IT’S NOT REALLY EVEN a weekend anyhow. In fact, it’s not even twenty-four hours. The parents arrive around midday on Saturday and are broomed back out again before lunch on Sunday.
It was one of the few moments that felt like they made sense. Mikie and I were sitting in the parking lot just watching cars roll up. Just like we would have been doing at about this point any other summer at home.
“I bet your mother gets here before my mother,” I said.
“Hnn,” he said.
“I mean it, Mikie. What do you want to bet? I’ll bet you anything.”
“Cut it out, Elvin. I don’t want to make bets on my mother.”
“Fine, take another mother,” I said. “I’ll stack my mother up against any mother in the joint. Or any father. I bet she’s the last one to show up. I bet I’m going to be sitting here with the crickets and the coyotes while everyone else is inside watching the talent show tonight and eating popcorn.”
“She’ll be here before Frankie’s folks.”
“No fair. Jesus will make an appearance before Frankie’s folks do.”
As I spoke, through the gate and up the drive came Mike’s mother’s little red Dodge Omni.
“See?” I said. “You owe me all your sick vouchers. Who’s next? Who else wants to take on my mother? She’s going to kick some big booty all over this camp.”
Mike left me there ranting while he went to the car to greet his mother, Brenda. I could call her Brenda, because she always said I could. And that wasn’t the only un-motherlike thing about her. She was smaller than us and red-headed and went on dates with men and did not mention it when one of our voices cracked even though everyone else in the world thought it was so damn funny. I was probably as anxious to see her when she stepped out of the car as Mikie was. As I always am.
She got out of the driver’s side and hugged him, which I loved. I stood stupidly watching it for a few seconds.
Then I fell back down on the seat of my pants. Out of the passenger side popped—my mother.
I was cool. I got back up, walked super slowly to the Omni, and shook my mother’s hand.
“This a new car, Brenda?” I asked while still shaking my mother’s hand. Brenda waved me off, and Mom started laughing. She thinks every single thing I say is a laugh riot whether I intend it to be or not.
“Still at it, are we Elvin? I suppose you’re chewing up everybody’s slippers since I left you too.”
Brenda came over and gave me a hug.
“Good,” I said as she squeezed me to her. “You’ll take me home now, won’t you?”
“You putting on weight?” she asked, holding me at arm’s length.
“Yes, he is,” Mikie chipped in unsolicited.
I pointed at myself as I spoke. “I’m in an athletic program,” I enunciated. “I’m bulking up.”
“And down,” Mike said.
Mom came up beside me and put an arm over my shoulders for moral support. I tried to be cool to her without scaring her off.
“So I have added a few pounds since I’ve been here. But I tell you, it’s the training. Muscle weighs more than fat, you know.”
“Ya, but a whole lot of fat still weighs more than a medium amount of muscle,” Mike said.
“You look wonderful,” my mother said, squeezing me.
“Strapping,” Brenda said.
It worked. I felt wonderful and strapping, and gave Mikie a face that said so. Sometimes I think he gets a little jealous because I’m needier than him and the mothers mother me a little more out of instinct.
“Well, now that the size of my butt is out of the way,” I said, “should we show you around?”
Mikie offered his arm, and Brenda took it. Mom looked at me expectantly.
“I knew you’d come crawling back,” I said, hooking my arm for her like the little teapot short and stout.
“I always do, don’t I?” she said, taking it.
The tour was somehow even duller than I’d figured it would be. There’s the golf course, uh-huh uh-huh, there’s the gym. It was goofy and bizarre on top of that, to be passing all the other guys giving the same stiff pointless tour to their parents, all of us pointing out the various activity areas on the day when no activities were being held. Yup, there’s the baseball diamond, uh-huh uh-huh, there’s the pool they don’t let us swim in, uh-huh uh-huh.
The mothers were being polite about the whole thing, being dragged out three hours from home to be bored stupid. But after a while I couldn’t take it. Even though it was against the rules, I found myself stumbling over into the truth.
