Entries Tagged 'Once Upon a Time...' ↓

I played softball for almost nine years, but I never was any good at it. My sister and I both played, but not only was she good, she was exceptional. I never hit a homerun in my entire softball-playing career, yet Amy was often purposefully walked by the opposing team because she could drive it far over the fence.

We are two years apart in age, which meant that every other year we were on the same team. The league was divided as such: 6-7 year olds, 8-9 year olds, 10-11 year olds and so on. And our teams were always pretty good. I remember one year when I played for the Ashland City Bankettes we won every game but one, I think, and we’d routinely beat our opponents by 30 points or more. That year we went to the state finals and came in fourth. But I certainly wasn’t the reason.

It’s kind of weird how I continued to suck for so long after so much practice. I was really scrawny when I was growing up, and clumsy. I was an eager batter with a weak swing. But once I was on base I was good to go. I was, at the very least, fast. I was always about the 7th or 8th batter on the lineup, and I played catcher. In a slowpitch league. I think everybody knows what that means.

Then all of the sudden our league became a fastpitch league. All of the counties surrounding us had been playing fastpitch for a couple of years before we finally made the switch.

Needless to say, catching for a fastpitch softball team is a little more, shall we say, challenging. For one thing, fastpitch allows base stealing. That meant my main objective was to never, ever drop the ball. Also, softballs flying at your face at 50-60 mph is frightening. You feel a little safer behind the mask and chest pate and shin guards, but you still go home with bruises on your palms.

But I loved stealing bases. Like I said, I was never a good batter, but fastpitch rules said we could bunt. I was a badass bunter. That ability, combined with my propensity to safely steal bases, meant I moved up in the batting order and saw a little more play time. I practiced hard when I began training as a fastpitch catcher, because it was rough to lose to those surrounding counties after winning for so long. My coach hauled in a pitching machine, cranked it up to 70 and stuck me in front of it. He made me run laps in all my catcher’s gear.

Despite all the hard work, we still sucked. Our competition was too far ahead of us.

I quit softball to be a cheerleader. I was a way better cheerleader than a softball player, but fear of a back handspring kept me from trying out for the squad my junior year, so I thought I’d go back to softball. I was too old by that time to go back to the city league, but my high school had an accomplished fastpitch softball team. I knew it would take some work, but I was incredibly fit after two year of competitive cheerleading, so I thought I could hang.

The first day of practice was tough, but I did okay. We went out on the field and ran drills, grounded balls, did some batting. The second day it rained, which is something I hadn’t planned on. I only brought my cleats to practice with me that day, but practice had been moved to the gym where only sneakers were allowed. Most of the girls trying out were also on the basketball team, so they had permanent lockers in their locker room which gave them access to tennis shoes. I wasn’t allowed on the gym floor in cleats, so I had to borrow a pair of sneakers from one of the basketball players. The only girl with an extra pair wore a size 9. I wear a size 6. But I had to make do.

They were hightops, all-leather basketball shoes, and they barely stayed on my feet at all. I had to tie the laces super tight around the ankles and wear two pairs of socks. The coaches showed up and divided us in to teams. Team one, my team, was to run one mile–18 laps–around the gym, and anyone that didn’t finsh got sent home. The team with the least number of people to successfully finish had to run an extra mile.

So I took off. And it was ridiculously hard. We used to run a mile every day before cheerleading practice, so it wasn’t the distance that got to me, it was the big ass clown shoes. Running in shoes three times too big makes things exponentially harder. It felt like I was climbing a mountain on skis. I had to lift my legs really high as not to trip. The shoes felt like heavy oversized bricks on my feet. But I made it. I ran the whole 18 laps in boat shoes.

But I forgot to tell you this part: I was sick. I hadn’t gone to school that day because I’d been puking. I tried to call the coach ahead of time and sit out, but she had no sympathy. I had to show up or I couldn’t play. I tried to eat, but couldn’t. I drank as much Gatorade as I could stomach and went in anyway.

The lack of food combined with the presence of a virus made me incredibly weak. After running my face was flushed crimson, and the skin around my mouth was pale white. I thought by lap 17 I was going to vomit or pass out, but I trucked on. I was dizzy and nearly in tears by lap 18. I made it ten yards or so from the finish line when I did it. I tripped over those big fucking shoes. I hit the gym floor with a thud and a squeak. My bare legs smacked against the waxed floor. I saw tiny lights, thousands of them in a sea of dark, but I heard one thing very clearly: "DRAG HER ACROSS!"

