Leg, p.12
Leg, page 12
Dad had tried to discourage me from going on Accutane—pointing out it caused erectile dysfunction and depression—but how could I trust a man who had grown up washing his face with bar soap? Anyway, he’d neglected to mention the worst side effect: dry lips. If I forgot ChapStick, Dad would drive the few blocks from his office to my junior high and park in the fire lane to hand off a tube in the hall outside Arnaud’s class like he was my drug dealer.
“This ChapStick thing is really becoming an annoying habit,” he would say as my mummified lips crackled and hissed under the balm. “Maybe you should try cigarettes instead. It’d be more French.”
I wouldn’t have smiled even if I found him funny. It hurt too much. And, in my current state, just the thought of cigarettes made the mustard climb up my nose.
THE JOHN
Having fixed everything else about myself in the lead-up to high school, I had just one body part that still needed work: my legs. I had surgery on my hamstrings the day after Christmas sophomore year and though they weren’t the calf and ass implants I’d hoped for, I was excited at the prospect of waking up a new sixteen-year-old.
I was still probably a little stoned from Lortab as Gretchen pushed me to class like an obscene parade float, me smiling and waving all the way as I grumbled about the difficulty of pooping. Surgery had stuffed up my bowels and opened up my nostrils. Since coming home from Primary Children’s everything smelled like Purell, even at school. I told Gretchen I was probably still sweating out anesthesia.
Still, I tried to treat it like a victory lap, the culmination of all that transformation. In terms of optics, my wheelchair was a major win. My lower extremities were half-piked in front of me in stirrups and dressed in Steri-Strips, gauze, and Ace bandages and packed into Velcro splints. My sweatpants were streaked with baby powder and my chafed butt was rigged onto an inflatable hemorrhoid donut. I couldn’t have looked more pathetic. We hadn’t even peeled the tape off my back from the epidural.
For weeks after my surgeries, success had been measured in less than baby steps: sitting up in bed without feeling nauseous, scooting up the stairs on my butt. My parents had hauled a TV on a card table into my room and hooked up a TiVo so I could watch reruns of The Simpsons, and when that got old they took me to see Cast Away at Century 16.
The theater had been crowded and a large man collided with my wheelchair in the lobby and spilled Coke and fat yellow kernels of buttered popcorn onto my lap. The worst part wasn’t the collision. It was the group of teenagers who glanced sideways at me and then looked away. You would have thought I’d asked one of them to wipe my ass. “This isn’t permanent!” I wanted to tell them. “I’m not really in a wheelchair.”
“Don’t worry,” my mom told me. “You’ll need stupid people to serve you coffee once you’re a famous newscaster.”
Getting back to school was a relief, even if I was in an enormous black wheelchair with a full rectum.
It helped that I had one of the most popular girls in school pushing me. I liked Gretchen, adored her, in fact, because she looked totally normal but wasn’t. She had rosy cheeks and a round, kind face, but also a pacemaker and a bone spur hanging off one foot like a sixth toe. You’d think that extra little toe would give her traction, but she’d had to retire from cheerleading after flying off the top of a human pyramid and cracking her head.
Gretchen and I had been in school together since kindergarten. Our families belonged to the same country club. Our dads were both affable men named Bob who scraped our windshields after winter storms and made killer post-tennis pancakes. The summer after seventh grade, at an outdoor concert, Tiffany talked Gretchen and me into sharing our first kiss with each other as Jerry Jeff Walker played “Mr. Bojangles” in the background. I ended up kissing Gretchen on the hand and the cheek. Saved by a technicality.
It was for the best that our early passion had ripened into friendship. Now that we were in high school Gretchen and I had bigger, more political fish to fry. We were going to make a historic run for student body president and VP at the end of junior year—historic because in forty years no pair of non-Mormons had ever won.
The highlight of most days was when Gretchen wheeled me into Journalism and put on my parking brake. That’s when the Greek guy I was secretly in love with, John, would trot up to me for a fist bump.