“There’s where the football coach made all the linemen run wind sprints after supper and I threw up baked beans into my nose. Couldn’t breath for twenty-four hours.”
“Oh, it never happened,” my mother said, punching me on the shoulder.
“Oh yes it did,” I said through gritted teeth as I punched her back. I thought I hit her hard. She laughed some more.
“And over there is where I woke up in the middle of the night, in that frog-infested stagnant pond, in my bed, which must have taken ten of them to move out there so carefully.”
“Stop, stop it, Elvin,” Mom protested. “You’re killing me.”
“I was only happy that there were those kindly eight million mosquitoes to roust me, or god knows what else that rabid, in-heat raccoon would have done to me next.”
“Mikie,” Brenda said, “did any of this actually happen to him?”
Mike shrugged. “I’ve totally lost track. Some of it seems to be confirmed by what I hear around camp, other stuff I don’t know. I really doubt the one about the peanut butter and the shaved opossum.”
“It happened,” I snapped. Then I turned to the mothers. “But I don’t want to talk about it.”
We walked down to the track-and-field area, where there was a sort of reception for the parents, with games and a light barbecue snack.
The barbecue was embarrassing. They set out a huge metal bowl full of corn bread made out of dust, a couple of buckets of apples that when you bit into them turned out to be apple sauce cleverly wrapped up in apple skins, and a rack of spare ribs that were only spare because they were left on the floor after some pig’s liposuction operation. You could have sailed a boat on the ocean of fat. Nobody ate any of it.
There was one popular item, however.
Right next to the two picnic tables covered in red and white checks were two big Rubbermaid trash barrels full of beer and ice. This, apparently, was for the fathers, because they lined up like they were going to communion as Brother Jackson, the official spirits dispenser, ho-hoed them up. As each father—with his boy yanked to his side—shuffled up grinning and mumbled about the greatness of the school and the football team and the camp and the trees and god, Brother Jackson bowed a sort of benign grinning blessing and slapped a cold one into his hand.
It was all the gung-ho slottists and their likewise square-jawed daddies who did that. No normal families. No women. The point seemed to be to separate THEM from, well, sub-THEMs. A nod, a wink, a quick chugalug, and we had order.
And a party. The plan worked beautifully. Shortly after the fathers passed through the beer line once, then twice, there was action. Three-legged races. Touch football. Water-balloon tosses. They even ate the ribs.
Brother Jackson stood there taking it all in, smiling, smiling, nodding, waving, making out the little mental lineup card for the next four years.
“Why not?” I heard Brenda say.
“You think so?” my mother answered.
And off they went.
“Oh my god!” I said to Mikie. “Can’t you do something? Stop them.”
“Why?” he said, grinning as he watched Brother Jackson reluctantly hand over two beers to the ladies.
“What is she doing?” I said. “She doesn’t drink beer. “You don’t drink beer,” I said as she returned. “You go give that back right this minute.”
“Hush, Elvin,” Mom said.
I looked on, horrified, as my mother chipped her long perfect nails picking at the top of that filthy beer can.
“Here, let me get that for you,” Mikie said, ever the frigging gentleman.
“Thank you, Mike,” she said, and... I watched her little bit of an Adam’s apple flick four times as she held the can up. Four times. The can was up there for, like ten minutes.
“Want me to run and get your toga out of the car, Ma?” I asked, arms folded.
“Oil your hinges, will you, Elvin?” Brenda said, and gave me a shove. She pushed me a few feet back.
I returned. “Oh, come on,” Ma said, putting her arm around me and forcing me to sit at the picnic table with her.
“See, they’re drinking iced tea,” I said, indicating the other mothers.
“Until Monday when their husbands go back to work.”
“Well, at least they make the eff—”
“Elvin, have a piece of corn bread. You love corn bread.”
“I’m not hungry. I had a big breakfast.”
