Stotan! (8 page)

“As the air inside the bottle contracted,” Lion continued, ignoring me, “my forehead drew tighter and tighter; my eyes bulged. The pimple didn't pop; just
extended like a throbbing finger deeper and deeper into the neck of the bottle.
It wasn't working!
I pulled on the bottle to remove it, but it was sucking my face off my head. I thought, ‘I'm going to have to wear this bottle to the dance. Melissa won't be impressed.'

“With that horrifying fate in mind, I gripped the bottle in both hands, closed my eyes, gritted my teeth and yanked. It popped free with the sound of two anteaters kissing in an echo chamber.

“Tremendous relief washed over me as I sank to the kitchen floor. Given the alternative, I was more than happy to escort the throbbing postule to the Football Frolics.

“But in the bathroom I gazed into the mirror and changed my mind. The mouth of the bottle had left a deep purple ring around the angry sore, forming a perfect three-dimensional bull's-eye right in the middle of my head.

“At the dance, after an infinity of I'll-ask-her-for-the-next-slow-ones, I screwed up the courage to do just that, and we glided across the dimly lit dance floor beneath the purple-and-gold crepe-paper streamers, two jerky steps forward, one jerky step back, at arm's length.

“Melissa peered deeply into my eyes. ‘Is that a corn plaster on your forehead?' she asked romantically.

“I acknowledged that it was. ‘I was showing some of the football players how to do a head spear,' I said, ‘and drove a loose rivet in the helmet I'd borrowed into my forehead. No big deal.'

“‘That must've hurt,' she said, nodding. ‘It got you right on that monstrous pimple.'”

WEDNESDAY

We flew through most of the workout today on the Norton Wheeler Express. Nortie was feeling so good about unloading the weight of his brother that he didn't care how badly Max hurt him. We didn't talk much last night, even after Lion lightened things up with his tale of the Pimple That Ate Serbousek, but one thing is sure: Nortie doesn't have to carry that around by himself anymore. I was glad that Elaine and her friends didn't make it over; that whatever magical bond Nortie's tale created among us wasn't broken. Jeff went out into the kitchen to make us another round of sandwiches, and KZUU sang us off to sleep.

When we got up this morning, there was a lot less
bitching and moaning and general dread and more a sense of going up there to take on The Man together. Somewhere early in the workout, just after we stood at closed-ranks attention for our post-warmup hosing down, the back of Lion's suit clutched tightly in Jeff's fist to prevent him from attempting some kind of new and torturous entry into the water, I followed Nortie into that soft-bordered world where my body is capable of doing whatever it will. The other guys fell in and our little machine hummed right through both five-minute breaks. Max had said all along that those five minutes were our time to do with what we pleased, so we spent one of them in the Torture Lane and the other doing no-breath sprints.

I think all swimmers use some kind of gimmick to keep them going during the really tough spots in workouts. I knew a state champ from two years ago who imagined a shark at his toes and got into swimming for his life. Jeff says he uses Colleen, his girlfriend, beckoning him from the far end of the pool in a translucent black negligee. He goes on with that description, but I'll spare you. Who knows what Lion uses? Probably something new and different from his bag of wizards and dragons and sorcerers for each lap he swims. I've tried them all—usually I tell Jeff I use Colleen too, same
negligee, same sordid details, just like the football team does on their wind sprints—but today I used Nortie's brother, Jeremy. And so did Nortie. He had told his story and not been condemned to rot in Hell for letting it out, and now, for the first time, it seemed like he might be able to use the power of Jeremy's memory for something positive in his life, rather than just a hammering reminder that the world can turn on you in the wink of an eye, with no warning whatsoever; no thirty-day notice to get your things in order. Because of what he got back from us; because our response to his story was to give him a Stotan Day, a day in which
no one backed off,
I think he got a taste of something that's been absent all his life: trust.

I know Max couldn't have had any idea what was going on, though every once in a while he makes you think that he knows everything by the way he just goes with it. It took him three or four reps of the first set of 200s to realize how things were, and he did his part by keeping the pressure right up there at the edge. After the first ten minutes or so, the bullhorn was nowhere in sight and the Airborne cap mysteriously disappeared. We did fewer deck drills and more swimming, with Max cutting back on the rest intervals between reps, subtly, a few seconds at a time, until we were getting not
one second more than we needed and still holding time standards. That's what Max has: touch. He knows when to put on the pressure, how to hold it and when to back off for room. Max Il Song is the Prince of Touch.