In a fateful twist, my old buddy Chip was now best friends with John. Chip and I were still on good terms, but we’d grown apart as I’d become more awkward around guys. The days of the massager and bareback were behind us. Now Chip was putting firecrackers in mailboxes and experimenting with partying while I was downloading pictures of Ben Affleck on the family computer.
“Face it. You’ve been dumped,” Danny said.
Danny was right but what he didn’t see was the upside: Chip’s new social circle meant I had an in with John. The two had delivered some Algebra II assignments to the house while I was still recovering from surgery in what I came to think of as our first hangout session. Now John and I were a couple of fist-bumping pals, not to mention what passed as intellectuals in our high school: we used big words and our parents had HBO subscriptions.
Girls at school called John a smelly rock geek, but I’d lusted after him since before losing my kissing virginity to Gretchen. Nearly every day, he’d worn the same Grateful Dead tie-dye shirt to seventh-grade Utah Studies, a class about Lake Bonneville, Ute Indians, fur trappers, and Mormon crickets taught by a benevolent and bewhiskered old man in a back support belt named Mr. Fagg. Normally, tie-dye didn’t do it for me, but this particular shirt was a send-up of The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy was a skipping, psychedelic skeleton with red roses for hair. Bannered in the swirling emerald sky above her were the words FOLLOW THE GOLDEN ROAD.
I’d sworn then I would.
John’s arm veins were art. He had hot hands, fingers strong and calloused from playing guitar and writing with nubby No. 2 pencils. I even found his stutter sexy. “W-w-what the hizz, G?” John greeted. “Are you feeling s-s-superb this morning?”
Superb. What a stud.
“I’m pretty out of it,” I’d tell John, trying to sound like a druggy rather than a teenager whose mom had been giving him suppositories.
Like all boys that age put under for anything more serious than a cavity, I considered it my sworn duty to squirt stage blood onto the dry facts of my case. My hamstring releases became, right there in front of John, a torrid story, a combination of what I’d picked up from checkups with Dr. Stevens and my own imagination.
Unlike certain sanctimonious others, John didn’t squat on his haunches to make himself eye level with me in my chair but let me gaze up at him fidgeting joyfully under his squeaky black leather jacket. He’d clutch the backs of his thighs in sympathy as I went off about how Dr. Stevens had butterflied my tight tendons like chicken breasts. I’d conclude, into the fraying crotch of John’s Carhartts, with some variation of the joke that the limb-lengthening would be totally worth it because it meant I’d get a new pair of jeans: my old ones would be too short.
John would raise his fists, stretching, and emit a tigery laugh-yawn. “T-tight,” he’d say. The tardy bell would finally ring and, as Mrs. Jacobs tried to start class, I’d think about how I wanted to unzip John’s fly with my coordinated left hand and go after him with what his friend Byron Bower once called, not in a nice way, my blowjob lips.
If we’re talking blowjob lips, Byron’s twin sister, Carlotta, is a good place to start. Carlotta was the other kid in our grade who walked with a limp and let’s just say she sucked up to me like no other. She approached a few days into my comeback tour to inform me she’d be helping me get better. She’d been through surgeries herself and knew I’d need a friend.
I can’t remember ever giving Carlotta the go-ahead to carry my books, open doors for me, or clear gawkers out of the way like an offensive tackle. She just went ahead and did these things. She was broad-nosed, with slender stemmed eyebrows that scattered well before meeting and enough hair on her head for two people. One of her arms was longer than the other, one hand allergically swollen. Sometimes she’d just stare at my Accutane-chapped lips and flaking chin and tell me I had a gorgeous smile. The consensus at school was that, unlike her popular brother, Carlotta was a little bit off.
It wasn’t long before I was out of knee immobilizers and back to shuffling around on my own two feet, pushing a walker. John was downright chivalric during this brief and embarrassing interlude, carrying that walker up the icy steps in the courtyard at school with a single sexy-strong hand. Part of me worried he was only being nice to me because he’d seen me with his good friend’s weird sister. Paranoia and plain old self-consciousness about my limp resumed as soon as the walker went away, wedging a real stick up my ass. Yes, my tight tendons were less tight, my limp less pronounced, but I still dragged my right foot and always would.
