A Shame Story
John Brady
Let me tell you a story about scoliosis and men’s underpants. It’s set in a Catholic grade school. If you hear that and think some Jacob-Riis-Irish-kids-stuffed-in-a-classroom-suffering-from-cholera-and-maybe-undernourishment-too stuff, that wasn’t this school which was named after Saint Anne, Christ’s grandmother. It was a nice building in a working- to middle-class neighborhood. There weren’t even that many Irish Catholics around. Mostly German- and Polish-American believers. Yes, all eight grades plus kindergarten were in a single building but not cramped in like an old-timey, home-on-the-range, one-room schoolhouse. Each grade had its very own classroom and the building was straightforwardly, functionally modern. The desks were newish and the windows let in plenty of light which is healthy. Certainly, it wasn’t modern like, say, Bauhaus is modern. That would have been incongruous anyway to have a parochial school designed by a group of European architects who to this day enjoy a predominantly secular reputation. Incongruous but cool. For sure. Especially to my older self. I mean to have gone to a Bauhaus-designed school. I would have collected a lot of cultural cachet from that later in life unlike having gone to parochial school which contributed very little useful cultural currency to be spent in the circles (unbelieving, post-structuralist, post-graduate) I was running in at the time. It was modern in another way too. Sometime people hear Catholic school, and they think of secretive, sectarian academies staffed by nuns with wooden rulers with sharp metal edges the ruler manufacturers had included in the ruler design as a help in tracing straight lines but that the nuns deployed punitively in their unrelentingly fervent efforts to drill Catholic orthodoxy into the impressionable boys and girls, shaping them into the papist, albeit scarred (physically and psychologically) shock troops that would then upon graduation and maturation take transsubstantiational hacksaws to America’s Protestant roots. That wasn’t St. Anne. It wasn’t one of those catechism drill schools that by that time -- the 1970s -- even most Catholics remembered with embarrassed chuckles if they acknowledged their existence at all. The nuns at St. Anne didn’t wear habits. They wore normal clothes and comfortable shoes. Okay. That’s not quite completely true. There was one nun who did wear a habit. Sister Ruth. She was kindly, if strict, and didn’t seem the holy drill sergeant type to secret a ruler up her long black sleeves. I don’t think she counts against the school’s forwardthinkingness. And if you’re going to insist on putting her on the anti-modern side of the ledger, her presence was balanced out by the fact that our principal was a former priest who had married a former nun who was the school’s Director of Religious Education. That’s some dope post-Vatican II unorthodoxy right there. We kids never did learn why they left the religious life. I think in some vague sense many of us assumed it was about sex. Catholicism's continued insistence on the value and rationality of celibacy: now that was, is and always will be embarrassing. Considering it now, love, which of course includes carnality but can’t only be that, probably had more to do with it. There are priests and nuns who fuck, but they don’t all give up their collars and wimples as a result. It takes something stronger (and purer?) to motivate someone to break a bond like the promise to serve God the rest of your life. Love can be that wedge. So yeah, the principal and his wife more than made up for Sister Ruth. That school was modern. For example, they took public health seriously which is why the older grades had annual scoliosis screenings. Each class would troop downstairs and line up outside of the music room, which wasn’t always in regular use and thus was a suitably appropriate location for a pop-up spinal health clinic. One by one, we’d file in to have our vertebrae inspected. Each kid would strip down to their underwear and bend over a few times while the scoliosis inspector -- a real one, mind you, like a public health nurse or some other certified representative of the medical profession and not like a priest or monsignor (this isn’t that type of Catholic story) -- looked for curves nascent and profound. Sometimes when I ran out of underpants because I hadn’t bothered to put them in the wash and not because I didn’t have enough pairs -- I did and you shouldn’t think I didn’t -- I would go and borrow a pair of my dad’s. I didn’t exactly sneak a pair; at the same time, I also didn’t announce it to the house that I had neglected to put my wash in the pile on time and as a result was going to wear a grown man’s underpants to school. It was a little weird to do I guess. Yet in my defense, attending school without underpants at all