Heather wore square, puffy sweaters in primary colors. They made her shoulders look broad and her neck skinny. She had braces and the bands were all different colors, like some sort of rubbery rainbow grill. Her bangs rose limply from the peak of her forehead, then flopped downward like crippled stalks of corn, which at times would rustle weakly in a stiff breeze, but by and large remained splayed and unresponsive. Her cheeks were high and round, like a cartoon chipmunk.
Oh, how I loved her. How I yearned for her attention. A simple look. A single word. A shared moment. A borrowed crayon.
Mind you, this was kindergarten.
Looking back, I suppose it might not have been love as I know it now. I'm pretty sure I wasn't capable of being attracted to much of anything at the time, especially girls, but I did feel an odd compulsion to pair with Heather. I couldn't explain why that was. Maybe it was some variety of role playing - another manner of compressing the overwhelmingly enormous world surrounding my six year old self into a miniature version, starring me, and filled with all the things I thought life was filled with: hospitals, grocery stores and doting wives.
I really don't know.
And though Heather was great - in the limited way that kindergarten-aged children can be great at anything beyond counting and occasionally screaming for no real reason - I'm pretty sure I picked her because she stood behind me in the lunch line.
Because I was a lover second and a pragmatist first.
By the time I was in the 8th grade my relationship with girls had changed, but only marginally. There was still something fundamentally unknowable about the female gender. And it wasn't the calculus and Latin kind of "unknowable" that could be resolved with hard work and an Adderall prescription. It was more like the deep space/ocean floor kind of unknowable that caused brain hemorrhaging in the improperly prepared.
I think, on some level, that "deer caught in a sniper sight" quality was exactly what Mr. Libby was looking for when he asked Marc and I to become the managers of the girls' varsity basketball team.
Because there had to be some reason and I literally can't come up with anything else even remotely plausible.
Mr. Libby was a whimsical, ginger sprite of a man who taught 7th grade history. He dressed like a guy who got beat up a lot in the 1940s and had a robust, carrot-colored beard that hung thickly, but neatly from his U-shaped chin.
As far as 7th grade history teachers go, he was a lot of fun. He was enthusiastic and encouraging. In lieu of a more traditional report on Ancient Greece, he let Marc and I shoot a fake Greek newscast (complete with a commercial for The Oracle's House of Pancakes, where the whole joke was that the waiter knew what you wanted before you ordered - which I still think is funny, despite all feedback to the contrary). Every now and then he could be persuaded to pop in a wrestling tape near the end of the day and let us revel in the singular pleasure that is watching professional wrestling during school hours.
He was cool in the kind of way that largely "uncool" kids like us could appreciate.
And he just happened to be the coach of the girls' varsity basketball team.
Which is a fact that would have gone completely unnoticed by me were it not for the day when he asked me and my best friend Marc to be co-managers of that very girls' varsity basketball team.
We said yes. I don't remember there being a discussion. I like to imagine us huddling together in the corner and slapping each other frantically to try and awaken from whatever suspiciously erotic dream-trap we had stumbled into, but I don't believe that was the case. I think we just said yes. Probably because what else were we supposed to say?
No?
Are you stupid?
I very clearly remember wondering what it meant. Because it had to mean something. It seemed like a thing that did not and could not exist separate of some grander motivation, some more powerful design. I have often asked myself "Why am I here?" but that question is usually cosmic in scale and I don't really suspect that there's an answer. But then, at that time, sitting in the gymnasium watching preteen girls run wind sprints and miss copious amounts of free throws, then it felt like there ought to be an answer.
"Why are we here?"
Adult Marc (who is similar to 8th Grade Marc, except wiser, more mature and in possession of a substantially greater amount of gardening tools) thinks that Mr. Libby perhaps saw something in us and took an active step in trying to bring it out. This seems feasible if you're only looking at the problem (as it were) and not the solution.
By that I mean yes, Marc and I were not exactly anti-social - not musky, feral man-boys locked in damp basements (we had to go to school, didn't we?), but not especially outgoing either. We were something of a cloistered pair, never making much of an effort to integrate into the wider world. We had Nintendo and pro wrestling. It felt - at least to me - that the wider world didn't have much use for us.
But we were clever and funny and talented in ways we might not have appreciated then. I could write and Marc has always been a talented artist - I just don't think those things felt like they meant anything at the time. At least, not to us. To adults, I suppose, it was a different story.
And on that side of the ledger, I guess maybe Marc's right about Mr. Libby's intentions.
That, however, does not answer the question: how the hell was managing the girls' varsity basketball team supposed to help?
If I had to put a percentage on it, in the immediate aftermath of the Big Question, as Mr. Libby stood there, waiting for an answer, 10% of my brain was trying to calculate how much shit I was about to catch for being a 13 year old boy managing a girls basketball team. The remaining 90%, however, was busy shouting helpful things like:
"GIRLS!"
"OH MY GOD, GIRLS!"
"THERE WILL BE GIRLS!"
"I LIKE GIRLS!"
"GIRLS ARE PRETTY!"
