The Blues and Grays of My Youth

by Brandon D. Christopher

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In the 2nd entry of the Being 13 series, Brandon discovers that the Lord works in mysterious ways. And sometimes those mysteries involve excrement.

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(from the archives)

My school uniform, which I enjoyed immensely, consisted of gray corduroy pants and a light-blue, short-sleeved shirt. I loved wearing a uniform to school everyday. I loved the way the clothes felt; I loved the lack of options in the morning and I loved the combination of colors: gray and light-blue.

The only clothes that I would wear outside of that uniform were my camouflage pants and an olive-green T-shirt, which, everyday at 3:30pm, would replace the school uniform along with my underarm holster and pellet gun. But during the hours of 8:00am and 3:00pm, it was gray corduroy pants and a light-blue, short-sleeved shirt. And thanks to perma-press rayon and a strict collar, my uniform looked as good in July as it did in September when it was new.

I wasn’t sure if other 12 year-olds were as proud of their grays and blues as I was. By their colored undershirts and various accessories, I presumed they were not. While self-analyzing myself during Physical Education’s hour-long football game, I concluded that my uniform was a lengthy step outside from the ways of my family, who all wore shorts and tennis shoes, denims and advertised T-shirts. I didn’t. I hated bare shorts, I hated white tennis shoes, I hated T-shirts and sports, and I hated T-shirts that advertised sports. The gray pants and collared shirt were my greatest attribute, I felt. To hell with humor, strength and charm, I wore a uniform!

I’m not sure why they called it touch football because once Chris Castric got that ball, he ran toward me and pounded an elbow into my chest as he passed. I flew to the asphalt ground and actually felt my heart bruise on impact. When my eyes returned from the back of my head, I saw Chris slam into another kid as he entered the coned touchdown zone and threw the football onto the ground in some form of a victory shuffle. His team cheered him on and chanted, “Chris, Chris, Chris,” as my team shook their heads and yelled, “Get up, you fag!”

Everyone in the game was wearing their blue gym shorts and yellow T-shirts, which was mandatory during Physical Education. I had secretly thrown out my P.E. clothes the first week of school, blaming it on the Luminous Catholic Boys, which was a fictitious gang that I had made up for the occasion of an alibi. After getting excused from sports for the first six months of the year for not having the appropriate attire, the coach had a change of heart and began making me play football and soccer and every other stupid sport in my gray and blue school uniform. Even though I usually left the playground sweaty and scuffed up, it was better than wearing those silly shorts for an hour a day.

Coach Craig excused me for the rest of the hour, due to my injuries, and I decided to continue my self-evaluation as I walked the length of the playground. It was surreal to be walking through the empty playground, with no other students in sight. As I walked further and further away from the football game, the sounds of birds chirping and distant vacuum cleaners replaced the cheers and sighs of the students. I heard car traffic and police sirens, and I felt like I was the last man on Earth for just a moment.

I became an archeological explorer when I found two quarters, a Canadian penny, and an empty bird’s nest near the back wall, and then I put the two quarters and penny inside the bird’s nest and set it into a tree. I walked a few feet before returning to the nest and pulled out the quarters. I put the two coins into my pocket, left the penny but spit into the nest, and then I returned the nest to the tree. Two quarters were two games of Tempest at the pizza joint near church.

Someone had left an aluminum baseball bat on the ground, probably since lunch. I grabbed the bat and continued walking, using it like a walking cane.Elegantly, I sleeked over the asphalt ground with my cane swaying beside me. My new cane, coupled with my school uniform, made me look daring and charming at the same time. I galvanized Christianity, I thought to myself. I was the new symbol of faith. Why couldn’t all altar boys walk with canes?

My exploration brought me to the desolate volleyball field, which looked like Pompeii after the volcano: a long net stood suspended by two metal poles at both sides, a volleyball was slowly rolling in the wind outside of the painted square, pages of notebook paper flapped by me and danced in tiny dust hurricanes across the ground- but there were no people anywhere.

