk to and I don’t know where else to turn,” I say, drama oozing out of every pore. She invites me in and we sit. Her office walls covered with travel photos, her coffee table stacked with celebrity magazines. I’m going to like it here. (Why the office was filled with copies of People and Us and not college brochures never crosses my mind.) She is at a chair placed in front of her desk and I am on the stained sofa. I begin. “My parents are getting divorced and I’m in a lot of pain.” This, being a Catholic school, draws her in instantly.
“Go on,” she prods.
First off, I should tell you right now, my parents aren’t getting a divorce. They fought as most young Italian-American married couples did in the ’70s and ’80s. The word had been bandied about often enough in our house. But no, they were not getting a divorce. And if they were, nothing would have thrilled me more. To be a child of divorce—could there be anything more glamorous? Extra gifts, double holidays, a father who lived in an apartment on the other side of town who guiltily sought to buy my affection. What could be better? During the times my parents did fight and divorce was mentioned I found myself pushing my mother gently toward it. “Don’t worry about me, do what’s best for yourself.” “I actually think this could be good for you.” The selfless confidant. My sister was always more upset at the thought of it, while I was already mentally packing. A change of scenery would do us all good, I’d think to myself as I imagined my new sophisticated life as a child of divorce. Theater, cigarettes, late nights in convertibles. What any of this was based on I have no idea. But no, my parents aren’t getting divorced and now here I am sitting in Sister Wilma’s office, telling her how devastated I am at the destruction of our family. Sister Wilma makes us tea as I continue, never taking her eyes off me, afraid to miss one second of my increasingly lurid story.
“It’s really bad,” I pronounce vaguely.
“How bad?”
“I can’t say. But bad.” When she seems too overly concerned I have to pull myself back a bit. “Bad. But not bad bad. Yet.” I don’t want to end up having child services or, worse, some well-meaning priest show up at our door. Nuns can be unpredictable. I have to play this one just right.
Fortunately, she couldn’t be more delightful. At the end of our session, like any good soap opera, I leave on a cliff-hanger. “I’m also afraid of—oh, that’s the bell.”
She’s practically salivating. “Afraid of what?!” I must be a nice change of pace from her usual stream of zit-covered, midlevel students stopping by for SAT worksheets and state university applications.
She says, “I’d like to see you again.”
This is when I stop and turn, applying years of One Life to Live watching. “Oh, Sister, I don’t know, I’m so afraid of falling behind in my studies. Especially with everything else that’s going on.” I tilt my head slightly down, then raise it for a moment, making a small concession. “I suppose I could come during gym classes…” And right then and there she fills out an excuse slip for next week’s phys ed classes and beyond.
“I want you to come see me whenever you have gym,” she says, handing me the slip. My life now saved by this small piece of paper. My most prized possession. “Don’t lose it,” she says. Lose it? I’ll fucking sleep with it.
Now I suppose in hindsight I could have actually just told her the truth. I was certainly troubled enough without having to create this bit of theater. But the thought never even occurred to me. Also, I don’t think reality had quite the same salaciousness as the tale I was already starting to spin.
I’m suddenly back in her office. This time she has our tea already prepared, and before long she’s treating me more like a fellow nun who’s stopped by to gossip than a fifteen-year-old closeted sophomore.
“Tell me everything,” she says, settling in. “How’s your mother doing?”
“Not great,” I say, blowing on my tea. “I think we’re going apartment hunting this weekend.” I have my parents so far down the road to divorce I haven’t quite figured how I’m going to get out of it when they never actually do.
“So, it’s really happening,” she says.
“Oh, God, yeah,” then quickly adding, “I don’t know what I’ll do,” remembering that I’m upset. I give my parents a complicated backstory that even I can’t keep straight. Creating characters for them as rich as any I’d seen on prime-time TV. Arguments, long-held grudges, petty grievances, fits of hysteria.
“I thought you said your mother never drank,” Sister Wilma says, catching me in one of my inconsistencies.
“This night she did,” I say with great import. Eventually, I just start rehashing plotlines from Knots Landing.
My mother worked in a law office in the city. My father often traveled for his job as a sales manager for Cunard Line. Neither of them had any idea that I had cast them as the stars of my own private soap opera. I’d come home from school and catch the end of One Life to Live while fixing my lunch. When Viki moves out on Clint after suspecting him of cheating on her with a past lover I think, That’s good, I can use that, as I spread mustard on my turkey sandwich.
If anything, my parents should be grateful. I had turned them into characters worthy of their own show. The John and Felicia that costarred in the story of my life as told to Sister Wilma were a wild, unpredictable, volatile pair. Think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? meets Hart to Hart. If I ever felt even the slightest bit of guilt I have no memory of it.
As the weeks pass I’m able to steer the conversation away from my parents’ disintegrating marriage and toward more banal topics like the weather or what I watched on TV the previous night. Having to keep this storyline moving was providing its own kind of stress. Some days I’d walk in and just not have it in me. “Can we just sit here,” I’d say on those days. Sister Wilma now looking deflated. This was her own private telenovela after all and I was preempting this week’s episode. But we had formed a fellowship by this time, and the falling away of my family drama didn’t preclude us from happily chatting about whatever was on our minds. I looked forward to this time with Sister Wilma. Some days we’d just leaf through her old vacation albums and she would tell me about her summers in Nova Scotia. She started out an easy mark but ended up a friend.
On the last day of our sessions together Sister Wilma asks about my parents. We hadn’t talked about them in a while at this point.
“Oh, they’re fine,” I say.
“You mean they’re not getting divorced?”
“Nope.”
“Huh.”
“I know,” I say casually, not feeling the need to explain myself further. She tells me I’m welcome back at any time, that her door is always open. But this day is also my last day of football in gym class. I no longer need to come. I no longer need her. She gives me my final excuse slip and hugs me goodbye (you could hug children then) and tells me she’ll miss me.
And when I go to present this final slip to my phys ed teacher. The final slip that excuses me from the entire semester’s worth of class. He takes it. And signs, or whatever it is he had to do with it, I don’t remember. And then he holds this slip of paper back out to me. Hanging on to it for a moment where it remains floating between the two of us. And the way he looks at me while he does this tells me he knows that this has all been bullshit. He knows what I’ve done. What I am. And I feel somehow diminished. Less than. Dirty, even. My amusing little ruse now revealed to me as a pathetic trick played on a lonely nun. And I think … “What if I had stayed?” “What if I had learned?” “What if I had thrown the football?” And then I think, “fuck you,” as I snatch the slip of paper from the air. I’d do it all again.