Athletic Shorts
Authors: Chris Crutcher
Athletic Shorts
Six Short Stories
In memory of Gary Deccio
1955–1990
What a wide embrace you had.
We still feel it
.
In my travels around the country and in letters from readers, I am constantly asked
what happens
to certain characters in my books. Does Willie Weaver make it when he returns to Oakland? Does he come back home to Montana again later? Where does Louie Banks go after graduation? Do Dillon Hemingway and Jennifer Lawless ever get together? Does Jeffrey Hawkins die?
The answer to all those questions is “I haven’t the foggiest idea.” My stories don’t stop because I stop writing them, but my participation in them does. When I come to the last page of any novel, I present the characters to you, the reader. What happens next is up to you.
However, at times I find myself thinking about some of these folks on my own. I have lived the better part of
a year with each, have taken long runs, fast motorcycle rides, and cross-country car trips with all of them. So once in a while I check in.
Athletic Shorts
provides my avenue to do that—short stories about characters from those books. Some of these stories take place before the time of the book in which the character appeared, some after, but all are enriched, in my mind, by that character’s history in fiction.
In my relatively short life as a writer, I have heard my share of praise (for writing about real problems, stories that boys will read, stories that have teaching value and can be used in the classroom), and I have received my share of criticism (for packing too much into one book, for depicting my characters’ hardships too graphically, and for using language and ideas that kids don’t need to be exposed to). Like most writers, I like to think the praise is well deserved, the criticism harsh and unfair. That allows me to go right on doing what I am doing.
But whether I am praised or criticized, writing is my passion. Whether it be comedy or tragedy or walking that high, thin tightwire between, my passion lies in connecting with people through the written word, through stories. The stories in this collection are stories
I care about. There is a bit of my soul in every one, a bit of the hero that lies within me, a bit of the fool. They are filled with males and females, oldsters and youngsters, gays and straights, blacks, whites, and all colors between. Some are foolish, some heroic; most, in their own way, are both. In other words they are human.
To tell the truth, I like it when my stories are seen by my critics from the same perspective as that in which most human beings are seen by their critics—for doing their best in tough situations, for failure, for excesses, for heart, for the glorious and the ghastly. I hope there is a little bit of all of that in
Athletic Shorts
.
ANGUS BETHUNE
“A Brief Moment in the Life of Angus Bethune” is the one story in this collection that does not include a character from any of my novels. In the fall of 1988, shortly after finishing writing
Chinese Handcuffs
and looking for something a little lighter to cool off my word processor, I received a call from Don Gallo, who had previously edited two collections of short stories for young adults. Don asked me to submit a story for his third, to be called
Connections,
urging me, if possible, to avoid such mainstay subjects of young adult literature as death, disease, and lost love
.
When I need a good idea, I run. Something about the cadence of my feet pounding on the road and the rhythm of air flowing in and out of me frees my mind to run to new ideas. It is possible I ran too far that day, or
the sun was much hotter than I thought, because when I returned home, I knew two things about my story: It would be about a fat kid with two sets of gay parents (so when he visited his mother, he also visited his stepmother, and when he visited his father, he also visited his stepfather), and his name would be Angus Bethune. I had waited years to use that name
.
It was my first attempt at writing a short story, so I felt I had nothing to lose. My ego was not wrapped up in getting it published. What happened next was magical for me. The short-story form forced me to be precise beyond what had been required before, and the process gave me invaluable lessons in word and idea economy
.
And I loved the finished product. So
much that I wanted to keep it for myself. But I had promised it to Don, and to Don it went
.
However, I like to have my cake and eat it. And lick the frosted beaters and sell it at the fair and have people jump out of it. So I took the story back, making it the only story in this collection that has previously appeared in another book
.
Sometimes, when I stand back and take a good look, I think my parents are ambassadors from hell. Two of them, at least, the biological ones, the
big
ones.
Four parents are what I have altogether, not unlike a whole lot of other kids. But quite unlike a whole lot of other kids, there ain’t a hetero among ’em. My dad’s divorced and remarried, and my mom’s divorced and remarried, so my mathematical account of my family suggests simply another confused teenager from a broken home. But my dads aren’t married to my moms. They’re married to
each other
. Same with my moms.
