Sweat it out

A question for the women in the room: In high school phys ed, did y’all strip naked for showers? Purely an academic question, naturally, since you never know when I might have to write a scene featuring high school girls in a locker room setting, and I wouldn’t want to get it wrong, would I?

Well, we stripped. It began in junior high, and I’m not sure what the point of it was. Lord knows it wasn’t necessary. We didn’t get all that smelly. At the time, I considered it a rite of passage, or perhaps a hazing ritual. We dissected cadavers in med school in small part to learn anatomy, in large part to overcome the taboo of not cutting people open with sharp implements. So what was the point of getting naked with a bunch of other guys? For what part of adult life did that prepare me?

This is no small point. Like girls, boys mature at different rates. In my 10th grade gym class, side-by-side in the locker room we had a boy who lacked the slightest poof of pubic hair (NOT me, so get that out of your mind) alongside a fellow I’ll call The Donkey (also not me, but if you want to think I’m lying, I won’t argue with you).

The Donkey once told the story of how his girlfriend had broken up with him, but had wanted him back within the fortnight. Implicit was the suggestion they had been sexually active and her dalliances elsewhere had not matched up. We all shook our heads knowingly. With clothes on, we would have figured him a BS artist, but in the locker room, we trusted the evidence of our eyes.

I used to wonder, and perhaps worry a little, about the prepubescent kids. The Hairless Ones. To me, this would be more profoundly disturbing to the adolescent male psyche than girls comparing their breasts’ Tanner Stages. Some girls never get past a Tanner 2, yet they’re just as feminine as a Tanner 4. But the guy with the Tanner 1 prick really does have something to worry about. His whole sexual future depends on making progress. If he’s thirteen and hairless and surrounded by a bunch of Tanner 2s and 3s and even a well endowed 4 (The Donkey), why shouldn’t he worry?

It’s not the worst part about PE. The worst part is war ball. Nevertheless, it ranks up there if you’re one of those Tanner 1s. So I’ll ask again: why was this necessary? Admittedly, I have to get nekkid around the guys in my gym’s locker room, but we’re all adults. It ain’t the same dynamic.

Maybe it’s that old life lesson that the world isn’t fair. I learned early on that some kids were richer than me, cuter than me, stronger or faster than me, more talented than me. That’s the way it was. That’s the way it always would be. I would never be the star quarterback, no matter how much I willed it, and I would never run a mile in under nine minutes. I would never play guitar like Peter Frampton, play chess like Bobby Fischer, or look good with an assault rifle like Patty Hearst.

And I would never, ever be hung like The Donkey.

D.