Ahhh! The joys of being an adolescent in junior high school. Especially PE, physical education to you dummies out there. And what an education it was. 

       My first real glimpse of what the rest of my life would be like.

       How can I describe it? That PE class. It was only an hour long, but how I looked forward to it each day. The crashing of metallic wall locker doors, the smell of festering, sweat-moist fungal penicillin-growing shorts and tee shirts.

       But also the warm aroma of the myriad of jock straps. Little jock straps for mostly little people (we were only fifteen years old then). The jock straps had no back (bottom), and left your tush wide open for the indignities to follow.

       The bullies and their henchmen.

       The snapping of jock straps on tiny undeveloped butts, and the screams of the victims, the small wimpy kids.

Whom the bigger bully kids picked on. A veritable torture dungeon of lust.

       If you were a wimpy kid, you went home after one of these beatings and that night cried in the shower because you didn’t want to share your pain with your know-nothing parents. You didn’t want them to think you were a wimpy kid.

       But after awhile, you came to find little ways to enjoy the pain, the bully who slammed the metal wall locker door on your thumb, who took a dirty towel and snapped it like a whip on your derriere while you were bent over. Or who said very politely, “could you look in my locker and see if there’s something in there?” And you were afraid and so you complied….and he smashed the door on your neck. 

       The wall lockers were assigned alphabetically, and of course your last name was alphabetically next to the worst bully in the school. So you had your wall locker right next to that of Ivan The Smasher.

       The trick was to arrive at your wall locker before Ivan did and get dressed in your rancid gym clothes and be out the door onto the playing field before he arrived. This was quite a trick since everybody arrived for PE at the same time and had only five minutes to get ready.

       But it could be done.

       You’ve made it. You’re in your smelly gym shorts and outside when you see Ivan with his sadist red eyes enter. A minute later you hear the scream of some poor unlucky kid two wall lockers away from Ivan who now pays the price you would have paid.

       The metal slamming of wall lockers and the snapping of towels and jock straps and the cries of the wimpy white-butt innocents, who will now have painful red welts to sit on for their next class.

       Life is PAIN! You’re learning about life.

       Where is the PE teacher during this torture dungeon of love? (love of inflicting pain). You might ask. He is oblivious. He doesn’t want to get involved because he considers teaching a bunch of punks to do knee bends beneath him (he wanted to be a pro football coach and even his own mother nags him, “when are you going to get a real job?" (not teaching).

       If the Pearl Harbor attack happened in the locker room, he wouldn’t notice it. If you were a wimpy kid and Ivan The Smasher was strangling you right on his desk and he was doing paperwork, with your head right next to his pencil, he would ask you to please stop gurgling and go away.

       This was my PE class.

       I miss it so, the joy of sweat, of excrement stains, of snapping jock straps and tiny white butts being pummeled by those with slightly bigger butts, the crashing of metal wall locker doors, the screams of the victims and the satisfied pre-sexual grunts of their tormentors.

       Later, I went up to Ivan The Smasher and said to him with a straight face, “the pain that time was exquisite.”

       From then on he picked on another kid.

The smashing of wall lockers, the screams of the victims. The snapping of jock straps.