It was the coach. He was instructing my teammates to pull my limp, defeated body across the finish line. And so they did. I remember it so clearly. It was humiliating. The big shoes bouncing along as two girls skinned my knees trying to appease the coach.

But it was over. I sat there, a pile of failure in big ass shoes. We were told to move into the weight room while group two took their run. There was no way. I couldn’t even get off the floor. I crawled over to the female of the two coaches and asked if I could come back tomorrow. She said if I left then I couldn’t come back the next day.

I did the only thing I could do and slowly made my way out of the gym. Once safely in the hall I found an out of the way spot. I collapsed on the carpet and closed my eyes and tried not to hyperventilate or throw up.

I have no idea how long I’d been lying there when Mr. Angevine found me. He was my Latin and German teacher. He was surprised to find me in a red-faced, sweaty heap, and he offered a piece of candy to raise my blood sugar level. Mr. Angevine was a diabetic. He bought some water and took me to his classroom, and I rested at a desk until I could call my mom to come get me.

I say this because Channel 2 has a softball league that plays against the other stations in Nashville. And I wouldn’t mind playing; I think it would be fun. Besides, I’m sure it is slowpitch. Then I remember the Big Shoe Distaster of 1993 and I think otherwise. These people have cameras.

When I was in high school I worked at a video store. It was in a small town and was really the only decent movie rental place in the whole of the city. Every single day, every day, a man named Orville Belcher would come in and ask, "You got any more a-them women in prison movies?"

And every day I would say no.

We had no true porn to speak of, but we had lots of Playboy videos and sexy, car wash cheerleader camp videos. But we only had one women in prison movie. And Orville Belcher was the only person who had ever rented it.

Fourteen times.

Orville, apparently, had a women in prison movie fetish. And we weren’t going to be his enablers. He would repeatedly ask if we would order him some more, and repeatedly we declined.

I wonder if Orville Belcher ever discovered the internets.

My grandmother’s house was small and white with a freshly cut lawn and a garden out back. When I think of it I remember fat, fresh tomatoes that oozed onto the picnic table on the side porch when we bit into them whole, like apples. We’d oversalt them with the tiny Mason jar salt shaker and dig at the gritty rind with our front teeth. Even our bare, dusty feet would be speckled with seeds.

Inside the the house smoke hung like wet velvet from meat frying on the stove and nearly constant cigarette smoking. The tiny house was always filled with people for supper on Sundays. Cousins, their cousins and friends of somebody’s uncle would all come down for fried pork chops and turnip greens, white beans and white bread. Granny would cook in her nightgown with her shoes off, hacking and smoking all the while. Every time we came to visit Granny asked if we’d "et yet." I think feeding her family was one of the only ways my grandmother knew how to tell us she loved us.

I’d eat dinner on the front porch or on the couch watching network television. I’d eat wherever my sister was. Sometimes I’d read the stack of National Enquirers that littered the dingy home or my grandfather’s football magazines. Once dinner was over the women would clean up and do the dishes while the men pulled up chairs and shuffled cards. Cigarette smoke would once again choke the air. Amy and I learned by experience that smoke rises–we spent a lot of time on the floor. We’d be lying face down, sometimes breathing right into the carpeting, to escape the thick layers of smoke. The brown carpet was aways full of crumbs and hair and lint.

I’d lie in the floor and listen to the sound of coins smacking the table and how dueces were wild and this was seven-card draw. I barely knew what "ante up" meant, because they never let me play. I wasn’t any good at it since I was seven or four and ten. Poker slang was the soundtrack to the boring, eye-stinging visits to grandmother’s house.

She died from complications from emphesema. She passed away and pretty much all I know about her is that she worked at a mat factory, was addicted to gambling and never talked to me much about anything. And that she could raise some pretty amazing things, especially tomatoes.

My co-worker L. is taking her boyfriend horseback riding for his birthday. She asked me if I’d ever gone and if an hour and a half sounded about right. I started laughing almost immediately as I remembered, for the first time in a long time, about my experience riding a horse.

My girl’s youth group at church when I was about 11 or 12 took a trip horseback riding. When we arrived we puddled up front to hear the instructions and safety guidelines for the horses and the trail. We were asked if we had experience riding horses and for some reason I raised my hand.

