In Glenda’s recent blog, she was called out on her frequent mentionings of ex-boyfriends, and has accepted the challenge to not write about them for an entire month. To fill the void, I present to you a tale from the annals of high school, the story of my ex-boyfriend the school mascot.
The year was 1990, and I was coocoo for cocoa puffs over a younger man in my physical education class. His name was Chris and at first glance we didn’t have much in common – he was a C-student, I was on the honor roll; he didn’t play sports, I was a cheerleader. But every afternoon we suited up in blue polyester shorts and red t-shirts emblazoned with the words “Peoria Physical Education”, and our differences quickly disappeared. Amidst the frustrations of state-mandated school athletics, Chris found fun and humor. It was springtime, and we flirted shamelessly during relay racing and outdoor softball games. He was a complete goofball, but he made me laugh, and by fall, he was my boyfriend.
Chris spoiled me by being my first love. He called me the prettiest girl in school and we stole kisses between classes under the staircase in junior hall (he was a junior; I, the older woman, a senior.) He sent me flowers and scrawled messages all over my notebooks (“Chris Hearts Gina”, “Gina and Chris 4eva”, etc.) Even my mother said she lived vicariously through our little romance, often ogling my roses while my father was around to witness her envy. The first few months of dating Chris were as blissful as any I’ve witnessed since.
But as I’ve said before, bliss does not forever last. In this case, the threat to the peace and love of my relationship came from a simple football game. At my high school there was great pomp and ceremony surrounding the Friday night football games. A large percentage of the student body, along with parents, alums, and P-town locals, warmed the bleachers of the stadium and watched as the Knights made gridiron magic. Each week the cheerleaders painstakingly created a giant paper shield through which our meaty football players would leap onto the field, accompanied by the school mascot the Knight, a junior named Dave who lumbered around in a green velvet suit with faux chain mail atop. On this particular night, however, Dave was out of town, and was replaced by his best friend, Chris.
I was excited about the prospect of being so close to Chris during the game – usually I had to watch him in the stands from the sidelines below. Our hormones raged unrequitedly as the games plodded on, each advancement down the field bringing us that much closer to pawing each other at game’s end. But the night that Chris suited up and joined us on the sidelines did not evoke the rapture I had hoped for. Unlike Dave, who stood quietly by our side with his face covered with the Knight helmet, occasionally waving his sword in the air and jumping up and down to celebrate a touchdown, Chris took Knighting to a new level. Within the first five minutes of the game the helmet was off, and Chris was rivaling the entire cheerleading squad by leading the fans in a cheer. Except it wasn’t a real cheer, not like the cheers my squadmates and I spent hours practicing after school three days a week. Noooo, it was one of those made up cheers, more appropriate for an elementary school playground than a Class A high school football game:
Firecracker, firecracker, Sis Boom Bah
Bugs Bunny, Bugs Bunny, Rah Rah Rah!
As he punctuated his performance with a sharp plunging of his sword into the air, I was mortified for Chris and awaited the boos and jeers from the crowd. Except that didn’t happen. They loved it and screamed for more, which fueled the fire for his next masterpiece:
Gimme a T! (… “T!”)
Gimme an E! (…”E!”)
Gimme an N! (…”N!”)
Gimme a D! (…”D!”)
Six letters of the alphabet later Chris had lured the fans out of their seats with an enthusiastic and dramatic spelling of the word, “TENDERLOIN”. He was such a smash that by the following Friday, when Dave had returned to town, Chris was still filling in as the mascot. In fact, Chris was picking up gigs at the basketball games too. He may have been solely responsible for the increase in sporting event attendance that season. Whereas fans usually cheered for the team, or at the very least the cheerleaders, they were now turning out in droves to see the mascot.
You’d think I would have been happy to see people turn out to watch the games, that if I was a true cheerleader at heart I would have appreciated school spirit no matter where it came from. But the sad truth is I was pissed, because I was 17, and I worked really hard on my stupid cheers, and no one seemed to pay any attention to the cheerleaders with Chris around. Even my dutiful father, who videotaped several games that season, was guilty of Chris-idolatry. When I got home to watch the videotape after one of the games, I saw that Dad’s lens was often focused on Chris’s antics: Chris drawing his sword from an imaginary sheath and dueling with an imaginary opponent, Chris leading the adoring crowd in a three-part round of "Row, Row, Row your Boat." Now I realize how hilarious he was, but at the time I waged my own protest and beseeched the faculty member in charge of school events to put Dave back on the mascot beat.
“I can’t put Dave back on, everyone wants Chris,” she explained.
“But nobody’s paying attention to the cheerleaders!,” I whined.
“I suggest you talk to your boyfriend about that.”
Eventually Chris got the message and turned in his Knight’s helmet for other pursuits that year. I don’t know what acted as the stronger driver towards his retirement – protecting my jealous feelings or wanting his Friday and Saturday nights free so he could hang out with his friends. I do know that the mascot fiasco was not the last of Chris’s stunts. The following school year, after we had broken up and I had moved away to college, my parents received phone calls at their office pertaining to this little piece of news:
It was a harmless prank, but yet again I found myself embarrassed by Chris’s antics. In a post-break up attempt to see a movie together that summer, Chris and I were greeted at the theater by high fives and “Hey, Naked Man! Yeah, right on!” Even as the lights dimmed, our fellow moviegoers, upon seeing Chris in the audience, made their appreciation of his “naked surprise” abundantly clear. It was the last movie I ever saw with him.
To this day, I’ve never dated anyone quite like him. He’s no longer alive, but I hope this little memoir serves as a small tribute to a very large life. Chris made me jealous, he made me mad, but he also made me laugh. Now, eleven years later, I finally get the joke.
