Vision Quest (15 page)

When I got home from the park I polished all Dad's shoes and oiled Carla's boots even though they didn't really need it. I didn't think I was sleepy, but I figured I should go to bed because I didn't want to be tired the next night and fall asleep in the middle of seeing the deer. But as soon as I cuddled up to Carla's back and got myself all contoured and warmed, I fell right to sleep and slept like an old tree till morning.

The phone rings me out
of my reverie. It's junior high and Otto and I are in Belle's basement watching her big brother and his friends take turns violating her body. She loves it. They invite us to join in, but we're too embarrassed and scared her mom will come home. We leave and run over to Otto's and flog our dummies raw.

I have a superturgid boner and it hurts to sprint upstairs. I catch the phone on about the zillionth ring. It's Dad waking me for the match. I like to take naps before a match if I can. For some reason they can be absolutely subterranean, so I like to make sure someone wakes me. No doubt I'm riddled with subconscious fears.

Dad wishes me good luck and asks again if I want him to come to the match. I tell him no, that this one won't be much to see, but to be sure to take off early next Tuesday night for the Shute match. He says he won't forget.

Back downstairs the bed's all warm still. Belle was probably the world's most beautiful and licentiously precocious seventh-grader. She really doesn't look much older now, except that the rest of her body has filled out to match her tits. Her legs are like the legs of a racehorse, long,
smooth-muscled, and precisely defined. In seventh grade she was mostly legs and tits and long pigtails.

I find it strange that even though I could not ask for more or better sex, I still fantasize about other girls. Even sometimes when Carla and I are making love I'll think of Belle. I'll think of coming on her tits, which her brother and his friends did to her great delight. She'd rub it all over with her hands—like suntan lotion. Once when we were making love, I imagined Mrs. Brockington, my history teacher, fucking a horse. I think it was because she had shown us a movie about the potentially future-shocking effects of artificial insemination, or maybe that was the time Tanneran told us about the death of Catherine the Great.

There's almost nothing sexually imaginable Carla is not up for. I guess we could shit on each other or something like that, but we don't. So I don't figure I'm sexually frustrated. I guess maybe I just have a lot of energy that works itself out through my cock.

I think of Belle's nipples all pumped up and brown, of Mrs. Brockington bending over her desk with a horse mounted behind, of Romaine Lewis about to introduce his cock to Carla's lips, of Lemon Pie's pictures of the dick-licking boys, of Mom. Weird.

It's amazing how fast I come once the images start flashing and how all I can think of now is a hot chocolate float after the match if my weight is down enough.

Our junior varsity is down,
19–11. I watch out the wrestling room window as Doug Bowden, our number-two man at fifty-four, shakes hands with some guy I don't know from Lewis and Clark. I assume Doug will put this guy away in short order. Doug would be number one on a lot of other teams, but the two of us have been in the same weight class these past two and a half years now and I've beaten him steady. We both lettered as sophomores because the senior I beat out for number one quit. That left a guy named Warren Morford, who should have wrestled at forty-five but didn't want to lose the weight. Warren was heavy into anchovy pizzas, and Kuch would treat him to one every chance he got so Warren wouldn't get to thinking about dropping down to forty-five, where Kuch was number one after Lynn Atkinson broke his neck sledding. Doug and Warren had some real battles. Whoever won would be so beat when it came time to wrestle me that I wasn't getting enough workout, which was Coach's motivation for the tough preparation drill we use now. If a guy's not being pushed enough, or if he has an especially tough match, Coach will run him thirty-second rounds against
the number-one men in the weight classes above. All next week, for example, I'll be wrestling Smith and Balldozer and Otto, one after the other, every thirty seconds, just as fast as we can go. I'm going to ask Coach to put Kuch in when I'm really tired so I'll have somebody lighter and faster—somebody like Shute—to work against.

“Lunchtime!” I yell down to the mats below. “Lunchtime, Dougie. Eat 'im, eat 'im, eat 'im!” Carla contends we wrestlers are all a bunch of suppressed puff-jobbers with our continual references to oral relations.

“Burn 'im, Dougie! Sting 'im! Take it to 'im one time!” yells Randy Smith, Doug's best friend, from the other side of the window.

