A Special Kind of Hell: The Playground

I am not sure why as we grow older and try to remember the past often our thoughts drift to our youngest age.  Perhaps it is our own psyche recognizing the importance in those formative years on how we came to know the world.  Maybe it was the most interesting part of our lives.  Perhaps it is a yearning for lost innocence.  Whatever the reason I found myself today harkening back to memories of one of the most brutal locations of a young child’s life, the playground.  

For a young child the playground embodies liberation, freedom, friendship and hierarchy.  It also is an arena where it is kill or be killed.  It is a regulated pandemonium when adult supervision is minimized and like Lord of the Flies children express their dominance over the others.  It can be in games, submission or actions of deprecation.  I can still recall Todd Mueller or was it Bobby Andresen pinching my neck and forcing me to bow while they said “Bauer, bow to the emperor.” I learned early on that a key to survival was to make people laugh.  Jokingly be gay, self deprecating or any other strategy that would draw a smile and defuse a situation.  At times I think the equipment on a playground at least in our time, more resembled an S & M Torture chamber.  There were no rubber mats and slides.  No plastic guards and guide rails.   There was concrete, dirt and rocks.  There were steel constructions designed to create mayhem and hills to run up and fall down.

My little school in the corner of my world was Lake Otis Elementary.  It was a single story school that spread out shaped like a ’T’ with three wings.  On one side of the ’T’ was the little kids playground, on the other was the big kids.  Little kids had swings, teeter totters, concrete pipes and monkey bars.   Each was diabolical in there own way.  Who can forget the sinking feeling of riding a teeter totter high in the air when you associate choses to jump off and you go plunging to the ground with a jarring thud your stomach meeting your brain in the process.  Or the monkey bars.  It wasn’t the hanging ladder many think of but an interconnected set of steel pipes forming a giant block where a miss step meant plunging to the ground.  The site where I, like the child in “A Christmas Story” succumbed to the enticing view of frosty metal only to have my tongue frozen in place as an attendant desperately ran inside the school to obtain a cup of warm water.  

One of the worst spots for myself was a giant concrete  pipe.  It seemed like a good idea, kids like to crawl right?  It was a sunny spring day, school almost over for the summer when sitting on top of the pipe I bent my head over the the pipes entrance to see a kid crawling through.  My head was upside down making the action all the more stimulating.  The moment proved irresistible for another child as he moved with the stealth of a stalking tiger behind me and shoved my ass sending me flying off the pipe backwards and shattering my left arm in two places.

It was a difficult day.  I went to the nurses office and the only splint they had was inflatable and leaked.  I had to keep blowing it up while my mom came and took me to the hospital.  The result was half a summer with my arm suspended in the air in a cast.  The perpetrator of the crime payed me a visit with his mother.  They wanted to say they were sorry and on a warm blue sky summers day with my arm dangling in an elevated swing, gave me a softball as a gift.  

The big kids side of the yard was a progression in sadism.  One year the Parent Teacher Organization raised money to buy us a witches hat.   The witches hat was a ring suspended around a pole by a series of chains.  Kids hang on to the ring and run creating a whirling that actually lifts kids off the ground as they fly through the air.  When the witches hat went in I think we lost 100 kids in one week.  Kids were flying off like flying squirrels with no dexterity as the ring sped up.  I think in retrospect part of the problem may have been that whomever installed it hung the ring way too high.  The resulting effect was that as soon as the spinning started, the average kid with their arms extended was airborne.  The school and the PTO quickly admitted defeat and with parental pressure most certainly rising, the witches hat was removed.

One of my favorite pieces was the tetherball.  My best friend Robert and I would whack the ball at each other and I would eventually lose every time.  It never occurred to me that it was Robert’s hight advantage and longer arms that did me in.  No matter, I learned humility and grace in defeat having never won a game against my Jolly Green Giant opponent.

All schools are filled with casts of semi-nepharious characters at least from the point of view of a child.  In my limited world there was a teacher who would pick me up and shake me by the neck named James Jeffery.  He was also known to insert boys head first into garbage cans.  He had a butch haircut and seemed horrendously intimidating.  I saw him years later and realized he was about 5 foot 2.  Needless to say there was a lot of work for a psychiatrist there.  Then there was Smitty the black janitor that patrolled the lunch room.  Children and lunchrooms are toxic in combination.  Free time and food.  I can only imagine what Smitty had to deal with every day.  The middle aged black man with a silver tooth smile would patrol between the tables challenging his inmates to make a mess.  This point was driven home to me when one day, for what I cannot remember, Smitty bent over between Todd Mueller and myself.  We each had our cartoon painted metal lunch boxes open and were drinking our sour, un refrigerated milk when Smitty produced a pocket knife and opened it up.  Looking deeply into my eyes in a terrifying way that probably left some residual scar on my psyche said in a slow deep gravely drawl, “I am going to cut your balls of one of these days.”

