I’m not quite Over The Hill yet, but you know how I can tell it’s clearly coming up over the horizon? Wait–that’s a poor invocation of that metaphor. To be more accurate: you now how I can tell I’m pretty much firmly atop the Hill, mere months away from tumbling down the other side?
Two words: Leg. Acy. Or, if you’re a normal person, one word: Legacy.
I’m about at the age where I’ve really started to think about my legacy and how the world will have been changed because of me. I mean, just looking at some of my fairly recent posts, such as Epitaph…, My Time To Go, and Dear Doctor Future President, and it’s pretty clear that’s been on my mind lately.
Speaking of which…
I have big legs. Like, those-aren’t-legs-those-are-tree-trunks legs. And don’t even get me started on my those-are-not-cow-calves-those-are-whale-calves calves. Seriously, though. I need you to stay focused on my thighs.
I have had big thighs as long as I can remember, and the historical record will attest that this has been the case at least since my sophomore year of high school.
One of the plethora of problems that teens face at that age is their ever-changing bodies. One way this is manifested is that one does not always have clothes that fit as well as they should. And for me, this played out in the form of having too-big thighs and not-big-enough pants.
But we haven’t reached the end of this path of logic yet; we need to go one step further.
How this really played out for me was that my wondrous-thunderous thighs would incessantly rub together and wear a hole right where the two pant legs met. So almost every pair of pants that I owned would sooner or later fall victim to the friction, making an eventual wardrobe malfunction1Mind you, this was circa 1996, almost a decade before Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake made that phrase infamous. statistically inevitable.
One day in Sophomore English, after the main lesson was through, the gang and I were just sitting around and chillaxing in the back of the classroom. Feeling particularly chillaxed that day, I casually had one leg up, with my foot resting on the seat of an adjacent desk.
At some point in time, one of my female classmates, whom we’ll call “Ms. May” for privacy purposes, got real quiet before eventually piping up, “I hope you’re wearing underwear, because you kind of have a hole in your pants and I can see your leg.”
*Record scratches*
As if I would reply with anything different, all I could really say was, in classic form, “Well, actually…”
Time out. I need to back up the story to earlier that morning.
A key detail that I had previously omitted was that, by some sick twist of fate, the weekly laundry cycle at home had gotten out of whack, resulting in a dearth of clean underwear in my drawer.
But who wants to wear dirty underwear, especially when you’re a greasy, smelly, sweaty teenage boy? I did what all y’all would have done in the same situation. I went commando.2AKA free-ballin’, in case you’re more familiar with that term.
The stars had mis-aligned, and as a result, I was sitting there caught with one leg up, the first-ever victim of a double wardrobe malfunction.
Time in.
So, sadly I found myself dashing Ms. May’s hopes, responding with a long pause that said that all that needed to be said.
To which someone else logically pointed out, “Then that’s not his leg you’re looking at…”
This being high school, of course everyone had a heyday with my predicament. One might even say they went a little nuts.
Later that day, I came back to my locker to find a note on it asking the question on everyone’s mind: “How’s it hanging, Breezy?” 3It was either that or “How’s it blowing, Breezy?” Same idea.
I wasn’t surprised to find out later that none other than Ms. May herself had been the primary instigator behind the sign, though at that point it could have been anybody since pretty much the entire school was privy to the story of my exposed privates by then.
Being the negative-attention whore that I am, I actually didn’t really mind all the ribbing, and secretly basked in the glory of the moment. A little bit of infamy is better than a lotta bit of obscurity, right?
On a brief side note, my best friend and owner of a blog-alias ironically appropriate for this story, Phillip K. Ballz, has claimed that there was a certain young lady in the crowd that had noticed my fleshy patch long before anyone had said anything, and that she chose to enjoy the view rather than ruin her moment of bliss. But, unless this happened on more than one occasion–and I can’t be 100% certain it didn’t–I’m not so sure about the veracity of his account, as he was one year younger and it doesn’t make sense that a freshman would be hanging out in sophomore English. But I digress…
It wasn’t until several months later, at the beginning of our Junior year, when the real payoff came. During back-to-school orientation, we were tasked with the chore of reviewing the boring ol’ student handbook. In the front we happened to find an insert highlighting the changes that had been made since the previous school year.
To my surprise–and to my delight–I found this little nugget, lightly paraphrased due to memory constraints:
“No jeans or shorts with holes in or near the crotch region shall be worn to school at any time…”
The “breezy” Amendment, Rolla High School Student Handbook (1997-98)
The point of the story is that’s not my leg you’re looking at.
That’s my “Legacy.” *wink*
Content created on: 19 February 2020 (Wednesday)
Footnotes & References:
Nice job getting into a situation that caused a new rule to be printed out in a handbook.