I don’t know why. I just used to lie all the time. Just make shit up. I did it to look cool, I’m sure, and besides, I likely thought, my stepmother owned a horse once. And I was around her some. I fed her apples on occasion and even saddled up and trotted around on her once. Then she was gone. For some reason I remember the explanation was that a gate was left open and when my parents were driving down the road their mare galloped up beside them and off, never to be seen again. But that can’t be true. Like I said, I just made stuff up. When you do that enough you eventually believe yourself and your memory in turn becomes a bit hazy.

Anyway, I lied and said I was experienced with horses so they gave me a spirited one who really liked to run. At first the horses were just slowly meandering down the trails face to ass, but toward the end of the trail there was an open field about 500 yards back to the stables. Now, I’m not sure if my hyped up horse was just thirsty or wound up or what but as soon as that trail ended that horse began to pick up speed until he was sprinting. And I didn’t know what to do. I had never ridden a horse for more than 45 minutes and now I was on one that was hauling SO MUCH ASS. I tried pulling the reins but I was more concerned about staying upright on that thing. So, I just lowered boney 11-year-old body into the saddle and held on and prayed.

Then I started crying. I was on a getaway horse with no idea how to stop it, bouncing and lurching with every gallop. I thought I was going to die beneath the thundering hooves of the murderhorse I’d lied my way into. I think I was hyperventilating by the time that horse slid into the water trough like he was stealing a base.

I haven’t been on a horse since, nor have I made any plans to do so. Also, I’ve tried to quit with the lying since it can obviously kill you.

Where I grew up, belief in God, a stiff pair of Wranglers and beer from a can was the benchmark by which all people were judged. Stray from that well-worn formula in my little country high school and you were likely to reap ridicule and ostracism from the folks who attended there. If there is one thing that rural Tennessee high schoolers strictly adhere to is conformity. The more alike, the better. And so, as a consequence, rowdy rednecks were goddamn everywhere.

They were easy to spot. The dress code was simple, both for boy and girl rednecks. First of all, boots were mandatory. In the parlance of the region the proper term is "shitkickers."  Boots worn sometimes varied from the traditional sharp-toed cowboy boot, often replaced with a soft, tan workboot. On occasion a pair of hiking boots would traipse into the picture. Pants were blue jeans, Levis or Wranglers only, starched and stonewashed or creased and indigo blue, never in between. They were always tight and always tapered. Belts were a must, worn with large brass buckles that said things like "Jack Daniels" or "Southern by the Grace of God." Shirts varied some–mostly t-shirts, sometimes knit and short-sleeved, but mostly they were the colorful Garth Brooks-inspired Western jobbies with pearl snaps instead of buttons. If it was time to go out line dancing or to the local football game, no look was complete without a crisp, speckless black cowboy hat. The chicks’ hats were their enormous bangs.

After the girls polished off a bottle of hairspray and the boys used up a whole can of car wax on their trucks, they’d often head to the Square, park in front of the county’s tiny courthouse and drink beer and holler. Other activities included scheduled fights at the Sycamore Rec or, my least favorite, field parties.

I’m not sure how many of you know what a field party is, so I’ll give you the best description I’ve got. Usually some kid’s family owned 75 acres of woods and open plains behind their home. When that kid got the urge to kick it, he’d invite his freinds to drive far, far out into the woods to sit on hay bails and build a bonfire and drink canned beer. Some guy would open up his truck’s doors and blare some Alan Jackson while people got really drunk and yee-hawed. I wish I was kidding.

You can’t blame them too much for the choice of extracirricular
activities. It was either beer bongs in a field or participate in a
D.A.R.E. dance troupe/sketch team that performed brain-numblingly trite
songs filled with misinformation about drug use to elementary schoolers
who’d just graduated from the D.A.R.E. program.
Myself a member of this D.A.R.E. acting troupe I performed a dance to
Bonnie Tyler’s "Total Eclipse of the Heart" wherein dancers wore
t-shirts reading COCAINE or TOBACCO. I would hug each dancer to
symbolize I had used the equally harmful cocaine and tobacco then,
literally, spin out of control. My God. You can see now why most of the
students chose to booze it up rather than humiliate themselves in such
a manner.

Even though I taught the dangers of drug use to little kids, I still
attended the dark gatherings in the woods. I just never drank. I would,
however, get a little thrill when the police (inevitably) showed up watching drunk, nightblinded teenagers running from blue lights
into a pitch-dark forest. I remember one unlucky young man running fulltilt into a barbed wire fence.

