King of the Mild Frontier (4 page)

WHATEVER DNA COURSED THROUGH
my grandfather's veins as he limped out onto the gas pump island to willingly give up more than a day's pay in the name of gallantry coursed through my own veins long before Ronny Cooper gave me the down-and-dirty version of human procreation. From as long ago as I can remember, “perty girls” just turned me on my head. As early as second grade I would sneak off to my bedroom after school so I could “think about perty girls.” At nine or ten I could ferret out a hidden
Playboy
magazine—which my father bought because it contained “some of the finest literature published
in the country today”—faster than a water witch could zero in on an underground stream. When I opened a current issue to find Stella Stevens buffed out, as they say, only three weeks after I'd seen her mesmerize Li'l Abner in the movie version of the play by the same name, my scalp tingled; my extremities went numb.

Even without Ronny Cooper's or Hugh Hefner's help, I was far ahead of my peers when it came to the gathering and distribution of pertinent information that would turn me into the “go-to guy” of middle elementary school and also get me a semipermanent guest seat in the principal's office. At the beginning of the summer of my tenth year, my father hired me to work cleaning restrooms and dusting shelves and filling the pop and candy machines at his service station, and though it didn't exactly provide me with the training I might later need to climb some corporate ladder, it placed me within earshot of the sexually brilliant high-school kids who pumped gas and lubed cars and fixed flats for him. It was this summer I heard the penis-in-the-pop-corn-bag story that would find its way into my first novel,
Running Loose,
getting me banned like a cult worshiper.

The closer I got to my teenage years, the more I realized that the path to perty girls passed through the locker room. Any way you cut it, jocks got the girls. Cascade sits in the
Rocky Mountain range about eighty miles north of Boise on the winding two-lane that connects southern and northern Idaho. I don't remember a time, then or now, when there were more than a thousand residents. The entire high-school student body numbered barely over a hundred; I graduated with fourteen other students (ten boys and five girls, which may have helped contribute to my social retardation). There was no problem becoming a jock:
Everyone
was a jock; otherwise there weren't enough players to fill a roster. If you didn't show up for football practice on the first day of your freshman year, they simply came and got you. So if you dreamed of something soft and perfumey in your future, you didn't have the same problem outfitting yourself in athletic gear as you might have had in a school of hundreds. Unfortunately, relativity being what it is, it wasn't good enough to get yourself into the uniform, you had to
play,
and it was advantageous if you didn't embarrass yourself doing it. And therein lay the problem.

At the beginning of my freshman year in high school I weighed 123 pounds, with all the muscle definition of a chalk outline. I couldn't complete a push-up. I could run a hundred yards in approximately the amount of time it took me to get a haircut. And I was terrified. My brother, John, was a junior that year, at right around six feet and 230. He
started at center on offense and middle linebacker on defense, and he had waited seventeen years to get me into an arena where he and his friends could pummel me without my bawling to my parents. And pummel me they did. I couldn't have bawled to my parents anyway; to bawl you must breathe.

By the middle of the season I was certain I would be granted no audience with any present or future cheerleader or Pep Club member due to football prowess and began looking forward to opportunities in upcoming athletic seasons: basketball or track.

My skills in basketball made me look like Joe Montana in football but the track season brought what turned out to be a defining athletic moment in my tenure as a Cascade Rambler.

I need to back up to say again that I went to high school from 1960 through 1964, a time when there were exactly zero competitive sports for girls. Because I knew some girls who I thought were pretty good athletes, I asked our high-school principal about that. He placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Chris, you know girls aren't emotionally equipped for competitive athletics.” This a day after Jesse Dopler had torn a full set of lockers off the wall because we lost a football game we were supposed to win, Jesse who
was
emotionally equipped.

The girls in our league were offered two interscholastic Play Days per year: one a track meet of sorts in the fall, and the other a round-robin spring softball game. They were allowed no more than three organized practices for each, in order that no school get an advantage over another.

