5

Early Saturday afternoon, I jogged over to the weight room at the edge of the athletic field. I even did a few slow laps on the running track with that damn jump rope dangling around my neck when I first got there.

A dozen of my teammates were inside doing extra training, including Marshall and Toby, and we took turns lifting and spotting for each other.

“How you doing with the stupid jump rope?” Marshall asked me between sets of bench presses. “You ready to hang yourself with it yet?”

“I can make threesies,” I answered, laughing at myself.

“That’s about where I am, man,” said Marshall.

Then Toby grabbed the rope and said, “Watch this. I can keep it going good.”

He jumped twelve times in a row. Only he did it like a caveman, pounding each one out, without any rhythm at all.

“That’s not what Coach meant about us getting lighter on our feet,” I said. “He wants us to change our approach.”

“I think Coach forgot who we are. Maybe he should get that Alana to teach us,” said Marshall, swinging his wrists in two small circles and skipping an invisible rope. “Queer boy can sing, ‘Strawberry shortcake cream on top.’”

“I’m so glad you didn’t wipe the floor with him in English,” I said. “They would have suspended you from school and the team.”

“Adonis, did we tell you? We’re going to meet that dude’s pops later,” Toby said. “Right after this.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know my cousin Gavin. Well, he went to that big military recruiting office downtown. The one with all the branches together—army, navy, air force, marines,” Marshall said. “The head officer over there is queer boy’s father—the colonel. My cousin saw that his name tag said HARPRING. So he asked him, ‘Do you have a relative that goes to my high school, Alan Harpring?’ ‘That’s my son,’ he says. ‘But you won’t be in any competition with him for a good assignment in the military. He’s not the type.’”

“Imagine your own pops doing you like that to a stranger,” said Toby.

“Makes sense to me,” said Marshall. “A colonel’s not some nobody private or corporal. He’s got a serious rep to uphold.”

Even so, I couldn’t imagine Dad dumping on me that way, no matter how much I disappointed him.

For months, Toby and Marshall had been talking about joining the military.

I thought that fit them perfectly.

Toby seemed to like taking orders. And Marshall, who already had a buzz cut, was good at giving them, unless Ethan was barking them out. Then they were both good soldiers, usually following through on whatever Ethan said.

Maybe I was in that army, too. But at least I could think for myself and make my own decisions.

I hadn’t given much thought to joining the real military.

Dad had served five years in the Coast Guard Reserves. He’d always said it helped him land the job with the fire department. So when those two offered me a ride to the recruiting office with them, I decided to tag along and check it out. But deep down, I was probably more interested in seeing what Alan’s father was like.

We walked into the recruiting office, past all the posters of straight-backed steel-eyed men in uniforms that read, BE ALL YOU CAN BE; AN ARMY OF ONE; CROSS INTO THE BLUE; and THE FE W, THE PROUD.

A sergeant told us the high-school recruits were at a park two blocks away, doing physical training.

“They’re all high-school students like yourselves, interested in the military way of life, and what wearing a uniform can bring them,” said the sergeant. “Some are waiting till they graduate to sign up. Others are testing it out, making sure it’s a commitment they want to make. Either way, you’ll have to speak with Colonel Harpring first, and that’s where he is, grooming the recruits.”

The three of us were wearing sweats, so when we arrived at the park, Alan’s father must have figured we belonged to that group of high-school recruits. There were nearly twenty of them doing jumping jacks, with him watching through a pair of dark shades.

“Soldiers are never late,” he snapped at us. “That’s because we’re not individuals. We arrive, train, and leave together as a unit. I’ve already stressed this to you.”

“No, sir,” Toby said. “We’ve never met you before. This is our first time here.”

Colonel Harpring was a half inch taller than me—or maybe he just stood up straighter. His barrel chest was decorated with at least ten shining medals, topped off by a silver eagle looking off to the side. And despite standing in the bright sun in his uniform jacket and hat, he was the only one of us who wasn’t sweating.

