WORLD RECORD WEDGIE - 1975
I believe I am the world’s record holder for Receiving A Wedgie From The Largest Group Of Assailants. The incident occurred on the lower field of Eastbrook Junior High School, on Spring Valley Road, in Paramus, New Jersey. The lower field is down a slight hill, and although it is big enough to hold two baseball diamonds, it is low enough that it is not visible to the teachers and yard attendants up by the school building.
The lower field is a dangerous place for any child not in with the jocks, heads or girls-who-smoke and I had avoided it for not only all of my seventh grade, but for most of my eighth grade too. As spring came though, I had improved enough at baseball that I started to feel confident that I could at least watch the jocks’ lunch break pick-up baseball games on it. I was careful, mind you. I sat on the top of the hill itself, so that my head and body were still visible to the teachers and yard attendants back by the school. Below me, the games were amazing to watch. Somewhere between seventh and eighth grades, many of the boys had gone from okay to dazzling. Pitches sailed in at 80 miles an hour. Balls were cracked out by bats, and soared 250 feet easily.
One day while perched on the top of the hill, I caught the attention of Peter Emerson, an extraordinary third-baseman, who called out to me with a friendly, “Freericks, you fag, what are you doing on the lower field?”
“I’m not on the lower field,” I answered, pushing my rear-end to the top of the hill to make sure.
Now, at the bottom of the hill, along the first base line, sat the girls-who-smoke and the queen of the girls-who-smoke was Angela Fonti. This was a name to savor as it rolled off your tongue…Angela Fonti. Ask anyone from Paramus about Angela Fonti, and they will still get nervous and giddy at the thought of her.
On the first day of seventh grade, when we went around our class telling what we hoped to grow up to be, Angela said she was going be a Playboy centerfold.
Angela was olive skinned, had almond shaped eyes and was so hot that Mr. Van Pelt, our assistant principal, blushed whenever she went by him. One day, in seventh grade, Angela walked up to me and announced loudly, “I’m never going to sit on your lap, Chuck, so forget it, you fag.” I later discovered that Al DiMeo, as a goof, had told Angela that I said I dreamed of her sitting on my lap – but he’d made it up. I’d never told anyone that I liked Angela – still, everyone liked Angela and everyone knew that everyone else liked Angela.
One day in the eighth grade, Angela came to school wearing a tube top that was basically a colorful sock around her chest. She attracted some attention with the tube top and that day’s baseball game was short a few players, as slowly but surely, more and more of the jocks left to sit with Angela and the other girls-who-smoke, over on the first base line. They had a ghetto-blaster that someone had snuck onto the field and it was playing Paul McCartney and Wings “Band on the run. Band on the run….” I was in my place, up at the top of the hill playing Lindsey Nelson, the New York Mets announcer, in my mind, “Bench hits a long fly ball to Freericks…Freericks is going back, back, back to the warning track and he makes an incredible leaping ice cream cone catch against the wall. To those of you listening on your radios, you’re missing a great shot of Angela Freericks, crying in the stands with joy for her husband. You know, that is one nice tube top she has on.” My imagination was snapped when Jimmy Maplewood, the best pitcher at Eastbrook Junior High School, called up to me with a friendly, “Hey, Fag, put on a glove and get out here. We need a left fielder.”
This was a moment of decision. Why was I up here if I didn’t want to play? Why was I up here if not to play for Angela Fonti? The boys circling Angela looked up at me. Angela and the girls-who-smoke looked up at me. If I didn’t come off the top of the hill, I knew that any chance I had for Junior High happiness would be gone. So I got up and against every voice in my head, I walked down the hill onto the lower field.
Steve Cosenza threw me his glove. I snagged it and trotted out to the outfield to a supportive round of “Don’t fuck up, Fag.” It was a truly great moment in my life. The jocks needed me. They wanted me to play. I stood in left field and began to shag flies. To the amazement of every one there, I was catching them left and right and my throws back were on target and clean. Paul Scanno even yelled out, “Good arm, Freericks,” when I nailed a runner at second.
And that turned the tide for me. For the next fifteen minutes, I played baseball with the jocks on the lower field. I couldn’t see the school from where I was. It was fucking amazing. Not only that, but they stopped calling me fag. I was Freericks. I looked over to Angela Fonti and the girls-who-smoke. Angela Fonti was watching me play and I was playing well. The crowd of boys around her had grown bigger. The boys were all watching me too. That was odd. Maybe they were surprised how good I was.
Suddenly, for the first time since our misunderstanding in seventh grade, Angela Fonti spoke to me. She yelled to me actually. She screamed, “Run, Chuck,” and I thought it can’t be. Angela is calling my name. She screamed again, “Run…” How cool it was to hear her addressing me! Then all the boys around her got up. There were well over thirty of them. Another twenty from the baseball diamond joined them. And every single one of them ran towards me. Once again, Angela’s sweet and beautiful voice called out, “Chuck, run!”
