Slot Machine Read online

  “Where’s Mikie?” I asked. “You seen him?”

  “Ya, he’s right over there.” Frank waved his arm over half the hall, covering a hundred and fifty or so guys, giving none of his attention to me and all of it to the indoctrination. He actually seemed to like it.

  Frankie was fitting in too well here. It was frightening. I needed Mike. Frank needed Mike too. While Frankie was game for anything, and I was game for nothing, Mike was Dad. That’s what we called him back at the old school, Dad. Everybody called him that, because of his sense, his radar for always knowing the way to go. Do this one. Don’t do that one. Don’t go there. That’s not funny. That’s cool. Everyone joked about it, called him Dad as if it was a cut. Sometimes, when he was too sensible, it got on our nerves. Then we called him Dud.

  But we always listened to him, or wished we had. It was just a gift, something that was built into him. He was never wrong. I knew that for a fact, because he told me so.

  We got split, though. Me and Frankie in one cabin, Mikie out there somewhere in one of the other nine Families. That’s what they called each group, a Family. As if we were different species of bugs, or Mafia factions. Whatever they called it, I didn’t connect. I felt like a baby bird dumped out of the nest, plummeting. I needed Mike. Frankie was like another baby bird dumped from the nest, but rocketing straight up. He needed Mikie too.

  “I want to introduce to you men,” Brother Jackson boomed on, “Mr. Buonfiglio, one of our senior instructors here at the retreat. Now some of you may know Mr. Buonfiglio as the coach of our school’s Division Two state champion football team. But that’s not the reason he’s here. That would violate state regulations regarding having organized football camps before August fifteenth...” Like a comedian, Jackson let his words trail off as he scanned the audience, a sly smile spreading across his black thread lips. “And we wouldn’t want to do that now, would we?”

  Hearty yucks started bubbling out here and there as guys started getting the joke.

  “No, no, no. Mr. Buonfiglio is here in his capacity as freshman history teacher and academic advisor...” He didn’t have to pause for a laugh this time, the crowd picking right up on it, Buonfiglio blowing hard on his whistle—his academic advising whistle—to big applause.

  “And this,” Jackson said, putting his hand on the shoulder of a taller, leaner, but just as grim-faced man as the not-football-coach, “is Mr. Rourke, who is not just the coach of the three-time state championship cross-country team, but also the study-hall proctor and guidance counselor. ...”

  This was apparently the funniest thing anyone there had ever heard. The A-frame rocked under my feet and over my head.

  On and on it went, through the murderers’ row of coaches who were teachers. I learned something as I shriveled in the middle of it all, hands cupped over my ears. I learned that the easier it is to spell someone’s laugh, the stupider that laugh sounds.

  HOF-HOF-HOF-HOF was popular close to the stage.

  HAR-AR-AR-AR-AR was the choice of most tall guys, the basketball players sprouting up here and there throughout.

  GUH-HUH-GUH-HUH-GUH-HUH. God, the guh-huhs, bone chilling in their ignorance, they rose from all corners, like a noxious gas that you couldn’t see, but was going to get you.

  HEE-AWW-HEE-AWW was Frankie’s brand. I knew that, wherever he was, Mikie wasn’t making a sound.

  Mother.

  Football camp. You sent me to football camp. How sweet. How did you ever guess? I did try soooo hard to keep my passion for smashing into other fat boys a secret, but you found me out, didn’t you? Who told? Come on now, who told?

  Yours Muy Macho,

  Elvin “Big Booty” Bishop

  P.S. How do you like my new name? I hope you like it a lot because apparently it’s mine to keep. Locker-room camaraderie stuff, you know. Please address all my mail accordingly from now on.

  We finally located Mikie and used one of our precious twenty-minute “Reflective Periods” to go see him. We get Reflectives three times a day: before breakfast, after lunch, after dinner. It was the only officially sanctioned time when we were not accountable to one function, one counselor, one location or another. Deep-thought time, to pull it all together, sort things out, see ourselves at one with... spiritual stuff. To the naked eye, it looked like almost everybody got closer to god in one of three ways: 1. smoking cigarettes, 2. sleeping, or 3. conducting party-of-one religious services in the bathroom.

