El Capitan

No, this is not an article about the famous rock formation or John Philip Sousa's best-known operetta. In point of bizarre fact, I am El Capitan...or, at any rate, I was.

My athletic career, during my school days, was not anything to brag about, by any stretch of the imagination. You may remember an earlier article I wrote, called A Hit in Any League. And that was a high point. I was generally the last one picked for any team sport. That went double for basketball. Hold the thought, while I provide a little background.

My family moved around while I was growing up, so I ended up being educated in four different states. By my junior year, it was Ohio's turn. I had been born there (Canton), but we left the state well before I started school. As a result, when I arrived at my new school, I had being a new kid going for me along with my easily-discernable athletic inability.

Still, by the eleventh grade, excellence in sports is not the be-all and end-all it is in the earlier grades, so I had no problem making friends. One of the friends, a sophomore, was not a fellow I would have sought out, except he lived on the same street, just a few houses down. Some of his classmates called him Señor Stahl, because he was absolutely the most inept student of the language our Spanish teacher had ever encountered in his many years of teaching the subject.

Oddly enough, there was a brief point when Señor Stahl knew more Spanish than I did. I had not been allowed to take two modern languages in my previous schools (and had to argue quite a bit to take both French and Spanish in this one), with the result that I was a year or so behind the others when I embarked on Spanish in my junior year.

After our first lesson, I asked my neighbor to quiz me on what I was supposed to learn. Since he had flunked first-year Spanish already, he was a year ahead of me...sort of. One of the vocabulary words we were supposed to learn from that first lesson was the word for "now": ahora. That was the first vocabulary word Sr. Stahl asked me, and I was immediately stumped. Call it a junior moment. "Give me a hint," I finally requested.

He thought for a bit and said, "There's a whore outside. Let's go pick her up right NOW."

Please understand, at that point in my life, I was a very horny teen who had never known the ultimate bliss, much to my great frustration. My immediate reaction to his clever hint was: "Really? A whore? Forget this Spanish crap, let's go!"

Stahl was I suppose what you would consider the class clown, not because he was the soul of wit, but because he was such a magnificent screw-up. I can sort of understand the thinking involved. I guess that, compared to Señor Stahl, the rest of the Spanish students didn't look so stupid, after all.

He was popular in the neighborhood because his was a house you could always go to if you wanted a little after-school relaxation (i.e., beer) before you got onto the grind of homework. We especially liked to play with his tape deck. Mind you, this was the early 1960s, where it was really something if a high-school kid had a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

We had fun goofing around with it on a number of occasions. I remember once, we did a spoof of the TV show, To Tell The Truth, where three contestants would claim to be the same person, and the panelists would have to sniff out the truth-teller.

Again, referencing the time, the outstanding player in the major leagues was the Dodgers' ace left-handed pitcher, Sandy Koufax, a/k/a Sandy the K, a/k/a, Super Jew. While Mr. Koufax was mowing them down in the city of angels, we in the Cleveland area had the big leagues' other Jewish pitcher, a much-less-scary guy named Barry Latman, toiling for the Indians. He tended to win about as often as Koufax lost. On a better team, he would have been practicing his craft in the minor leagues.

Anyway, in this session, Stahl was the MC, I was all three of the contestants, and the others were the panelists. The unspoken, but understood, idea was that the panelists were not going to figure it out, despite obvious clues.

As contestant #1 (in my best redneck voice) I said, "Hi, y'all Ah'm Bar' Latman."

As contestant #2, I said, "Señor, my name, she ees Barry Latman, I THEENK."

As contestant #3, I said, "So, I'm Barry Latman already, nu? So sue me."

I did repay my neighbor for the Spanish vocabulary quiz, in spades. While he was a disaster at the Español, he was no great shakes at the other subjects, either. In case you were wondering, the answer is, by the skin of his teeth.

Anyway, I helped him with a huge project for his English class, in which he not only didn't get a failing grade, but came off looking pretty good. I figured, he owed me, tape recorder notwithstanding, but never expected to collect on the debt.

We are now in the winter of my senior year. A bunch of us sub-varsity types are gathered in the gym for the start of the intramural basketball season. The way the gym teacher had come up with to choose the six captains was to have all the seniors line up, horizontally, with their backs to the rest of the students. Then the underclassmen would line up behind the senior they most wanted to be a team captain.

I took my position, having no idea what to expect or what was going to take place behind my back. After the others had had a chance to choose their leaders, I heard the teacher, a cranky jock-type named Mr. Mars, announce to the underclassmen, "This is gym class, people, not clowning around class." I turned around and saw that Sr. Stahl and almost every junior there had lined up behind me.

Mr. Mars demanded that the electors vote again. I kept my back dutifully turned to the crowd, but had an idea what was going to take place. Mars scowled even more and began to announce the seniors who would be captains. He rattled off five names, then took a long hard look at me and my throng. Finally, he sighed and mumbled, "All right, Lane, get over there with the other five." Mind you, being an intramural basketball captain was not that big a deal for me. Managing to really honk off a tool like Mr. Mars, without doing anything wrong, now that was huge.

I should point out that I chose well among the "talent" pool, and did what I could-short of actually sinking baskets, that is-to help my team. If the faculty referee made a lousy call on one of my talented players, I would insinuate myself between the player and the ref and beef even harder than the offended teammate, thereby ensuring that, if anyone was going to get bounced for misconduct, it would be Capt. Couldn't-Hit-The-Broadside-of-a-Barn, rather than someone who could actually shoot.

The one ref nobody argued with was old Mr. McLanahan, the football coach emeritus, who was known far and wide as "Mr. Exercise," and who, I think, had been at the school since the 1920s. His method of calling fouls in our basketball games was to take as deep a breath as he could, stick the whistle in his mouth, then let it out into the whistle, when he could not hold it any longer, and point to whichever player first came into his field of vision.

As I said, everybody realized it was fruitless and probably a bad idea to give Mr. Exercise a hard time, but I did have occasion to take advantage of his perceptive abilities. In a tight game, one of our opponents scored a rare basket. I was standing close to Mr. Exercise, the referee (and scorekeeper). In a flash of inspiration, I cheered wildly for the guy who had sunk the bucket. This caused McLanahan to figure, not unreasonably, that my team had just logged two points, and so it was noted. That little reversal of the truth, coupled with my only bucket of the season enabled us to win a squeaker, 17-16.

I also did what I could to ensure my team was always in fighting trim. "I expect all of you guys to observe strict training rules, just like the varsity," I told them with a cigarette dangling from my lips. In the end, we won six out of eight and placed second. Not bad for a bunch of clowns.