Miami, now there is where you get HEAT. We used to go to schools--cinderblock construction with flat, black tar roof-- and the south Florida sun would make that roof tar boil. The streets and parking lots rippled all around you and all the whole world looked like a mirage. South Dade. Coral rock and canals. Banana trees that nobody wanted and sticky sap Brazilian Pepper and papery Malalukas spreading through the native swampy trees and sawgrass. When we kids went fishing we would rest cool in the shade of the Australian Pines that lined the Tamiami Canal. The pines were welcome invaders. Shade is valuable. They provided shade. But at Southwest Miami Sr. High School there was no shade.
Southwest Miami Sr. High School. Newly built on a denuded parcel of land in the floodplains of the ‘Glades. Not a mature tree to be found. No A/C to be found. At least not in the student area. The class rooms all had an outside wall on one side, the hall on the other side and two interior walls, one with a “black board” that was green. The outside wall had large, unshaded awning windows that cranked open and closed. If the outside wall was on the north (shady) side of the building you were hot but OK. But if it was on the south side you roasted in the winter and charbroiled in the spring and fall. Sitting in those Formica desks with the sweat running down your neck was brutal. We never gave it too much thought because that was all we knew-heat and sweat.
The school corridors linking the buildings were open to the weather with just a poured concrete roof over a poured concrete walkway. They were built ‘open’ to allow the ‘breezes’ to waft through the school. But there either was no breeze to waft or the breeze was gale force and carried the golf ball sized rain ‘drops’ horizontally through the walkway. I guess that is why they called them breezeways.
On the way to class you had go from building to building to stop by your locker and get your books/gym uniform/lunch/ lunch money/ etc and you only had a few minutes so you ran. By the time you got to class you were either soaked from sweat or drenched with rain. That was how you got wet when you didn’t want to get wet. There were times you wanted to get wet but couldn’t…
The previously mentioned gym suit consisted of khaki shorts with elastic waist band, white ‘T’ shirt, white socks and sneakers. (The girls wore a strange, one piece uniform that looked, simply, like a pale green or white sack with arm and leg holes. There was elastic at the waist that cinched the hour glass figure that was just beginning to develop in the young women of our class). You were supposed to bring the uniforms and sneakers home once a week and wash them-and I guess air out the gym lockers over the weekend. In fact they rarely were washed more than once a month and the lockers themselves smelled worse than most gas station rest rooms and never, ever got a breath of fresh air.
During this period of American history physical fitness was taken very seriously but primitively. No fancy gyms with exercise bikes or treadmills. No mirrors or carpeted workout stations and (as I have said before) No A/C. We had a gym with a hardwood floor and floor mats hung on all the walls to prevent anyone from smashing a head or kneecap on the cement block walls. We had basketball hoops and huge rolling laundry carts filled with all kinds of balls-volley balls, basketballs, dodge balls, heavy exercise balls, etc. But all this interior luxury was reserved for days when the rain (flying sideways through the breezeways) kept us from enjoying the outdoors. Outdoors we had a four hundred and forty yard unpaved track, a huge field of weeds and small stones, an asphalt pad with six hoops and three full basketball courts or four volleyball courts or any number of other sweaty games outlined in a graphic of two and one half inch, multicolored, lines painted like hieroglyphs on the sticky black asphalt. We had tetherball and volley ball and touch football and softball. My favorite was track and field-I had read the autobiography of Roger Bannister and the great American Jim Thorp-and imagined that one day I would set records like them. Even with the sweat and heat this was the best part of my day.
I always played full out, even though my ‘full out’ was laughable. I was a chubby little guy who dreamed fast but ran slow. I couldn’t do a pull up. I was always chosen either last or very, very close to last, to be on anybody’s team. Even when we had dance lessons (Oh Yes! We had dance lessons as part of physical education! And even the dancing was sweaty!) I was a loser. To begin the dance lessons we would line up-boys on one side of the gym starting with the tallest guy and down to the smallest-that would be me. The girls did the same on the other side of the gym. The gym teacher would start a march up on the phonograph and the lines would begin to march forward. The head of the boy’s line would head for the head of the girls line and they would pair off. Then the second pair, third…etc etc etc …down to me, whereupon I would get either no one as there might not be enough girls (a true blessing) or I would get Linda Brockstein.
Linda Brockstein (real name not used for reasons which will become obvious) had a problem. She had some kind of horrible condition that made her nose always run. Not some clear snot but very green, gooy looking snot that she had to constantly wipe off with tissue. The tissues became sloppy looking. I never could figure out where she got rid of them. We had a lot of classes together and I saw her most of the day-wiping her nose-and I never did see her get rid of one of the tissues. So there was the snot and the tissues and the bubbles that used to blow up out of her nostril sometimes from the snot when she talked really fast answering a question in class and she did answer a lot of questions in class. She was smart. Class to her was like track and field to me-full out. And I wanted to be nice to her and not be disgusted but I couldn’t. Especially when I had to dance with her. I just kept thinking ‘where does she ditch the tissues?’
When it wasn’t raining and we were outdoors we’d work on the President’s Official Physical Fitness Program (the President was very serious about Physical Fitness and his counsel had laid down goals for running the mile, pull ups, push ups, sit ups, and a dozen other real exercises!). We also played foot ball (touch), did the high jump and broad jump (that was when my imagination ran wild), played softball (I was always in right field), and even did archery under the (unknown to us) cancerous Miami sun. I loved it! After forty five minutes of exercise and sweat we would go into the locker room and clean up for our next period. That meant undress and take a shower and get back in ‘street clothes’.
A hot shower after playing in the sun in Miami opens up your pores to dime size. What little water your body can spare (that it doesn’t need to keep the blood liquidy), comes out of the pores and soaks you down to your socks immediately. You squish. You will be sitting in a puddle in your next class. The cure for this is a cold shower. In the boys locker room there are twenty shower heads in the long, open shower. Nineteen are blazing hot and one is like ice. There is a line at the icy one. The steam blows out of the others and it is only when you are sure you will be late for your next class and have run out of waiting time on line at the icy one that you grudgingly take a hot one. This is when you would like to run naked through the breezeway in a hurricane. This is when you wouldn’t mind being soaked with the pure, cool water from the clouds that blow in from the Everglades and horizontally through the breezeways and soak the students of Southwest Miami Sr. High.