What I hated most was the rampant racism and ignorance. Confederate
flags (always called "rebel flags") draped a lot of the town. They were
made into hood adornments, headbands and even swimsuits. Hoisting huge,
billowing rebel flags on one’s enormous truck (often with the exhaust
modified to be even louder) was very common. Every morning coming to
school looked like a fucking Civil War pride parade.

Eventually the flag (or any racially-"motivated" clothing or
accessory) was banned from school’s campus after the seven or so black
kids in school finally spoke up about how offensive it was to them.
This happened at that year’s homecoming football game where both white
kids and black kids whipped out firearms to make their points. No one
was shot or even shot at, but after that night the administration took
the racially charged atmosphere at my school very seriously.

And I’m not exaggerating about the number of black kids that
attended my high school. There was only one Asian kid in my whole
grade, on she was only half Asian and had one of the thickest Southern
accents I’ve ever heard. Foreign exchange students–who must have been
heartbroken to learn they’d be attending school in the sticks of
Tennessee, not LA or NYC like they’d asked–were treated as if they’d
just slithered off a space ship. In truth, the kids at my school were
very kind and generous to our imports, but they riddled the Spanish girl
with questions like, "Will you teach me to speak Mexican?" Or they’d
ask the German guy if he was a Nazi.

Anyone who dyed their hair an unnatural color was automatically a
huge freak, unless they were also a guy, in which case he was also a
cocksucking faggot. Speaking of which, there wasn’t a single openly gay
student in the entire 1,000 student population. I now know, almost 10
years later, only one kid I grew up with that is now out. Of course, I
don’t so much keep up with my old classmates.

My fondest memories, though, of growing up in a rural nowhere town
are of the roads. With not so much as a single movie screen to occupy
our time, cars were our escape. Whether I was driving myself or riding
silently with friends, I very much liked whipping down the endless
winding roads down by the river where the streetlights ended and the
stars began. We’d coast over the bridge and out to where the trees
bowed to autumn’s gusts with the radio off, windows down, the smell of
poplars and hickory trees almost as loud as the sounds of crickets and
tires on gravel. We would travel the bended roads singing songs or
telling jokes while pastures and steeples flew past us to reveal more
of the same.

My ten year renunion is this year and I’m not sure I’ll attend. That
time and place seems farther away than even a decade. Maybe if we all
piled into the bed of a pickup and set out to relearn the roads we
memorized in our youth I’d be more inclined to attend. Somehow I imagine
there will just be a bunch of beer in cans and a bunch of yee-hawing.

Monday was pizza day. I looked very forward to Monday’s pizza lunch in the fifth grade.  I anticipated the cracker-like crust topped with a layer of red, then a layer of ground meat all topped with waxy, snot-colored cheese. It was a scrumptuous treat compared to Tuesday’s papery lump covered in gravy or Thurday’s stiff stroganoff. I would eat my pizza with a fried potato side of some kind and drink with it chocolate milk. This was my school’s example of balanced nutrition for a growing 9-year-old girl.

School lunch cost $1 in fifth grade, in 1986, though that wasn’t what it cost for me. I was on reduced lunches, the discount meal program for kid’s whose parent or parents had a low income. My  lunch cost 40 cents. Some kids had free lunches. At least, I thought, I wasn’t a free lunch kid.

However, no one but me knew the difference unless I told them. Once at the end of the line, tray full of mysterious sustenance, both reduced and free lunch kids used a punch card as their currency at the register.  Having a punch card quickly identified you as a Kmart-clothes-wearing poor kid.  I would keep my card in my sleeve if I was wearing long sleeves and produce it for the cashier at the last minute.  I kept my reduced lunch status as well-hidden as possible.  I wildly envied the kids that paid the whole dollar for their pizza and french fries and chocolate milk in cash.  But not as much as I envied the truly cool kids–the kids who brought their lunch from home.

Of all the kids who brought their lunch from home I remember Ellie
Anne Gore’s lunch the most.  Ellie Anne Gore’s lunch came in a crisp
brown paper bag folded over neatly one time.  Ellie Anne’s name was
always printed on the bag in colored pencil and all capital letters.
Each letter was a different color, and her mother, a school teacher,
would draw little balls at the tip of each ‘l’ or ‘n’.  She dressed
Ellie Anne in lacy dresses with layers of tulle underneath and fastened
homemade ribbon clips into her freshly hot-rolled hair every picture day.

