My Life in Pinik - Part 5

Alejandro and Enrique couldn’t protect me from the shame of always being picked last for teams, but if I wasn’t used to it by now, when I was going to be used to it? And as we finished with the traditional sports for which I’d long known I had no aptitude whatever, and explored new ones, like soccer and gymnastics, I discovered myself a lot less useless athletically than I’d always imagined. I seemed to have a real knack for dribbling a soccer ball with my feet. Other boys would charge at me, seemingly intent on knocking me flying and relieving me of the ball, and I’d embarrass them, either faking them out or simply outrunning them. By the end of our two-week soccer unit, I’d scored more goals than anyone in my class, though of course it was the boy who’d scored the second most whom Coach Himmelmann named the class’s best player.

I went to the PE office after classes to ask him about it. You should have seen the assembled coaches sneering and heard their snickering when I presented myself. Coach Himmelmann was furious with embarrassment as he led me to his office, whose door he pointedly left open. He acted as though he’d initiated the meeting, telling me loudly before I was able even to explain why I’d called on him, “I want you to be very clear about this: I very strongly disapprove of you and everything you stand for.” Outside, one of the other coaches loudly snickered, “You tell her, Buddy.” A couple of the other coaches guffawed at his ingenious use of the feminine pronoun. I wondered exactly what it was Coach saw me representing.

I acknowledged that I wasn’t of much use at football, basketball, or baseball. More guffaws from outside. “You got that right,” Coach snarled, as though in some awful movie about CB radio. “But,” I said, “I think I was pretty clearly the best soccer player in class, and wonder why you said Bruce Logue was.”

“Are you questioning my judgment?” he leaned forward to growl at me, as though I’d somehow impeached his masculinity. I think I was supposed to cower or even burst into tears, but I just smiled at him. He snorted in disgust at my failure — the failure of a 14-year-old who stood 5-4 and weighed 118 pounds to confront a big 220-or-so-pounder in his early forties — to get back in his face, as I think the popular saying goes, and leaned back in his chair. “Listen,” he said, “we do soccer because the school board says we have to. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a girl’s sport.”

I guess gymnastics must have been for girls too, as I was at the top of my class in gymnastic too, the only one who could do a standing back flip. A couple of my classmates actually complimented me. I’m pretty sure Coach would have strangled them with his bare hands if he’d thought he could get away with it.

I don’t want to jump too far ahead, but maybe this is the best place to recount how, seven years later, after I moved down to the City and got a job at a trendy Asian fusion restaurant where I was the only Caucasian…ladyboy, Coach and a couple other butch guys came in one night. Seated in another…gurl’s section, they seemed at first to be rigid with discomfort and loathing. But once they had a couple of drinks in them, I think they got another kind of rigid. When they left, I found out from Lili, who’d served them, that Coach Himmelmann had pleaded for her phone number. We were strictly forbidden to date customers, so Lily had had in the end to give him a false number. Take this from me: most of your most aggressive homophobes and those most offended by someone who doesn’t fit neatly into a conventional gender slot are those who watch the most shemale porn and secretly fantasize most about sucking a cock.