The Two Kinds of Decay

The Cheerleader

I attended a public school with cheerleaders, pep rallies, and powder-puff football. My high school’s mascot was the Red Raider, and he was represented by an American Indian wearing a headdress and waving a tomahawk.

One day every fall, just before Thanksgiving, the principal would remind us over the public address system that today was the biggest pep rally of the year and that our school needed us to show our spirit.

By school he meant varsity football team. Our football team’s rivalry with that of an adjacent town was the oldest high school football rivalry in the United States of America, and there was an engraved monument downtown, in front of the police station, to remind us.

When I was a freshman, I went to the pep rally. I hadn’t figured out yet that as long as I got good grades, no one would care if I spent two entire semesters of Spanish in the photography darkroom, or if I left school after sixth period to hang out downtown at Coffee Connection.

At the pep rally the principal introduced the football coach, and the football coach introduced each team member individually, and everyone in the bleachers cheered when each player entered the gymnasium from one end and walked across to the other, where the coach was standing with his megaphone.

The football players were shirtless, their muscular chests painted with red “war paint,” and they swaggered as if they’d taken the virginity of half the girls in the sophomore class, which they had.

And all the women in the whole senior class, even the fat and ugly and unpopular ones, wore red felt dresses they had made, with scissor-cut fringe and matching red felt headbands decorated with white feathers, and they wore red “war paint” on their faces, too, because they were the Senior Squaws. And they were addressed by the football coach and saluted for their great spirit and for their help to the cause at hand, which was to beat Needham.

The cheerleaders cartwheeled in their red and white and black, regulation skintight uniforms in rows across the gym, then danced like strippers to bass-pumping music. They jumped and flashed their asses, and at the end there was a pyramid, and then more screaming, after which the football coach congratulated the young women on their display of talent and skill.

In a yearbook photo of this very pep rally, I am sitting in the bleachers with my friend who dropped out to go to art school, and the two of us look stoned. All around us are blurry teenagers, their faces just sharp enough to broadcast their ecstasy.

At the powder-puff football game the Senior Squaws wrestled in the mud and were very drunk. It was summarized, in code, in the Senior Voice, the underground newspaper for seniors, which detailed the events of their last month in high school, the month of spirit days (Hat Day! Shaving Cream Day!), and which was very easy to find lying around the cafeteria every morning.

Seven years later, I was in the hospital, too nauseated to eat. I was too nauseated not just to eat but to swallow even a sip of water.

I was prescribed a strong antiemetic. In suppository form. And the nurse who pushed it into my ass had been one of the varsity cheerleaders from that 1988 pep rally.

Like all good nurses, she understood that inserting a bullet of hardened gel into someone’s rectum was just another thing that had to be done, no more or less willingly than picking up a dropped rubber glove or stripping a bed after someone died in it.

She radiated love without smiling. And when she finished her shift at seven that night, she sat with me, still in her tight white uniform, and we watched Dirty Dancing on television, talking a little during the commercials.

That’s what she was like.