Authors: Chris Crutcher
“When will that be, dear?” Mom asks, her eyes rolled back in disbelief.
He leans forward. “That will be at business luncheons, or banquets, or country clubs. Who knows? Don’t undermine me, dear.”
I resist the urge to say I’ll never eat among large numbers of civilized Americans because I’d starve trying to remember all the Miss Manners tidbits he’s tried to implant in my brain over the years; I want to stay at the table long enough to issue the challenge. I sip my water, and my seriously deprived tongue cramps around the lime like a fist.
“I welcome any and all opportunities to teach you a lesson, John,” he says with some exaggeration.
“Wanna wrestle me?”
He smiles. “What lesson could you learn in a coma?”
He has a point. But I push on. “You’re looking a little soft, Dad. You’re pushing fifty. The years might be the perfect equalizer.”
“I wrestled at
Oklahoma—
”
“Number two at Oklahoma,” I correct, hoping to set the bait without losing an appendage before the real match.
“The man who wrestled ahead of me went to the Olympics in his weight division,” he reminds me.
“He lost,” I remind him back.
Dad puts down his fork. I’m pretty sure my sense of humor came from Mom’s side of the family. “You’re walking on thin ice, young man,” he says. Usually he calls me “young man” immediately before I feel wrenching physical pain.
“There’s a way to settle this,” I say.
“Name your place.”
“High school gym. Two weeks from Wednesday. As a prelim to the parent-student volleyball game.”
“You want to be embarrassed in front of your friends?” he asks.
“Better than in front of my enemies.”
His steely blue eyes penetrate my skull. “No mercy,” he says finally.
“No mercy,” I answer.
MacArthur fashions a snowball of mashed potatoes and fires it across the room at Brinkley. I put down my fork and lay a hand on his shoulder. “Mac. Eating is not a pretty thing. It’s our job as civilized—”
“That’s enough, Johnny,” Mom warns.
So I’m wrestling Dad. The instant I know it is the instant I have second and third thoughts. What I haven’t said about Dad is that he doesn’t weigh two pounds more than he did before his last wrestling match at Oklahoma. He runs seven miles a day, swims three times a week, and lifts weights regularly at his club. The veins on Dad’s biceps and forearms look like a detailed street map of Billings.
But he’s old. What he hasn’t been doing is wrestling, and anyone who wrestles will tell you there’s a certain lunatic edge you have to walk, and the only way to stay there is by eating celery sticks and raw spinach and Nutriment and running ten miles a day mummified in Saran Wrap and cranking out daily sit-ups and push-ups well into four digits—preferably in a sauna. Your nose and cheeks should sport permanent mat burns, and if your ears fold inward rather than outward, you’re bogus.
Dad ain’t been wrestling.
But he wrestled at Oklahoma.
But he wrestled number two.
This may be my chance.
I stand toe to toe with the Great Cecil B. Rivers, one hand lightly in the crotch of his elbow, the other loosely at the back of his neck. We are mirror images. Our foreheads touch. Coach Everett stands in his starched referee’s shirt, arm raised and whistle ready, facing us. Dad wears his Oklahoma wrestling togs, which fit like the day he wore them last. For the past two weeks I have heard him in the wee hours of morning, grunting out push-ups and sit-ups, and three nights ago I awoke after midnight to the rapid whap-whap-whap of his jump rope slapping against his study floor. He hasn’t mentioned increasing his workouts. In fact, he told me he was taking a couple of weeks off at the club to even things out for me. He did nearly match me push-up for push-up the other night after dinner after I told him I was writing a novel about our two cats—Huntley and Brinkley. Huntley is a Manx, a cat with no tail, and Brinkley is a fast, sleek little gold alley cat. I told Dad I saw this novel as a classic tale of love and war between the two protagonists, in which Huntley covets Brinkley’s beautiful tail and is willing to fight to the
death for it. (Dad was already counting words.) In the final scene the two would meet in a dark alley to settle their fate, the prize being Brinkley’s beautiful golden tail. Then I told him I meant to call it “A Tail and Two Kitties.”
One thousand four hundred thirty push-ups.