would have been weirder. This was many years before ‘going commando’ had been established as an accepted form of dress thanks to Joey on Friends. I was a regular-sized grade-school boy and my dad was a regular-sized adult male, so it wasn’t like the underpants fit. I mean if you had seen me in only my underpants while I was wearing my dad’s, you would have thought, “That boy is wearing underpants that very definitely don’t fit,” and you probably would have asked yourself why and maybe thought that something wasn’t quite right at home even though that wasn’t the case in this instance. Our household was very stable in the ways that count, i.e., emotionally, financially, culturally, etc., even though my wearing ill-fitting underpants would maybe suggest otherwise to a person with more rigid standards of sartorial propriety than I obviously actively had and that my parents, as evidenced by their tolerance of my filching and wearing my pop’s BVDs, at least passively possessed. I can’t remember it exactly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the thought of the scoliosis nurse thinking oddly of me and imputing certain realities - unfairly, for sure! -- to my family and home life crossed my mind as I was sitting in class later that morning wearing man-sized underpants and heard our teacher remind us that our spines would be screened later that day. Do they still do those screenings? I’m not sure, but I am reasonably sure that they have faded in popularity if they’re still around at all. After all, when’s the last time you’ve been talking to parents of school-aged children and one or more of them has broached the subject of scoliosis screenings. It just doesn’t happen. Also, it’s apparently the case that the screenings have fallen out of favor because they didn’t work. They missed too many cases of actual scoliosis. Or they found spinal curvatures that didn’t actually exist. This raises a serious question about which type of news would be worse: the shock of a diagnosis that your spine was growing more serpentine by the day followed at some indeterminate point by the relief that it in fact was normal; or the relief of receiving a clean bill of health that would be gradually and then more and more quickly eroded by the realization that you might go through your entire life crooked. Thinking about either option gives me the tingles. We or, at least, I went into those screenings with a real sense of foreboding. Because scoliosis wasn’t some abstract condition. Kids had it, and we knew them. There was one girl who didn’t go to our school but who went to the nearby public school who was a well-known scoliosis sufferer. She and Jordon Knox, who was in our class, were going together and so we’d see her around school. Again, this was the 70s and before the widespread use of plastics and Velcro to good and humane effect in corrective braces. Instead, her spine and head were held rigid in an angular and very metal frame that stuck out from her back and chest underneath her clothes. She wore a lot of sweaters. It looked so uncomfortable. It was also very conspicuous. When you saw her, you knew immediately what was wrong. She had scoliosis and was consigned to live inside that metal prison for at least the foreseeable future. That’s what we knew. We also knew that she let Jordan feel her breasts. Besides wondering if we’d be able to do that if we were given a chance and whether we would enjoy it, we also wondered -- and maybe even whispered this thought out loud to each other; I don’t know, it’s so many years ago, but I have a memory of something like this -- whether her easiness (not a good word, I know, but we were young and products of our time) in granting Jordan free (and unlimited?) passage to second base wasn’t somehow tied to her medical condition. Like she offered access to the private sectors of her body because she was ashamed of its damaged condition or because she felt like an outcast and wanted attention. It never crossed our mind that she might of done it because she just liked her boyfriend’s touch. I do know that it did cross my mind to wonder whether the brace got in the way. The logistics of pleasure can be perplexing. At any rate, when the nurse looked at my spine, I only had to take off my shirt and the fact that I was wearing my dad’s underpants remained my personal affair. Also, I didn’t have scoliosis. On both fronts, I had worried for nothing.
Based in Portland, John Brady is the author of Golden Palms, a noir about LA politics. It’s funny too. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in various other outlets, including Exposition Review, pioneertown, Big Windows Review, Drunk Monkeys, the Los Angeles Review, Pomona Valley Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Punk Planet, and on National Public Radio. His writing is available at johnbradywriter.com