I walked to the volleyball and hit it with the baseball bat, which sent it rolling toward the football game. I watched it roll for what seemed like thirty or forty seconds until it hit the foot of a faraway student who picked it up and rested it under his arm without even looking down. His eyes were glued to the football game as they followed Chris Castric knocking some other frail kid to the gravel.

The volleyball area was shaded by huge trees that hung over the brick wall surrounding the playground. Patches of darkness consumed most of this eastern block of the asphalt. I decided to sit and watch the last half of the football game from this safe distance. Tiring of this, I began pounding tree debris with the tip of the baseball bat. Tiring of that, I started tapping the bat against the metal pole holding up the volleyball net and amazed myself with the curling, reverberating sounds that it made.Never before had I heard music from Africa, but I imagined that that’s what it must have sounded like.

The wind died down a little, and I noticed several flies circulating over a small hole in the ground nearby. I crawled the few feet to the little opening in the gravel and saw that it was a perfectly round passage, exactly the width of a tennis ball. I knew it was exactly the width of a tennis ball because there was a tennis ball deep down inside of it, maybe six inches down. The luminous green of its felt was unmistakable.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness inside, and I studied this strange hole as I squatted above it. It appeared to be some form of pipe-like shaft entering the Earth straight down - God only knew how far. And then a strange smell lifted from the hole, which felt to be warmer than the air around me. Its odor was repulsive yet captivating, like the aroma of a terrible fart that you just had to smell twice because you couldn’t believe that it came out of you.

The wind came again and blew the flies and the smell away, and when it stopped I returned my nose to the hole to get one more whiff of the wretched bog below me. It smelled like a combination of alley shit and burnt meat. The new term “bum shit” had just been invented.

My years of exploration helped me to surmise that this hole was either the legendary passageway that went straight down to Hell, which allowed the Devil to travel between our world and his, or the hole was simply an additional outlet for the metal pipe that held up the volleyball net. I carefully weighed both theories for several minutes before deciding that, regardless, I wanted the tennis ball inside of it. If the ball was indeed the only thing stopping the Devil from traveling through the tube to Earth, at least I would have fifteen to twenty good minutes of hitting the ball against the wall before he took my soul.

There weren’t that many approaches to getting a tennis ball out of a thin hole in the ground, especially when all I had was a baseball bat. I tried sliding my hand down inside of it, and my middle finger actually grazed the felt of the ball, but it must have been floating atop some type of water because it bobbed up and down whenever I touched it. My thumb, my dreaded thumb, prevented me from going any further down into the hole and getting a better hold.

The smell rose again and caused me to shriek back several inches. I was getting angry now. I wanted that ball. I wanted that ball so much that I was going to punish it for not helping me get it out. If I couldn’t have it then no one was going to have it. The ball was going to learn a valuable lesson in upsetting me. I would push that ball to the depths of Hell so that no one would ever see it again.

And at just the moment that I slid the aluminum baseball bat into the hole - which seemed to fit perfectly inside like a bullet in a chamber - I remembered what a couple of fellow classmates had said about a bum taking a huge crap in the volleyball court, and how no one wanted to clean it up so they just used a cola can to push it into one of the extra holes for the volleyball net. They laughed as they said it, and I laughed as I imagined Coach Craig setting up the volleyball net and getting a bum’s turd all over his fingers.

And now, at that exact moment that I realized all of this, and actually started to laugh again at the scheme of it, I pushed down on the baseball bat with all my might, and a huge spray of thick, brown water shot up from the hole and drenched my light-blue shirt and gray pants. The area between the circumference of the bat and the sides of the hole were miniscule, yet big enough to allow chunks of what I feared was bum shit to drench my neck and the front of my beloved uniform.

My hands let go of the bat, which had already sunk two feet into the Earth, and I unknowingly stood and walked backwards, with my arms still extended in front of me like Frankenstein in reverse. The stench of the thick liquid on my clothes and skin was, if possible, ten-times worse now than when it was contained inside the hole.