“We came by to find out about joining up after we graduate,” Marshall said. “We go to Central High, sir.”

It sounded like Marshall said “Central High” fishing for a reaction from the colonel about Alan. But there wasn’t any.

Instead, the colonel arched his back, took off his shades, and said, “We’ve had both successes and failures with recruits from Central before. However, whether you’re a success or a failure is squarely on your own shoulders, no one else’s.”

I wasn’t about to mention Alan’s name. And I knew Marshall and Toby weren’t really interested in getting on the wrong side of him, either.

“Compete at any team sports there? ” he asked us. “That’s the mark of a military mind-set.”

“Varsity football,” Marshall answered. “We’re starters on the offensive line.”

He asked our names, and when I told him, “Adonis,” he said, “That’s a strong name, full of character. Maybe you’ll be one of the success stories. Perhaps that name will provide the backbone you’ll need. How did you come by it?”

I skipped the part about that naked statue with the perfect body, and I told him how Dad had named me after his favorite wrestler.

“Adrian Adonis,” the colonel said. “I remember him well. A pretty boy with long, golden locks of hair. He was a beast of a man, but his vanity always got in the way. He lost a match one time looking for a mirror. ”

I went on to say how Dad served in the Coast Guard. But I could tell the colonel had stopped listening before I was finished.

“Join the others in some PT for now,” he ordered. “PT, that’s physical training—the body and mind working as one, a single weapon. We’ll discuss your recruitment options later.”

I put my nose down into the grass to do push-ups, thinking how it couldn’t have been his father’s fault that Alan was the way he was. The colonel looked solid as a rock and could have been the figure on any of those recruiting posters.

So I figured that maybe Alan’s mother was one of those closet lesbians, passing down some kind of gay gene to him. And that’s why she wasn’t in the picture anymore.

PT ended when the sergeant from the recruiting office showed up in a camouflage-painted truck. Then all of those gung-ho high-school recruits, half of them with buzz cuts, started unloading chairs and fold-up tables from the back of it.

The sergeant set up trays of food filled with fried chicken, potato salad, and coleslaw.

“That’s the best part of the military,” said Marshall. “They feed you, give you clothes, and put a roof over your head—all for free. All you got to do is say ‘Yes, sir,’ and let them do the thinking for you.”

No one touched a bite until everyone was seated and had a plate of food in front of them. There was one open seat at the head of the table, and I thought that was being saved for Alan’s father. But the sergeant took it instead.

I asked Toby and Marshall about that, and Toby said, “Officers only eat with other officers. A colonel probably wouldn’t even talk to recruits if it wasn’t his job to get them to join up. He’d mostly tell a sergeant or somebody what he wanted, and they’d tell you.”

On the sergeant’s order, we all started to chow down. It was almost like having a picnic in the park with rules and regulations. And if an army of puny ants had shown up to ruin it, I’m sure we would have wiped them off the face of the earth.

Alan’s father stood watching from about fifteen feet away while we ate, without saying a single word. He even had someone else hand the three of us recruiting folders with his name and phone number on them.

“He must want to disown his fag son,” whispered Marshall.

“Big-time,” said Toby. “Alan’s the crud from his gene pool, real pond scum.”

“What kinds of things do you think they do together?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” answered Marshall. “But I could make a whole list of the things they don’t do.”

“Yeah, like get facials and have their nails done,” said Toby.

I figured Colonel Harpring was an expert at forcing recruits to fall into line for their own good. The same way Dad had learned to hoist someone who was unconscious onto his shoulders and carry him from a burning building.

So Alan must have just been a hopeless case.

 

 

 

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, WHILE JEANNIE WAS DOING HER homework at the kitchen table, I said, “I met your friend’s father, the colonel, down at the recruiting office. Are you sure they’re related? I’ve never seen two more total opp—”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” Jeannie cut me off. “What I know from Alan is that he’s a bully, with lots of problems about his own identity.”