The trip back to reality wasn't as rough today. This Stotan stuff seems to be taking hold. After we lay on the shower floor awhile, I glanced up to see Lion looking over at Nortie, who was leaning up against the wall, watching the water hammer on his stomach. He said, “Nortie, you did the right thing, telling us.” Nortie looked straight back at him, eyebrows raised, lips pursed, and nodded.

We didn't just go back and hole up all day today like we did for the past two. Some of the soreness and stiffness is starting to recede and we're feeling more like human beings again, so we decided to get out and around a little bit. It was a day without scrambled-egg and peanut-butter sandwiches. First, we hit the Savage House, Spokane's premier pizza place, and fairly astonished their lunchtime crew with the sheer bulk of what we ingested. Savage House management may think twice before choosing to continue their “Wednesday Lunch Special—all you can eat for $2.99.” Then we whipped downtown to catch a matinee before heading
back to Lion's dungeon to prepare for Elaine and her friends, which is to say straighten out the sleeping bags and make sure the heater was working. Along about six Jeff and I decided to run over to the drugstore and get some toothpaste and maybe a couple of comic books for distraction. We were thumbing through the somewhat limited selection when I happened to look out the plate-glass window to see O'Brian walking toward the entrance with a bundle under his arm. He dropped the bundle on the sidewalk beside the three newspaper racks standing there and snipped the wire that held it together with wire-cutters. I didn't recognize the guy with him, but he was carrying several identical bundles. They talked for a quick second, then walked off across the parking lot.

Jeff and I paid for our stuff—I told the man behind the counter it might be in his best interest to strip-search Jeff—and we split. Outside, I didn't have to look for more than a second to know the contents of O'Brian's cargo. That unconscious jerk-off is a paper boy for those Aryan Nation idiots over in Falls Lake. The small sign they left beside the papers said it all:
TAKE ONE—LEARN THE TRUTH.
We picked up one of the papers and walked back across the street to Lion's, deciding not to tell Lion yet because we didn't want to spend the rest of
the evening hunting O'Brian down like the scum he is and spreading his body parts over the city.

Shortly after we got back, we heard a car pull up outside, then the sounds of girls' voices. Nortie got up and looked out the window and said, “Uh-oh.”

I said, “What?”

“Elaine's here,” he said.

“So, what's ‘uh-oh' about that?”

“Milika's with her.” He rubbed his hands on the front of his pants. “Oh, Jeez,” he said, “I haven't seen her since I quit the Center.”

“You haven't even called her?” Jeff asked.

Nortie shook his head.

Jeff said, “Uh-oh.”

“She's gonna pop you upside the head,” Lion said.

“If I'm
lucky.
God, I should have at least called.”

“Twenty-twenty vision,” I said. “The man's a romantic genius. A modern-day Errol Flynn.”

Jeff answered the knock at the door. Nortie looked as if he were visualizing Milika standing on the other side wrapping her fist around a roll of quarters so she could put him away with one punch. The two of them entered laden with grocery sacks; evidently Elaine's other friends couldn't make it. Milika set her groceries on the counter, then turned around and looked at
Nortie, who was standing over by Lion's bed with his hands in his pockets. He started to shrug and she marched across the room and whapped him alongside the ear with an open hand.

Jeff looked to Elaine. “You women are so predictable,” he said.

“What's the matter with you?” Milika yelled at Nortie.

“I—”

“Where you been? Why didn't you call me? No wonder your dad hits you.” She started to take another shot at the side of his head, but he flinched and she held back. “You think you'd just never see me again? You think you can crawl off and disappear?”

“I didn't—”

“You
going
with me or what? You don't treat me like that, understand?”

“I didn't—”

“You understand?”

Nortie nodded. “Yeah, I understand. I'm sorry.”

Milika softened a little. “Yeah, well,” she said, “sorry don't get it. I got no time to spend with someone who won't talk to me. Don't be sorry, just don't ever do it again, okay?”

Nortie smiled. “Yeah, okay.”

Milika started to walk back to the counter, but turned in the middle of the room and looked straight back at Nortie. She said, “Next time I hit you, hit me back. You want to be my man, you don't take that from anybody.”

Poor little turd just can't win.

“So what's to eat?” I asked Elaine, hoping to end the ambush.

She reached into one of the bags, dragged out a dozen weiners and said, “We're going to have a weenie roast. I brought sticks and buns and mustard and ketchup, and I have wood in the car. Move over, Annette Funnyjello, we're having a beach party.”

“You may not have noticed,” I said, “but along with everything else this place doesn't have, it doesn't have a fireplace.”