Inside that perfect brown bag was a red, sandwich-sized Tupperware
container holding a turkey sandwich on white bread, crusts neatly
removed, topped with a thick, bright, yellow slice of cheese and two
layers of crisp iceberg lettuce.  The sandwich was cut into four
triangular pieces, the way I liked it best.  After eating her sandwich
she would pull out a tiny bag of store-bought potato chips, often
Moore’s brand.  She would eat each item in her brown paper bag one at a time,
keeping each thing hidden until the other was completely
eaten.  After her final potato chip she’d fish out a bag of
M&M’s.  I was so jealous that Ellie Anne got to have candy every
day for lunch.  Not a fun-sized bag, either.  A full, brown bag of
plain M&M’s that she would rip at one corner, removing each
chocolate piece by piece, poking the candy into her mouth with one
finger. Then she’d chew slowly, always savoring each one.

Ellie Anne never shared her M&M’s, nor did I ever ask for a piece of her candy.

It is funny how little I knew as a 9-year-old about money and how
buying things actually works.  Apparently I was completely incapable of
accurately estimating large numbers of people.  I would stand in
the lunch line, cleverly masking my tell-tale punch card in my sleeve,
wondering how much lunch ladies made every day.  I estimated that there
were probably one hundred kids who bought lunch at my elementary school
every day (even though the actual number was more like 500) and that if
each lunch cost $1, then that meant they made $100 a day!  I forgot to
subtract the loss of revenue caused by free and reduced lunch kids like
myself, but nevermind that.  Waiting in the lunch line on Pizza Monday one day eighteen years ago, I wanted
to become a lunch lady.  Because $100 a day sounded like as much money
as anybody would ever need.  And I would be extra nice to the punch
card children.  Maybe even throw in a free bag of M&M’s from time
to time.

In 6th grade I lived in a tiny two bedroom apartment on Hibiscus St. with my mother and my sister.  I rode my bike a lot then–on the porch and down and around the dead-end loop that was my street.  The road ended at the parking lot of my aparment building, but not before climbing an enormous hill.  That paved mountain of a back yard was lots of fun on two wheels.  My sister and the only other neighbor our age would ride together almost nightly.

On this afternoon, for some reason long ago lost on me, I was riding the neighbor girl’s bike instead of my own, even though it was too small for me.  She was a couple of years younger, and tiny, but I pulled my knees to my ears and rode it anyway.

The huge hill curved to the right and out of sight of those standing at the top.  My sister and the neighbor stood watching as I shot down the slope on the teeny bicycle, the tops of my thighs smacking the pink rubber-covered handlebars all the way down.  Once out of sight I tossed the bike gently to the side and layed down on the ground next to it.  I screamed for my sister and friend, yelling that I’d crashed only to laugh uncontrollably when they came jogging down.

For an 11-year old that is a pretty cunning trick, so I had to do it again.  After they took a few turns I did the exact same thing, only this time it wasn’t as easy to get them to come running.  I had to plead and insist "I’M NOT KIDDING THIS TIME!"  They finally came to my aid looking thoroughly worried.  Haha!–gotten again. 

Life was good.  I was 11, riding bikes after school, fooling my sister and having some laughs.  I was feeling pretty invincible.  So, I mounted the bike for a third sail down the hill, and I was almost around the corner when my too-long legs sent the handlebars  akimbo causing me to flip over the bike and meet fast and furious with the ground below.  The bicycle landed on top of me.

I tried to get up by propping my weight on my left arm, but I learned quickly and in a horrifying amount of pain that my arm was broken.  I screamed for help.  I heard nothing in return but echo of my pitiful plea.

I lay crumpled and covered by a bike on the street for ten or fifteen minutes.  I tried, but I couldn’t get up, the pain was too hot and searing.  Finally a neighbor drove by and called an ambulance. 

Once at the backwoods Ashland City hospital they realized the break was too severe for them to handle.  They wrapped my mangled left arm in a magazine and duct taped it up.  I was transported to a Nashville hospital wearing a glossy, yet sturdy, Vogue magazine on my arm.  The nurse who saw me right after I was admitted laughed out loud when she saw it.

Anyway, if you are wondering I learned my lesson.  I don’t ever fake it anymore.  Nothing good ever comes of that.

