God's Gym Read Online Free PDF Page A

your naked dance where you sorta collapse or rather get down,
down,
loosen everything you own, giving it up, giving it all up and sinking, flowing down slinky to the floor onto your back and elbow, then roll, coil, twist like the
sacred python rubbing the earth's rich life-giving juices into your gloriously colored, speckled skin, the part like one strand of hair bonding, braiding with others till your dance thickens and rises again royally, like Nefertiti's snake-twined crown above her bronze forehead.
    It didn't work, did it. You didn't dance for me with your clothes off ever again. Damage done to you too deep to be undone by words, wishes. You never had a chance. Is that hopelessness part of what I love in you. No chance from the jump, even though you excelled in those areas where everybody expected not to see you represented, didn't count on you being present, let alone deserving of praise. My Jill outstanding at math. Blew tuba in the all-city orchestra. Captain of the county champs, undefeated debating team of her 97-percent-white suburban high school. You aspired to become an astronaut, didn't you. Took flying lessons, I bet. As skilled at aeronautics as aerobics. Earned an AAU Junior Olympic bronze medal swimming the 1500 meters, in spite of denser bones and less buoyancy than your pale opponents, in spite of banks of fast-twitch muscles and minimal slow-twitch, you overcame the biological burdens of African descent predisposing you to sprints and attention deficits and dooming poor me to quick starts, rapid acceleration, early burnout, premature ejaculation some whispered when they weren't dissing my slower, reptilian brain's brawn, how its muscles retarded mental activity, rendering me sluggish and thuggish, intent they said on one and only one thing, my one-track mind chasing beasty, fleshy pleasure, you know, what your mom meant when she told you again and again,
Boys are nasty
(read
black
boys). Boys are
only after one thing.
What others, higher up than your mom on the image-making chain, proclaimed and proved by lynching Emmett Till.
    But this story's not about black boys, is it. Not my story. It's about Jill, whose early successes weren't enough to allow her to shed her skin. So let's stick to her. Leopards can't change their
spots. She simply sank deeper into the miring clay of other people's perceptions in which she played the role of exception to the rule. As perfectly as she performed everything she wasn't spozed to be able to perform, she couldn't alter the rule. Found herself adrift, stranded on a raft, the lonely floating island of her gifts, her achievements, her exceptional status. Jill's teenage heart saddened, began to harden. No room on the stone raft for anybody else.
    This movable feast followed her to the best schools. Girls' schools, a women's college, because you can't trust nasty boys. No point placing yourself at risk. Your pussy in harm's way. Because that's how boys see you. Black booty. That's what these cracker college boys (because it's all white boys or almost all in the best schools) thought of you, Jill. A walk on the dark, wild side. Your allegedly weak morals and naturally lascivious inclinations what they see in spite of or maybe because you display time and time again just the opposite of what they expect. You can't escape what their science predicts, what they teach, what you learn about yourself in the best schools.
    Let me digress a moment. Our lives, Jill's and mine, parallel each other in numerous particulars. I emphasize the parallel only to remind the reader I know whereof I speak. In a way. Of course there are important differences, too, between Jill and me. Differences, beginning with gender, she's quick to point out, when I presume to know too much about her. As I often do. Anyway, for simplicity's sake and because it's kind of cute and wicked to sustain the Jack and Jill club bourgey riff, let's call me Jack, Jack attending one of the best schools on a hoop