Slot Machine

by Chris Lynch

  “No. I quit.” I fell back again. The dew on the grass felt awfully good on the back of my neck.

  “You can’t quit.”

  “Ha.” It was my most supremely confident laugh. It was my only confident laugh. “Oh yes I can. There are many many things I cannot do. But quit? Quit I can, with the best of them. I quit football in the middle of the day, when everybody said it couldn’t be done. I quit baseball so fast it made their helmets spin. Hell, I quit wrestling when I wasn’t even trying to quit. It’s frightening, the quitting powers I possess. Why, if they only had a Quitting Sector here, I’d be home free. I’d be the captain. I’d be the coach—”

  “Well then do it for me. If you quit now, they’ll probably make me carry all four bags.”

  I sat up to look at him, preparing something wiseguy to say to him. But when I saw his big stupid wet eyes, he looked soft and weak. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t Frank at all. He wasn’t that way, ever, soft and weak. He wasn’t that way, and he wasn’t supposed to be.

  “You quit too, then.”

  “Nope,” he said, and gave up, started hoisting all four bags on his shoulders. He looked like a little tiny boy under them.

  “All right, all right,” I said, and took my share. We double-timed it to the fifth hole. “But why not?” I finally asked, just before we got there. “You don’t need this.”

  “Yes I do,” he said softly. “I’m almost there. I’m almost made.”

  No matter how many times he said it, no matter how hard he tried, Frankie couldn’t quite make me see the magic of his arrangement. But what was clear to me was that he did see it. So I went along.

  “Here you go, boys,” Okie said, shoving two more beers in our hands.

  The thought made me woozy. “Thank you anyway,” I said, handing it back. “Got any Gatorade?”

  “Don’t be a wuss,” Okie said, snarling and smiling at the same time.

  “Just take it, Elvin,” Frank whispered.

  Okie monitored us, to make sure we didn’t waste any of his expensive, imported New Jersey beer. The rest of them were watching us too. So I sipped.

  Frankie didn’t sip. He gulped. “What’s the occasion?” he asked. “You guys don’t usually have brew in the daytime.”

  They didn’t usually, and they didn’t now, either. They were spectators, I realized. Frank and I were the show.

  “Nothin’ special,” Obie called. “Headin’ into the last week, we just thought it was time you advanced to the next level.”

  “Thanks,” Frank said with a puzzled look. Then they all looked at me.

  I had two full beers and a sip in my belly already. That was about one and a half more than I’d ever had in there at one time before. I was sweating. I was sleepy. My stomach was a little fluttery and dangerously empty of food. But it was up there in my head too. And I decided that two beers was not the worst feeling I ever had.

  I drank down the third beer.

  Three beers was the worst feeling I ever had.

  We were on the road, halfway to the sixth tee, when I began unraveling. First I dropped one of the two golf bags. The strap slowly slid down my shoulder, down my arm, onto the ground. I was aware of it, felt it happening, but couldn’t seem to react to it. And when it finally dropped, I left it. I kept walking, looked down at it once, kept walking, and never even considered stooping to pick it up.

  Ten yards along, Frankie said, “Hey. Hey, Elvin. Go get that.”

  I turned to look at him and shook my head no. Then I let the second bag fall.

  “Cut that out,” he said in that now-familiar desperate whisper. Too late. We were noticed.

  “What the hell’s goin’ on?” Odie hollered. “Get my damn clubs.”

  “Go,” Frank said.

  I did not reply, so Frank hooked his bags over my shoulders and went to claim mine. That satisfied the O’s, so they resumed walking. As soon as they’d turned away, and before Frank reached the fallen clubs, I vomited. Loudly.

  No, no one rushed to my aid. No one brought me a towel, or a drink of water. They booed. The O’s simply all stood in a line as if the national anthem were playing, and they booed me while I puked.

  “Clear him out of here, Frankie,” Obie commanded. “And he was never here, Frank. Make sure of it. It didn’t happen to him here.”

