Escape Points (6 page)

You could spot the young wrestlers by this walk anywhere in any city. They were marked by thick, strong necks and backs, not as much bulk as it was a muscular control of the space they occupied, Hummers in a parking lot of Nissans. It was mass minus body fat, size without excess. It was a different walk than a swimmer’s or a football player’s; the carriage showed more pride than bravado, with a gymnast’s ease and a weight lifter’s strength.

The walk was not robotic but intentional and aimed, although we did nickname one of the wrestlers from another school RoboWrestler because he looked as if his limbs were made of metal. Each of his steps seemed studied and precise, as if he was walking on the mat for the first period of the first match, when anything was possible and the
red digital numbers on the scoreboard read
2:00
. Three two-minute periods, six minutes of intensity. They all wrestled hard, whistle to whistle. Buzzer to buzzer. It wasn’t over until then. You keep wrestling. You stand up. And if you get taken down, you stand up again.

During a match, Powell would shout so loud at the wrestler on the mat, telling him what moves to do next—to takedown, shoot, pull his head up, get his arm out—that he was always hoarse at the end of the dual or the tournament. Powell was often voiceless after meets, after hours of jumping up from his seat at matside and yelling instructions. The wrestlers looked up if they could and watched what Powell motioned for them to do. At the end of a match, even if the wrestler won, Powell was there to demonstrate what he could have done better. If the wrestler lost, Powell was there to tell him what to do next time.

“I can only hear Powell’s voice when I’m wrestling,” Weldon told me once.

“When I am on my deathbed, I will be the proudest man because I gave everything to everything,” Brendan said he told the boys at practice.

Each summer Powell and three other coaches took the wrestling seniors, from the 103-pounder to the 285-pound heavyweight, on a weeklong backpacking trip, a teambuilding exercise planned and executed with the help of assistant coaches. Weldon and eight teammates went to Glacier National Park, where they climbed blue-white mountains and talked about everything in life beyond wrestling. Brendan and his teammates went to Zion National Park in Utah, where Brendan said they ate peanut butter quesadillas atop red mesas and talked about what it is to be a man who earns respect.

Weeks in advance, Powell sent home detailed lists of what the wrestlers needed to bring for the trip—backpack, sleeping pad, Nalgene bottles, sunscreen, flashlight, cash. Knowing teenage boys the way he did, he had them all bring their packed gear to a meeting three days before departure to double check. These life-lasting memories of landscapes off the mat were the backdrop for the boys’ later imitations of Powell sprinting up the side of a mountain with all
his gear plus tents, first aid, and food—perhaps one hundred pounds of equipment in all.

My three boys had dozens of coaches in other sports throughout the years, but the boys were not nearly this close to any of them. We certainly never quoted any of them at dinner.

When my sons were younger it was all I could do to get them to their practices with the help of sitters during the week, and in the evenings and on weekends sit and watch the games, matches, meets, and tournaments. I made a master list of the boys’ baseball games and practices one season when all three were playing house league baseball—forty-eight practices and games in all. Some at the same time. All on three different fields. During the week, the sitters helped. Some Saturdays, games were spread out from 8
AM
to 3
PM.
Some Saturdays, all three games were at 9
AM,
so I drove from one field to the other hoping to catch at least an inning where that son did something he wanted me to see.

Weldon never really clicked with any of the coaches on the local baseball, basketball, or traveling soccer teams in grade school or middle school. They yelled too much, were dismissive, or didn’t seem to care personally about him. And the truth is they probably didn’t. They had their own kids, their own work, their own lives. You couldn’t expect anything beyond the game or the tournament. And a few said as much. They were speed fathers, like speed dates, who could provide for hours a week what an absent father could not. And nothing more.

Brendan liked a few of his baseball and basketball coaches and only one of his soccer coaches. He played his last year of baseball in sixth grade when his coach called him a derogatory name at practice. He played youth football from third to eighth grade, and one year he liked his football coach a lot, talked about him often, but when the season ended, the relationship ended.

Colin had devoted coaches for many league and traveling teams from baseball to soccer to basketball. For two years Colin had Tim Odell as a youth football coach, whom he adored. Colin told me once he decided he wanted Tim to be his father, partly because of
how kind he was to Colin and partly because he had his own Super Bowl ring. I said we would need to ask his wife.

I never threatened the boys with a coach’s name the way I did when I said, “Stop, or I’ll call Powell.”

Powell arranged parent night every first Monday of the month in season at a local pub. Whoever could, showed up. We ordered sandwiches, burgers, beer, and salads and talked. It was a way for families to come together, a tradition Powell initiated. We had new T-shirts each year that read, H
USKIES
W
RESTLING
F
AMILY
. It was a way for all of us to take responsibility for each other’s sons.

