My friend, or, rather, anti-friend, Ajay disagrees.
“You’re an idiot,” says Ajay.
“Go back to fucking Mumbai,” I tell him. “Or whatever the fuck it’s called now.”
“Mumbai,” says Ajay. “And I was born here.”
“In the Rover?”
It’s not a bad place to be born. Every third beer is a buyback.
I don’t bother pulling a face. They never work on Ajay, not even
I Know My Racism Amuses You, but It’s Still Racism, so I Win
, and anyway it gets tiresome manipulating my universe. It’s nice to give those millions of tiny face muscles a break. Ajay goes up to the bar, and I keep my eyes peeled for dart dykes. When he comes back, I tell him all about Roanoke.
“You really are a fucking idiot. Go home to your wife.”
* * *
I go home to my wife. She’s sitting up at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, like she saw it in a movie about a wife sitting up for her shitty husband. She clicks her wedding ring against the side of the mug, which is my mug, a mug she gave me that reads
WORLD’S SHITTIEST HUSBAND.
I tell her everything, but I can hardly hear my words because I’m focused on the nearly Dutch wonder forming on my face—
Most Radiant Penitence.
It’s a fairly simple purse-and-squint combo, but unless performed by an old master like myself, it risks smirk.
“Motherfucker,” my wife says, in the tone of an earlier generation. “Do you love her?”
“Not her,” I say. “Maybe the one who caught us.”
“I want to save our marriage,” says my wife. “Do you want to save our marriage?”
“Yes,” I say. “Just not right now.”
“Get out.”
* * *
I’ve got my prepacked get-out bag and I’m standing in the nursery doorway watching my sleeping son sleep. His face is smooth and milky in the moonlight, and there’s really no name for it, his face, not yet, except maybe
I’m Sleeping
. Some people might consider this expression beautiful, but it scares the crap out of me. You need more than
I’m Sleeping
to navigate all the evil in this world. Me gone, who’s going to teach my boy
The Strange Thing Is It’s Nobody’s Fault
, or
Believe I Jammed the Printer All You Want, We’ve Still Got to Order Toner
? Folks? People? My wife? I drop my get-out bag on the nursery floor, curl up next to the crib. There’s the moon through the window, that Moon Man with his masterful Moon Man look:
We Are All Schmucks, but I Control the Tides
. If he had a coffee mug, it would read “World’s Shittiest Moon.” But he doesn’t have a coffee mug. I get that now.
ODE to OLDCORN
Oldcorn was a shot-putter from the hippie days. He was my hero for a while. I was a shot-putter from the long-after-the-hippie-days-were-gone days. It was called the Reagan era, but I learned that only later.
We studied the Oldcorn Way with Coach Monroe. Oldcorn torque, Oldcorn spin.
“Finish like this,” said Coach Monroe. “Do not fall out of the circle. Your mark means nothing if you fall out of the circle. It’s a foul. Do it enough times, you foul out. Like you were never even here.”
We all nodded, me and Merk and Fred Powler, the police chief’s son. We were the fattest, strongest boys in our school. We had nothing to do, nowhere to be. There’s not a lot of call for our type until the weather gets cold.
“It’s all a question of character,” said Coach Monroe. “And fun. Fun’s important.”
We did wind sprints, stadium steps, pushed weights in the weight room. We’d sit out on the hill above the circle, roll shots in our hands. They were heavy things, seamed and bright, dusted with lime.
Coach Monroe sat with us, lotus-style, our guru. He gobbed down the ridge. He talked about Oldcorn, adjusted his balls. He had moods, tales to tell.
“Oldcorn dislocated his shoulder hundreds of times,” he said. “It would pop out and he’d just pop it back in, step up for his next put.
“Oldcorn once said to me, ‘Everything dies in the middle.’ The put dies in the middle. Remember that. You can start hard and finish hard, but what did you do in the middle? Did you lapse? Was there a lapse? Did you think about Mindy Richter on the gymnastics team? Did you think about Mindy Richter hanging off those rings, her snapperhole all open and stinky-sweet? The put dies. End of story. Oldcorn got more cooze than you could keep between magazine covers under your bed next to your crusty sock. But do you know what he was thinking in the middle of his spin? Accelerate! Accelerate!
“I also want to tell you this: Oldcorn had black friends, Oriental friends, he had a Mexican roommate. That’s character. It didn’t matter what you looked like. He didn’t care what was inside of you, either. He was a shot-putter. Now shower up.”
