by Robert Hoge
The teacher would choose two captains. The captains would then look the rest of us over, using their obvious years of sporting experience, training, coaching, and performing at the highest levels of athletic competition. And they’d slowly put us poor suckers out of our misery.
It would start like this. Whichever captain had first pick would select the super-competitive skinny kid who didn’t play an organized sport because his parents were worried he’d break something. It was rare but not unknown to have some kids with actual athletic talent with us there on those Friday afternoons. Then the captains would make their way through the kids who had some skills but weren’t as well-rounded: the kid who could catch but couldn’t bat; the kid who could bat but couldn’t run.
The first few times, I waited with excitement for my name to be called. I couldn’t run fast, but the teacher always allowed someone else to run for me if we were playing something like softball. I figured my chances of getting picked were as good as those of anyone else.
My hopes were soon dashed, though. It became very obvious very quickly that even on a team of nobodies with no sporting talent and often even less enthusiasm, no one was keen to pick me.
The captains would keep going until there were only three or four students left. This is where things would get really interesting. The two captains would look over and see that it was a choice between the crippled kid, the kid who could not catch a ball even if it was dropped gently into his cupped hands from inches above, the kid who had a cast taken off their broken ankle only last week, and the kid who just couldn’t get the rules of any game, no matter how often you tried to explain them.
The captains would be down to their second-to-last choice. They’d look us over, look at each other, sometimes look at the teacher, and invariably they’d call out: “Robert.”
I’d hear my name and I’d limp on over to my teammates, occasionally issuing a high five and talking about how we were going to crush our opponents. But in my heart I’d know there was no honor in being chosen second to last.
Every now and then I’d get my hopes up, thinking maybe I’d be recognized for my brilliant tactical or motivational skills and would be chosen first for a change. Other times I would have been happier to be picked last—it would have been honest, at least. But no. Second to last had become the new last.
When you’re a young boy who loves sports, there’s hardly anything worse than being picked second to last for a sporting team, knowing the captain probably would have picked you last but didn’t because he either felt sorry for you or was worried he’d get a disapproving look from the teacher.
It seemed like there was no sport for me to play.
• • •
People sometimes assumed I had been playing a sport when I was “injured,” which seemed unfair—even cruel—when I wanted to play so badly and wasn’t able to.
When I was twelve, I once went into an elevator by myself. Two middle-aged ladies got in after me. One of them looked me up and down, then stared at my face long enough to make me look away.
“Terrible how they let kids so young play rough sports these days,” she said to her friend. “Look at the damage it does.”
The other woman turned and stared at me too. “Yes, yes it is,” she said.
Some of the best talks I have ever had started with someone asking, “This might seem rude, but can I ask about your face/nose/scars/bumps?” Wherever those conversations ended up, they started as honest exchanges. Acknowledging someone’s differences can be about saying you’re not scared to talk to someone about the things that make them who they are.
Those few moments in the elevator were not one of those times and I stayed silent until we reached the ground floor.
I should have cringed or felt embarrassed or angry at those two women, but at the time I just wanted to laugh. Lady, if only you knew how much I wished I was this ugly because I was allowed to play sports!
14
Things Written Down
Things in class were almost as dire as they were on the sporting field.
I made it to grade three, where I had my first male teacher, Mr. French. He was tall with a booming voice and a bushy beard. The nuns I’d had in grades one and two were mysterious, unknowable, but Mr. French was a civilian.
We spent long days tackling spelling and multiplication and grammar. But we seemed to spend most of our time on handwriting. We were expected to master “running writing,” or cursive. My attempts were so shaky, so misshapen, so ugly, it looked like I’d interpreted running writing to mean writing done while running in a race.
“Not good enough, Robert. You’ve got to try harder,” Mr. French said again and again. “Don’t hurry so much. Slow down and think about what you’re doing with your pen.”
Finally, it was time for a test. Not a spelling test or a vocabulary test. A handwriting test. Mr. French would read out a sentence and we had to write it down as neatly as we could. I slowed down and did okay for the first three or four letters. But I quickly fell behind as Mr. French read the next sentence and I had to rush to catch up. This meant messy letters again. After a few painful sentences, we finished. My paper might as well have been covered in the etchings of an alien language, written left-handed while standing on my head. In a pool. My test came back with a single checkmark on the entire page and lots of very precise, neat X-marks. One out of ten.
Mr. French called me and two other kids to the front of the class. He told us there was no reason for handwriting that messy and we clearly hadn’t been practicing. I started going red. It was the first time I’d been called out in front of the class for bad schoolwork.
Then he said four words that scarred me for life. “Hold out your hands.” Schools at the time still punished students by whacking their hands or bottoms with straps or a long, thin piece of wood called a cane. We were going to get the cane! I’d been in trouble at school before, but most of the time, that just meant a whack on the bottom from one of the nuns.
