Escape Points (3 page)

After another hour, my brothers and sisters hugged and kissed each other good-bye and we all left the hospital. I walked to the parking lot with my sisters Maureen and Madeleine and Madeleine’s husband, Mike, feeling that helplessness I felt when my father died in 1988, as if I’d been dropped from the roof of a building without a net below.

“Are we orphans?” Maureen asked.

“I don’t think adults can be orphans,” Madeleine answered. “Only children can be orphans.”

The boys were already at their schools; the sitter who had spent the night got them ready, packed their lunches, and drove them. I went home and called my ex-husband from the phone in the breakfast room where I had painted on the wall the Chinese proverb, “Govern a family as you would cook a small fish—very gently.”

“The boys will need to go to the wake tomorrow and the funeral the next day,” I said. “They can’t go to Wednesday night dinner with you; they have to be at the funeral home.”

I felt like I was on autopilot; I hadn’t slept. I guess I hoped that he’d respond with compassion and kindness. My mom had just died, a woman he’d known his whole life who had been friends with his
parents since they went to college together. So I let my guard down, pictured myself speaking to a friend, to the man I wished he was. I said something stupid, something I didn’t really mean. I was tired. I was scared.

“When I am ninety-five, I am going to spare the boys what I just witnessed and step in front of a moving train so they don’t have to watch me die.”

He laughed. “Don’t worry, Michele, I will shoot you long before then.”

T
he father bent down at the edge of the mat and screamed to his son, “Crush his face! Crush his face!”

Brendan, who was eleven, looked up at me, his left arm twisted like a wet kitchen towel by this bloodthirsty boy who appeared to be a mini-assassin.

“Excuse me, this is his first match ever,” I said. “Does he have to crush his face?”

The father glared at me as if I was speaking in tongues.

At every Sunday youth wrestling tournament, hundreds of boy bodies in shapes from gangly to marshmallow were bare-armed and categorized from forty pounds to more than two hundred, ages five to fifteen. There could be as many as one thousand youth wrestlers at one tournament and at least twice that many parents, grandparents, and siblings. On Sundays the gyms in every city and every state around the country were tropically humid and alive with an unforgiving drumming of shouts, grunts, and whistles. It sounded as loud as if I were sitting in the last row of a 747.

Two years earlier in 2000, as a sixth grader exhausted by the daddy-is-the-coach syndrome so dominant in the suburb where we lived, Weldon read a brochure mailed to the house about folkstyle youth wrestling offered at the local public high school. He did not want to play on one more team where the coach’s son got the key positions and the most play time. Sure, some moms were coaches, but I could not take the time from work, and I never could have been able to coach a sport for all three sons, which was the only fair way to do it.

“It doesn’t matter who your father is in wrestling,” a friend told me when I explained how Weldon had picked this sport new to our family. “It’s just you on the mat.”

So I signed him up that October for the Little Huskies Wrestling team at Oak Park and River Forest High School and sent in the check; he began four evening practices a week that sometimes ran until 9
PM
. After practice, Weldon would come to the car exhausted and wet with sweat, but smiling. I had to bring Brendan and Colin with me in the car to get Weldon; they were ten and seven years old, and I couldn’t leave either home alone. Sometimes the three of us tried to predict exactly what time Weldon would emerge from the field house or the precise outside temperature registered on the dashboard of my Volvo station wagon.

“Two degrees!” Colin would say. Some nights he was right.

When Weldon folded into the front seat, his duffel bag behind him, I asked how it went.

“It was hard, but it was great.”

That first year of youth wrestling for Weldon, I felt like Jane Goodall observing wild chimps: an awkward outsider, not knowing the scoring, moves, what to cheer and when. I was ignorant of the unspoken mother’s law that you never, ever approached a son who had just lost. You waited for him to come to you. And then you just listened. I wondered why I had never known about this vast secret underworld of competition for the very young, a different universe from other sports. Like swimming, track, or gymnastics, you stayed all day for a tournament. But unlike any of those, that day consisted
of sometimes brutal one-on-one contests against someone aimed at slamming your son to the ground and pressing both his shoulders flush to the rubber mat.

I learned the mythology around competitive youth and high school wrestling was steeped in error. There was the common misunderstanding that it bore a resemblance to the idiotic, clownish, steroid-soaked freak fights of platinum blonde professional WWE wrestling on television. There was also a homophobic taboo about young men who loved the sport, including mockery and taunts from kids in sports with less close contact—say tennis or lacrosse. I was learning more each week.