“You don't roast weenies and marshmallows indoors, you silly goose,” she said. “We'll roast 'em down in the alley.”

“It's fifteen degrees out there,” I said.

“That makes it five degrees warmer than it is in here,” Milika said, and she was close to right—the heater had been performing less than admirably all day long and it was looking to be the coldest night of the week.

Past experience told us that if you're going to argue with Elaine, you have to
want
to argue, and none of us did, so we had a damn weenie roast. We sat on the hoods of my car and Elaine's, and Lion's Jeepster in the alley behind the Fireside, dressed in every stitch of warm clothes we had; built a fire and stuffed ourselves with hot dogs and marshmallows and, except for the snow and the cold and the unlikely surroundings and the fact that there isn't a body of water within a hundred miles of here that isn't frozen solid, it was a beach party. The fire crackled and sizzled and our shadows danced on the side of the Fireside Tavern and something about the whole stupid experience was a little bit magic—until the fire burned down and something about the whole stupid experience was colder than hell.

We went back inside, Nortie holding back a little with Milika, probably trying his hand at another apology, and stuffed towels in the cracks around the windows and doors and beat on the heater a little—Lion went down into the Fireside to make sure it was plugged in well—and things warmed up a little. We made Elaine insanely jealous with stories of Stotan Week and she lamented the fact that there's no place for women to have the experience we were having. “Sure there is,” Nortie said, “when they die and go to Hell.”

Milika, on the other hand, was absolutely content with the knowledge that there isn't a place for girls to have the experience we were having.

Around nine o'clock Elaine produced four straws in her hand. “Short straw gets the Elaine Ferral no-mercy, full-body massage, guaranteed to relax every muscle Max has ambushed. The massage will be the product of six weeks of intense training at Gary Takashita's massage school—a blending of styles from the East and West. It is non-sexual in nature, and if the recipient makes one false move, I'll tear his arm off.”

I've never won anything in my life, never even a single game of Bingo—hardly a coin-flip—but I drew the short straw, an obvious move on the part of the gods to let Elaine get her hands on me and fall forever in love. When the cries of “Fix!” died away and those reptiles crawled off into their bags, Elaine told me to put on my suit and lie down on the bag. It was chilly, but once she started in, the temperature in my body was the only one that mattered to me.

That massage had to be one of the most wonderful things I've ever felt. She started with my shoulders and neck and worked for at least an hour, working over every muscle Stotan Week had bushwhacked. She used a continuous deep rolling motion that took all the tension
down and out through my fingers and toes. She even massaged my face.

 

We all talked for a while—every once in a while I'd moan and Jeff and Lion would threaten my life—until everyone else had drifted off. By the time she finished, I was convinced she was hopelessly, terminally in love with me and that I should describe in lurid detail every fantastic hallucination I'd had about her in the past few months. She saved me from that by going once quickly over my shoulders again, hard, then slapping my back. “Gotta go,” she said. “Make tomorrow a good one.” She gently shook Milika awake, and they were gone. Boy, I hate this. One of these days I
have
to check her out. Soon. Soon as I clean things up with Devnee. I'll do that tomorrow.

THURSDAY

The magic was gone today. Oh, God, was the magic gone. You never want to turn your back on something as tough as Stotan Week; take it for granted in any way and it'll sneak up from behind and hit you on the back of the head with a pickax. We did and it did. Today we
went up there thinking we had it knocked. Three days down, two to go; all the confidence in the world after humming through yesterday in a magical fog. What we forgot was you have to
do
it, and you have to do it
all out
, and if you don't, it won't work and you will be sorry.

We must have spent half our time today in the Torture Lane. Max used the bullhorn like it was growing out of his face, and he must have thrown the siren into the deep end, because there wasn't even a sniff of a five-minute rest period. And Jeff let Lion off his leash. Christ, we're headed around the pool deck on what must have been our fiftieth lap of bearwalk when, instead of taking a right to continue around the pool, that peckerbrain takes a left and heads for the door. The door to
outside.
It's twenty-two degrees out there, semi-blizzard conditions, we're soaking wet and dog tired and that stark raving brain-damaged lunatic takes us on a bearwalk across the tundra. “Stotan! Stotan! All the way!” he yelled as he butted the door open with his head and forged his way through—
through,
not
over
—the snowbank next to the sidewalk and out to the fence, then across the yard and back through the other door and into the Torture Lane, the three of us following
dutifully behind him, swearing we're going to rip his arms and legs from his body and let Marty O'Brian use his torso for a chest-protector.