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Caution: Not for those of weak stomachs.
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. . . . . THE PHYS. ED. STUDENT AIDE
When I was a senior in high school, a classmate had as his sixth hour class assignment a non-paid student aide position within the Physical Education department. This was perfect for Woody and was a position he had tried to get since the beginning of the tenth grade. Woody knew what he wanted to do in life, and that was to become a phys. ed. teacher and a coach of boy's sports on the high school level. He was the oldest of nine children in a fatherless home and had helped coach his younger brothers and sisters in all manner of sports. He, being on the small thin side himself did not play any sports. But he was always ready with a tip on how to improve a free throw percentage or how to kick a football that extra five yards. He not only knew what kinesiology was, but in my high school, was likely the only kid who could pronounce it correctly. Woody was a phys ed nerd.
But as luck would have it, he was assigned not to the football coaching staff, nor the strength training staff, but to the man who had the regular P.E. class for the sixth hour, Coach Wilbert, a well-known a-hole of a coach and an all-around cement-headed bully. To make matters worse, Woody was assigned by Coach Wilbert to do basic office bullshit that had nothing to do with actual sports, fitness, or coaching. He was not a happy camper. He asked if he could at least referee the intramural sports played during the sixth hour. Coach Wilbert told him in no uncertain terms in front of his classmates that he, Woody, didn't know shit about shit, and that his place was in the office, and should get used to the fact that he was Coach Wilbert's errand boy and nothing more, and he would remain so for the next twenty weeks. Worse yet, Coach Wilbert began to make a daily sport of verbally putting down the diminutive Woody.
One errand Coach Wilbert had Woody run every day remained the same throughout the semester. When woody would show up early, as usual, Coach Wilbert would hand him a quarter and send him to the fruit machine across the quad to select the best apple he could find in the fruit machine. Woody would oblige him and then walk through the locker room where the sixth period P.E. class was suiting up. As Woody walked amongst the gym lockers in full view of the entire sixth period P.E. class, he would jam the apple down his pants and rub it vigorously on his dick and balls. He would then pull his hand out of his pants holding the apple proudly, walk into the coaches’ office, and present the apple to Coach Wilbert.
A short while later, Coach Wilbert would get our class started in calisthenics. As we started our jumping jacks, Wilbert would take large audible bites out of his apple and chew them noisily as he barked out a rhythm between pigging down apple chunks. The first day that Woody gave the apple his special treatment, fellow classmate Mike Beckmann ran over to a nearby rail and puked his guts out. I felt a little flush myself. But over the next 20 weeks, we got used to seeing the daily apple rub followed by the daily ingesting of said soiled apple. More often than not, we would see a smiling Woody staring out from the coaches' office with a broad grin on his face.
I was recently reminded of this by a classmate who sent me an article out of the L.A. Times talking of Woody's retirement from coaching High School Sports in the Los Angeles City School System. At five-foot two-inches tall, Woody must have been quite an odd sight coaching his high school to three city basketball championships and eight playoff berths in his 26 years of head coaching. Add to that a half dozen golf team championships and four wrestling championships, (and also, most amazingly, two Math Counts state championships) making one of the winingest sports coaches in modern high school history. The article had quotes from a half dozen professional sports stars singing praise for this talented, selfless, and nurturing man.
But to me, Woody will always be known by the notation the editor placed under his senior picture in my class yearbook: "Woody B., Class Apple Polisher."
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