In "The Flyweight," an all-star high-school wrestler struggles with his own success and the expectations of others when he begins hearing voices after a schizophrenic breakdown. "Visigoth," the title story, depicts a college hockey player unable to understand that his relationship with an English professor is over. The novella "The Free Fall" focuses on a cycle of escalating violence in small farming and mining towns and the effect that it has on the main character and his family.
Sharp, inquisitive, and witty, Visigoth challenges the reader to question the popular glory of violence in all its manifestations.
In "The Flyweight," an all-star high-school wrestler struggles with his own success and the expectations of others when he begins hearing voices after a schizophrenic breakdown. "Visigoth," the title story, depicts a college hockey player unable to understand that his relationship with an English professor is over. The novella "The Free Fall" focuses on a cycle of escalating violence in small farming and mining towns and the effect that it has on the main character and his family.
Sharp, inquisitive, and witty, Visigoth challenges the reader to question the popular glory of violence in all its manifestations.
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Overview
In "The Flyweight," an all-star high-school wrestler struggles with his own success and the expectations of others when he begins hearing voices after a schizophrenic breakdown. "Visigoth," the title story, depicts a college hockey player unable to understand that his relationship with an English professor is over. The novella "The Free Fall" focuses on a cycle of escalating violence in small farming and mining towns and the effect that it has on the main character and his family.
Sharp, inquisitive, and witty, Visigoth challenges the reader to question the popular glory of violence in all its manifestations.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781571310514 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Milkweed Editions |
| Publication date: | 03/17/2006 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 991,257 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
visigoth
storiesBy GARY AMDAHL
MILKWEED EDITIONS
Copyright © 2006 Gary AmdahlAll right reserved.
ISBN: 1-57131-051-7
Chapter One
the flyweight
Dennis Hurt was perhaps not classically handsome. He looked, we sometimes kidded him, like a tiny Frankenstein's Monster: pale, five-two, veins like dark throbbing ropes tangled about his arms and neck, bicepses like surgically implanted softballs. Beginning to gray already at eighteen, his dark brows nearly met in the middle and there were deep purple half-moons beneath remarkably large and impenetrable black eyes.
His brothers were significantly younger than Dennis, and significantly taller as well. His father was tall, too, a slender man whom Dennis liked to say he could bust up like a pretzel rod. He said so not with animosity, because he loved his father and his beanpole brothers like crazy, but merely to point out how strange fathers and sons can be to each other-families too. And to suggest, on a sort of philosophical note, that there ought not be such disparities of power between people.
His father, who worked the long, private hours of a melancholy and inward man leading a public and successful life, was the senior pastor of a very large Lutheran church-the biggest in the world, it was widelybelieved. At the same time, however, he was a drop-dead businessman, a crackerjack venture capitalist, exceptionally astute regarding his portfolio, and a good landlord. Pastor Hurt chaired the Christian Business Fellowship Network, and had just performed-at the time I am writing of, which is many years ago now-a narrow escape from a deal he knew in hindsight he should not have even heard about. There was this entrepreneur, nominally Christian, who had obtained funds to buy some medical equipment from a company in dire straits, with the idea that he would lease the equipment back to the company, but what he did was just hand the money over to the CEO, which, if I understood correctly, constituted fraud. There was transport of something over a state line and some other magic tricks, and exactly where Pastor Hurt fit in, I'm not sure. Both Dennis and I got lost in that kind of conversation quite easily, so I just can't say.
Dennis's mother left his father because there wasn't enough of him to go around. At the time it was also useful as an illustration of how pastors are just people too. As far as Dennis went, he simply felt there was no point of contact between his father and himself. They had almost nothing in common: a shoe size that was some tremendous figure I never actually pinned down, a preference for black industrial-style crepe-soled shoes, big hands with long slender piano-player fingers. But where Dennis was rippling with muscle everywhere on his little frame, his father's limbs were weak-looking and skinny, legs for instance riding straight up into his back, no rear end to speak of, loose and worn khaki trousers flapping about his bones. He wore big square glasses in thick black frames-Dennis could read a printed page across the room-and a small, dirty-looking moustache that I felt did his sincere face a terrible disservice. I don't think Dennis characterized him as a pretzel rod because he was physically so much weaker-he was in fact quite strong-but because they were so different, so mysteriously, agonizingly different.