I continued walking backwards, too shocked to vomit, too shocked to lower my arms. I could feel it running down my neck as I looked down at my entire body, seeing it all over me - patches of brown water, runny clumps of hair, and thick particles of what looked like ground beef. I leaned as far forward as possible, trying not to let any of it soak through the shirt and touch my chest. I had no idea what to do next. I looked around, half-hoping that someone was nearby to help me do something about this, and yet thankful that no one was around to have witnessed this horrible event - the most disgustingly horrible event in Catholic history. The worldly explorer had definitely made the wrong move this time.

I had to think quickly. The water faucets were near the doors to the school, nearly one hundred and fifty feet away. At this speed, leaning over, I could make it there in twenty or thirty seconds, but what if someone came out? I checked my watch. I had about three minutes till the bell rang, which meant three minutes before my football-playing class ran through those very same doors to go to the gym to change clothes, and about three minutes before the next class came out through those doors for their hour of Physical Education. It was my only shot - I had to go for it.

Half-skipping while leaning forward was not a terribly quick method of travel, but it got me to the water faucet in seconds-flat. Realizing that splashing water onto my shirt wasn’t going to do the trick, I pulled my ruined blue attribute over my head, paying very careful attention as not to let any of it touch my face, and I soaked it under the gentle stream of cool water. The drain suddenly clogged with human waste and hair, and I wrung my shirt out and repeated the process in the growing pool of brown water.

The water faucet wasn’t going to work - I realized this now. I needed more water, more area, a bigger drain. The bathroom! I deliberated on whether or not to put the shirt back on as I ran down the school hall to the bathroom. I didn’t know which was worse: getting caught pale and shirtless or getting caught with shit on my shirt. I went with the shirtless and ran down the hall with my wet wad of polyester in my hand, and I made it to the bathroom just as the bell sounded throughout the school.

I could hear the roar of students permeating the hallways as I removed my pants and soaked them alongside my shirt under the large faucet of the sink. Glancing in the mirror ahead of me, I noticed that some of the brown liquid had managed to speckle across my jaw and cheeks, and I quickly doused my entire head under the water. The smell was still horrifying but beginning to dilute, and the stains in my shirt and pants were starting to vanish.

Two fourth-graders walked in and saw me standing over the sink in my black shoes and unmentionables, and I quickly yelled, “My clothes caught fire!” One of the fourth-graders dropped his peach folder and ran out, and the other walked to the urinal beside me and peed.
“Are you going to go to the nurse?” The young boy asked. “I don’t know,” I replied.

He finished up and washed his hands in the sink to the left of me, and, casually, he leaned over and examined what I was doing in my sink. He saw my pants and shirt, the two things I loved most in this world, soaking in a pool of tan water in the sink. “Did you poop in them?” He asked. “There was a fire,” I repeated.

“It smells like poop!” He exclaimed and plugged his nose with his index finger and thumb. “Oh, man!” He didn’t bother to dry his hands before leaving the bathroom. And he didn’t even bother to pick up his friend’s fallen peach folder from the floor.

Luckily, no one else came into the bathroom before I had wrung out my clothes and put them back on. They were still wet and extremely wrinkled, but they were back on. The brown stains were still visible in the shirt but now light enough to be passed off as something other than a bum’s shit. The gray corduroy pants had turned pitch black from being wet. I just hoped I had gotten most of it off.

Hard to believe, but I returned to class and sat out the last two hours at my desk in a wet uniform that mildly reeked of feces. I stuck to my story that my clothes had caught fire and I had to subdue the flames by soaking them in the sink. And when asked by the teacher how none of my hair was burnt off by pulling a flaming shirt over my head, not to mention why there were no burn marks on any of my clothes, I told her that our God was a miraculous one, and who was she or I to question His good will.

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A native of Los Angeles, Brandon D. Christopher has survived 41 jobs, 7 cars, 4 days in jail, and completed a 3-hour Learning Annex seminar to become a private investigator. He is the author of several published essays and short stories, and is currently searching for a publisher for his latest novel Dirty Little Altar Boy. He can be reached at BrandonDChristopher@hotmail.com.