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| Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my donkey or Wild Thing, I think you drag me Wednesday, March 10, 2010 Mark K. Campbell HMMMTPFFLLTTTT! That’s the closest I can come to spelling the noise I made when all the air that one second before was safely inside my lungs had suddenly been forced out, rocketed up into the Azle High gym rafters, then, when I really needed it to return, went down the stairs and out the door.
A round face man with a whistle bent over me and asked, “Are you okay?”
As an asthmatic, I’m a huge fan of breathing. Right now, that was proving to be impossible. I tried to say the word “yes” but what came out was the sound a full balloon makes when you stretch out the neck and let a bit of air out – air I really could’ve used then. “You sure?” he asked. I made the balloon sound again and he returned to refereeing the donkey basketball game. I rose from the incredibly hard gym floor and, wheezing, remounted Elvis. Seconds before, I was lined up for a shot and suddenly my lung air was outside hailing a cab. There are plenty of things to ponder while trying to shoot a basketball from a donkey’s back: balance, keeping the reins close, watching for rival donkey riders; unbeknownst to me, someone (a human, I think) was about to reject my shot from behind.
That’s when I violated all those ponderings; I had to let go of the reins to shoot and the savage, blind rejection caused me to lose my balance. Little did I know that that would be the closest I would get to getting off a shot the entire night. Also, little did I know, that landing on the floor vertebrae first would only be the second most trying event of the evening. None of the air exiting incident was any of Elvis’ fault. He was a good, passive donkey who clearly hailed not from the early gyrating Elvis the Pelvis era but the mostly sedate Fat Vegas Elvis time. But gentle Elvis would soon be replaced with...Wild Thing. At halftime of the championship game, Elvis was excused for a fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich and was replaced with a rambunctious critter. Clearly, this animal was caged like a burro Hannibal Lecter in some secret part of the animal trailer out back and was set loose on humanity one gym at a time to even things up. Apparently, Wild Thing was a PETA infiltrator whose lone mission was to wreak as much havoc on mankind as possible – which it did to a trio of my teammates frantically trying to keep the unruly animal from bolting into the stands. Wild Thing cared nothing about the finer points of donkey basketball, believing he was actually Seabiscuit. All Wild Thing did was speed round and round the court despite some substantial humans – like 205-pound me – either pulling madly/uselessly on the reins in an effort to keep Wild Thing from creating carnage in Row 29 or trying to run along side the ever-galloping monster. What little air I had managed to recover since the vertebra incident was spent trying to corral the rampaging renegade beast. How I missed the gentle Elvis, my earlier, peaceful donkey! Unlike Wild Thing, Elvis apparently had not been fed Red Bull-laced sugar cubes between halves. It was the wiliness of Wild Thing that caused a moment more memorable than tumbling back-first onto the floor before the assembled masses supporting Project Graduation, at least for my lung area again. This one went unnoticed by all but my ribcage. Wild Thing occasionally threw on the brakes at random times and at one of these sudden stops, I did not. I crashed into his ample haunches, a strategy he had clearly perfected after years of touring America’s gymnasiums. I don’t know if my rib is actually broken but anyone who has suffered a rib simply bruised knows that breathing and sleeping become mighty tough for many days. So the game is over but Wild Thing and PETA fulfilled their agenda: Every night in bed when I roll over to searing torso pain on my right side, I think of Wild Thing and wonder if he’s lurking just beyond the bedroom door, challenging me to just try and make it to the bathroom and the ibuprofen. Mark K. Campbell is the Epigraph sports editor. |