Quitting Football: Free Association
Endorphins make me think of dolphins,
and dorsal fins, and fishing with Eddy Dorf in
my memory or imagination, the two of us
sitting on a big rock, smoking a bone,
waiting for the fish to bite. Free association
is a technique for investigating the unconscious mind
of a preferably very relaxed subject
who reports all passing thoughts. I am thinking
of those logical relationship questions
on the SATs: this is to that as that is
to this. Analogies are to analgesics
as logical relationships are to sex, drugs,
and rock ‘n’ roll. Porpoises are to dolphins
as memory is to the imagination: a sort of lesser
cousin, less acrobatic, less capable of adapting
to life in a tank. And now I’m thinking
of the first time I got stoned in high school:
I was with some new friends in the woods out behind
the football field. The football players, my ex-
teammates, were running in place, doing their squat thrusts
as we floated past them back to class on the riptide
of our buzz, doing the elementary back stroke,
giving them our wasted grins and victory signs,
as they gritted and grunted and gave us
the finger, high on their own endogenous peptides.
The elementary backstroke makes me think
of snow angels. And frogs. And the jet propulsion
of squids. And of looking up at cloud formations
and seeing the shapes of countries, genitalia,
pomeranians, sputniks, saxophones.
***
Fame
I used to wonder what it felt like
to be David Mitnik
who had hair under his arms already
in the 6th grade. More specifically,
I wondered if one could feel the hair there—
if one had hair there—
or was it more like the hair on your head
which you can’t really feel
unless the sun is beating down on it or the rain
has soaked it through, and then, arguably,
it’s the rain or sun you feel and not the hair
per se. But the hair that grew
where the sun didn’t shine—now, that
I knew nothing about at the famous
tender age of twelve and a half. I didn’t
want to be David Mitnik, I just wanted
something like an autograph—
what might rub off of his signature
armpit hair by being in his presence,
on his team, or even in his chair in his absence.
I remember once when he was absent
I sat down at his desk—still warm, it seemed,
from so much precociousness—
and I imagined myself in his skin,
the hair crowding my seat like
a crowd in their seats, each individual
tendril standing up and cheering, doing the wave, rooting
for puberty! Which finally came, of course,
but it grew old fast. And it wasn’t long
before I ached to return to the obscure
vacant lots of childhood
where nothing much grew
and the old games ruled
and the smooth balls flew.
***
The 600
It wasn’t exactly a sprint
and it wasn’t exactly
long distance, this one and a half
times around our poor excuse
for a soccer field in junior high,
which looked more like a bald patch with
some grave grass growing around the ears
and Mr. Balducci standing in the middle,
yelling at us. And what was he yelling?
Encouragements? Affirmations? Cheers?
No, he was yelling bald
homophobic epithets and threats,
and laughing sadistically and brushing an imaginary
hair from his receding hairline
in an almost imperceptibly effeminate gesture.
Into the valley of death directly after
lunch, we ran the 600. Mac ‘n cheese,
frankfurters, green jello, yellow
pudding scudding down the sidelines
in a jumble kept down in the name of
fitness, patriotism, and the Presidential Patch,
which had a bald eagle on it
that our mothers
(whom Mr. Balducci also yelled about)
could sew onto our gym shorts if we earned it.
I would have earned the Presidential Patch—
I did the requisite ten chin-ups, fifty push-ups,
ran the gauntlet of Mr. Balducci’s abuses
for exactly 600 yards in under two minutes—
but then I puked. And puking was for pussies,
faggots, fairies: the effete fellowship
of the fallen. Patently unpresidential.
***
Paul Hostovsky makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. His poems and essays appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. Website: paulhostovsky.com.
