I Was Afraid of Them in Junior High

Yesterday, I started reading this 2018 collection of stories by McGuane, who writes often about the West (where he lives) and about the down-and-out. (I’d love to sit at a table conversation with characters from McGuane and from Henry James!)

One story has some high school scenes, and it takes place about the time I was there (later 50s, early 60s), and the narrator mentions taps that some boys wore on their shoes. 

That took me back.

For the same was true in the junior high and high school that I attended in Hiram, Ohio.

Taps weren’t the only part of the costume worn then by “hoods,” as we called them. They wore their shirt collars turned up, their pants slung low, as they clicked their way through the halls—all with wooden floors. Defiant and threatening.

I was afraid of them, the hoods—but at least I could hear them coming.

I was a small kid and couldn’t do a thing about what they did to me. For a while I was a crossing guard at the nearest intersection to the school. I liked it (I got out of school early); I feared it (the hoods who walked by).

One of those hoods (I’ll call him Hoody) totally ignored my flag and my instructions. What he did not ignore was the pair of white bucks I wore to school for a while, my attempt to imitate popular singer Pat Boone, who was noted for such shoes.

Hoody would click his way up to me, stop, grab a shoulder, and wipe his shoes on my white bucks, which I would then have to clean that night. Soon, I wearied of that and started wearing tennis shoes again.

I couldn’t do a thing about it. Protest? (Hah!) Report him? (Certain death.) I just quietly went along with it—saying nothing, doing nothing (except, of course, cleaning the shoes later on).

Then (9th grade) we got a new athletic coach and gym teacher. Mr. Barnhart, whom I quickly admired, even loved.

Part of that was his coaching and teaching; part was what happened one day in the study hall he was supervising.

I was there; Hoody was there. Hoody was in the back, screwing around, ignoring Coach Barnhart’s clear signals to cut it out.

The coach moved toward the back. “Cut it out, Hoody,” he said sharply.

Hoody ignored him.

“Down to the office!” he barked. And moved to grab Hoody’s arm.

Hoody realized he was out of his league—Coach had been a star football and baseball player.

He started clicking his way down to the office with loud and patent disdain.

“Don’t make me haul you down there,” said Coach. And then ... one of my favorite lines in my life. 

“I eat guys like you for breakfast!”—this uttered with a quietly fierce sincerity. A promise, not an empty threat.

The clicking grew more quiet; there was absolute silence in the study hall.  And I felt I had a new hero.