Put On Your Big Boy Pants

Professor Muscle, Part IV

 

 

It was easy to keep my mind off of Polo’s painting during the next couple of months. My wife Lara and I were taking parenting classes for twins at the local hospital. There was so much to take in: synchronized breast feeding, nipple confusion, the cost of baby formula, the need for a fan in the baby room to reduce SIDS, the debate between cloth and disposable diapers, the pros and cons of various twin strollers, keeping updated on various websites for recalls of pacifiers, baby toys, and other baby items, the importance of “individuating” your twins by dressing them in different clothes and putting their toys and clothing in separate drawers and compartments, the importance of maintaining nuptial intimacy in order to be positive role models for your children who will be more likely to have positive, healthy, intimate relationships.

We joined the South Bay Twins Support Group where parents could talk about parenting all the time because, let’s face it, when you’re not taking care of your twins all you want to do is talk about raising your twins so that in essence you’re never really not taking care of them. I can see now that becoming a parent is not unlike joining a cult. But unlike other cults, this is one from which you can never leave.

While it was easy for me to forget Polo’s painting, I could not forget Brandon who was still in my class. Still bearing a cast, he sat at his desk with a smug expression. He was behind on the final draft of his third and fourth essays, neither of which he had turned in, and neither one of us had brought the matter up. There was a tension between us. He knew that I knew that he had stolen my framed photograph and, worse, he knew I was in no position to ask for it back. This was affirmed in class one afternoon when, before the students had settled at their desks, I turned to Brandon and said, “I know you stole it.” His response was that his hand hurt and he wondered if he may never use it again. Then he said, “I’m still young. There’s a good chance it will heal. But your photograph is another story. My guess is it’s long gone. Probably one of your fans stole it.”

That was the last I ever saw or heard from him. I received an email from admissions the following day that he had dropped the class.

 The day Brandon had dropped my class, I had received a call in my office from Polo.

“It’s finished.”

“Better than the photo?” I asked anxiously.

“Different.”

“What do you mean?”

“I happen to like it. I really got into the project. It is my own personal vision, but as such, it’s impossible for me to describe it.  You’ll have to take a look for yourself.”

“Shit, Polo. I don’t like the way this sounds. Your personal visions always make me nervous.”

“If you don’t like it, I’ll keep it. I’m sure I’ll be able to sell it.”

“We’ll see about that.”

With Polo’s background in directing horror films, I imagined his “artistic vision” might be a variation of Dorian Gray, with the painting rendering some demon consumed in the flames of hell.

But when I arrived at Polo’s home, he dispelled me of that notion rather quickly. His easel was draped with a white sheet. He was nibbling on hot peppers again and sweating through his shirt. “Chiquito pero picoso,” he said while washing his peppers down with an icy glass of lemonade. Then clearing his throat, he said, “Are you ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

With a grand gesture, Polo tore the sheet off the easel and there it was, the portrait of a man who was presumably me. Only Polo failed to capture the rugged muscularity of that youthful version of myself. The man was shirtless and doing some feeble pose, but he was a splitting image, not of me, but of George Costanza, complete with glasses, double chin, a bald pate, and tufts of uncombed hair above the ears.

“It’s a bit impressionistic,” Polo said. “I could not discipline myself. I’ve decided not to charge you.”

“Believe me, I wouldn’t pay you no matter what your demands. This is not what I asked for.”

“Your eyes are closed to the vision.”

“Eat some more peppers,” I said. “I’m out of here.”

 I never did retrieve the framed photograph taken of me before taking second place in the Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest. Above my computer, I’ve put a large framed photograph of my two twin daughters, Natalie and Julia. They’re sharing a bassinet and their heads are touching. There are subtle yet discernable smiles on their faces. There is the suggestion of blissful sleep. It’s a mighty fine photograph. I took it myself. I had it framed.

I never talk about what used to lie underneath, that photograph of the “ripped” young man. All it is to me now is a hideous scar, the reminder of a past I’m glad to never see again.

 

 

Professor Muscle, Part III

 

I needed to get the stolen photograph back somehow. If I couldn’t get it back, I did have a degraded version of it scanned in my computer but the image was so fuzzy as to be almost worthless. Then I had a ingenious epiphany: Perhaps my uncle Polo LeBlanc could do an oil painting of the scanned photograph. Perhaps his painting would elevate the glory of my youth even far beyond that which was contained in the photograph.

