Slot Machine (2 page)

“There is no such thing as liverwurst fritters,” Frankie said as I lay on my wooden slab of a bed, writing.

“Stop peeking over my shoulder,” I said. I folded the letter and stashed it in my locker. “And fine, then you tell me what we just ate.”

“Ah... calzone.”

“No way.”

“Corn dogs.”

“Corn dogs are shaped like hot dogs. These were shaped like cow pies.”

“Uh... okay, so what, Elvin, so they were liverwurst fritters. They were fine. You have to stop complaining about everything. We’ve been here for three hours and you already have a reputation as a whiner.”

“Ohhhh,” I whined, “now who said thaaaat...?” I flopped back down onto the bed, stretched out, stared at the brown water spot on the ceiling directly above me.

Frank came over and sat on the edge, pushing me. “Scoot over there, will you?” He gave me a series of shoves to make room for himself, as if I had anywhere to go. The big part of me hung over the other side of the bed.

“Listen, El,” he said very seriously and quietly, as guys unpacked and wrote letters and burped up liverwurst all around us. “I’ll help you out here, but I can’t do it all. You have to make some kind of effort. Certain kinds of guys get picked on more than others. Try not to be one of those kind of guys.”

“Ya, like fat guys,” I said. “What, am I going to not be fat while I’m here?”

“True, the fat doesn’t help,” said Frankie. “But that’s not it. You might as well be wearing a sign that says, ‘Hi, I’m Elvin. Abuse me.’ I mean, you have to be fat, okay, but you don’t have to be a dink or a geek or a feeb or a simp.”

“That’s just what my mother said when...”

“And stop talking about your mother all the time. Toughen up. Grow up. I’ll let you in on a little secret here. ...”

“Don’t tell me any secrets, Frank. I don’t want to know any secrets. I like not knowing what I don’t know.”

“It’s simple,” he preached on. “Act like me. Don’t make that face, Elvin. Junior high is dead.” He made a loud smacking sound with his big lips. “Kiss it good-bye. Bigger things lie ahead. You can’t be a lump anymore—you have to be a
mover
. Like myself, for example.”

What he was referring to, of course, was his
style.
He knew that he was pretty and manly at the same time and all grown up before the rest of us, and this gave him confidence. It was only a matter of time before the almost lewd, rock-and-roll way he acted in junior high went from “problem behavior” to star power. Nobody understood that better than Frankie himself.

“God’s gift to himself,” the girls in the school yard would snap as they sneaked peeks at him from behind.

“Yesss,” he would respond, hearing them every time.

But it was dangerous to act like he did. He acted big and beautiful because he was. Some of us were not equipped.

“Just try it,” he urged, waving me up off the cot, trying to raise me from the social dead. “Trust me, it’s all in the way you act. If you act like a slug, you’ll be a slug. But if you act like
moi
...”

I stood, moderately inspired.

“There you go,” he said. “Honestly,
I
act like me all the time, and it still makes me all tingly.

“And besides,” he added, “if you act like
you
here, they’ll kick your ass.”

I lay back down.

“And I won’t let them kick your ass, El,” he said, resting a hand on my belly. “Sure, I’ll die for your cookies, but I’d really rather not. So go ahead now, take a nap. This will work better if you have all your strength.”

They gave us an hour after dinner to either barf it up or keep it down. I figured it was one of those trial-by-fire things that would make men out of us. The kind of stuff that happened to Jesus and A Man Called Horse in the movies. I sweated it out on my bed, made it through cold turkey, did not lose the dinner. The first test was passed; I had a hunch it wasn’t the last.

Then we had to return to the scene of the crime, to receive The Message.

“We’re going to take the measure of you, men” were the first official words we heard. We were back in the woodsy A-frame dining hall/auditorium, and Brother Jackson was talking. He was in charge. In charge of the retreat, and in charge of the school. He wasn’t the headmaster; that was just a figurehead job. Jackson was the real thing:
Dean of Men
. I couldn’t wait to put that in a letter, because I was sure my mother would think I made it up.

Frankie leaned into me. We were at the core, the nub of the nub of the sweaty gathering of three hundred new freshmen. Frosh, we were called. A forest of half-popped Adam’s apples.

“They want to take the measure of
this
man, they better have a yardstick handy,” Frank hummed.