So I ran. But there really was no place to go. The lower field ended at a chain link fence, and my passage back to the hill was blocked by fifty boys running at me.
I made it about fifteen feet before the first body landed on top of me. Within a second, there were more than a dozen hands and bodies all over me. One hand reached into my pants and pulled up the back of my underwear.
I tribal chant filled the air, as forty-nine voices all intoned, “Wedgie, wedgie, wedgie.” The fiftieth boy had climbed back up the hill to the upper field to let all the other kids who never came down to the lower field know that it would safe for them today, as long as they helped.
Within two or three boys, my underwear began ripping. By the sixth boy, the elastic band was over my head and around my neck, and they were now pulling on the torn fabric.
Now, you may think, what an awful, awful thing for a boy to go through. But at the time this was happening, I have to admit the biggest thought running through my head was that Angela Fonti had warned me. She liked me enough to try and help me. The second thought going through my head was, “Yeah, they’re giving me a wedgie, but they did let me play baseball with them too.” The third thought I had was, “this will be over soon, because the fabrics going to completely give and what will they yank on?”
Through seventy or eighty boys, the fabric tore here and there, but never completely gave. My you-know-whats were in my stomach. As the line to wedgie me finally began to thin, the musical theatre club kids, the school newspaper staff kids and other assorted upper field kids piled on top of me and continued the assault. I remember Eric Horawitz, who I could beat up 364 days out of the year, but this was the 365th, was one of the last attackers. By this time, the front elastic was being yanked out of the back of my pants and any actual delivery of pain was luckily just to my waist. The last boy to jump on was Al DiMeo, who had told Angela I wanted her to sit on my lap the year before. He actually punched me because, and I quote this, because I couldn’t make it up, “We were friends and I should have let him be one of the first ones to wedgie me, not made him wait.”
The bell rang signaling that we had to get back to class and I was left alone on the lower field with strings and scraps of underwear tethered to my legs and my neck. Slowly, I brushed myself off, stood up and hobbled back to B3-E9, my classroom, while stuffing the tattered fabric down the back of my pants.
When Angela saw me she said, “I tried to warn you. I hope they didn’t hurt you.”
And in that moment it became the best day of the year, the best day I’d had in a very long time. Angela Fonti cared about me. Angela Fonti wanted to protect me.
And then she finished her thought. “You should run faster, Fag,” she said before strutting away.
I believe I am the world’s record holder for Receiving A Wedgie From The Largest Group Of Assailants. The incident occurred on the lower field of Eastbrook Junior High School, on Spring Valley Road, in Paramus, New Jersey. The lower field is down a slight hill, and although it is big enough to hold two baseball diamonds, it is low enough that it is not visible to the teachers and yard attendants up by the school building.
The lower field is a dangerous place for any child not in with the jocks, heads or girls-who-smoke and I had avoided it for not only all of my seventh grade, but for most of my eighth grade too. As spring came though, I had improved enough at baseball that I started to feel confident that I could at least watch the jocks’ lunch break pick-up baseball games on it. I was careful, mind you. I sat on the top of the hill itself, so that my head and body were still visible to the teachers and yard attendants back by the school. Below me, the games were amazing to watch. Somewhere between seventh and eighth grades, many of the boys had gone from okay to dazzling. Pitches sailed in at 80 miles an hour. Balls were cracked out by bats, and soared 250 feet easily.
One day while perched on the top of the hill, I caught the attention of Peter Emerson, an extraordinary third-baseman, who called out to me with a friendly, “Freericks, you fag, what are you doing on the lower field?”
“I’m not on the lower field,” I answered, pushing my rear-end to the top of the hill to make sure.
Now, at the bottom of the hill, along the first base line, sat the girls-who-smoke and the queen of the girls-who-smoke was Angela Fonti. This was a name to savor as it rolled off your tongue…Angela Fonti. Ask anyone from Paramus about Angela Fonti, and they will still get nervous and giddy at the thought of her.
On the first day of seventh grade, when we went around our class telling what we hoped to grow up to be, Angela said she was going be a Playboy centerfold.
Angela was olive skinned, had almond shaped eyes and was so hot that Mr. Van Pelt, our assistant principal, blushed whenever she went by him. One day, in seventh grade, Angela walked up to me and announced loudly, “I’m never going to sit on your lap, Chuck, so forget it, you fag.” I later discovered that Al DiMeo, as a goof, had told Angela that I said I dreamed of her sitting on my lap – but he’d made it up. I’d never told anyone that I liked Angela – still, everyone liked Angela and everyone knew that everyone else liked Angela.