"GIRLS SMELL LIKE RASPBERRIES AND CRIMPING IRONS!"
"GIRLS WEAR BRAS!"
"GIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRLLLLLLLLSSSSS!!!!"
What's funny is that looking back on it, nearly 20 years later, I have absolutely no idea how any of the actual girls on that team felt about the situation. In truth, I don't think they had many feelings on the subject. And why should they? It's not like Marc and I were taking showers with them or administering awkward rubdowns after the games. We were more an extension of Mr. Libby than anything, and I have to suppose that Mr. Libby was, as their coach (and a noted ginger), something of an asexual figure in their lives. And we, as his unpaid underlings, were more or less inconsequential.
It helped, I think, that we were - as a team - historically awful. There was very little at stake. Yes, there was effort. There was pride. But at the end of the day, there was an unspoken understanding that this was just a game and one that none of those girls were particularly well-suited to play.
As for our duties as managers, Marc and I attended every practice and every game. At practice we pulled basketballs from the storage closet, dumped them out in the middle of the court, and then sat in the stands and made jokes about whatever it was smart-asses joked about in the early '90s. If Coach Libby was feeling ornery, he'd call Marc and I down from the stands and make us participate in drills. On a good day that meant fetching stray balls during free throw shooting practice. On a bad day that meant playing power forward during a five on five scrimmage.
We weren't athletes. That was supposed to be a given, and I don't think there was any expectation of coordination, grace or reflexes, but we were also two 13 year old boys surrounded by cute female peers. It's well enough to say "I'm not much of an athlete" but when someone passes you the rock you don't want to look like a jackass. I can't speak for Marc, but those scrimmages against mostly pre-teen girls were probably the most competitive moments of my life.
I did not want to suck.
I mean, I did suck. I just didn't want it to be completely obvious. Ideally, I wanted everyone to walk away from those scrimmages thinking, "Man, that Jesse has potential...too bad he's too busy being so brooding and mysterious and unbearably sexy to focus on sports." If I had to smash some 70 pound 7th grader en route to a big offensive put-back, so be it. The hardball court is no place for softness.
That said, we were pretty much terrible. We both ran the floor like newborn sea turtles scuttling across the sand, dressed in jeans and corduroys, not quite coordinated enough to take 20 consecutive steps without body checking some poor girl, usually a teammate. My jump shots had the horizontal velocity of a helium balloon and the accuracy of a North Korean nuclear missile. My passes either bounced painfully off someone's shin or threatened to disable one of the florescent lighting rigs hung 30 feet over our heads.
I like to think that, if anything, our presence and comic ineptitude was a reminder to the girls that yes, they were not exactly the best basketball team ever assembled, but look - it could always be worse.
Games were fun. Not because we ever won them, but mostly because I highly enjoyed visiting other schools.
Or, to be more accurate I suppose, I enjoyed visiting the gymnasiums of other schools, since that was pretty much all I ever got to see. Still, there was something genuinely exciting about it. I was born in Ellsworth, Maine and went to school in the same town from pre-school through high school. Until I started going on those trips with the basketball team, the concept of other schools and other students was as abstract as the concept of life on other planets. Sure, I believed that they existed, but I didn't have much solid proof to go on.
I think the similarities were actually more fascinating to me than the differences. Those schools felt less like foreign constructions and more like parallel dimensions - alternate versions of the familiar. Different color schemes. Different scoreboards. Doors in a slightly different place. "This is what my school would have looked like if the Nazis had won WWII," I would think to myself. "This is the version where Maine invaded New Hampshire." "This just like Ellsworth, but if Walt Disney had conquered Canada in a bloody land battle."
We did have work to do at those games. Besides sitting on the bench next to Coach Libby and getting deeply quizzical "Gay or mentally handicapped?" stares from the parents of opposing players, we also had to hand water bottles to the girls during timeouts and clap encouragingly when appropriate.
I was actually drafted into being the scorekeeper for the boys team, because I'm so fucking great at counting it's obscene. Once a player on the opposing team put one in his own basket. Being a novice to these things, I added his name to our side of the scoresheet and gave him his justly deserved 2 points. I mean, come on - the man earned it. Apparently, that's not how you handle those situations and I was told to award the 2 points to one of our players. Which player? The choice was mine. And what a choice it was! Let's just say I hope I never have to make an actual important decision in my life, because 20 years later I'm still not sure I made the right call. In fact, I'm sure I didn't. GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE?
I don't know if those months with the girls basketball team really helped anything - presuming they were ever meant to help in the first place. If anything, I think it pushed us further away from the (somewhat large) section of peers that we were never likely to be accepted by anyway. We remained clandestine and (charmingly) odd and soon after graduated on to high school, where everything seemed to reset itself anyway.
But it was fun. Marc has joked that Mr. Libby only meant to ask me, but Marc was standing right there so what the fuck, he made it a two-for-one deal. But I wouldn't have done it on my own and I wouldn't have enjoyed it if my best friend hadn't been there with me. Childhood is really just one life-altering trauma after another. You need someone to laugh about it with or you're lost. And we may have sucked at basketball, but we were great at laughing about it.