“Are you serious? His father’s a big-shot officer down there,” I said, grabbing an almost-empty quart of milk from the fridge, before lifting the carton to my lips.

“And why do you think he needs to be a big shot in a uniform?” asked Jeannie. “Because he’s confident or insecure?”

I wiped my sleeve across my mouth and said, “That’s crazy talk. Who sold you on that? Alan? Because I don’t think identity is something he’s got his arms wrapped completely around.”

“Why don’t you enlist with his father, then? You already wear one stupid uniform. What are you going to do for status when high school’s over? You’re not getting a football scholarship to college. None of you are. You only won three out of ten games last year.”

“Get lost! And there’s no status for you in being vice president of the Fashion Club?”

“Why would you ask that? You don’t think there’s any for Alan in being president,” she said, tapping her pen on the open page in front of her.

“Hey, even if me and my teammates do lose games, at least we know what we are—straight.”

Once that came out of my mouth, I knew it sounded way too mean. But she was the one who’d started it.

“And who did you go to the recruiting office with?”

“Toby and Marshall.”

“So the three of you were just checking out joining a new team. One where you’ll sleep in a barrack full of men, with no women around. Maybe you and your friends should look a little closer at yourselves, Adonis.”

“And it’s not the same in the Fashion Club when girls try to dress each other to look hot?”

“Then I guess you just proved it. Alan’s the only straight one here,” said Jeannie, slamming her notebook shut.

I had more I could say, but I didn’t want to go another round with her. So I bit my tongue, and I let Jeannie collect all her books and walk off thinking she’d won something.

I stayed home that night to do my own schoolwork and study my playbook.

Dad was on duty at the firehouse, so Mom called out the plays for me. I listened to the numbers and told her where I was supposed to be on the field.

“Pro right, fifteen smash,” said Mom.

“Fifteen is Ethan’s number. That’s a quarterback sneak,” I said. “I don’t go anywhere. I just get as low and strong as I can, and try to move the pile of players at the line of scrimmage forward.”

After my nailing thirty of them in a row, Mom asked, “How come you can memorize all of these numbers and symbols, but you can’t pull an A in trigonometry?”

The answer was because it didn’t mean as much to me as football.

But I was smart enough to just shrug my shoulders and say, “I just can’t figure it out. I must have some kind of mental block.”

Then Mom asked out of nowhere, “How’d your date with Melody go?”

My brain froze for a second, searching for the right story. Until I realized I could tell Mom the truth, because nothing had really happened.

“Her parents were at a party, so we hung out at her house and played games.”

“Games, huh? Well, you must have had your fill of fun then, to be staying home on a Saturday night.”

“No, really, we played games. And I don’t mean Truth or Dare. We played board games and stuff,” I said. “I’m just tired tonight. I had two training sessions today, with some of my teammates in the morning and those recruits in the afternoon.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard enough about the idea of you in the military for a while. I’m still getting used to the violence of football. I don’t need to think about you being in a war zone somewhere,” said Mom as she handed me back my playbook.

“That’s all right, I’m not sold on it, either.”

Another part of staying home that night had to do with me not wanting to run into Melody. She could be out with her friends, and I didn’t want to stress over saying or doing the right things if I ran into her.

I left everything perfect with Melody last night, asking her out for next Saturday at the end of our date. I’d lined it up great, knowing she’d be in the stands for our home game next Friday under the lights. And I’d probably see her after the game, too, while I was still in my uniform. So it was going to be like having a lock on her for most of the weekend.

Before I went to bed, the sweet smell of chocolate filled the house.

It wasn’t easy, but I passed on the walnut brownies Mom and Jeannie baked.

“I’m in serious training!” I called down to them from my bedroom. “Don’t tempt me!”

I looked into the mirror and pinched more than an inch of blubber around my belly. Then I thought about how I might look in swim trunks next summer, standing beside Melody in a bikini.

So I got down on the floor, hoping to knock out two hundred crunches.