  We found Mikie in Cluster Seven. No, they’re not cabins, they’re “Clusters.” Frankie and I were clustering way over in Number Two.

  Mikie came out and sat on a rock, hunched over, his chin on his fist. “I don’t know...” he kept saying while shaking his head. “I don’t know...”

  “What happens if we escape?” I asked.

  “You guys are big babies,” Frankie said. “When are you going to grow up? This could be the most fun you ever had. What, you want to spend all summer with Mommy?”

  “Yes,” I blurted.

  “I don’t know,” Mikie repeated. “It’s not so much the camp. Three weeks isn’t so hard. I’m just not so sure about the school. Is this what it’s going to be like? They’re a little... gung-ho for me.”

  “Jeez, that’s exactly what you guys need,” Frankie said, “is a little gung-ho.” He pumped his fist when he said ho. “You’re the two boringest guys in the whole camp—”

  “Retreat,” I corrected him.

  “The two boringest guys in the whole retreat. I mean, I’m compromising myself just being seen here in the open with you.” He looked all around, as if the geek police were gaining on him.

  “You been slotted yet for tomorrow?” I asked Mike. For starters we were allowed to tell the administration what we were best at, and if there was space, that was the area, or “Sector,” we’d go with. Then, after checking you out, if they decided otherwise, you’d be slotted elsewhere. So you gave them a list of at least two specialties.

  “Hoop Sector,” Mike said, shrugging. “But I told them if they wanted I could also do Baseball Sector or run some track. How ’bout you?”

  “I abstained,” I said.

  “That was so damn embarrassing,” Frankie said. “In front of the whole Family.”

  Mike liked it. “Abstained?” He laughed.

  “Told the counselor—all right, how’s this, his name is Thor—that I was a conscientious objector, that the whole slotting thing was degrading, and that I had a lot of unslottable intangibles to contribute to the school.”

  “Uh-oh. What did he say?”

  “He scribbled for like five minutes in his notebook, then said they’d get back to me.”

  “Yikes,” Mike said.

  A bell gonged high up in the tower. Reflective Period was over in another five minutes. Time to hurry back to the Cluster to be with the Family.

  “So what’s your slot, Frankie?” Mike called as we started back up the trail.

  Frank spun to face Mikie, walking backward now. “Come on, Dad,” Frankie drawled, “what’s always been my slot?”

  Mikie started shaking his head again, pointing sternly as Frank slapped himself on the rear, then galloped away like a horse. “Better watch yourself, Franko,” he warned.

  What had Frankie’s slot always been? Big persona, mostly. And he set out immediately to make it so here too. First night we established the routine, everyone in Cluster Two gathering around for the stories. In another camp, they would have been ghost stories. Here, it was Frankie telling amazing-Frankie stories. My job was to nod, to corroborate, to verify that yes, I swear to god he did that, he actually did that. More or less.

  “You remember that nun, don’t you, Elvin? Sure. She was a novice, actually, not quite a nun yet, still on the fence, if ya know what I mean.” He grabbed his thigh when he said it, and whenever he said it, he charged that phrase—if ya know what I mean—with more secret, smutty meaning than anything that ever popped up in the letters to Penthouse. “Well I’ll tell ya, she was o
n that fence when she came to our school, and she was tottering pretty bad when she left. Am I right, Elvin?”

  I had forgotten if he was, strictly, right. But he told it so well, told it so good, that he always had me believing in him. “You are right, Frankie,” I said. I could enjoy this for a while, basking in a little bit of Frankie’s raunchy glamour. It was as close to the real thing as I was likely to get anytime soon.

  “She wasn’t a nun like, you know, nuns. She was young. She wore a pair of Guess? jeans sometimes in the afternoons when she raked the churchyard, and let me tell you, she didn’t embarrass herself doing it either. Everybody fell in love the day she showed up, boys and girls, no lie. She looked like Keanu Reeves.”

  “Oh, you’re full of it, man,” one big guy, football slotted, challenged.

  Frank just tilted a glance my way, and I did my thing. I raised my hand, put on my Boy Scout face, and said, “I swear. It’s the truth. It’s all true.”

