by Andrew Cotto
Inside, it felt cold and creepy, and Sammie’s flashlight shone on dripping pipes in the narrow corridor that led toward the abandoned locker room. We crept along like super sleuths, though we probably could have brought a boom box and cranked tunes, since nobody was securing the inside of the gym in the middle of the night.
After going through the halls and into the main gym area, Sammie busted out his key and worked the lock to the annex. We walked across the mats, into the empty, round theater, guided by the dim light that came through the small window up top. There were no windows in the locker room, so we hit the lights and looked around: high ceilings, soda machines, and a doctor’s table; rows of dark blue lockers, full length, with each guy’s last name on a plaque up top; a slogan up high painted across the cinder block walls, above a packed trophy case. Banners and posters and all sorts of memorabilia covered every other available inch.
It smelled pretty bad, being a locker room and everything, but not as bad as I’d figured it would. Sammie said that they had laundry machines in the back, and the manager had to wash their uniforms or practice gear every night. The floors looked mopped, too. There was a mile-high stack of clean towels on a table by the shower stalls.
I felt kind of powerful in there, those guys and their stuff at our mercy. A lot of damage could be done, from just tearing things down and making a mess, to writing something clever with my spray can, to doing something to their uniforms, like cutting them into bikinis before the big match. But that didn’t sit right. Besides, we hadn’t come for that. We had just come to make sure that the big ladder they used to get stuff hung from the Arch was in there. Sammie found it in the back, by the laundry machines. After we left, I poked around the main gym area, trying to find a way up to the roof. Then we went home and waited for the next day.
The new slogan caught on. Most everyone seemed to share it like a juicy secret. People whispered, not too quietly, “Abort Wrestling” as they passed each other around campus. Hands were slapped and looks exchanged. Notes were passed in class, and that day, in three of my five periods, it had been written on the desktop where I sat. “Abort Wrestling” was taking over. At lunch, people at back tables coughed it out loud, voices muffled into their hands.
The dining hall buzzed and the back-and-forth gossip seemed to hover right over the wrestlers’ table. About halfway through lunch, the whole team got up and left together. When the last of them walked through the doorway, the room exploded with applause. The headmaster took to the podium and called for calm. But calm from what? You can’t calm urgency. You can’t calm community. People wanted to come together, and this was something we could come together about. We were just making a little noise. The wrestlers had, sort of, taken our school away; now we were sort of taking it back. Nobody had broken any rules, except for me, and nobody, except for Sammie, knew that it was me who had broken those rules. At least that’s what I figured.
After classes, I was in the dorm, taking a leak, when Terence came into the bathroom. I’d seen him around, of course. He lived right next door and, as much time as he spent holed up in his room, he did have to come out sometimes. So we’d pass each other around campus and around the dorm, sometimes. He always looked mildly sedated.. I didn’t even look at him when he squared off in the urinal next to mine.
“You think you’re slick,” he mumbled. His voice had gotten lower and slower. I wasn’t crazy about talking to dudes when taking leaks, and he kind of caught me off guard, talking mysteriously and everything. I didn’t say anything, just kept staring at the wall in front of me. “I saw your ass coming out of the mail room yesterday morning,” he said, “when I was on my way to detention.”
I peed faster, shook sloppy, fastened up, and made for the door.
Terence sort of huffed, in a mocking way, and put his eyes on me before I could walk out the door.
“I hope you ain’t doing this for me, ’cause I don’t give two shits about none of y’all.”
I took a deep breath and thought for a second. “I’m doing it for all of us,” I said, and walked out, leaving Terence with his dick in his hand. I wouldn’t have minded hanging around and talking it out a bit with him. A lot had happened since that first day in the dorm, with that crazy scene in the lobby and then me getting caught dancing in my undies that afternoon when Terence moved in. A lot had happened, alright, but I didn’t have time to talk about it then. I had a wrestling match to attend.