One day in the eighth grade, Angela came to school wearing a tube top that was basically a colorful sock around her chest. She attracted some attention with the tube top and that day’s baseball game was short a few players, as slowly but surely, more and more of the jocks left to sit with Angela and the other girls-who-smoke, over on the first base line. They had a ghetto-blaster that someone had snuck onto the field and it was playing Paul McCartney and Wings “Band on the run. Band on the run….” I was in my place, up at the top of the hill playing Lindsey Nelson, the New York Mets announcer, in my mind, “Bench hits a long fly ball to Freericks…Freericks is going back, back, back to the warning track and he makes an incredible leaping ice cream cone catch against the wall. To those of you listening on your radios, you’re missing a great shot of Angela Freericks, crying in the stands with joy for her husband. You know, that is one nice tube top she has on.” My imagination was snapped when Jimmy Maplewood, the best pitcher at Eastbrook Junior High School, called up to me with a friendly, “Hey, Fag, put on a glove and get out here. We need a left fielder.”
This was a moment of decision. Why was I up here if I didn’t want to play? Why was I up here if not to play for Angela Fonti? The boys circling Angela looked up at me. Angela and the girls-who-smoke looked up at me. If I didn’t come off the top of the hill, I knew that any chance I had for Junior High happiness would be gone. So I got up and against every voice in my head, I walked down the hill onto the lower field.
Steve Cosenza threw me his glove. I snagged it and trotted out to the outfield to a supportive round of “Don’t fuck up, Fag.” It was a truly great moment in my life. The jocks needed me. They wanted me to play. I stood in left field and began to shag flies. To the amazement of every one there, I was catching them left and right and my throws back were on target and clean. Paul Scanno even yelled out, “Good arm, Freericks,” when I nailed a runner at second.
And that turned the tide for me. For the next fifteen minutes, I played baseball with the jocks on the lower field. I couldn’t see the school from where I was. It was fucking amazing. Not only that, but they stopped calling me fag. I was Freericks. I looked over to Angela Fonti and the girls-who-smoke. Angela Fonti was watching me play and I was playing well. The crowd of boys around her had grown bigger. The boys were all watching me too. That was odd. Maybe they were surprised how good I was.
Suddenly, for the first time since our misunderstanding in seventh grade, Angela Fonti spoke to me. She yelled to me actually. She screamed, “Run, Chuck,” and I thought it can’t be. Angela is calling my name. She screamed again, “Run…” How cool it was to hear her addressing me! Then all the boys around her got up. There were well over thirty of them. Another twenty from the baseball diamond joined them. And every single one of them ran towards me. Once again, Angela’s sweet and beautiful voice called out, “Chuck, run!”
So I ran. But there really was no place to go. The lower field ended at a chain link fence, and my passage back to the hill was blocked by fifty boys running at me.
I made it about fifteen feet before the first body landed on top of me. Within a second, there were more than a dozen hands and bodies all over me. One hand reached into my pants and pulled up the back of my underwear.
I tribal chant filled the air, as forty-nine voices all intoned, “Wedgie, wedgie, wedgie.” The fiftieth boy had climbed back up the hill to the upper field to let all the other kids who never came down to the lower field know that it would safe for them today, as long as they helped.
Within two or three boys, my underwear began ripping. By the sixth boy, the elastic band was over my head and around my neck, and they were now pulling on the torn fabric.
Now, you may think, what an awful, awful thing for a boy to go through. But at the time this was happening, I have to admit the biggest thought running through my head was that Angela Fonti had warned me. She liked me enough to try and help me. The second thought going through my head was, “Yeah, they’re giving me a wedgie, but they did let me play baseball with them too.” The third thought I had was, “this will be over soon, because the fabrics going to completely give and what will they yank on?”
Through seventy or eighty boys, the fabric tore here and there, but never completely gave. My you-know-whats were in my stomach. As the line to wedgie me finally began to thin, the musical theatre club kids, the school newspaper staff kids and other assorted upper field kids piled on top of me and continued the assault. I remember Eric Horawitz, who I could beat up 364 days out of the year, but this was the 365th, was one of the last attackers. By this time, the front elastic was being yanked out of the back of my pants and any actual delivery of pain was luckily just to my waist. The last boy to jump on was Al DiMeo, who had told Angela I wanted her to sit on my lap the year before. He actually punched me because, and I quote this, because I couldn’t make it up, “We were friends and I should have let him be one of the first ones to wedgie me, not made him wait.”
The bell rang signaling that we had to get back to class and I was left alone on the lower field with strings and scraps of underwear tethered to my legs and my neck. Slowly, I brushed myself off, stood up and hobbled back to B3-E9, my classroom, while stuffing the tattered fabric down the back of my pants.
When Angela saw me she said, “I tried to warn you. I hope they didn’t hurt you.”
And in that moment it became the best day of the year, the best day I’d had in a very long time. Angela Fonti cared about me. Angela Fonti wanted to protect me.
And then she finished her thought. “You should run faster, Fag,” she said before strutting away.
0 comments:
Post a Comment