Three track meets into the 1961 season, I have established myself as the only runner in the league who can actually make a track meet longer. Each team is allowed two entries per event with the exception of the mile run, the event in which all “athletes” who don't qualify for any
other
event are dumped. I have not received an official time in any of my first three mile runs because by the time I finish the timers have packed up their stop watches and headed for their cars.

The day my athletic image changes forever, we have just received our new purple-and-gold sweats (gold top, purple pants) and after finishing a set of quarter-mile “sprints” that leave me convulsing on my hands and knees, welcoming an imagined crippling car accident in which I lose my legs and therefore am not required to endure this madness anymore, I pull myself together to stumble for the showers. As I walk over the rise next to the high-school gymnasium, I see the girls in one of their three practices leading to their softball Play Day. At bat is Ellen Breidenbach, a solid, strong girl who appears as if she can hit the ball to Boise. On second
base is Paula Whitson, the girl to whom I've been silently pledging my love since first grade. In a school with a population of just over a hundred, it's probably an overstatement to say she doesn't know I exist, but it's no overstatement at all to say, from a romantic standpoint, she doesn't care. As I move closer to the action, I hear Ellen telling the girls she wants to bat but doesn't want to run the bases, and suddenly I understand the meaning of the word “purpose” in the Christian sense. God has placed me exactly here, exactly now, for a purpose. He wants me to get to second base with Paula Whitson.

The girls are getting irritated with Ellen because they want to get on with the game, so I step up and volunteer to run for her. All agree my speed creates no advantage for Ellen but demand that I touch home plate before running to first to keep me from jumping the gun.

I agree, and crouch as close as I dare behind Ellen, a lefty, so I can tag the plate a split second after she hits the ball and be on my way.

The pitcher tosses the ball; Ellen swings for the imaginary fence as I step forward with stars in my eyes to tag the plate. She misses the ball by at least six inches…fouls me off.

One of my many missing teeth is stuck in the
bat.

There are those few seconds following a near-death experience when your body hasn't decided whether or not to send the message of truth to your brain, so it doesn't hurt yet. As I lie on the ground, my brand-new gold sweatshirt now crimson and gold, fairly certain my face has been knocked off my head, I think, This isn't so bad. She has to come see how I am. My imagination pictures a fallen warrior. In the absence of heroics, abject pity will do. I still don't know the extent of the damages, but each girl who leans over to see winces in empathy. In the background Ellen wails, searching desperately for Kleenex. In retrospect, applying Kleenex to what she has done would be like gargling saltwater for a brain tumor.

I gaze into the circle of faces hovering over me; no Paula Whitson. She must have gone for help. Suddenly the girls' heads part for Gary Hirai and Julio Bilbao, two upperclassmen,
real
track guys, who gently lift me to my feet and help me the two blocks to Valley County Hospital. As I glance back, the baseball field is swimming, but I have no problem making out Paula Whitson, slapping her leg with her mitt, waiting for the game to start.

In the days that follow, the story spreads to every corner of elementary, junior high, and high school. Little girls are playing Ellen Breidenbach like I used to play Roy Rogers,
empowering themselves by knocking an imaginary Chris Crutcher (whoever
he
is) for a loop. The principal, bless his heart, places the bat, my front tooth still stuck in it like a sharp rock, in the trophy case above the caption
DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME
, next to a picture of what I used to look like. He is forced to call a moratorium on high-school boys calling out “Strike one!” upon seeing Ellen in the halls, then miming a devastating blow to the mouth and falling to the floor, reducing Ellen to tears each and every time. My dreams of Paula Whitson promising herself to me in exchange for the letter sweater I may never earn are reduced to rubble, so I turn to comedy: removing my brand-new plastic clackers in speech class to deliver an informative speech on “Poithonous Thnakes of the American Thouth” and concocting a ventriloquist's act wherein I place those clackers between slices of a bun and hold a hilarious conversation between Gabby Hayes (Roy Rogers's toothless sidekick) and the world's first talking hamburger. Very high comedy, but not exactly the way to get next to something soft and willing.

