Slot Machine (7 page)

T
HE BASEBALL DOOR CLOSED
as abruptly as it had opened. New day, new slot, new Elvin. By decree. “Wrestling, Thor? How do you come up with that?”

“There were a lot of casualties the last two days out of wrestling. Slots are open. Besides, it’s the only program that actually has a category with your name on it: Junior Heavyweight.”

“Come on, don’t you have anything else?”

“Sure,” he said, smiling. “I could squeeze you into Swimming Sector, but you gotta wear this.” Out of his breast pocket Thor produced a Lycra Speedo bathing suit, grape with diagonal lime-green lightning bolts. He pulled it down over his fist, and it fit snugly.

“One size fits all,” he said, smirking.

“I should,” I said, sounding almost like I meant it. “It’d serve you all right, to look at me in that thing. I’d wear it to all the meals.”

He continued to hold it out to me.

“Where do I get my wrestling gear?” I moaned.

“At the venue.” He pointed up the hill to the hall.

When I turned to go, I was surprised to feel Thor’s arm on me. He gripped my forearm hard and pulled me back.

“Elvin, I want to give you some advice. You’re a funny kid, and I like you. You don’t take the whole slotting thing seriously, and that’s cool, but for your own sake just try to take it a little
more
seriously. Try to find a place. I don’t want to say nothing bad about the school now, but it could be a long four years for a guy if he doesn’t have a place. Know?”

He looked so serious, as if he was telling me of a death in the family, that he gave me a chill. I couldn’t answer him, couldn’t really tell if he’d even asked me anything.

“Just a
little
more seriously, that’s all. It’s better for a guy like you, in a big school. You want to have a place. You
don’t
want to not have a place. Just advice. Okay, Elvin?”

That time, it sounded like a question. “Okay,” I said, because Thor seemed to want to help me. But I didn’t know what I could do with that advice.

When I walked up the steps of the dining hall, under the poor semi-naked Massachusetts Indian that I was staring at more and more, I felt my stomach knot.

“Ah, and in they continue to roll,” the perfect coach announced. In a crowd of a thousand people you would point to this man—hard and energetic and crew cut—and say this guy is a wrestling coach. “The traditional day-three football washouts,” he said, up on his toes and gesturing as he spoke. “Am I right?”

“You are right,” I said. “Except I’m a two-day football washout via a one-day layover in baseball.”

“Catcher!” Coach said, excited by his own savvy.

“Catcher it was,” I said.

“Well, son, I do hope you find a home here with the Grappling Knights. We’d love to have you.”

He was a little corny, but he sounded all right. My stomach briefly unballed. Then I got a load of the grunting, Grappling Knights.

In a weird way it was as if I had made a wish and found it had been granted. When Thor held up that Speedo, one size fits all, I shrank inside, feeling like that was the farthest thing from what I needed now. So instead I wound up with the wrestling squad, whose motto should have been all sizes fit one sport.

It made sense when I saw them. Unlike other sports, I was assigned this one because I
fit
. The wrestling team had a built-in slot for me—junior heavyweight—just like Thor said. And they have slots for a lot of other freaks too. It was a world defined purely by weight, the first thing that was clearly laid out since I got here.

It was probably rude, the way I stood in the middle of the floor and stared at them before getting too close. But the way they were so relaxed about it, I figured I wasn’t the first. Some of them just flopped, several stretched out their legs and arms, bending and kicking and wind-milling as if they were already at work, battling some invisible opponents. A couple of tight, compact, round-muscled guys did this thing where they locked arms back to back and took turns lifting each other off the floor. They enjoyed it so much, they took the show on the road, lifting, walking, dropping the other guy, then being lifted, walked, dropped, until they made a circuit of the whole hall.

The world of weight.
I
was merely a junior heavyweight. Which meant that above me were two more weight classes: heavyweight and super heavyweight. And for practice purposes they tried to have two of each on hand, which meant this group had several people even
bigger
than my last club.

Below the heaviest weights were the real athletes: middleweights, junior middleweights, welterweights. These guys were the cat family, coiled, edgy, muscled, with a thin layer of flesh strapped tight over the sinew. They were mean, and could have played with the football or hockey teams if they had wanted to, except those sports didn’t allow the close personal head twisting and leg bending so popular in wrestling. Not to mention, of course, the pinning of another guy by forcing his legs up over his head.