“Our goal is to be a place where kids feel special, empowered, and loved,” Powell said. At the wrestling banquet during Brendan’s senior year and Colin’s freshman year, Powell talked about each wrestler on the team from freshmen to sophomores, junior varsity and varsity, with personal details and often some jokes.

He teased one wrestler. “Ninety-five percent of the time this kid drove me nuts,” Powell said. “But he worked hard and would do whatever the team needed.” Powell embraced him.

He told each wrestler how proud he was of him. Parents fought back tears.

“We believe 100 percent in what we do, this year the kids believed in what we do, and when you all believe in that, it’s a powerful thing,” Powell said.

The back table in the south cafeteria was laden with homemade dishes—the families of juniors and seniors brought the entrées, the parents of the freshmen brought appetizers and salads, the parents of sophomores, desserts. After the wrestlers and their parents heaped lasagna, fried chicken, casseroles, and vegetables onto paper plates, and plucked brownies and cookies from trays and platters onto separate plates, Powell spoke from the podium’s microphone.

“This is the hardest sport for a parent,” Powell said.

The parents nodded. It was hard to get up at 6
AM
to drive them to weight lifting, make lunches before the tournaments, endure their weight-making moods, get them to the team bus every Saturday morning, and sit in the stands and watch for up to six hours at a
time—fourteen hours if it was a regional, state, or national tournament. And when your son got to the mat, you might be watching him lose or get hurt. There was more work than glory, especially since you traded hours and hours of support for just a few minutes of watching him in competition.

Powell continued his talk from the podium. “The coaches work the hardest, but we get the most out of it. We call it a wrestling family because in a lot of ways it is a family. By no means do we intend to replace you as parents, but it’s nice to be loved.”

He added, “Thank you for giving your sons to us.”

W
eldon stood in front of the bathroom mirror one morning exclaiming, in what I identified as a tone of glee, “I’m getting it! I’m getting the ear!”

I was mortified. I inspected it and promised I would look it up online and see how to proceed as soon as I got to work. His ear was puffy, enlarged, swollen with blood. It was gross. Midseason of his junior year on varsity and his fourth year of wrestling, he was getting it. I called Powell, sure that this would excuse my son from practice and upcoming matches for some time if not forever. He’s getting the ear, for goodness sake. The ear.

“It’s not a big deal,” he said.

I knew what the ear meant. His coaches all had the ear. Usually, the pair, like Powell. Misshapen and noticeably nonsymmetrical, no two cauliflower ears manifested the same way. Some were outright horrific, elfin, pointed, and enlarged—years after the trauma. Forever.

Were athletes who played volleyball so permanently changed? Swimmers? Some ears were just rounded and reddened, like mini
water balloons. Others more grotesque, with the unpredictable crannies and bumps reminiscent of the plastic-molded models of mountains and volcanoes used in elementary school geography class.

It was called cauliflower ear. But cauliflower was bland, pale, unremarkable. The name implied none of the mother terror it inspired, and none of the mysterious pride wrestlers associated with, well, this deformity. It scared me. And I wanted to do everything I could to prevent it.

Would people stare? Would they consider him defective? Was it my fault?

“You’ll want your girlfriend or your wife to like your ears,” I said to Weldon when I could think of nothing else to convince him it was not a good thing.

“I won’t be with a woman that shallow,” Weldon responded.

It was an acquired condition that came from repeated trauma to the ear, resulting in hematomas and a collection of blood and fluid that permanently damaged its structure. It was something wrestlers got after having their heads pulverized against a wrestling mat over and over during the course of several years, creating severe friction and a breakdown of cartilage. And for reasons I could not understand, wrestlers didn’t apologize for it, hide it, or shrink from it. They wanted to get it.

It is what they got when they did not wear the headgear in practice that was required in folkstyle competition. They did not wear it off-season in freestyle or Greco. To me it would be like lifting a pan out of the oven without wearing oven mitts, knowing your hands would burn and blister and it would hurt, but you did it anyway because you believed it meant you were a good cook. Season after season they skipped the headgear no matter how many times their mothers made them swear they didn’t. Cauliflower ear was not for the accidental wrestler, it was for the wrestler who saw the sport as something far more than six minutes of competition in a singlet. It was for the real wrestler, the one who believed all those sayings on the T-shirts, like G
O
H
ARD OR
G
O
H
OME
, P
AIN
I
S
W
EAKNESS
L
EAVING THE
B
ODY
, or T
AP
O
UT OR
P
ASS
O
UT
.

