Thomas Maguane fiction- "Ice"

"Drum majors back then were on the verge of being replaced by “majorettes,” and a position that had once been considered honorably athletic had become somehow effete and clouded with unspoken sexual ambiguity—although that ambiguity hadn’t yet managed to taint our own drum major, whose pert and blossoming girlfriends all seemed to wind up losing their reputations. Nevertheless, the crowd hoped for humiliating disaster. I, strangely, hoped for his success. I waited for that high toss to produce, as if by the hand of Praxiteles, the most graceful division of space, a split second of immortality for the drum major, and, for me, a lesson in courage. At the same time, another part of me shared the crowd’s wish to see him on all fours with the baton up his behind. As would become a lifelong habit for most of us, we longed to witness both spectacular achievement and mortifying failure. Neither of these things, we were discreetly certain, would ever come to us; we would instead be granted the frictionless lives of the meek."