Monday, March 03, 2003

The cutest guy in the bar

It is never a pleasant experience to encounter as an adult the barrel-chested gym coach who tormented you — perhaps unconsciously, but mercilessly — throughout junior high and high school phys-ed classes. Memories of standing, vulnerable and cold in a wood-floored arena, robbed of the relative dignity of your Toughskins and sweatshirt and reduced to thin blue polyester running shorts and a wrinkled white t-shirt come flooding right back, your brain naggingly reminding you that any second, the barked order to undertake a running drill or rope climb or painful calisthenic will come.

If a sight or sound or smell can take us back to childhood — cotton candy at a fair or the theme music from Captain Kangaroo — none can more easily reduce us to awkward adolescence than the sight of that coach, a little hunched, a bit thicker around the waist but still, undeniably, the man who made third period a little slice of hell.

If you're going to have such an awkward and unexpected reunion, however, there is really no better way than after a few drinks, when you are relaxed and comfortably on your way to a pleasant buzz, and while you are making out languidly with the cutest guy in the bar.

The coach, in this case, was Mr. Jackson, Richard's phys-ed nemesis for three years, from freshman to junior years of high school. Rich spotted him across the room, through a miasma of smoke, just beyond the pool table, nursing a longnecked beer and glancing, a bit nervously, around the room, his eyes darting up to take a quick look and then returning just as rapidly to contemplate his bottle.

The cutest guy in the bar, incidentally, was me, an admission which says less about my vanity than it does about the crowd at Magnolia's on a wintery Saturday night.