It wasn’t easy getting my Uncle Polo to see me. I had to assure him that I had no contagious illnesses and that I had had the swine flu vaccination. As the husband of a pregnant wife, I was a “priority” so I was one of the first to get inoculated.  He finally agreed to see me.

Polo is no doubt the most eccentric person I know. He was once a piano instructor in San Francisco, living in a rundown school bus and giving lessons in the bus. Yes, his piano was inside the bus and he slept in there. Then he became convinced that the felt fibers on the hammers were contributing to a “toxic reaction” resulting in headaches, rashes, and lethargy and he quit playing and teaching piano altogether. He moved to New Zealand and lived for a while as a sheep farmer. After that, he lived in Mexico and directed soap operas and low-budge horror films. When he felt that the “medium” wasn’t doing justice to his artistic sensibility he moved to Southern California in the late 1970s, bought a small house in Redondo Beach for under 100K and made a living by selling oil paintings at the beach. Actually, he doesn’t sell the paintings himself. As a germaphobe, he won’t interact with potential buyers at the outdoor galleries. He’s hired an assistant. He’s been making enough to pay his bills for the last thirty years. 

I drove to his house, which is across from a high school. He answered the door wearing sunglasses, a white T-shirt, and jeans. He is short and stocky with silver hair and a pate. We sat down while he nibbled from a bowl of red hot peppers, of the Black Scorpion Tongue variety. Polo believes hot peppers increase his immune system and contribute to stimulating his “artistic visions.”

I watched him sweat profusely as he ate the peppers and told him about my stolen photograph, the degraded image I  had emailed to him, and my desire for a large painting, grander than even the photograph.

“Yes, I could make such a painting,” he said. “From a technical standpoint, it is very doable. But philosophically I may be opposed to it.”

“Why?”

“Because it is not becoming of you to have a painting of yourself. I find it just another way to fuel your narcissism.”

“Whatever you think of me, Polo, that photo is part of my past, it’s part of my life. It makes me feel relevant.”

“Relevant? Could you expound on that, my friend?”

 “Like most people, I am rather irrelevant, especially at my age, which doesn’t mean my pregnant wife doesn’t care about me or that I am irrelevant to her, because of course I am, but in terms of having an important voice in the world, you know, I am a nobody.”

“So you might feel relevant if CNN or some other global TV station would call during a calamity so that you could lend my expertise to assuage the anxieties of the masses or if you published several books that helped millions of people see things in a new and compelling way. Then you might feel relevant.”

My uncle knows me fairly well. I said, “I’d be a liar if I denied never harboring such thoughts.”

“I see, and me making a grand painting of your muscular youth will contribute to your relevance. Is that it?”

 “Yes, I acknowledge that this is true. I must say I feel especially irrelevant without my beloved photograph and in all honesty my irrelevance doesn’t sit well with me. It is not something I care to digest. And when I contemplate my irrelevance and see all the relevant people in the world I am overcome with a kind of envy that afflicts me with dyspepsia and crapulence.”

“Oh, so we’re not talking about relevance, are we now. We’re talking about fame. We’re talking about being noticed. Do you think you’d be happy if you were one of those attention sluts always blathering on TV?”

“Polo, enough of the crap. Will or will you not make me the painting?”

“I can see I’m not going to change you. Your narcissism is well entrenched. Very well then. Come back in three months. I’ll have it done by then.”

“Three months? My daughters will be born by then.”

“I’m an artist. Don’t rush me.”

“What about the cost?”

“The cost? Wait until you see it. Then we’ll negotiate a fair price.”

 

 

Professor Muscle, Part II

 

This isn’t to say that the photograph that has captured my musculr youth hasn’t brought upon bad tidings because indeed it has. More recently, a most unfortunate incident occurred between me and Brandon, one of my students, inside my office. A former wrestler in high school, Brandon was in my office, sitting next to me, going over the second draft of his essay when he looked at the photograph and said, “Yeah, dude, you were buffed back then,” and then looking me over he said in subtle disparaging tone, “But what the hell happened?”

“What are you suggesting?” I shouted.

“Dude.”

“Are you suggesting I’ve gone to pot? Who are you? The big bad wrestler who thinks he can come in here and insult me? Is that it?”

“Dude.”

I stuck my hand out and said, “Think you’re tough, is that it? Come on then. Let’s see who’s got the strength.”

“Dude, I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I can take care of myself, thank you very much.”

“All right then. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

And with that Brandon offered me his hand for a hand-crushing handshake contest. I was surprised how weak this 200-pound wrestler’s grip was and I exerted immediate pressure, watching with delight at the look of unpleasant surprise on Brandon’s face as it became apparent he did not know what he was in store for.