Chapter 19
I’d been on a school roof plenty of times. Back in the old neighborhood, I’d had to go up there whenever we ran out of balls. I’d get on a ledge by a corner window, where the school was one floor, then jump and catch the edge of the overhang and pull myself up. No problem. Once up there, I’d walk around on the gravel, fetch all the balls, and throw them down into the school yard. I was the only one of the guys athletic enough and gutsy enough to pull this off, and that was why my name was spray painted up higher than all the rest: I’d done it from the roof, hanging down by one hand and spraying DOMINO with the other.
Getting up on the gym roof at Hamden Academy wasn’t going to be that easy. I’d been looking at the gymnasium complex all week, trying to figure out the best way to get on top of the wrestling annex. All I wanted to do was take a peek through the window in the roof, and check on the results of my plan so far. I could have done this the easy way, just by showing up, but I figured that, if things worked out as I hoped, and nobody went to the match except for me, it would seem suspicious. There could have been an easier way than getting up there on the roof, but I was in superhero mode, and doing it like this made me feel like a kid again.
I’d looked around the night before for the stairwell leading to the main gymnasium roof, but the door up top was locked, which was too bad, because it would have made things a breeze. The only other way I could think to get up there was through the maintenance area. This was the last compartment of the complex, and the cover they’d built for the grounds equipment was only one story. It bordered the woods out toward the fields, and I came around through the trees and stayed out of sight to make sure no one was there. I fastened the straps of my backpack, put up the hood on my sweatshirt, and tied it tight. To get into the maintenance area, all I had to do was climb a 12-foot hurricane fence. To get onto the roof, though, I had to ride a tractor.
They needed these giant farm tractors to cut all that grass, and I sat on top of the biggest one for about five minutes, trying to figure things out. There were buttons and levers and dials, and I didn’t have a clue about any of them. I had a learner’s permit, but had only driven our car around the block two or three times. The tractor keys were in the ignition already, which was good, because I hadn’t even thought about keys. (I’d figured you used a button or a cord or something.) With the engine on, I pulled and pushed and turned everything I could until the beast jumped forward. I nearly fell off the back. I must have looked ridiculous, jerking around like that, but I wasn’t there to win any farm boy style contest and, eventually, I got that monster out of the shed and right next to the roof.
From the top of the seat, the leap to the roof wasn’t bad. The corrugated tin stung my hands and scratched my forearms, but I struggled and squirmed my way up there soon enough. The wrestling annex was the next section, and a ladder, mounted into the bricks, brought me up two flights. The lack of sound filled me with hope. I crept up onto the tar roof to the rounded window in the center. With my hands as a visor, I squinted through the glass until the scene below became clear: wrestlers on the mat and benches, coaches on both sides, a referee and a scorekeeper, nobody in the stands. Nobody except Rice and Santos in the front row of the balcony, paper bags of protest over their heads (I could tell it was them by the size and shape differential). Good one by those guys.
Instead of going back, I took the next ladder a few more stories up to the roof of the main gymnasium. The hills in every direction seemed endless, rolling over each other for as far as I could see. People walked around campus,
and I felt like shouting out to them. I felt like letting them know I was up there, and what I’d been up to. Instead, I whipped out my spray can, went across the roof, and climbed down a few rungs on the ladder that led to the first section. From there, I hung out as far as I could and scrawled as wide as I could in the same style as I had in the mail room, but instead of the slogan, I wrote my name in gigantic letters: DOMINO.
I made it up and down all the sections, practically sliding down the ladders. From the tin roof, I jumped to the ground and landed with a thud. I climbed back over the fence and disappeared into the woods. By the time I got back around to campus, changed my clothes, and walked the path, people had gathered below what had been written on the side of the gymnasium. I bummed a smoke at the shack and admired my work. After that, I went home and got ready for dinner.