The bottom tier of Grappling Knights was more motley than all the others. Featherweights, bantamweights, flyweights. The titles pretty much say it all: At the Olympic level you might see a tiny guy who is scary and intense and strong, who just happens to be small boned. But in the general population, when they’re just trying to fill the slot of “peanuttiest little guys,” the result is a collection of skeletons, anemics, and leprechauns who might possibly be able to scare the chess team, but also might not.

At the top of the ladder we had an honest-to-god giant. Not a great big guy, but a guy with some kind of gland thing that made his head the same width as his hips and his hands the size of stop signs.

At the bottom we had a dwarf. A very mean, stocky three-foot-nine bantam.

“Here ya go, man,” the coach said brightly, tossing me my one-piece outfit. His name, written in marker across the front of his tight T-shirt, was Coach Wolfe.

I took the outfit into the dressing room/equipment room/kitchen and strapped it on. It was like one of those old-timey bathing suits guys like Charlie Chaplin and The Great Gatsby used to wear, with the squared-off legs and the thin shoulder straps. It was red, of course. I felt naked, shuffling back into the main dining hall, the way the stretchy material clung to the rolling terrain of me and blended with the rosy pinkness of my embarrassed skin tone.

And it crawled. I pulled it out. It crawled back up. I stretched the straps as far as possible to relieve some of the tension. They snapped back up. By the time I’d crossed the whole floor to where the team was assembled, they were all watching my crab-walking-cheek-squeezing-pick-the-thong-out-of-my-butt dance.

“Hey, man, synchronized swimming is down at the pool,” one guy called, bringing hoots of laughter. I sized him up as he smirked at me. He was a junior heavyweight, of course. Only
his
fat seemed to come with some muscles.

It was about evenly divided between guys who were there because they were real wrestlers and wanted to be on the school team and guys who were there just because, well, everybody’s got to be somewhere. My partner, the smart-mouth guy, was a wrestler wrestler.

“Okay, Bishop, Metzger, square off. Let’s see what we got now in junior heavy. It’s been pretty boring for poor ol’ Metz up till now.”

“How unfortunate,” I thought as I reluctantly approached the center of the mat. “My opponent has been bored, waiting for me. He’s had nobody his own size to pick on for three whole days.”

The other wrestlers gathered around the edges of the mat. Metzger stood across from me, two feet of very thin air separating us. He crouched, staring right into my eyes. I wished I was back in football. I crouched and could see my hands trembling on my knees. I thought about Frankie, for some reason. Wished he was here. Mikie too. I felt like I wanted to run. A feeling that came over me
very
infrequently. I couldn’t do that, I knew. So when Wolfe screeched the whistle, I blasted straight ahead.

I had no idea. All this time, and I never even knew. But now, pushed to the wall, I found out about myself, as many others in history have found their own hidden greatness, through adversity. I found my niche: I was a
great
wrestler.

With my initial burst, I drove Metzger backward. He was stunned by my aggressiveness. I pressed the attack, taking advantage of the situation the way all great strategists must. I blasted him again. He looked to the sidelines, stunned, for help. Too bad, Metz. I grabbed him. I twisted him. I bent him to my will.

“What the f—” he yelped.

Power like nothing else I’d ever known surged through my body. I wanted to wrestle, and I never wanted to stop wrestling.

So I didn’t. Metzger, beaten into cowardice, had his back to me by the time I caught him for the final destruction. I laughed out loud. Metzger gurgled in my grip.

I felt the footsteps pounding toward me from three sides. They’d be hoisting me to their shoulders any second. The messiah of the wrestling program.

There was a scream. “You can’t do that!”

I continued to squeeze Metzger’s windpipe.

Hands were all over me then. “You can’t do that!” There was that scream again.

I gouged the eye. I bit the top of his head.

“Cut that out. Stop it. Stop right now.” That was the coach. He joined three others in dragging me off, all pinning me down at once. Only then, looking into the coach’s soft black eyes, did I get it.

Apparently, I had the wrong kind of wrestling.