In a place like Cascade you simply can't give up on the jock thing, even after you've been reduced to getting ninety percent of your attention with a traveling dental show. The bigger, older guys will finally graduate and you
will
get your
chance. So flash forward to the winter of my junior year. I have grown to nearly six feet. My body no longer resembles a stepped-on marshmallow, but rather a strung-out piece of taffy, though there is the shadow of a bump on each arm that may one day grow into biceps; my number of push-ups is nearing double digits. I have put on enough weight to have lettered in football, though certainly not at one of the skill positions, and am allowing my imagination to portray me as a deadeye jump shooter once basketball starts.

Reality, however, says something different. We have thirteen players and twelve uniforms, so I wear JV shorts and a gold T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and the double-0 carefully applied with Magic Marker. If there is a twenty-point differential with less than two minutes remaining in the game, Coach puts me in. Because we have a good team and are never twenty points behind, I always enter a game to wild applause from the home crowd because they know if Coach puts me in, the game is locked. We are exactly halfway through the season—have played each league team once—and I have yet to get a statistic. I do not have a point or a rebound. I do not have an assist. I do not even have a foul. I'm not fast enough to
foul.

I'm moving through the halls one day when my friend Ron Boyd, football quarterback, high-scoring basketball
point guard, turns to me. “Crutcher, we gotta get you some press; it's getting embarrassing to hang around with you.”

“Hey, man, at least you get to go home at the end of the day. I have to hang around with me
all
the time.”

“Yeah, well, we're going to end all that. We're at McCall this weekend and they suck. We'll be
thirty
points ahead of them when you go in. First out-of-bounds play we get, you haul it down the floor; I'll fire the ball. They'll never expect a fast break with us that far ahead. You'll get two or three shots at the basket before they even know where you are.”

I am
pumped,
because though McCall is having a major building year in basketball, they have something any one of us would trade our team for in a heartbeat: Gerry Greene. Gerry Greene is the only girl in the entire league still in the running for the Idaho Junior Miss Pageant. Gerry Greene is tall and dark and heartbreakingly beautiful. If you see Gerry Greene on the streets of McCall, you tell your buddies you had a conversation; if you actually do get close enough to say hi, you tell them you went for a Coke. I know guys with topographical maps of McCall, Idaho, with pushpins stuck in them for Gerry Greene sightings. Gerry Greene is a very big deal. She will be at the game. I am going to score with Gerry Greene.

The game plays out almost exactly as Boyd predicted. With two minutes to go, Cascade leads by thirty-five points.
The other scrubs have been in
twice.
Coach calls me down from the end of the bench. I sprinkle some of the 7 UP I have been drinking on my forehead to look like sweat and untuck my shirt so it will appear as if I'm going
back
in, but the Cascade fans are not to be fooled and take it off the applause meter; McCall is an arch rival. I stand next to Coach as he goes through his substitution ritual: arm over the shoulder, leaning in close, giving instruction. He gives me the same instruction he always gives me—“Don't embarrass yourself”—slaps my butt, and pushes me onto the court.

A McCall player is at the free-throw line, and Boyd meets me at the out-of-bounds line. “If he makes this,” he whispers, “go. I'll step out and fire it down. This is your chance.”

A jackhammer drills against my sternum as the McCall player sinks both ends of a one-and-one, and I am headed downcourt like a runaway train.

Let it never be said that Chris Crutcher does not listen. My coach's last words before I stepped onto the court were “Don't embarrass yourself.” That isn't always easy. At this point in my life I am a deeply religious person, especially when I want something, and I know the Lord works in strange and mysterious ways that make Him sometimes
appear as if He's not working at all. I also know He helps those who help themselves, and I'm about to do that, because I have a rap sheet on missed opportunities as long as that of a career felon. If I go down the center of the court, Boyd is going to throw that ball over my shoulder, and, remembering football season, I know my chances of hauling it in are about the same as winning the lottery, which hasn't been invented yet. So I cut down the sideline, thinking I'll hang a one-eighty at the baseline, giving me the best shot at catching the ball.