Stotan!

  TUESDAY

  I was right. I woke up this morning pinned to the mattress with deep-burning muscle pain. My spleen was sore. My liver was sore. Nothing worked like it was supposed to; I felt like a stumbling toddler learning to move all over again.

  From the time the alarm went off until we arrived at the pool, not a complete sentence was uttered—unless the Lord’s name in vain can be considered a complete sentence, and I think it’s missing a verb. The heater wasn’t working and it had to be forty degrees in the room; sitting on the freezing toilet seat was our first Stotan surprise of the day.

  We grabbed our suits and towels, pulled on our coats and gloves and boots like grumpy little kids being forced out into the snow to play, and piled back into Lion’s Jeepster. I have to say one of the worst parts of the whole day was driving through the neighborhoods toward the pool, anticipating four more hours as a wus posing as a Stotan. I couldn’t imagine it being over. When I was a little kid and had to go to the dentist, the only way I could get through the “death walk,” where you’re riding up in the elevator, then walking down the hall to his office, hearing imaginary screams, was to think about how in an hour or so it would be over. No matter how bad it got, how many live nerves he accidentally drilled, I’d walk out of there alive in about an hour. Well, I couldn’t even see an hour into this day, much less clear through to noon. It seemed as if we were headed into something dark and ugly from which there was no return. We were getting on the MTA (one of Long John’s old favorites).

  After forty-five minutes of non-stop land drills and a good hosing off by Fireman Max, Lion showed his first signs of cracking. We were lined up ready for the 400-’fly warmup when Lion suddenly did a perfect military about-face, a left-face, marched to the low board, up and out to the end, did another perfect about-face, folded his arms over his stomach and fell straight backward into the pool, his back slapping the water like a wet carp on a flat rock. As he fell, he screamed, “Stotan!” We stared a split second in stunned amazement as he started his 400 ’fly, before Nortie and Jeff and I followed suit, dropping off the end of the board like ducks in an arcade, then fishtailing off to our lanes to complete the warmup. Peckerhead Lion wasn’t going to get ahead of us on pain.

  Again the whirlwind of non-stop land and water drills; sets of 400s, bearwalk, steamrollers, deck drills, four long trips to the Torture Lane, situps on raw tailbones, sets of no-breathe springs, Max hollering all the way, “You have to let go! Give it up! You can’t beat it! You’re in it! You’re part of it! Give it up!”

  Lion was the first to slip in. Suddenly he was swimming faster than all of us, getting half again as many repetitions on any given drill, his chest bouncing off the deck in accelerating cadence as he racked off an infinity of pushups. Then Jeff, in less maniacal fashion, started picking up until he was in perfect rhythm with Lion. I looked at Nortie struggling to get himself out of the water and said, “Let’s get it, young feller.”

  Somewhere in the next couple of repeats I noticed things going soft at the edges; and we were a machine. Max put the bullhorn down and just called the starts. He didn’t call out times or shout encouragement, or in any way risk jolting us out of the spell.

  And then it was noon; a letdown to stop.

  In the shower no one spoke. That kind of high makes “normal” seem abysmal, and we tried to hang on to it as long as we could. I felt almost hung over as the exhaustion and the deep, deep muscle fatigue crept back into my consciousness. The soreness was gone, but it would return—physical pain that comes from the soul rather than from outside.

  We picked up our Coke and more eggs at Safeway—which is fast becoming our only connection to the outside world—and went straight back to Lion’s. The heater was still on the blink, so we crawled into our bags fully dressed, thinking we could fix it later.

  Still no one mentioned what had happened—how the workout had just taken over—define it and it goes away—but I’m sure we all hoped we could re-create it tomorrow; we dreaded the idea of going through half that in a conscious state.

  We passed up the gourmet sandwiches for sleep—drifting off into that totally relaxed, dreamless sleep your body goes to, looking for the state nearest death.

  I woke up in the late-afternoon dimness—maybe around four—to scuffling coming from Lion’s bed. Jeff was on top of him, pinning Lion’s arms to his mattress with his knees. Jeff hollered for Nortie, who came flying up out of his sleep to the bed before he even knew why he was there.

  “Beat on his chest!” Jeff said.

