The Gym Show

November 5, 2011, Indianapolis, Indiana

The gymnast approached the unevens looking serious and contemplative. She was petite except for her massive shoulders, which appeared to be developing a sizable dowager’s hump. The rest of her body was out of proportion with her shoulders—she had no hips, no breasts, and possessed rather short, mighty legs, every muscle bulging and defined. Her hair was slicked back, pinned, and beribboned. Her leotard looked as if she had sprayed it on with electric blue and white sparkled paint. She paused, dipped her head as if in prayer, then tilted her chin toward the judges and flashed a brilliant silver orthodontically enhanced smile as if she had planned it this way all along. With a quick flick of her wrist, she signaled her readiness then mounted the apparatus with a simple glide kip. Now it was all business. The rest of her routine was anything but simple, characterized by releases, reverses, twists, and Giants. Her hands would fly from the bar, and in a blind move, grasp the bar again in the opposite direction. It was almost too difficult to follow exactly what she was doing and how she was able to execute each move, but she certainly made her tricks look seamless and easy. She punctuated the end of her routine with a double twist and landed nearly flawlessly, only leaning slightly to the right upon landing first on one foot then the other.

“Elfie, that bobble will cost her at least one tenth of a point.”

“Ah, that’s true, Bart. And I did not think that her difficulty level was of the same caliber as we’ve seen in the past.”

“Let’s wait for the judges’ scores...”

“Nine-five! Nine-three! NINE-OH! Oh, my, Bart, that’s going to be devastating...wait...nine-six...I do believe she’s dropped to fourth place behind teammate, Alyssa Sanderson. Not a good day for Chelsea Manning...”

All right, Elfie, you get your fat ass up there and try to do what she just did.

Julie hit the ‘last’ button on the remote and went back to The Barefoot Contessa. Ina was whipping up cheddar and dill scones, chicken salad, and a carrot salad with golden raisins. She sighed. The last thing she needed to be doing was watching another cooking show. Feeling like a manatee, she was perched in a ratty-looking Lay-Z-Boy, the arms of which were caked with grease—the result of too many grimy hands clutching its sides to fling it back into the recline mode. She had the chair tilted back, but only back as far as it took the footrest to appear. Julie sat nearly immobile, her left knee couched in an inflatable device with icy water running through its vinyl veins. The device was attached to a tube that was attached to a cooler, which was, at least earlier in the afternoon, filled with ice water. She wasn’t so sure now, and this, combined with the need to use the bathroom, would soon necessitate a shift. However, she was too afraid to move too much to check the ice. The knee had, earlier in the day, been scoped, its shredded meniscus removed, rendering the knee’s owner temporarily inert.

Julie didn’t even have a good story to go along with the knee injury that had resulted in the removal of the cartilage that had afforded her, for years, the ability to perform all manner of athletic tricks. No, this injury was the result of a jump. Up. As in, “My daughter had sunk a three pointer at the very last second of a basketball game—not even a championship game, just a regular game—and they won. And I jumped—up.”

Already bored with Ina, Julie tenderly and awkwardly reached down to grab the edge of the FedEx box that contained a stack of books her sister Jenny had recently sent her. These weren’t just any books, though. The box was filled with yearbooks from Julie’s high school, not her own documentation of her time at Mercyville High School, but memory-filled archives encapsulating the years when her father had been the high school’s principal, and her mother had been the girls’ physical education teacher. The yearbooks, the contents of which had been poured over, memorized, and analyzed by both Jenny and Julie when they were children, had always been shelved in her family’s living room until her dad had sold the house in 1987, and the contents of her childhood home were cast about her small hometown in an estate sale. During the sale, Jenny had surreptitiously set the yearbooks aside, even though she knew that many folks from the area would have paid a substantial price for the entire collection of Mercyville memories.

Julie had recently asked Jenny to send her the yearbooks. A few years ago, she had come up with the idea that she wanted to, somehow, between working full time and mothering her three children, document the years that her parents had spent working together at Mercyville High School. She was especially interested in capturing the years when her mother’s signature creation—the Gym Show—had established itself as the school year’s most exciting, eclectic, and intriguing event. Those yearbooks (placed, maddeningly, just out of her reach from the Lay-Z-Boy) contained decades of memories that she was sure would somehow inspire her to write some kind of synopsis about the Gym Show. She could just about get her left hand on the edge of the box, and if she shifted—however, when she shifted, a sharp stab of pain ran through her knee and she gave up.

