If you look through my senior class high-school yearbook, you’ll find a couple of things. First, you’ll find me wondering what kind of creepy stalker you are to be carefully scrutinizing my 15-year-old high-school yearbook. And second, under my graduate portrait, you’ll find a pair of nicknames listed for me: Grocery-man and Hulaman.

How I got to be called Grocery-man is simple: I worked at a grocery store at the local mall, and there was a gaggle of freshman girls who took to referring to me as Grocery-man, calling me that so often that when I was asked to list my nicknames for the yearbook, I was forced to admit that, sadly, Grocery-man really was one of my most widely used and longstanding nicknames.

How I got to be named Hulaman, however, bears more explanation. Half a page of that yearbook is actually devoted to a cartoon drawn by my friend Kevin that immortalizes this incident. So I know it can be told in about six panels, but I’ll just give you my version.

I took physics in the first semester of my final year. There was a particular piece of experimental apparatus in our classroom that consisted of a symmetrical track that sloped downward, looped, and then sloped upward again. The idea is that you’d roll a marble down one side, it would do a loop-de-loop and continue up the other side before returning, and we’d all learn a little something about centripetal force. By the end of the semester, we’d learned everything we needed to know about centripetal force (namely, how to hustle schoolchildren in tetherball games) so this marble track sat unused at the back of the classroom, broken down into three pieces: two long sections and a central hoop piece.

One day after our teacher, Mr. Olsen, had stepped out of the room for a moment, one of my classmates bet me I couldn’t get this hoop around my waist. Now, back in my senior year of high school, I was a real skinny cat. I wasn’t a real Peter Lynn like I am now. Back then, I had a 28-inch waist and a hard time finding jeans in my size. So I knew I could fit this relatively large hoop around my waist. “Yes I can,” I said.

With the class watching, I raised my arms over my head and slipped into the hoop, which slid down over my torso and came to rest atop my hips with a minimum of fuss. I stood there triumphantly like a giant wearing a tiny hula hoop. “See?” I told my challenger. “No problem.” Boy, did he look stupid. My point proven, I pushed the hoop down to squeeze it past my hips and legs so I could pass my body through it entirely and simply step out of it, like a sideshow contortionist. Except I couldn’t. It was stuck.

I’d always been slim-hipped, but suddenly my pelvis seemed matronly and perfectly designed for childbearing. My hips were fractionally larger in diameter than the steel hoop, and there was simply no way to force it past without shearing off layers of denim and flesh. The shoulders hadn’t been a problem; by simply raising my arms, I’d forced them together enough to slip through. If I’d had the presence of mind to do a handstand, the hoop would have simply clattered to the floor. Or I could have just raised my arms and, while I wouldn’t have been able to pull it back up and over them, I could have had someone do it for me. I opted to instead panic and struggle uselessly, attempting to force it down over my hips as my classmates howled with laughter.

Then the door opened. Mr. Olsen was back.

I leaped back in my seat before he entered and opened my textbook wide to conceal the steel hoop around my waist. My classmates continued to titter as I kept my eyes trained on the pages of my text, pretending to be deeply immersed in Newtonian mechanics. The bemused Mr. Olsen gave us a suspicious look, but opted to simply continue the lesson. He turned to write something on the chalkboard. As soon as he did, I jumped back out of my seat to resume my hoop dance, the class roaring as I leaped and flopped like a dying fish in my struggle to remove it.

Mr. Olsen wheeled back around, only to find everyone poker-faced, with me back in my seat with my textbook draped strategically over my hoop. When he turned to write on the chalkboard again, I again leaped out of my seat and strove mightily to free myself, contorting my body and straining my muscles like Houdini making a straitjacket escape. Again, Mr. Olsen turned around at the sound of laughter to find nothing apparently amiss.

After a few moments, Mr. Olsen needed to retrieve something from the office at the back of the classroom. As soon as he disappeared from view, I leaped out of my seat and ran out the door, sprinting past the open doors of several classrooms with a steel hoop plainly around my waist. I ran into the washroom and began vainly wrestling with it again. A sophomore washing his hands at the sink gave me a strange look. “Would you like a hand with that?” he offered after a moment. I gladly raised my arms, and he pulled the hoop up over my torso, shoulders, and limbs. I thanked him and left.

I skulked back to my classroom, tiptoeing past the door to another door near the back of the room. I knelt as I turned the knob. The door creaked open a crack. I slid the hoop back into the room. Then I closed the door and ran away.

About ten minutes later, I mustered the nerve to creep back through the front door of the classroom, accidentally closing the door on my finger, to an explosion of laughter from my classmates. I slouched back into my seat and waited out the rest of the class. The bell rang, and I slipped out the door, marveling that I’d gotten away cleanly. Mr. Olsen had somehow remained completely in the dark.

Not for long, as it turned out. As a postscript, I learned soon afterward that a pudgy guy we called Norm (for his unfortunate resemblance to Cheers regular George Wendt) approached Mr. Olsen right after class. “If you want to know what everyone was laughing at,” he began, and he proceeded to tell him the whole thing. Mr. Olsen actually had a good sense of humour, so he wasn’t upset. He found the whole thing pretty funny.

I was a little upset, though, if only because Norm had spoiled a clean getaway. I wasn’t furious, but I did want to give him the business about it a little. The next time I saw him, I approached him with a scowl on my face, mustering every bit of menace available to a skinny little guy with a 28-inch waist. “You told Olsen, didn’t you?” I said.

He suddenly looked panicked. “How do you know?”

“I know,” I said. “You told him.”

“I’m sorry,” he pleaded. “I’ll give you five bucks.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not good enough.”

“I’ll give you my car!”

He actually offered me his car. I tried to keep my composure and decided to push further. “No. The only payment I’ll accept is your life.”

I then stalked off. And Norm didn’t show up for school again for the next three days. I’m not even kidding.