The affliction was painful and impossible to disguise. If the athlete wore his hair below his ears to cover it off-season, then maybe you wouldn’t notice. But in season, long hair was not allowed, or at least not encouraged. If a wrestler had long hair, he was required to wear a hair cap. It would seem common sense to attempt to avoid getting cauliflower ear. But like so many aspects of all three of my sons’ lives, this acceptance of the injury was anathema to me. Like the calluses on the hands of an expert shoemaker, cauliflower ear showed the world that you wrestled with everything you had, and a little thing like a permanently deformed ear would not dissuade you from the sport. Wrestling mattered; the cosmetic appeal of your ear didn’t.

Weldon’s teammate, Peter Lovaas, a 145-pounder his senior year, earned himself the ear. He said he told women he met in college either that he was attacked by squirrels, or that he rubbed peanut butter on his ear for his cat to lick off. Sometimes the cat nipped, he said. All of the girls recoiled.

Wrestler ear, boxing ear, or rugby ear were emblematic of all I found counterintuitive and all that I knew instinctively about trying to keep my boys from harm. Weldon earned the ear in his junior year. Brendan earned the ear the next year, his sophomore year. Weldon’s right ear and Brendan’s left, with shifting lumps and swollen tissue, were visible reminders of all that was startlingly different about us: their maleness and impulsivity, their determination, lack of vanity, and a burning dedication to a goal regardless of price.

The ear meant I failed. Their disfigurement was all my fault; both those ears were my fault.

To a wrestler the ear was a sign not that you were less than perfect, but that you were committed to the sport. It was about manhood and drive, an outward sign that you were someone who suffered for greatness. This was the exacted cost, and it was small compared to the monumental high of having a striped-shirted referee thrust your hand in the air in victory over your most fierce opponent. It was a sign. You were good and you wrestled for a very long time. Or you had soft ears susceptible to this injury, Weldon told me. Some people just have soft ears.

The second day of his engorged ear, I took Weldon to the emergency care center near our house. It was the spot I called the drive-through doctor or Doc in the Box—where I took the boys before or after work in emergencies and upon suspicions of bronchitis or infections. It was open from 7
AM
to 11
PM
and was able to do X-rays and stitches, a much better option than my pediatrician’s office, which was open only from 10
AM
to 4
PM
, timing that was after I left for work and long before I got home.

“This is stupid,” he said on the ride to the immediate care site.

Weldon was clearly annoyed and I was surely a pathetic, overprotective mother for making him go to the doctor in the first place. Heck, he could just stab himself with a needle and puncture it, drain it, and be done. Weldon continued with his usual you-wouldn’t-understand-you-are-not-an-athlete diatribe. His coach told me all it needed was a draining. Weldon at first said the trainer would drain it in the wrestling room that afternoon, and I cringed. He came home from school with it undrained. Then he asked me to please just get a needle and drain the blood from his engorged right ear. I almost puked. As if I would take a needle and poke him.

The doctor on call was a beautiful African American woman, about ten years younger than me and clearly disapproving of the sport.

“He needs to wear headgear,” the doctor said.

I know. I tell him all the time.

She had Weldon lie down on the table, and the nurse who always talked to me kindly when I came in with each of the boys spread paper toweling across his chest and neck and attached it to his T-shirt with a metal clip. She cleaned and then sponged the ear with iodine, injected anesthetic, and took a scalpel to the part of the inner cartilage swollen with blood, the hematoma that had developed under the skin. She was deliberate and calm, not speaking. Weldon sighed heavily. I was sure it really hurt. I was amazed at how much blood and fluid spilled onto the paper towels—it seemed like several ounces but was likely only one or two. All I could think was these poor, beautiful baby ears of his. Look what wrestling has done.

The only time he was ever in the hospital before was for these ears. At three, he had small plastic tubes surgically inserted in his Eustachian tubes to help avert his recurring ear infections. We were living in South Bend, Indiana, in a small rented ranch house I called the trailer home without the wheels. I remember how terrified I was as the attendants wheeled his small body into the operating room. He was all arms and legs then. Slender, with blonde hair and an energy that was unnerving; he was only gone a few hours and the operation was uneventful.

For months into years, he wore red plastic earplugs when swimming, and I was always careful washing his hair in the tub. At bath time I cupped one hand around each ear as I carefully poured water from a plastic cup over his head to rinse the suds from his scalp. I bathed him simultaneously in the tub with Brendan to save time, and Brendan would imitate me and cup his own hands over his ears. Brendan was a little more than a year old and would sit in the tub behind Weldon and splash and giggle until I washed his hair.

Like the doctor had promised, one day the tiny cylindrical tubes fell out and he had no more ear infections. He had outgrown them like so many pairs of his gym shoes and corduroy pants.