After I heard the initial whack, I wished I’d been first in line. I closed my eyes and started to slowly curl my fingers.
“Hand flat, Robert,” Mr. French said as he approached me.
He brought the cane down on my hand and I thought it was going to split in two. It left a cranky red mark across my hand. My writing hand. I closed my eyes again and tried not to cry.
Right then and there I decided that what my words meant and said were more important than how they looked. I decided I’d always choose writing faster over writing neat. I’d sacrifice legibility on the altar of speed. Looks didn’t matter so much.
• • •
Grade four was worlds better.
• • •
I had one of the best teachers of all my school years, Gary Bolton. He was young and energetic. He played the guitar and taught us how to make tacos. He showed us batik, letting us paint wax patterns on cloth and T-shirts and spill dye everywhere. And he read us passages from The Lord of the Rings, in which the two tiny hobbits, Frodo and Sam, are taken by the evil Gollum into the lair of the giant spider, Shelob. Gollum leads them there as a ruse, so Shelob can sting them and he can regain the ring.
I’d be one of the kids clamoring for “more, more please, sir” when Mr. Bolton would eventually sigh and say it was enough for that day. I told him how exciting it was to be hearing a story from such a big book.
“You know what, Robert?” he said. “Maybe you could write one of your own someday.”
I’d never really thought about that before.
• • •
Life outside of the classroom was changing for me too.
I was getting better at dealing with other kids. If someone started teasing me, I did my best to ignore it. I was also starting to understand that I could try to ignore or shake off the way I felt when people called me names. At home, I was learning how to deal with my four ol
der siblings, learning how to argue—even while losing 82 percent of the arguments I had with them and almost all of the arguments I got into with my parents. I was starting to understand what was easy and comfortable and what was more challenging. I was starting to conquer my disability and grasp my place in the small world I inhabited.
Then I met my first true love.
Her name was Michelle. She was new to the school. Michelle and her older sister were just starting at Guardian Angels that year. She had deep brown eyes and hair three shades from red. She was in Mr. Bolton’s class with me, enjoying math and English and batik and eating tacos along with everyone else. She seemed distant but in a warm way that felt like she just really hadn’t got to know many people yet.
I decided she simply had to be my girlfriend.
I didn’t know much about girls, but I knew I couldn’t just go up to her and say something. I wondered for a little while about the best way to communicate my deep-felt passion and decided to commit it to paper. I grabbed a pencil and ripped a sheet of paper from my exercise book. The page came out with a ragged tear and the pencil turned out to be a green one, but that would have to do. In my head, what I wrote read like the most exquisite poem ever committed to paper by a ten-year-old. It was smart and beautiful—poetry from a midget Shakespeare. Mr. Bolton had said maybe I could write a book someday, so surely this would be easy.
The next challenge was to deliver the poem to Michelle. I thought about leaving it for her in class, but I had the sense that it might end up getting me in trouble. My best bet would be to deliver the note at lunchtime. Find Michelle, give her the note, and wait for endless love. Easy. The problem was that the girls and boys played in different parts of the playground. There was the occasional border skirmish, but crossings from one side to the other were rare.
I stood near the border of the girls’ area, waiting, trying to spot Michelle. Robert F came and joined me and asked what I was doing.
“I’m looking for Michelle,” I said. “To give a message to her.”
“Can’t see her,” Robert F said.
“Nope.”
A few other boys came to join us and when I explained what I was doing one of them shouted out, “Hey, girls. Come here for a second, would you? Hey, girls!”
It was loud enough to attract attention and two girls wandered over.
“Robert wants to get this message to Michelle. Can you find her and give it to her?”
One of the girls nodded. She held out her hand and I gave her the note containing what felt like the two most important sentences I’d ever write. The girl then moved a few steps away and said, “We’ll give it to Michelle. But we need to read it first.”
“No!” I yelled, horrified.
The girl smiled and slowly unfolded the note.
“You want Michelle to be your girlfriend,” she said. “You!”
The other girl laughed too and a couple of the boys behind me sniggered. Then came the reminders.
“You’ve got a funny nose,” one of the girls said.
“And no legs,” one of the boys behind me said.
“Give it back,” I said.
“No, we’ll make sure we get it to Michelle.”
The school bell called us back to class and the girl turned and ran. I tried to chase her but she was faster than me. The note was either on its way to Michelle or to someone else entirely. I didn’t have any idea what to do, but I had to get back to class. I spent the rest of the day worried that the message had been delivered to Michelle and equally worried that it hadn’t. I didn’t look at her once the whole afternoon.