* * *
We were fifteen, sixteen and maybe feeling funny when we showered up. We talked a lot about dropping the soap. Maybe Merk felt the funniest, but it wasn’t his fault he had a foreskin, that his dong had weird veins. He was from a weird country. We taunted him, but only in the shower room.
“Hey,” said Fred Powler. “What’s a snapper?”
“What’re you, a fucking ’tard?” said Merk.
“Leave him alone,” I said.
Picture me, the good kid from after-school television. Picture Fred, the feeb who will teach us to be free. That’s the story of humanity, or at least that was the story of Fred. He’d been smarter than any of us and not teaching us anything until some punk got Fred in the skull with a snowrock. An accident, said Fred’s dad, Chief Powler. Most of the world’s snowrocks are packed by accident, I’m sure. Now Fred maybe belonged on that bus with the rubber handles, but who had the heart to put him on it? I didn’t have that kind of heart. I did Fred’s homework for him. I figured he could start to be retarded next year.
* * *
Twilight, we’d walk home to our houses down streets named for famous soldiers: Eisenhower, Bradley, MacArthur, McQueen. We had our own names for places that didn’t have town names. I worried the feebed version of Fred had forgotten them all.
“What’s that?” I said.
“It’s for cars.”
“The Parking Lot of Lost Ambition,” I said. “And what’s behind it?”
“Bushes.”
“The Forest of Teen Pregnancy,” I said.
That’s maybe where Mindy Richter was right now, I added, conducting guided tours of her snapperhole. When I got to Oklahoma State, Oldcorn’s alma mater, on my shot put scholarship, all the Mindy Richters of the world would beckon me from beds of silk. They’d wake at dawn, alone, a poem there on the pillow where my cheek had been.
An ode to Oldcorn, maybe.
* * *
There was a book in the library called
Athletes of the Seventies.
I spent a lot of study periods studying a photograph of Oldcorn in the middle of a spin. Sweat twirled off his antiwar whiskers. His mouth was cut wide with what must have been his famous banshee noises. The shot was pitted, chalked, cradled in the hollow of his neck. I could almost see it flying off his fingertips, hang there in the day skies of my mind, an iron moon.
We took a bus to a meet in the land of the Jackson Whites, a mountain people with too many fingers on their hands and even fingers on their feet. The Jackson Whites were a wild breed, Coach Monroe had told us, come down from Revolutionary War times—Hessian deserters, Indians, runaway slaves. There on the mountain they made their own inbred mutant race. I was hoping to see a flipper boy flapping on a banjo or a Revolutionary lute.
But this mountain had big houses on it. There were shiny cars with smug bumper stickers parked along the road. We drove up to a beautiful school, this tinted octagon of new-math glass. Our milers, quarter milers, hurdlers and high hurdlers, long jumpers and high jumpers and triple jumpers and pole-vaulters, all our twitchy golden Spartans jumped off the bus and ran up to the bleachers, the raked cinder track. There were no shot-putting circles in sight.
Coach Monroe grabbed a guy jogging past. The man’s whistle popped from his lips.
“Where the hell do you put around here?”
“Put what?” said the man.
“The shot.”
“Other side of the school,” he said.
“Where? In the fucking woods?” said Coach Monroe. “These kids aren’t lepers. In Europe, this sport is appreciated.”
“Go throw in Europe,” said the man.
“Put,” said Coach Monroe. “Not throw.”
We found the circle, a pack of boys warming up. They looked like us with better sneakers. They wore brand-new shorts with bright metallic trim. Coach Monroe took the tape measure out of his coat. There were not enough judges in this part of New Jersey. We would have to judge for ourselves.
Coach Monroe gathered us to him, jabbed his clipboard at each of our hearts.
“Go, Spartans!” said Merk.
“Forget that crap,” said Coach Monroe. “Just accelerate.”
It wasn’t even what you would call a contest. The kids in the metallic shorts were gliders, like some lost clan of Cro-Mags, new to fire, ignorant of spin. They were good sports, though. They hopped around with the tape roll, called out our marks.
“Teach us that spin you do,” one of them said.
“Are you a Spartan?” said Merk.
“We’re Badgers,” said the boy.
“They’re Jacksons,” I said.
“I’m a Baum,” said the boy.