Yes, there were wrestling moms filling the seats in the stands, yelling their sons’ names, but most everywhere you looked—on the gym floor, in the cafeteria, in the stands—were fathers and sons. Fathers embracing their sons after a win, fathers putting their arms on the shoulders of boys after a loss.

In the early years after our divorce, my ex-husband would take the boys to wrestling tournaments if they fell on his visitation weekends. But he was never there consistently. Not every time. Not every match.

Looking around the gyms, sometimes the sons resemble their fathers so much—the slope of the jaw, the shape of the arms—that it is startling. Just observing the legacies makes me feel a lot of things, not the least of which is my somehow being responsible for what my boys did not get, that I made the choice to marry someone who would go away. That I married someone who would willfully hijack my sons’ feeling that they are loved unconditionally by both parents. I could do my part, but I could never do both parts.

The first portion of the morning consisted of weigh-ins when hundreds of boys, and a few girls, were weighed in a separate gym from parents, accompanied by coaches, then grouped by age and weight, their weights drawn on their arms in marker. I noticed on one boy about eight or nine years old, the number 172 was drawn an inch or so high in wide, black permanent marker strokes on his upper right bicep. The way his pale flesh folded and blossomed from
beneath his shiny polyester singlet made him look as if his body was filled with scoops of cookie dough. Behind him was a father with the same furtive expression and rumpling build, his thick hand firmly gripping his son’s shoulder.

The wrestlers were grouped by weight and age so the first two-minute period with thirty seconds of rest followed by two one-minute periods—with thirty seconds of rest in between—were evenly matched. Unlike high school and college, youth wrestlers didn’t need to make a specific weight; each wrestled what he weighed that morning and was grouped with other wrestlers in that weight and age bracket, say a weight range of 106–108 pounds.

Some of the compact boys in the “midget” category had muscles so sharply formed and legs with distinctly circular calves that they looked like animated resin trophies, caricatures of miniature men. I wondered if they considered the political incorrectness of the midget category and if they would eventually shift to call the category “little people.”

Boys darted through crowds standing in line at the refreshment stand or on the gymnasium sidelines, holding green or blue liter bottles of Gatorade, their hair buzzed short and purposeful, waiting for volunteers to sell them hot dogs, pizza, pretzels, donuts, popcorn, chips, or bagels with cream cheese. Their fathers were either elated or furious, some wearing XXL T-shirts stretched taut like drum covers over their bowling ball bellies. Mothers wore T-shirts with photo likenesses of their wrestlers.

In that bewitching morning hour before the wrestling began, mayhem reigned on the mats with dozens of wrestlers running in circles, jumping on each other, having chicken fights, stretching, doing jumping jacks, running in place, playing tag—all of them all at once. “Eye of the Tiger” was usually playing over the loudspeakers; it was the unofficial wrestler’s theme song. If you could’ve harnessed the raw energy in the gym, you could’ve saved the planet.

Parents chatty and amicable in the early morning settled into their stakeout sections, club teams seated with their wrestlers in the stands, stepping over McDonald’s bags and Dunkin’ Donuts boxes.
The most coveted spots were in the top row against the gym wall for back support. Those wall slots filled up quickly on two sides of the gym. Some of us brought the inexpensive portable stadium seats we bought at Home Depot. If you were lucky, you might be able to find an electrical outlet for your laptop. Chances were there was no Wi-Fi. I brought dozens of papers to grade for my freshman journalism class and, in December, stacks of Christmas cards to address. I brought to-do lists, newspapers, and magazines to read. I created current events quizzes.

“Save me a spot,” I said to Caryn, who had three wrestling sons of her own, two out of her three boys the same ages as my boys. Our youngest sons, Colin and Sam, would later be inseparable best friends.

Usually, the matches were in a Chicago suburb perhaps thirty miles away and far outside my comfort zone; finding the high school only with the help of Yahoo! directions. Without a GPS, using only printed instructions, I often had to retrace my steps after mistaking a right for a left, trying desperately to remember where I spotted the last Starbucks in which strip mall near which bank. Sometimes I thought MapQuest and Yahoo! made intentional errors in the end of a trip—a left instead of a right, a north instead of a south, Glenbard East High School instead of Glenbard North—just to force drivers to pull into a gas station or 7-Eleven to get help from a clerk, who was hopefully over sixteen and knew the names of the major roads. I once asked a young clerk where the local high school was, and he replied that he didn’t have any idea. I asked someone in the parking lot on my way back to my car, and she motioned that it was a block away.

“What are you doing Sunday? Can you meet for an hour for coffee or something?” my sister Madeleine would ask.

“No; I’m watching wrestling.”

