Dark
Matters
2. Towel Boy

by Donna Lamb

 
I trotted on into the gym and headed for the locker room, one end of which was used for the school athletic teams, closer to the showers and with larger lockers. I stopped at my own locker near the doors to stuff my books in on top of my gym clothes. It took me two tries to get the combination right; I remembered the numbers fine but my hands were shaking.

I tried to think about the playing I’d seen, all the guys rushing around and shoving one another. I hadn’t taken a sketch pad with me into the bleachers because I’ve had bad experiences with people ripping up my sketches. Mentally, though, I had filled several pages with drawings. Or drawrings to use the local pronunciation. I tried to concentrate on what sort of action poses and details I might use when I got home, or in art class tomorrow.

It wasn’t working, though. I kept anticipating what I would be seeing when I got to the gym. The reality after I pried open the heavy side door to the locker room turned out not to be too different from what I had imagined. After all, I’d been taking high school gym for a couple of months now; there couldn’t be too many surprises.

WRUHS is a big school and there must have been close to a thousand lockers in the smelly, echoing chamber just on the boys’ side of the gym. Most of the lockers for gym clothes were about one foot square with one taller locker for street clothes for every eight or ten small ones. Down near the showers were still larger lockers for athletes who needed a place to keep their team uniforms and game equipment.

The jock end of the concrete space had twenty or thirty now naked or nearly naked guys horsing around and shouting insults at each other. Put down humor is common in high school but the football players can sound a lot more vicious about it than my bookworm friends.

The door to the towel closet was in the same wall as the opening to the showers, kind of in a corner where there might be fewer drafts and less traffic congestion. I sort of sneaked up on it, moving along the edges and avoiding the aisles between lockers where the guys were pulling off their uniforms and collecting soap and shampoos and stuff before heading to the showers.

Another coach, Mr. Gordon stood by the hall to the showers. He looked bored. Shorter than Coach Lamont but heavier, he had the build of a wrestler rather than a runner. He nodded at me as I unlocked the towel room which had a split, Dutch-type, door.

“You’re Wally, ain’cha?” said Coach Gordon. “Gonna be the new towel boy.”

I didn’t say anything since he didn’t seem to expect a reply.

The key unlocked the lower half of the door and I slipped under the upper half and then unlatched it from inside. The space measured about six by ten feet, lined on two walls with shelves of freshly laundered towels. It smelled clean except that two canvas-and-frame bins took up about half of the floor space and reeked of feet and sweat and soap. One of the bins was full of dirty towels and the other half-full.

“Stay behind the door and hand towels out when the guys come out of the shower. One towel to a customer,” said Gordon. “And push that half-empty bin out here for them to throw their towels in when they leave. Nobody should leave without returning a towel.”

“Huh?” I said. How would I stop them?

“There’s a clipboard hanging on the back of the door to keep track of how many towels you give out and how many you get back,” said the coach.

I found it, but I didn’t get to ask any more questions because the first guys were coming out of the showers, naked and dripping wet.

“Hey, Wally,” said Thomas Tuttle who had been beating me up almost once a week since third grade. “Gimme a towel.” Thom-Thom sounded almost friendly. He was the starting quarterback for the JV team, as tall as Jon with long, sorta stringy arms. He was even smiling and not in that evil way that meant he was gonna give me a head rub or something.

I gave him a towel, and the next guy and the next and the one after that and so on. Most of them called me by name, and I tried to look only at their faces and hands and not at what they had between their legs.

One thing they all had there was hair, and mostly lots of it. Myself, I barely had any hair there and that only in the last six months or so. Puberty had only recently become more than a myth to me, and I still didn’t know what I really thought about the process.

For the first ten guys or so, I think I mostly kept my eyes on their faces. I was keeping count of the towels I handed out, like Coach had told me to. This was easier than it sounds because they came in stacks of ten, each stack crosswise to the towels under it. But the twelfth guy was Jon Carlyle.

“Get a good look, Wally!” he said, standing legs apart and arms held open wide wearing nothing but a chunky gold pinkie ring on his left hand.

I couldn’t help it. I did take a look. He was pretty impressive down there. In fact, he was pretty impressive all over. Not the tallest or heaviest guy on the team but he had plenty of muscle in the right places. Only fifteen and nearly six feet tall with that triangular shape like they try to put on the cover of all the magazines.

“Towel,” I said, and I threw one in his face.

He caught it, laughed, and trotted off toward his locker. I watched the muscles in his butt cheeks work as he moved until someone else asked for a towel.

After that, it seemed harder to keep my eyes on the faces of the guys coming up to my little window. I started throwing the towels at them, so they had to pay attention and maybe not notice where I was looking. But more often than not I ended up throwing at their crotches which most of them seemed to think was funny.