This entire knee episode had turned into a colossal pain in the ass.

Two weeks after the untimely jump that had caused the injury and many, many painkillers later, Julie had conceded to have the knee scoped. It was a simple outpatient procedure, and it went fine; that is, until her doctor arrived in the post-surgery suite to issue his instructions for her post-surgery behavior. As an aside, he had informed her that he had just looked at the MRI pre-surgery and the tear that he had only previously suspected was present was, indeed, much worse than he had initially thought given the trifling injury that led her to him in the first place.

“I had to take it all out. There just wasn’t any meniscus left at all; it was in shreds. Are you sure that you just jumped up that one time?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I’ve been running about 30 miles a week for the past three years, and it hasn’t given me any problem at all before then.” Julie waited for his eyebrows to indicate a surprised and somewhat impressed countenance.

“Do you ever run on concrete?”

“Well, yeah ... in the wintertime, I run at my school. You know, run the halls—it’s carpeted, but I’m pretty sure it’s concrete underneath. It’s a pretty big school. One level. It’s a middle school.” As if he cared! Julie was a teacher in a large suburban middle school. Running in the halls after school had dismissed was about the only perk she could enjoy at work after spending an entire day with 180 hormone-ravaged, ill-mannered eighth graders.

“You know that concrete is, like, the absolute worst surface you could be running on. That’s wrought havoc on your joints. Any other sports? Were you an athlete growing up?” For a genius with an MD after his name, he certainly sucked at sentence structure.

“No. I wasn’t an athlete. I was just a gymnast.”

As soon as the words were out, Julie regretted having spoken them. She had been saying, “No, I was just a gymnast” for most of her adult life, and certainly when asked by friends why her three children were such good athletes. Gymnastics in the new millennium was highly athletic, artistic, competitive, and elite. Just ask Chelsea Manning. Julie, however, had never participated in gymnastics competitively, unless one factored in her YMCA experience as an eighteen-year old tumbling phenom. The 1970s was still a nascent era in the gymnastics milieu, especially in her small, obscure hometown in western Pennsylvania.

“You’re, what,” Dr. Knee consulted her chart, “forty-seven? How long did you say you have been running?”

Julie cast her eyes toward her swollen left knee, and absently rubbed her thigh above the bandaged site. “Well … since my fortieth birthday. You see, I had lost a little bit of weight, and I started running, and I really, really liked it. I figured since I hadn’t been a runner when I was young—you know, because I was just a gymnast—then I wouldn’t be compromising my joints. You know.”

“Well, you’re done running. It’s simply out of the question. You have no more cartilage left in that knee. Why don’t you try swimming?”

She could feel the hot tears well up in her eyes. Julie genuinely loved to run. She didn’t run fast, and she knew that she probably looked stupid doing it, but it was something physical that was giving her some satisfaction—a release from the tension, the stress, and the spiritual draining that teaching sucked out of her soul, one long kid-filled day at a time. Running provided Julie with a time to think. Teaching school all day and having three kids was hard enough; when she was running, she had time to sort out her day, plan her week, dream a little, and know that when she was done, she could reward herself with a glass of wine—sometimes the whole bottle—and a hot bubble bath.

These were the thoughts that had occupied her mind as she watched the World Gymnastic Championship, probably over now, and a second episode of The Barefoot Contessa. Ina was making dinner for her sweetheart, Jeffrey who apparently loves her unconditionally, as long as she cooks him his favorite foods, all rich in fat, sugar, and calories. She wondered if Ina had ever been a runner. It was doubtful that she had ever been a gymnast.

