I Ate My Wheaties
“Kleinman, you’re trying to beat the system!” Dan Bailey, the thick-necked, flat-topped, wrestling coach, with a military demeanor was yelling at my high school friend.
Coach Bailey, teaching his regular gym class, had caught Harry Kleinman hiding behind the Universal weight machine, to avoid doing wind sprints. Coach hated people who tried to beat the system, especially when it came to physical activity. And Harry always tried to beat the system.
In gym, during push-up drills, Harry would lay prone watching the coach, moving only when their eyes met. Harry did not jump to reach the pull-up bar seven feet above the floor, he stood on a chair then grasped the bar. Coach Bailey would grab the chair and yell at the hanging Harry to hoist his pear-shaped frame upward. Harry didn’t even try. He dropped to the ground without completing a single pull-up. He walked around hurdles, ran under the high jump bar, and rolled weights across the floor rather than lift them. Harry’s gym clothes, unsoiled by sweat, remained in his locker year-round as they never needed to be taken home and washed.
Harry and I grew up together. Pudgy with sandy hair, even in grade school he liked sports as a spectator, not as a player. But, in high school, he was a player with all the drugs that floated around the building in the early 70’s. Harry loved hallucinogenic drugs, especially LSD, with the most powerful variety, windowpane his favorite. Harry studied hard and, as a rule, would never take drugs during school, only on weekends. He achieved A’s and B’s with the lone exception of gym, where the D’s in gym stuck out like plantar warts on his report card. However, this time, the last semester of his senior year, Harry was flunking gym. An ”F” would drop his grade point average and show on the transcripts sent with his college applications.
Coach Bailey always saved his infamous indoor obstacle course for the last gym class of the year. To pass the class, students had to complete it in one-and-a-half minutes. The obstacle course, short but intense, began with a series of yellow traffic cones to zigzag through. Then quick stutter-steps through five pairs of car tires, followed by a climb over a 12-foot rope fence, through a cloth tunnel, over three hurdles, a leap over two barrels and then a short dash to the finish line. Usually, these activities were performed with the sun in your eyes, because the first-floor gym featured windows and glass doors to the outside facing east and our class was first thing in the morning.
In previous runs through the course, Harry finished dead last, never under three minutes. And, the coach took special delight in failing students, like Harry, who he felt tried to beat the system. Desperate to avoid the “F,” Harry decided to break his own rule and take a hit of LSD on a school day. His thinking, as I learned later, relied on precise timing. Harry needed to ingest the LSD so that he could run the obstacle course between the initial onset of euphoria, when awareness was most keen and energy spiked, but before full-tilt hallucinations hit; when rocks on a beach turned into dancing bears.
In the locker room, before gym class, I watched Harry place a hit of windowpane under his tongue. We marched into the gym, and with the other students mulled around waiting for the coach to begin class.
“Line up straight,” Coach Bailey yelled as he entered the gym.
Harry was third in line, and I was fourth and during the line up process is when the glitch in Harry’s precise timing occurred. Harry’s calculation forgot to figure in the coach’s attention to detail. Coach Bailey tweaked the course, realigning each obstacle for maximum interference. That delay combined with the general chaos of keeping high-school boys in a straight line, allowed the windowpane to kick in. Harry later told me that as he waited in line for his turn to run the course, he stared at the coach who returned his attention with a dagger-like gaze, accompanied by a smirk. Then the coach reviewed the obstacle course rules as the final preparation before sending the first student down the course. Harry, sweating like a sprinkler, saw tracers shoot like laser beams from the fingers of Coach Bailey’s gesturing arms. The mouths and ears of the two students in front of him elongated, their hair lengthened, and their eyes pinched. They’re becoming Samurai demons, Harry thought.
“Ready, set,” the coach said to the first student in line, right-hand in the air, ready to drop to start him down the obstacle course. His left-hand held a stopwatch. His brain electric, Harry yelled “Go” then ran around the two people in front of him and bolted onto the course, the coach’s hand still in the air.
Harry zigzagged like a downhill skier through the traffic cones, his legs pumped like pistons in and out of each tire, spider-like he scrambled to the top of the rope fence in two moves, then flipped over the top rope with his legs pointed straight at the ceiling, landing in a crouched cat-like position. Harry dived into the cloth tunnel and exited with a front somersault. He flew over the hurdles, then legs in a split, he cleared the barrels like a ballet dancer in mid-flight, landing two feet beyond the finish line – in under one minute according to the coach’s stopwatch.
Then, instead of stopping to the sound of the coach’s jaw hitting the floor, Harry leaped onto the pull-up bar and whipped off fifteen military style chin-ups without a whiff of strain.
“Kleinman, what’s got into you?” the shocked coach yelled.
“I ate my Wheaties,” Harry called back, then ran out the glass doors, across the school’s front lawn and into the parking lot of the shopping mall across the way. The entire gym class stared at Harry, still clad in gym clothes, as he shrank into the morning sunlight and vanished into the stores.
Harry beat the system. He passed gym.