He had said so many things like that before dinner on this first day that I hardly even heard him by then. I was scanning the crowd for Mikie.

“Slotting,” Jackson boomed, his microphone turned up twenty times louder than it needed to be. “Slotting, we call it. We believe that each man has got a slot, a place in the big scheme of things, and to maximize the potential of each, it is in everybody’s best interest to find that slot at the earliest possible time.”

“I have a slot,” Frankie mumbled, “but
he’s
not going to find it.”

“Where’s Mikie?” I asked. “You seen him?”

“Ya, he’s right over there.” Frank waved his arm over half the hall, covering a hundred and fifty or so guys, giving none of his attention to me and all of it to the indoctrination. He actually seemed to like it.

Frankie was fitting in too well here. It was frightening. I needed Mike. Frank needed Mike too. While Frankie was game for anything, and I was game for nothing, Mike was Dad. That’s what we called him back at the old school, Dad. Everybody called him that, because of his sense, his radar for always knowing the way to go. Do this one. Don’t do that one. Don’t go there. That’s not funny. That’s cool. Everyone joked about it, called him Dad as if it was a cut. Sometimes, when he was too sensible, it got on our nerves. Then we called him Dud.

But we always listened to him, or wished we had. It was just a gift, something that was built into him. He was never wrong. I knew that for a fact, because he told me so.

We got split, though. Me and Frankie in one cabin, Mikie out there somewhere in one of the other nine
Families
. That’s what they called each group, a Family. As if we were different species of bugs, or Mafia factions. Whatever they called it, I didn’t connect. I felt like a baby bird dumped out of the nest, plummeting. I needed Mike. Frankie was like another baby bird dumped from the nest, but rocketing straight up. He needed Mikie too.

“I want to introduce to you men,” Brother Jackson boomed on, “Mr. Buonfiglio, one of our senior instructors here at the retreat. Now some of you may know Mr. Buonfiglio as the coach of our school’s Division Two state champion football team. But that’s not the reason he’s here. That would violate state regulations regarding having organized football camps before August fifteenth...” Like a comedian, Jackson let his words trail off as he scanned the audience, a sly smile spreading across his black thread lips. “And we wouldn’t want to do
that
now, would we?”

Hearty yucks started bubbling out here and there as guys started getting the joke.

“No, no, no. Mr. Buonfiglio is here in his capacity as freshman history teacher and academic advisor...” He didn’t have to pause for a laugh this time, the crowd picking right up on it, Buonfiglio blowing hard on his whistle—his academic advising whistle—to big applause.

“And this,” Jackson said, putting his hand on the shoulder of a taller, leaner, but just as grim-faced man as the not-football-coach, “is Mr. Rourke, who is
not
just the coach of the
three-time
state championship cross-country team, but also the study-hall proctor and guidance counselor. ...”

This was apparently the funniest thing anyone there had ever heard. The A-frame rocked under my feet and over my head.

On and on it went, through the murderers’ row of coaches who were teachers. I learned something as I shriveled in the middle of it all, hands cupped over my ears. I learned that the easier it is to spell someone’s laugh, the stupider that laugh sounds.

HOF-HOF-HOF-HOF was popular close to the stage.

HAR-AR-AR-AR-AR was the choice of most tall guys, the basketball players sprouting up here and there throughout.

GUH-HUH-GUH-HUH-GUH-HUH. God, the guh-huhs, bone chilling in their ignorance, they rose from all corners, like a noxious gas that you couldn’t see, but was going to get you.

HEE-AWW-HEE-AWW was Frankie’s brand. I knew that, wherever he was, Mikie wasn’t making a sound.

Mother.

Football camp. You sent me to football camp. How sweet. How did you ever guess? I did try soooo hard to keep my passion for smashing into other fat boys a secret, but you found me out, didn’t you? Who told? Come on now, who told?

Yours Muy Macho,

Elvin “Big Booty” Bishop

P.S. How do you like my new name? I hope you like it a lot because apparently it’s mine to keep. Locker-room camaraderie stuff, you know. Please address all my mail accordingly from now on.