With an audible sigh, Julie flipped back to ESPN, but the gymnastic spectacle was over, juxtaposed by what appeared to be a news conference. Like an old friend, the Penn State logo was visible at the bottom of the screen, catching Julie’s attention immediately, but the words “Penn State Ex-Coach, AD Among Others Charged in Child Sex Case” replaced whatever warm feelings she may have had at any reference to her alma mater. A lifelong Penn State fan and 1985 graduate of the Main campus, Julie listened in gradually increasing stages of disbelief then abject horror as the sports pundit revealed details alleging that the team’s former defensive coordinator had just been indicted on forty counts of sex crimes against young boys. This was unbelievable, incomprehensible.

Repulsed beyond reason, Julie felt as if she had to throw up. She sat stock still, eyes targeted at the television and strained to hear more as the story continued to name the school’s athletic director and another university official as complicit in the cover up of the ex-coach’s crimes, but stopped short of accusing head coach Joe Paterno of any wrongdoing. Julie let out her pent-up breath, somewhat mollified. To her, Joe Paterno represented all that was pure and good about college sports, and she, along with every other kid who grew up in Pennsylvania, idolized the venerable football coach. After all, it was Penn State football that had drawn Julie toward the State College campus just as students at Alabama or Notre Dame flocked to those universities because of their storied football programs.

She flipped through the remaining channels looking for other coverage, some other story that would, she hoped, downplay the severity of Penn State’s involvement in this nightmarish crime, but every other news outlet reported the same events with the same details that essentially named the University as a co-conspirator in this man’s crimes. Not surprisingly, but with a sadness and an ache in her heart that she could not explain or assuage, in the coming days Julie would find that her beloved Joe Paterno, a man who represented all that was good, wholesome, and down-to-earth in the world of collegiate sports, would be viciously vilified. It was not only the media who cast him out as an abettor of abuse, but the public in general maligned his name and his reputation and associated him with the scandal in the worst possible way—and that scandal would be the end of his career and, indeed, his life.

Julie turned off the TV and stared at nothing, forgetting about the trivialities of her torn up knee, absorbing the news with a sickening dread that this announcement was the end of her fascination with Penn State. What did Joe Paterno know and when did he know it? What would this scandal do to all of those, like her, who had worshipped Penn State, its history, its sterling reputation in the world of collegiate sports? In these coming days, her friends and even her own husband would politely suggest that her concern was altogether misguided—that her real sorrow should be directed to those young boys who had been ruined by this man. While that was true, the reality of what had happened to them, especially as more sordid details were revealed through the press, was simply too evil to comprehend, and as a way to defer that evil from creeping into her consciousness, Julie focused instead on the collateral damage.

All of this reflection about her beloved Penn State and her childhood growing up in Pennsylvania invariably made her think about her parents. She missed them both, but she especially missed her father. What would he have thought about all of this? In Joe Paterno’s shoes, what would he have done?

Julie’s involvement in gymnastics had put her in touch, literally, with any number of coaches—male and female. Any of these adults at the various camps and clinics she attended could have taken advantage of their respective positions—they could have committed the same revolting acts as this ex-coach had committed—a man whose name would soon become synonymous with all that was evil and sickening in the universe. Julie wasn’t naïve enough to think that this man’s crimes were committed in a vacuum; as a teacher, child abuse was a reality she faced quite often, and, unfortunately, teacher-student liaisons were becoming more and more prevalent but no less abhorrent. But at what point had this kind of appalling behavior become so commonplace? Or, was it just that the public’s insatiable hunger for salaciousness made for better TV ratings? Try as she might, she couldn’t imagine anything like this happening in her childhood.

Gymnastics had dominated her youth to the extent that it defined her. Whenever Julie’s name came up in any conversation, people would preface it with “That gymnast.” Her love for gymnastics began as a child and continued throughout her high school years. Though her debut on the gym floor had little to do with gymnastics and everything to do with being the daughter of two of the town’s most interesting people, Julie never forgot that spring in 1970 when gymnastics became the most essential part of her being. It was her first real Gym Show.

Her father would never forget that spring, either, though Julie was never to know the reason why. Nor would she ever know just how much her own father had in common with her beloved hero Joe Paterno.

Julie reached down again, more determined than before to pull the box of yearbooks close enough so she could find the 1970 edition of “The Walleye,” this time more to return to her childhood than to revisit memories of the Gym Show—and to return to an era when her world was an innocent place where men didn’t hurt little boys.