This one comes from the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction department here at Friday Night Bug Juice Inc.
The setting is Stout Junior High School in Dearborn, Michigan. The time is 1972-1975. The steel door leading from the boy’s shower room to the pool opens and into the pool area parades a group of sixty young teen boys totally nude. Dicks and balls of all shapes and sizes bounce into place around the heavily chlorinated pool. Watching the parade of pubes is gym teacher Rick Haas.
Is this the start of something perverted? Some adult endorsed ritual of humiliation , degradation and eroticism?
Yes...and no.
This is the gym class I grew up with in the mid-seventies at my junior high in middle class Michigan. For some reason, never made clear to me and never questioned by my parents, we were required to perform the swimming portion of our gym class nude. As mentioned in previous blogs, I don’t do nude very well. I am hung (lower case letters) like a fat, mayonnaise skinned Irishman. When you combine my natural limitations with cold air, cold water and fear, you have a walking, barely bouncing afterthought.
We were all given specific areas to stand around the pool, because as everyone knows, any physical activity should get started with calisthenics.
“All right men, “ barks big Rick Haas, “let’s get started with twenty jumping jacks.”
“Now hit your backs, it’s time for leg lifts, four counts. Count one, lift legs off the ground pushed together, count two spread legs wide, count three legs still off the ground but back together, count four back to the ground. Let’s do twenty.”
“Very good. Now get in the push up position. I want good push ups, chest all the way to the pool deck. No cheating, no girlie push ups. Ten good ones on my go.”
Are you fucking kidding me. Use your imagination. Sixty dicks flopping around during jumping jacks, sixty assholes spread open for leg lifts, sixty units brushing the germ ridden pool deck for push ups.
I only wish that this was the end of the weirdness and perversion.
Once calisthenics were completed it was time for fun and games.
One popular game was Bean-O. In this game, all sixty kids were required to jam into the shallow end of the pool. Six volleyballs were introduced into this cramped area. The goal of the game is to hit someone, anyone as hard as you could with the ball. No teams, no scoring, only pain.
A few points of interest surrounding this “game”:
If somebody was about to hit you and you thought going under water could save your ass, the guy just followed you around until you had to surface for air and then nailed you.
Once, a ball skimmed out onto the pool deck and some poor bastard left the water to get it. He quickly became the object of many throws and painfully discovered that leaving the waist deep water left his junk as an inviting target. Nobody ever went on the deck to grab an errant ball after that.
One time a ball came to me and I turned to hit the guy standing next to me, who happened to be preoccupied with an enemy in the opposite direction. Just before I rallied the ball off his unsuspecting dome, I noticed it was Paul, a good friend of mine. I held off hitting him and fired it at some other sap. The whistle blew and I was beckoned from the pool. “Morrison,” Haas barked, “why didn’t you hit him.” No answer. “It’s time for an El Supremo.” I cringed. An El Supremo was the administration of a whack to your bare, wet ass using the top wood bar of a track hurdle. There were two, two inch round holes drilled about six inches from each other on this wood bar. A well placed whack from Haas left you with a white circle on each otherwise crimson ass cheek, what our gym teacher hilariously referred to as “headlights”.
The other game we played was known as water polo, though I can assure you that it bore no resemblance to the water polo you see played during the Olympics.
In this game, the sixty nude boys were split up into two teams, with one team lined up at the deep end of the pool and the other lined up at the shallow end. One volleyball was thrown into the middle of the pool. The goal was to put the ball in the trough at the other guy’s end of the pool.
That’s it. No more rules.
Anything and everything was allowed and encouraged. If someone had the ball and you could force them under water until lack of air made them capitulate, do it. If you wanted to punch someone on the side of the head to encourage them to give up the ball, do it. If you wanted to gang up four or five deep on a guys back until he broke down, do it.
My brother Tony has informed me that his tour of duty at Stout, some six years later featured much of the same nude weirdness. Ripping the title from the headlines of the day, a game popular during his tenure was called “Vietnam”. In this contest, teams of three were instructed to swim or tread water as quietly as possible from one end of the pool to the other, like soldiers trying to get through water undetected by the enemy. The three man team that made the most noise received some type of corporal punishment, simulating the punishment a noisy soldier might expect in the actual Vietnam War ( I suspect the losing soldier got worse than a whack, but even Haas had his limits). I guess if you lost a relative or loved one in Vietnam and were troubled by it, too fucking bad.
Aside from these three fun games, kids would randomly get selected to jump off the diving board with their hands held tight to their sides. Haas would then throw a volleyball at your defenseless body. If you kept your hands at your sides and accepted the inevitable welt of ball on wet skin, game over. If you cringed, turned away or otherwise defended yourself, you got a whack. I knocked a ball away one time and was rewarded with a whack administered by Haas using a plastic whiffle ball bat. Better than an El Supremo.
This stuff really happened.
Fuck you Rick Haas!
Cheers! Jim