After endless nervous hours, school was over for the day. I was packed up, schoolbag over my shoulder and ready to go faster than anyone. Or so I thought. Michelle was faster. Before I could move, she was there standing in front of my desk.
“Hi, Robert,” she said, and smiled.
“Hi, Michelle,” I said.
Now would be a good time to magically grow legs so I could run away, I thought.
“I got your note,” she said.
“Oh.” I could tell by the look in her eyes that it was not going to be good news.
Michelle declined my offer of boyfriendship.
“It’s just, you’re a boy,” she said.
I shrugged and escaped as fast as I could without saying a word. My love letter had only two sentences and later I figured out I had spelled her name wrong. I didn’t even think to sign my name to it. Not my most successful piece of writing ever. I’d done it in a hurry too, so it wasn’t even neat. Mr. French would not have been impressed.
The teasing subsided a few days later. Not once did I think Michelle had said no for any reason other than that I was a boy.
• • •
My time at Guardian Angels was coming to an end. Boys left the school after grade four and usually headed for Iona, where they’d do both middle and high school.
“You know what, Robert?” my brother Michael said when we were talking about it at home one day.
“What?”
“You know what they do at Iona if you spit on the ground?”
“What?” I asked, starting to worry.
“If you spit on the ground there, one of the seniors makes you get down on your hands and knees and lick it up.”
Michael started licking the air like it tasted nice.
“Do they really?” I asked.
“Yep,” Gary said. “I saw it happen just the other day. Grade-five kid had to lick up his spit from the quadrangle. Those seniors, they’ll push your face right into the ground to make sure you lick up that spit.”
Michael and Gary took great delight in seeing how much this terrified me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Any school that would make someone lick up their own spit—lick it up off the actual ground—must be really tough.
The funny thing was, I was not the kind of kid who ever, in a thousand years, would even think about spitting on the ground. I knew Dad would be most displeased if I ever did something so crude. I don’t know why I was so worried.
Off to Iona I went, half expecting to see kids on all fours licking up spit. I’d survived my first four years of school, hadn’t scared the girls too much, and was about to make my way in the big school down the road.
Surely it couldn’t be that bad, I thought.
And it wasn’t.
It was worse.
15
The Angry Asphalt
My elementary school was the tiniest of midgets, compared to the giant that was Iona.
Even I could walk from one end of my old elementary school to the other in four minutes. Iona seemed like a huge raging monster in comparison. In the middle was the quadrangle—an ocean of angry asphalt roiling in the summer heat. Around it was a hodgepodge of classrooms, a hall, a library, a tiny chapel, a science block, a manual arts workshop, and more classrooms. They, in turn, were surrounded by a great green moat of sports fields. Guardian Angels was so small you could have lifted it up and plonked it on the Iona quadrangle without hitting a building on any side. Lots of familiar faces came with me to start grade five, including David and Robert F, plus a heap of new kids too. In grades five to seven we had our own classrooms, our own lunch area, our own teachers, and our own deputy principal—our own little world inside the bigger school. Even so, I went from a school with a few hundred students to one that had nearly a thousand. It was still all new and gigantic and grand and frightening.
Everyone was trying to fit in at the new school, including me. I was desperate to find my place, to work out where I fit. Maybe it would be a new start. Maybe I’d be able to prove myself in the classroom. I was reading lots and could pick up facts fast enough that I didn’t always need to work hard to understand them. Surely this would be a big advantage, I thought. Surely the other kids couldn’t help but see how smart I was. It didn�
��t work out quite the way I planned it, though. It turned out that other kids could pick up facts quickly too. Plus, they worked harder at it.
I’d only been at Iona a few weeks when a kid I’d never met before called me “Toe Nose.” He must have seen the media coverage of my big operation when I was four and known that the doctors had made me a nose out of a toe.
Four weeks in I was being called half a dozen names that weren’t Robert—cripple, spastic, legless, and the dreaded Toe Nose. Even though some of my friends had come to the new school as well, sometimes it felt like the loneliest place in the world.
I’d pick up a new nickname every six months or so. Some would go out of fashion, to be forgotten for a year or two, and then come back in vogue. Some would slowly lose their power to hurt me and would fall into disuse. Quite quickly I had accumulated enough nicknames to last a lifetime. Counting down, here’s my top ten.
Number 10: Toothpick Legs
Origin: A quick look at my legs and an assumption they were made of wood.
Originality: Medium.
Hurt factor: Mostly I was annoyed having to explain that my artificial legs were not made out of wood, thank you very much. They were made from fiberglass, metal, and rubber. Wood is so mid last century.
Laugh factor: Low.
How I got over it: Like a predator flourishing while its prey is plentiful, this nickname burned strong for a short while but came to an end after kids realized it didn’t hurt, and got cranky when I yelled at them, “They’re not made of wood!”