It was almost closing time at the emergency care center when the doctor wrapped Weldon’s ear with a large bandage that made him look something like the illustration on the cover of
The Red Badge of Courage
. When he woke up in the morning, his ear was filled with fluid again, only this time it throbbed painfully. He was not happy.

Of course, it was my fault. I should never have taken him there. The doctor was an idiot, didn’t know what she was doing. Why did I take him there? An assistant coach drained Peter’s ear in his garage just a few days before. The garage.

After checking the instructions for a follow-up, I made an appointment with an ear, nose, and throat specialist. The office was in Berwyn and we had a 6:30 evening appointment the next day.

That day it snowed unforgivingly. I drove two hours in crawling traffic to get from my office to the high school to pick up Weldon, and another hour and a half to get a few miles to the new doctor’s
office. The windshield wipers were little protection against the driving snow.

“Why don’t you just leave me alone?” He was shouting most of the way.

I was very upset and fought back tears. “I am only trying to do what is best for you.”

We arrived before 8
PM
, after I called the office repeatedly to beg for them to stay open. They did. This doctor was not so forgiving.

“You cannot wrestle with this ear for at least two weeks,” he told Weldon.

Now I had done it. I had taken away his chance to win at wrestling, to place at state.

He fidgeted in the chair as the doctor told him he would drain it again and this time stitch it down—literally sewing the front of the ear to the back—so the ear would not fill up with fluid. The doctor told him wrestling was a dangerous sport.

“My son plays soccer, why not try that?” the doctor asked.

I didn’t tell him Weldon already had. It was all wrestling all the time now, no more baseball, no more basketball, no more soccer. Wrestling was it.

When the doctor turned his back to Weldon and toward the tray of instruments, Weldon shot me a look that would melt many fainthearted parents. I didn’t care. I was going to fix what was wrong. I was not going to let my son have the ear. No matter how much he hated me at that moment, I felt I was right. I was going to fix this.

It was December and the season was heating up. Weldon said he had no choice; he had to compete. When I stopped Powell at a meet, frantic about Weldon’s ear filling again with fluid, he told me not to worry, that it would be fine. Weldon did need to wrestle. He was fine.

This was crazy. He had an injury, for God’s sake.

Almost a week after Weldon got the ear, after the trip to the emergency care and twice to the ear, nose, and throat specialist he despised, I e-mailed the boys’ pediatrician, Dr. Sharon Flint. We developed a friendship over the years, seeing each other at the boys’ annual physicals. We also attended the same church when I lived
in Oak Park, our kids were roughly the same ages, and we went to some of the same parties. Our birthdays were a day apart, and we had breakfast to mark the occasion every year. I explained Weldon’s condition to Sharon and she gave me the name of a specialist she recommended—Dr. Salil Doshi.

Weldon’s ear hurt, he admitted reluctantly, and even with the stitching and the bandaging, it was filling up again. It did not look any better, even though now it was covered with dried, blood-soaked bandages. I was uneasy and wanted someone else to look at it. You had to take care of the ear within two weeks, get rid of the fluid, otherwise the ear would harden and would be completely deformed.

At his tidy office, Dr. Doshi listened to Weldon and nodded when Weldon explained how he needed to wrestle in a little more than a week. Finally, someone who understood him; I could read Weldon’s relief on his face.

Dr. Doshi said an operation was necessary. It would be outpatient, but he would be under anesthetic. He would drain and scrape the ear and reform it as best he could, then he would stitch it, and it would return to normal in time. He was reassuring and confident. I made the arrangements.

A few days later, I was alone in the hospital waiting area, as I was always alone in the waiting rooms for the boys. I waited for their vaccinations, their dental cleanings, Brendan’s orthodontic appointments, their haircuts, the parent-teacher conferences, for them to get showered and changed after games and meets. I waited for them in parking lots with the car running and the radio on, too tired to grade papers or return phone calls, just wishing I could go home or do something for myself, like go to the bathroom or shower.

It is what single parents do. You go alone to all the appointments, not making small talk or discussing the current crisis or conditions with a partner. You hand over the insurance card, write the check, answer the questions about history and immunizations, read the parenting magazines and occasionally the general interest magazine you would maybe buy for yourself if you had the time. You walk outside to make cell phone calls if you are not too worried, reschedule your
meetings, rearrange your other children’s schedules, scrawl notes on legal pads, check messages, make lists, wait for the prescriptions to be filled. You talk to yourself, you plan. You try not to waste the afternoon or the day. You are always the only one waiting, you are always the only one there, only sometimes wishing it didn’t always have to be you. But you know it will always be you.