I almost made it, but I started to really sweat. And Barclay tried licking at my face so hard, I had to quit with thirty left to go.

 

 

 

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, DAD WAS HOME AND WE BOTH SETTLED on the living room couch to watch the opening week of pro football on TV. The Baltimore Ravens were playing the Washington Redskins in the first game.

“I guess for the next five months, until the Super Bowl, you two are going to dedicate nine hours of every Sunday to parking yourselves in front of that TV and watching football—the one o’clock game, the four o’clock game, the Sunday night game. Oh, and I forgot, Monday Night Football,” said Mom, who was sitting at a side table making her third-grade lesson plans for the following week. “I tell my students all the time, ‘Forget the video games and SpongeBob cartoons—go out and play, get some exercise.’ Don’t you two ever feel like you’re wasting your lives, watching other people live theirs? ”

“Excuse me, that’s why I actually play football,” I answered.

“And what’s your excuse?” she asked Dad.

“In case you’ve forgotten, I save lives so people can live them,” he said, dipping another chip into a bowl of salsa. “This is my relaxation, and it’s time I spend with my son.”

“Besides, it’s educational, too,” I told Mom. “Do you know how the Ravens got their name?”

“Tell me,” she said. “I can’t wait to hear.”

“It’s from that poem ‘The Raven.’ The writer’s buried in Baltimore.”

“Is that why their uniforms are purple, because of Poe’s purple curtains?” she asked.

“What curtains?” I said, confused.

“The ones in the poem you’ve obviously never read,” she said.

“I read it once—Nevermore,” I said with a grin.

Dad even gave me a high five over that line.

“Do you know lots of Native Americans consider the name ‘Redskins’ to be an insult and a slur?” Mom asked. “There are even some newspapers that won’t print their name, and just call them ‘Washington.’”

“All nonsense,” said Dad. “They should never change a team’s name on account of that. It’s tradition, what people are used to hearing.”

“They say it’s as insulting as if there was a team called the N-word after African Americans or the S-word after Hispanics,” Mom kept on.

Then I turned to Dad and asked, “You’ve heard of the Green Bay Packers, right? Well, you know what my friend Marshall said Alan would want to name our project team in English class?”

“No, what?”

“The Fudge Packers.”

“So that’s the project you’re working on with Alan,” Mom said over Dad’s laughing. “Now I get your Ravens comment.”

“Know who’d be the most popular player on that Fudge Packers team?” Dad asked me.

“No, who?”

“Don’t say it,” Mom warned him.

“The tight end,” said Dad as Mom picked up all of her books and headed for the kitchen.

“I’ll leave you two children alone,” she said, annoyed. “Let me know if either of you grows up anytime soon.”

“Your mother doesn’t understand what we share. That when it comes to fathers and sons, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“You wouldn’t know it by seeing Alan’s dad, the colonel.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. He’s got no reason to complain,” Dad said, starting to crack up again. “From what you tell me, at least his son’s some kind of fruit.”

And we shared a double-handed high five to celebrate that one.

The game was going great, with lots of hard hitting. That had me and Dad pumped. So at halftime, we grabbed a football and went out into the backyard to have a catch. And we made a point to tell Mom that we were getting our butts outside for some exercise and to “live our own lives” for a while.

Dad could really throw a tight spiral, better than me.

I’d watch the spinning laces on the ball cut through the air and into my hands.

Barclay ran back and forth between us, shadowing the first twenty passes or so, before he hunkered down in the grass, exhausted.

“You serious at all about the military?” Dad asked. “It’s a big commitment.”

“I don’t know. They ask an awful lot from you. Maybe the reserves.”

“Not much different than being on a football team,” Dad said, throwing me another bullet pass. “I’ve got confidence you could handle it.”

“I hate to say it, but Alan’s dad looked pretty impressive with all those medals pinned to his chest. That would turn girls’ heads.”

In my mind, I had a picture of Melody hanging off my arm, with me dressed in a sharp-creased military uniform.