“That was hours and hours ago. And you’re still not hungry? What did you eat?”
“I’m in training. I just have to watch it, that’s all.”
“Oh, I see,” she said. And she did see. She didn’t see it all, but she saw enough to know to leave it alone.
A football came spinning end over end our way, skidded across the table, and landed under Mom’s bench. She sipped her beer, reached for the ball.
“All right. Right here, lady,” guys from both teams hollered at her, clapping their hands.
“Throw it long,” Brenda called.
“Give it to me—I’ll walk it over,” I said.
She wound up, big like a baseball pitcher, her left foot immodestly high in the air, and let it fly.
The ball went straight up in the air, landed on the picnic table, bounced off the corn bread without chipping a single piece, then rolled meekly to the ground. Mikie picked it up and sailed it back while all the real men laughed and joked and applauded.
“Who was that? Sign her up,” one kid yelled.
Another kid, one of the chosen ones I recognized from my football days, called out an answer. “Couldn’t you tell? That’s Elvin’s father,” he yelled.
“Can we go now?” I asked very quietly but very firmly. “Can we, please?”
Mom nodded, and as we started walking, Mikie and Brenda joined us. “So where are we going?” Brenda asked.
“Someplace better than this,” I said. “A special Sector where only the coolest guys are allowed. The library.”
“We have a library?” Mikie laughed.
“Yes, but usually I’m the only one allowed in. I’ll make an exception for parents’ weekend, though.”
“So,” Mom said when we’d put a little distance between them and us, “do you still really hate it here that badly?”
“Sure do,” I said.
“Well, you can come home if you want to. I’m glad you tried it, but if you don’t want to stay the last week, you can come home with Brenda and me tomorrow.”
I gave it time, as if I was thinking it over, even though I wasn’t. I didn’t want her to feel rejected. “No. Thanks anyway,” I said evenly.
“I’m proud of you, Elvin. I really am,” she said, and she took my hand.
“Ah, you’re drunk,” I said, squeezing.
I turned on only a couple of lights in the library. It was darker and more musty and beautiful than before. Mikie was awed at what was here that nobody even knew about. We didn’t do much, except browse almost silently in four different directions for an hour. Maybe two hours.
I figured they all loved it as much as I did when the Nightmeal gong rang in the tower and I had to flash the lights on and off for ten minutes to collect everybody up again.
“This is the finest group we have ever had in all my years as headmaster,” Brother Jackson boomed. The audience stomped their feet and whacked their glasses with silverware and woof-woofed as if they truly believed Jackson did not say that to last year’s group and wouldn’t be saying it to next year’s.
We were assembled at long tables in the dining hall, trying to eat our community meal and watch the stage at the same time. The ribs had returned. And the corn bread. The tablecloths too, that were supposed to get our all-American appetites pumped up. In an effort to keep us all from starving totally to death and leaving them with a big mess to clean up, they had also added hot dogs, hamburgers, and corn on the cob, all apparently boiled in the same gigantic vat. And finger bowls of their own secret barbecue sauce which, it was no secret, was ketchup mixed with vinegar and imitation maple syrup.
So the entertainment had to be good.
Part of what this was all about was to show the parents just what the administration could turn out in just a couple of weeks. Toward that end and “without further ado,” as Brother Jackson said—
“Did we miss the earlier ado?” I didn’t know where she was getting it, but Mom was developing a pretty smart mouth on her.
“I would like you all to see the future of Knights’ powerhouse football,” Jackson bellowed, clapping heartily right into his microphone so that it sounded like we were being shelled.
And out onto the stage marched the football team. In full, gleaming red-and-white home uniforms. There were twenty-two of them, representing a full offensive and defensive unit, and it was just for show, but you could bet that these same guys would wind up somewhere in that school football program in the near future. Probably wearing the numbers they’d already chosen.