  “Beat on my chest and die!” was Lion’s reply.

  “Don’t beat on his chest and die!” Jeff said.

  Nortie looked to me. “Flip a coin,” I said. “You’re going to die.”

  “Why am I beating on his chest?” Nortie asked.

  “Just do it!”

  Nortie started pounding on Lion’s chest with his middle knuckle, like Jeff does to Nortie all the time.

  “Why is he pounding on my chest?” Lion asked.

  “Because my back hurts,” Jeff said. “Because, for a reason I would be far too embarrassed to explain, I fell backward off the diving board today and almost laid my back open so I could keep up some kind of ‘Stotan status’ with my brain-damaged teammate.”

  “Yeah,” Nortie said, and pounded harder.

  Lion let loose with a maniacal laugh, and Nortie quickened the cadence. “Stotan!” Lion screamed. “Stotan! Stotan! All the way! Beat me!” He laughed again.

  Jeff pushed Nortie away and pulled Lion’s bag up around his shoulders, zipping it up in the same motion. Lion didn’t even struggle, just kept up his chant. Jeff stuffed his head down into the bag and closed the top with his fist, then dragged his prize off the bed, out the door, down the stairs, for Chrissakes, and threw it into the snowbank. All to the muffled chant “Stotan! Stotan! All the way!”

  Jeff reappeared in seconds, walked into the kitchen and started throwing large globs of peanut butter onto the bread he’d laid out earlier for sandwiches.

  I crawled out of my bag and fiddled with the heater for a few seconds, pulling and pushing the frayed cord, and it magically came on. Nortie let out a quick “All right!” and scrambled over to stand by it. “Gotta get warm,” he said. “When Lion gets back up here, he’s going to beat me to death, and I want to feel it.”

  Lion stepped back through the door, dragging his snowy sleeping bag, dropped it on the floor, pounded his chest three times and said, “Stotan.” He flipped a snowball to Jeff, who dropped it in the sink.

  Nortie watched him warily a few seconds to be sure Lion wasn’t going to turn on him, breathed an almost inaudible sigh of relief and said, “Boy, we really got hummin’ today, huh?”

  I said, “Huh.”

  “How does he do that?” Nortie asked.

  “He doesn’t do it,” Lion said. “We do it.”

  “Yeah,” Nortie said, “but I couldn’t do it by myself. And I wouldn’t, either. I mean, it’s crazy. You guys know that, don’t you? There’ll come a time when we ask ourselves why we did it. Like right now. Why are we doing this? Are we jerks?”

  “You are,” Jeff said, “but that has nothing to do with Stotan Week. Let me give you a little advice. Forget that question until we’re out of here. You’re either going to do it or you’re not. Questions like ‘why’ only make it tougher.”

  Nortie grunted in agreement. “What time’s Elaine coming anyway?”

  “About seven,” Jeff said, and came through the kitchen door with the first plateload of sandwiches. “Eat up. Gotta have these gone before she gets here to make us a real meal.”

  At the sight of the sandwiches, my mouth watered uncontrollably. Christ, even my salivary glands were sore.

  It was quiet for the first few minutes we ate, except for a noise that sounded suspiciously like feeding time at the county fair. Then Nortie said, “I wonder if this could hurt us. I mean, I wonder if Max could work us so hard we’d drop dead or something. We get working
so hard it doesn’t hurt anymore. I mean, it hurts, but I don’t care—I just keep swimming harder. Isn’t pain supposed to be a signal? I wonder if this is dangerous.”

  “It’s what I’ve been talking about all the time,” Lion said. “It’s your mind that stops you from working out like that all the time—protecting you, holding you back. When you let go of the idea that you can’t do it, there’s nothing to stop you.” He rolled over with great difficulty and looked up at the ceiling. “Sometimes when I’m working on a painting—a good one—I’ll get going and I can’t stop. I see exactly what needs to be where. I’m zipping along miles ahead of what I actually have on the canvas, and the idea of stopping isn’t thinkable. I’m into it so much my brain can’t tell me it’s too good for me to be doing. I’ve completely lost whole afternoons and nights to that. I think this is how you get really good at something.”

