The year I spent in the fourth grade was probably one of the most important times in my life. It was a transitional period for me, in which I moved away from the lackadaisical freedoms of childhood and into the rigid seriousness of prepubescent adolescence. In the summer of 1994 my family was living in the town of Columbia, Illinois, and in the fall I would be starting school at Immaculate Conception School, which was the extravagantly named Catholic school in town. Since I was the new kid in town my parents thought it imperative that I assimilate with other youths as quickly as possible. In order to accomplish this my brother and I were quickly enrolled in an organized soccer league. Now, in previous summers I had to suffer the humiliations of Little League baseball, so I was used to having my summers interrupted by the vicious demands of Sport. However, this was the first time that I entered a competitive soccer league. One thing I realized very quickly is with soccer you have to run...a lot. I would have to say that 100% of the time a player is either running or moving at some kind of accelerated pace. Now, I have mentioned in the past that at age ten (10) my body was not built for any form of physical activity. I was a great sitter and an even better recliner, and I could watch the hell out of a TV, but running? Michael J. Fox has a better chance of earning a degree in calligraphy than I had at running. Soccer practice became hour long endurance tests in which my only motivation was to not be the shittiest player on the field. Games were obviously worse, because the thing I hated more than running was competition. I have found that there is a very strong correlation between how good I am at something and how much I give a shit. I have no doubt in my mind that had I been a soccer prodigy I would have relished the competition, but I wasn't a prodigy, although my old man did refer to me sometimes as the Garbage Disposal, because of how much food I could put down. Anyway, the natural drive that an athlete has to win had died inside me long ago. It was buried under the bra and underwear section of the JCPenney catalog and countless episodes of Ren & Stimpy. I was forced to play soccer, I hated it, and simply didn't care if we won or lost. My whole philosophy on the sport was Stay Away From The Ball. I hated playing the forward position because that meant I had to run the entire length of the field, and I had the lung capacity of an aborted fetus with a pack-a-day habit. On occasions I would be selected to play goalie. I assumed that it wasn't for my insanity-inducing reflexes, but was more for the fact that the goalie is the position that can always be furthest from the ball while still considered an actual player. But the goalie position was a two-sided coin. I like playing goalie, because I didn't have to run. I could usually lean against a post and get some good counting done. On the other hand, I was the last line of defense. The entire game could rest on my shoulders. Move this way and we lose, move that way and we win. I couldn't take the pressure. My defense consisted only of praying that my teammates would not let the ball get to me. If that failed then I would occasionally flail a hopeless limb, most of the time in the opposite direction of the careening ball. My only true victory in the sport came during a Saturday tournament. Before our game was scheduled to start, my mom gave me some money to get some food and pop at the concession stand. As I was returning to my teammates, who were stationed at the bottom of a hill by the fields, I noticed that the game was about ready to start and I wasn't there. So, against all my instincts, I began to run down the hill. Walking a few yards in front of me was a boy who looked a couple years younger than me. He must have heard me lumbering towards him, because he looked back at me and I saw his eyes widen in fear. He let out a yell and began sprinting down the hill in front of me. It was the only time in my life I have been able to intimidate someone. The only good thing to come out of soccer was that I got to meet the boys that would become my friends during the school year. The boy I became best friends with was a lanky red-haired kid named Matt. He was rail-thin, had perpetually uncombed hair, and a set of wild blue eyes that would haunt Charles Manson's dreams. Matt may have suffered from some form of A.D.D., because the kid was very smart, but he was fucking nuts. I remember being at an arcade with him once and he actually said, "I'm gonna fight this guy." And then he walked up to a kid playing a game and started talking shit until a fist fight erupted. I maintained my usual safe-distance. I thought maybe Matt had some kind of emotional problems, stemming from what I have no theory. His dad might have pissed in his mom's pussy while he was being conceived. That's one way to dilute the quality of the sperm [citation needed]. Although I considered Matt to be my best friend that year, we had a sort of love-hate relationship. We were friends, but we fought all the time. Matt could be very mean-spirited, a trait shared amongst the gingers. There were times when I would show up to school not knowing if Matt would be my friend that day or not. But more often than not we got along fine. We did sleepovers, birthday parties, all the stuff normal