However, that’s not the principal reason I sometimes see my so-called real parents as emissaries from way down under. As a matter of fact, that frightening little off-season trade took place prior to—though not
much
prior to—my birth, so until I began collecting expert feedback from friends at school, somewhere along about fourth grade, I perceived my situation as relatively normal.
No, what really hacks me off is that they didn’t conceive me in some high tech fashion that would have allowed them to dip into an alternative gene pool for my physical goodies. See, when people the size of my parents decide to reproduce, they usually dig a pit and crawl down in there together for several days. Really, I’m surprised someone in this family doesn’t have a trunk. Or a blowhole. I swear my gestation period was three years and seven months.
You don’t survive a genetic history like that unscathed. While farsighted parents of other infants my age were preenrolling their kids four years ahead into elite preschools, my dad was hounding the World Wrestling Federation to hold a spot for me sometime in the early 1990s. I mean, my mom had to go to the husky section of Safeway to buy me Pampers.
I’m a big kid.
And they named me Angus. God, a name like Angus Bethune would tumble
Robert Redford
from a nine and a half to a four, and I ain’t no Robert Redford.
“Angus is a cow,” I complained to my stepmother,
Bella, the day in first grade I came home from school early for punching the bearer of that sad information in the stomach.
“Your mother must have had a good reason for naming you that,” she said.
“For naming me after a cow?”
“You can’t go around punching everyone who says that to you,” she warned.
“Yes, I can,” I said.
“Angus is a cow,” I said to my mother when she got home from her job at Westhead Trucking firm. “You guys named me after a cow.”
“Your father’s uncle was named Angus,” she said, stripping off her outer shirt with a loud sigh, then plopping into her easy chair with a beer, wearing nothing but her bra, a bra, I might add, that could well have floated an ejected fighter pilot to safety.
“So my father’s uncle was named after a cow, too,” I said. “What did
he
think of that?”
“Actually,” Mom said, “I think he was kind of proud. Angus was quite a farmer, you know.”
“Jesus help me,” I said, and went to my room.
As Angus, the fat kid with perverted parents, I’ve had my share of adjustment problems, though it isn’t as
bad as it sounds. My parents’ gene pool wasn’t a
total
sump. Dad’s family has all kinds of high-school shot put record holders and hammer throwers and even a gridiron hero or two, and my mom’s sister almost made it to the Olympic trials in speed skating, so I was handed a fair-size cache of athletic ability. I am
incredibly
quick for a fat kid, and I have world-class reflexes. It is nearly impossible for the defensive lineman across from me to shake me, such are my anticipatory skills, and when I’m on defense, I need only to lock in on a running back’s hips to zero in on the tackle. I cannot be shaken free. Plus you don’t have to dig
too
deep in our ancestral remains to find an IQ safely into three digits, so grades come pretty easy to me. But I’d sure be willing to go into the winter trade meetings and swap reflexes, biceps, and brain cells, lock, stock, and barrel, for a little physical beauty.
Which brings me to tonight. I don’t want you to think I spend
all
my life bitching about being short-changed in the Tom Cruise department or about having parents a shade to the left of middle on your normal bell-shaped sexual curve; but tonight is a big night, and I don’t want the blubbery bogeymen or the phantoms of sexual perversity, who usually pop up to point me out for public mockery, mucking it up for me. I want
normal
. I want
socially acceptable
. See, I was elected Senior Winter Ball King, which means for about one minute I’ll be featured gliding across the floor beneath the crimson and gold crepe paper streamers at Lake Michigan High School with Melissa Lefevre, the girl of my dreams—and only my dreams—who was elected Senior Winter Ball Queen. For that minute we’ll be out there alone.
Alone with Melissa Lefevre.
