![]() He said that he was going to show me proper ways to lift weights. ![]() What he told me next is something I’ll never forget. He had told me to buy the weights, and I had done it. I was looking forward to Monday with a strange anticipation I had never felt before in my short life. I got the weights into the basement somehow and left them on the floor. I figured he would throw me across the room if I didn’t. Since it was Mr Pepperman telling me to do this, I did it. He was not the nicest person I had ever met in my life, but at least he cared enough to tell me that much. This weekend, have your mommy take you to Sears and buy one of those one-hundred-pound sand-filled weight sets and drag it home. Actually he said something like “You’re a skinny little faggot. One day in October, Mr Pepperman asked me if I had ever worked with weights. That was it, as far as talking out of turn in class, or being late either. Pepperman lifted the boy off the ground by the lapels of his jacket and pinned him to the blackboard. No one talked out of turn in his class except once that I can remember. He was an absolutely no-bullshit, powerfully built Viet veteran who barely spoke outside of class. ![]() Peperman commanded intense respect and fear all over the school. I believe that they were the better for it. ![]() They saw things that the better-looking, more well-groomed members of our school would never see, knew things they would never know. You hang out with a guy who’s gotten his head pushed into a toilet a few times and you treat him like you want to be treated, you’ll have a good friend there. To this day, some of those guys are some of the coolest people I’ve ever known. I would only talk to a certain few of the boys in my grade who were losers like me. Years passed and I learned to keep it all inside. When I looked in the mirror and saw my sallow face staring back, I wanted nothing more than to be transformed into one of them, just for a night, to see what it would be like to have some of their seemingly well-adjusted happiness. I wanted to talk like them, dress like them, carry myself with the ease that one does when he knows he’s not going to get pounded in the hallway between classes. As stupid as it seems now, I wanted to be like my fellow students in every way. I was not respected, just observed to see what I would do next. I was pretty good at boxing but only because the rage that filled my every waking moment made me wild and unpredictable. In sports, I was laughed at and never chosen to be on a team. I was that which was there to be antagonized. I knew very well why they antagonized me. When others would tease me, I didn’t run home crying and wondering why. I could never talk back to an instructor, so I had to sit still and take it. One instructor took to calling me “the garbage can” in front of the other students. At school I was told that I would never amount to anything. I was a product of all the taunts and threats at school combined with the fear and humiliation I dealt with on a regular basis. When I was young, I had no sense of myself. I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. Daarom, voor diegenen die het nog nooit gelezen zouden hebben.een klein meesterwerkje met meer rake one-liners als er hier ledensignatures zijn. Ik heb zopas van hem een boek genaamd "The Portable Henry Rollins" gekocht met daarin o.a. Op het net vind je echter enkel verkorte versies of uittreksels. Onderstaand essay, "The Iron" van Henry Rollins, zullen de fans wel kennen, of gelezen hebben elders op het internet.
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