Mr. Sal

Salvatore Domenicomico taught gym and insisted people call him Mr. Sal. He had long ago grown tired of watching people twist their faces coarsely around the syllables of his name. Everyone he grew up with had long, ethnic, Mediterranean surnames and most of them had foreign first names, but he understood that this was not that little Italian neighborhood where his father still lived, rising every morning and putting on the electrician's uniform for a company he was years retired from, to tend his tomatoes and zucchini. Mr. Sal was a proud Sicilian rooster, the black pompadour of his hair standing up like a cock's comb above his twinkling eyes. He was short, especially in the legs, which were undermined by his wide, puffed out chest. His face was a map of crags and deep lines, a severe dimple in the center of his chin, rills of crow's feet like cracked mistreated leather. The geographic features of his face became exaggerated with hearty smile and rustic laugh, and they were exaggerated with sustained frequency．　　

Mr. Sal worked in the hot summer sun, tarring driveways for his brother, stripped to the waist. The housewives peeked around their curtains at his rugged, sweating form. In the fall he would take his student's hands in his and chide them for their smoothness. He would wheeze and carry on like Archie Bunker at the trappings of their leisure. Truthfully he didn't object to the privilege and care taken with his students. He wasn't a youth revisionist who wanted to argue that having to go to work at 15, running form bullies because his mother gave him focaccia with anchovy for lunch, or getting a smart clip on the ear because his father was frustrated by his bosses who asked him to repeat too many words through his thick accent, was good to develop character in a child. But he would carry on still, hoping that they would at least appreciate all the ways people were looking out for them.

He was a wrestler. Normally he walked with a clunky bulk, bow legged and inefficient. He couldn't run quickly because of his stumpy legs, and he was not suited for football or basketball, but for wrestling he was compact and powerful. He rolled and shot with a grace he could only have on a mat. He was technical and precise, so unlike the grousing Mr. Sal who didn't own a cell phone and comically pretended to conduct the orchestra every year at the Spring Fling. The story was that his family had been champion wrestlers for years and years, stretching back into the ancient times of Rome. When he taught his kids who couldn't pronounce his name, and couldn't relate to the broken concrete and patchy gardens of his neighborhood, he could take them to the gym and show them the science his people had created, and they could understand him through wordless contest.