Now I don’t want to go into the tomfoolery that must have gone on behind the scenes to get me elected to such a highly regarded post because to tell you the truth, I can’t even imagine. I mean, it’s a joke, I know that. I just don’t know whose. It’s a hell of a good one, though, because someone had to coax a plurality of more than five hundred seniors to forgo casting their ballots for any of a number of bona fide Adonises to write in the name of a cow. At first I tried to turn it down, but Granddad let me know right quick I’d draw a lot more attention if I made a fuss than if I acted as if I were the logical choice—indeed, the only choice—and went right along. Granddad is the man who taught me to be a dignified fat kid. “Always remember these words, and live by ’em,” he said after my third suspension from kindergarten for fighting. “
Screw ’em
.
Anybody doesn’t like the way you look, screw ’em.”
And that’s just what I’ve done, because my grandfather—on my dad’s side—is one righteous dude, and as smart as they come in an extra-large wide-body sport coat. Sometimes I’ve screwed ’em by punching them in the nose, and sometimes by walking away. And sometimes by joining them—you know, laughing at myself. That’s the one that works best. But when my temper is quick, it likes to speak first, and often as not someone’s lying on the floor in a pool of nose fluids before I remember what a hoot it is to have the names of my mother and father dragged through the mud or my body compared with the Michelin tire man.
So you see, slowly but surely I’m getting all this under control. I don’t mind that my detractors—who are legion—will wonder aloud tonight whether it is Melissa or I who is the Winter Ball Queen, a playful reference to my folks’ quirky preferences, and I don’t mind that I’ll likely hear, “Why do they just swim up on the beach like that?” at least three times. What I mind is that during those few seconds when Melissa and I have the floor to ourselves, all those kids, friend and foe, will be watching me
dance
. Now, I’ve chronicled the majority of my maladies here, but none remotely approaches my altogether bankrupt sense of rhythm. When it
comes to clapping his hands or stomping his feet to the beat, Angus Bethune is completely, absolutely, and, most of all, irreversibly brain dead.
I’ve known about the dance for three weeks now. I even know the name of the song, though I don’t recognize it, and I went out and spent hard-earned money on dance lessons, dance lessons that sent not one but two petite, anorexic-looking rookie Arthur Murray girls off sharpening their typing skills to apply at Kelly Services. Those girls had some sore pods.
I’ve been planning for Melissa Lefevre for a long time. I fell in love with her in kindergarten, when she dared a kid named Alex Immergluck to stick his tongue on a car bumper in minus-thirty-five-degree weather for calling her a “big, fat, snot-nosed deadbeat,” a term I’m sure now that was diagnostic of his homelife, but that at the time served only to call up Melissa’s anger. Being a fat kid, I was interested in all the creative retaliatory methods I could get to store in the old computer for later use, and when I saw the patch of Alex’s tongue stuck tight to the bumper as he screamed down the street, holding his bleeding mouth, I knew I was in the company of genius. And such lovely genius it was. God, from kindergarten on, Melissa was that tan, sinewy
legged blond girl with the brown eyes that just make you ache. You ache a lot more when you’re a fat kid, though, because you know she was put on the earth, out of your reach, only to make you feel bad. You have no business trying to touch her.
But at the same time my grandfather—a huge silver-haired Rolls-Royce of a grandfather—kept telling me over and over I could have any damn thing I wanted. He told me that down under that sleeping bag of globules I wore beneath my skin beat the heart of a lion and the body of Jack La Lanne. In fact, in the fifth grade Granddad took me down to San Francisco on Jack’s sixty-fifth birthday to let me watch him swim to Alcatraz with his hands cuffed behind him, towing a boat on a line with his teeth. He did it, he really did. He still does.
Granddad also took me to San Francisco to see some gay people; but we went to a place called Polk Street, and it didn’t help much. I mean, my parents are working folks who are with only the person they’re with, and Polk Street was filled with people looking like they were headed for a Tandy leather swap meet. Maybe it helped, though. At least my parents looked more normal to me, although my mother could pass for Bruiser of the Week about fifty-two times in any given
year, so
normal
is a relative term.