The wrestling team won. They’d be leaving in a few days for the national tournament. Big news, though nobody clapped when the announcement was made at dinner. Nobody except the faculty and some clueless freshmen. The rest of the large hall sat silent until a chant began. It began in the back and, at first, I couldn’t make out what it was, but as momentum picked up across the room, I knew they were chanting for me or, at least, for whomever had started the rebellion against the wrestlers: “Domino!” “Domino!” “Domino!” “Domino!”
The sound bounced around the dining hall, and people began to pound on the big wooden tables. Not everybody was doing it, but enough. Not me, though. I couldn’t call out my own name, and I felt a little uneasy, sitting there thinking as the dining hall echoed around me that maybe I’d made a mistake. I ditched that thought when I caught Brenda’s eye. She sat a few tables away, not chanting or anything, just looking at me with an expression I couldn’t make out. But she looked at me, and that was enough to keep me going.
Everything began to fall apart the next morning, right below the Arch. Sammie and I had pulled off the next part of our plan the night before, sneaking out of the dorm again and into the abandoned locker room. But something felt wrong as we crept through the corridor. My insides couldn’t keep still, though I figured that might have something to do with all the prune juice we had tanked in our room after lights out.
Every part of the plan took longer than expected, but we got it done without getting caught and made it back to the dorm at about 2:00 in the morning. Sammie and I fell fast asleep. We even slept through our first classes and barely made it to the Arch in time to catch all the action.
At first, things seemed perfect. On that blue morning, a crowd had gathered where the banner hung, and I smiled thinking about what we had done and how we had done it. In the wrestlers’ locker room the night before, me and Sammie, side by side, the prune juice kicking in, our pants around our ankles, our privates hanging down as we squatted like two baboons in the woods, aimed our rectums into separate wrestling shoes Sammie had stolen earlier in the year. And the whole time, as we squatted and pooped, we laughed and laughed like no one’s ever possibly laughed before. I really thought I might die, squatted down like that and laughing so hard. Relief and laughter and this twisted sense of payback made tears stream down our faces. We had both cried bitter tears earlier that year.
Afterward, with rubber gloves on, I carried the stinking shoes, carefully strung with twine. Sammie lugged the ladder across campus. Under the Arch, as careful as I could, I’d hung the shit-filled shoes from their most recent banner. Then we’d ditched the ladder so that it couldn’t be used the next morning to get the hanging shoes down.
And that’s how we found the wrestlers the next morning, in front of the crowd, trying to get their shoes down. Chester was up on the shoulders of two goons, trying to saw through the twine with his room key. McCoy stood behind them, hands on hips, breathing heavy through his nose. Chester’s nose crinkled as he worked, aware of a funky smell, but too distracted with his arms stretched out over his head, way high up in the air. When the twine broke, Chester caught the shoes and was overwhelmed, right away, by the stink. He fell off the shoulder-platform and landed on his back. Shit from the shoes spilled all over his chest.
Some people laughed and some people didn’t. I knew right away that I’d gone too far. Regret seeped in and sagged my shoulders. Another mistake that I’d have to fess up to and get punished for, but I wasn’t fessing up right then, because McCoy walked into the crowd looking to provide some punishment. He grabbed every guy he could by the shirt, shaking them around and asking if they thought it was funny. He went one by one until people smartened up and got lost. I headed for the mail room like I had an interest in mail.
Surprisingly, something waited for me in my box. It was a big envelope with a logo on the front from Stonington College. What timing. I knew enough about college admissions to know that they didn’t send a big envelope to say “thanks, but no thanks.” I’d gotten into my first choice, a college on the seashore of Connecticut. Holy shit.
I tore open the envelope and read the letter about 10 times. I had earned one of those moments. One of those moments where joy fills you up, and you could scream or jump, just about blow up with happiness, tell everyone in sight — strangers or neighbors or friends — your good news. The mail room was filled with the faces of people who wanted to be anywhere but under the Arch, getting tossed around on a school morning by McCoy and company. They didn’t deserve that. I did. So I swallowed my good news and left the mail room alone. The Arch had cleared out by then and the campus was quiet.
