Chapter 3: Idol Worship

I’LL PROBABLY get back to talking about the lockdown and how it affected school and all. The remote learning environment on the laptop made home schooling supplemental. I did okay, but with just half the course curriculum. With that load, I could keep up. I was spending around six hours a day working out. As predicted, I ended up taking two years to finish tenth grade as Mikey went zooming past me. But I actually got it. I wasn’t unable to learn. As Mom predicted, Mikey graduated with my class in 2023 and I officially became a member of the class of 2024. And a cheerleader.

Then, my senior year, I met the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. It wasn’t long after my one lone date with Dana that I arrived for cheerleader practice and saw Tara White with Coach Cook. I was instantly in love. I’d seen her in the Acrobatic Gymnastics World Championships in Geneva. You wouldn’t believe the obscure sports channel I had to subscribe to in order to watch that on my laptop. It was beautiful.

But Tara had been injured in the dynamic routine qualifying round and was carried off the floor on a stretcher. There’d been a flurry of stories about the extent of her injuries—unknown—over the next several days, and then the story dropped out of the news until it was reported that her partner, who had dropped her in the routine, had passed away.

The woman I saw talking to Coach Cook looked far more elegant, refined, and beautiful than the little girl I’d seen in the competition three years ago. She also sat regally in her wheelchair. I wanted to rush over and bow at her feet.

I restrained myself when Penny grabbed my arm with a grip hard enough to leave a bruise.

There was nothing between Penny and me except our cheer partnership. She had a boyfriend. She was still possessive. I have to tell you that Penny wasn’t the only flyer on the cheer squad. She was the smallest and did some of the most difficult tricks with me, but two other girls were often the ones who mounted my shoulders or stood on my hands. I was the all-round base for the team. If all three girls were flying, or standing on top, the other two were each supported by two more girls.

I didn’t cheer at ballgames or other sports events. From the first day I walked onto the gym floor with the cheer team, it was made clear I was there for their competitive routines where they did more acrobatics than when cheering at a game. I wasn’t the only one. There were sixteen of us on the competition team. Usually, only five cheered at a sporting event. They were the ones who bounced up and down with their boobs flying and slept with the football players. No thanks.

“Paul, come here, please. Penny, you, too. Flyers and bases,” Coach called to us.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said as we ran up to stand before her.

“I’d like to introduce you to our new acrobatics coach,” she said.

“Tara White,” I finally broke in. I was too excited to see the phenomenal acrobat in person. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t survive three years ago. I’m so happy to see you.”

“Well, you have a fan,” Coach Cook laughed. “For the rest of you, this is Tara White, one of the world’s top acrobatic gymnasts until a tragic accident at the World Championships three years ago. She has recently relocated to Minneapolis and has volunteered to help coach our cheer squad this year. She will work primarily with our five bases and three flyers, but will have choreography suggestions for the entire team.”

“Happy to meet you, Miss White,” Penny said politely.

I thought Tara’s smile was a little forced. She didn’t really look much older than any of us. When I did the calculations, I finally decided she wasn’t more than a year older than I was. Like all the tops in acrobatic gymnastics mixed pairs, she’d looked twelve when I saw her perform. I glanced at Penny. She would be eighteen soon and still looked twelve, as well. Tara looked much more mature.

We moved to a separate area where Tara rolled her chair to work with the acrobatic cheerleaders. We all did tumbling and flips, but only the eight of us did formations that involved two levels, lifts, and throws. We’d had some discussion as to whether we could do a three-tier pyramid formation, but hadn’t come up with an answer. We weren’t far into demonstrating our moves when one of the girls asked Tara if she’d teach us a pyramid. I saw her heave a big sigh and drop her head.

When she raised it, there was fire in her eyes.

“Paul, would you be kind enough to remove your shirt, please?”

I was really surprised. Our uniforms weren’t even form-fitting. There were cheerleading rules about what we could wear and high schools were instructed to de-emphasize form-fitting tops and ultra-short skirts. There were specific rules about what panties girls had to wear and instructed men to have full-length bottoms. We all had to wear specific shoes.

But I’d probably do anything for Tara White. I pulled my shirt off.

Since I didn’t dress with the girls, I couldn’t think of a time when any of them had seen me bare-chested. It was a little embarrassing—not that I have anything to be ashamed of in that department. There were a few gasps or catches of breath. I’d been training in gymnastics for six and a half years now. I was not the skinny runt I was in seventh grade. I had a six-pack and nice set of pecs and guns.

“Ladies, I detect that you have not seen this shape revealed before. I want you to notice the musculature and the core strength. Paul, please bring your partner to your shoulders so we can see the muscles at work,” Tara said.

Penny stepped up to me and did a stairstep mount to my shoulders. When she stood up, I held her ankles next to my ears.

“That move requires every muscle in the upper body, and several in the lower body I won’t ask Paul to show you,” she said. There were some giggles. “So, when any of you can show me comparable musculature and control, I’ll discuss building a pyramid with you. You can gain that strength, by the way, by working in your trios on artistic formations. Anyone care to show me now?”

