Gang Girls

Elizabeth Garcia - Liz to her rough and tumble friends with their leather jackets and biker boots - pretty much ruled junior high school.  She smoked like a chimney, wore gold hoop earrings, covered her pockmarked face with layers of makeup and traveled in a pack.  She was a gang girl with a quick temper and a colorful vocabulary, the first predatory female I'd ever known - tall, massive and powerfully built, tatooed and terrifying.  She had no use for classes or teachers and she flaunted discipline, defied authority and dared anyone to get in her way.

Her one weakness was sports - softball, wrestling, and field hockey.  Fiercely competitive and with a rock hard determination to win, she overshadowed her teammates, verbally battering us to perform, daring us to lose.  We played out of fear as much as anything else, reveling at each win and dreading the aftermath of the few and far between losses.  Disappointing a coach or a school or even a parent was one thing - disappointing Liz could get you a black eye and that was when she was feeling charitable.  What I remember most clearly, is how she looked in her gym wear - the dark green pullovers and bloomers were designed for athletics, meant to be sexless and functional and proper - and while they hung loosely on the rest of us, Liz filled her's so tightly that we worried she might one day rip her seams and just bust out.

I only faced her once, in a practice softball game where I had the bad luck to be on the opposing side.  I came to the plate and she was on the mound, a hugely muscled and imposing figure with the sunlight at her back, her hair tucked up under a cap but her earrings glinting.  Before stepping up I'd had a sudden and startling revelation - if by some miracle, I was to get a hit, she was sure to mow me over before I got to first.  On the other hand, if I didn't, it was equally likely that she'd hunt me down and deliver an equal punishment for not trying hard enough.   The catcher settled in behind me, Liz went into her windup and I had an overpowering urge to shut my eyes and pray.  Her first pitch whistled by me, her second was low but so close I almost felt it graze my knees.  On the third, I swung and missed and on the fourth, having nothing to lose, I connected and felt a shockwave from my fingertips to my shoulders.  The ball soared up and away and I ran for all I was worth, only dimly aware of Liz calmly and competently taking a few backward steps, shading her eyes with one meaty hand and extending her glove with the other.  The ball dropped in with a thud and the umpire signaled me out - out I may have been, but I was intact.  Several feet away, Liz removed her cap and wiped her forehead, then with barely a glance my way, resumed her pitching stance.  For the briefest second, I thought she might have nodded to me, just the faintest sign of approval, and I sighed with relief although later I decided I'd imagined it.

Seems to me it's always about the doing not the trying.