One didn’t change for PE at OWJHS. He didn’t swap the chic attire in which he attended his academic classes for the shorts and T-shirt in the school colours his parents had been compelled to buy him. He stripped for it, and how the coaches loved saying that, seeing how it made the timid 12-year-olds a couple of months out of elementary school tremble. If one were ill, or otherwise unable to participate in the day’s activities, a black mark called a non-strip was recorded beside his name. Strip, strip, strip!
As though it wasn’t bad enough that we, who in most cases hadn’t been naked in front of another human being since infancy, had to shower together! I hadn’t even discovered the pleasures of my own hand yet, and here I was being informed that I was expected to…strip, and let all my peers see that which no one had glimpsed since I was an infant!
In every boys’ locker room in the world, there are a few boys — the alphas, the badasses — who are really gifted at towel-snapping. I have never been whipped, but I can’t imagine a whip is able to sting much more than [Name Withheld}’s towels did. And do you suppose Coaches Heydenreich and Rall ever uttered a word of discouragement about it? Not one. I’d bet money they imagined being terrorised by a sadistic classmate in the showers Built Character.
(The shyest boy at my elementary school, and maybe in the Los Angeles Unified School District — a boy who was heard to speak, very softly, around once every semester, with eyes averted — was said to have…developed well before any of the rest of us. I can’t say for sure because I was no more likely to glance at my classmates’ genitalia than to stare unblinkingly at the sun. I do know that his priapic precocity made him a favourite target of towel-snappers. God, not that He exists, has a really cruel sense of humour.)
Once having…stripped, we assembled on the basketball court outside, and there learned to impersonate soldiers. The coach would snarl, “Ten-HUT!” (macho asshole for attention), and we neatly lined up athletes would snap to the requisite posture. If pleased with us, the coach would then begrudgingly grumble, “At ease,” which stance involved rather less rigidity. I see now we were being primed for the armed forces, in which, half a dozen years hence, we would defend The American Way of Life against the Viet Cong.
Surfing was gigantic at OWJHS at the time, and it was very fashionable for teen surfers to lighten their hair with hydrogen peroxide. Coach Heydenreich’s advising us that lightening one’s hair was a sure sight of incipient homosexuality dissuaded pleasingly few boys. We were also advised not to lift weights with each other, as that too might turn us into queers.
Most of the time, Rall and Heydenreich seemed bored to tears with their job. But they came dramatically to life in mid-fall each year for the big all-star football game between the ninth-graders who would graduate the following June, as nature intended, and those who would be banished to Westchester High School in January. It was obviously just cruel random fate that had kept the pair of them from overseeing major universities’ football programmes.
I suspect a great many of OWJHS’s female instructors — including the wonderfully named, bullet-brassiered Greek spitfire Marian Titangos — lusted for Rall, whose permanent deep tan beautifully set off his blue eyes and gleaming white teeth. No one had ever seen him and Paul Newman in a room together. I like to think that, given his affinity for tanning, he was leathery, prolifically creased, and no longer remotely attractive by 45, and that his final years were marked by awful loneliness, or random fellow sadists snapping towels at his ass.
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