The bleachers are about full and most of the cheerleaders are here. The junior varsity matches usually start with a small crowd, just parents of the wrestlers and the few really interested people who want good seats for the varsity match. But by the time they get to the 154-pound class the gym is usually about full and the crowd is into it.

Belle stomps her feet and claps her hands and starts a takedown chant. Now our whole side of the bleachers is chanting at Doug. “Takedown!” Clap, clap, clap. “Takedown!” Clap, clap, clap. “Takedown!” Clap, clap, clap.

Both Doug and the L.C. guy shoot for the takedown at the same time. They bump heads and go to the mat. Doug gets the worst of it and L.C. slips behind for the points. Smith and I look at each other.

“Come on, you Dougie!” Randy yells. “Put it on 'im! Gobble, gobble, gobble one time!”

Doug looks sheepishly to the bench where Coach Ratta and the assistant coach, Tom Morgan, sit with the JVs. Morgan laughs and speaks into the tape recorder.

L.C. has visions of a quick pin. He begins to ride Doug high, looking to sneak a half nelson on him and drive him to his back. Doug feels the guy's weight shifting and lets him have the half nelson. Almost. The light of five pinning points shines in his eyes as L.C. starts to drive Doug over. Doug clamps down hard on the guy's feeble half nelson, rolls to his back, then right over again. Our bleachers erupt in a chant of “Pin, pin, pin!” and the light in L.C.'s eyes turns to panic. He flops and strains and tries to bridge, but Doug has his shoulders controlled now with a half nelson of his own. Slap! The ref slaps the mat, and it's all over. Our side cheers, the L.C. side sighs, and Doug bounces up and waits for the ref to raise his hand.

There it is: balance again. The most important quality a wrestler has. More important than strength, speed, smarts—even more important than endurance. You
feel
the guy's weight. You
feel
where he's going, what his body's going to do. Then you take advantage. You use his strength, his speed, his smarts, even his endurance, against him.

I'm not terribly excited about the other JV matches, so I go sit with Kuch and Sausage. Kuch is trying to bolster Sausage's confidence. Mash did a little psych job on him at
the weigh-in. Mash knew he couldn't make weight with his warm-up suit on, but he tried anyway. The ref read off 104.5. You could just see Sausage thinking, “He's not gonna make weight! I won't be killed!” Mash took off his warm-ups. In his tights and top he weighed 103.25. Sausage closed his eyes, undoubtedly calculating the weight of an L.C. wrestling uniform. Mash stripped to his jock. Sausage peeked around the ref and read the results for himself: 102.75. He turned a white shade of pale. Mash stood off by himself and put his stuff back on. With no larger person next to him to put his small stature in perspective, Mash looks like he could go about nine-feet-three and 690 pounds. Sausage shouldn't have looked, but he did.

“You gotta go after him, Sausage,” Kuch says. “You've got nothing to lose. Go out there fierce and proud and there's no way you'll come back ashamed. No matter how bad ya get beat.”

Sausage is hunched up in a corner. He hangs his head between his legs and breathes heavily through his mouth.

Balldozer comes over, pats him on the knee, and says, “Shit to the thirteenth power, Sausage,” which is a French way of saying good luck.

Coach comes through the door smiling. The JVs pulled it out, 22–19. He tells us, like he always does, that we'll have a minute of silence before we head out.

Schmoozler turns off his James Taylor tape. Jerry and Mike Konigi, who are Buddhists, pray. So do Seeley and
Williamson and Smith and Raska, who are what they call “born-again” Christians.

I really like that none of the religious guys on the team evangelizes anymore. Coach, who is a Christian, gives a talk at the start of the season about peoples' rights to their views of life. He had to start doing it in my sophomore year because there got to be so much conflict among born-agains and heads and guys who just wanted to be left alone to wrestle that it wasn't hardly any fun to come to practice.

Once I asked Coach what he prayed about in our minute of silence and he said he thanked God for the gift of life and prayed that nobody got hurt too bad.