“Of course”—Jackson leaned into his microphone, all smirk and smart-ass—“this is just a show. Since this is not a real”—he dragged out the word, reeeeeeal, winking—“football camp, we don’t really know that much about the ability of these particular boys. But come the fall, they’ll have their chance just like everybody else.”
The kids looked like a real football team. The Dallas Cowboys.
No, the Oakland Raiders.
“They frighten me,” Mom whispered.
“Ya, well they don’t scare me,” I whispered even more softly.
As the not-really-the-football-team thundered offstage right (well of course—they wore their cleats for the show), the Arroyo brothers bounded up the left side. A pair of soccer-playing twins who had just moved with their physician parents from Spain, the Arroyos had to be a part of the show. They were a major prize. The Knights beat out several other local Catholic schools in a savage competition to win the white-blond scholar-athletes to beef up the soccer program. Never mind that the school’s soccer program falls somewhere behind bocce ball in the hierarchy of team sports. Forget that they had to hustle to get enough kids to qualify as a team and thus provide the Arroyos with a forum for their skills. The Arroyos were a high-profile acquisition for a school that made the front page of the metro section after an investigation into the “complexion” of their scholarship programs.
So what if, as Mikie observed, “They must’ve had to boil those two to bleed all their color out? They’re whiter than you, Elvin.”
I happen to be fair skinned. To the point where you can see into me like the muscle chart in the doctor’s office.
They were a catch, and they were going on that stage. It was a bonus that they could also keep a ball in the air for a half hour without letting it hit the floor.
Which they did. It was a boring half hour, but it gave us a chance to eat and was a big public relations score for the school.
Until he spoiled it.
The Arroyos were nearing the big finale, heading the ball back and forth and back and forth, faster now and faster, actually getting people to look up from their plates as the ball pinballed between them, when...
Zzziiiip. He came howling from backstage. Absolutely naked. Except for a skimpy little Zorro mask. He split into the middle of the boys, grabbed the ball.
“No hands,” one of the boys called automatically. “Cannot use the hands.”
He tossed the ball up, headed it a few times himself, keeping pretty fair balance, then ran out from under it, disappearing back the way he came.
The bouncing of the ball echoed through the quiet hall as everyone sat. Then a few guys started whistling. A few more started clapping. A few fathers joined in, until half the crowd was cheering, the other half muttering. He didn’t have the vocal support of most guys’ mothers, but they didn’t look entirely upset either as they whispered amongst themselves.
“Was that Frankie?” my mother finally said, making me gulp.
“When did he get so hairy?” Brenda asked.
The answers were: Yes, it was Frankie; and last summer was when he got hairy. He was cruising through his O’s apprenticeship now. Too bad his folks couldn’t be there to see.
“I am sorry,” Jackson said, and hustled the next act on. This was a stroke of genius, since they were so awful they certainly must have bored everyone into total amnesia. It was counselors, athletes, mostly team captains. Each one came out to tell in drippy detail how awesome his team was, how awesome the school was, how awesome sports would be for the kids, how awesome it was to have spirit, and how awesome his own personal coach was. The only ones who didn’t make you wish you had a gun with a scope on it were the football and hockey guys, who were drunk and in a rush to get back up to the campsite. We could hear, loud and clear, the sound of Obie throwing up as soon as he left the stage.
“You don’t do that, do you, Elvin?”
“You know I don’t drink, Ma.”
“No, I mean the nudity thing that Frankie did.”
“Ma,” I said scoldingly. I turned red just from hearing her say it, never mind doing it.
“I know. It’s just that, well, I understand that there are certain pressures sometimes, to do things in unfamiliar situations that you might not normally do. That’s all. I just want you to be aware... that’s all.”
“I’m aware,” I said.
“And to represent our fine wrestling program...” My ears pricked up at the sound. I hadn’t heard anything about this.
“... could Elvin Bishop come backstage please? Also, could...”