Later that day, low clouds crept in. A steady drizzle started in the afternoon and practice was canceled. I took a stroll through the soft rain, down to the falls. I sat on the bridge, above the misting water, and tried to get things straight. I’d been confused all day, feeling good about getting into college and everything, but bad about what happened under the Arch. I kept telling myself that those guys deserved every bit of what they got. I kept telling myself that they deserved it for being mean to Sammie and for what they did to Terence, and me, and our room, and the school, and everything else that made those jerk-offs such jerk-offs. I was a hero. That’s what I told myself.
As the mist soaked into my clothes, the idea of me as a hero began to fade. I hadn’t done what was right. I’d done what was easy. Making those morons look bad and turning the school on them had nothing to do with courage. Standing up to them, face-to-face, would have been better, but the way I did it made things worse. Those guys were madder than ever, and there was no way they were going to walk away or do the right thing. Now, thanks to me, bad things were coming. And I knew about bad things.
Bad things had happened to me, for sure, but because of those things, I’d been a jerk to my dad, and to Sammie, and to other people, too. I’d hurt the most beautiful girl in the world. I’d gotten so many things wrong and caused people pain, people who didn’t deserve it. I’d lost my way. Big time. And as I sat there on the bridge, soaked through to the skin, I watched the rushing water get whisked away and wondered how to find my way home.
We had a game that next afternoon. I struck out three times, got hit by a pitch, and made two errors in the outfield. We lost 8-to-nothing. My head was off somewhere else, thinking about that school year, and the year before that, and the years before that. After the game, I tucked a ball into my glove and walked straight home, across the soggy fields and into the woods behind Montgomery. I pounded the ball over and over. Through the trees, I could hear the sound of voices raised, back and forth, that biting sound of barks.
The voices became recognizable when I reached the parking lot: Rice’s fakadaka way of speaking up against Chester’s hillbilly twang. They went back and forth, up and down, and over each other. I heard a third voice, too, foreign and unrecognizable. When I got to the lobby, I realized it was the voice of Santos, a voice I’d never heard before. He screamed in Spanish, what I assumed were curse words, at 100 mph. Speed cursing must have been his sport, though nobody seemed to notice.
All eyes, about half the dorm and a pack of wrestlers, were on
Rice and Chester in the middle of the common area. Sammie and a couple of other guys upstairs had come out of their rooms to lean over the railings and stare down at the action. Rice and Chester, nose to nose, or nose to neck, really, were attacking each other with threats and insults. Non-stop. Nonsensical. Their words had no meaning… just blathering that spun them toward fists. McCoy stood to the side, restrained by his teammates, ready to rip Rice to pieces. Veins bulged in McCoy’s neck and forehead, his eyes about to burst out of his block head.
There were some calm voices, too. Voices of reason. Wrestlers reminding each other that they had a national tournament at stake. That they had scholarships to colleges. Guys from the dorm even called for Rice and Chester to back off, to go home, to give it a rest already. They must’ve been tired of all the drama. Tired of the effect it had on all of us.
Terence must have been tired of it, too. He stormed from the stairwell and pushed Chester right off his little feet. Just sent his ass flying across the common area. Tough day for that kid. First the stinky shoes, then this. He slid across the floor and all the noise stopped. The wrestlers let go of McCoy. He and Terence stared at each other from across the room. As they began to walk toward each other, I knew I had to do something to keep the dominoes from falling in the wrong direction.
When McCoy crouched and circled to his right, I raised my glove and timed him as he moved around, focusing on my spot. After a few turns, I had him in my sights. I made an abbreviated wind-up and then fired a bullet that caught the big bastard right in the balls. “Uhhh!” he coughed, and crumpled to the ground. All eyes turned to me.