I thought I better give him a chance to escape my formidable grip. I said, “If you don’t want to get hurt, you can back off right now.”

“Bring it on, bro.”

And with those words, I pushed the pedal to the metal, as it were, employing all those years of hand-crushing exercises on my victim, this ignorant school boy who had the audacity to suggest that I had become some sort of fallen creature unworthy of the photograph above my desk.

What happened next wasn’t pretty. Brandon shouted, “Jesus Christ! You broke my hand!” Upon which I let go. But it was too late. The damage had been done. Brandon was in so much pain, he was bent over clutching his injured hand, his face between his knees. Then he turned toward the nearby trash can and vomited inside it.

“Pain can do that sometimes,” I said, transitioning into my lecture voice. “Bring on intense nausea, sometimes resulting in vomiting.”

Brandon looked at me in disbelief. He said, “Jesus, dude, you didn’t have to break my hand.”

“Have you learned something today?”

“What?”

“About me, my strength.”

“This isn’t about you, man. You’re crazy.”

And with that, he left me alone in my office, at which time I stared at the photograph of myself. The young man in the photo seemed to look back at me with an incriminating glare.

 I didn’t see Brandon in class the afternoon of the handshaking incident. Nor did I see him the following week. I was both worried about his condition and my own, for I feared he may file a grievance against me or worse sue me and the college. I abstained from telling my wife Lara about the incident. She was six-months pregnant with twin girls. The last thing she needed was to be stressed out about things, least of all her husband crushing a student’s hand. I feared retribution from Brandon more for my wife’s sake than my own. Gratefully, my fears were allayed the following week when Brandon walked into my office with his hand in a cast.  

“My God, Brandon, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s cool, bro,” he said, sitting down next to my desk. “I had it coming. I egged you on.”

“Thank you for being a good sport,” I said. “Yes, you challenged me, but I’m older and presumably wiser. I should know better.”

“It is what it is.”

He put his second draft on my desk and asked me if I could help him. I was gratified to see that Brandon, who seemed rather lackluster academically speaking, was putting in effort in polishing is final revision. I said, “What is the meaning of this newfound enthusiasm for writing?”

“It’s like you said in class, if you can’t find any passion for your essays, just go home, drink beer, eat apple pie and watch reruns of American Idol.”

“Very well then.”

But before I could help him, I had an urgent need to pee. I urinate rather frequently, about once an hour or so, a condition that could not be pinpointed by urologists, endocrinologists and other specialists. One doctor suggested it was psychosomatic, the result of an anxious high-strung personality. And I was feeling anxieties at the moment, as I was guilt-stricken looking at Brandon’s cast.

I said, “Will you watch the office for me? I must go to the bathroom. I’ll leave the door open. If anyone asks, I’ll be right back.”

And with that, I hurried to the faculty bathroom, just across the hall, took care of my business, and returned. When I got back to my office, the door was closed. Luckily, I had my keys in my pants pocket. I unlocked the door. When I entered the office, Brandon was gone. I didn’t really care about him. If he couldn’t wait five minutes for me to go to the bathroom, then he wasn’t really serious about me helping him.

What I did care about was that Brandon had presumably stolen my framed bodybuilding photo. Where that glorious youth flexed his muscles in that tropical garden there was now above my computer a huge swath of emptiness, a giant bald spot. 

 

 

Professor Muscle, Part I

With a certain amount of pride, I can say I am the only tenured English instructor at Prospect College who does not have an office in the Humanities Division. I share an office with Coach Tom Reinhart, a former Olympic wrestling champion and PE and health instructor, in the PE Building. He was on the hiring committee when I got my full-time teaching job at Prospect thirteen years ago. I didn’t know Tom or anyone else at the college. I had no inside help. I walked into the interview “cold,” an unknown from the streets, as it were.

Tom said when I strutted into the interview room in my black suit, a stout 230 pounds at six feet flat, I looked less like an English professor and more like a wrestler, a mixed martial arts fighter, or an NFL linebacker. My aggressive posture and flinty countenance had a pugilistic air that he had found refreshing, as he does not have much tolerance for persnickety pencil-neck academic types. One of the things he found appealing about my presence was a large dark stain on my red tie, which suggested a certain manly laxity regarding my professional attire. Later I explained to him that it was hot sauce from the Taco Bell lunch I had nervously eaten before my interview. So when Reinhart saw this muscular man with a stain on his tie, he made his mind up right there that I would get the job and he used his influence with the committee to make sure that that was the case.