Sausage, I'm sure, usually spends his silent minute dreaming of at least a hand job after the match. I doubt his thoughts are on his cock this evening, though. He and Kuch are huddled in the corner and Kuch is whispering softly. I know exactly what he's saying:

“Even if my people must eventually pass from the face of the earth, they will live on in whatever men are fierce and strong, so that when women see a man who is proud and brave and vengeful, even if he has a white face, they will cry: ‘That is a Human Being!' ”

I never know what Balldozer is thinking. I really like him, but with his French and Brazilian backgrounds, we have some kind of cultural gap.

Schmooz is pillowed upon his warm-up jacket, singing softly, “In my mind I'm gone to Carolina. . . .” I can see his lips move.

Otto's got his feet up on the wall and behind his closed eyes he's watching films on the ceiling. He's only thinking of the way to win. Before a wrestling match or a football game Otto becomes cybernetic. Name a move and he tells you the counter. Name a play and he tells you his assignment. “Guy goes for a single leg, I go for a whizzer. Thirty-four-trap: I pull and rip their tackle at the line, then look for the linebacker.”

I'm not thinking much of anything.

*  *  *

Lewis and Clark is about finished with their exercises. They're the only team that doesn't run out on the mat. They walk out real slow, swaying druidically in their black hooded warm-up suits. Their hoods come down so far you can't see their faces. Mash leads the way. They look like mean lumps of coal, except for Romaine Lewis. He's tall and slim and his hood won't fit over his hair. He wears it in dreadlocks and looks like a mean black male Medusa. And L.C. doesn't shout out their exercises. They just grunt and moan a little at each other. Opposing schools' fans get very offended. There's something of the air of professional wrestling in their histrionics. They do it to psych out their opponents and it works about half the time. It sure works on me. I love it so much I just want to applaud. It takes me until my second round before I even feel like serious wrestling. Roman Polanski would love the L.C. warm-ups.

We're all bunched up behind the locker-room door. Coach has left us and gone out to the bench to chuckle at L.C. Sausage is on tiptoes, peering through the little window in the door to see when they finish. He's all set to lead us out on the mat and take us through our exercises.

“Okay,” Sausage says. He turns back to face us. He takes a big breath. The captain is always supposed to give a big battle cry as we charge out.

“Dog style!” yells Sausage as we burst through the door to heavy cheers and thread our way between the bleachers to the mat. We're all sprinting, legs high, and whooping hard and laughing a little, too, at Sausage's chilling call to arms. I'd say he's in the right frame of mind.

We're fairly loose and sweating just a bead or two by the end of the exercises. Sausage leads us a couple times around the big gold circle as we whoop and holler, then to the bench.

In a minute we're out on the mat again for the introductions. The two teams line up, facing each other. The announcer gives the weight class, then introduces the wrestlers. Sausage has only a black apparition with which to shake hands. But we know Mash is in there. He moves like a small but mighty thunderhead back to the L.C. bench to take off his warm-up suit and do a few more twists and bends. Coach takes Konigi and Sausage back behind our bench and kneads their shoulders in turn and talks steadily to them. Romaine gives me a couple fists to bang. I do it twice.

“Brother man,” he says and bangs back once.

“Good luck, Romaine,” I reply. I sure like him. As long as we've been acquainted I've always wanted to get to know him better. Go camping or to some shows or something. Otto knows him pretty well. Romaine is a wide receiver and defensive halfback.

Little Konigi decisions his man in a crummy match characterized by mutual stalling. He got two takedown points and then wrestled defensively the rest of the match. His older brother yells at him by the drinking fountain. They're a funny pair. Little Konig is a hell-raiser everywhere but on the mat, where he's technically good enough but wrestles like he's signed a nonaggression pact. Big Konig is shy everywhere but on the mat, where he goes for broke every second. His matches never go beyond two rounds. It's pin or get pinned for the Big Konig at 123.

The ref signals for Mash and Sausage. Sausage trots out like a little pony. Mash takes his time. They meet in the inner gold circle, shake hands, and turn to face each other. The ref blows his whistle.

Down goes Sausage after a single leg. Mash counters with a cross-face that bends Sausage's nose about 180 degrees, then shoves him away. Sausage's headgear is pushed over his eyes, so the ref calls time.