“Hi,” she said. “I’m Holly Herndon. I teach English.”
I said ‘hi’ back, very diminutively, as the condition of somebody walking on eggshells.
I was, after all, in a high school. For years and years, I’d had the career aspiration to be a teacher, but had been held back continuously by the religious right in my town which objected to my documented marijuana habit. Or maybe it was the sexual encounter I’d had with some grass in the middle of a field.
Anyway, high schools, for me, have always been grounds of expression’s freedom, of the lack of judgment, of the lack of the cold, callous, dead buzzing of the “real world.” I remember just monkeying around in my own one time, looking for an old teacher who I couldn’t find, and beholding this bright-eyed young creature of about 16 shout “Mi amor” at a platonic (or purportedly platonic) fellow female chum about 18 feet away, the latter of which gave a coy reply, obedient and embarrassed at best. It was a time of discovery. It was a time of disappointment. But it was what it was — nothing was being bought or sold.
Anyway, talking to this Mrs. Herndon, I was very confused.
“We’re putting on a play,” she said.
Wow, I thought, an entire play, and it was free of charge. Think of all the work that goes into a play — the rehearsing, the props, the dress-up, the body language, the directing, the projection of voice (the latter of which I failed most miserably at, though there were a couple of categories there). I still remember seeing the show House, which was by and large pretty entertaining, mocking the enterprise of plays with the main character claiming to only attend if he wanted to “see someone naked” (in which case it seems as a person he really only needs a total of one body part, but that’s none of my business). My sister acted growing up. She was four years older, and I have to admit, she was good, her director this long-haired, frazzled curmudgeon of joy the type of person looking the result of an electric volt from the sky, such were his energy and aura. I was both a sports jock and a music and photography nut who also bagged groceries and made subs on the weekend, along with finding the time to continually watch my Chicago Bears lose 10-7 (the average point total in an NFL game is more like 23 for each team), but I always considered the acting realm something distant, Dionysian and pure, made for people who are really good at standing still for long periods of time, breathing in a lot of dust and still being able to yell without a microphone and be heard by adulating, elderly audience members with hearing aids in the crowd.
So there’s gotta be a catch. This friendly, buxom English teacher of about 50 is leading me through the hallways of this school I’ve never been in, to a lavishly orchestrated and literarily intricate event for which I paid zero money. The catch this time? I wasn’t there for the play at all. I’d come for a basketball game. But it’s funny to think of how many times in life I’ll be staring the system in the face — the naked girls dancing on poles, the glaring oafs in the pubs thinking they know everything (knowing really only the adoration of their own voice), the straight-lined, perfectly mown driveways which garner more attention than the decaying poor, the buildings boarded up, the needy, drugged out lurching in the streets, and I’ll be wishing that a play would be going on.
This one was south of town, to which I’d walked two and a half miles from my “crack spot” downtown, so to speak. I had my comfortable pointy Reebok shoes on which I was probably 10 years too old to be wearing, but nobody seemed to mind. Even though it was a basketball game I was in a hockey jersey and I climbed up the bleachers to a section in back, as was my usual. I sat down sort of head of these three bearded, grizzly-looking dudes who sort of seemed to be all sharing the same brain, as if they were used to operating complimentary annexations of the same machine all the time, in work, and the sounds of the game sank into me.
When I was younger I used to find that ear-piercing buzzer annoying, but by this point it almost soothed me a bit — a presage of the hour and a half of tendon-testing physical activity to be promptly outlayed before me. In time, I noticed that I’d sat down behind a mother and her high school daughter, a sort of nerdy-looking type who I was kind of surprised wasn’t down the hall acting. But I hadn’t thought anything of it. She was next to an apparent boyfriend. In time, he left, and when he got up I noticed that the butt crack of a giant obese dude four rows down was garishly visible.
15 minutes or so later, this rail-thin, beautiful girl of 16 with breasts visible through a hooded sweatshirt game and sat down next to the nerdy-looking girl, who had periodically been stretching a hand out so as to almost touch a shoe of mine, to touch it indeed, had I not moved it. The thin girl in the hoodie, who couldn’t have weighed more than 90 pounds, would lean forward, and I would see some skin of the lower back, and some underwear which read “Pink” on the elastic strap. She and the nerdy girl would talk, looking at the same phone. They’d sit close and I’d notice the nerdy looking girl letting a hand rest against the hoodie-d girl’s thigh, here and there. The guy they’d been with was nowhere to be found.
At one point a 15 year old girl in yoga pants walked by slowly, easily and cluelessly, with apparent disregard for what she was doing to the psyches of all the males in attendance. Suddenly, I knew exactly how the apocalypse would happen.
As the game progressed, a spin-move here, a rebound there, 17 missed shots here (it was a preseasons scrimmage so we’ll cut ‘em some slack), eventually, a fellow mom came over to associate with the nerdy girl’s mom, who was right there. So at this point, I was sitting directly behind, no more than three feet away from, four different women each of whom altered my anatomy significantly. The mom who came over had a flawless, classically chiseled butt, in jeans, and stood with arms crossed talking to the other 40-year-old woman, who also had bright eyes and a very friendly demeanor. The rhythm of the basketball game coaxed them into an ease, a carelessness, and I sat motionless, loath before the idea of disrupting or affectively souring their conversation in any way, or even worse, or putting any of them off. The high school girls remained entranced in a phone, although what they were doing was unclear. At one point the hoodied girl looked back with Brooklyn on her shirt and gave me a startled look, and then went back to the world.
What can I say? God da** it, there was just so much to see. And then there was nothing.