I was stunned breathless. I looked to my mother. I looked to Mikie. Nobody had an answer to this one. A proud little smile slipped across Mom’s face, and there was no longer a choice. I had to go.
Backstage. “How come nobody told us about this?” I asked as I cautiously stepped into my suit.
“It was all thrown together last minute,” the mean and quiet wrestling counselor said. He was big and round muscled and wouldn’t look me in the eye. We almost never saw him at the Sector, and when we did, he would only work with the real wrestlers, like Axe. “Wrestling makes a good show,” he said. “It works onstage too. We can’t exactly have a goddamn baseball game up there while your parents are eating.”
“I guess we can’t,” I said.
Other wrestlers came in and dressed. Axe, Metzger, whoever got called over the P.A. Mostly the hard cores.
I started to worry. Could it be this bad? Were they so deranged in this place that bloodshed would actually be considered part of a nice dinner-theater show? I turned to watch from the side as two of the little guys put on a fine exhibition, grappling away in front of the crowd. Technically, they were beautiful. One leg wrapped around another, a clean takedown. A half nelson. An escape. They knew exactly what they were doing, and twined around each other like one animal. A boa constrictor.
The crowd applauded heartily when they were done, and again after the next two, also small guys. I applauded too. That was the way it was supposed to be done. That was what they were up there for.
What was I doing up here?
“And now a special treat...”
“This should be good,” I thought, lost in the show now.
“The Masked Potato versus Little Death!”
Huh?
Then somebody, two somebodies, two big somebodies who stank like beer, grabbed me from behind. One wrapped me up in a bear hug, then the other jammed a sheer nylon stocking over my head.
The place erupted with laughs when they shoved me mightily out onto the stage, where I was met by my opponent, the dwarf. He ran full steam, jumped into the air, bounced off my chest.
I didn’t know what was going on, but the audience sure was loving it. I tried, dazed, to look around for answers, but every time my eyes left him, the strong little bastard slammed me, so I had to fight, sort of.
I tried to grab him, to contain him, but he ran. I chased him around the periphery of the stage, but I couldn’t get him—he ducked low to the ground and ran such tight circles that I just couldn’t manage. Then he got around me and kicked me in the behind.
I thought the hall was going to cave in on us with the wild, on-its-feet cheering of the crowd. I looked to Brother Jackson for some sort of unspoken explanation. He pretended not to see me.
Then Little Death jumped up on my back, holding me around the neck.
“I swear I’m going to kill you,” I said as his cheek pressed up against mine. I clutched desperately at his face.
“Cut the shit,” he said through quick shallow breaths. “Just do the damn show.”
“Why?” I asked, wheezing from his choke.
“I want to get along,” he said.
I reached him, caught his hair. I gave it all the hate I had, which right then was more hate than anybody, when I pulled him down over my head and slammed him on the floor.
He was tough. He didn’t even seem to mind what I did, or when I landed on top of him. He just wanted me to get it.
“I had to say yes,” he went on as I tried lamely to force his shoulders to stay down. “Guy like me... guy like you. Best you can do. Be a sport. You get along.”
More than ever I wanted him down. I wanted to slam him. But I couldn’t do it.
Then I looked up, into the crowd. I was so lost, I didn’t even know what I felt about it. I needed to read my mother’s face.
I was frightened by what I saw. She was frightened. She was scared and sad and looking to me like she might cry except that she was so totally confused. That was it, the problem was that she didn’t know. She might cry in a second, if I let her know. Or she might laugh if I didn’t.
When he gave me the tiniest shove, I flew off Little Death like I was slung from a catapult. My fans gobbled it up. I stood in classic ready position as he then came stalking me.
“Now you get it,” he said quietly. “It’s better this way. Come on, you’ve seen it a million times on TV—let’s go for it.”
He rushed me, punched me, not hard, in the solar plexus, and I doubled over. When I did, he grabbed me in a headlock. I straightened up, with him still clinging to me, and walked all around the stage.