One weekend my father took my sister and myself and my stepmom and my teenaged stepsister and her friend to the park.  We packed an oversized Thremos cooler with sandwiches and corn chips and canned sodas and drove out for a day of play.  We found a place to picnic once we arrived and unpacked our belongings, staking our ground.  My sister and I immediately sprinted straight for the swings.  I hopped on the first one I saw and began pumping my legs in efforts to make my belly-lurching ascent.  My sister studied each swing below me, hesitating, but all I could feel was the fall afternoon air cool on my face swinging high toward the trees and the sky and the clouds.

"Can I have your swing?  These all have bugs on them," my sister shouted from below.  Typically I would tell her to shove off and just wipe the seat clear, but I was feeling nice.  It was Park Day, and I could handle some dirt and a few bugs so my baby sister wouldn’t have to.

Without thinking I let go of the chains and launched myself into the air at the swing’s highest climb then fell dozens of feet onto my wrist.  My body followed too quickly thereafter.

I didn’t know I had broken my arm even though I heard three snaps and it went completely numb.  I didn’t cry, just kicked my legs and wailed.  My sister, looking paniced, searched for the nearest adult to help her heap of a sibling, but the nearest family was Asian and spoke no English.  My sister ran to find my father and while she was gone I layed on the ground in the most severe amount of pain I’d ever experienced surrounded by startled strangers speaking with a frenzy and in a foreign language.  Park Day had just gotten way fucked up.

My Dad came running and at first began inspecting my legs.  I had to tell him it was my arm, it’s just I couldn’t move it.  Like some sort of superhero he ripped a towel in half lengthwise and fashioned a sling for my gimpy arm.  The nearest hospital was 30 miles away and we’d all piled into one car for the trip to the park.  I remember sitting on someone’s lap on the way to the emergency room.

Although we didn’t get going to the hospital right away.  My stepsister and her scandalous friend went to hide in the woods and smoke cigarettes.  When it was time to go get me mended they were nowhere to be found.  Finally they emerged stinky from the woods.  They got busted that day and I was forever dubbed a nark by my stepsister from then on.  Stupid, brittle bones.

Once the endorphins wore off I was in excrutiating pain.  A nurse gave me a shot for the pain IN MY BROKEN ARM.  Oh God, the agony.  There was so much waiting, too.  I was told the doctor was going to set my arm 20 whole minutes before it actually happened.  I just had to look at my disfigured limb and imagine what putting me back together was going to entail.

Do you know?  Have you ever had a broken bone set?  If not, let me tell you it is a terrifying, hair-raising horror.  The crunch of your bones crudely crunching back into place is a sound you never want to hear.

I wore a hot pink cast home that day.  I thought it would be better than the other option, blue, until I got home and realized it clashed with every single thing in my closet.  I was 7 or so when this happened and too young to swallow pills.  They wanted to prescribe me a pain killer strong enough to mask the pain, but didn’t have anything in liquid form.  So the doctor’s idea was to crush up the pill and make me eat it in syrup or jelly.  It was torture just to ease the pain of my shattered bone.

That was a really traumatizing time for me.  I would, long after I had my cast removed, have phantom pains or my entire arm would go numb.  ["Are you talking about that little girl?"]  To this day I can’t watch videos of fools on skateboards who break their legs, it fucking kills me.  I also don’t like to hear stories of broken bones because the pain was so intense it still gets to me.

My left arm was broken again a few years later in the same place.  It is warped now, bowed a little, but you wouldn’t notice unless I pointed it out.  But it’s sensitive in that spot to the touch.  Put your hand there and I might cringe.

I’m just a little bit competitive.  Well, I used to be much more competitive when I was younger.  I remember in high school, sometimes teachers would read the names of those who made A’s, and for no other reason than to hear aloud that I was number one I would study extra hard and write 3 pages instead of 2 in hopes of being named top student.

You would have hated me.

I was only 19 when I started as a waitress at Outback in my college town.  I had been working at the Cooker, which is now out of business (even though the Cooker in Murfreesboro has a sign that says "The Cooker Pie is Back" just above the For Rent sign, with some of the letters dangling half-off pitifully), but most of my days there were spent standing around.  Once some of us heard word there would be an Outback opening in town we envisioned our ticket out of that other snore of a restaurant.  And you got to wear jeans!  None of that dry-cleaned 100% cotton shirts, heavily starched, with a tie and khaki pants.  Rumor had it girls could even wear shorts!

