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.
“I’m sorry about the jokes, Dad. I don’t know what got into me. If I could take it back, I would. If I—”
“Nope,” he says. “This is mine. I’ve raised you for seventeen years, Johnny. And it’s come to this. I wanted it to be different. I really did. I swore…” For the first time ever, and I mean ever, I hear my father break into sobs. I lay a hand on his shoulder, but he brushes it away.
“You want me to leave, Dad?”
He nods.
At the Winter Sports Awards banquet, my father stands before a crowd of athletes and their parents for the first time since he wrestled me. He is immensely uneasy but determined. Dad is there to re-present the 160 state championship trophy to me. The crowd waits in silence. Dad swallows hard. “I’m going to write a novel,” he begins. “An epic novel about our two cats. Their names are Huntley and Brinkley….”
The Other Pin
PREFACE
THE OTHER PIN
There is an idiom in athletics (though when I played sports, people used to say, “There is an idiot in athletics”) that humiliation breeds character. As a freshman in high school I was made to go against my two-years-older, fifty-pounds-heavier brother in blocking and tackling drills, in order to experience the character-building adventure of being likened unto a pancake.
My first year as a competitive swimmer in college, my swimming coach entered me in a preseason 200 freestyle race against, among others, Steve Krause, who at the time held the world record in the 1,650 freestyle. Two hundred yards in a traditional twenty-five-yard pool requires one to swim a mere eight laps. When I finished that race, Krause was gone. He wasn’t resting comfortably in his lane, shaking hands with the other competitors; he wasn’t even up on the deck drying off. He was gone.
Petey Shropshrire, small and tentative, is about to face one of the biggest challenges of his athletic career: a wrestling match with an athlete all his peers dread to face. He is plagued by constant, gnawing hunger, as he is commanded to drop to the lowest weight of his less than brilliant wrestling career, only to be almost certainly humiliated at the moment of truth.
The person to whom Petey normally turns for support—his friend Johnny Rivers—is the person who got him into this jam in the first place. He finds himself with no place to turn but the source of the problem itself.
THE OTHER PIN
“I need somebody to wrestle Byers,” Coach says, and all the grapplers under 125 pounds stare hard at the mat. Johnny Rivers moves in close to Petey Shropshrire, digging an elbow into his ribs. Petey remains quiet and still as a statue, knowing Coach, like the great moonlight auctioneer he is, will take any sound or movement as a bid.
“Do it,” Johnny whispers. “This is a chance to wrestle varsity again. Might get you enough points to letter.”
“I’d go with the number one person at that weight,” Coach continues, spitting his chaw of tobacco into the paper cup that has been with him so long it seems part of his hand, “but Byers is a special case, and I need a man who can handle that.”
No one steps forward.
“Someone has to do it,” Coach continues. “Chris Byers is gonna be wrestling one-twelve or one-nineteen all year long. Silver Creek has a good team this year; we can’t afford to forfeit. An’ we ain’t gonna. Either I get a volunteer, or I get me a volunteer.”
“Do it!” Johnny whispers again. “It’s not gonna be that bad.”
“It’s humiliating,” Petey whispers back. “You don’t win against Chris Byers.”
“You don’t win against Johnny Rivers either,” Johnny says. “But that doesn’t stop guys from wrestling me.”
“That’s different. You just win. Byers humiliates.”
“That may be. But we’ve got a good chance to win regionals this year. Maybe even state. Somebody has to wrestle Byers. Horseshoe Bend forfeited at that weight and lost the match because of it. We can’t afford that, so reach for the sky, sidewinder. Give a little for the cause.” Johnny pinches the inside of Petey’s leg, hard, and Petey screeches, bolting forward.
“Shropshrire,” Coach says. “Gutsy move. I knew a hero would show hisself. A pin’ll give you just about what you need for your letter, won’t it? You wrestled varsity twice already, ain’t you?”
Petey starts to protest the nature of his volunteer move but knows Coach well enough to know it’s a done deal. Petey glances around the room. The other guys at lower weights smile again, all looking tremendously relieved. Petey wonders if this time he has truly bitten off more than he can chew. Nobody wants to wrestle Chris Byers. He makes a mental note to launch a pipe bomb through Johnny Rivers’s bedroom window tonight. “Yeah, I guess so,” he says, but somehow that doesn’t ease his sense of dread.
“Look at this as a spiritual challenge,” Elmer Shropshrire says. “There’s often something to be gained, taking on a task that others shy away from.”
“You’re not giving me the kind of help I’m asking for, Dad,” Petey says. He is again in the familiar spot of having to tell his father what advice he seeks. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Don’t do it, son. You can’t win. Save yourself.’”
Elmer sits back. He has dedicated his life to clearing the way for his only child, and he hurts inside each time he fails, which seems far too often. A tall, beefy man with a waistline like an equator and a dearth of athletic talent, he has long been elated at his son’s interest in sports. Petey excels at baseball, and that is his love; but in a town as small as Coho, Montana, there are many other opportunities, and for the past two years, mostly because of the urgings of his friend Johnny Rivers, Petey has filled the winter months with wrestling. So far he hasn’t been great, but his quickness keeps his shoulders off the mat and his name consistently in the number two spot, with the opportunity to wrestle varsity on occasions when number one wrestles up or down a weight class. Or when it comes time to wrestle the likes of Chris Byers. “What can I do really, son?” Elmer asks now. “What would help you?”
“We could move away,” Petey says. “Maybe some other state. After the match we’ll have to anyway. I’ll be too humiliated to show my face, and unless you and Mom have skin like elephant hide, you’ll be too humiliated, too. So just be looking for a new location. Maybe the East Coast. We could get into sailin
g. Wear those fancy white pants and blue blazers with anchors on the pockets. We’ll tell people we’re related to the Kennedys. Get a family coat of arms. Cover our tracks, Dad, hear me? Cover them good. No one will ever know I wrestled Chris Byers.”
Petey’s dad smiles. In truth, it tickles him when Petey gets wound up like this, running 90 mph at the mouth and 10 in the brain. He never teases Petey in this state, however, because Petey takes impending tragedy quite seriously, and laughing at him serves only to aggravate his condition. “Petey,” he says when Petey stops to breathe, “you’ll do fine. It’s only three rounds out of your entire wrestling career, and no matter what happens, it’ll be over in ten minutes at most.”
“When it’s over is when it starts, Dad. Because then I have to shower and dress and face the world. I have to show my face at school, Dad, and on the street. It’s Chris Byers this and Chris Byers that all over the sports page after every match. If Johnny Rivers got half that much attention, he’d be all-state without ever stepping on the mat.”
“You have to understand it’s a human interest story,” Elmer says. “No matter how you feel, Chris Byers has gone through a lot, beaten heavy odds. The best thing you can do is go out there, hold your head up, and wrestle your best match. That’s all anyone can ask. Anybody wants to give you a hard time after that, that’s their problem.”