The playground had its own commander.  Our commandant came in the form of a middle aged woman perhaps around 60 named Phyllis.  She had a gruff mean exterior and constantly patrolled the inmates under her control.  At the time I was still developing my consciousness of the world and the significance of historical events.  Along with my friend Shane McCoy, we were studying Nazi’s.  We hadn’t reached the bad parts yet.  We were primarily interested in the cool uniforms.  I think it also stemmed from a desire to have German soldiers to add to our battles with green army men.  On a side note Shane did achieve this with his Guns of Navarone play set he received one Christmas, a fact that left me eternally jealous.  If Shane only knew that in 2013 a used one sold on eBay for over 300 dollars. 

Things started to go south between Phylis and I when at one point after suffering some form of containment order from her, I saluted her with a Nazi salute and said, “Heil Hiltler!”  Off to the principals office I went towed by my ear.  My parents made me watch the entire mini series Holocaust on TV to ensure I understood who the Nazi’s were and what they had done.

Life in Alaska meant that most of a students outdoor time was spent in winter’s interminable grasp.   The season essentially stretched from October to May and encompassed nearly the entire school year.  Winter of course means frozen ground, air and snow.  I do believe the rules have changed but as a child I cannot remember a single time when we were allowed to skip recess because of cold or snow.  School was never once canceled for inclement weather.  This was Alaska where temperatures were often in the single digits or below and we all just lived with that reality and made it our own.  Still with snow suits and moon boots we braved the freezing temperatures for our moment in the freezer.  I recall one day when I just couldn’t take it anymore.  My hands were cold, my feet were cold, my cheeks felt like they were turning to leather.  I snuck in a side door of the school and sat quietly on a bench in a hallway trying to warm myself.  I was alone, free and warm.  I hadn’t been there long when my nemesis Phylis appeared at the door.  How she knew I do not know.  I believe to this day she had some kind of evil neuron intercept path into the active minds of children.  She opened the door and leering at me told me to get outside.  I told her I was freezing but there was no impact on her cruel uncompromising veneer.  Failing to change her mind for some reason the words “well kiss my sweet petunia” came to my lips.  Before I knew it my ear was extended yet again from my head and I was in the principals office with a call to my parents.  At least I was warm.

    

Winter meant snow and piles of it.  Giant mounds that like the monkey bars screamed out for dominance.  Each of us charged up like marines planting the flag only to be jettisoned off.  At one point I landed with a concussion and finished the day, you guessed it, warm.  Chris Congdon was determined to show his superiority.  In the opposite corner was a ferocious young black girl that had probably been fighting since the day she was born.  She occupied the top spot and Chris was determined to knock her off.   Chris barreled up the icy hill and was launched backward with tremendous ferocity.  His indignation from being bested by a black girl was sufficient to send him into a tirade that resulted in a fist fight between him and the girl.  Chris didn’t stand a chance and was soon knocked flat on his back.  Chris never lived it down and today is probably somewhere selling used cars and cowering with the memory.  The girl for her part is probably CEO of a major corporation.

On the back of the school leading over the gym there was a door and a stairwell.  Legends were told about where it led and what was there.  I have no idea how old it was but in 1974 it seemed ancient.  It was likely a secret location where kids were tortured or criminals took refuge.  One day while out on the little kids playground the door was open and we couldn’t resist.  I remember sneaking up the stairwell as if I was soon to discover some mysterious Masonic ritual in progress.  Each step seemed to lead closer to what was accepted as our eventual demise.  At the top we discovered some kind of an abandoned apartment hidden away.  Why it existed I will never know but the fact that it was there and we survived to tell of its existence created a perpetual bubble of fear concerning the location.

As we grow older our world expands exponentially.   We go from a reality where we live in microcosms to one where each passing day introduces more and more of the unknown.  From our house to the neighborhood.  From the neighborhood to the school and the vast area in between.  The distance our legs can travel gives way to a bicycle and eventually a car and an airplane.  When we return to the world from which we came we are amazed at how what was once so big has become so small.  Lake Otis Elementary is still there but the school that I remember has been remodeled away.  The same thing happened to my high school.  The places of memory, the equipment we played on has long since been erased and reconfigured.  That said, some where within the recesses of our minds the memories vividly remain colored by a tint of innocence we long ago surrendered to the world. 

Note:  An original version of this story was published in 2011.  I had forgotten.  Call it age but it is amazing how similar two creations can be that are written independently eight years apart.  That said, each is a collection of slightly different memories in parts.