So, I interviewed with Outback.  It was a three-day process with a battery of tests to boot.  I was one of the last people hired for the 60-person staff in the trailer office next to the enormous Outback Steakouse neon sign lying on the ground.  Amazing how huge one of those things is when you are walking along beside it.

We trained while the building was being finished.  In fact, most of our first day was spent outside.  Since every single employee there was brand new, they shipped in a team of trainers from other stores to educate and excite the new servers.  One of the five of Outback’s "Principles and Beliefs" is Fun.  They say they make Outback a fun place to work to keep employees happy–this is their philosophy anyway.  The execution is often somewhat lacking.

Anyway, on the very first day of training we played games.  For a couple of hours, I think.  They did this one weird game where you carry a frisbee in your butt and the first one to the finish line wins a giant Foster’s surfboard (NOTE: Not an actual surfboard).  I sat that one out.  But I did get VERY INTO an intense game of Simon Says.  Like I said, there were 60 or so of us, all in dark denim and bushman’s shirts, our trainers leading the game, taking turns playing Simon.  I was focused.  I wanted to win that game.  I had never met 95% of those people before and what better way to introduce myself than by beating them? 

Eventually there were only 8 of us left playing.  Dozens and dozens of my co-workers all stood watching from the sidelines as we fought hard to the end.  The game had gotten tedious by then, but none of us still playing wanted to stop.  So the trainers taking turns playing Simon would switch out more frequently to try to trip us up.  One of the trainers, a petite ex-UT cheerleader from a Knoxville Outback switched places with the previous Simon and yelled as her first instruction, "Jump around and act like a cheerleader!"

Immediately and with great gusto I screamed "Whooooo!" at the top of my lungs, jumped up and down and even kicked my leg into the air.  Alas, I was the only one.  The cute college cheerleader waitress didn’t say "Simon Says," so in front of a sea of strangers who would soon become people I’d see almost every day, I got all Kirstin Dunst in Bring it On in front of everybody.

The wall of laughter from the sidelines was a thousand slaps to my face, and my cheeks were red enough for that to be true.  I ran from the group of players to the only person I knew there, who turned to me and said, "That.  Was awesome."

There is a high school principal in Nashville that no longer has a job because the kids there constantly fight. Gang fighting, random jumpings, bus beatings. This has been happening all year long, but two weeks ago students were arrested every single day for fighting on school property. MANY students. One day it was like 18.

I am well-informed about the situation because one of the women I like at work has two teenaged daughters who attend school there, so I’ve been paying close attention to the story, which led me to think about the fighting that occured at my own high school.

The situation was very different for me. The public high school my friend’s kids go to is urban and is very racially diverse. My public high school was very rural, yet only a 30 minute drive away fom the school in Nashville. I’d say that less than 2% of the student body at my high school belonged to a minority race. White, rebel flag-waving, tobacco chewing people they were. Well, a lot of them, anyway. Despite the nearly all-Caucasian population, we had serious racial tensions in our school. The few black students at my school felt so threatened by the institutional, as well as intentional and direct racism they experiences that there were a few skirmishes. That involved guns. After that any racially “motivated” clothing or paraphanelia of any kind was not permitted on school grounds. Believe it or not, after that ,things died down.

No, most of the fighting at my school was about other things. It was about boys and girls and bad deals and break-ups. About getting cheated. The fights I happened to witness were passionate, and everyone knew the participants history with one another. For instance, I was not surprised to see Marcia Sloan* and Brooke Binkley* straight up BOXING each other in the hallway during 4th period from my seat in AP English. Brooke fucked Marcia’s boyfriend in the theatre light loft, the one with the winding staircase, and most of the days when Marica was working. I watched them land punch after punch on purpling cheeks and ears, but didn’t say anything to anyone. I didn’t feel motivated to interfere, and I couldn’t interrupt class I was 14 at the time, I was probably afraid of what people would think if I spoke up. That fight was broken up within 2-3 minutes by the petite, 50-something sophomore English teacher who got herself punched in the face in the process. The punch was on purpose. Marcia got expelled for that one.

But the most legendary fights were the ones that were planned in advance. Knowing a fight on school grounds would lead to expulsion or be broken up within seconds, those with a taste for blood would challenge the person they intended to fight to do so at a later date. And always at the Sycamore Rec.
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