I Love You, Miss Huddleston by Philip Gulley

Author:Philip Gulley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

My Many Shames

In 1878 our town appropriated the Central Normal College from Ladoga, Indiana. Its president, a Mr. William French Harper, was twenty-three years old, brilliant, but impulsive. He moved the college to Danville in the middle of a spring night. The following November he disappeared. When he returned home a year later, he claimed to have been abducted by Indians and held hostage in Wyoming before stealing a pony and escaping. His explanation was greeted with skepticism. It was the consensus of the towns people that a woman was involved. The next year Harper moved to Los Angeles, became a Baptist minister, and wooed hundreds of women to the Lord.

The college died in 1952, but not before graduating sixty thousand teachers, some of whom tried to teach me. Our town inherited the campus and used it for a high school until 1973, when it became our junior high. The school was four blocks from our home, up Broadway to Wayne Street, across Main, past the Victory Bell to the school.* I would detour two blocks to Logan’s Mobil each morning to buy ten pieces of Bazooka bubble gum. When I got to school I discreetly chewed them, then stuck the wad beneath my desk, adding to the mass of calcified gum clinging to its underside like barnacles to a boat.

Junior high school was a study in humiliation. Each day presented fresh opportunities for embarrassment and degradation. The tender oversight of elementary school was dispensed with, the brutality of life squarely faced. This was especially apparent in Mr. Johnson’s eighth grade P.E. class, where we had to do the two things designed to strike fear into the heart of any adolescent boy—shower nude in front of others, and learn to dance.

Of the two, the showers were worse—standing naked among your peers while the football players snapped you with a towel and laughed at your winkie. Dancing ran a close second. In anticipation of the junior high dance, Mrs. Dollens, the girls’ P.E. teacher, borrowed a phonograph from Mrs. McNeff in the library, trooped the girls down to the gymnasium, and seated them on the bleachers. The boys milled around, studying the girls like farmers inspecting horses, looking over their teeth, scrutinizing their hocks for slewfoot.

The protocol, I soon grasped, was to select from among the trove of beauties the one perfect specimen with whom to dance. Then, in order to avoid first-hand rejection, have your best friend ask for the pleasure of her company on your behalf.

“Who do you want to dance with?” Tim Hadley asked me.

“Jane Martin,” I said, taking care not to select a girl so stratospherically popular I would face rejection, but not so homely I would be embarrassed. It was a fine line to tread. Tim petitioned Jane on my behalf. She eyed me warily, then nodded her head in agreement, though with little enthusiasm. Since my overtures to girls had customarily been met with scorn, her indifference was a welcome improvement.

The rest of the class paired off.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.