boyhood friends do. And if I'm being honest, I brought a lot of Matt's ire on myself. You see, in fourth grade I was a pathological liar of Casey Anthony proportions. I lied about everything to everyone. And it was always the most pointless shit. I mean, I lied to cover my ass when I was in trouble, but I also lied about movies I saw, books I read, presents I received. And a lot of my lies were aimed at Matt. One time I told Matt that my family was going to Busch Stadium that night to watch a Cardinals game and we had an extra ticket. "Do you want to go?" Matt was so excited. I told him I would call him that night and my family would pick him up to take him to the game...But it was all bullshit. My family did have tickets to a Cardinals game, but no extra ticket. I'm not sure why I lied, but if I had to venture a guess I would say it was because between the time I asked Matt to the game and when he figured out he wasn't going to be picked up, I was his fucking hero. I came through! For that brief window of time I was the man. The anger he felt towards me later on was worth the time he spent thrilled that I had asked him to go to a ball game. When my family got back from the game Matt had left multiple messages on our answering machine asking if everything was OK. I wasn't sure what I was going to say to Matt the next day, but I figured I would wing it. Turns out I didn't have to say anything. When I approached him, he simply turned towards me and spit a loogie right in my face. That was the gist of our relationship. It was built on lies and insults and suspicions with moments of genuine friendship. Fourth grade was also an important year for me, because it was the year that my brother Dale had completed his Homeric quest to find my father's porn stash. This quest was all predicated on a hunch we had that our dad just looked like he was the type to own porn. After two years of searching, Dale discovered a large stack of Playboys stuffed inside a Xerox box that was marked "Easter." Those Playboys, which covered the 1986-87 season, were my first real introduction to sex. I believe that sexual orientation in genetic and unchangeable, because at 10 I had no concept of what it actually meant to be gay. Gay was just a concept, an insult. It was looking at those pictures and centerfolds of fully nude women that I moved from being an asexual child to a fervent heterosexual. I was fucking mesmerised by those magazines. Dale and I looked at them whenever we had free time. We would stash a few in our room, then switch them out with a new batch when our erections had grown immune. The thing about naked women in the 1980s is there was always a lot of hair...gallons and gallons of hair. Most of the women in the Playboys I was looking at could wear their pubic hair in a ponytail. And of course the idea that a woman could shave her pubic hair was nowhere near my thoughts, so I was forced to look at beautiful women with enough hair between their legs to weave a rug. And since the vagina itself was hidden behind this fucking eagle's nest, it really didn't do anything for me. I had no idea what a vagina looked like, and all I saw in those magazines was just the absence of a penis. So I became obsessed with breasts. I would go crazy thinking about them. Since I went to a Catholic school it was mandatory to attend church as a school during the week. Every once in a while I would sit behind a seventh or eighth grade girl whose bra straps were visible through her shirt. At that point my mind would shut off and I would just fucking stare at these straps for a whole hour. Dale had a girlfriend that he brought over to our house every now and then, but she was so flat I think her chest was actually concave. The gods are cruel. So in fourth grade I discovered I sucked at soccer, I was terrible at lying but didn't care, and I discovered bewbs. Fourth grade was also the year I found out I sucked at math. Elementary school math was generally easy for me. It was simple adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, no big deal. But in fourth grade they introduce equations. They put goddam letters into the problems. I absolutely hated math class. It was my worst subject. And as with soccer, since I sucked at math, I didn't care about math. The teacher would assign a section of our math workbook and then give us some time to get started on it, and I was shut that motherfucking book right then and there and shove it into my desk. I truly never did the assignments. I handed in so many papers where only one or two of the problems were even attempted. Of course my apathy caught up to me at the end of the year. I passed math class with a D-, but was also given a letter that said if I did not maintain a certain grade in fifth grade math, I would have to take fourth grade math over again. But for some reason Fate keeps saving my ass from true humiliation. That summer, my dad was once again transferred from Illinois back to Omaha, so by fifth grade I was back in my hometown of Treynor, Iowa, with all my old friends. And the issue of nearly failing math never came up at school. My year of fourth grade will always hold a special place in my heart, because that was when I began my journey into the man I am today, a man who is kinda a dick, kinda not.
© Eric Moore - 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment