I’m pretty sure I’m the only kid to be kicked off a high school basketball team for wearing too much jewellery.
Basketball was another one of those times where people just assumed things about me, thought I was someone I wasn’t, put me in a position to fail, then blamed me when I did. I didn’t try out for the team, never showed interest in the team, but wound up on the team. As its star player.
Other than gym class, I had never touched a basketball in any sort of competitive way, let alone played in an actual game. I didn’t know the positions or the rules. I was awkward and skinny, I didn’t own a pair of running shoes that fit, and none of the girls I went to school with had ever seen me in shorts. The tops of my thighs were covered in burn marks, and I hated my legs. This was a problem. But there I was.
In my last year of high school, I had late-period lunch, around two, so the cafeteria was usually empty. In the nicer months I’d always go home for lunch, barbecue a couple burgers, smoke a few of my parents’ cigarettes, and suntan on the roof of the house. I’d climb up the side of the deck, put down a towel right there on the shingles, cover my chest and face in vegetable oil from the pantry, and get a little colour. I wouldn’t even pour it into my hand—I’d lie back and drizzle a line of it from the top of my jeans to my neck, then I’d rub it in with both hands, from my bellybutton to my forehead. I’d bake myself. And I could do all that in less than an hour.
At this point I still had my long hair but was much less glam than I had been years before. The world was changing, fast. Everything that I thought was cool was suddenly a joke. My idols were now clowns, and my taste in music was outdated and laughable. That was the year grunge happened, and I was not ready. For everything Nirvana stood for at the time, the rage, the passion, and the genius, I don’t think Kurt Cobain’s influence on fashion gets enough credit. I think we should talk more about that. Not only did Nirvana show up and destroy everything I loved musically, but overnight preppy prom queens who smelled like cotton candy, who’d spend hours on their hair and makeup before class, with bra straps showing and skirts short enough to get them a letter sent home to their parents, were showing up in baggy jeans and their fathers’ old flannel shirts, with unwashed, uncombed hair. It was incredible to see. I’ve still never seen anything like it. Never before has one individual, who never wanted to be an example of anything, let alone fashion, had such an impact on the way teenagers saw themselves. Within a month my high school looked like Project Grungeway and Cobain was their God. I hated Nirvana.
I was not grungy. Far from it. My whole life I was shy, pretty, and constantly mistaken for a girl. And I could always tell when it was about to happen. I remember as a kid being at the mall and fighting for space at the perfume counter while Christmas shopping for my mom, when a man cut in front of me. He was a bit of a dick and shoved me to the side. The woman behind the counter watched this all go down and put her hand out, waving it back and forth in that mom way with one finger extended right up in that guy’s face. “No, no, no. This young lady was ahead of you, sir. Sorry.”
This happened often, and I never corrected anyone. It would have been easy to just say “Thanks, but ‘boy,’ ” but I never did. It was easier to just go with it. It was less embarrassing. I was far cooler with people thinking I was a girl than I was with them wondering why I’d choose to look so much like one. So I never set them straight. Even on the phone, I was one of those boys whose voice changed way late. I’d answer a call and the person on the other end would say something like “Oh hi, miss. Is your mom or dad home?”
I’d say nothing and just hand the phone over to my mom. All the time.
Grunge did one thing, though. It normalized facial hair. Back then, facial hair wasn’t cool. We were young men raised by fathers who peaked in the late ’60s or mid ’70s. Our dads had moustaches, big thick gnarly ones. The kind you’d see in porno. The kind we’d make fun of. Nobody ever wanted to look like their dad, and my old man had a legendary moustache. But suddenly, in the early ’90s, goatees, soul patches, and beards were the shit, and the girly makeup-covered, smooth glam rock faces were out. Facial hair was cool, and this was a way for me to finally look like a guy. The first day I could grow something on my face, I did. It was a flag, a badge, a way for me to end the confusion about what exactly I was.
I’ve had some sort of facial hair ever since then. I haven’t been fully clean-shaven in over thirty years. I never had that moment with my Pops where he taught me how to shave. Never stood in the bathroom, both of us lathering up in front of the mirror.
By the end of high school, the only two holdovers from my glam years were that my toenails were always painted. Always something fun and bright, and never black. Goth kids painted their shit black, and I was not goth. The other thing, that last little bit of that glam rock kid I used to be, was jewellery. Just before I started grade nine, years before, I started collecting bracelets. Most of them were cheap metal bangles from headshops or were given to me by girls I dated who’d add to my collection. I never took them off. Ever. And because I’d had them on for years, while I was still growing, I wouldn’t have been able to take them off even if I wanted to. My hands grew too big, so these were permanent. These were my thing. My wrist underneath was always some shade of green, and if I ever raised my hand to ask a question in class, I sounded like sleigh bells.