I was feeling strong and from the kitchen door told him of my second great novel of the call girl who could command any price because of the size of her luscious breasts. (This one cost me double because Dad didn’t think Mac should be exposed to such tawdry tales at the tender age of two, even though I reminded Dad that very recently such things were seen merely as lunch boxes to Mac.) The novel would be called “The Sale of Two—”
“Johnny!” Mom warned, her finger aimed at my chest like a poison blowgun. “Say it and you’ll be picking soap shavings out of your teeth till you’re thirty.”
Dad matched me one for one for the first thousand, then fell off to one for two. I swear, it looks like someone slipped a tennis ball under his skin where his triceps should be. The man’s in
steely
shape for a dude pushing fifty.
Coach Everett brings his hand down with the whistle, and my father’s hand tightens on my elbow like a
vise. I have to be very careful in close; he has at least fifteen pounds on me.
He dives at my leg for the takedown, but I dance away a step and fall forward onto his back, twisting quickly to ride him from behind, hoping to turn him over with a half nelson; but Dad stands, and I bounce away to avoid his simply falling backward and turning me into a pinned grease spot.
He whirls, smiling, his eyebrows dancing. “Oklahoma,” he says.
“Number two,” I say back, and go for his leg. I get the takedown, but his escape is so quick I need a slo-mo replay to prove I ever had him. The rest of the round is spent locked in quick takedowns and escapes, each of us looking for that one opportunity.
When Coach’s whistle ends the round, we are locked in the position in which we started. Dad slaps me playfully on the side of the head and smiles again. Playful slaps from my dad make you think you should answer the phone.
The crowd is evenly split, kids screaming for me, parents cheering for Dad to win one for the Ancients. We stand facing each other an instant—Dad staring me down, daring me to drop my gaze and turn for my corner—when I see it, behind his eyes, at the corners of
his smile. Dad’s tiring, and for a reason I can’t explain, a sadness rises in my chest. I turn.
In my corner, I ignore what I saw. Troy Marsh, our mauler at unlimited, and Stephan Stent, a knot of muscle at 103, my self-appointed cornermen for this Generational Wrestlemania, towel me off, dispensing clots of wisdom that could come only from below the neck.
“Time for young sons everywhere to arise,” Troy says, “and dig deep furrows in the mats with they daddies’ noses.” Troy’s dad is long gone, having left his mother and four sisters hopelessly mired in the welfare system. He took tonight’s coaching assignment like a man with a mission.
“Wear him down a little more,” Stephan says. “Stay away as long as you can. Jesus, Johnny, your dad’s a
monster
. Doesn’t he smoke or anything?”
“Only out the ears,” I say.
Troy punches my shoulder. “Well, mess up now, my boy, and your daddy’s gonna grab your ankles and make a wish.”
Across the mat Coach Everett, the
referee
, for Christ’s sake, is giving Dad pointers. I hyperventilate for the rest of my minute, walking down the side of the mat, away from my coaching brain trust, remembering Dad’s look.
If I’m not mistaken, there was a trace of desperation.
Coach brings us to the center, and Dad chooses the down position. I kneel beside him, my right arm lightly around his middle, left hand on the crook of his left elbow. Dad will try to step out, and I’ll try to drive him down. We both know it. He’s told me a million times what a great escape artist he was at Oklahoma. Within a millisecond of the sound of Coach’s slap on the mat, Dad is standing facing me, his smile in full bloom. Whatever I saw at the end of the last round is gone, and we’re in a death lock. The second round is the first, replayed at fast forward. We’re up and down so often I feel like I’m ducking bullets. My strategy becomes survival: Go for the quick takedown and work for a move; get away if it fails, which it does, time after time. At the whistle I’m one point up.
“Pin his ass,” Troy says in my corner. He nods across the mat. “Old man looks rode hard and put up wet. Look at ’im.”
“You looking at the same guy I am?” I gasp.
Troy grips my shoulders, his playfulness drained away. “He wins, you never live it down,” he says through gritted teeth. “This is how you move up. Got to take your daddy down.”
It’s clear how badly Troy would like that opportunity for himself, to get even with his father for leaving his mom and sisters with nothing but the humiliation of being poor. I wonder briefly how many other kids in the bleachers are rooting for me to make a statement for those of us whose time has come to measure ourselves against our fathers.
I choose the down position, Dad draped over me like a bulldogger. “I’m taking you out,” he says. “Tired of messing around. You’ve looked good in front of your friends long enough.”
“That right?” I say, and all our slack pulls tight. This is what I’ve always hated: the feeling that Dad has to be in control, that when the chips are down, he gets to call the shots, and the rest of us be damned. “Give it your best shot, Oklahoma.”