Dennis and I were on the wrestling team. I wasn't particularly good, but Dennis had never been defeated. Not once in four years. Our coach once said to some people gathered to honor him that you could not buy what Dennis had. He meant it in the usual complimentary way, but up there on the dais with his dinner untouched, Dennis was struck with fear: oh my god, he thought, what do I have, what do I have, oh my god. "What he had" had troubled him since he first suspected he had it; to hear it announced in a ballroom was alarming. Coach went on to describe it as stick-to-itiveness and the ability, the will, to give a hundred and seventeen percent whenever anyone asked for it. I think that's what he said. He was a nubbin-headed old boar hog for whom nobody had the least respect, but he and Dennis were kind of in business together-and this relationship was terribly important to Dennis. Once when Coach was obviously in his cups, maudlin as could be, he admitted he was just pissing in the wind. Dennis was a once-in-a-lifetime wrestler who would win a gold medal and a seat in Congress and he wanted to help. "How can I help you?" he cried.
He used my friend to teach younger wrestlers, took him all over the place, establishing himself as the mentor, hanging a plumb bob from the front strap of Denny's headgear and having him walk over desks and things to illustrate the proper relation of head and knees. They shot a training film together called Wrestling for Champions. These are the seven fundamentals, Coach croaks in voice-overs and gruesome head shots. Posture: there Denny is with the plumb bob. Motion: he stutter-steps left and right, forward and backward, like some jumped-up crab. Changing Levels: he does a kind of limbo-stick drill. Penetration: the Giant Stride Into Your Opponent (which is me). Lifting: he hoists a few teammates (again I am in the picture looking stupid). Backstep: a Greco-Roman two-hundred-seventy-degree spin-and-throw. Finally, the Back Arch: back to a gym wall, Dennis bends over backward until his palms are against the wall, then walks himself up and down it. For the dramatic fun of it, he feigns a grapple with Coach, who outweighs him by a couple hundred pounds, and falls over backward with Coach atop him. But just when you think he has been crushed to death, you see Coach go flying into the camera with a miked-up crash. A little later, after the arm-bars and nelsons both full and half and head-levers and cradles, he's talking about strategies: your strong wrestler likes to work in close and your quick wrestler likes room to move. The first will crowd you and the second surprise you. But the best wrestler-cut to Dennis in competition-is both quick and strong: you crowd this guy, thinking you're stronger, and he'll embroil you in his power, but if you try to work from a distance, thinking you're faster, he'll run you ragged-cut to shot of ref holding Denny's arm up. He looked bored, but I knew he was anything but.
One morning, toward the middle of Denny's fourth season of seamless victory, we stood at our narrow beige lockers, working the tumblers, when Linda the pom-pom girl arrived, shooting glances I couldn't begin to describe or understand-everything to everybody-and kissed Dennis on the cheek.
Linda came from good Christian stock as well. Her feeling-which she asserted not merely as Christian but as practical-was that we were living the best years of our lives. Dennis and I slumped against our lockers, taking in the milling and listening to Linda as she fell into an admonitory, then a motherly, tone: best years of our lives.
Dennis said, "I can't believe that."
Linda gaped, I smiled.
"We will look back on these years," said Linda, "these yuh-"
"No we won't," Denny said sternly, "and do you know why? Because these years suck the dick of the Great Woolly Mammoth, that's why."
"What is the matter with you, anyway?" Linda's pompoms rustled in agitation, then fell silently to her side.