“Can’t help you,” said Merk. “It’s the Spartan spin.”
“It’s Oldcorn’s,” I said.
“What’s Oldcorn?” said Baum.
“Look it up,” I said. “There’s a book.”
Somebody stared at us from the edge of the field. He had dirty pants, carried a planter and a spade. I tried to look into his crazy Jackson eyes, but there was nothing crazy about them. Just bored.
“That’s the groundskeeper,” said Baum.
“Oh,” I said.
* * *
Sometimes after a big meet we went to Merk’s uncle’s house to drink beer. Merk’s uncle’s basement was filled with beer, beer memorabilia, electric beer signs, and beer embroidery on the wall. Merk’s uncle worked in beverage distribution. Mostly beer. He said we could drink all we wanted, as long as we stayed in the basement.
There was a pool table down there. The cue sticks were just the right size for indoor javelin. We didn’t have outdoor javelin at our school anymore. Some kid had caught one in the neck.
Now the basement door swung open and there were Merk’s uncle’s loafers on the top step.
“Hello, boys,” he called. “I’m home and I’m thirsty. Pour one for the old man.”
Last time he’d gotten drunk with us, he’d sung love ballads into a balled-up pair of underwear.
“I’ve got to book,” I said.
* * *
Oldcorn won gold in Mexico. He was supposed to go to Munich, but he shattered his hip in a bike wreck. The hip never healed right. He had to revert to the glide. He won some meets, but he wasn’t Oldcorn anymore. He went out for the American team in 1976, the Montreal games, but with one put left in the trials, trailing badly, Oldcorn walked off the field, disappeared.
“He went to an ashram,” said Coach Monroe.
“Why?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“What’s an ashram?” I said.
Coach Monroe’s office was a cubbyhole behind the basketball bleachers. His desk was heaped with binders, team rosters, meet schedules, pole vault catalogs. He lit a cigarette, took a puff, blew the smoke into a gym bag, zipped it shut. Then he dunked the cigarette in a cup of tea.
“There,” he said. “Now, what were we talking about?”
“Oldcorn,” I said.
“Well, what can I say? I don’t know. He was an eccentric dude. He lived a private system. I know you guys like hearing about the good old days, but you should concentrate on what you’re doing now. Which brings me to another question. What do you think you’re doing now?”
“What do you mean, Coach?”
“Don’t get me wrong. I like having you around. You’re a nice kid. But how far do you think you’re going with the shot put?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I never thought about it.”
“That’s good,” said Coach Monroe. “That’s good to hear.”
* * *
Coach Monroe said there would be a special surprise at our last home meet. When those Jacksons, with their satchels and their magic shorts, made their way to our circle, I saw what he meant. The special surprise was named Bucky Schmidt. He was enormous, milky-blue colored, like thin milk, with a flat head and a mean Hessian nose. He was the most mutated boy you could ever hope to see, though you had to look hard to see the Jackson in him. Or maybe there wasn’t any Jackson in him at all.
I do know the world is divided, or even just subdivided, between those who have met their Bucky Schmidt and those who have their Bucky coming. I’ve met my Bucky Schmidt and so I’m never disappointed by the way of things. I don’t want and want. Good money, good times, I’m happy for what I get. You don’t worry so much about it all when you know there is somebody out there who can take everything away like some terrible god.
That day, all of us just stood there to watch a god put shots. I wondered what Bucky Schmidt was thinking in the middle of his spin. I doubt it was snapperholes, or even to accelerate. The word “accelerate” would have slowed him down. The boy was pure blur.
“He’s a strange guy, but holy shit,” said that Badger, Baum. “And he throws longer in practice.”
“He doesn’t throw,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s not throwing. It’s putting. Shot-putting.”
“Sure thing,” said the Badger.
“Have you looked at his toes?” I said.
“Why would I do that?”
“Does he have a banjo?”
“Clarinet. I’ve seen it.”
“Can he talk?”
“Why wouldn’t he talk?”
“He’s a Jackson, right?” I said.
“He’s a Schmidt,” said the Badger. “Is that a Jackson? What’s a Jackson?”
“Ask Schmidt,” I said.
* * *
After the meet, Coach Monroe gathered us next to the field house.
“I want to thank you boys for a great year,” he said. “You really gave it your all.”
“We got killed today,” said Merk.
“You sure as hell did,” came a voice.
A stranger leaned on the field house wall.