Ghost Pine #10: Wires (2006)
Table of Contents:
1. Untitled Dialogue Between me and me at ages 16 and 24
2. The Social Justice Club, Part Two: Recruits
i) Origins
ii) The Non-Competitive League
iii) Enclaves
iv) Sundar
v) Marco
vi) Maher
3. “Cocksucker”
4. Bonfire
5. SF: Found and Lost
i) The Rooftops of San Francisco
ii) Django’s Room
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Excerpt:
The Non-Competitive League
Near the end of lunch that day I saw my first potential recruit. I was walking down the hall when I noticed a charged up green mohawk emerging from one of the school’s more secluded bathrooms. The sleeves of the mohican’s jean jacket were skillfully removed and as he turned down the hall the lyrics to a Crass song transcribed in liquid paper across his back were clearly visible. The band’s logo, by far the most geometrically complex of any punk band, was painted above the lyrics.
An assortment of spikes and silk screened patches also adorned the vest. One held the image of a giant fist punching a fractured swastika while another read “Fur is Dead” over a grainy black and white image of what I could only guess was a mink pelt. The vested punk’s face was a constellation of acne covered by the long blonde whiskers he considered a beard. I called his name and as he approached I saw his mouth was drawn into a sneer. I had heard the rumours, but hadn’t believed them. After being expelled for the third, and many thought final, time the summer before, Alex had somehow been re-admitted to Merivale High School.
I first met Alex in grade nine when we were both sentenced to the same obligatory gym class. It was taught by Mr. Nugent, a jolly imp of a man standing no more than five feet tall. Each morning he walked across the gymnasium dressed in shorts and a t-shirt singing to himself, “Born Free / free as the grass grows.” He alternated between crooning and whistling the melody of his personal theme song.
Dwarfed by many of his post-pubescent students, ‘the Nuge’ was genuinely excited and happy to be a physical educator. He had no sadistic aims to whip us into peak physical shape comparable to a squadron of Hitler Youth. Instead his mission was the promotion of physical fitness through a series of team sports, with a strong emphasis on fun.
Despite this noble goal, after the first month of teaching our class he witnessed a disturbing trend. The class was evenly split between jock and spazz and as such often degenerated into a desperate blood sport of the latter running from the former across the football field.
Early in October the Nuge gathered the class into a semi-circle on the waxed wood planks of the gymnasium floor. He sat on a red rubber ball, a whistle hanging around his neck. “I’ve decided to divide the class into two leagues,” he said soberly. “The first will be for the guys who really take sports seriously and want to play hard—” Here his speech was interrupted by the howls and high-fives of ravenous jocks.
“The other league is for the . . .” he paused to consider his words.
“Geeks?” a jock muttered to a crony, loud enough to be heard and ignored.
“For the guys who just want to have fun!” was how we, the blossoming freaks with matchstick limbs, were dubbed by our miniature teacher.
If someone had had the foresight to document the games played by the Non-Competitive League over the remainder of the year it would have provided fodder for the ultimate sports bloopers video. In our quest to ‘just have fun’ we committed a truly awesome array of crimes against sport, be they foul balls, errors, off-sides or just a profound inability to throw a football. Without the pressure of playing with the task-oriented jocks, we let it all hang out. On the field or in the gym we were safe, protected by the patron saint of freaks, a gym teacher who had the foresight to segregate.
We ignored each other in the halls between classes, each of us ashamed of our profound collective failure as athletes. When we did acknowledge each other with a nod, real communication was avoided as we each considered ourselves higher on the social ladder than the other.
In the intricately ordered, nearly lupine hierarchy of grade nine gym class none were lower on the totem pole than Alex, the future punk. He simply refused to adopt a strategy to avoid the jocks’ derision. The extra large Star Trek t-shirts hanging from his spindly frame instantly called attention to his Omega status. Despite this, Alex stood tall, he was a geek and somehow proud of it. He didn’t speak often, but when he did it was without any sense of embarrassment for what he was.
The joy, or at least lack of shame, he took in his position as gym class untermensch drove the jocks insane. In the games of dodgeball played before the class was partitioned, Alex was often at the epicenter of the opposing team’s volleys. During one such game he was struck just below the clinging waistband of his jogging pants.
In an unwritten rule of gym class, being hit below the belt was an event that called for a certain dramatic flair. If a ball in flight struck anywhere within thirty centimetres of your genitals it was expected of you to writhe on the floor, emitting moans approximating a death rattle. Even the writing of a will on the gym floor was not uncommon. This is because at the age of fourteen your balls are obviously so big and so fragile that you could die if they were somehow broken in gym class.
While a chorus of jocks let out a howl of “OOHH!” at their classmate’s suffering, Alex refused to pretend to be in pain when he wasn’t. He shrugged off his groin hit, bending forward and taking a breath before standing straight and resuming play.
“That ain’t right,” one of the jocks said, shaking his head in disbelief.
At the end of grade nine the Non-Competitive League disbanded. A year later, all of its former members were punks, Alex being the first and the de facto leader. Before anyone else had the guts to shave their head Alex already had a charged ‘hawk, a customized jean jacket, and wore a dog collar he shoplifted from the pet store at the mall. He had also been soundly beaten by the jocks of the higher grades for these reasons more than once. As a punk he refined his gym class aloofness into an extreme cool. When hockey-haired boneheads called him “faggot” he’d look right through them. Or worse, he’d smile. That really got them pissed.
One day he took me to his locker. The inside of its door was decorated with anti police propaganda and photos of Rancid cut from Details magazine. “I know they’re sell outs,” he said of the million-selling Berkeley pop punk band, “but when I put these pictures up this girl who has the locker next to me said ‘ew, they’re so ugly,’ so I left them up just to fuck with her.” He looked like a rat when he smiled. “Fuck pretty people. I like ugly.”
“How did you get back into school?” I asked, stunned to see him, and yet somehow not surprised.
“Well, it took a couple weeks, but I finally had a meeting with my mom and Baird,” he sneered when he mentioned the name of the hated vice-principal.
He twisted his voice so that it had a saccharine quality, “I told them I’d try really, really hard this year.” He blew air through his teeth and snarled “Fuck it.
“Well, lunch is over. I got Biology but I fuckin’ hate it. I’m skipping to meet Tops at Rockwell’s.” The punks loved hanging out in the mall’s family restaurant, named after the painter who invented the suburban pastoral. They equally enjoyed the free refills and the shocked looks of the blue-haired grannies who were the restaurant’s only other afternoon clientele. Basking in the scowls, they paid for their drinks in mountains of dimes and pennies, stiffing on the tip every time.
Before he left I told him of Thursday’s inaugural meeting of Mr. Michel’s club. A raspy “Maybe,” was the closest he would come to confirming his appearance.
As Alex walked down the hall to the door, I saw a new addition to his black jean vest. Another silk screened patch, this one was located just below the Crass lyrics, it read “I HATE JOCKS.”