“What was your rank in the Coast Guard Reserves?” I asked Dad.

“I was a seaman, first class.”

“That’s it? No medals or nothing?”

“Look, that colonel’s a lifer. Probably took him a lot of years to move up the ranks. I had other talents. I was practically born to be a firefighter.”

“How’s that?”

“I can smell smoke a mile away.”

I was about to say, Yeah, as long as it’s not in your own firehouse.

But I didn’t.

Dad’s arm must have been getting tired, because his next pass missed me by five feet. And I had to chase it to the far corner of the yard, up against the back fence where Barclay usually did his business.

I could smell the stench of urine soaked into the ground when I picked up the ball, and I didn’t want to even touch it after that. So I gave it a kick back toward the house with my foot.

But when I looked up, Dad was already heading inside.

“Come on, Adonis, the game is gonna start up again.”

The second half was as good as the first. The score was tied at 17, with just three minutes to go.

Then Mom came into the living room and said, “Adonis, it’s almost four o’clock. I need you to pick up your sister and her friends from the movies.”

“No way, I’ll miss the end of the game.”

“Would you rather cook dinner and I’ll go get them?” Mom asked in a pointed tone. “Remember, our deal about you using my car on the weekends had to do with you taking more responsibility. If you want to back out of it over a football game, that’s fine.”

I could see myself taking Melody out on a city bus—or worse, her driving me.

“Dad, can I at least take the Trans Am?”

“No.”

“Why not? You got Mom’s Honda here, in case you get a fire call.”

“It’s not all about that,” said Dad. “The car’s a fourth-generation Firebird Trans Am. Pontiac stopped making them seven years ago and is now out of business. I grew up on those cars. They’re all I ever drove. I don’t want to waste some of the miles it’s got left so you can make a movie run. Besides, new drivers are hard on cars—the engine, brakes, dings, dents.”

“I understand. You want to deny your only son the same opportunity you had growing up, to sit behind the wheel of an American classic,” I said, laying on the guilt thick. “I’ll probably have to settle for driving some Japanese crap one day, with a name I can’t even pronounce. How do they say it—‘Hi-un-dai’?”

“Here,” Dad finally conceded, tossing me the keys. “And it’s only because you’re missing the end of the game.”

“The movie’s over at four oh five. They’re at the Orpheum,” Mom said. “They’ll be waiting outside.”

I didn’t want to let on, but I’d trade the ending of that game for driving Dad’s car anytime, especially when I could catch the highlights later on ESPN.

Dad’s Firebird was white, with a single blue stripe running down the center. That was exactly the same as the Central High team colors. The car practically hugged the ground, and it had a rear spoiler and pop-up headlights. It was powerful, too, a real muscle car with a V-8 engine beneath the hood.

It had been nearly three months since I was behind the wheel of that gorgeous baby, and that was with Dad riding shotgun. Now I was flying solo.

At a red light two blocks from the Orpheum, a pair of good-looking girls gave me the eye as they crossed the street, right in front of me. I revved the engine high and felt all that horsepower. Then, when the light turned green, I punched the gas and took off down the street like I owned it.

It was already 4: 08. There were plenty of people outside the theater to see me in that sleek sports car, but Jeannie and her girlfriends were nowhere in sight.

After a few more minutes, I looked up at the marquee. There was a horror movie and two shoot-’emup flicks playing. None of them was the kind Jeannie would go to see.

So I figured Mom had screwed up, and that they had gone to the Premiere, six or seven blocks in the opposite direction.

By the time I got there, Jeannie and her friends had walked all the way up to the corner and were starting home on their own. That’s when I saw that she was with Alan and another girl.

I thought about hitting the horn to get their attention.

But I didn’t want anyone seeing me drive Alan around.

What if he tried to sit up front? What if we ran into somebody from the team?

It was a no-brainer. Mom had given me the wrong theater. That was the perfect excuse. So I just let the three of them keep right on walking. And I took the long way home, looking for more girls to impress.