  Nortie nodded and was quiet for a few seconds. Then he said, “Yeah, but these are our bodies. How much can they take?”

  Jeff looked up from his second sandwich and said, “Want me to tell you how much they can take?”

  I said, “Yeah, Dad, tell us a how-much-they-can-take story.”

  Jeff ignored me.

  “Is this a Marine Corps story, Dad?” Lion goaded.

  At the end of his junior year, Jeff had an opportunity to sail around the world with a friend of his dad’s. The opportunity came after Jeff punched out a student teacher for putting some major moves on his girlfriend, Colleen, and then calling her a tease because she wouldn’t respond.

  Colleen tried to handle it herself, but couldn’t get the guy to back off. So Jeff went into his room with Colleen one night after school and they asked him together to lighten up. He said he would, but things just got worse. Jeff called him down in a Chemistry class one day, and when the guy told him to “grow up,” Jeff mopped the place up with him. It might have ended there, but Jeff threatened to light the guy with a Bunsen burner and somebody went for the principal, who at the time was a real hard-ass named Petrie. To make a long story short, Petrie expelled Jeff and told him he would never graduate from Frost—that he was a disgrace and a troublemaker. Jeff probably could have enrolled someplace else—I mean, by law they have to give you an education—but the opportunity for the trip came up and he and his parents jumped on it, figuring he could sit out a year while Petrie lost some of his fervor. To make an even longer story even shorter, they shipwrecked off the Virgin Islands and Jeff was back by Christmas—too soon for Petrie to have cooled off. So, mostly on a whim, Jeff lied about his age and joined the Marine Reserves, figuring he could get the tough part out of the way in the six months between then and summer, then have an obligation for just one weekend a month and a short stint each summer. That way, he figured, with the draft reinstated and prospects of the U.S. sending the cream of its manhood off to collect bullets in some Central or South American country looming, he’d have a better chance to stay away from unfriendly fire. Reserve units go last. He pulled it off as planned and started with us the next year when Petrie was nothing but a miserable memory and Mrs. Stevens was The Man.

  “This is a Marine Corps story, son,” Jeff said. “Listen up.” He settled back with a sandwich, his audience captive in every way.

  “When I got to boot camp, I was as cocky as they come. I knew some of these guys were tough, but they didn’t have a lifetime of Max in their history. I was in great shape and actually bigger and stronger than most of the guys there; and gung ho? Yes, boys and girls, your redheaded hero was ready.

  “Well, I really aired it out, taking everything they could hand out and jumping to attention for more, and some of the guys started looking up to me, because I was beating The Man at his own game. Three or four days into it I was tough.

  “Then one night the sergeant came into the barracks after lights out to rag on us. He did a little impromptu inspection, and those who didn’t pass, which was everyone, did pushups and listened to a raft of his crap. Then he moved right up in front of me, which was the reason he was there in the first place, and said, ‘Well, Mr. Hawkins. I guess you think you’re pretty hot stuff around here,’ and I said, ‘No, sir. I don’t, sir.’ He said, ‘Don’t call me sir, you little pimp! I’m a sergeant and you will address me that way!’ So I said, ‘Yes, Sergeant!’ and he said, ‘Mr. Hawkins, I want the rest of these men to see you for what you really are. A sister. A warm, wet sister.’ I didn’t know what to say, so I stood there in my shorts at attention.”

  “Jeez,” Nortie said, “were you scared?” It’s hard for Nortie to imagine Jeff afraid of anything.

  “Scared drizzly,” Jeff said, “but I was still cocky enough not to show it. Sarge pulled his bayonet out of a scabbard stuck in his belt and for a quick second I thought my number was up, but he balanced it on its handle against the wall, blade straight up, and ordered me to come over, lean my back and butt against the wall and slide down to a sitting position just above the blade—like sitting erect in a chair, only there’s no chair.”

  “That sounds hard,” Nortie said.

  Jeff’s eyes rolled. “Not for the first thirty seconds,” he said, “but Sarge gave a little speech on courage to the troops standing there by their bunks, put his face down close to mine and said, ‘I’ll be back, young lady. You better be right there where you are or I’ll make the rest of your stay here so miserable you’ll wish you’d gone ahead and sat on it,’ and he left.