No longer a parade float, I went back to organizing my days around how I’d get from point A to point B without anyone noticing my funny walk. I didn’t like to bend or move in front of anyone and had Dr. Stevens write me a note permanently exempting me from PE. Dashing into class, I took off my backpack and carried it in front of me to hide my skinny legs, hating myself when my right toe caught and sent me stumbling, as it still often does.
My beloved Doc Martens were only worn at home where there was carpet because the acoustics were terrible in the halls at school and I hated people looking over their shoulders to see me coming. My closet wasn’t a closet. It was a shoebox.
I don’t know if Carlotta’s limp bugged her less than mine did, only that she didn’t let it stop her from clomping down the halls and signing up for clubs. Operation Smile was one thing, but you had to hand it to her for galumphing through dance company recitals in the back row, her ribbon tosses two beats behind everyone else’s, her butt sticking out, like mine did.
Her brother Byron was usually twisted around in his auditorium seat loudly hitting on a pretty girl during these tour de thump performances, a loose gold watch rattling on his wrist. It killed me that this supposedly cool dude barely acknowledged his sister when eye contact and some small talk made her light up, shake her head, and smile down at her pigeon-toed feet, too moved to speak. I figured I could at least return the favor—I’d look out for her if her own brother wouldn’t.
By the spring, thatches of leg hair had grown around my red incision scars. The tennis bubble at the club came down for the summer and, as soon as it was warm enough, Dad and I started driving over there to get in a set or two after dinner. Grand old cottonwoods discharged bugs, seeds, and pulp onto the courts and the smell of duck poop permeated the grounds, but our games grew larger and more exuberant as we played through sunset and into the violet of dusk, fist-pumping like we were on a show court dazzling a small but devoted posse of spectators.
Every sports story is the same when fathers and sons are involved. The father teaches the son to play and the son eventually surpasses him, or doesn’t. The twist in my rivalry with Dad, if you could call it that, was our joint lack of twisting ability, our physical limitations. It took Dad breaking his neck to make our matches competitive.
As I’d started to take my lessons and league matches more seriously, as I challenged kids on the ladder, Dad became more than my hitting partner. If anything, it bugged me that he handed me calls. Balls that landed six inches wide miraculously hit the line in my dad’s estimation. If I missed a second serve, he’d dig a ball from his overstuffed pocket and have it bouncing my way before I could move to the other side of the center mark.
“Redo,” Dad would say. “Take another.”
“I know what you’re doing,” I’d holler to him.
“What’s that, Greggo?” he’d say lamely, like he couldn’t hear me.
Tennis was a good sport for a kid with tight tendons. Even on our cracked and weed-riddled court at home there was little to trip over besides my own feet. The worst I’d do was scuff up the baseline and burn a hole in the right toe of my tennis shoe. My New Balance sneakers were arch-supporting and orthopedic, one of my first online purchases, and there was something freeing about being in them, chasing down balls just to call them out, daring myself to net. Once I got there it was clear I didn’t know what to do and I usually took a big swing and missed by several feet.
Since I already had a one-handed backhand (modeled after Pete Sampras’s, not my dad’s), I didn’t have to wait for my clumsy right side to let me down. Believe it or not, I was more coordinated with a racket than a lot of kids my age. Some of this was the natural advantage of having a court in our backyard, but some of it was a bit of modest talent. It made me wonder what my life would have been if I hadn’t crushed my umbilical cord on the way out of Mom’s uterus. Could I have been an athlete?
“If you ask me, Greggo, you already are one,” Dad would say.
There was another advantage to getting back on the court. With Dad’s unwitting help, I sped up my return to John and Chip’s tennis class at the Cottonwood Club and was in shape to try out for the junior varsity team at school. I made a point of wearing a sleeve on my good left knee. My excuse for playing with it was that the incision site had been mildly swollen since surgery, but my real reason was that I hoped it would spare me having to explain why I was limping. “It still looks like you’re favoring your right leg,” observed Coach Snarr, the seminary teacher.