  “Thank you,” Frank said, bowing graciously.

  “No, thank you,” I replied. I never wanted him to stop.

  “Listen, guys,” Frank went on, “I don’t blame you. Half the time I look at my life and I can hardly believe it myself. But there it is.”

  “So what happened?” an impatient desperate small voice shot through.

  “Well, I just told her, I said, Sis, I’m tight with the Lord, and we got an agreement: I don’t steal his chicks, and he doesn’t throw me into no whales or turn me into salt.”

  “What did she do? Come on?”

  Out of his version of modesty, Frankie gestured to me to finish.

  “She killed herself,” I said flatly.

  They all moaned; somebody booed.

  “Well, they transferred her anyway, after she took the pills. And we heard that the next time she really did it, with the hair dryer in the bathtub.”

  “Lights out,” the voice called, and the lights snapped immediately off.

  “Nnnnnnnaked. And dead. In the bathtub,” Frankie hummed like the devil in the darkness.

  Frankie always told stories to get a reaction. Laughs, applause, and gasps for Frank were like blood for a vampire. So he was probably satisfied, after lights-out, to hear the symphony of rusty bedsprings eek-eeking all over the barracks.

  “Pace yourselves, boys,” I thought, “or you’ll never survive three weeks with the guy.”

  Mrs. Bishop,

  There are no girls here, Ma. None. Not even a nun. Even the big ugly nurse and his assistant are male. Did you know about this? If it were not for Frankie’s imagination, we would all be dangerously lonely here. Have we thought this out all the way? Do we think this is a good thing for me at this stage? All right let it be on your head, Ma.

  Fine. Whatever. I’m sorry, I’m being bratty. I shouldn’t be raining on your summer. How are those World Cup games going anyway? Pretty ripping, huh? Was that you the paper showed sitting in the party tent with Placido Domingo after Italy-Spain in Foxboro? He was looking down your dress, you know. Did I not tell you to avoid the European men while I’m away?

  No Longer Your Concern,

  Mr. Bishop

  Chapter 2: Oh my god. Football.

  WHAT TO DO WITH the fat guys? They don’t know what to do with the fat guys. The fat guys don’t fit the Plan, the Philosophy, the shorts. Red shorts. Everybody’s got to wear them. The Plan is that all the fine young men here can succeed if they are properly guided to the right sports activity for them. The raw material is in there, in each and every one of us, and it can be molded with the proper instruction at the earliest levels—before we get too screwed up.

  I tried to tell them. I tried earnestly to tell them that my insides were every bit as flabby as my outsides. They wouldn’t hear of it. None of the people in charge here—and they were all in charge, except for the kids—could conceive of this. They’d call up their directory of everything they knew about young men’s insides, and that profile would not show up. The soft kid, the kid who could not play anything and who did not even care about it. They were sorry, but that kid did not exist.

  “We’ll find what you’re hidin’ inside there,” said Thor, my Cluster Leader. He grabbed two fistfuls of fat at my beltline and yanked me around as he said it, like a hundred people had done before him.

  Why do people think that’s funny?

  Football, of course. Their response to a fat kid is always football. They don’t know what else to do. They figure they’re going to melt away my outside and find a football-player-shaped monster lurking on the inside.

  They just wouldn’t listen.

  “Don’t cry, goddammit,” the coach screamed. It was my third play from scrimmage, eight minutes and three head slaps into my football career. “It’s a head slap. It’s illegal, but it happens all the time. You can’t cry about it. Jesus.” He turned his back on me and stalked away, personally offended by my behavior. Then he paced, as violent people will do when they’re trying to get it under control.

  I wasn’t crying, anyhow. Yes, I was upset, and yes, there were tears splashing down my face, but I was not crying. They were just those pain tears, the kind that come out when your mind says “no way, not now, cannot cry here” but your body knows better and goes ahead unauthorized.

  I could feel around me that I was getting looks from the four score and seven other gridiron monkeys who stood in temporary grunt-free silence all over the field. Hell, half of them had cried already, but they channeled their pain in a much more acceptable way: They went on and maimed somebody else.