So one afternoon in grade twelve I was walking back though the empty caf coming in from the smoking pit. Back then, schools let kids smoke cigarettes in a designated area. This was on school property, and close enough to the side doors that you could dip out for a quick one while on a bathroom break from class if you needed to. I was walking one way, smelling like cigarettes and vegetable oil, and our gym coach was coming at me. We didn’t really know each other, but he stopped me. Coach was a cool yet crusty younger teacher, but we hadn’t ever talked after grade ten when I didn’t have to take gym anymore.
“How tall are you?” he asked as we passed each other.
“Six three-ish. Why?” I answered.
“You know we could use you, right?”
“For what?” I asked.
“On the team. Basketball.”
“To do what?” I was so confused.
“Basketball,” he explained, while sounding just as confused as I did.
This is the moment I should have politely said no. Thanked him and moved on. This is when I should have told him I knew absolutely nothing about basketball. But I didn’t.
“Do you have gym clothes here?”
“I have track pants, yeah,” I said.
“Swing by for practice in an hour. We’ll get you out there.”
Being that tall, at that age, I got mistaken for a basketball player almost as much as I got mistaken for a girl. This was constant and almost comical. But like those other times, I’d never correct anyone. I’d actually avoid anything that had to do with basketball, just to avoid the embarrassment of having no clue what I was doing.
I’m not going to lie: that first practice felt great. I mean, I was the only kid in sweatpants, and I wore my socks on the court because I didn’t have runners in my locker, but I did all the things. The coach told me to stand under the net and for forty-five minutes I just stuffed guys. Anytime anyone would come in for a layup, I’d stand on my tiptoes, put that big jangly, bracelet-covered arm up, and shut them down. Basketball was easy.
I’d never been on a school team before, and this whole thing felt really good. I should have kept it to myself, but I went home and told Pop that I was on the squad. My dad was just as much of a sports fan as he was music fan, which wasn’t much. He’d watch the odd hockey game with me but didn’t know who the players were or who had the best shot at winning. It was just a way for us to hang out. Hockey wasn’t fun for him, but time together was.
He was pumped for me, and we high-fived when I told him how I spent all practice shutting guys down, and how the coach said the other teams were going to shit themselves when they saw me walk onto the court. I may or may not have told my dad that Coach said I was their “secret weapon,” even though I’m 100 percent sure Coach never used those words while talking to me.
Once again, this was ego doing battle with insecurity.
My high school was small, so when it came to sports, music, or drama, everyone just sort of did everything. We didn’t really have “jocks”—everyone got to play. Two days after that first practice, I played my first game. I had my uniform, tied up all my hair into a giant ponytail, wrapped two bandanas around my left wrist to hide all my bracelets, and walked out with the team.
It was an away game, and other schools always made us eat shit. For everything. People just hated Acton. We were the trashy skids who all the other schools agreed to hate, and I looked like their mascot. When we walked onto the court the gym went silent. There I was, six foot three-ish, and beside me was James. James was born with dwarfism; he was a little person. He was a kid we’d always gone to school with. I stayed far away from sports so I hadn’t really thought about how other people would react to seeing him on a basketball court. And now he was standing beside me, a giant with a high ponytail in a pink scrunchie. The other team and their fans had no clue what to even do with this, so they whispered and laughed. Which is something I was very used to, and I’m more than sure James was too. Neither of us let on like we cared. I’m not sure James even did care.
The first five minutes of that game were a disaster. I didn’t know where to stand, what the plan was, who to pass the ball to, or what a foul was. I knew nothing about basketball. In those first few minutes I was double- and triple-teamed by their defence. They assumed I was a killer, and tried to shut me down, but soon realized I was a huge waste of resources. James was ten times the basketball player I was, so for the rest of the first quarter the other team just let me awkwardly run up and down the court like a baby giraffe. I wasn’t a threat. I was an embarrassment to the game.
I remember the coach saying, “What are you doing, man?” to which I just answered, “I. Don’t. Know!”
He seemed as pissed as he was confused.
Before the end of the half, one of my bandanas came loose and my bracelets started to show. The ref blew his whistle and walked me over to the bench. “Those have to go,” he told my coach. “They’re dangerous. Someone is going to get hurt with those. Take them off,” he said to me.