Surprising both of us, I beat John in a scrimmage match at tryouts. He won the rematch, erasing my fluke victory, and went on to make the team. I was cut. I figured it was a win/win, but on the drive home, as “The Rain Song” purred from his car speakers, John broke the tense silence and told me he wasn’t upset. “I j-just hate losing to people I know I’m b-b-better than.”
I should have had him pull over so I could limp home, angrily bobbing and jerking on the side of the road, but John looked so cute in his red bandanna and this was the good part of the song. Robert Plant was cursing the gloom, letting us know that he loved us so. Oh, oh. John may have partied with Chip and Byron, but I was his measuring stick, the person he called when he needed to feel better about a lousy match or his unbelievably shitty performance on the ACT that was four points better than mine. “You’re still going to get into an Ivy, John,” I said. “Think about how great your personal statement is. What other kid is going to write about Keith Richards?”
One day in Journalism, cheerleaders came around distributing candy. John didn’t take any, just turned it down. His gesture, small though it was, helped fuel a growing vigilance about what I was putting into my body. Gretchen and I started to trade diet books that issued edicts like “Orange juice is a meal” and “Muffin is just another word for cake.” I would have had an eating disorder if I’d known what to call it. I’d exercise in the basement and then close myself in the pantry and consume an entire box of Honey Nut Cheerios or a whole loaf of French bread from the grocery store. For some reason, I thought bread was super healthy. I figured as long as I didn’t put dressing on my salad I’d lose weight, though I had none to lose. I squeezed the grease out of fries, patted my pizza down with a napkin.
From being obsessed with John, it was a hop, skip, and a limp to shaping my whole world around his whims. I was already on the newspaper staff with him junior year, but I transferred into Art History, Honors Precalc with Trig, and the literary magazine so our schedules would sync up. John’s Xcel membership motivated me to not eat the baby carrots Dad packed in my lunch (too much glycemic sugar) and pound away on the treadmill in the basement. Eventually, I could go more than five miles in forty minutes. “It’s like you’re punishing the motherfucker,” Tiffany observed from the stairs.
I lived my life in a state of preparedness. The person I was preparing for was John. I blasted Aida in the car but kept a Weezer album in the CD changer just in case. I’d make Mom idle in the library parking lot as I tried to snap along to Dixie Chicken (totally different from Dixie Chicks, I’d discovered upon first reporting back to John). Mom would give me some serious side-eye as we pulled into traffic, like I was an imposter. “Who are you and what have you done with my Greg?”
“Aida’s scratched,” I’d tell her.
It wasn’t all in my head, either. John skipped Monster Mash that October to take me to Jackass: The Movie. He started sneaking away from house parties at eleven or twelve at night to play ping-pong with me in the basement. I had to work hard to keep up in my AP classes, so I was usually just making art history flashcards in my room when my Nokia lit up with one of John’s texts: Shit’s pandemonium. Utter madness. The debauchery has reached new heights.
Knowing John would soon be inviting himself over, I’d run downstairs and dig out the paddles hotheaded Danny, now away at Berkeley, hadn’t bitten or splintered in frustration. When I heard John come through the side gate and dance down the outside stairs to the basement, his lively shag bouncing with him, I’d fix my wild eyebrows, double check for boogers, and make sure my hands weren’t shaking.
Just being around John caused a chemical, color-changing reaction in me. I was ruddy and breathless for the first five minutes of every rendezvous, running my hands through my hair, laughing too hard, bracing myself against the pinball machine behind the ping-pong table, and muttering “Oh God!” should his rugby shirt lift to reveal a swatch of hairy belly as he tested sore muscles. “Shit, the gym was intense,” he’d say. “I just went home an-and passed out.”
That stutter, it was so dear to me. It reminded me of my leg, how it would be its most debilitating when I most wanted it to go away. John might not stutter once for an entire night when it was the two of us, but the second he got in front of the Gretchens of the world, it was game over. It intrigued me that John was almost opinionless about my leg, not sympathetic or condescending, like he didn’t see it at all.