“I
can’t
?” I asked, when things had quieted down. I was back in the dressing kitchen, where Coach Wolfe was just now giving me the orientation he
should
have given me before.

“I can’t punch?”

He shook his head in disbelief. I was starting to get very familiar with this reaction around camp.

“I can’t kick? I can’t do the scissors, or the iron claw?”

He laughed. “I almost wish you could, Bishop. You’re bringing back some memories for me. But unfortunately no, this is a different kind of wrestling.”

“Well jeez, somebody could have
told
me,” I said, a little perturbed. Then I sank into a confidential whisper, as if what I told him next was a big secret. “Frankly, Coach, I’m not really a sports guy. I’m a TV guy. As far as I’m concerned, what I was doing was wrestling. I don’t know what the hell you people are doing.” I stared through a kitchen window, out to where the rest of the guys were practicing. “Look at that. One guy starts out on his hands and knees, and the other guy gets to jump on him. Does that seem fair to you?”

Coach walked up and slapped me on the back of the neck. It hurt like hell, but the look on his face indicated it was a friendly, sports-guys gesture, so I didn’t mind too much. With that kindly grip on my brain stem, he guided me back out to the floor. “Yes, actually it does, but you have to understand the game first. The real game. We’ll get you some coaching,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”

First order of business in my rehabilitation was apologizing to Metzger.

“Sorry, Metzger,” I mumbled, although the sight of him still sitting slumped, rubbing his chafed throat, gave me a little rush all over again.

“Ya,” he grunted. “Well, it didn’t hurt anyway, except when you were scratching.”

“I never scratched you.”

“Yes you did, blob.”

“Oh ya, I’ll do it again if you don’t watch—” I pulled to get out of Coach’s grip, but he held me with three fingers without even trying too hard.

“We’ll pair you up with somebody else for a while,” Coach Wolfe said.

The somebody else turned out to be Eugene the Giant. In the all-important nickname industry within juvenile athletics, Eugene was known as “Eugene No-Hygiene.” At first I thought, “How cruel.” Until I worked, closely, with the guy for a day. He’d earned that nickname. By the second day I was a better wrestler simply because Eugene offended me so much. Did he change that underwear between days one and two? Legitimate question. Did he use deodorant? Not even a question. He was tough to get a hold on because of the thick layer of oil that laminated his entire person, from the top of his gargantuan, matted head along the whitehead-peaked range of his face to his long reptilian arms and legs. His coating was thick and unbreakable, like the Skin-So-Soft my mother used to slather all over me to keep the mosquitoes away. But it didn’t smell like Skin-So-Soft. No, no it did not smell like Skin-So-Soft.

The very worst of it was I liked Eugene. He was a big, powerful, gentle mutant bear, and he went out of his way to try and teach me some of what he knew about the sport. Which was considerable.

He kept setting me up in all the positions, teaching me how to break the hold or to press the attack.

“Here, put your hand here, on my wrist,” he said as he planted himself four on the floor. “The other arm around my waist. This knee up, the other one down.” He spoke slowly, the same way he walked, his legs and his words both unfolding gradually but determinedly. I put the hold on him.

“Spread your legs wider,” he said.

“I am.”

“No, wider, your balance is no good.”

“I can’t. That’s it.”

“You have to. Stretch.”

“Eugene, my legs are already further apart than they’ve ever been before. I’m afraid they’re traumatized with the whole separation thing.”

Eugene’s hands were a lot quicker than his feet or his speech. When it was clear I would not improve my balance, his left hand stabbed out behind him, seized my lower leg, and pulled. The leg came out from under me, he pushed my upper body backward with his, and I found myself
thunk
on the floor. When I hit, Eugene hit with me, pinning me, his glistening broad back pressed hard against my chest. He still held the leg, and used it to lever me to the floor.

“Get your shoulders up,” he grunted. “Don’t let me pin your shoulders to the floor.” It was almost comical, but that’s just what he was like. Straining to do something to me, while at the same time trying to teach me to stop him from doing it.

I tried. I pushed with whatever strength I had, but Eugene had all the angle. He had spread his big frame out in all directions, getting both feet and one hand flat on the floor, so that in addition to his strength and weight, his balance made it like trying to lift a gigantic manhole cover off of me.