“They don’t come off,” I told them.
Coach grabbed my wrist and started digging his finger under the other bandana to loosen it up. “Get rid of these. Now,” he told me.
“No. I can’t. They don’t come off,” I repeated.
“Cut them off,” he snapped.
Those bracelets, and my hot pink toenails, were the last two things that made me, me. Everything was changing so fast, and here I was trying to be someone I wasn’t. Again.
“Get that shit off or you’re gone,” the coach told me.
Okay, I thought, and I started to walk over to the bench to take a seat when he grabbed my shoulder and spun me around.
“No!” he said. “Get your shit and go. You’re done.”
I knew he wasn’t really mad about the bracelets; this wasn’t about jewellery. He was pissed at himself. He’d been wrong about me. I never wanted to be the star anything. I’d never been on a team, didn’t want to be singled out, and hated taking orders. Sure, I had one good practice, but I was shit at basketball. I was tall, and that’s all I was. He’d thought I was something that I wasn’t, and I made him look like a fool, even though it was me who just got kicked out of a high school basketball game for excessive jewellery wearing.
In my school, being chosen valedictorian was more of a popularity contest than something you earned. It wasn’t based on grades or your volunteer work or how many awards you had won. It was an open vote, democratic to a fault, and anyone could get nominated. Anyone could win. The election was student-run but teacher-supervised. If enough people wrote your name down on a piece of paper on vote day, you’d be the kid who’d get to send off the senior class with words of wisdom and encouragement and the confidence to chase their dreams and crush their goals. Just like in the movies.
On nomination day, I was as shocked as anyone to see my name on the shortlist. It was me and three girls. Three really smart girls who were all going off to high-end universities. Three girls who had spent their entire high school careers preparing for a moment like this. Me, I was just popular. I think people wrote my name down hoping I’d get up there, shotgun a beer, yell, “Acton High School seniors rule,” throw my fist in the air, crush the can on my head, and walk off to thunderous applause. That’s what guys like me did in the movies. I could do that. I had never, comfortably, been on a stage in front of people, and I certainly wasn’t equipped to be anything close to inspiring. But I could make a fool of myself. I could make people laugh.
Election Day was an absolute scandal. A shit show. A screw job to end all screw jobs.
When all the ballots had been counted and recounted, I was chosen by my peers to be their valedictorian. By four votes. I won because four more people in that school wanted to see me get up there and say some crazy shit than the ones who wanted to be inspired.
Kerry-Anne deserved it. And we all knew it.
Three anonymous teachers were in charge of overseeing and validating the vote. Apparently four votes were just “too close to call,” so they hit a hard pause on the entire thing. I hadn’t even celebrated yet. I didn’t get a chance to tell my parents, but before the end of the day there was going to be a revote. I don’t know what exactly they were hoping for, but I assumed it was any result that wasn’t me.
In the two or three hours between votes I started to take things seriously. It really hit me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be the guy who flashed the crowd, did a shot, and walked off. I didn’t want to do the thing they all hoped I would. I didn’t want to just be funny, and I certainly didn’t want to let anyone down. I skipped two periods and sat in the smoking pit just outside the cafeteria and played this out in my head. Over and over. I barely passed grade eleven English, didn’t take any poetry or creative writing classes, and hadn’t got a grade above 60 percent on a book report in my whole life.
How do you write a speech when you have nothing to say?
I sat there, chain-smoking, feeling the exact same way I did when I’d sit naked with my guitar in my bedroom trying to force myself to cry, looking for something inside of me I knew I’d never find. I wanted to write a great speech the same way I wanted to write a great ballad. I wanted to be heartbreaking, thoughtful, inspiring, and motivating. I wanted it to be the thing people would remember. The kind of speech you see go viral on YouTube today. I needed this. I needed to go out this way. I wanted to surprise people. I wanted to stand there on a stage, with an audience, validated and vulnerable.
The recount happened and I lost. By two votes, and it was official this time. There was no way they were ever going to give this to me, and nothing anyone said was going to turn this around no matter how unfair it seemed. This was a screw job. It was never going to be me.
The second vote, by the way, would have been even closer had I not voted for Kerry-Anne. She deserved it, and I had nothing to say anyway.
These were people who thought I was something that I wasn’t, and there was no way I was going to make a fool of myself to prove them right. I didn’t want to be put into another position to fail and then get blamed for it, again, when I did.
I’m still not sure who those three anonymous teachers were who were in charge of the whole thing, but I bloody well guarantee you one of them was the basketball coach.