Persons attempting to find a "text" in this [story] will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR - Wendell Berry's introduction to Jayber Crow.
This article was posted to Jayber on 20 May 2008 by to the following categories: Stories.
An audio version of this article is also available.
Hunched, shivering, goose-pimply and bare, I assembled with other pubescent boys on the wet, slippery, and slimy concrete of our Junior High locker room after a pre-swim rinse. I could smell the dry chlorine in the air, and had already started prophesying to myself the inevitable ashy dander that would ensue that afternoon in the form of an anhydrous itchy epidermis.
I could see our commanding gym teacher strolling towards us from his office while whistling a confident but unidentifiable and ugly tune. (Why did he always do that?) He was carrying an orange 5-gallon pale and a clipboard for roll-call.
When he got near, he dropped the bucket from a distance too high to be considered careful, and as it hit the concrete, it startled us and made an echoing and hollow thud which reverberated through the cavernous shower room.
Each of us stood quietly wide-eyed, anticipating the unknown thing we would be forced to do next. Then, without notice, he dropped his clipboard to his thigh, turned his right foot 90 degrees outward, shifted his weight to his left hip and assumed an awkward pose that seemed as though he were about to demonstrate a textbook touch-pass.
With his extended right foot, he kicked the pale of tiny, cold, wet, Speedo swimsuits to the center of our mass, and said unsympathetically as though he were a raspy-voiced and condescending army sergeant who yelled and smoked too much, "Strap 'em on, boys".
After entering the pool, we sat impatiently to be inspected for Scoliosis. The girls (who where just finishing their own swim unit) skittered past us like a set of nervous ants trying to orient themselves to a nest that didn't exist.
It was at this point, as I looked down the row of us boys, observing our varying reactions to the girls that were walking by, that I realized that there were two kinds of people in my class: those that were popular, confident, and coordinated; and those that had an inborn mistrust of their personal adequacy as men.
I was an accepting member of the latter, but wished dearly that I could somehow skip adolescence before my weakness could be solidified further. Unfortunately, as I would find out, I would just have to wait.