I Said What?

Chase's comment on my most recent article brought up a very good memory from high school that I would like to share because it is marginally funny and entertaining. If anything, it might make you think about laughing or something. Anyways, it happened our final glorious year of high school. Chase and I, along with another of our friends, were blessed with the great fortune of placement in the same gym/study period. This was awesome because I didn't have to hang out with all the weirdos I didn't know, and it was the last period of the day so I could leave school early on the days we went to study!

Let me first provide a description of the gym class. Chase and I were without a doubt the minorities in a class filled with Puerto Ricans and probably some other ethnic groups. I'm too ignorant to know all the ethnic groups by which I was surrounded. Our other friend that I mentioned was in the class with us is Puerto Rican, but he's very different from his brethren. I'll refer to the other people in the gym class as the majority in this particular post. So, the majorities were the classic high school students who thought they were great at every sport, regardless if we were playing basketball, football, softball, it didn't matter, they thought they were great at it. No matter how many bricks they put up, how many passes they dropped, or how slow they actually moved, in their heads they were superstars. That must be why most of them didn't play any sports even at the high school level. My apologies, some of the majority might have been on the 3,209 person football roster.

Gym class itself was, and I have no doubt in my mind that it still is, a complete joke. Really all that the "physical education" teachers did was take attendance and then give us a ball. "Here's a basketball. Now try to get it in that hoop." I just remembered the stupid fitness test thing we had to pass each year, what a load of garbage. On this one particular day we were "playing" softball. I didn't give a shit about anything going on in gym class, so Chase, our majority friend, and I were just standing in the outfield chatting. Somehow we got on the subject of girlfriends. The conversation was flowing along smoothly, nothing out of the ordinary, until the utterance of the question. The question was served up by our majority friend. The question: "How about you, Toninho (I get to refer to myself in the third-person with my blog name!), have you ever had a girlfriend?" Before I get to the answer to this question, I must first give background information on my friendship with Chase and our majority friend.

I will start with our majority friend. I had first met him in fifth grade, I believe. So we certainly knew each other, but we hadn't hung out or anything at this point. We were on good terms and were beginning to develop a good friendship. I'll just say that we didn't know very much about one another in particular. As for Chase, I had just met him about halfway through the previous school year. I don't know why it took so long for our paths to cross, but we met in a totally awesome English class! We had hung out once outside of school for the first time at the very end of junior year and were in the process of mixing our groups of friends together. However, we still didn't know each other too well. So all three of us were friends, but not extremely close friends that know all the mannerisms and tendencies of each other, at least not at that point. Make a sense? That might be somewhat funny if you get it. If not, then you can blame China. This information is important when thinking about how my response to the question weighed between my companions.

The utterance of the question brought with it silence among the three of us. My simple, concise, straight to the point reply verbatim: "Nah, I'm pretty gay." Silence. More silence. And a little more silence. Then I laughed, bringing delight to our little pow-wow. This historic moment remains a focal point in the development of our friendship. I hope you enjoyed the story, and if you didn't, you can suck my big, fat, hairy left toe!