  Frank stood over me patiently, shielding me from the O’s by standing between us. He waited until I was good and empty, then helped me to my feet, putting my arm over his shoulder. He didn’t say anything until we were off the golf course, across the parking lot, and standing near the entrance to the administration building that housed the nurse’s station. He removed his hand from around my waist, checked me out to see that I was steady on my own, then started walking backward away from me.

  “I’m sorry, Elvin,” he said, walking away slowly.

  And as he said it, I wanted to cry. I felt even sorrier for him, watching him crawl back for more.

  There are some things a guy just shouldn’t have to see.

  So this is how they get you. They got me good. “No, Thor, this couldn’t be right.”

  “They don’t make mistakes when they hand down assignments. And even when they do make mistakes, they don’t. If you know what I mean. So there you go, Friar.”

  Religion Sector. A.k.a. The Calling. This was what happened when they couldn’t mold you into one of the preferred manly slots. And try as they might, they found me unmoldable. I retained my shape, such as it was.

  “Okay, Thor, let’s work on this one, huh? I’ve got no calling. None. God has never called to me personally, and if he did, frankly, I wouldn’t answer. So this is a big fat mistake.”

  “Well, Elvin, this Sector is for more than just the guys who might want to go into the priesthood or brotherhood. There’s also the opposite.”

  “Meaning?”

  “What did you do yesterday, Elvin?”

  “Damn!”

  “See, you need help.”

  “Damn, damn, damn. How does everyone know everything around here?”

  “You don’t want to know that.”

  “Fine. Well anyway, I don’t care anymore. About anything. So I don’t want to go to any crappy Religion Sector, so I won’t go. I’ll swear all day if I have to, so they won’t want me. Shit. Shit, goddammit.”

  Thor held his washboard abdomen laughing at me. “I am going to hate to see you leave, man. But seriously, this is a kind of plea-bargain thing. You go to Religious Studies as a sort of alternative substance-abuse program, or they tell your mother what happened.”

  That shut me right up.

  “Well what about him?” I said, pointing to Frankie, who was still detoxing in bed. I was so irritated, I didn’t care what a rat I was being.

  “He didn’t turn himself in.”

  “Grrrr,” I said.

  “Yes, Elvin, grrr.”

  “Assholes.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Damn them to hell.”

  “Wow you’re getting in the spirit.”

  “Where do I go?” I sighed.

  “Gymnasium basement,” he said.

  “Of course.” I slunk on toward the door but didn’t go out before adding, “It wasn’t even my fault. They made me drink it.”

  “Right, Elvin,” Thor said. “We never heard that one before. And you got pregnant by swimming in the pool with boys, right?”

  “Ah, out of Babylon comes young Bishop,” Brother Flemming proclaimed as I eeked open the door to the crypt-classroom.

  “Oh Jesus,” I said, pulling the door closed again.

  “Come back here, young man,” Flemming commanded.

  I returned, reluctantly. After a quick scan of the class I knew that I had reached rock bottom. I had heard about this, the complete moral destruction drinkers suffer when they are finally tapped out. Seeing snakes and rats and mutant creatures with frogs’ bodies and Madonna’s face. Sleeping with the company of tiny devil-faced, knife-wielding versions of themselves
sticking their flesh and laughing all night until they had to jump out of bed and dig up that last bottle of molasses-brown rum in the backyard and drink it all down like weak tea. Gurgling, gurgling. But I was on the ultra-fast track. I had been a problem drinker for less than twenty-four hours, and already I was surrounded by haunts.

  Brother Flemming, head spook. He was here, in this slot of the brotherhood, because he simply could not exist anywhere else. His whole person screamed catechism and Latin Mass, pointer smashes across the knuckles, and you’ll go blind if you touch that. The little spectacles, the bleached-white head polished to a Turtle Wax sheen on top, fringed with eight or ten foot-long white hairs on the sides. The eyebrows like shaving brushes. Ditto the crops of nose and ear hair. The total absence of any eye movement unless he turned his whole head to look at you like the wax-museum version of Vincent Price. The long black dress that most brothers had given up by now but that Flemming wore down past his shoes to give the impression of levitating from point to point rather than walking. And then there was his trick of clearing his everbusy sinuses by hucking an egg-size lungy into his handkerchief, staring at it mesmerized for a minute as if nobody else was in the room, then folding the hanky neatly back into his pocket.