The bottom line, though, no matter how my grandfather tried to convince me otherwise, was that Melissa Lefevre would remain a Fig Newton of my imagination throughout my school years, and no matter how hard Granddad primed me, I would never have the opportunity for any conversation with Melissa other than one in my head. Until tonight. Tonight I’ll
have
to talk to her. If I don’t, she’ll have only my dancing by which to remember me, which is like Mrs. Fudd remembering Elmer for his hair. It’d be a damn shame.
All I really want is my moment with her. I have no illusions, no thoughts of her being struck blind and asking me to take her home. When you’re different, on the down side, you learn to live from one scarce rich moment to the next, no matter the distance between. You become like a camel in a vast scorched desert dotted with precious few oases, storing those cool, watery moments in your hump, assuring survival until you stumble upon the next.
All I want is my moment.
So here I sit, my rented burgundy tux lying across my bed like a dropcloth waiting to be unfolded on the floor of the Sistine Chapel, digging deep into my reserves for the courage not to crumble, hoping for the
power to call up the vision of the decent guy I know I am rather than the short-fused, round clown-jock so many people see. What can Melissa be thinking? She’ll be there with someone else, of course, so her winter Nightmare on Elm Street will last but a few minutes at most. She’s probably telling herself as I sit here that it’s like a trip to the dentist. No matter how badly he’s going to hurt you, no matter how many bare nerves he drills or how many syringes of Novocain he explodes into the roof of your mouth, in an hour you’ll walk out of there. And you’ll still be alive.
Of course, Melissa hasn’t seen me dance.
My dad was in an hour ago, looking sadly at me sitting here on the side of my bed in my underwear next to this glorious tuxedo, which, once on, will undoubtedly cast me as a giant plum. Dad’s the one who escorted me to Roland’s Big and Tall to have me fitted, and to make sure I got something that would be comfortable. He’s a sensitive guy, one who has always scouted uncharted waters for me in an attempt to clear away at least the huge logs, to render those waters a
little
more navigable.
He wore his Kissbusters T-shirt, with the universal stop sign—a circle with a slash through it—over huge
red lips. I gave one to each of my four parents back in junior high when I negotiated the No Kissing Contract. (“I don’t care who’s with who or what you do in the sack at night,” I screamed out of exasperation during one of our bimonthly “absence of malice get-togethers,” designed by my parents to cement our extended family solidarity. “Just don’t
kiss
in front of me! I’m in junior high now! Look! Under here!” I said, raising my arms, pointing to the budding tufts of hair. “I got a bouquet of flowering pubiscus under each arm! And the jury’s in: I like girls! The only people I want to see kissing are boys and girls! Not boys kissing boys. Not girls kissing girls! I want to see boys kissing girls! Understand? Hairy lips on smooth lips! Read mine! Boys…kissing…girls!” I started to walk out of the room, then whirled. “You know what I need? You ask me that all the time! ‘Angus, are you suffering emotional harm because we’re different? Angus, are you feeling angst? Angus, do you need help adjusting? Angus, do you want to see a therapist?’ I’m not having trouble adjusting! I don’t even know what angst is! I don’t want to see a therapist! I just don’t want to see you
kissing
! You want to know what I need? I’ll tell you! Role models! Someone to show me how things are done! Don’t you guys ever watch Oprah? Or Donahue?”) It was a
marvelous tantrum, and effective in that it resulted in the now-famous ironclad No Kissing Contract, which I have since, for my part, dissolved but to which they adhere as if it were the
Kama Sutra
itself. You will not hear the smacking, sucking reverberations of lips parting in passion from lips in either of
my
happy homes.
“The cummerbund is good,” Dad says. “It changes your lines, acts almost as a girdle. Don’t keep the jacket buttoned for long; unbutton it early in the name of being casual. That way it won’t pull tight where you bulge.” Dad is the person most responsible for teaching me to dress a body ignored by the sensibilities of the world’s clothiers. It was he who taught me to buy pants with a high waist and to go ahead through the embarrassment of giving the salesman my full waist size—instead of cheating a few inches to save face—so I could always get
all
of myself into my pants and leave nothing hanging over. He also drilled into me that it is a mortal sin for a fat man to buy a shirt that tucks in. In short, my father is most responsible for teaching me to dress like a big top.