Coach’s hand hits the mat like a gunshot, and I lock down on Dad’s elbow, rolling hard to pull him over my back to the mat. He must have expected me to step out because he’s caught off guard. Suddenly I’m staring down into his astonished face, and his desperation returns. He struggles to throw me off-balance and slide out; but I’ve got him, and before he can move, I’m winding like a cobra into the guillotine. If I get it, he’s
done. From a distance it’s hard to tell which of us is in trouble. We’re both on our backs, wrapped head to toe, but my arm is woven under Dad’s neck, around his shoulder, and under his back, where my hands are locked. Dad strains with everything he has left to pull away; but my grip is tight, and I pull hard.
A thousand ringing slaps alongside my head run through my brain, followed by a slide show of Dad belittling Mom, Dad telling us how to eat, Dad telling us when to sleep, when to laugh, never to cry, and I dig deep inside the meanest part of me for the power to force him down. I see him standing over my push-ups, demanding that I address him as “sir,” and my muscle is stressed cable. “Get ready, Oklahoma,” I grunt. “You’re about to feel a land rush on your shoulder blades.”
He’s locked in a bridge, and I strain harder. The crowd becomes strangely silent—I think it’s not sure it wants to see this changing of the guard—and Dad’s shoulders inch toward the mat.
“When I get out of this,” he grunts back, “I’m gonna hurt you.”
Screw you, Dad
. And I scream out the punch line of every bad joke I’ve ever made up or ever heard. “We’ve
come to seize your berry, not to praise it! Bless the beets and the chilled wren!” I yell. “These are the souls that time men’s tries! Booty is only shin deep! The beer that made Milfamee walk us! For whom the Tells bowl!”
Screw you, Dad!
and with all my strength I drive back into him. His iron body gives, and I turn up the last bit of tension. A groan rolls out of him, and Coach’s hand slaps the mat. I release in exhaustion, and Dad is instantly standing, eyes blazing through me. I reach to shake his hand, a sneer playing on my lip; but he slaps it away, and the cheering and booing and laughing stop. Every man, woman, and child in the gym recognizes this, whether from their nightmares or their daily lives. I’m lost for an instant, confused. “Come on, Dad,” I say, offering my hand again. My sneer is gone. “You were good.” Again he slaps my hand away and turns, and I reach for his shoulder. Before more than three hundred people my father slaps the side of my face so hard I sit on the mat as if dropped by a hammer.
“Come on, Rivers! Lay off! He’s a kid!”
Dad stares into the bleachers, as if slapped back into consciousness himself, and I see his shoulders slump. He gazes back down at me, and I expect for an instant he’ll offer me a hand; but suddenly he’s walking across
the gymnasium floor to the boos of the crowd.
I beat the Great Cecil B. Rivers. So where is my glory?
I didn’t stay to call play by play for the volleyball game. My love affair with Marilyn Waters will have to wait. I could no more have remained in that gym and borne my father’s shame than fly to the moon.
Mom said, “I’m sorry,” when I walked through the back door into the kitchen, and nodded her head toward my father, sitting in the next room in his easy chair, reading a book. I crept silently past him to the stairs.
It’s well after one. Someone is moving downstairs. It has to be Dad. God, why did I taunt him? Why couldn’t I just win it?
Why couldn’t I have lost?
I stand in the doorway to his study. Dad sits with his back to me in his leather chair, head bent forward. He’s paging through something, and I move closer.
“Dad,” I say softly, and he starts, swiveling in the chair to face me. Tears have streaked his face. I’d give almost anything not to see this. “I’m sorry. I heard you—You want me to go?”
“No,” he says, and motions me toward him.
In his lap, lying open, is my old baby album. Here, decked out in his United States Marine dress blues, he holds me, staring in wonder into my infant eyes. There I perch on an inner tube, a bubble pipe jutting out under his marine cap. Here I’m draped in his Oklahoma letter jacket, sitting high atop a navy fighter jet. Dad watches me look at the pictures.
“I swore it’d be different for you and me,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“That I wouldn’t do to you what my dad did to me. Make you feel the way I felt.”
“Grampa?”
Dad nods. “Yup. He was good with you, and he’s great with Mac. But somehow I guess your own boy gets too close.” Tears well up again.