  Composed, Coach came back as I lined up again. He screamed right into the little one-inch earhole on the right side of my helmet, so it sounded like he had a bullhorn pressed to the side of my head. “Do not let him get by you again! Your quarterback was a dead man on that last play! Protect the passer! Don’t cry! Don’t cry!”

  “I was not crying,” I yelled, because it seemed pretty important to establish that. It didn’t matter; the coach was already back to pacing, walking me off his mind.

  The snap, my man rushed me. Pushed me, two hands flat on my chest. Bam. Pushed me again, blasting me back a couple more steps. I tried to dig in. Useless. Crowded me. Clack, his helmet banged into mine. One punch in the stomach. My wind gone. I was practically running backward. “Jesus Christ,” I heard the desperate-sounding quarterback behind me say. I was just trying to fend my man off now with stiff arms, waving hands. Bang! Left-side head slap nearly knocked me over until Bang! right-side head slap rocked me the other way. My head hit the turf before my hands could brace me. I heard the thud of the quarterback being driven into the ground behind me.

  I couldn’t get right up. Which was not a problem. Coach came to me.

  “Stop crying,” he screamed. “Jesus, I hate that.” He lunged at me as he spoke, like he was going to hit me himself.

  It didn’t bother me much. I had enough on my plate just trying to get up. As I pushed to try and get some space between my throbbing head and the earth, it felt as if I was lifting the planet off of me, rather than vice versa. I paused for a few seconds on all fours, touched my face lightly with my fingertips, and felt the blood drip from my nose. A couple of guys got me by the armpits and brought me to the nurse’s station.

  Sick bay. Full of slackers like me. Skinny kids and fat kids. Sick bay—or “Injured list” or “IL,” as they prefer to call it—is a very hot ticket, especially in the first few days of retreat.

  In fact it’s so popular that they issue us vouchers for IL time. You get four vouchers, each good for an hour with the nurse, or a half day if he declares you a wreck. Seems that in years past out-of-shape guys were always taking dives and hiding out in sick bay for most of camp. Hence the voucher system. If you ran out of vouchers, you were not allowed to go to the nurse if you could get there under your own power. And if you couldn’t, it was a judgment call made by the coach.

  I was lying on my cot, a cool ice bag across my sinuses, musing on a way to retroactively flunk my way b
ack into junior high, when the guy in the next cot broke the dream.

  “What you in for?”

  I opened my eyes, turned slightly to look. “Wow,” I said as I took him all in. He was lying on his stomach, stretching out way over both ends of his little cot, even farther than I overlapped the sides of mine. Can’t have the tubs and beanpoles getting too comfortable down at the clinic, now, can we?

  To the untrained eye, this could have been a player. But one glance and I knew better. I recognized the look.

  “Basketball slot, huh?” I said wisely.

  He nodded, then winced with the pain of nodding. “Football slot?” he asked in return.

  “Ya,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Undercut. Went up for a rebound and somebody took my legs out from under me, landed right on my back. You?”

  “Head slaps. Nosebleeds. Public humiliation.” I kept nodding as I talked, he kept nodding as he listened. Like we’d all been here before, more or less.

  The nurse’s assistant, Butch, came over and stood between our cots. Regaining speech control was the official first sign of readiness to return to the general population. Butch himself barely qualified. “You can get up?” he said to my new geeky friend.

  “I not can get up,” he grunted slowly.

  When I laughed, Butch set himself on me. “You. Bleeding stop?”

  I removed the ice pack, brought two fingers to my nostrils.

  “Hey. Do that again,” Butch insisted.

  “What? This?” I asked, and touched my nose again.

  Butch pulled me up by the wrist. “Hell, if you can do that, you’re ready to go back. Stop wastin’ my time.”

  Before I was forced out, I leaned down toward my comrade. “Elvin Bishop,” I said, and shook his hand.

  “Paul Burman,” he said in return. He smiled through real pain. “Cool. I haven’t actually made any friends here yet.”

  I didn’t want to lead him on. “Oh, well, see I already have two friends, so I’m all set for now. But... well, we’ll see.” Then I dropped into a whisper for what I was really after: “This for real?” I asked, pointing at his back.