Helter Shelter
A few months back, when daughter Jess was nearing the end of her high-school softball season, the players and coaches on the team ran into a little problem with cursing. Understand, the high-school softball girls were well-groomed, well-behaved and well-spoken young ladies, but they were, as Crash Davis said in Bull Durham, dealing with a lot of, uh, stuff. The seniors were worried about getting into their first-choice colleges. The younger girls were fretting over exams. Some girls were worried about their boyfriends. Given all the hassles and distractions, I was not amazed to hear some of the girls let fly with a high-decibel “Dammit!” down at the ballfield.
I’ll freely admit, I’m not the least bit bothered by 18-year-old ball-playing girls saying “dammit.” Truth is, I want a ballplayer to get a little mad when she lets a ball jump up and smack her in the shin or when she throws the ball to first base when every living creature at the ball field, frogs and muskrats included, knew that the play was at third.
It wasn’t just “Dammit!” Sometimes it was the stuff Crash Davis was dealing with a lot of. It wasn’t unusual for a ballplayer to erupt with a loud “Shiii!” crescendo, with no consonant on the end. And truth be told, on a few occasions, some of the girls would add the consonant.
At the top of the cussing and fuming pyramid, there was one kid—an adorable but tightly wound perpetual-anger machine—who’d drop the f-bomb at any time, for any reason or for no reason. Sometimes she’d launch her f-bombs in bunches, like a kid lighting off a whole pack of firecrackers.
This bothered our head coach, who values deportment on the ball field. “They represent the school,” he said. True enough. However, as the assistant coach, I just wanted the girls to catch the ball cleanly, throw it straight and hit it through the infield every now and then, dammit. And was it too much to ask that they throw the ball to the correct base? What the hell were they thinking?
My head was full of expletives every day I was at the ball field. I struggled like Jimmy Carter fighting lust in his heart way back in 1976. If I was thinking cusswords, wasn’t that pretty much the same thing as saying cusswords out loud? Could I keep my own cusswords on the upwind side of my vocal chords? And if I told the girls that they absolutely, positively had to stop cussing, wouldn’t they do what teenage girls do and increase their cussing a thousandfold just to spite me? The perpetual-anger machine, I knew, would’ve used her glove to hide her face from the head coach, then gotten my attention and silently mouthed a string of colorful profanities just to put me on notice. What could I do? Bench her? No. That would only hurt the ball team. And for all I knew, benching the kid—who had a 200 IQ and a .460 batting average—might throw her into a spite spiral that could end with her running away with a biker gang. I couldn’t have that on my conscience. So I heeded the words of 38 Special: “Hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose control.”
The problem with the swearing softballers harked back to my high school days, when I got a good, hard look at what cussophobia could do to a person. My buddy, who I’m going to call Johnny Blank, was a musician, and a brainy kid to boot. He just happened to be devoutly religious—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Somewhere along the line, Johnny Blank got it into his head that cussing was a go-to-hell-level sin. So he came up with a workaround. Johnny made up his mind that he would replace every profane utterance with a blank. Not a blank as in silence, but the actual word “blank.”
For a couple years, I listened to Johnny Blank spew the most obscene language I could imagine. Johnny went on and on about situations that were “blanked up.” When an argument heated up, Johnny would yell, “that’s bullblank” or “I hate that son of a blank. He’s a blanking blankhole.”
On the morning after prom night, Johnny Blank told me that he and his girlfriend had spent the night together in his van. “I blanked her,” said Johnny Blank, “and then she blanked my blank.”
“Sounds like a good night’s work to me,” I said. “But you need to wash up before you go home to your mama. You smell like blank juice.”
And then there was the cherry on Johnny Blank’s no-cussing sundae, the epithet he saved for people who’d really blanked him off. He called them “blanksuckin’ motherblankers.”
I’m telling you, if there’s anything worse than a blanksuckin’ motherblanker, it’s the demons inside the man who invented the term blanksuckin’ motherblanker and the tightly wound, way-twisted-up people who drove him to it. I’ll take the real cussing over the blanked-up cussing anytime.
And if I coach softball-playing girls again, I will feign deafness.
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|