  “Well, the sweat ran down my chest and the insides of my arms and my thighs burned and every once in a while I’d feel myself slip a little and I’d push back up. Once I felt the tip of the blade, but Sarge didn’t come back. My knees started to shake, but I held on—still acting tough—and guys were whispering to hang in there.

  “I heard the door and saw the sarge coming slowly down the hall. He walked up in front of me and said, ‘You’re a little tougher than I thought,’ and walked out again.”

  Even Lion was up on his elbows listening, though I’m sure he’d heard it before.

  Jeff started to get up to take a leak, but I yelled, “Finish the story, you jerk!” and he smiled and sat back down on his bag. Jeff has to know he’s appreciated.

  “Well, then I started to break. Parts of my legs were going numb and I was afraid I couldn’t keep control. My butt and lower back were on fire. Tears ran down my face and I started to whimper. Guys were still encouraging me, whispering it would only be a few more seconds, but I broke. I started screaming for Sarge, bawling and wailing and begging. I didn’t have the strength left in my legs to push myself up, and the guys were too scared of Sarge to kick the knife out. The door opened and he walked back at his same slow pace. I could feel the point of the blade right there, and I cried and blubbered as he walked toward me. He stood in front of me and kicked the bayonet over, then turned to the troops and said, ‘See, I told you he was a sister,’ and started to walk out.

  “But just as he kicked it out, I checked out. I mean, I checked out. He was walking away and I screamed at him: ‘Put it back! Get back here, you worthless scumbag! Put it back!’ He whirled around and just stood there, looking at me—and he looked surprised. I screamed, ‘Screw you, Sergeant! Put the stinking thing back! What’s the matter, sister?’ I was still in position and I felt like I could hold it forever.”

  Jeff laughed. “Boy, Sarge didn’t know whether to crap his drawers or go blind—he just wasn’t programmed for it. So he walked out. I looked at the rest of the guys watching me from their bunks, sort of frozen there, and I held the position maybe thirty more seconds. Then I pushed hard against the wall and stood up.”

  He looked at Nortie. “Don’t worry about your body. It can take a lot. Max hasn’t tapped anything yet.”

  Nortie just stared, his mind back somewhere on the pain in Jeff’s legs, then snapped to. “That’s your body,” he said. “He’s tapped mine.” He was quiet a second, then his eyes lit up. “Stotan stories!” he said. “That’s what we can do. We can tell Stotan stories. It’ll keep
us from getting bored. Got any more, Jeff?”

  Jeff looked at him, shook his head and turned away.

  “It’s a good idea,” Nortie said, and turned to me. I’d finished my sandwich and was lying on my stomach in my bag, relaxed. “Nortie,” I said, “you probably have more Stotan stories than all of us combined. You tell a Stotan story.”

  A thousand hard times must have whipped through his mind, and his face showed a little piece of each one, but he just raised his eyebrows and put his chin in his hands.

  “I do have a Stotan story, as a matter of fact,” Nortie said. It was several hours later and Elaine had sent a friend over to tell us something had come up and she’d have to come tomorrow night. We were getting a little tired of each other’s company, so it was disappointing, but we whipped over to Dick’s Drive-In and got a six-pack of burgers each to appease ourselves. We were back and about ready to call it a night.

  I said, “Let’s hear it.”

  “You’ve already heard part of it,” Nortie said. “Nobody else knows this, so you guys have to promise it doesn’t go out of this room, okay?”

  “All Stotan stories stay within the brotherhood,” Lion said. “New rule.”

  “It might not be a real Stotan story…”

  “Just tell it, for Chrissakes!” Jeff yelled. “We can give it a title later.”

  “I used to have a brother,” Nortie said, and I knew this was a real Stotan story.

  “Really?” Lion said. “I never knew…” I raised my hand and shook my head at him. He let it trail off.

  “Yeah,” Nortie said. “No one around here knows about him. His name was Jeremy. I was six when he died. Exactly six. He died on my birthday.”

  I said, “Nortie, you don’t have to tell this. When I said you must have stories, I meant…”

  “I need to tell this,” he said. “I’ve had it with me a long time. Is it okay to tell it?”