  His flock wasn’t much better. There were only ten of them, but they were a whole stadium full of weirdness. The one closest to the door refused to lift his face out of the Bible on his desk, showing only the vivid bald spot—ringed with creeping crud—on the top of his head. A thirteen-year-old kid with a bald spot like Friar Tuck. Behind him were two guys comparing Jesus-head medallions across the aisle, bickering over which one displayed more anguish. Behind them were two guys who looked like they must have been brought in in leg chains but who managed to slip their drug-ravaged structures through the cuffs. Another guy sitting rigid and smiling with his hands folded on the desk—my idea of a real troublemaker. And the rest just appeared to be your run-of-the-mill scared stiffs like myself who were here seeking the traditional asylum of the church for the remainder of camp in hopes of not being wiped out altogether by the athletic Hun. The sports escapees aren’t necessarily hot for the religion thing but would make a deal with the devil to bail out of the slot rat race. Since locally god was more handy, the deal was this.

  Not the fourth infantry division we had here, and yet I was nervous anyway. They were a mob. And any mob that is not your mob—and every mob was not my mob—is dangerous. Even a mob of wild wimps.

  And they had a charismatic leader.

  “Here is your Bible, Mr. Bishop. Take it with you to that seat there in back. And that Bible belongs to you for the remainder of the retreat, so you are responsible for it. Take it with you everywhere.”

  “Everywhere,” I said with a little laugh. I had yet to discover that Brother Flemming did not recognize humor when he had committed it.

  “Everywhere, sir. That amuses you?”

  “Well, ya. As long as you’re going to have me haul a Bible around the place with me, why don’t you just slap a propeller on my head and paint a big red bull’s-eye on my butt? You’ll achieve the same thing.”

  About one third of the class laughed, coincidentally, like hell. One third looked at me and scowled viciously, like You get the stake, I’ll get the matches. The final third sank into their seats, looking like Oh god, I hope he doesn’t make trouble for all of us.

  I stopped to appreciate. I liked all of it, all three reactions. I could enjoy this, the only group I was ever in in which I was—The Maverick.

  Whack! I never should have taken my eyes off him. He made no sound when he moved.

  “There’s your propeller, Mr. Bishop.” He had clopped me on the ear so hard, I could hear it reddening. “Would you like to further discuss the merits of the Good Book?”

  He held the Good Book high overhead. Over my head.

  “I think I’ll just listen for a while,” I said.

  “See?” Flemming said as he reached for the hanky. “The word of god is already having a positive impact on your life.” Then he hucked.

  “We here are all on the road to Damascus,” Flemming winded from back at his mountaintop desk. “Some of us have already been struck by the power of god’s will. Others of us”—he turned a fierce stare in my direction—“will need to be struck down off our high horse before we will be ready to change direction.”

  I felt personally challenged by this guy. He apparently had me set up as his example for the week, but I wasn’t going to absorb any hellfire off of him, not after all I’d survived already. I raised my hand, almost involuntarily.

  “Bishop.”

  “Um, Brother. I just wanted to say in my defense that, you know, I drank some beer—didn’t even enjoy it very much, but that’s another story—but anyway, I didn’t kill somebody’s grandmother or sleep with a sheep.”

  The reaction, again, was the same breakdown—one third laughs, one third burning stares, one third Leave me out of this. But this time I enjoyed it without taking my eyes off Flemming.

  “Ooooo, you got him now.” The voice came from over my shoulder. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was one of the laughers. “You struck his pet theme. Bestiality. Makes him crazy.”

  I smiled, looking right at Flemming as I did.

  “You have amused yourself once again, Mr. Bishop?” Flemming growled.

  “We take our amusement where we can get it, sir. You understand.”

  “Uh-oh, watch out,” said The Voice. “You’ve done it again. Favorite theme number two—boys who amuse themselves.”