Not that my interviewing skills didn’t help. Reinhart said I was confident, if a bit cocky, and I used my deadpan humor to make the committee laugh as I gave my sample 10-minute lecture on paragraph unity and cohesiveness, using a PowerPoint example that centered on my eccentric uncle, Polo LeBlanc, a professional artist who suffers from acute hypochondria, which compels him to watch his living room television from his backyard with a pair of binoculars in order to avoid getting testicular cancer.

So when I got hired—which, let’s face it, is a huge deal, getting a tenure-track position in a major Los Angeles job market—Reinhart called me and offered me the spare desk in his PE office. “I need you,” he said, “so they don’t stick some ugly battleaxe in here with me.”

One of the first things I did when I moved into Reinhart’s office was make sure I fit in with the room’s athletic, masculine theme. His office is cluttered with wrestling trophies, newspaper clippings of his wrestling glory years, sumo wrestling posters, photographs of his two daughters (all-state volleyball champions) and his burly son (all-state football and wrestling champion), and other souvenirs of athletic achievement. There is even an alabaster statue of two naked wrestlers entwined in battle, one taking a firm grasp of his opponent’s scrotum, which I find a bit unsettling. Personally, I would not keep such a statue in my office, but it was not my place to say so.

In addition to all the wrestling paraphernalia,  the office always smells like sweaty gym shoes. There is equipment for Reinhart’s PE classes lying around, bags of volleyballs, medicine balls, dumbbells, golf bags, health supplement and gym equipment catalogs, and my favorite items, the hand-crushing grip exercisers, which I’ve been addicted to using all these years as I love being able to shake a man’s hand—any man no matter how large—and startle him with my hand-crushing strength.

To make sure I fit in with the masculine décor, I put on the wall above my desk a large framed glossy photograph of me a week before I entered and took second place in the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest. My father took the photograph of me in his backyard in San Jose, California. I’m wearing nothing but red gym shorts. At nineteen years of age, I’m a lean and mean 185 pounds, probably with about 3% body fat. I am what you would call “ripped.” In the photograph I am not really posing much at all in what you might call a “three-quarter semi-relaxed” shot with me twisting my bare, oil-slathered tanned torso toward the camera. My arms are slightly flexed by my hips, as if I were holding a spear with both hands. I have a head full of long dark curly hair, pronounced fully-formed cheek bones, almond-shaped eyes. There is a lush cluster of bougainvillea in the background. The total effect is very tropical, suggesting Maui or Tahiti.  In fact, people who see the photograph frequently ask me if I am Hawaiian or Tahitian or Polynesian when in fact I am neither. But this is besides the point. The issue is that I am proud of the photograph. It says to my students, or to anyone else for that matter, that while I am a college English professor immersed in the world of the intellect, I am not an effete egghead, but a man who delves in the pursuit of physical culture at its very finest. The photograph also says that while I may be “old” and thus irrelevant at forty-eight, the stunning image of my youth is proof of the fact that I was once a gamer, a player, a man who once mattered.

The photograph is important in that it underscores that we are dealing with a different kind of English professor here. It’s important that college students have a diversity of English instructors who defy the stereotypes they may have of them. Students can behold the photo of that nineteen-year-old bodybuilder and realize that you don’t have to be a chicken-neck geek to pursue the study of composition and literature. The photograph must be especially helpful in maintaining the self-esteem of the male students who feel ashamed, perhaps even emasculated, that they’re being required to take a freshman composition class.

Many would condemn me for putting up such a photograph. What kind of woefully insecure man has to spread his peacock feathers in his office like that? What a pathetically vain thing to do. But the photograph affords me a mystique that I otherwise would not enjoy. And it’s not just the photograph that creates this mystique. It’s my office in the PE building, my proximity to the football coach, Ram Stockwell, and all the football players that Stockwell has put in my classes has over years. I am now shrouded in mystery. You see, many students are under the impression that I’m not an English instructor, per se, but an assistant football coach teaching English under the auspices of the English Department or that I am a substitute teacher for an English instructor who abruptly fell ill and that the college could not find anyone on such short notice so they capitulated to hiring me, an employee from the PE department, to fill in. I get students all the time asking me why I, a football coach, is teaching English, and I always come up with some sarcastic response or other such as, “I’m teaching this class because of judge-appointed community service for drunk driving.” 

Part II

Part III

Part IV