Rocket Man

I used to run up around the school and then down Rainier Street on the way back home. Someone I was supposed to meet lived there. I worked out like a bastard animal to get in shape for varsity football. I played for an incredibly intense, incredibly successful high school football coach. With my animal workouts, I got to be the fastest player on my team. They timed us semi-regularly. 40-yard dash. Admittedly, we didn't have a particularly fast football team; nevertheless, I was the fastest. I was also the third strongest guy on the team. The only two guys who could bench press more than me were huge linemen who outweighed my average build by about 50 pounds, so I would HOPE that they could out-bench-press me!

I had actually started the offseason conditioning program stronger than even those two guys, but once the regular after-school workouts started in earnest as a team, then pretty soon, when it came to the bench press, it felt like I had a four-cylinder-engined car that was competing against a couple cars with eight-cylinder engines: I may have had a head start on them, but it was inevitable that they would pass me.

The week before football season started was also the week before the high school year started. Someone I was supposed to meet later went to my same high school. This last week of practice before the football season started was traditionally called "Hell Week," because of the penultimate intensity of the full-pads, double-a-day football practices in the sweltering heat of late August. We practiced and panted like dogs, both morning and afternoon. Most guys had to drive or get dropped off to practice. But my parents lived three houses up from a park that led to the high school and the practice field. It was literally a five or six-minute walk for me. This was how I acquired my nickname among my teammates.

For the early-morning practices, the hot August sun was not yet tormenting and crippling, it was so damnably early that the first practice of the day started. The grass would actually be cool. There would be a low, fine mist above the landscaped, freshly sprinklered grass in that park.

Because I lived so close to the school and the field, I didn't have to put my football pads on in the locker room like the other guys. I would put my pads and everything on in my bedroom, even my cleats, and I'd then walk out my downstairs sliding-glass door and go clockety-clock-clackety down the sidewalk in full football pads, helmet dangling from one arm. And then I would have to cut through that freshly sprinklered, misty-manicured lawn in the park to get to the practice field. Did I mention it was damnably early? My teammates would be exiting the locker room or already stretching on the field. They would see me coming as a ghostly, mist-shrouded figure. I would emerge, apparition-like, through the misty morning fog, fully padded up to play.

Now, at the time, and for a long time, the central playground feature of this park, right in the middle of the sandbox I had to walk through to get to practice, was a rather unique, three-story, metal-encaged, playground rocket for climbing. Little kids could climb up its three segmented stories, and they could slide down the descending slide sticking out from the side of the middle, metal segment. Someone I was supposed to meet used to climb up there later on with a pencil wedged sideways in her full lips and a journal in her hand; all by herself she would write in her journal from the inevitable third story of the rocket, inevitable because its lofty isolation beckoned her. As it did for me, later, but my beckoning call from its alluring isolation was more for beer drinking and deep pondering, at the time.

But my mystified teammates would see me emerging from the fog next to this huge, yellow, metal rocket. And I became known as "Rocket Man." I wish it had something to do with my having been the fastest player on the team. But no, my team nickname had a much less heroic, and much weirder origin than that.