  I laughed freely, as if Flemming were in on the joke and would join in any time now.

  “I am a patient and forbearing man,” Flemming said, beating his pointer into the palm of his free hand like an old-time cop with a nightstick. “But do not test me.”

  The Voice, from right behind me, would not let me go. “Better stop, Bishop. Don’t test him. Whatever you do, don’t mention Cub Scouts. For god’s sake don’t mention Cub Scouts. That was all in the past. They never proved a thing.”

  “Can I go to the bathroom?” I blurted, spluttering laugh spits all over my desk.

  “He was framed, Bishop. He was just walking by that shower stall, and that Cub Scout just happened to slip on the soap, and he accidentally impaled himself on the coincidentally naked brother.”

  The Voice stopped, and the room was dead silent as I cackled, the way you can only laugh when it’s important not to. I held my belly and enjoyed every second. It felt good inside, way beyond eating. This was what was so terrible here at Camp Joyless, I realized. Nobody was into laughing.

  Flemming bore down on me. “You are entering one of the finest Christian Brothers schools in America. If you think the study of religion is so funny...” His arm came down like he was dropping the checkered flag at the Indy 500. I pulled back, but it was going to split me like a great big log.

  Until The Hand shot out. The Hand, belonging to The Voice.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Flemming asked with such menace that I got ready for him to try again.

  “Ah, I’m stopping a crime,” The Voice said, standing now. “You can’t do that.”

  I turned. Attached to a body, The Voice shrank to human scale. He was medium. Medium build, medium complexion, medium height. His actions made him bigger, though. His actions said, simply, “Totally unafraid.”

  “Oh yes I can do that,” Flemming said.

  Before the two of them got into an embarrassing duke-out over me, I intervened.

  “Thanks,” I said to my protector, then stood to face the brother myself. “No, really, you can’t do that.”

  “And why not?”

  “Well, because I can’t let you. See, it’s like this: First there was the whole shanghai thing that got me here in the first place... then the football stompings, the baseball beanings... Jesus, the mole business, the humiliation... wrestling, running, not wrestling... and none of that did me in. I’m not broken, you see? So if I let myself be b
roken by one little guy with a big stick... well, you can see how that would mean it was all for nothing. So, brother, no, I can’t let you do that.”

  “So suck on that,” The Voice cheered.

  Flemming stared at me, dumbstruck, as if I was speaking in tongues. Maybe no other victim had ever tried to explain himself before. So he turned to The Voice instead. “Get out,” he said.

  “Psyched,” The Voice answered. “New record, thirty minutes. I lasted in track and field a whole day.”

  He brushed past Flemming, who had lost interest in me. The Brother went back to the front of the class and started firing up his brimstone again. “Get thee behind me, Satan,” he said, making a stiff-arm gesture at the exiting Voice.

  “Fine,” The Voice answered. “Just as long as thee don’t get behind me.”

  Again, I had that feeling of being alone in the audience of a comedy no one else was hearing. It wasn’t that I had anything necessarily against god—other than his sense of humor, which I didn’t share—or Flemming personally. It was just that I had had enough. I didn’t want to be bullied or instructed or improved in any way. I wanted a laugh. And I wasn’t scared of anything anymore, except the fear that I might never laugh again.

  “Is that it?” I said, pointing at The Voice, who had stopped in the doorway. “That’s all he had to do, up and leave?”

  The Voice started beckoning me to do it too.

  “Shall I drive you someplace?” replied the totally disgusted Brother, pointing me to the door with his pointer. “Call you a cab, perhaps?”

  I got up and walked toward the door, moving slowly, waiting for the catch. There was none, though. However, I did notice a strange thing in people’s eyes. Something like respect.

  The most outrageous thing yet. They thought I was cool here. I was not a geek in this room, I was a hellion. I almost wanted to stay.

  “You missed a great opportunity here, Bishop,” Flemming said triumphantly. “Your mother will now be informed of your transgression.”

  “Well my mother already knows about the sheep. And she loves me anyway.”

  I think even some of the religious geeky kids were snickering when I left.