Sometimes a towel landed on the floor. Coach Gordon noticed this and told me to knock off throwing the towels, just hand them over. This meant the jocks had to get closer for me to give them a towel and that meant getting an even better look at their equipment.

The variation down there surprised me. Not just size but shape and color and whether guys were circumcised or not. Long ones, thin ones, short ones, wide ones. Some had balls held tight to the shaft; some had balls that hung down like oranges in a Christmas stocking. Most of them had some hair, but a lot of them had really bushy crotches.

I started to feel a bit odd. The air in the room felt close and humid from the showers. The smell of soap and sweat and wet concrete seemed to fill my head. My pants felt tight and I didn’t want to think about that.

I threw one last towel at Toby Underwood, a big fat boy whose equipment was almost hidden by his stomach. He grinned and pranced away with his towel, stopping once to wag his wide butt at me. Nearby guys laughed, and I would have blushed if my face could have turned any redder.

The locker room had one of those big institutional clocks and ten minutes after I arrived, the rush from the lockers had ended with Toby and jocks began leaving the gym in their street clothes. It being early October in the Big Valley, the weather had cooled off, and most of the guys were in long pants with sweaters or jackets, but a few had put on shorts and t-shirt afterschool clothes, carrying their school togs home in paper bags.

And all of them were tossing towels into the towel bin I was supposed to be responsible for counting. I wrote down the total of outgoing towels quickly under the column for JV and started keeping track of towels going into the dirty bin. What was I supposed to do if the numbers didn’t match? A few of the guys threw their towels right at me, and I swatted the damp, stinky rags into the bin using my clipboard.

Jon sauntered up, looking pleased with himself. He had on the same black jeans, white shirt and Lobos jacket he’d been wearing before, and he filled them out at least as well as anyone else in the school. I smiled at him a bit shakily.

“You finished yet, Wally?” he asked.

“I think I’m supposed to wait till all the towels come back,” I said.

“You know, everyone is done with their towels; you can go around and collect them instead of waiting for them to bring them to you.”

“Good idea,” I said. “Twenty-nine towels have come back, so there are still nine of them out there.”

“Go get ‘em, Wally,” said Jon. “I’ll guard the bin for you to count any towels anyone tries to sneak back with.” His grin got wider and he winked.

I almost tripped over one of the benches, walking sideways while looking back at Jon.

“Careful,” he said, still grinning.

“Yeah, huh,” I said.

It didn’t take me long to find eight of the towels, some of them on the floor and most of them without a person in sight to accuse of not having returned their towel. I used one of the cleaner towels to pick up the ones that had been stepped on or seemed to be totally soaked. But Toby Underwood, fully dressed, was using the ninth towel to shine his shoes.

“I need that to put in the bin so I can go,” I said.

“Yeah, how ‘bout that?” he said.

Toby always had been an ass. He was only a freshman, like me, but he was playing on the JV team because of his size. Certainly not due to his speed or smarts.

“C’mon, Toby,” I said, knowing it was coming out in a whine. “Gimme the towel so I can go.”

He sneered. “Where you gonna go, queer boy? Somewhere you can suck your boyfriend’s cock in private?”

I stared at him.

“Yeah, ol’ Jon’s got the hots for your sister, but he’ll settle for you. I bet your mouth is fuckin’ softer than hers anyway.”

I clenched my teeth. “Gimme the towel, you’re done with it!”

He spun the damp cloth into the traditional locker room weapon, grinning at me. “I’ll give it to you, you fuckin’ fairy!”

He snapped the rattail at my face and I jumped back, squealing even though I hated that.

Suddenly Jon was there.

We were the last three students in the gym; the coaches were in their offices. They would come if I screamed, I knew that. I wanted to scream but I put a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t.

Toby dropped the towel on the bench, smiling. He was actually bigger than Jon, I realized. Though a lot of his mass was fat, he stood an inch or so taller, too. “Gotta defend your girlfriend,” he sneered.

“Get the towel, Wally,” said Jon. I snagged it and went around him to dump towels in the bin.

While I recorded the number of towels returned, I heard Jon say, “Anytime, any place but not here and now, Underwood. We fight at school, we’ll both get kicked off the team.”

I couldn’t see them, but the big empty locker room was quiet enough to hear. “Is she any good?” Toby asked. “Or don’t you even know? She’s probably like her sister and won’t put out either.”

“Saturday afternoon,” said Jon. “Empty field behind K-Mart. Bring friends to carry you away.”

“If she does it, that makes you a queer, too. Carlyle,” said Toby and his voice had a whiney edge like he was afraid he might have gone too far.

I didn’t listen to anymore; I ran to my locker at the other end of the room to get my books and go home.