6:59 AM

You shuffle across the dank grass. You pass through the chain-link gates, which seem to serve to keep people in just as much as they serve to keep others out. You pass a sliding mural of athletes frozen in various stages of physical exertion, which when moved reveals a snack stand which serves nachos, candy, hotdogs – staples of the American sports scene. You arrive at the open double doors, out of which comes the feeble, artificial light of halogen bulbs, cutting weakly at the morning fog. Now is the only time to take a breath and enjoy the silence of the morning before walking into the buzzing world of the halogens.

The lockers of the Casa Grande locker room are oriented to have some sort of order, but this mark has been missed. The locker columns are stacked and spaced like grimy skyscrapers. The lockers- cold and identical, rusty and grubby, creaking and clicking- dominate most of the room, lined up like orange and blue catacombs. Some of the locker doors are bent inward, as if some crude force had made an effort to individualize them from the repetitive paradigm of lockers. Other doors were simply gone, replaced by sheet metal and left sealed forever. All the lockers were numbered, with numbers which never seemed to begin or end, numbers that flicker into existence around the seven hundreds and drift listlessly through the one thousands, like ghosts forever seeking a resting place. The back of the room is a mess: it resembles the mangled treasure horde of an ancient pharaoh. The clutter is made up of bats and sticks and mats and balls and boxes and shirts and baskets; a plethora of sports equipment preserved from the distant past and laid to rest in a quiet corner. The air hangs with a dry, musky odor, which various air fresheners and deodorants try unconvincingly to cover up. The floor is made of the same tasteless linoleum that likely covers the floors of military barracks and third-world prisons, but scarred, scratched, and scored for more than any military parade or prison riot could.

Right turn, click, left turn, click, right turn, click, and once again the latch does not lift. I blink slowly and look to the right, realizing that for the past 3 minutes I have been trying my combination in the wrong locker. My locker and its adjacent twin are nearly identical, the only difference being the set of numbers at the top. The lockers, like the students of the school, are all labeled by number and are only identified as such. Right turn, click, left turn, click, right turn, click, and still the latch on locker nine hundred and eighty four stays closed, my fumble of turning the dial a fraction of an inch too much; punished with the lock’s resolute insistence on staying closed. Once again I blink slowly and repeat the combination, waiting for the caffeine to kick in. This is 6:59 AM at zero period PE. No-one in their right mind would be in the locker room this early. Except for me. The only noises are the buzzing of the florescent fixtures and the shuffling of another early-riser three rows down. Under the affects of an untimely awakening, being wrenched from the dark embrace of rest, the cold bench in the middle of the locker row looks like a bed, the slush-grey PE shirt looks like a pillow, but these hallucination I ignore, the time for rest has ended. Being in the dormant locker room is preferable to standing outside in the clammy mist, or the chilly rain, or the cold rays of the bleary eyed morning sun. The locker room can be observed best at this time in the morning, for anyone bored or foolish enough to wish to do so, before the crowd of students marches in to prepare for another day’s work.

The locker room is a place meant by administrators to be a place for pep talks and amp ups, anticipation and pre-game activity, relaxation and ritual; but the bare necessities that the facility is used for and the wear of the numerous users has rendered the locker room an unpleasant zone of transition. The locker room is a place of daily introduction into the grind of school life for me, it is the tunnel between the whimsical and carefree realm of warm beds and warmer breakfasts, and the reality of life when your boots hit the pavement, or the linoleum. In the substantial world, there are “locker rooms” of all kinds, be they surgery prep rooms, bus terminals, or any other places of changeover; the calm before the storm, the jolt to consciousness. The places of transition may not be pleasurable, they may not be ideal; but they are nonetheless integral in the architecture of life, between the here and the there, locker rooms and their ilk form the in-between.

-Sean G