We finally located Mikie and used one of our precious twenty-minute “Reflective Periods” to go see him. We get Reflectives three times a day: before breakfast, after lunch, after dinner. It was the only officially sanctioned time when we were not accountable to one function, one counselor, one location or another. Deep-thought time, to pull it all together, sort things out, see ourselves at one with... spiritual stuff. To the naked eye, it looked like almost everybody got closer to god in one of three ways: 1. smoking cigarettes, 2. sleeping, or 3. conducting party-of-one religious services in the bathroom.

We found Mikie in Cluster Seven. No, they’re not cabins, they’re “Clusters.” Frankie and I were clustering way over in Number Two.

Mikie came out and sat on a rock, hunched over, his chin on his fist. “I don’t know...” he kept saying while shaking his head. “I don’t know...”

“What happens if we escape?” I asked.

“You guys are big babies,” Frankie said. “When are you going to grow up? This could be the most fun you ever had. What, you want to spend all summer with Mommy?”

“Yes,” I blurted.

“I don’t know,” Mikie repeated. “It’s not so much the camp. Three weeks isn’t so hard. I’m just not so sure about the school. Is this what it’s going to be like? They’re a little... gung-ho for me.”

“Jeez, that’s exactly what you guys
need
,” Frankie said, “is a little gung-
ho
.” He pumped his fist when he said ho. “You’re the two boringest guys in the whole camp—”

“Retreat,” I corrected him.

“The two boringest guys in the whole retreat. I mean, I’m compromising myself just being seen here in the open with you.” He looked all around, as if the geek police were gaining on him.

“You been slotted yet for tomorrow?” I asked Mike. For starters we were allowed to tell the administration what we were best at, and if there was space, that was the area, or “Sector,” we’d go with. Then, after checking you out, if they decided otherwise, you’d be slotted elsewhere. So you gave them a list of at least two specialties.

“Hoop Sector,” Mike said, shrugging. “But I told them if they wanted I could also do Baseball Sector or run some track. How ’bout you?”

“I abstained,” I said.

“That was
so
damn embarrassing,” Frankie said. “In front of the whole Family.”

Mike liked it. “Abstained?” He laughed.

“Told the counselor—all right, how’s this, his name is
Thor
—that I was a conscientious objector, that the whole slotting thing was degrading, and that I had a lot of unslottable intangibles to contribute to the school.”

“Uh-oh. What did he say?”

“He scribbled for like five minutes in his notebook, then said they’d get back to me.”

“Yikes,” Mike said.

A bell gonged high up in the tower. Reflective Period was over in another five minutes. Time to hurry back to the Cluster to be with the Family.

“So what’s your slot, Frankie?” Mike called as we started back up the trail.

Frank spun to face Mikie, walking backward now. “Come on, Dad,” Frankie drawled, “what’s
always
been my slot?”

Mikie started shaking his head again, pointing sternly as Frank slapped himself on the rear, then galloped away like a horse. “Better watch yourself, Franko,” he warned.

What had Frankie’s slot always been?
Big persona,
mostly. And he set out immediately to make it so here too. First night we established the routine, everyone in Cluster Two gathering around for the stories. In another camp, they would have been ghost stories. Here, it was Frankie telling amazing-Frankie stories. My job was to nod, to corroborate, to verify that yes, I swear to god he did that, he actually did that. More or less.

“You remember that nun, don’t you, Elvin? Sure. She was a novice, actually, not quite a nun yet, still on the fence,
if ya know what I mean
.” He grabbed his thigh when he said it, and whenever he said it, he charged that phrase—
if ya know what I mean
—with more secret, smutty meaning than anything that ever popped up in the letters to
Penthouse
. “Well I’ll tell ya, she was on that fence when she came to our school, and she was tottering pretty bad when she left. Am I right, Elvin?”

I had forgotten if he was, strictly, right. But he told it so well, told it so
good
, that he always had me believing in him. “You are right, Frankie,” I said. I could enjoy this for a while, basking in a little bit of Frankie’s raunchy glamour. It was as close to the real thing as I was likely to get anytime soon.

“She wasn’t a nun like, you know, nuns. She was young. She wore a pair of Guess? jeans sometimes in the afternoons when she raked the churchyard, and let me tell you, she didn’t embarrass herself doing it either. Everybody fell in love the day she showed up, boys
and
girls, no lie. She looked like Keanu Reeves.”

“Oh, you’re full of it, man,” one big guy, football slotted, challenged.