Being, after all, not truly comfortable with colorful language like that, Dennis shrugged and said, "Long thought to be extinct."
"You're hallucinating," said Linda, "right now, aren't you? Why don't you eat something instead of grossing out people who only want to help you adjust to normal life?"
It was true that he was fasting. He fasted recklessly, religiously, not so much to stay under a hundred pounds, but rather to maintain in himself that sense that he was both a good dog, doing his duty, and a computer, binary, no options, win or lose. Too much food and he started feeling sassy, preternatural. The graphed X and Y of energy and weight rose and fell respectively, met at the optimal point, then shot sharply off the chart in two directions. Dennis associated "emaciated" with "meek" and thought he would continue to inherit the earth either way.
Linda flounced off with a shout of good cheer and Dennis looked down at his legs, which were deeply bowed, as if in shame. A very tall boy, taller than anybody in the school, a boy we knew only by sight, came up and stood so close to us that Dennis had to drop his head back on his shoulders to take him in. He was not fat, but certainly heavy with loose meat all over him. He smiled like he was excited to be near us, and spoke with a faint southern accent and a mild stutter. There was a long, soft, almost sweet "Howwww," and then an up-tempo "much can you bench-press?" He dropped his head on his chest to look at Dennis. I asked him how much he tipped the scales at, and the tall boy came back with a figure more than double Denny's. "He could press you, Man Mountain!" I said. The tall boy laughed hysterically, then wiped his mouth and apologized. He tugged from his pants pockets five one-dollar bills, whereupon we trooped down to the weight room and I took his money as Dennis cleaned and jerked the tall boy's weight. I said, "Tell your friends what you saw here." Other performances included one-handed pull-ups and benching one hundred pounds on the Universal Gym for five minutes without a significant break in rhythm.
I managed these affairs. Dennis and I were best friends. I would like to think we still are friends. But whatever is between us now, he thought very highly of me then. I was, he said too many times, the Renaissance man, pulling him and Linda both through chemistry and physics in my wake, singing the part of Nathan Detroit in the school play, explaining to him the difference between wet black deposits on the spark plugs of our motorcycles, and dry black deposits. I played the trumpet and the guitar and the piano, he told everybody within earshot. He believed I was extremely successful with women, shouting jokes at them in the incredulous manner of an acerbic stand-up comic, then just kind of becoming one with them, never making an overt move or pass, enveloping them somehow, while they huffed and puffed all over me with ardor. I was a three-letter man, and if I wasn't the world's greatest wrestler, so what?
I was indeed a mediocre wrestler. I lost so many times it made Dennis uneasy in the bowels to spectate. Though I was nearly a foot taller than him, with seventy more pounds, he rode me easily around the mat, using the basic moves and holds and often waving a free arm like a bronc rider. It's easy to imagine me hating him for such showboating. But it's also easy, I think, for the reader to imagine him hating me-or maybe envying me and being ashamed of himself, watching me slip with unerring instinct from girl of his dreams to girl of his dreams. Hate is too strong a word. I do not think friends can hate each other. But certainly we had a friendship referring dangerously to sex and violence and little else. But what else is there? That is in fact the question Dennis put to the Christ when He came to him in the vision.
Dennis could feel something like a tendon parting inside his head that winter. He was emaciated as usual but miraculously stronger than ever. The good dog in him was thinking more and more of Jesus, seeing that shape in Eternity and adding it to the unswerving sense of duty. But he struggled with it, more or less like any son of a pastor would. The computer continued to churn bits. He felt something very like a membrane start to tear, felt a burning along that line, right down the middle. In an instinctive bid to acknowledge and banish it in one fell swoop, he dramatized it. (He'd just seen Guys and Dolls, and really thought I was onto something. The thrill and glory of athletic endeavor is there, on stage, but it's not nearly so lonely. Everybody loves everybody else, even when-especially when-they appear to hate and wish to conquer or upstage each other!)