“Hardly,” said one of the girls.

“You can come down now, Penny,” Tara said.

Penny gave a little bounce and jumped off my shoulders into my arms. I set her on the ground.

“I want you to know that this is what happens to a flyer when her base drops her.” Tara used her hands to lift one of her legs and then let it drop. It was completely limp. She maneuvered it back onto the footrest of her chair.

“Oh, shit. I mean ... I’m sorry, Miss. I didn’t mean to be vulgar,” Penny said. She turned and looked me up and down.

“It’s something I say on a regular basis,” Tara said.

“What happened to your base?” one of the other girls asked.

“He killed himself rather than come to visit me,” Tara said. “I’m not telling you any of this to make you feel bad. It’s been three years since the accident and I’m more mobile than most paraplegics. I have strong arms and torso muscles, and even limited use of my legs. I want you to know, though, that I am deadly serious when I talk about the importance of your strength and support for each other. Now, let’s work on some other formations you can do with a top and a base—or two bases.”

During the COVID pandemic—I said I was going back to that—I didn’t have to go to school. I mean at school. We all thought everyone was going back in the fall, but the damned plague just kept on and on. It was fine with me. Mom and Dad had agreed to help me at home for my sophomore year, even if it took two years. And it did.

Dad and I finished converting the garage into a gym for me so I could work out when I couldn’t go to the gym. The gym was permitted to open in June, but on a limited basis. My time there was strictly for coaching, then I had to leave so they could get someone else in. I averaged only two hours a day. But I had a six-hour training regimen.

Dad borrowed a set of parallel bars, a pommel horse, and a set of rings that were being stored at the university. The rings were strictly for exercises, not for practicing a routine on. The rafters in the garage weren’t high enough to do a routine. I practiced rings, vault, high bar, and floor exercises at the gym. I also got a pegboard and we laid a wrestling mat he salvaged on the floor.

Dad and I installed a metal carport from Home Depot in front of the garage and he made it clear that I was responsible for seeing that snow was cleared between the door and the carport and out the driveway to the street. We had about eight inches of snow on the ground from November through February, but it started melting off then with only a few storms through April. I never stopped to think about what all this was costing my parents, or to make a special point of thanking them until much later.

Between being locked down inside and my time in the gym or garage, I didn’t have anything really to personally spend money on, so my allowance just got dropped in a dresser drawer. I had no idea how important that would become in the future. I was really lucky to have parents who were employed at a pretty high level and believed in providing for their kids. I’ve often mentioned that to them as I got older.

As soon as I had a space, I moved my laptop to the garage with me. When I took breaks from working out, I did my assignments for the day. I took classes on the school’s remote access, like Mikey did, and we studied some together. Mom and Dad both checked over my homework each evening to be sure I was doing the studies and not just ‘hanging from the rings.’

I couldn’t do routines on the rings in the garage. There just wasn’t enough height. I could do exercises on them, but ... People don’t realize when they watch a competitor on the rings, his coach is giving him a boost up to the rings which are hung 8’2” off the floor and 20” apart. But the rings are hung from straps anchored 18’ off the floor. If you figure the angles and relative force it would take to press your body into a cross with your arms straight out, you’d be pushing the rings roughly five or six feet apart. You’d be forcing the straps out at a much higher angle if they were only anchored three feet above your head. You’d practically have to be touching the anchor.

Mom made me figure this all out in a geometry lesson. She’s done that with a lot of the equipment. It was some of the stuff I understood best!

The rings in competition are called ‘still rings.’ That’s as opposed to swinging rings, I guess. Part of the artistry is that the gymnast is supposed to do his entire routine without having the rings swinging from that eighteen-foot-high anchor.

I tell you all this to explain why, three years later when I was a senior and told to take off my shirt, my chest and arms were something to look at.

But ... Oh yeah. Back in 2020 when I was doing two-thirds or more of my exercises in the garage, I was just building upper body strength on the rings, not doing a routine.

The same was true with the pegboard. Think of approaching a climbing wall. You find a new handhold and pull yourself up with your foot pressure and the pull of your arms. Two differences between that and the pegboard. First, you don’t use your legs at all. Your feet are dangling. Second, there aren’t multiple handholds. There are multiple holes for the pegs. To move up or across the pegboard, you have to pull one peg out of the hole while you are dangling from the other, then put the peg into the next hole and pull yourself up on it.

There’s just enough height in our garage that I can do a limited routine on the parallel bars or the pommel horse, except I have to be careful with dismounts. Have to be careful regardless because I’m working without a spotter. I don’t have a death wish.

Dad took us all to the university to get vaccinated in September. We were back a month later for the second dose. It didn’t look like people were taking it seriously, though, and cases started increasing again. You guessed it, the gym was closed again. Coach Dawson met with me by video link every day for the rest of the year.