“Where is he?” I demanded of the crowd, as if I didn’t know he was hanging off my face. I turned all around, spinning us both in a circle until I got dizzy and we fell in a heap.
We got up and did some more of the tried-and-true big-fat-guy-chasing-little-dwarfy-guy shtick, him running between my legs, then when I bent over to look between them, him leapfrogging over my back. The kid was a great athlete.
By the time he finally pinned me a couple of long minutes later—me lying flat on my back with my arms and legs jerking like a heart patient getting electrical jolts—we had them all roaring with laughter.
I got up and we shook hands to the background music of applause, but we could not look at each other. As we made our way off the stage, Brother Jackson held out his happy hand for me to shake. I walked right by him.
My mother was still awestruck after I’d changed into my regular clothes and returned to the table.
“I have never seen that side of you, Elvin. You’ve become a real cutup. What have they done to you here?”
I didn’t even touch it. If she was happy, I was happy. I smiled nice. Mike smiled nice too. He knew.
The kids’ parents with dough stayed at the hotel or one of the bed and breakfasts in town. The rest stayed in the dorms at the seminary. Mom and Brenda shared a room there.
We walked to the dorm to pick them up in the morning and carry their bags back to the car.
“Very gallant of you two,” Brenda said, “dropping the girls off at the dorm at the end of the evening, going home, then coming back to pick them up in the morning. Remember that when you’re in college.”
“College?” I put my hand over my heart. “Could we slow down please? It was just a few weeks ago we were perfectly content in that school it had taken us eight years to get used to... then this... then that school in September... now the college thing. This is just too much, it’s just to much.”
My mother and Brenda laughed and laughed, as if I was putting on yet another show for them. I wasn’t.
They were leaving is what it was.
When we reached the car, I took Brenda’s bag from Mikie and brought it along with Mom’s around to the back. I popped open the Omni’s hatch, threw in one bag, threw in the other, then climbed in after them. I wedged myself in between the luggage and the spare-tire compartment, flattened myself out, and pulled the hatch shut on myself.
The three of them came back at once. They stood there staring in at me, smiling broadly like I was something in a pet-store window. From my end, breathing was already a little hard.
Mikie looked back up over his shoulder, cupping a hand against the brilliant sun. It was already beating in on me through the glass.
“Remember what we used to do to frogs with a magnifying glass?” he asked. “You’ll never make it home.”
Brenda popped the hatch open. It made that hydraulic Pffffft sound. Although that may have been me. “You are too funny, Elvin,” she said.
“Too,” Mom echoed, offering me a hand to get out. It was a struggle, much harder than getting in was, but together we extricated me. Mikie and his mom walked around to the driver’s side, I and mine to the passenger’s.
“Why don’t you go and get your bag, Elvin,” she said. “We can wait.”
I looked over the top of the car at Mikie and Brenda hugging.
“Thank you very much for coming, Mrs. Bishop,” I said. “I trust you enjoyed your stay here at the Rancho Diablo retreat. All our guests have a fine time, whether they like it or not, and we do hope you will return.” I smiled good and cheesy and shook her hand.
“See you next week,” she said, as bravely as I did. Then, as I was shutting her door, she whispered, “Very proud. I love you.”
“There ya go now,” I said, slamming the door hard. “On your way. Drive careful. And watch that drinking now.”
We stood and watched them go. They all thought it was a joke, when the truth was it took everything I had to pull myself out of the back of the car.
But she was proud of me.
When the red Dodge Omni had finally disappeared, Mikie slapped me on the back. “Want to go get something to eat?” he asked cautiously.
I shook my head.
“You want to just hang out?”
I nodded.
“You want me to leave you alone?”
I shook my head.
“Library might be cool.”
I nodded, and we started walking.
We could do that, sometimes for hours, times when things weren’t so good for me. Me not saying a word the whole time and Mikie not making me. It took us years to get that just right, and now it sure made things a lot easier.