We went to the gym and started climbing rope. This was something we did every other day: thirty feet, unknotted, up and down ten times. It was rugged exercise for me, but Dennis didn't even use his legs. It was cold that day on the dark, varnished floor, but warm up at the top where the high windows let in long boxes of dusty light. I finished five and took a rest. Dennis stopped up at the top and dangled, listening to that slow split of membrane.
"Lance," he said in a little voice, the voice of a baby angel floating up there, "I think I'm losing my grip."
And let go of the rope with one hand.
He turned slowly in a full circle, then back the other way. I exclaimed my appreciation: it was something I had not seen before, something, certainly, to add to the show.
Then he monkeyed down the rope, actually jabbering, let go with both hands and bounced hard on the gleaming floor, leapt back up and rocketed to the top, hand over blurred hand, feet dangling motionless as if he were riding an invisible elevator or was crippled, the end of the rope quivering only slightly he was so smooth, up and down, up and down, like he was crazy, dropping from higher and higher up the rope, slamming into the floor and firing back up in smooth, relentless, furious ascent and descent. He finished and said he felt like ripping somebody's limbs off and sobbing for a week. He chuckled when he said this, encouraging me to do likewise. We stood there, heaving, glaring, snickering. Turned out he was stoned. This, too, was a first for us. His snickering imperturbability and comic indifference to the real danger his extreme condition put him in was like flypaper to me. I admired him much more deeply and confusedly than I could say.
The days grew clamorous as Dennis sojourned from victory to victory and the likelihood of a fourth consecutive state championship grew and grew. One morning, a TV crew idled their van in front of Dennis's house, talking to Coach and waiting for him and Dennis to walk out the door as they'd planned. Dennis burst through the door and began running as fast as he could. The van chirped its tires, a sound that echoed up and down the quiet street. He stopped abruptly after only a mile, completely winded it seemed, and the driver of the van slammed on the brakes. The cameraman and the reporter threw open their respective doors and got out. "How does it feel?" the reporter asked. "Three times state champ, four seasons without a single defeat. Doesn't that make you feel, you know, a little nervous? How do you feel on the eve of-?"
"I feel," Dennis said with startling truculence, "like I can take care of myself."
They wanted to share more of his day, so we jogged another couple miles, slowly, allowing the cameraman to jog with us, for effect. At school we ushered them into the dark gym and reeled a little hemp. He went up and came down a few times and then a whirlwind of his actual, secret fears and anxieties engulfed him. Dangling in the warm dusty box, he quoted some fabulous Psalms of David at the crew, about the eyes of his enemies standing out with fatness and how he would break the teeth of them all, pour their brains out like the viscera of pigs. He let go of the rope with one hand, then the other. By the time he refastened, he was moving downward at a great clip. The rope sliced deeply into his hands; it was like grabbing a spinning drill bit. When he got to the bottom, he held them out for inspection: they were burned white. As we stared, thin seams and spots of blood appeared on his palms. Then suddenly they were awash. The crew recorded this in professional silence. As they were leaving, the reporter said, "We're into spectacular pictures, you know, in our biz, people being plucked from raging rivers and so on, but I don't think this is something we can use. It's just too strange. But it'll be in our tape library if you ever, you know, want to check back."
The station's news director, however, had other ideas, and broadcast the footage. The gist of the segment was that Dennis had miscalculated and was now wounded. It was the talk of the meet. Nobody paid the least bit of attention to all the great wrestling going on-they were all waiting to see if he would do something wicked, crazy, or foolish. It was a given he would attempt one of the three, and then the question was, would he be punished for it and fail, or would he be punished for it and prevail? Everybody wanted him to be, or assumed he would be, punished in some way. The idea that it would be a walk for him-as every other match had been for years-was dismissed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from visigoth by GARY AMDAHL Copyright © 2006 by Gary Amdahl. Excerpted by permission.
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