The eight or so youth tournaments each season were on Sundays because high school gyms were used for team varsity wrestling and basketball on Saturdays. Like Weldon before him, Brendan was part of Little Huskies, an offshoot of the Oak Park and River Forest High School team and one of the organized clubs that served as feeder pipelines for high school wrestling programs across the state and the
country. Every week about a dozen to twenty young boys from our team wrestled, many of them the tail end of wrestling families with older brothers in the sport.

Few champions started the sport their freshman year of high school; many had been wrestling since grade school, some since kindergarten in these Sunday youth wrestling tournaments. Plenty of these boys attended supplemental private wrestling training programs twice a week all year; at some the cost of one-on-one training was one hundred dollars an hour. For groups of two to three young wrestlers, it could cost sixty dollars an hour per wrestler. I could never afford to send the boys to these elite team programs—I had neither the time nor the money to get them there. But plenty of parents did; and their kids usually won the tournaments, the state titles, the scholarships to Big Ten colleges.

As the day matured, the air grew dense and humid with the feral odor of pizza, hot dogs, and sweet, ripening sweat, the intensity thickening and festering by midafternoon. Families arrived with Igloo coolers of food like Cheetos, pork rinds, and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches; separate bags of knitting and crossword puzzle books; and smaller children in car seats and strollers. Some parents left intermittently to smoke in the parking lot.

No matter how much food was brought in, it seemed so much more was purchased and so much else thrown away. Sometimes a few high-protein, low-calorie offerings were available from a concession stand, like oranges and bananas, but most of the food was deep-fried and cheesed. There were mountains of candy choices. Long, colored sugar ropes hung from many boys’ mouths to their waists as they gobbled their way to the end, like a long wick of a cartoon bomb fuse.

At some concession stands you could find the walking taco—an opened bag of Fritos with a scoop of hot chili poured on top and a teaspoon of shredded cheddar cheese, with a plastic spoon plunged into the chunky mess. I made hundreds of them working the food line at Little Huskies tournaments. You needed a Crock-Pot to heat the chili and ice to cool the bags of shredded cheese. And lots of paper towels.

The announcer gave the predictable procedural details and then played a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” sometimes the recording by Whitney Houston, most of the time just a recorded instrumental version with a church organ. Refs blew whistles, and the wrestling matches erupted on four rubber mats with each mat divided into two. Two wrestlers were on each mat. Red and green strips of Velcro were fastened onto the boys’ ankles just before their match—the same Velcro strips used over and over again on different wrestlers—to differentiate the wrestlers for scoring. I used to wonder what the bacterial count on those strips would be at the end of the day—and then I wouldn’t let myself think about it. The ref wore one red and one green wristband and held the corresponding colored wrist in the air to quickly note the points scored for each wrestler.

In the matches, the boys looked like dancing spider monkeys on fast-forward, rolling over each other, grappling, shooting for a takedown, pinning, standing up, crying, winning, arms shot in the air. The thuds of an official pin—a referee’s slam of his open hand onto the mat signaling a boy was pinned and the match was over—occasionally pierced the air like an exclamation point. The smallest and youngest wrestlers were first. Some were so cute they looked like Power Rangers dolls, some cried inconsolably when they lost, and others were cocky and determined, like small pit bulls. The matches worked up from the youngest Midget through Novice to the Cadets, some of whom at fifteen had been wrestling ten years and looked mature enough to father children. Some even sported facial hair and tattoos.

“Now you won’t take first,” a father reprimanded his son, as if he had just committed a felony. The boy’s shoulders were shaking from crying, his neck and arms red from the recent loss. The wrestler made his way to a corner of the gym to cry.

Each mat had a nearby long, folding table where up to four scorekeepers sat, controlling the clock and the score. One mat was connected to the overhead scoreboard; the other matches were scored on foot-high cardboard cards of numbers that scorekeepers—usually high school volunteers—flipped forward on double rings to
show points earned. Every match had its own digital running clock. Occasionally a parent shouted at the ref to contest a point.

“Parents off the mats, only wrestlers and coaches on the floor,” the announcer pleaded often each hour. But it was as futile as trying to stop passing drivers from watching the twisted remains of a car crash.

In the stands, boys slept like young cougars between matches, curling onto pillows, hooded sweatshirts pulled over their heads, covered by down-filled coats brought hastily from home, water bottles strewn like spent rifle casings across the floor near the orange peels and candy wrappers. A young wrestler could have as many as six matches in one day, fewer if he lost early on, more if he won. The goal was not to go home early. The goal was to go home later sporting a green ribbon with gold-colored medal for first, second, or third place.