4 / Ubi Sunt
The halls of my high school were wooden and olden. The maids used uncountable tins of wax and bottles of furniture oil on the halls and rooms every weekend. I enjoyed the waning smell of cleansers and polishers Monday to Friday. You could count the days by what your nose told you. By Friday, the school was filthy all over again. In sunlight, you could see a ragged trench down the middle of the wax on Thursday, but the channels underneath the lockers were always bright as newly buffed 1920 oak.
We had open lockers. Nobody stole, except now and then a sad case who’d swipe your compass for geometry and then sit right by you and use it in class — so screwed-up he didn’t think of hiding things he’d stolen. Twice a crazy boy from out in the sticks brought a loaded pistol into class, but they caught him both times. All he wanted to do was show and tell. Then they caught him exposing himself in the back row of civics class and shipped him. Then there was a scandal in the library over this bunch of greasers who were tearing the brassiere advertisements out of the magazines and taking them home. I also remember another boy who sewed a tiny square picture of a Kotex box on the front of his tee shirt. He’d walk down the hall, get in front of some lovely and popular girl coming the other way, then throw open his jacket and flex his chest, a broken grin on his face as she saw and shrieked. Then there were the football guys, half of them mill boys and rednecks, the other half boys from middle-class subdivisions stuck around town. If they were sure of the slightest secrecy in the halls, they’d cram you in a locker, or hold you by the throat and twist out your tee shirt so you were left with embarrassing female protrusions where your paps were supposed to be, or maybe they’d just come up behind you and swat the back of your head with a flat hand. All this was just pure bliss for them. It wasn’t malevolence or bullying. They did it to each other. They’d cold-cock some buddy, then wink and grin slyly, and say, “Uh oh!” like a hand had come out of the blue and done it and they didn’t have anything to do with it. One day when I was a freshman I was writing a Latin test as a big hand curled around the crook of my desk and I commenced being dragged along in my desk sideways through the aisle. I looked over and saw one of those foot-ball scoundrels pulling me beside him with one arm, his face beaming with pleasure. The teacher had gone out of the room. When he had my desk top crammed against his, he fell to cheating off my paper with an open, completely guileless face. A moment later, he shot me scooting back to my rightful row with a terrific push from his left leg. It was a beautiful feat of strength, and I don’t think his main point was to cheat. Real depravity at Dream of Pines was rare. And the principal tried to run a pretty tight ship. You could get busted for smoking a cigarette in the basement head; for profanity or insubordination; for setting fire to a waste-basket.
We were all crazy about beauty and power. Some of us fell in love with our own voices and joined the glee club or the forensic club, and some the band, some football; some went in for automobiles; some for clothes, driving to Shreveport and Dallas to buy them; some of us just lent money and looked at the beautiful girls; the guys went around adoring their own erections and body hair; the girls, their expanding breasts — everybody having at it with his aboriginal ego, for beauty and power. Even those mill boys in my home room who were in bad health and held startling contests at breaking wind while devotional was being read by a member of the Bible Club over the P.A. system — they were having at it in their way: Beauty and Power.
The room fans on second level brought in the smell of that oily peanut butter off Monday’s sandwiches, or that heated tunafish odor from salads the cafeteria maids were scooping. It was Federal Aid lunch, and cost a quarter.
We had one teacher Harvard-trained by way of postal correspondence and another who had half a master’s degree. And there were twenty others actively, passively, strangely, cryptically, feverishly incoherent, each in his special style.
I had the head football coach for biology. Here was a fellow whose ambition it was to impress us with the night-mare of a soldier burning alive in a shell-struck tank — something he’d witnessed in World War II — and also with the unknown but true prevalence of tapeworm among the kids of the South. He could make you uncomfortable with his rugged poetry on these subjects, but he seemed to have nothing else to say. It was known that he also felt deeply about masturbation, but he didn’t care to broach this in mixed classes. At three o’clock he ran off to coach the varsity in his Marine Corps shorts. He was positive the trouble with his team was either tapeworm or masturbation, and out there he made himself vocal about it, yelling out at this boy or other that he must be sleeping with his hands under the covers, or needed a physical examination. This always got a big laugh from the line coach, a flaccid baboon who taught factory arts and made a point out of being hilariously obsequious to the head coach. He wore sleeveless jerseys and had marvelously huge, sopping armpits.
My sophomore year I went out for football, but caught a cold and quit. I was just about good enough at it to make first team out at Dream of Pines Colored, which by then must’ve been featuring tuberculosis victims on its varsity. I heard their band when I was out on the field, though. They were about half a mile away and still sounded like a heavenly orchestra to my ears. It seemed silly to be out there at practice in my clouted, filthy pads when I heard them.
I was the sort that tended to bear grudges. I didn’t like anybody correcting me on anything for any reason. I was down and out. I was not proud. The old pubic pox was still scattered on my face, and yet I yearned for everything beautiful in life. I was ready to be abused and picked on. I got into a fight in the locker room at the gym over a yachtsman’s cap the old man had brought back to me as a souvenir from Miami when he went to a convention of mattress people there. And I won that fight, against a fat kid one grade under me, using depraved tactics like sitting on his chest and hitting him in the face, and using, really, everything I had in me. I admit I hit him as often as I could with the knuckle wearing the Trojan-head ring — a gift from Mother.
The spinster librarian got on me one day for not smiling in the hall. She said she knew my folks would be disappointed in the hard personality I was showing. Then I broke down — not to her, not in front of that bitch, but in my mind: Aw sweet Jesus, don’t you know when you’re as ugly as a shotgunned butt of pork, and you love everything and hate everything at the same time, when you haven’t got a face decent enough to look at the girls you want to look at, and when you haven’t got a talent to show, being neither introvert nor extrovert, because you don’t have the talent to go either way, and you start loving the rain because you might be seen with more shadow on you than usual, and hating the sun because it exposes all the corners you want to creep into, and you avoid mirrors and beautiful objects, like your old glass agate marbles, the rock garden in the country club foyer, and the color photographs in National Geographic, because you’re afraid of these beautiful things looking back and folding up into cinders from your ugly stare — don’t you know, Librarian, that you can’t go around giving everybody a smile like your ass was made of candy? Much less you, with that ecclesiastical look of sour meno-pause on your spinster face, would I smile at, Miss Dedder. You stand there telling me about my smile. And you Miss Dedder, owed some poor man your sex sometime back in the thirties, and ignored him; you might could’ve made some poor man sane with it, way back then in Louisiana, with Huey Long and his crowd rearing up, but you didn’t, did you? And you telling me about my lack of smile. You sit behind that desk six hours a day surveilling around the tables to make sure none of us write filthy slurs against the status quo in the margins of your precious books, or that the rednecks aren’t tearing the brassiere advertisements out of the magazines. I looked away from her and went my way down the hall.